Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Riot Material in Bed (tap here)

artist

Tales Of The Unconfined: Alison Saar’s Defiant Women Warriors

Syncopation, at L.A Louver, Los Angeles (through 29 February)
Chaos in the Kitchen, at Frieze Los Angeles
Reviewed by Lita Barrie

Alison Saar’s work combines the raw power of tribal art with the postmodern sophistication of complex cultural subtexts. Her work is made in a near devotional way, which infuses a rare emotional intensity into her new narratives on upturning gender and racial hierarchies. Few artists can use visual materials as skillfully to create such powerful political statements. Fewer still can combine aesthetic technique and conceptual acuity in artwork that is so heartfelt it resonates with the viewer viscerally, a sensation akin to listening to a Nina Simone song. This is a rare feat only an exceptional artist can accomplish, which makes her concurrent exhibitions, Syncopation, at L.A Louver, and Chaos in the Kitchen, at Frieze Los Angeles, stand out even amidst the art fair frenzy. [Read More…]

artist

The Shaman’s Bride Lifts Her Veil In Lezley Saar’s A Conjuring of Conjurors

at Walter Maciel Gallery, Los Angeles (through 22 February)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

 

Born under a bad sign

Been down since I began to crawl

If it wasn’t for bad luck

You know, I wouldn’t have no luck at all


In the magical exhibition, A Conjuring of Conjurors, artist Lezley Saar herself becomes the master shaman as she explores the role of mysticism, spiritualism and religious rituals in the human quest for safety, survival and certainty. Known for her earlier works that examine those who dwell in the interstices of identity, Saar here creates fantastically invented narratives of soothsayers and seers who use amulets, bones and tinctures to fix what is broken, find what is lost, or cure all manner of maladies.  [Read More…]

♥

Check out the Riot Material Gallery on Instagram. Cappuccinos on the house.

books

Excerpt from Jaki Liebezeit: The Life, Theory and Practice of a Master Drummer

by John Payne

Jaki Liebezeit: The Life, Theory and Practice of a Master Drummer
edited by Jono Podmore
Unbound, 320 pp., $16.94

The drum master Jaki Liebezeit pursued over a decades-long career an enduring fascination with the core truths of time as expressed via rhythm. Not just a musician who wished to perfect a technique or expand his range of drumming styles, Liebezeit took his fascination deeper, to realms in which the very whys and wherefores of rhythm’s true place in any musical mode were of paramount importance – as was by extension its metaphorical relationship to the human being’s role in larger collective society. [Read More…]

thought

Corporate Fascism And The Aesthetics of Politics

by Johanna Drucker

Corporate fascism. We know the term. Now we will see the full ugly face of its wrath in the vengeful fury of Trump. Trump, like all opportunistic social phenomena, is an expression of a  trending wave of collective sentiment and will. He is neither sole cause (autonomous agent) nor simple effect (isolated outcome) of a deliberate plan of action on his own part. But the specifics of his own psychopathology optimize his virulent capacity for destructive impact. Watching and listening to the monster speak in the state of His Union address would be sufficient, even without other mountains of evidence, to feel the grotesque distortions of the personality in all of its many disorders. Now his rabid vengeance is unleashed and unrestrained. [Read More…]

artist

The Swirling Claustrophopias Of Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet

at Met Fifth Avenue, NYC
Reviewed by Lisa Zeiger

“…the deepest and earliest secret of all: that just as we watch other life, other life watches us.”
—Toni Morrison, “Memory, Creation, and Fiction”

The superlative Félix Vallotton exhibition recently at the Metropolitan Museum, titled Painter of Disquiet, was an enthralling view of the tension between Vallotton’s early anarchist political engagement and the abiding, rather staid (though always darkling) character of his oeuvre over his 44-year career. [Read More…]

The Line –>

Creature-Feature After Midnight Is Killed By A Buckshot Of Clichés

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko Heartbreak can be a savage thing. It's a primal ache that creeps up on you in the middle of the night, ferociously roaring and threatening to tear your heart into tiny pieces. This metaphor is made literal in the horror-drama After Midnight, which focuses on a man-versus-monster battle that begins after the dropping of a devastating Dear John letter. … [Read More...]

A Labyrinth Of Interlocking Lives In Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies

Reviewed by Ruth Franklin Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi, translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth Catapult, 243 pp., $16.95 (paper) Review courtesy of The New York Review of Books In an engrossing book published last spring called Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, the Australian writer Jane Alison makes a trenchant observation about the “dramatic arc” long considered the foundation for plot. Swelling to a climax and then deflating, it resembles nothing so much as a phallus: “Bit masculo-sexual, no?” Alison’s book offers alternative possibilities for … [Read More...]

The Line

In Its Feminist Spin On The Turn Of The Screw, The Turning Fatally Flubs The Finale

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

The glory of psychological horror is the doubt injected within it. Is there truly a malevolent spirit creeping through creaking halls of the grand old house? Is there someone lurking in the dark, hungry to do harm? Is there a Babadook knock-knock-knocking at the closet door? Or is it all in the mind of a harried woman pushed to bring of sanity? The “what if” of it all is crucial to the stinging pleasure of this viewing experience, tickling your brain with possibilities. Perhaps the most popular tale of such stories is Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. This gothic horror novella has been adapted to film and television dozens of times over the past 122 years. And Floria Sigismondi’s The Turning certainly is another one, and almost a great one! Shame its attempt to give this old tale a fresh relevance is fumbled in a bewildering final act. [Read More…]

Gathering No Moss, Toh-Kichi’s Baikamo Wanders Freely If Not Ferally Through The Avant-Garde

on Libra Records
Reviewed by John Payne

Since her 1996 duo set with Paul Bley on Something About Water (Libra), pianist-composer Satoko Fujii has led numerous groups in widely varied formats ranging from free jazz to avant-rock to new-music chamber works. The possessor of a most formidable set of playing chops, Fujii is an intellectually engaged and refreshingly progressive-minded musician whose idiosyncratically shaped and harmonized compositions have seen upwards of 80-plus releases on her and partner Natsuki Tamura’s Libra label (Tamura, who also goes by the name Kappa Maki, is on his own a beautifully unclichéd tone-warper with an equally brazen disregard for the hollow holys of his instrument). If you want a reference point for the kind of beyond-jazz musical freedom Fujii represents, you might think Carla Bley and Michael Mantler’s Jazz Composers Orchestra stuff of the early ‘70s. [Read More…]

Jimmy Heath, aka Little Bird, Takes Soul’s Serenading Flight

Jimmy “Little Bird” Heath
1926 – 2020
RIP

by Henry Cherry

When saxophonist Jimmy Heath died at 93 from undisclosed causes on Sunday, January 19, 2020, he left younger brother Albert as the last of the Heath brothers, a remarkable trio of musicians who worked collectively and individually to help craft the pillars of jazz music. With Albert on drums, Percy on bass and middle brother Jimmy, nicknamed Little Bird because of the early influence of Charlie Parker on his playing, on saxophone, the Heaths played on hundreds of recordings with legends and under known greats of the musical idiom. Without the Heaths musical input, jazz would not be what it is today. [Read More…]

A Man’s History As Passing Shadow In John Sonsini’s Cowboy Stories & New Paintings

at Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles (through February 22)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

The iconic and often brutal mythology that informs images of the American West is unreliable at best, specifically as it relates to the larger-than-life stereotype of the cowboy. Forged in the fires of patriarchy, the familiarity of the gritty, rugged lone cowboy making his way on horseback across the prairie, persists to this day. He exemplifies the myth that has become synonymous with our image of American culture, yet this image is simplistic and problematic in that it privileges one culture over another and leaves no room for shared human experience. [Read More…]

The Savage Wit And Surreal Wonder Of The Wave

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

You make one little decision and the repercussions hit you like a wave. Boom! You’re knocked out of your cozy footing and swept away into a new reality. There’s a swirl of excitement and terror as you desperately stretch to find your bearings or snatch a breath of air. Maybe you wish you could go back to before, make a new choice, take a new path. All of this is what the trippy sci-fi thriller The Wave is about. [Read More…]