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Entering the Mind

Enter Here

image

Igor Posner, from his new book Cargó. Read the review of Cargó at Riot Material Magazine.

The Psyche of Migration in Igor Posner’s Cargó

Reviewed by Justin Herfst

In the opening sequence of Igor Posner’s Cargó, two images are stacked on top of each other. In the top image is a green thicket, and in the bottom a black and white image of an elderly gentleman dressed in a long coat walking in the dark. The man appears deep in thought, the very top of his head cut out by the frame almost as though his head were filled with the imaginations of the thicket. The sequence is pure intuition, an inner movement that has been refined over the ten years Posner worked on Cargó. Like two disparate sounds brought together into harmony, the sequence intuitively makes sense. On the following page are two black and white images, one of a women’s legs on a bed and the other a boy looking on into the camera. In the low light, the shutter speed is slowed and both images are blurred. Black space in both photographs reach across the page so no border separates the images and there is no frame save for the rectangle of the page. Gone are any presuppositions of tradition and bookmaking. In its edit and its subject, Cargó is loosed from the material present and handed over to the subliminal.    [Read More…]

art

Installation View of Martin Puryear, at Matthew Marks.

Martin Puryear and the Volumes Voiced From Within

at Matthew Marks Gallery, Los Angeles (through 8 April 2023)
Reviewed by Lorraine Heitzman

In the midst of the frenzy of Frieze week, the quiet of Martin Puryear’s show at Matthew Marks Gallery was practically deafening. Admittedly, Puryear’s art has always been somewhat monastic, even restrained, and the sculptures in this show are no less hushed. Over the course of his career the world has only become louder and more vitriolic, and the stillness that is his stock-in-trade is amplified against the atmospheric noise that is now so prevalent. Like an admonished child, Puryear has learned to use his inside voice, but he has also mastered the ability to make his voice heard above the din. Through impeccable craftsmanship and a minimalist sensibility, his sculptures speak louder than the clamoring voices of countless others. [Read More…]

books

Dystopia Borne Alive in No Land in Sight

Reviewed by Jason Tandon

No Land in Sight
by Charles Simic
Knopf, 96pp., $23.95

HR

Charles Simic is not just one of the most celebrated and honored poets of the last fifty years; now in his eighties, he remains one of the most prolific, having released four books since 2015. Fans of Simic’s poetry who have especially enjoyed his newer work, such as Come Closer and Listen (2019) and Scribbled in the Dark (2017), will find many of the hallmarks of his recent style in his latest collection, No Land in Sight. The poems are brief, often ten lines or fewer, and they are primarily set in a city (presumably New York City, where Simic has spent much of his time when not in New Hampshire). His persona is a solitary figure who suffers from insomnia and roams the streets at all hours or lies in bed listening to the wind, a portentous sound in Simic’s work. He routinely shows empathy for the homeless, disdain for political leaders, and bemusement at the masses who blindly follow them. [Read More…]

art

Susan Kaprov. "The Dense City: Magenta Sky." At Riot Material

Susan Kaprov: Conversations on Art, Technology and The Space Age

by Jill Conner      

In some respects Susan Kaprov’s art has remained elusive, until now. Her experimental photomontages are included in the permanent collections of museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Susan Kaprov was born in 1946 and grew up in New York City when the verve of women’s liberation and the haze of the sexual revolution continued to circulate. Shortly before finishing high school, The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan, and The Group, by Mary McCarthy, both appeared in 1963, and Elizabeth Hardwick had co-founded The New York Review of Books while The New York Times remained on a 4-month strike.  When Susan Kaprov received a Bachelor of Science degree from the City University of New York in 1970, Kate Millet’s groundbreaking book, Sexual Politics, was published. A new realism was flourishing throughout contemporary art at this time. [Read More…]

books

American Mega-Agriculture is Swallowing Us Whole

Reviewed by Ian Frazier

Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It
by Tom Philpott
Bloomsbury, 246 pp., $28.00; $17.00 (paper)

The Farmer’s Lawyer: The North Dakota Nine and the Fight to Save the Family Farm
by Sarah Vogel
Bloomsbury, 407 pp., $19.89
NYR

We are eating a big hole in the middle of the Midwest and sucking up California’s ancient aquifers until the land collapses like an empty juice box. The awe that new arrivals from other countries feel when they see the bounty in a US supermarket is an illusion—more like what one might experience when stepping from a cold night into a nice, warm house where they’re burning the furniture. In short, we are plundering the natural sources of our food production and can’t go on this way. [Read More…]

Riot Material Monthly Digest (tap here)

The Line

Yehonatan Koenig's Winter Solstice (detail). 2022. At Riot Material Magazine.

Luminosities Beyond the Eye in Yehonatan Koenig’s Ink on Paper

at The BAG, Los Angeles (through 19 February) Reviewed by Eve Wood Yehonatan Koenig’s luminous ink drawings are studies in both absence and presence, suspension and saturation, death and rebirth. The patterns he creates in his drawings repudiate any obvious associations one might have when considering the act of mark-making and, indeed, the process by which he creates these works is in-and-of-itself an act of both defiance and meditation. One might attempt to configure a story from these images, or at the very least, contrive some kind of skeletal narrative. However, the beauty of Koenig’s … [Read More...]

Kourosh Beigpour at Riot Material

Meditations on the Mystical Sublime: Kourosh Beigpour’s Mandal

at Advocartsy, Los Angeles (through 4 February 2023) Reviewed by Christopher Ian Lutz The human mind seeks connectivity. The writing of letters and numbers, and the drawing of lines in a painting, are acts of connecting points. Furthermore, geometry, language, narration, astrology, and philosophy are intellectual means to connect points that align with our thoughts and emotions. This symmetry of our subjective experience with the objective physical world and universal phenomenon provides us with a sense of completeness. Our nature is complete, but we do not always have a sense of fullness. … [Read More...]

Glenn Hardy’s Who Am I If I Don’t Represent?

at Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles (through 11 February 2023) Reviewed by Eve Wood Glenn Hardy’s second solo exhibition, aptly title Who Am I If … [Read More...]

An Interview with Pae White

Slow Winter Sun, at Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco (through 25 February 2023) by Amadour Artist Pae White captivates her audience with a … [Read More...]

Ibrahim El-Salahi Pain Relief Drawings

at The Drawing Center, NYC (through 15 January) Reviewed by Robyn Creswell Pain Relief Drawings by Ibrahim El-Salahi Contributors: Laura Hoptman, … [Read More...]

In Conversation with Artist Jim Shaw

Jim Shaw: Thinking the Unthinkable, at Gagosian, Beverly Hills (12 January – 25 February 2023) by Amadour Artist Jim Shaw captures the tantalizing … [Read More...]

Freedom and the Postwar Avant-Garde

Reviewed by Erik Hmiel The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War by Louis Menand Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 880pp., $18.89 When I was in … [Read More...]

Stalking the Atomic City

Stalking the Atomic City

Reviewed by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.

Stalking the Atomic City
by Markiyan Kamysh
translated by Hanna Leliv and Reilly Costigan-Humes
Astra House, 160pp., $13.59
HR

The disaster at the nuclear power plant at Chornobyl in April 1986 created, in real life, a geography people had only imagined. The Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation is the size of Luxembourg, a thousand square miles of marsh, ponds, forest, villages, towns, and large-scale industrial ruins, frozen in time. We’ve seen the photos of swing sets and classrooms overrun with vines, the abandoned high-rises in Pripyat. We’ve heard the stories of boar and lynx and deer and birds reclaiming their ancestral wilderness and harboring who knows what genetic mutations. The Red Forest is the most toxic place on Earth. In a hospital basement is a pile of firefighters’ uniforms that will remain deadly to the touch for centuries. [Read More…]

Jeff Parker, "Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy," is reviewed at Riot Material magazine.

The Best Jazz Guitar is Jeff Parker’s Jazz Guitar

Best Jazz Record of 2022
Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy
Eremite Records

Reviewed by Henry Cherry

Four selections of sets from Jeff Parker’s Monday evening live performances with his quartet are the basis of his most recent release, Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy. There is no actual tennis involved. ETA is a small restaurant venue in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. The extended name is a nod to late writer David Foster Wallace. It’s that sort of place, oranges in a bowl on the bar, oysters on the half-shell, and Jeff Parker working his way through the situational complications of jazz in the digital era. [Read More…]

Gerard & Kelly: Panorama. An interview with Gerard & Kelly is at Riot Material Magazine.

An Interview with Gerard & Kelly

by Amadour
.

Artist duo Gerard & Kelly personify the collaborative nature of art making. Their exhibition, Panorama, at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, displays a dynamic video with three dancers questioning the colonialist narratives on the ceiling mural of the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, now the Pinault Collection. The artists also work with silkscreening in their Glyphs series, which explores notions of  “orientation” and the multilayered works of composer Julius Eastman. In this conversation, we discuss the duo’s many collaborators and influences, how they articulate their vision for performance, and their time in art school.

[Read More…]

It Begins with a Corpse: New Work from Cormac McCarthy

Reviewed by Michael Gorra
The Passenger
by Cormac McCarthy
Knopf, 383 pp., $20.22
Stella Maris
by Cormac McCarthy
Knopf, 190 pp., $19.99
NYR

No regular reader of Cormac McCarthy will be surprised to find that The Passenger begins with a corpse. Or two corpses, really, one of which has gone missing. The one we see, in the italicized, single-page prologue with which the book begins, is of a frozen golden-haired girl found hanging “among the bare gray poles of the winter trees.” Her name is Alicia Western, and she’s dressed in white, with a red sash that makes her easy to spot against the snow, a “bit of color in the scrupulous desolation.” It is Christmas 1972, a forest near the Wisconsin sanitarium where the twenty-year-old has checked herself in—a place she’s been before. [Read More…]

Detail of Henry Taylor, "Warning shots not required," 2011. At Riot Material magazine.

Henry Taylor’s B Side: Where Mind Shapes Itself to Canvas

Henry Taylor: B Side
at MOCA Grand, Los Angeles (through 30 April 2023)

Reviewed by Eve Wood

Ages ago when there were LP records and 45s, the B side of a popular single made allowances for experimentation and could be counted on as an alternative vision to the more mainstream and compulsory hit single. B sides were not the reason you bought the album, but they were perhaps a more authentic representation of the artist’s vision, and every so often a great B side would feel akin to unearthing gold. Henry Taylor’s thirty-year retrospective at MOCA Grand pays homage to the unexpected, the visceral, and the odd man out, and like any successful B side, you want to keep listening. [Read More…]

Riot Sounds

Sleaford Mods, "Force 10 From Navarone," featuring Florence Shaw, can be listened to at Riot Material magazine -- in the exclusive Riot Sounds.

New From the Mods: “Force 10 From Navarone”

Sleaford Mods
feat. Florence Shaw (of Dry Cleaning)
from UK Grim

on Rough Trade

Dean Blunt's "The Rot." Listen at Riot Material under the exclusive Riot Sounds.

“The Rot” — Though A Rose By Any Other Name

by Dean Blunt
feat. Joanne Robertson
from BLACK METAL 2

https://www.riotmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/10-the-rot.m4a

on Rough Trade

The Line

A poetic interpretation of Anselm Kiefer's Exodus, at Los Angeles Marciano Art Foundation, is at Riot Material.

On Wing With Word Through Anselm Kiefer’s Exodus

Gagosian at Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles (through 25 March 2023) by Rachel Reid Wilkie Los Angeles poet Rachel Reid Wilkie was given the task of walking into Anselm Kiefer’s Exodus — a literally monumental exhibition, in that each of these paintings are upwards of 30’ tall — and addressing the colossal artworks “cold,” as in […]

Songbook of a Bygone Dead: Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song

Reviewed by Dan Chiasson The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan Simon & Schuster, 352pp., $28.93 NYR Bob Dylan’s new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, is a kind of music-appreciation course open to auditors and members of the general public. It is best savored one chapter, one song, at a time, while listening to the […]

Grant Wallace, “Through Evolution Comes Revelation.” at Riot Material magazine.

Communication Breakdown: Grant Wallace, His Heirs & the Legacy of a Forgotten Genius

Grant Wallace: Over the Psychic Radio at Ricco/Maresca Gallery, NYC (through 3 December 2022) By Michael Bonesteel Freelance writer and editor Deborah Coffin of Albany, California, was in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley in 1997 when she first encountered street musician Brian Wallace at a party. “I had a friend who knew Brian,” […]

Smoking the Bible by Chris Abani

Words To Wrap Around A Dying Brother

Smoking the Bible Reviewed by Rhony Bhopla Smoking the Bible by Chris Abani Copper Canyon Press, 96pp., $15.99 HR Chris Abani’s autobiographical book of poems, Smoking the Bible, centers on the relationship of two brothers growing up in Nigeria with an Igbo father and an English mother. The poems, which incorporate the Igbo language along […]

Yehonatan Koenig. "Shulamith" (2022). At Riot Material Magazine

Yehonatan Koenig’s Subversion of the Ordinary

Knowing Not Knowing, at Matt Drey Arts (presenting with the Kava Collective) by Mat Gleason The art of Yehonatan Koenig is a subatomic soiree, every mark-making molecule involved in contributing to a higher purpose along the way. There is form and structure revealed here, an elegant point in the digressions of a thousand or more […]

The Joshua Tree Talk

A Conversation on Dzogchen C von Hassett & Rachel Reid Wilkie at Joshua Tree Retreat Center 

Louise Bourgeois: What Is The Shape of This Problem?

at University of Southern California, Fisher Museum of Art. (through 3 December 3, 2022) Reviewed by Margaret Lazzari Louise Bourgeois is widely recognized for her sculptures and installations, but Louise Bourgeois: What is The Shape of This Problem is a wonderful opportunity to immerse yourself in her perhaps-lesser-known prints, fabric work and writings. This exhibit contains over […]

The Artful Construction of The ‘I’

by Merve Emre NYR The essay form…bears some responsibility for the fact that bad essays tell stories about people instead of elucidating the matter at hand. —Theodor Adorno The personal essay is a genre that is difficult to define but easy to denounce. The offending element is rarely the essay as a form, but its […]

Moonage Daydream Conveys More Myth Than Man

Moonage Daydream Dir. Brett Morgan Reviewed by Nicholas Goldwin As one of the greatest shapeshifters in the expansive history of rock music, it seems only fitting that the documentary with David Bowie as its subject never seems content to express the trials, tribulations and artistic triumphs of Bowie in any one fixed way. This is […]

Carnación di Rocío Molina, at Riot Material Magazine.

On Binding: Notes from Venice

Bienalle Arte and Bienalle Danza, Venice 2022 By Allyn Aglaïa Chest bound, lips sealed, I walked through Venice alone, quiet, and: thought about narratives that bind us to erotic binds

Mohammad Barrangi's Guardians of Eden (Dreamscape #8), at Riot Material magazine.

Transcendence Beyond Erasure in Mohammad Barrangi’s Dreamscape

at Advocartsy, Los Angeles (thru 5 November 2022) Reviewed by Christopher Ian Lutz Fantasy requires a symbolic vehicle to transport a character from the real world into the imaginary realm, where the laws of reality are subverted or obscured to justify an otherwise absurd event. The artist might depict the vehicle as a real object […]

Idris Khan's The Pattern of Landscape at Sean Kelly Gallery, Los Angeles. An interview with Idris is at Riot Material magazine.

An Interview with Idris Khan

The Pattern of Landscape, at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles (through 5 November 2022) by Ricky Amadour Opening on the corner of Highland and De Longpre Avenues in the heart of Hollywood, Idris Khan’s The Pattern of Landscape is the inaugural exhibition at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles. Khan investigates color theory, text, and musical concepts through […]

Soul Crash: Our Slow, Inexorable Release Into the Metaverse

by Sue Halpern The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball Liveright 352pp., $18.89 NYR In October 2021, when Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would now be called Meta and its business interests would be pivoting to the metaverse, there was almost universal confusion: most observers had no idea what he was […]

green tara

Pointing the Staff at the Old Man

A wisdom transmission by Samaneri Jayasāra Excerpted from —  Advice from the Lotus Born  from the chapter “Pointing the Staff at the Old Man” Translated by Eric Pema Kunsang Rangjung Yeshe Publications, 184pp., $21.95 . .

Margaret Lazzari’s "Shimmer." From the exhibition "Breathing Space."

Margaret Lazzari’s Luminous Breathing Space

at George Billis Gallery, Los Angeles (through 8 October 2022) Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner “Things are not what they seem: nor are they otherwise.” –Buddha Margaret Lazzari’s luminous solo exhibition of paintings, entitled Breathing Space, were painted during the pandemic, and the exhibition title is indeed significant. It’s defined as a respite, a hiatus, or an […]

A Look Back on an Iconoclast: Art Critic Dave Hickey

by Jarrett Earnest Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art by Daniel Oppenheimer University of Texas Press, 141 pp., $24.95 The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, Revised and Expanded by Dave Hickey University of Chicago Press, 123 pp., $15.00 (paper) Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy by Dave Hickey Art Issues Press, 215 […]

From Phil Tippet's Mad God, reviewed at Riot Material magazine.

Nihilism Births Its Own Interminable Hell

Mad God Dir. Phil Tippett Reviewed by Nicholas Goldwin Technically astonishing and immersive to a fault, director Phil Tippett successfully demonstrates that thirty years of relentless dedication to your craft can lead to cinematic innovations even his old stomping grounds – the sets of Star Wars and Jurassic Park – have yet to catch up. […]

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