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art

John Bradford: By Land And By Sea

at Anna Zorina Gallery, NYC (through 25 April — view this exhibition online at annazorinagallery.com)
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

“For there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.”
— Herman Melville, from Moby Dick

The latest John Bradford exhibit at Zorina Gallery shows works in a style, history painting, that’s been out of favor with the art establishment for many decades. All the paintings’ subjects come from the 19th century or before, and relate to momentous events relating to the USA and the Americas: arrival of the Mayflower, of Columbus, Washington’s revolution, Lincoln’s wars. Bradford’s technique, thick impasto, is mostly found nowadays on paintings for sale in the streets: think view of Paris at sunset. What is a blueblood painter, if ever there was one — he is a descendant of William Bradford, the English Puritan separatist who escaped persecution from King James I on the Mayflower and became the longstanding Governor of the Plymouth Colony, known thereafter as the Pilgrim Fathers — doing producing low art? [Read More…]

artist

Gerhard Richter’s Solemn Yet Miraculous Retrospective, Painting After All

at Met Breuer, NYC (through 5 July 2020)
Reviewed by Peter Schjeldahl
The New Yorker

“Birkenau.” The dread name—of the main death facilities at Auschwitz—entitles four large abstract paintings and four full-sized digital reproductions of them in the last gallery of Painting After All, a peculiarly solemn Gerhard Richter retrospective at the Met Breuer. The works are based on four clandestine photographs that were smuggled out of the concentration camp in 1944. Two, taken from the shadowed exit of a gas chamber, show naked corpses strewn on the ground and smoke rising from bodies afire in a trench beyond them. Men in uniform stand at ease—two appear to chat—amid the shambles. Richter first saw the images in the fifties. He encountered them again in 2008 and kept the worst of them hanging in his studio in Cologne. In 2014, he projected them onto canvas and traced them. As he worked, they became illegible. The finished paintings exemplify Richter’s frequent style of densely layered, dragged pigments. They are unusually harsh in aspect, with clashing red and green, sickly whites, and grim blacks. But you’d hardly guess, by looking, their awful inspiration. [Read More…]

♥

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LA CORONA | RIOT CINEMA

Cinema Disordinaire: A List Of Infectiously Strange Must-See Films For The End Times

Cinema Disordinaire, aka Riot Cinema, is a uniquely selective entry of films that showcase the singular in all of cinema, the seminal, and the utterly sublime come to screen this past half century. For these particularly disordinary times, where self-isolation is our newly mandated norm, we offer up a distilled list from Cinema Disordinaire’s five-decade accounting. These are must-see films — if you’re a lover of cutting-edge or entirely uncommon cinema — beginning with the latest (2019) and working backwards to high cult-bizarro, 1972. Soderbergh’s Contagion, the current streaming darling of this moment, is surely not amongst these greats, but an infectious strangeness runs throughout them all. They are, in other words, Riot Material’s favorites, offered up for those with a latently wicked heart. Below you’ll find links that take you to the original reviews of each film. Enjoy: [Read More…]

la corona | thought

Now All The Plagues That In The Pendulous Air Hang Fated O’er Men’s Faults

by Emma Smith
The New York Times

Plague erased social, gender and personal differences. Shakespeare responded by emphasizing people’s unique and inerasable difference. His work is a narrative vaccine.

Twitter has been taunting us: When he was in quarantine from the plague, William Shakespeare wrote King Lear. He had an advantage, of sorts: Shakespeare’s life was marked by plague. Just weeks after his baptism at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, the register read, “Hic incepit pestis” (Here begins the plague). Mortality rates in the town were four times that of the previous, plague-free year. Shakespeare, the son of the town’s glover, survived it and many further outbreaks. Much of his work was composed, if not in lockdown, then in the shadow of a highly infectious disease without a known cure. [Read More…]

opinion

The LA Times And The Question Of Crisis Deliverance

by C von Hassett

The LA Times, once a towering, globally respected newspaper, has become a click-bait web of invasive ads and circus-style barking for subscription servicing that, though intolerable even when things in our city were on the norm, now come across as shark-like and ravenous, a dubious entity profiteering its wares much in the way of the two deplorables who stocked up on some 17,000 bottles of hand sanitizers with full intent of selling off all to the fearful for a handsome profit. They, if you recall, were swiftly booted from Amazon for price-gouging and were universally demonized in numerous news outlets around the world. Is not the sanitized LA Times, in this perfect viral storm, hawking their wares much the same? Are they not hording the gold of crisis-era information and, rather than sharing it without charge — as is their civic duty — they instead frontload every headline, every one-sentence introductory blurb, with either an onslaught of ads or swift delivery to a paid subscription page. No Corona updates without cash in hand for those of us living under its singular mantle, for no longer in this city is there a competing newspaper to call them in check. [Read More…]

The Line –>

Cornel West’s “Democracy Matters in Race Matters”

Preface to the 25th Anniversary Edition to Race Matters Race Matters by Cornel West Beacon Press, 110pp., $11.60 Black people in the United States differ from all other modern people owing to the unprecedented levels of unregulated and unrestrained violence directed at them. No other people have been taught systematically to hate themselves -- psychic violence -- reinforced by the powers of state and civic coercion — physical violence -- for the primary purpose of controlling their minds and exploiting their labor for nearly four hundred years. The unique combination of American terrorism … [Read More...]

Jazz in LA: Arturo and Adam O’Farrill, Live From Culver City

https://www.facebook.com/afrolatinjazz/videos/10222660969536605/ The Live Show: Arturo and Adam O'Farrill, 28 March 2020 Please scroll to 8 minutes into the video above; technical setup prior . Riot Material is proud to present, and stream live this evening, legendary Jazz pianist Arturo O’Farrill and his son, Trumpeter and NPR critic’s fave Adam O’Farrill, performing together in their living room, Saturday, 28 March beginning at 6pm Pacific Standard Time. This will be a very special evening where father and son, two exceptionally fine men and notable greats on their instruments, burn down … [Read More...]

The Line

In This Moment Of Collective Anxiety, New Images of Man Ponders The Human Condition, And Further Disquiets The Sense

at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Genie Davis

Curated by Alison M. Gingeras, the expansive exhibition New Images of Man is a both a revisiting of and expansion on a 1959 exhibition of the same name at MoMA in New York City. A tribute and comment on the human condition, the original exhibition, curated by Peter Selz, focused on new figurative work following WWII. As such, it included a wide range of artists, from de Kooning to Giacometti, working in both sculptural forms and painted images. The Blum & Poe iteration offers its own view of figurative human depiction in a vast variety of genres, from pigment prints to acrylic and oil-on-canvas, fabric, paper-mache and other mixed media, as well as sculptural figures in bronze, plaster, and even created from a mixture of fabric and human hair. [Read More…]

Connecting The Community

Riot Material magazine, like so many of us at the moment, is cash-strapped and unable to pay for new content in the short run, so I wanted to reach out to friends in editorial around the country and internationally to offer paid writing gigs to RM’s outstanding team of writers and critics: Artillery, Art in America, Frieze, Juxtapoz, ArtForum, Aesthetica, Little White Lies, Fangoria, Cinema Scope, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Spin, Vibe, DownBeat, JazzTime, Los Angeles Review of Books, New York Review of Books, Paris Review, Atlantic Monthly… to call out but a few. You can’t go wrong with the Riot Material regulars listed, with links to their work in the magazine, below. Feel free to check in with me here for an introduction to any of the writers below to review art (LA, NYC, London), film, literature, music, et all: [Read More…]

Subversion As Transmission In klipschutz’s Premeditations

Reviewed by James McWilliams

Premeditations
by klipschutz
Hoot n Waddle, 120pp., $16.00

Premeditations is a poet’s ode to poets. With wry nostalgia, klipschutz (the name author Kurt Lipschutz goes by), a San Francisco poet and songwriter (who works closely with the musician Chuck Prophet), opens his paean to poetry by defending the increasingly endangered sacred space where one typically discovers words that fuel the spirit: a bookstore. “North Beach Threnody,” the volume’s opening poem, leads with this stanza:

A landmark, registered, and us inside it,
folded up in folding chairs, with
everything outside moving
fast in another direction.
 [Read More…]

McCoy Tyner, Greatest Jazz Pianist Of All Time, Is Dead at 81

by Henry Cherry

McCoy Tyner’s death was announced on his Facebook page earlier today. Tyner, most famously linked to John Coltrane, was a gale force of rhythmic complexity and ingenuity on the piano. Joining with Coltrane while still a teen, his double-barreled approach to the aural intricacies of modern jazz cannot be fully appreciated. The genius of Tyner’s musicality is still being deciphered. [Read More…]