When a historical nightmare occurs it can distort every facet of society, in particular the arts. Artistic expression is molded by the tides of events. If a society goes completely mad, its artistic processes will be a reflection of the disease. This is ever so evident in the evolution of fascist societies. Rüdiger Suchsland’s brilliant, unnerving yet captivating new documentary, Hitler’s Hollywood, is a work of dark reverie and critical study. It challenges the viewer to ponder the very meaning of the word “beauty,” and to wonder in disturbed awe if fascism can indeed produce beautiful works. Moments in this documentary are indeed so luminous that the spectator cannot help but drink in the imagery, even if we are aware that it is all merely a veil for horrors. [Read More…]
records
Wajatta’s Wickedly Funky (And Fun!) Casual High Technology
on Comedy Dynamics
Reviewed by John Payne
As a way of potentially creating something genuinely new, or at least surprising, the time-honored but perhaps neglected artistic scheme of melding or juxtaposing multiple dissimilar aesthetic beliefs or conceptual visions in order to birth a third entity, independent of its parents’ genetics, might be the best way to describe the resonant thrills encoded within the grooves of Wajatta’s debut album. [Read More…]
film
John Cameron Mitchell’s Timid How To Talk To Girls At Parties
In 2001, John Cameron Mitchell roared onto the film scene like a bat out of hell with Hedwig And The Angry Inch. Based on his daring Off-Broadway show, this outrageous rock musical was celebrated for its poignant tale of self-love and the dynamic spectacle of its sensational song numbers. Remarkably, Mitchell brought the experience of the live show into the movie theater, creating a sense of enchanting spontaneity that transformed the audiences who saw it. And that included me. [Read More…]
art
A Love Letter In Sprays: LA’s BEYOND THE STREETS
At Werkartz, Los Angeles (through 6 July)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch
Wandering through the cavernous, labyrinthine yet thoroughly modern galleries of BEYOND THE STREETS — graffiti and street art historian Roger Gastman’s love letter to the genre — the viewer stumbles upon a modest and intimate installation resembling an ancient Roman temple. Closer inspection, however, reveals references to a myriad of other religious traditions, including Buddhist prayer wheels and a relief sculpture of the Biblical serpent tempting Eve. It is this blending of worlds, this juxtaposition of old and new, East and West, and high and low-brow art that defines this extravaganza of an exhibition [Read More…]
art
KAN Offers Up A Fresh Way ‘To Look’
at Durden and Ray, Los Angeles (through 26 May)
Reviewed by Genie Davis
KAN, the group exhibition at Durden and Ray, is a subtle, poetic show that shines with both its intent and its artwork. Curated by Sijia Chen and Lydia Michelle Espinoza, the show features the work of Chen and artists Carl Berg, Gul Cagin, Hai-Biao Cai, Huang Cheng, Roni Feldman, Ed Gomez, Jenny Hager, Ruowan Li, Ty Pownall, and Zhengsai Xie.
Primarily abstract work, with some figurative pieces, KÀN in Chinese translates as “to look,” and that is what each piece encourages us to do remarkably well here. Viewers are invited to observe captured moments, to take-in even the most minute or quiet details with intention and purpose. Each piece in the exhibition is quietly contemplative. Regardless of mediums — which are varied — the works encourage the viewer to turn inward, to go beyond the casual glance and truly study a piece. Many, though by no means all, of these works have subdued palettes, in most cases the palettes chosen by the artist fall into a specific series of shades. [Read More…]
The Aggressively Uncategorizable Roger Ballen
Roger Ballen: Ballenesque
at Fahey/Klein Gallery (through June 16, 2018)
Reviewed by Shana Nys Dambrot
Ballenesque: Roger Ballen: A Retrospective
by Roger Ballen and Robert JC Young
Thames & Hudson, 336 pp., $80.00
Sometimes an artist’s style is so aggressively uncategorizable, so interdisciplinary and outside conventions, that it defies not only genre, but any meaningful comparisons to history or peer — and their name simply becomes its own adjective. Meet US/South African artist Roger Ballen, whose sui generis style of photography-based practices has been dubbed Ballenesque, because there’s literally no better way to describe it. Of course, in this case, Ballen himself began referring to his own work that way fairly early on, in the 1990s, and honestly he has a point. [Read More…]
Roger Ballen’s Visceral & Phantasmagorical Outland
In her review of the Roger Ballen retrospective, “Ballenesque,” at Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles (through June 16, 2018), Shana Nys Dambrot tells us, “in the last three decades, Ballen’s instincts became more and more fantastical, his poetic and surrealist impulses gaining momentum and eventually taking over his storytelling impulse in the name of fiction and allegory.”
The exhibition is a must see, and to double down on its delightfully troubling aesthetic — and to get a truly visceral sense of Ballen’s taste for the fantasitical, the grossly poetic and the apocalyptically surreal — check out his 2015 short, Outland:
The Line
Hank Willis Thomas: What We Ask Is Simple
at Jack Shainman Gallery, NYC (through May 12, 2018)
Reviewed by Angelica Villa
Hank Willis Thomas’s What We Ask is Simple, at Jack Shainman Gallery, is a graphic montage of 20th century plight and redemption. Using iconic imagery of modern protest with an advanced photographic method, these works become fully perceivable in form and content while illuminated. Each viewer is nudged to participate in this collective exposure. The entirety of the production, its recurring pull of granular memory, operates like an antique projection, clicking through filmy capsules with pulsing light. Predicated on thorough theoretical research and a deep investigation into archival material, Thomas’s conceptual process relies substantially on the collection of both the iconic and the transient in literary and photographic relics of mass culture. [Read More…]
Melting Point: Movements in Contemporary Clay
the Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Christopher Michno
Figuratively shouldering the weight of the world in his performance El Peso de la Tierra (2017 – 2018), Armando Cortes dragged a piece of clay equal to his own weight a quarter of a mile along Wilshire Boulevard, from Chris Burden’s Urban Light installation to the Craft and Folk Art Museum, during the opening this January of the CAFAM’s inaugural clay biennial, “Melting Point: Movements in Contemporary Clay.” Saddled with a hand-carved wooden yoke—an object that symbolically confers the role of beast of burden—in order to tow the pyramid-shaped black clay mass, the artist posited this gesture as an expansive reference to divisions of labor aligned with immigration status and cultural identity, and as an implication of systemic racism. [Read More…]
Figuring History: Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas
at the Seattle Art Museum
By Lorraine Heitzman
Figuring History, at The Seattle Art Museum, raises the question, “How do we perceive that which isn’t there?” For Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, and Mickalene Thomas, that is not a rhetorical question. For these three generations of African American painters, the absence of people of color in art was personal. Their ability to tell their stories with such verve and conviction and their choice to break through conventions about whom and what should be represented in art has transformed art history. Each artist faced the challenge differently but together their work shifts the paradigm of race and representation in museums towards a more inclusive record of what it means to be American. [Read More…]
An Interview With Rumble’s Executive Producer Stevie Salas
The recent documentary Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World is a revelation, from Link Wray’s monumental influence on the landscape of music, to the legendary stars paying tribute to the songs and rhythms of indigenous cultures whose struggles were hidden from history for far too long. The line up of celebrities in this documentary is impressive: Stevie Van Zandt, Martin Scorsese, Taj Mahal, Georges Clinton, Tony Bennett, Taboo, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Robbie Robertson and Steven Tyler, to name a few, including Iggy Pop, who owes his decision to become a musician to Link Wray’s infamous power cord.
Link Wray & His Wray Men, “Rumble” (1958) [Read More…]
The Triplets of Belleville Cine-Concert
at The Barclay Theater, Irvine
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner
The Triplets of Belleville (2003), a French-Canadian, wildly inventive and idiosyncratic animated film with no dialogue (just sound effects and simulated speech) has an exuberant original Oscar-winning soundtrack (more on that later). The plot is ostensibly about a boy, a dog, a grandmother and a bicycle, but it is really about the passing of time, aging, resilience and persistence. At the same time, it hints at a social critique of America while clearly a love letter to early Disney animation as well as a paean to those kitschy American gangster movies from the 1930’s. Add in a love affair with Hollywood’s movie musicals and you begin to sense the complexity here, as all this is served up with a dash of whimsy and with a deeply sardonic Gallic sense of humor. [Read More…]