Riot Material

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fashion

Audacious Digs In Virgil Abloh’s Figures of Speech

at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Reviewed by Seren Sensei

In a short video clip during Figures of Speech, Virgil Abloh’s show at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago, he mused on his upbringing and influences. Born the son of Ghanaian immigrants in a small town in Illinois, he discussed the wonders of growing up “in the middle of nowhere,” and the freedom it gave him to explore, and to create, without feeling beholden to any predominant ideology or method of production. [Read More…]

film

In Jaw-Dropping Homage To The Twilight Zone, The Exhilarating The Vast of Night

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

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…]

♥

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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…]

artist

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…]

artist

Process And Fierce Redemption In Betye Saar’s Call and Response

at LACMA (through April 5, 2020)
Reviewed by Genie Davis

Betye Saar’s riveting, 40-object exhibition currently at LACMA offers a fascinating insight into the artist’s process. It’s strong focus on the power of redemptive faith and personal strength in the face of adversity is passionate and compelling – which can be frankly said of all Saar’s work. The exhibition also aches with possibility: Saar is a prolific artist, and as extensive as this exhibition is in terms of an insightful view of her sketchbooks, the longing remains to see more of her finished works, of which there are fewer than 20 exhibited here. [Read More…]

The Line –>

Lightly Through The Looking Glass With Apple’s [AR]T Walk

By Mayne

Alert the critics: The cutting edge of New York City’s art avantgarde can now be found at the Fifth Avenue Apple Store. Amid the blistering doldrums of summer, Apple has offered [AR]T Walk a guided tour of their new augmented reality exhibit. Co-curated with the New Museum, the tour is being offered in five other cities around the world: London, Paris, San Francisco, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, though the latter has been suspended indefinitely due to the political instability. [Read More…]

Wounds Of Desire In Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain And Glory

Reviewed by John Payne

Were you looking for such a thing, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more humanizing film than Pedro Almodóvar’s latest little miracle. The Spanish director/writer’s Pain and Glory is a story about an artist, who suffers, and remembers, and relives. This tale is only somewhat the story of people in general, though it’s easy and quite wrenching to project ourselves onto the life of Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas), a veteran film director afflicted by several physical maladies. His bodily decline brings him great pain, physical and mental. Of course he can’t work, can’t create, in this deteriorating state. He spends his days mostly prostrate in bed, having gobbled a vast regimen of pills and yogurts, and just recently has dabbled in heroin. [Read More…]

The Line

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…]

A Pitch-Black Comedic Masterwork In Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

South Korean writer/director Bong Joon-ho has been thrilling critics and genre fans since 2006, when he unleashed his rambunctious yet heartbreaking creature-feature The Host. He’s awed us again and again with marvelous movies like the mind-bending murder-mystery Mother, the star-stuffed dystopian drama Snowpiercer, and the whimsical yet brutal fantasy-adventure Okja. By now, when you walk into a Joon-ho movie, you should expect something wildly riveting and wickedly clever. And that’s about all you can predict, because Joon-ho’s stories take audiences down paths twisted and devastating, often just when you think everything might just work out. In this vein, his pitch-black comedy Parasite might his masterpiece. [Read More…]

Maria Lassnig’s Ways of Being

at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

In the self portrait Du oder Ich (You Or Me), Maria Lassnig points one gun at the viewer, the other at herself. Either I kill you or I kill myself, or both. Her face expresses fear, dismay, perhaps disgust, but not aggression. If she shoots at the viewer and her double, the brush-flourishing painter, it’s out of sheer terror. In her 80s, Lassnig depicts herself in the nude, without sparing us any detail of her ageing body. Sagging breasts, folds of flesh, hairless pudenda. The visitor is warned: the works in Maria Lassnig’s retrospective will not shy from brutal truths. We live in angst, in solitude, our bodies decay, we die, or those we love die. Women are subjected to male domination, artists to opportunists and passing trends. These facts of life, of her life, of ours in their universality, are delivered through Lassnig’s very own brand of expressionism: broad strokes, distortion of the body and face, grotesque, symbolism. So why does the work in the exhibition leave an impression of such striking beauty? [Read More…]

Activating Absence In Lenz Geerk’s Mixed Blessings

at Roberts Projects, Los Angeles (through 12 October)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

It’s very difficult to create a cohesive and engaging narrative with a suite of only five paintings. It’s inevitable that some works appear more central to the narrative structure than others, and in many cases the viewer is left out of the narrative loop altogether. So, it is particularly satisfying to discover work by an artist that holds up so beautifully in terms of creating an engaging and comprehensive story in only five works. In almost all of Lenz Geerk’s paintings there is either a door or a door frame, which suggests the convergence of the past with the present as we step through an open door into the future or remain behind the door in what metaphorically could suggest the past. What is interesting is that Geerk’s figures appear poised between worlds, as though the open doors were mirrors of self-reflection rather than actual tangible objects. The space of the paintings is activated by absence, by ghostly figures for whom there is no expiation, only the blurred boundaries between what was and what will be. [Read More…]