Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Riot Material in Bed (tap here)
RCA The Indian-head test pattern

RIOT MATERIAL is on short sabbatical following the once-in-a-lifetime Covid Pause and the wholesale chaos that’s so swiftly ensued throughout this deeply fragmented land. The righteous fight for radical change, social justice and the thorough eradication of systematic racism is upon us. All well-intentioned hands are needed on deck and, indeed, every effort of the publishers of this magazine are currently aimed at the elevation and actualization of this singular cause.

Meantime, RM will still be publishing, though we will do so far less frequently, so please look out for occasional new essays and reviews as they go live on the site. Announcements of all new publishings will be made on our Medium and Facebook pages. 

Much love from Editorial —
Be safe, remain engaged,
and above all else
Abort The Patriarchy!!!

thought

Cornel West’s “Democracy Matters in Race Matters”

Preface to the 25th Anniversary Edition to Race Matters

Race Matters
by Cornel West
Beacon Press, 110pp., $11.60

Black people in the United States differ from all other modern people owing to the unprecedented levels of unregulated and unrestrained violence directed at them. No other people have been taught systematically to hate themselves — psychic violence — reinforced by the powers of state and civic coercion — physical violence — for the primary purpose of controlling their minds and exploiting their labor for nearly four hundred years. The unique combination of American terrorism — Jim Crow and lynching — as well as American barbarism — slave trade and slave labor — bears witness to the distinctive American assault on black humanity. This vicious ideology and practice of white supremacy has left its indelible mark on all spheres of American life — from the prevailing crimes of Amerindian reservations to the discriminatory realities against Spanish-speaking Latinos to racial stereotypes against Asians. Yet the fundamental litmus test for American democracy — its economy, government, criminal justice system, education, mass media, and culture — remains: how broad and intense are the arbitrary powers used and deployed against black people. In this sense, the problem of the twenty-first century remains the prob­lem of the color line. [Read More…]

thought

Reckoning Race in Eudora Welty’s Photographs

by James McWilliams

Two portraits; two men. Both are from 1930s Mississippi. The men are situated together, photos 22 and 23, both from Eudora Welty’s only published book of photographs, simply titled Photographs. If you could put a frame around both images it would be the Jim Crow South. [Read More…]

♥

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art

A Gathering Of Ruins, And Simmering Consciousness, In Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus

in Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London
by Zadie Smith

Kara Walker: Hyundai Commission
edited by Clara Kim
Tate Publishing, 144pp., $24.95
New York Review of Books

Two women are bound at the waist, tied to each other. One is a slim, white woman, in antebellum underskirt and corset. A Scarlett O’Hara type. She is having the air squeezed out of her by a larger, bare-breasted black woman, who wears a kerchief around her head. To an American audience, I imagine, this black woman could easily read as “Mammy.” To a viewer from the wider diaspora—to a black Briton, say—she is perhaps less likely to invoke the stereotypical placidity of “Mammy,” hewing closer to the fury of her mythological opposite, the legendary Nanny of the Maroons: escaped slave, leader of peoples. Her hand is held up forcefully, indicating the direction in which she is determined to go, but the rope between her and the white woman is pulled taut: both struggle under its constriction. And in this drama of opposing forces, through this brutal dialectic, aspects of each woman’s anatomy are grotesquely eroticized by her adversary: buttocks for the black woman, breasts for her white counterpart. Which raises the question: Who tied this constricting rope? A third party? And, if the struggle continues, will the white woman eventually be extinguished? Will the black woman be free? That is, if the white woman is on the verge of extinguishment at all. Maybe she’s on the verge of something else entirely: definition. That’s why we cinch waists, isn’t it? To achieve definition? [Read More…]

books

Romare Bearden And The Collapsing Of Worlds Into Fabulant Forms

Reviewed by Sarah Elizabeth Lewis
.
The Romare Bearden Reader
edited by Robert G. O’Meally
Duke University Press, 413 pp., $29.95 (paper)
New York Review of Books

Every year, Congressman John Lewis has made a pilgrimage to honor the anniversary of the campaign to march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capitol in Montgomery. The journey began on Sunday, March 7, 1965, when Lewis, then twenty-five years old and chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was severely beaten and nearly killed by state troopers as he led six hundred peaceful protesters in a march that started at a church in Selma and was forcibly intercepted by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named after the Confederate general and grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

[Read More…]

thought

The Line –>

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 … [Read More...]

The Unbound Promise Of The Full Five-Hour Masterwork Until The End Of The World

by Henry Cherry Until the End of the World is a film, like the best of them, that stands outside of genre. Part sci-fi epoch, part love story, part road movie, it begins and ends with an image of the Earth’s curvature. Made by director Wim Wenders, it is the culmination of his most successful period as a filmmaker, a truth made all the more striking in that upon its initial release, Until the End of the World was a failure. … [Read More...]

The Line

Gerhard Richter’s Solemn Yet Miraculous Retrospective, Painting After All

at Met Breuer, NYC (through 5 July 2020)
Reviewed by Peter Schjeldahl
The New Yorker

“Birkenau.” The dread name—of the main death facilities at Auschwitz—entitles four large abstract paintings and four full-sized digital reproductions of them in the last gallery of Painting After All, a peculiarly solemn Gerhard Richter retrospective at the Met Breuer. The works are based on four clandestine photographs that were smuggled out of the concentration camp in 1944. Two, taken from the shadowed exit of a gas chamber, show naked corpses strewn on the ground and smoke rising from bodies afire in a trench beyond them. Men in uniform stand at ease—two appear to chat—amid the shambles. Richter first saw the images in the fifties. He encountered them again in 2008 and kept the worst of them hanging in his studio in Cologne. In 2014, he projected them onto canvas and traced them. As he worked, they became illegible. The finished paintings exemplify Richter’s frequent style of densely layered, dragged pigments. They are unusually harsh in aspect, with clashing red and green, sickly whites, and grim blacks. But you’d hardly guess, by looking, their awful inspiration. [Read More…]

Cinema Disordinaire: A List Of Infectiously Strange Must-See Films For The End Times

Cinema Disordinaire, aka Riot Cinema, is a uniquely selective entry of films that showcase the singular in all of cinema, the seminal, and the utterly sublime come to screen this past half century. For these particularly disordinary times, where self-isolation is our newly mandated norm, we offer up a distilled list from Cinema Disordinaire’s five-decade accounting. These are must-see films — if you’re a lover of cutting-edge or entirely uncommon cinema — beginning with the latest (2019) and working backwards to high cult-bizarro, 1972. Soderbergh’s Contagion, the current streaming darling of this moment, is surely not amongst these greats, but an infectious strangeness runs throughout them all. They are, in other words, Riot Material’s favorites, offered up for those with a latently wicked heart. Below you’ll find links that take you to the original reviews of each film. Enjoy: [Read More…]

The LA Times And The Question Of Crisis Deliverance

by C von Hassett

The LA Times, once a towering, globally respected newspaper, has become a click-bait web of invasive ads and circus-style barking for subscription servicing that, though intolerable even when things in our city were on the norm, now come across as shark-like and ravenous, a dubious entity profiteering its wares much in the way of the two deplorables who stocked up on some 17,000 bottles of hand sanitizers with full intent of selling off all to the fearful for a handsome profit. They, if you recall, were swiftly booted from Amazon for price-gouging and were universally demonized in numerous news outlets around the world. Is not the sanitized LA Times, in this perfect viral storm, hawking their wares much the same? Are they not hording the gold of crisis-era information and, rather than sharing it without charge — as is their civic duty — they instead frontload every headline, every one-sentence introductory blurb, with either an onslaught of ads or swift delivery to a paid subscription page. No Corona updates without cash in hand for those of us living under its singular mantle, for no longer in this city is there a competing newspaper to call them in check. [Read More…]

On Lessons From August Wilson’s Jitney

at the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles
By Seren Sensei 

Jitney ran for a limited revival at the Mark Taper Forum prior to the quarantines that recently swept through L.A. County. A protective measure against global pandemic COVID-19, the lockdown effectively shut down bars, restaurants, movie theaters, plays and gatherings; while leaders felt this was necessary to halt the spread of the highly contagious illness, a wave of uncertainty has settled across the landscape of the gig and freelancer economy, powered by everything from artists to food servers to Uber and Lyft drivers. [Read More…]

The Beguiling Desolations Of Trisha Donnelly

at Matthew Marks Gallery, NYC
by Brian Block

In this era of pervasive promotional storytelling, Trisha Donnelly consistently chooses to go the other way and expunge. Her works carry no titles, her exhibitions no names, and her press releases only a few facts. This calculated act of liberalizing the viewing field works to intensify the abstracting power of the white cube toward the discrete objects and artist’s interventions on view. Indeed, what remains most compelling about Donnelly’s practice is her expert crafting of distinctive analogue mise en scène that finely reframes the show’s perceptual field. Far more gripping than any particular artwork of hers, it is this clandestine manipulation of the gallery space itself — as if it were a fabric in her medium — that she wields to captivating and occasionally frustrating effect. [Read More…]