Riot Material

Bereavement Of The Felled: New Works By Trisha Donnelly

at The Shed, NYC (through May 19)
Reviewed by John Haber

If a tree falls in a forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it still make a sound? At the very least, it can make art. For Trisha Donnelly, it must make a sound as well, for art is always listening, even as so many refuse to hear. Much of the planet may be dying, like her two fallen trees at The Shed, but art can speak to that as well. She has the very first show in the cultural center of Manhattan’s Hudson Yards, and it makes quite an impact. It puts to the test a gallery with, as yet, too few visitors, next to a shopping mall serving too little of New York. It looks beyond that very concentration of wealth to a fragile state of nature. It also risks drowning global warming and goodness knows what else in sounds of its own. [Read More…]

Don’t Call Me A Person of Color: I’m Black

by Seren Sensei

A strange thing happens when you say the word “Black” as it pertains to race. People will often curl their lips up, as if you’ve said something distasteful or inappropriate; the color might drain from their faces in an expression akin to dread. The phrase “Black Lives Matter” triggers the knee jerk response of “All Lives Matter.” The FBI identifies those that fight for Black American rights as a terrorist group under the title of “Black Identity Extremists.” And. increasingly, “Black” is used interchangeably with “Person of Color,” POC, which ostensibly is much less racially charged. This is a strange and disturbing phenomenon, since Black is not synonymous with POC: all Black people are persons of color, but all persons of color are not Black. And non-Black persons of color, or NBPOC, still benefit from and can practice anti-Black racism. [Read More…]

Breadcrumbs For The Disenchanted: Peg Alford Pursell’s A Girl Goes Into The Forest

Reviewed by John Biscello

A Girl Goes Into the Forest
by Peg Alford Pursell
Dzanc, 200pp., $16.95

In the dream I was sitting with my mother in a restaurant lobby, waiting to be seated for dinner. The hostess came over, asked me my name, which I confirmed, then told me to follow her — I had a phone call. At the hostessing station, I took the black phone with the cord and on the other end of the line was my sister’s voice: tremulous, distraught. She told me she was lost, could I come get her? I asked her where she had gotten lost. She said she couldn’t remember, and when I asked her what was around her right now, what did she see, she told me that she saw trees. Lots and lots of tall trees. She said she was in a forest and she was beginning to panic because someone had told her that if she was there after it got dark it was going to be really hard to find her way out. And it was starting to get dark. She begged me to find her before it was too late, and then the line went dead. When I awoke from the dream, I understood that my sister, who in this reality had been mired in the living hell of drug addiction, had been calling out to me from the forest in which she found herself, her soul-being, lost and desperate, without a single bread crumb to orient her movement and recovery. [Read More…]

Mythological Jazz Asteroids in the Afro Futurist Space Belt

Trust In The Lifeforce Of The Deep Mystery: The Comet is Coming
on Impulse!

Reviewed by Henry Cherry

Experience by itself, the phenomenological philosopher Edmund Husserl said, is not science. In the hands of London band The Comet is Coming, experience is a strict adherence to improvisation and exploration that filters the scientific process into a musical call and response. It has purified their sound. So perhaps Husserl is only part right. Maybe some experience is scientific. Maybe some music is science. [Read More…]

Amon Tobin’s Fear in a Handful of Dust

on Nomark

Reviewed by John Payne

On the occasions when he drops a new platter, the veteran producer/DJ-composer Amon Tobin can always be counted on to raise the sonic-magic bar several notches. From his early found-sounds ‘n’ beats productions such as Bricolage (1997), Permutation (1998), the magnificent Supermodified (2000) and Out From Out Where (2002), he progressed to things like Foley Room (2007), which explored the role of sound design and field recordings, and ISAM (2011), the titular acronym referring to “Invented Sound Applied to Music” and in which Tobin utilized advanced synthesis processing and production techniques traditionally reserved for sound design in film. [Read More…]

Artists As Keepers Of Radical Thought In The Weight of Matter

at Roberts Projects, Los Angeles (through June 15)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

The Weight of Matter, on view at Roberts Projects in Culver City, takes as it central premise the idea that artists are the keepers of radical thought, of dreams and incongruities, of nightmares and deepening schisms, and that these ideas are worth each and every dissection, no matter how minute or painstaking. On the surface, the exhibition appears to expand on the theme of materiality – how artists utilize their materials in new and inventive ways, yet if we look more closely, all the works included here begin with materiality as a central subject, and then deliberately and systematically subvert the process by which the works are imagined. [Read More…]

Head-Spinning Intrigue And Landmark Cinema In Zhang Yimou’s Shadow

Reviewed by Glenn Kenny

After the limp 2017 film The Great Wall, the director Zhang Yimou was clearly looking to enact a return to form. With Shadow (2019), Zhang has done more than that: he’s created a martial-arts movie landmark, as strong in its performances as it is spectacularly novel in its violence. [Read More…]

Nari Ward: We The People

at The New Museum, NYC (through May 26) Reviewed by John Haber When it comes to Nari Ward, it can take a long time to hear so many voices. They are … [Read More...]

London’s Jazz Scene Is Burning

Theon Cross's Fyah on Gearbox Records Reviewed by Henry Cherry Theon Cross’s new album, Fyah, is a monument to the importance of the London Jazz … [Read More...]

Kristen Roupenian’s You Know You Want This: “Cat Person” and Other Stories

Reviewed by Ruth Franklin You Know You Want This: “Cat Person” and Other Stories by Kristen Roupenian Scout, 225 pp., $24.99 Courtesy of The New … [Read More...]

Olivier Assayas’s Non-Fiction: A Cinematic Essay About The Digital Onslaught

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo Few can deny that we are currently passing through a historical epoch in terms of technological evolution. Like the … [Read More...]

Radiant Poetic Shadows And The Timeless Framings Of Roy DeCarava

Roy DeCarava: The Work of Art, at The Underground Museum, Los Angeles (through June 30) Reviewed by Henry Cherry Despite a couple of career … [Read More...]

In Fabric Is A Decadent Horror About A Dress That Kills

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko Glamorous. Daring. Sexy. A new dress can feel like a promise to yourself that you'll become the woman fit to wear it. But … [Read More...]

Gan Bi’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night Floats Along The Back Rivers Of Memory

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

It is difficult to describe the experience of watching Long Day’s Journey Into Night without sounding as if you are remembering a dream. The new film by China’s Gan Bi is more about ambiance than plot, more about the hazy feeling of attempting to travel back in time through the eye of mind. It is the very texture of the film that weaves a strange spell. Bi is one of the emerging new voices of Chinese cinema, which is already renowned for visual inventiveness. [Read More…]

The Un-Man Falleth

by Barrett Martin

“The Un-Man Falleth” is from Martin’s forthcoming book,
The Way of the Zen Cowboy: Fireside Stories From A Globetrotting Rhythmatist
Out May 10 on Sunyata Books

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”
—Abraham Lincoln

President Lincoln’s quote above is probably more true today than it was when he said it back in the mid-19th century, and this is evidenced in the rampant corruption that has seized Lincoln’s own party today, at every level of government, from the lowest municipal bureaucrat up to the White House. Over the last 50 years, and long before the presidential election of 2016, I’ve watched as the United States devolved into a wave of angry male misogyny, bigotry, and outright racism that has embarrassed our country to a degree that I didn’t think was possible—until it became a reality. [Read More…]

Andy Warhol – From A to B and Back Again

at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (May 19 – September 2)
Reviewed by Jill Conner

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is set to open Andy Warhol – From A to B and Back Again, a stunning retrospective that presents the artist’s large-scale compositions, installations, portraits, sculptures and films. The title of this exhibition suggests something relational about Warhol, which sounds odd at first because he had been so well connected. Since moving to New York City in 1949, he became the most sought-after commercial illustrator in advertising design, where images and their subsequent repetition in print bridged perfectly with popular culture. [Read More…]

Knives and Skin Blends Teen-Noir, Dark Satire And ’80s Musical Numbers

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

Have you seen Carolyn Harper? That’s the horrid question that thumps in the hearts of the characters in the trippy teen-noir Knives and Skin. It was another quiet night in a Midwest small town when band geek Carolyn Harper went missing. Her pom-pommed shako cap will be found near a river that keeps silent on the secret of that night. But as her friends and family search for clues — or her corpse — the fragile façade of normalcy and pleasantry is shattered. In its place come boundary-pushing flirtations, uncomfortable parent-child confrontations, a mounting dread of mortality, and a string of acapella musical numbers, thoughtfully plucked from a catalog of ’80s classics.

[Read More…]

Christoph Waltz’s Savagely Clever Directorial Debut In Georgetown