Art. Word. Thought.
at Durden and Ray, Los Angles (through December 1)
Reviewed by Genie Davis
If life is an ocean then art is a wave. The wave carrying this exhibition brings artists from Iceland and Los Angeles together in a dazzling exhibition that fuses elements of technology with images of sea and self. [Read More…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
Or The De Facto Proxy Of Non American Blacks In Black American/DACS Roles
By Seren Sensei
There’s been a quiet hostility simmering within the Black diaspora.
It is most apparent when discussing media representation. It tensed when veteran American actor Samuel L. Jackson wondered what a Black American — what I call the descendants of American chattel slavery (DACS) — might have brought to the American-charged racism of ‘Get Out,’ and when fellow Brits John Boyega and Iris Elba came to star Daniel Kaluuya’s defense. It arose again with the casting of British actor Daniel Ezra as the lead in the CW’S newest teen drama: a football show titled, ironically, ‘All American,’ and based on the life of real life DACS football player Spencer Paysinger. [Read More…]
at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (Through January 6, 2019)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch
Societal stereotypes and divisions are unfortunately ubiquitous in our culture. Which begs the question, how should we go about demolishing them? With the nearly 300 photographs, paintings, drawings, videos, and installations currently comprising her blockbuster Hammer Museum retrospective, Adrian Piper: Concepts and Intuitions, 1965-2016, this New York-born, Berlin-based conceptual artist and former philosophy professor obliterates these harmful ideas via self-expression and scholarly inquisition. This comprehensive, almost encyclopedic presentation not only documents fifty years of Piper’s experimental oeuvre but also investigates the genesis of prejudice and embraces a much looser, more liberated sense of self. [Read More…]
You might think yourself a savvy cinephile. Perhaps you’ve heard that Border won Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival and is Sweden’s submission for Best Foreign-Language Film for the upcoming Academy Awards. So you hear the premise of a customs officer who forms an unexpected bond with a stranger she investigates, and assume you have a solid idea of the drama and romance that will unfurl. You’re wrong. Even if you know Border is adapted from a short story from Let The Right One In author and screenwriter John Ajvide Lindqvist, you can’t possibly conceive of the wild, disturbing yet beautiful story that’s lies within. And better yet, its unnerving surprises are just part of what makes this movie absolutely marvelous. [Read More…]
The Tony-award winning musical from the composer/lyricist team of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, which is playing at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles, continues the trend towards darker and more internal stories in contemporary musical theater. Pasek and Paul, who wrote the music for the film La-La Land and the Broadway musical A Christmas Story, are following in the footsteps of Next to Normal, which chronicled the story of a dysfunctional American family. [Read More…]
There are several ways of remembering a nightmare. Interpreting a classic work always requires a true sense of daring. When literature has become canon or a film a cultural staple, updating a story for a new age will bring with it the baggage of decades. For our new era of ghouls and menacing shadows, director Luca Guadagnino has decided to conjure his own interpretation of Dario Argento’s 1977 Suspiria. This new version, nearly 3 hours in length, is not worthy of the label “remake.” Guadagnino has taken Argento’s pulpy, color-strewn cult object and transformed it into a work of an almost occult power. It is a film set in the very decade of the original, but it seems to be channeling our own, present sense that dark forces at work in the world. To compare the two versions is to compare two eras and mindsets, two interpretations of the extreme and satanic. [Read More…]
at The Museum of Contemporary Art (Through March 11, 2019)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch
Life is messy. Art should be, too. In One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, a sweeping group exhibition currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), curator Helen Molesworth, assembles Arizona-born carpenter, film critic, and painter Manny Farber’s most delightfully chaotic and cluttered still-lifes. Vibrantly colored and richly detailed, these monumental canvases elevate and celebrate the mundane through scattered flowers, ripe fruit, and handwritten notes. Presented alongside a slew of over 100 similarly-themed multimedia works from celebrated artists, including Josiah McElheny, Lorna Simpson, and Wolfgang Tillmans, these loose, jazz-like paintings reveal the anarchic yet alluring rhythm of daily life. [Read More…]
