Riot Material

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art

Testaments to Treachery and the Trampling of Souls in C von Hassett’s Don’t Repeat Don’t Repeat

at MASH Gallery, Los Angeles (through 1 February)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

Hunter S. Thompson once wrote, “For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.” Which is to say, the realization of Man’s or any man’s greatest achievements comes at often dire costs and, perhaps requisitely, at the ravaging expense of the masses. C von Hassett understands this better than most, as his solo exhibition at MASH Gallery reads like a primer for the dispossessed, a lexicon of dark and sinister images that are ominous yet also humorous in a wryly sardonic kind of way. Tackling topics like mass murder, starvation, lynching and, well, Adolf Hitler, Hassett’s images function not so much as dark harbingers from the past or warnings of things to come, but as testaments to the treachery inherent in the human character, which is its own kind of warning. These paintings feel more urgent than ever, as there is an almost palpable sense of dread in the world today, and Hassett does not shy away from the gritty, unnerving truth of where we are and what we’ve come to. [Read More…]

artist

Beauty In The Slaughterhouse: Francis Bacon’s Books And Painting

Bacon en toutes lettres, Centre Pompidou, Paris (through January 20)
Francis Bacon: Late Paintings, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (February 23 – May 25)

Reviewed by Sarah Stewart-Kroeker and Stephen S. Bush

Humans are susceptible to puncture and cut, and in the end, like all dead organic matter, we’ll spoil. Whatever else we are, we’re meat. Francis Bacon’s paintings incessantly remind us of these truths. Whereas Pablo Picasso’s cubism was perspectival and worked from side to side—merging left, center, and right, Bacon’s is physiological and works from the inside out: interior, surface, and exterior. Organs and bones intermingle with skin and hair. In his oeuvre, the human subject itself serves as the memento mori, it is always figured and disfigured, fleshy and skeletal, animated and decaying.  [Read More…]

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interview

Jeffrey Vallance Interview: The Story Behind Blinky

by Lita Barrie

Jeffrey Vallance has loved pranks since he was at high school but it did not occur to him that they could be called “performance art” until he went to art school. Vallance is so guileless he did not understand why he was called a “prankster” at first because he was making a social point. Since then he has continued to do what came naturally to him: blurring the lines between art and life because it has never occurred to him that they could be separate. Vallance is known as a pioneer of Infiltration Art (a form of Intervention Art) because he interacts with religious and political institutions and foreign dignitaries: traveling throughout Polynesia in search of the origin of the myth of Tiki and meeting with the king of Tonga and the queen and president of Palau; studying Christian relics and meeting Pope John Paul 11 at the Vatican; creating a Richard Nixon Museum; initiating a campaign “Preserving America’s Cultural Heritage” and creating a shamanic magic drum in Lapland. These art performances led to whacky sculptures, phantasmagoric paintings, collages, bricolages and frenzied drawings that draw as much on folk art and pop culture as avant-garde concepts. [Read More…]

art

Beyond The Weeping Muse: Dora Maar

at Tate Modern, London (through 15 March 2020)
Reviewed by Christopher P Jones

There was a decade in Dora Maar’s life when anything seemed possible. During the 1930s she opened her own studio in Paris with art director Pierre Kéfer. She shared a darkroom with the Hungarian-French photographer Brassaï. She showed her work in Dada and Surrealist exhibitions. Her photos began appearing print, from fashion magazines to surrealist catalogues. She worked with May Ray. She met and fell in love with Pablo Picasso. [Read More…]

architecture

The Dagger-Like Behemoth Of MoMA’s Conjoined Super-Tall

by Martin Filler
Filler examines the “colossal imposition” of 53W53, wherein he states MoMA must now “bear responsibility for making local environmental quality even worse.”
Courtesy of  The New York Review of Books

Among the plethora of disturbingly disproportionate, super-tall, super-thin condominium towers that have spiked the New York City skyline since the turn of the millennium and that graphically symbolize America’s concomitant surge in income inequality, the most recently completed of them marks the spot of the Museum of Modern Art, which inaugurated its latest building project in October, two weeks before its ninetieth anniversary. The dagger-like ultra-high-rise component of the conjoined complex was built to the plans of the French architect Jean Nouvel, while the enlargement of the museum itself is the work of the New York partnership Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) in association with Gensler, the powerhouse multinational firm that often provides technical and construction management expertise on high-style projects conceived by less full-service practitioners. [Read More…]

The Line –>

Giving Voice To The Voiceless In Christopher Myers’ Drapetomania

at Fort Gansevoort, Los Angeles (through February 8) Reviewed by Genie Davis Opening an outpost in Los Angeles, the well-known New York-based gallery, Fort Gansevoort, chose artist, author, and play-write Christopher Myers’ Drapetomania as its inaugural exhibition in this city. Myers’ large-scale, mural-sized textile works and powerfully bleak sculptures create a stirring initial show. … [Read More...]

Philipp Kremer: With Lovers

at Nicodem Gallery, Los Angeles (through February 1) Reviewed by Eve Wood Imagine a faceless orgy, a concupiscence of bodies – colliding, embracing, penetrating, wherein the entirety of the surrounding picture plane is reduced to a senseless expanse of writhing and roiling flesh. In Philipp Kremer’s work, the notion of desire is determined by an exploration into genderless ideation. Sex is not strictly sex, nor is this beauteous lovemaking, but an electrified and energized landscape of human intersections – hand in hand, arm over arm, face into face, thigh across thigh, torsos twisting and … [Read More...]

The Line

Twenty Que With J. Matthew Thomas

By Erin Currier

The appearance of J. Matthew Thomas on our Earth is a rare and fortuitous event, akin to a special comet or eclipse that occurs once every 500 hundred years or so. He is the DaVinci of our day-and-age, a true Visionary bringing together community, education, environment and art with international events such as the PASEO, programs such as Studio TAOS and Pecha Kucha nights. His tenure at the Harwood Museum in Taos has seen him at the curatorial Vanguard in featuring previously unknown or undervalued works by Women, Indigenous, LGBTQ, and other underrepresented artists. [Read More…]

Memory Palaces & The Hidden Art: Works And Studies Within The Collection Of Audrey B. Heckler

Reviewed by Sanford Schwartz
Memory Palaces: Inside the Collection of Audrey B. Heckler (through January 26)
an exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum, NYC, January 26, 2020
 
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There are two stories, one might say, being told at the American Folk Art Museum’s current show Memory Palaces: Inside the Collection of Audrey B. Heckler. The first and more clear-cut is that the exhibition gives us a chance to see what must be one of the most discerning and wide-ranging collections of self-taught, or outsider, art in this country. There are top-notch works here by artists of varying degrees of recognition, many of whom were active in the middle and later years of the last century. Some, including Carlo Zinelli, William Hawkins, Adolf Wölfli, Thornton Dial, and Madge Gill, are known to people who follow this art but are not quite household names. There are strong works here as well by artists—such as Christine Sefolosha, Malcolm McKesson, and Edmund Monsiel—whose pictures may come as a welcome surprise to nearly everybody. And there are fine pieces by Bill Traylor and James Castle, and extraordinary ones by Martín Ramírez, who are all becoming widely known.

[Read More…]

Into the Abyss With Jonathan Glazer’s Feral Short: The Fall

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

Jonathan Glazer emerges every so often with work that above all is constructed by a powerful aesthetic. More than narratives, what Glazer crafts are images combined with soundscapes which immerse the viewer in moments of dread, hallucination and discovery. Moments which could have the feel of a common day action suddenly take on a dreamlike ambiance. In Glazer’s underrated 2004 film, Birth, Nicole Kidman plays an upper class New Yorker confronted with the possibility that a young boy is her reincarnated husband. His 2013 Under the Skin finds a silent woman played by Scarlett Johansson, an extraterrestrial in human form, drives through grey streets seeking male prospects for the purpose of consuming their physical essence for an unclear plan. In both films familiar settings, whether upscale dinner parties or gritty alleyways, are touched by extreme possibilities. But how does the artist respond to the world when it actually does become extreme? [Read More…]

Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet The Sun Again

at The Broad, Los Angeles (through February 16)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

“Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.” —Edward Said

“To stay alive you must slay silence” –Simin Behbahani

Shirin Neshat’s dense and nearly overwhelming exhibition I Will Greet The Sun Again interrogates the very nature of reality, myth, perception and memory with her piercing portraits of women whose face, hands and feet are covered with intricate, decorative Farsi text; her haunting videos reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s mysterious starkness, and her later portraits, which compile faces of the exiled.  Neshat’s compelling photographs (black and white) and mystical films (black and white as well as color) examine cultural norms surrounding the wearing of the veil, as seen through both the Western and Islamic gaze along with the cultural dislocation suffered by individuals in diaspora. [Read More…]

A Portrait Of Bolivian Heartbreak

By Alci Rengifo

An Associated Press photo by Natasha Pisarenko shows an indigenous Bolivian woman standing amid clouds of tear gas, holding the national flag and at its tip, the Wiphala flag of the nation’s indigenous peoples. Her society is again a victim of history. Its dreams vanished in acrid smoke. The photo’s aesthetic is both human and brimming with intensity. [Read More…]