We’ve met lovers like Jules and Mickey before in movies like Badlands, Natural Born Killers and, of course, Bonnie and Clyde. They are partners in crime, metaphorically and literally, kicking off Villains with a smash-and-grab robbery that’s given a bit of flare by the animal masks they choose to wear. As they dash off in their getaway car, Jules (Maika Monroe) excitement translates into titillation, and she’s all over an elated Mickey (Bill Skarsgård) as he drives. But their plan to hightail to a beach and easy living hits a snag when they run out of gas. [Read More…]
artist
Terry Allen’s The Exact Moment It Happens in The West
at LA Louver (through September 28)
Reviewed by Eve Wood
Entering into Terry Allen’s universe is not unlike the imagined sensation of standing on an egg as it rolls across a hard wood floor, never stopping long enough to crack. The process by which we come to understand and appreciate his work requires a level of commitment on the part of the viewer not unlike balancing on an egg in that there are so many nuances and brilliantly imaginative connections being made all at once, that you feel that if you look away — even for an instant, that egg could shatter beneath your feet and you would be left with nothing but egg on your face. [Read More…]
film
On Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am
Toni Morrison published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, when she was 39 years old. By this time she was a divorced single mother of two sons and a respected teacher with a master’s degree in English from Cornell. She was an established a senior editor at Random House, the only Black woman in that position at the publisher. She’d championed Black authors and emphasized Black literature in the mainstream, including developing and strategically bringing out autobiographies by such Black Power luminaries as Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali. She was a close friend of influential participants in the Black Arts Movement, like the poet Sonia Sanchez. Yet in Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, the most recent documentary released on Morrison, she recalls being unwilling to submit The Bluest Eye, a novel about a little Black girl that longs above all else to have blue eyes, to Random House because she was, in her own words, “Just an editor. Not a writer.” [Read More…]
interview
Waad And Hamza al-Kateab, Edward Watts, On Syria And Their New Film, For Sama
For Sama is an extraordinary journey into war through the intimate lens of a woman who, in the course of five grueling years, also becomes a mother. From the 2011 uprisings in Aleppo, Syria, to her daily life in an area under never-ending siege, director Waad al-Kateab offers an unprecedented look into the lives of civilians held hostage under the oppression of what they refer to as “The Regime” — Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad regime — amid the shadows of global politics. [Read More…]
art
Narrative Painting In Los Angeles
at Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica (through August 31)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner
The streets were dark with something more than night.
–Raymond Chandler
We tell stories in order to live.
–Joan Didion
The City of Stars, sometimes known as “LaLaLand” — our often misunderstood Los Angeles — has always had a dark side. Too often it’s a place where dreams come to die. On the bright side, it is a place of endless sunlight and personal reinvention. Here, reality and fiction, truth and lies intertwine as everyone waits for The Big One to rearrange the furniture. Home to the literary work of Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, and Nathaniel West, it is a tantalizing contradiction of place. Narrative Painting In Los Angeles brings together thirteen figurative painters who interrogate the history of art, the nature of identity, sexual politics and social justice through the lens of Southern California with enormous skill and elan. [Read More…]
Reconsidering Content In Open Call Group 2
at The Shed Bloomberg Building, NYC (through August 25)
Reviewed by Jill Conner
When The Shed opened in April, it was roundly panned by the cultural press, despite the fact that it is currently the most dynamic platform for emerging, contemporary art made by artists who live and work in New York City. The rough, daily endeavor of living and working here finds resonance throughout the monumental, rhomboid shape designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro that is imbued with movement. This philanthropic effort to finally preserve and platform the city’s ever-growing, marginal, creative culture is not only epic, but long overdue. [Read More…]
Punch Surveys Sex, Celebrity, Religion And Self-Image
at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (through August 17)
Reviewed by Genie Davis
Curated by artist Nina Chanel Abney, Punch, at Jeffrey Deitch in mid-city, beautifully assaults the viewer with color, exciting shapes, and vibrant figuration. The current exhibition is an expansion of one presented at Deitch’s New York outpost last year; here the focus is primarily on LA-based artists, thirty-three in all — contemporary artists creating figurative and abstract connections with culture, society, and humanity. [Read More…]
The Line
David Crosby and Cameron Crowe on Capturing a Legendary Life in Remember My Name
At 77, the youthful fire inside David Crosby refuses to flicker out. The music legend makes this more than evident in the new, reflective documentary David Crosby: Remember My Name. A chronicle of his highs and lows, Crosby impressively allows this to be a work of complete, sometimes stinging honesty. Directed by A.J. Eaton with renowned director and journalist Cameron Crowe producing, Remember My Name leaves few stones unturned in Crosby’s life. In a sense he is a survivor from that last generation of creative minds who were heirs to the Romantic tradition. Born in the shadow of World War II, finding a voice in the tumultuous 60s, there’s more to a personality like Crosby than the mere tag of “old hippie.” From his drug abuse to writing iconic music and touring as a member of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young before the group implodes amid intense squabbles, it’s all laid bare in this film. And that’s exactly how he wanted it. [Read More…]
An Eye Through The Knotted Peephole In Junichiro Tanizaki’s Devils in Daylight
Devils in Daylight
by Junichiro Tanizaki
New Directions Publishing, 96pp., $9.95
“I would call back at least for literature this world of shadows we are losing. In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the thing that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration. I do not ask that this be done everywhere, but perhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them.”– Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows
Early 20thcentury, Japan. You, caped in shadows, find yourself watching two men who are watching, through a grainy peephole, two other people, a man and a woman, who are seemingly killing another man. The entire thing is busy, complex, furtive; erotic in its staggered geometry. Outside, where you are and where you aren’t, the rain-slicked street holds tiny concentric halos of light projected out from the window of an Inn that dizzies its patrons with licentious allure, while Rockwell’s paranoia blares from a jukebox — It always feels like somebody’s watching me, tell me is it just a dream — and you can’t help but look over your shoulder as you see a lantern-eyed black cat, smiling. Mind you, the song and the jukebox haven’t been invented yet, and Rockwell lingers as a figment awaiting popstar iteration, but still, they are there, this is happening, a confluence of elements, which includes you and five other people (one of them now very much dead), and the whole thing gets you thinking about the dreamlike immediacy of voyeurism, or the pyramidic folds of role-playing. You have entered that place between realms, where the novelist Junichiro Tanizaki so comfortably dwells. [Read More…]
Interview with Painter and Printmaker Austin Stiegemeier
Recently we interviewed the painter and printmaker Austin Stiegemeier, who is teaching fine art at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. Stiegemeier grew up in the small town of Rathdrum in northern Idaho. He began studying art while still in elementary school, and eventually pursued his art education at two universities in Washington State, completing his MFA at Washington State University. Since then, Stiegemeier has taught at several U.S. colleges, including Gonzaga University in Spokane, WA. Our conversation concentrated on his pursuit of representational art, including narrative art and portraiture. [Read More…]
An Army Of Women Warriors In Ann Shostrom’s The Rising
at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, NYC
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban
Ann Shostrom’s army of women warriors fills the front room of the Elizabeth Harris Gallery, a ghostly troop draped in shades of white: the traditional color of virgins, brides and suffragettes. Tall and graceful, evoking Corinthian columns, these seventeen fabric figures are both timeless and completely of the moment. Elegantly pieced together from sinuous scraps of material foraged from salvage sales, thrift stores, friends’ childhood wardrobes and Shostrom’s own closet, they simultaneously suggest Miss Havisham’s endless jilted vigil, the courageous members of the #Metoo Movement, and the chorus of 100-something congresswomen who earlier this year proudly wore ivory, ecru and alabaster to President Trump’s second State of the Union address. While explicitly feminine, they are also plainly phallic, iron fists within velvet — or in this case lace, linen and silk — gloves. [Read More…]
Benjamin Naishtat’s Rojo And A Region’s Cinematic Reckoning
The cinema of the Andes is a haunted art form. Rojo is set in the Argentina of the 1970s, plotted and shot like a classic noir, with a dark political subtext. Like many of the best recent films from this particular South American country and its neighbor Chile, the crime genre is used to tackle the legacy of the neo-fascist military regimes that governed these countries during the Cold War. This adds a layer of richness to the storytelling you don’t find in most U.S. movies or shows about detectives and murder. Noir has of course always been a vehicle to express the deepest recesses of any society, going back to films made by German expatriates in the U.S. during and after World War II. Fleeing the Nazis, directors like Fritz Lang framed the American underbelly with titles like The Big Heat and Scarlet Street. Now it is Latin American directors coming of age in the lingering aftermath of political terror who are refurnishing the genre in new ways. [Read More…]