What to make of the deeply strange Vox Lux? Actor turned writer/director Brady Corbet centers on the tragedy-strewn life of a female pop star to explore celebrity, sisterhood, motherhood, and terrorism. But while his sophomore effort is wildly ambitious, it’s more confounding than captivating, and ultimately underwhelming. [Read More…]
film
Clara’s Ghost Is A Twisted Family Affair
Reviewed by Kristy Puchko
There’s a unique kind of horror found within families. Inside jokes can become a cozy place to nestle insults. Old wounds and deepening resentments can be papered over with any new bit of family gossip or for any get together. But in the horror-comedy Clara’s Ghost, a brush with the potentially paranormal pushes a mild-mannered mom to lash out against the family that’s tradition is casually berating her. [Read More…]
exegesis
James Dickey’s Black Mask: Deliverance as a Runaway Slave Narrative
When Burt Reynolds died last August, the obits recounted the strange life of an iconic American actor. Particularly weird was how Reynolds often lied about where he was born. He said he was born Waycross, Georgia. Why anyone born in Lansing, Michigan would want to be from Waycross, Georgia is a baffling question. What we do know is that Reynolds, who always identified as southern, and even affected a twang to fit the image, was, with this odd fib, participating in a cultural practice with roots dating back to nineteenth-century plantation culture. Burt Reynolds was “storying.” [Read More…]
thought
Why Frank Zappa Is The Voice America (Still) Needs
“It’s time for a revolution, but probably not in the terms that people imagine it.” –Frank Zappa
This December marks 25 years since the death of DIY genius, comical cynic, lyrical satirist, musical innovator, social commentator, sardonic iconoclast, political debater, and composer-slash-rock-star Frank Zappa.
Throughout his eyebrow-raising career, Zappa parodied the plastic people, brain police, valley girls, dancing fools, and hungry freaks across America. His prolific body of work is a symphony of observations of human absurdity, expressed through such mediums as political meetings in the Soviet Union and the former Czechoslovakia, experimental advertisements for razors and cough drops, a violin bow tickling a bicycle wheel, a surrealist claymation music video, and a grotesque potato-headed puppet named Thing-Fish. He aimed to “shake people out of their complacency… and make them question things.” [Read More…]
film
Mary Queen of Scots is a Messy But Marvelous Bit Of Feminist Fan (Non)Fiction
A legendary beauty with a string of dead lovers and a dangerous claim to the English throne, Mary Stuart is a figure who has long fascinated historians. She has been painted as a murderer, a traitor, and a slut. But Mary Queen of Scots reconsiders this bad reputation and reconstructs her as a proto-feminist heroine who was condemned for her ambition, her beauty, and for trying to have it all. [Read More…]
Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson’s Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism
Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson’s Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism
by Timothy Denevi
PublicAffairs, 416 pp., $18.30
On a cloudy Tuesday afternoon I found myself by a train station in Santa Monica ordering an Uber ride. To ride the train through the bowels of the city can be a daily reminder that quite a sector of our civilization has gone completely insane, but the Uber ride itself put the icing on the cake and confirmed this dark suspicion. The driver, who shall remain unnamed, was a jolly type with a curious name. I have a bad habit of getting easily into conversation with any human who crosses my path and asked where the driver hailed from. Poland was the answer. Ah yes, Poland. I mentioned that Poland has been undergoing quite the political sea change, using those words as to not say the current government as right-wing and nationalist. This was my second mistake. The driver quickly announced himself as a partisan of the ruling Law and Justice Party (what a shudder to even type such a name) because, hey, they were getting rid of “the Communists still left over from the past,” who are inevitably “controlled by the Jews.” [Read More…]
Haruki Murakami’s “The Wind Cave”
Excerpted from Murakami's recent novel, Killing Commendatore Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel Read Riot Material's review of Killing Commedatore
When I was fifteen, my younger sister died. It happened very suddenly. She was twelve then, in her first year of junior high. She had been born with a congenital heart problem, but since her last surgeries, in the upper grades of elementary school, she hadn’t shown any more symptoms, and our family had felt reassured, holding on to the faint hope that her life would go on without incident. But, in May of that year, her heartbeat became more irregular. It was especially bad when she lay down, and she suffered many sleepless nights. She underwent tests at the university hospital, but no matter how detailed the tests the doctors couldn’t pinpoint any changes in her physical condition. The basic issue had ostensibly been resolved by the operations, and they were baffled. [Read More…]
The Line
The Farce of Imperial Pageantry In Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite
We begin with an evening walking through the artificial cities of the Fox Studios lot, accompanied by a Turk who can read a star map, graced with a name that has a royal origin. She inevitably helps us find our way among the maze of this place. It is but a day after the republic has cast its vote in another election embodying well these mad times. We walk through the false New York streets of the lot, nestled within the west side of Los Angeles. Like power, the city within this city is but an illusion. Such are the perfect conditions to enter the world of The Favourite, the new film by Greek enfant terrible Yorgos Lanthimos. Like his ancestors, Luis Bunuel, Tristan Tzara and other practitioners of the surreal arts, Lanthimos captures this era in civilization better than almost any other director. This new work reaches back into the past, yet has a timeless force in its dissection and sheer mocking of the pageantry of empire. [Read More…]
Helmut Newton: Private Property
at 10 Corso Como, NYC
Reviewed by Jill Connor
The infamous partnership between art and fashion is receiving overwhelming recognition throughout New York galleries and museums this Fall. From September to November, 10 Corso Como introduced Private Property by the world-renowned fashion photographer, Helmut Newton. Although Newton passed away in 2004, this specific set of photographs had never been exhibited in the United States. Initially Private Property was created in 1984, but Newton had not intended for these photographs to be seen publicly. This dossier of 45 gelatin silver prints covers a decade of Newton’s career, from 1971 to 1983, and presents a mix of unknown models with well-known celebrities who, at that time, were beginning to gain notoriety. [Read More…]
A Critical Look At Deborah Sengl’s The Last Days of Mankind
The Last Days of Mankind
Artwork by Deborah Sengl
Contributions by Marjorie Perloff, Matthias Goldmann, Anna Souchuk and Paul Reitter
DoppelHouse Press, 176 pp., $38.95
doppelhouse.com
Excerpted from the DoppelHouse Press edition, publishing at the end of the month, which examines Deborah Sengl’s The Last Days of Mankind.
“The Document Is a Figure”
by Matthias Goldmann
Deborah Sengl’s project The Last Days of Mankind originated as an exhibition at the Essl Museum in Klosterneuburg in early 2014, the year that marked the centennial of the beginning of World War I. The artist used 176 taxidermied white rats as actors presenting forty-four scenes from Karl Kraus’ documentary anti-war play The Last Days of Mankind (Die letzten Tage der Menschheit), which comprises 220 scenes and filled 800 pages in the original edition. Due to its length and stage directions, which include the appearance of 12,000 horses, the play has never been performed in full. This “horrible symphony of deeds”[i] is, as Kraus’s preface puts it, unsuited for human audiences and “intended for a theater on Mars.”[ii] There have been numerous attempts since the nineteen sixties to stage this unstageable play; Sengl’s installation was not the only one in 2014, though certainly it was one of the most commended. [iii] [Read More…]
Ron Baron’s Ode to a Void
at Studio 10, Brooklyn
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban
In his ghostly installation, Ode to a Void, at Studio10, Brooklyn, artist Ron Baron has channeled a literally granular level of grief. Particles of pearlite, salt, sand and broken glass are sprinkled on the gallery floor in the pattern of a room-sized spiral resembling a cosmic corona. Placed seemingly at random on this winding road to nowhere — or at least nowhere on earth — are some 60 pairs of shoes, ranging from baby’s shoes to adult cowboy boots. They have been slip-cast in ceramic, and whatever their past life was, they are now frozen in time. [Read More…]
Jordan Wolfson: Art and Objecthood
at the Broad, Los Angeles (Through January 20, 2019)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch
“I was mostly just interested in the physicality of what I’d seen in the animatronic field, and I was also interested in making a sculpture that had the potential to be chronological or structural in the same way a video is. My hope is that the work dips in and out of spectacle.” 一 Jordan Wolfson
Beginning with the iconic Venus of Willendorf and her luscious curves, the Western art historical tradition has long associated the female body with consumption and objecthood. Now, in this modern age of technology and the #MeToo Movement, provocative American sculptor Jordan Wolfson’s hypersexualized animatronic figure currently on view at the Broad Museum deliberately challenges the viewer with its seemingly stereotypical depiction of women. Undoubtedly, this demeaning representation is bound to trigger consternation and spark debate. The artist is no stranger to this kind of controversy. His violent virtual reality-based installation at the 2017 Whitney Biennial shocked and horrified both critics and visitors alike. While the Broad’s (Female Figure) is far tamer in comparison, it does effectively question the progress of gender equality in America and echo Edouard Manet’s Olympia (1863) in its subversion of the male gaze. [Read More…]