In 2016, production designer turned writer/director Robert Eggers awed critics with his directorial debut, The Witch, a daring horror film set in the 1630s. Now, for his ferociously anticipated follow-up, he and his brother/co-writer Max Eggers have journeyed 200-some years to a rocky and remote island off the New England coast to tell a tale of isolation, envy, intimacy, wrath, and regret with The Lighthouse. [Read More…]
artist
How to Hate the City: A Storyboard Of Canvases
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
at The Neue Galerie, NYC (through January 13)
Reviewed by John Haber
No movement in early modern art was as cosmopolitan as German Expressionism — and the group that called itself Die Brücke. Who else took to the streets when Picasso was just finding his way from circus performers to still life? Who else first exhibited in a former butcher’s shop, where it also met? When, decades later, Adolf Hitler denounced the movement as “degenerate art,” his rhetoric feels familiar from religious conservatives even now blaming a perceived moral decline on urban liberals. And who in Die Brücke was as cosmopolitan as its oldest founding member, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner? [Read More…]
art
Laura Krifka’s Wickedly Deviant The Game of Patience
at Luis De Jesus (through October 26)
Reviewed by Lita Barrie
Laura Krifka enjoys doing things she is not supposed to do. Having absorbed the tenets of neoclassical painting, she bypasses high-minded seriousness by adding a candy-coated veneer of hyper-artificiality adopted from 1950s MGM musicals to the domestic decor of private scenes she then undercuts with a deviant sexual subtext recalling David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. This irresistible mix of dexterity, decor, decorum and deviance makes viewing her paintings a guilty pleasure — rather like sneaking into a peep show or secretly spying on neighbor’s forbidden acts. We can view the conventions of art, cinema and domestic life through a bemused female gaze with no-holds-barred on taking delight in human foibles. [Read More…]
books
Hiroko Oyamada’s Mordant Fable, The Factory
The Factory
by Hiroko Oyamada
New Directions, 128pp., $13.95
The year was 1936, when an indefatigable tramp served as a working-class Virgil in guiding audiences through the hellscape of big industry and assembly line madness. The tramp, of course, was Charlie Chaplin in his iconic film, Modern Times, which applied fool’s wisdom in overlaying its satire with calculated mania, circus-like antics, romantic aspirations, and a punch-drunk heart that refuses to throw in the towel. There is a visually brilliant scene in which the tramp gets swallowed up in the machine on which he’s working, a hapless Jonah churning within the gear-heavy belly of the industrial whale, and this image metaphorically underscored what Chaplin saw as the threats of dehumanization confronting “modern man.” [Read More…]
records
Sound Itself As The Only Way Forward In Swans’ Leaving Meaning
out October 25 on Young God Records
Reviewed by John Payne
Michael Gira founded/guiding-lighted the sort of no-wave / noise / spiritual-purification band Swans in NYC 35 some odd years ago, and, roughly, he’s made a career out of trying musically to express the inexpressible ever since. After a hiatus of a few years, during which he formed Angels of Light, Gira re-formed Swans in 2010 and proceeded to release a series of exceedingly, brutally beautiful double-CDs of mental mayhem-catharsis. [Read More…]
In Jaw-Dropping Homage To The Twilight Zone, The Exhilarating The Vast of Night
There’s something in the air on a crisp night in 1950s Cayuga, New Mexico. Sure, there’s excitement as basketball season begins with a game so anticipated that nearly the entirety of this rural town has convened upon the high school’s gymnasium. But then there’s something stranger, a crackle on the phone lines, a light in the skies. In The Vast of Night, this mystery will be cracked wide open by an unlikely pair of amateur detectives. The result is an ode to The Twilight Zone series that is fittingly riveting, exhilaratingly daring, and a whiz-bang technical marvel. [Read More…]
Resilience: Philip Guston In 1971
at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles (through January 5, 2020)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner
…there’s no success like failure and failure’s no success at all
Bob Dylan
The painter’s first duty is to be free
Philip Guston
In 1970, New York City was the undisputed center of the art world and 57th street in midtown Manhattan was the epicenter of New York’s art world with its plethora of blue chip galleries. Art and theater critics reigned supreme – they could and would ruin careers with a gleeful flourish of their poison pens. When Philip Guston, acclaimed Abstract-Expressionist, showed his new large-scale paintings at Marlborough in October, 1970, he was roundly excoriated for his switch from abstract art to figuration. Not only was the work (horrors!) figurative, it was rudely cartoonish and crudely drawn. [Read More…]
The Line
Transits Through Finalities In Robert Gunderman’s This End
at AF Projects, Los Angeles (through October 12)
Reviewed by Eve Wood
Robert Gunderman’s current exhibition at AF Projects could be understood as both a meditation on the nature of time and an investigation into the elusiveness of memory. The title of the exhibition, This End, powerfully yet simply encapsulates and personalizes the idea of transition and death, how each of us, burdened as we are within our own physical vessels, must contend with the ever-impending notion that we too will pass. Gunderman sees this “passing” as an opportunity for self-awareness and exploration wherein the “end” might just become yet another beginning. [Read More…]
The Lodge Offers a Chilling Follow-Up To Goodnight Mommy
In 2015, Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz dropped jaws and blew minds with their harrowing–and at points hilarious–debut narrative feature, Goodnight Mommy. Last year, they offered a fresh taste in terror with a vignette in the folklore-inspired horror anthology, The Field Guide To Evil. Now, this heralded Austrian pair of co-writers/co-directors is back with their much-anticipated English-language debut, The Lodge. And while this psychological thriller has plenty in common with their first film, the vibe is decidedly different. [Read More…]
Takashi Miike’s First Love Is A Delightfully Earnest Rom-Com Set To An Onslaught Of Slaughter
As you might anticipate, First Love is a story of boy meets girl, but coming from Takashi Miike, the visionary director behind Ichi the Killer, Audition, and 13 Assasins, you might rightly anticipate this romantic-comedy is less flowers and kisses and more yakuzas and blood. There is also a high-kicking revenge killer, a grimacing ghost in tightie-whities, and a pair of gruesome yet pretty damn funny decapitations. [Read More…]
Samuelle Richardson And Joy Ray In Beyond/Within
at Launch Gallery, Los Angeles (through September 28)
Reviewed by Genie Davis
The two-person exhibition now at Launch LA on La Brea literally and figuratively soars. Curated by MOAH’s Andi Campognone, Beyond/Within features the work of artists Samuelle Richardson and Joy Ray. The exhibition is uniquely paired. Both have utilized paint and fabric, create textile art, and rely on painterly technique. Richardson, whose fabric sculptural work here depicts primarily birds – but also human heads – some with bared teeth, is also a highly skilled artist when working in paint. The grace and fluidity of her sculpture, and its elegant refinement in what is traditionally considered “craft” materials, evokes her background. Using, embracing, and even accentuating the rougher aspects of her fabrics, the pieces recall the fact that they are created, not actual, living birds, while revealing themselves simultaneously to be delicately alive and transcendent. They could fly, if you let their magic in. [Read More…]
Sacraments Of Splendor In Naudline Pierre’s For I Am with You Until the End of Time
at Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles (through 26 October)
Reviewed by Eve Wood
No doubt Brooklyn based artist Naudline Pierre keeps the sacraments, though not necessarily the ones decried by the Almighty Himself, living instead, I would imagine, according to a more personal but none less rigorous code of ethics informed more by beauty and love than by traditions and dogma. Her first exhibition at Shulamit Nazarian, aptly titled For I Am with You Until the End of Time, which is from the King James Bible Matthew 28:20 which cautions the reader to observe all of God’s teachings no matter the evident cost. This statement could also be considered comforting, or a means by which us mere mortals might soothe our aching souls, knowing that we are connected somehow to the divine. One thing is clear for sure – Pierre believes in the healing powers of love – most importantly our own innate ability to transform dark and disturbing experiences into something more joyous. [Read More…]