Riot Material

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art

Restless Threads: The Tapestries of Annette Cords

Reviewed by Jill Conner
at Project:ARTspace, New York City
.
When Shape/Shifters opened on January 7, 2020 at Project:ARTspace in Manhattan, no one was remotely ready for something as dramatic as the Covid-19 pandemic, despite the reports that had been circulating out of China. The opening reception was packed and stood as a strong validation of Cords’ new Jacquard tapestries, which simultaneously embraced and reflected the fast-paced nature of New York City. Even though this curatorial collaboration between myself and the artist closed on February 20, 2020, the unexpected shutdown that occurred nearly two weeks later, ceased all potential conversations about this innovative project. The walkable city had been brought to an abrupt halt, and the regular conduits of communication were distorted. And yet, despite the new era of lockdowns and self-quarantine, her work remains key to an objective, city-based adaptation.

[Read More…]

books

‘Aliveness Made True of Blackness’ in Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Open Water

Reviewed by Yagnishsing Dawoor

Open Water
by Caleb Azumah Nelson 
Grove Atlantic, 160pp., $12.10
ORB

The killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers quickly spawned a soundscape dominated by grief, despair and anger. Song after song released by Black musicians all over the world thematised antiblack violence, indexing Blackness to death. “Black Parade,” Beyoncé’s joyous love letter to Black culture, stands out as an exception to this trend. Dropped on Juneteenth, the song came with a message addressed to Beyoncé’s Black fans that privileged not the terms of death, but of being alive. ‘Being Black is your activism,’ the singer wrote on her website, ‘Black excellence is a form of protest. Black joy is your right’. [Read More…]

♥

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books

Sting in the Tale: Art, Hoax and Provocation

by Antoinette LaFarge

Sting in the Tale: Art, Hoax and Provocation
DoppelHouse Press, 432pp., $49.95

Introduction [excerpt]

It matters what stories we tell to tell other
 stories with.… It matters what stories
make worlds, what worlds make stories.
—Donna Haraway, “SF: Science Fiction, Speculative
Fabulation, String Figures, So Far”

It sometimes seems that we live in an era of ubiquitous fakery. Indeed, there is now an entire vocabulary to encompass shades of deception that leave the propaganda and disinformation of past generations in the dust. Now we live with fake memoirs and deepfake videos, catfishing and sockpuppetry on social networks, astroturfing (fake grassroots efforts), and an entire rainbow of washings: whitewashing, greenwashing, purple, red, pink. In the realm of film and video alone we find docufiction, docudrama, pseudo-documentary, fake-fiction, mockumentary, and reality-TV parsing out differences in the compounding of truth and fiction that sometimes seem almost too subtle to grasp. Accompanying this shift from the early information age to our current “infocalypse” era of rampant misinformation, a form of art has emerged that likewise traffics in deception, placing itself right at this potent junction where fiction and fact make contact. But instead of following the current pressure to choose sides—especially, to choose the moral high ground of fact and truth as a bulwark against a tide of “lying liars”—there is a group of artists who take a different path, one that confounds fact and fiction in complicated ways. One that indeed celebrates a state in which the two cannot be simply or securely separated into opposing camps. [Read More…]

books

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice Provokes an Imp

Review by James McWilliams

Breath Like the Wind at Dawn
by Devin Jacobsen
Sagging Meniscus Press, 200 pp., $16.80

One doesn’t really enjoy a novel with a protagonist whose distinguishing feature is a passion for watching people take their last breath. And given that these last gasps are not gentle expirations after a life well lived but rather throat throttles at the hands of the protagonist, well, let’s just say Breath Like the Wind at Dawn is not what anyone would call a lyrical, feel-good novel. It’s safe to say it did not make any “summer must read” lists.  [Read More…]

art

Recalibrating Awareness in Rebecca Campbell Infinite Density, Infinite Light

At LA Louver (through 2 July 2021)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

How does an artist adequately describe in paint the concept of love? One could say that even the idea of attempting to capture this ineffable human attribute seems schmaltzy and somehow embarrassing, yet most of us have at some point or other lived and died by the sword of passion- jilted, exalted, or both simultaneously. Each person’s personal history is also the history of humanity in that within each life’s unique and spectacular set of personal associations, images, affinities and biases, there also exists a common thread of communion, of universal likeness and of love. We all want it. We all have lost it. We all somehow find it again, and if we don’t, our lives speak endlessly to the pain of this loss. [Read More…]

The Line –>

The Beautiful and the Damned: Yelena Moskovich’s A Door Behind A Door

Reviewed by John Biscello A Door Behind A Door by Yelena Moskovich Two Dollar Radio, 188 pp., $16.99 In the afterlife You could be headed for the serious strife Now you make the scene all day But tomorrow there’ll be Hell to pay —The Squirrel Nut Zippers, “Hell” Look out there. In the distance, toward the horizon. Can you see it? More importantly, can you feel it? A solitary rowboat adrift at sea, the waves like scallop-fringed wraiths from a Japanese woodblock beginning to gather around it, and the individual in that boat, brave and terrified and lost and found all at once, … [Read More...]

Radical Black Dignity and the Shared Revolutionary Paths of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

Reviewed by Brandon M. Terry The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. by Peniel E. Joseph Basic Books, 384 pp., $18.99 NYRB Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X met only once, at the US Capitol during the Senate debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That chance encounter was immortalized in a photograph that shows the two men shaking hands and smiling but reveals little trace of the public feud that has linked them in our historical imagination. Their conflict has cast arguably the longest shadow over African-American politics and the … [Read More...]

The Line

Being Apart: A Memoir of 2020

by Mark Goodman

For us the new year began far from home at the southern tip of Africa. Apartheid — “apartness” — was a euphemism for racial brutality, and the necessary condition for its enactment: the dehumanizing ghettoization that precedes violence. 2020 would be a year of reckoning for my country’s racial division and a year when being-apart became a universal condition. The disorienting isolation of quarantine spread with its own kind of virulence, eroding intimacy and fraying bonds. [Read More…]

Simphiwe Ndzube’s Like the Snake that Fed the Chameleon

at Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles (through 20 March 2021)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a Cheshire cat.
–Julian Huxley

I will eat the last signs of my weakness
Remove the scars of old childhood wars
and dare to enter the forest whistling
like a snake that had fed the chameleon
–“Solstice,” Audre Lorde

Simphiwe Ndzube’s engaging exhibit, entitled Like the Snake that Fed the Chameleon at Nicodim Gallery, is a visual and aural treat composed of paintings, sculptures and two installations, all bathed in a soundscape created by the artist in collaboration with Thabo K. Makgolo and Zambini Makwetha. A master storyteller, Nzdube creates an existential, otherworldly space where the ordinary becomes extraordinary. The work defies easy explanations, as mystery is piled on top of enigma. Each painting or sculpture shares a homemade, do-it-yourself aesthetic, with all seams made visible, as though haphazardly sewn, stitched, stapled, glued and pinned together in a hurry. All collaged elements are intentionally separate and noticeable, like a homey piecework crazy quilt. Ndzube juggles fact and fiction, the real and the imagined, with a skill and dexterity of a trained magician while employing inventive improvisation like a superb jazz musician. [Read More…]

Portals for Memory, and Wonder, in the Work of Reggie Burrows Hodges

at Karma Gallery, NYC
Reviewed by Hilton Als
NYRB

Reggie Burrows Hodges begins by painting a raw canvas black. Then he paints his figures and their atmosphere on top of that. His hand is everywhere in his work, in control but not controlling. Shall we call Hodges’s work controlled bleeding? While Color Field painters such as Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and the like managed their paint by splashing color here and there, their project was different from Hodges’s in a number of ways, including their use of color. While today we look on those distinguished Color Field paintings for the joy they express about physicality, the irrepressible eye, and a relative lack of fear when it comes to the decorative, there are, in these artists’ wonderfully gestural work, some shortcomings. Such as their use, or lack of use, of the color black, a hue that is of the utmost importance to Hodges, who has said: “I start with a black ground [as a way] of dealing with blackness’s totality. I’m painting an environment in which the figures emerge from negative space….If you see my paintings in person, you’ll look at the depth.” [Read More…]

It Floods the Womb Until One Drowns

Reviewed Brandon M. Terry

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
by Les Payne and Tamara Payne
Liveright, 612 pp., $27.52
NYRB

At the end of his remarkable, improbable life, Malcolm X was on the cusp of a reinvention that might have been even more significant than his conversion in prison from criminal predation to religious piety. Although he rose to prominence preaching the bleak, racialist metaphysics of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam (NOI), which depicted whites as “devils by nature,” in March 1964 Malcolm defected from the Nation and converted to Sunni Islam. Charging Muhammad with the sexual exploitation of his teenage secretaries, and the NOI with corruption, criminality, and idolatry, Malcolm pushed a dangerous feud toward its deadly conclusion. [Read More…]

In Conversation: Andrej Dubravsky and Sam Trioli

Andrej Dubravsky, Aggressive Slav + Friendly Slav, at LAUNCH F18, NYC
by Sam Trioli

Andrej Dubravsky speaks to Sam Trioli about his new paintings for his current dual exhibition at LAUNCH F18, Aggressive Slav and  Friendly Slav. Created from his countryside home in rural Slovakia, Andrej shares the effects on his work and life with returning to nature.

SAM TRIOLI: This exhibition highlights a new series of paintings for you. How did the Aggressive Slav/Friendly Slav series first begin?

ANDREJ DUBRAVSKY: I don’t even know if it’s a particular “series” with an exact start and end, to be honest. I just keep working all year long on various subjects in parallel, no matter if there’s any show coming up next month or in the next six months. Sometime before the works had to be shipped to New York City, I lined up many paintings outside in my garden and I picked from all of these paintings and sort of curated them in a way that would make a sense. This show makes it my first solo show in New York City.  [Read More…]