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art

Margaret Lazzari’s Luminous Breathing Space

at George Billis Gallery, Los Angeles (through 8 October 2022)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

“Things are not what they seem: nor are they otherwise.”
–Buddha

Margaret Lazzari’s luminous solo exhibition of paintings, entitled Breathing Space, were painted during the pandemic, and the exhibition title is indeed significant. It’s defined as a respite, a hiatus, or an interval where one takes time to recover. The paintings themselves shift seamlessly between abstraction and figuration, observation and invention evoking both delight and anxiety. Her painting process informs this ever-changing perspective that intrigues, confounds and compels the viewer upon sustained investigation of the images. [Read More…]

mind

books

A Look Back on an Iconoclast: Art Critic Dave Hickey

by Jarrett Earnest

Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art
by Daniel Oppenheimer
University of Texas Press, 141 pp., $24.95

The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, Revised and Expanded
by Dave Hickey
University of Chicago Press, 123 pp., $15.00 (paper)

Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy
by Dave Hickey
Art Issues Press, 215 pp., $19.95 (paper)
NYRB

When Dave Hickey died last fall at the age of eighty-two, he left behind a singular contribution to the history of art writing, along with a badly bruised reputation, both routinely called “iconoclastic” for lack of anything more precise. The magazines he’d published in since the 1960s hardly took notice. The perfunctory obituaries that did appear treated him as a kind of Hunter S. Thompson of the contemporary art world, ensconced as he was in Las Vegas at the height of his fame. But alongside the bluster of “the bad boy of art criticism” was a neon Walter Pater of the Southwest who almost single-handedly remade the practice of art writing with his first two collections, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (1993) and Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (1997). In Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art, Daniel Oppenheimer complicates the cartoon version of his life that continues to shadow his reputation as a writer. What remains is the difficult task of taking stock of Hickey’s literary achievement. [Read More…]

film

Nihilism Births Its Own Interminable Hell

Mad God
Dir. Phil Tippett

Reviewed by Nicholas Goldwin

Technically astonishing and immersive to a fault, director Phil Tippett successfully demonstrates that thirty years of relentless dedication to your craft can lead to cinematic innovations even his old stomping grounds – the sets of Star Wars and Jurassic Park – have yet to catch up. Not to disparage either of those staples of cinema, but neither Tyrannosaurs nor Tatooine have anything on Tippett.

[Read More…]

art

An Interview with Artist Eve Wood

Eve Wood: Hanging in There to Hang On
at Track 16 Gallery, Los Angeles (opening reception: Saturday, September 10, 7-10pm)

by Julie Adler

I met Eve Wood at Holly Matter, an art gallery on Heliotrope in East Hollywood, 22 years ago now. I recall she got up and read some of her poems. Incisive, cutting, direct, I thought, “wow, what a master,” and also “ouch,” but in a good way. We became friends there, and a few years later she brought out some drawings at a meal we were having, of people, animals with wide eyes, craggy lines. Sparse, comical and awkward, eyes staring back at you or away. Up until that point I had no idea Eve was also a visual artist. I had come from a performance art background but was also starting to get more engaged in 2 dimensions. She was eager to do a trade. It seemed we shared a similar concern for the human condition. And because we humans are funny in our grotesqueness, our derangement, our folly, we didn’t think it unusual to portray that. We also felt the comradery of being outsiders, even though we both grew up here in LA and went to art school here.

So, when Eve asked me to interview her for this publication, I did not hesitate. It’s been wonderful to burrow in with her on the ways and means of her process. She’s really not an outsider (nor am I.) She is as inside as it gets. [Read More…]

Riot Material Monthly Digest (tap here)

The Line

John Lurie’s The History of Bones

Reviewed by Cintra Wilson The History of Bones: A Memoir by John Lurie Random House, 435 pp., $28.00 NYRB It was 1989 when I saw John Lurie on TV in a late-night advertisement for the new Lounge Lizards album, Voice of Chunk, which was “not available in stores” and selling exclusively through an 800 number. Operators were standing by. It was a charming, homemade ad, shot on grainy video, full of beautiful women dressed in international garb like they were animatronic dolls in Disneyland’s It’s a Small World ride. … [Read More...]

Marlene Dumas’ Masks of Inborn Gods

open-end, at Palazzo Grassi, Venice (through 8 January 2023) Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx Four relatively small artworks greet the visitor in the first room of the Marlene Dumas exhibit, open-end, at Palazzo Grassi. D-rection shows a young man contemplating his rather large and purple erection. A bluish white face and a brown face unite for a kiss in a nearly abstract closeup, Kissed. The subject of a Turkish Girl exhibits her vulva by holding up her legs at an unlikely angle. Finally, in the small loose drawing About Heaven, unidentified objects are flanked by a Dumas poem about … [Read More...]

The Clear, Crisp Taste of Cronenberg

Crimes of the Future
Reviewed by Anna Shechtman and D.A. Miller
Neon
NYRB

A line from Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg’s latest film, has been trailing it around with the campy insistence of an old-fashioned ad campaign: “Surgery is the new sex.” On receiving this information, a skeptical Saul Tenser, played by Viggo Mortensen, asks, “Does there have to be a new sex?” “Yes,” he is told by Kristen Stewart’s Timlin, with the assurance of a fashion influencer, “It’s time.”

It’s time for a new sex? For Timlin, infatuated with Saul, this might mean, “It’s time for a new sex act—sex between us.” For devotees of Cronenberg’s cinema, the phrase more pertinently means, “It’s time for a new Cronenberg film.” The director has been spawning new versions of sex since the start of his career. Murder is the new sex (Videodrome, 1983), car accidents are the new sex (Crash, 1996), commodity fetishism is the new sex (Cosmopolis, 2012), and so on. To get in the mood for new sex, you might resort to the rave drug that Cosmopolis calls “novo,” and afterward, you may need to be cured of bugs at the “Institute of Neo-venereal Disease” (the first Crimes of the Future, 1970). At all events, the precondition for making it with anyone in Cronenberg is making it new. [Read More…]

An Artist at Work, An Artist in Life: Studio Visits with Nancy Kay Turner

July 2022, Los Angeles

by Margaret Lazzari

“An iceberg is 10% above water and 90% below. When we talk about our work, artists all talk about the stuff above water, but we never talk about all the stuff way beneath the work. Who knows what their work will be until they do it, until they do the investigation, until they get surprised?”  –Nancy Kay Turner

This article is about the whole iceberg of Nancy Kay Turner’s artwork, discussing the 10% above but also illuminating some below, including the chance occurrences and unplanned upheavals that shaped her work just as much as her conscious intention form them.  –ML  [Read More…]

Conjuring a Divine Silence in Georganne Deen’s The Lyric Escape

at Rory Devine Fine Art, Los Angeles (through 6 August)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

Albert Camus once famously asked, “Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?” One can only hope that this was a rhetorical question, yet however ironic, it is still a sentiment worth pondering, especially considering today’s current socio-political climate of daily hate crimes, bigotry and mass shootings. Let’s face it — if you happen to have been born into a corporeal, human existence, you will inevitably suffer some sort of trauma, either real or imagined, over the course of your lifetime. Hell, even the act of being born, is enough to scare any living creature back into the womb. Still, we persist because, in the end, as Camus suggests, we must all take solace in the smallest mundane tasks that frame our lives and make them bearable. It’s rare that an artist is a direct conduit to both grief and absurdity simultaneously, yet Georganne Deen is exactly that, relishing in the absolute bizarreness that often encompasses a life well lived. [Read More…]

An Exclusively Organic Diet is Good Enough to Save Your Life

An excerpt from Entering the Mind, the new book from C von Hassett which speaks to the ways we can enter our own mind in meditation to both recognize and stabilize in its already perfectly awakened state. To do this, we must first cleanse the body of the myriad mind-clouding toxins taken in through food. The chapter below, “Eclipse and Revelation,” argues in favor of a diet free from industrial pesticides, which only then will allow us to see our own naturally occurring mind within — or what is more properly known as ‘mind in its natural state.’ Here, in this state, we learn to Awaken.

Entering the Mind
by C von Hassett
Waterside Productions, 173pp., $12.95

Eclipse and Revelation

Before entering mind or having any opportunity to recognize its essence, we must first have a body that allows us to freely enter the natural state without awareness itself being impeded by the toxins we take in. The in-flight airplane metaphor is apt: when masks drop in a moment of alert, put yours on first before taking care of others. We must take care of our body first before there is even a chance to remedy the confusion of our own mind. If the body is sick, being poisoned each day by pollutants in our environment, then awareness, too, is hampered by these same toxins. Mind follows body, and when the mind is riddled – be it by thoughts or by the actual poisons absorbed into our flesh – it cannot recognize itself, let alone come to the experiential realization that wisdom-being arrives only from within. [Read More…]

Nicole Eisenman and the Moderns: Head, Kisses, Battles

at Fondation Vincent Van Gogh Arles, France (through 23 October 2022)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

Art is never made in a vacuum, as all visual iterations must derive from something: a momentary glimpse of refracted light, a train pulling out of the station, a woman lying languorously on a bed. Whatever it is we are witness to, at least in the context of art, it has been done before. The trick is to create a compelling conversation between the ‘now’ and the ‘then,’ to find threads of association, of understanding and celebration.

Nicole Eisenman has always been a renegade maker of things that are at once luminous and sardonic. She is an artist who asks the questions we are too afraid to ponder, and then she answers them for us – with wit, grace and infinite wisdom. Her answers may not always be what we want to hear, but rest assured they are true. Nicole Eisenman and the Moderns. Heads, Kisses, Battles establishes what the catalogue essay describes as an unprecedented dialogue between the artist’s own oeuvre and that of twenty-seven modern artists, including (and perhaps most importantly) Vincent Van Gogh. This, to be sure, is not an easy task, and it is one that could easily have slipped into sentimentality were it not for the fact that there is not one sentimental bone in Eisenman’s body. [Read More…]