by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Again last night as we slept,
the babies,
were falling from the sky.
So many of them–
eyes wide as darkness,
glowing lifeless palms. [Read more…]
Archives for February 2017
Ren Hang: Selections
RIP
Ren Hang | 1987 – 2017
_ _ _
Ren Hang
No Light, But Rather Darkness Visible: The Broad’s Creature
The Broad, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner
“Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.” —Albert Camus
“Creature,” at The Broad Museum, brings together 55 diverse artists whose engaging work, according to the curatorial statement, demonstrates a “representation of the self.” This vague description states the obvious, as art is always crafted of its maker’s fears, obsessions, thoughts, attitudes, neuroses and beliefs. However, let’s examine the word creature. What does the word “creature” conjure? If you are of a certain age, you might automatically think of the cheesy fifties B movies such as, “Creature of the Black Lagoon” or “Godzilla,” our favorite irradiated lizard mutating into a rampaging gigantic freak of nature. Creatures can inspire fear, dread or curiosity. They can be small and terrifying (tarantulas, snakes), or unknown and unknowable like aliens. They can even be invisible like ghosts, goblins or spirits. Real or invented, they populate our imagination and our nightmares. [Read more…]
On The Art Of Scott Burton
No one said anything, or even guessed. Everyone waited for it, what could come after abstract expressionism, which had died alongside Jackson Pollock in a senseless, drunken car crash on August 11, 1956. There weren’t any theories on how artists could further the surface of a canvas with paint and tool. The growing meaninglessness of abstract painting merely ramified after numerous aesthetic dead ends. Unquestionably, no American painter could replace Pollock. However, what would come next didn’t need a spokesman, or a macho flâneur with an anger problem for that matter. The art world was about to explode with an androgynous art wave imbued with the spirit of Duchamp, who said: “The whole trend of painting was something I didn’t care to continue” (Tomkins, 2014, p. 100). Many artists of the next generation excoriated the canvas, turned away from the emotive and toward the cerebral. For them, experience became the creator and the artwork. [Read more…]
Desert X And Beyond: A Photo Essay
An Interview With Neville Wakefield, Curator Of Desert X
Neville Wakefield is the Curator and Artistic Director of Desert X, a site-specific contemporary art exhibition ongoing throughout the Coachella Valley from February 25 to April 30, 2017. RIOT MATERIAL spoke with Neville on the eve of Desert X’s launch.
CHRISTOPHER HASSETT: What is it about these artists you’ve selected for Desert X that speak to you personally, or speak to a greater vision you’re trying to articulate through the exhibition, and I refer to them more as an inter-connective group as opposed to distinct individuals? [Read more…]
Riot Material Talks With Desert X Artists Jennifer Bolande, Glenn Kaino, Phillip K. Smith III and Tavares Strachan
Desert X, a site-specific contemporary art exhibition in the Coachella Valley, curated by Artistic Director Neville Wakefield, will become the sweeping canvas for work by established and emerging artists, whose projects will amplify and articulate global and local issues ranging from climate change to Tribal culture, immigration to tourism, gaming to golf. The exhibition, which opens to the public this weekend, 25 February, will focus attention on, and create a conversation about, environmental, social and cultural conditions of the 21st century as reflected in the greater Palm Springs area.
In an online roundtable discussion, RIOT MATERIAL spoke with Desert X artists Jennifer Bolande, Glenn Kaino, Phillip K. Smith III, Tavares Strachan about the desert, their driving visions, and their particular installations. [Read more…]
Prodigious History: On Julius Obsequens’ Liber Prodigiorum
My friend Joseph Howley, who teaches classics at Columbia University, leans over to me at a bar and asks, “Have you ever heard of Julius Obsequens?” At some point I became known among some friends and acquaintances as someone who collects strange and interesting information, which means I’m now passed all manner of strange tidbit and interesting factoid: over the Internet, at bars, over coffee. This is how Julius Obsequens came into my life—a writer whose story is also about the strange way knowledge is transmitted. [Read more…]
I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House
I’m still disappointed that I missed out on Osgood Perkins’ directorial debut February (now retitled The Blackcoat’s Daughter) at last year’s TIFF. Bloody Disgusting raved about the Emma Roberts film, naming it one of the best films of the year. So I knew that this year I had to check out Perkins’ sophomore effort, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016).
The new film is a slow-burn haunted house story that’s a little reminiscent of The Others. Unlike other recent ghost films, Perkins eschews CGI completely, opting to use lingering off-centered static shots, silence and an unsettling soundtrack to create a moody, atmospheric tone. To suggest that the film is languid is an understatement. Perkins is less interested in a conventional narrative than he is in enveloping the audience in the timeless world filled with mystery novels, endless routine and constant ethereal banging on the walls. [Read more…]
The World Trade Center’s Grand Architectural Failure
In his commentary preceding a review of three new books in The New York Review of Books, excerpted below, Martin Filler speaks to a failure of imagination and architecture at Manhattan’s Ground Zero. You can read the full review in the March 9 issue, or read it on site at nybooks.com
No urban design project in modern American experience has aroused such high expectations and intense scrutiny as the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site in New York City. It has taken fifteen years since the terrorist assault of September 11, 2001, for the principal structures of this sixteen-acre parcel in Lower Manhattan to be completed. In a field where time is money in a very direct sense (because of interest payments on the vast sums borrowed to finance big construction schemes), such a long gestation period usually signifies not judicious deliberation on the part of planners, developers, designers, engineers, and contractors, but rather economic, political, or bureaucratic problems that can impede a speedy and cost-efficient conclusion. [Read more…]
The Primitive, Expressive Figurations Of David Lynch
Works On Paper And Sculpture Art Los Angeles Contemporary / Kayne Griffin Corcoran By Christopher Michno
At this year’s Art Los Angeles Contemporary, the international contemporary art fair of the West Coast, the Los Angeles gallery Kayne Griffin Corcoran devoted its booth to a display of 46 works on paper and two mixed media sculptures by David Lynch. The four day affair, running January 26-29, 2017, offered a dense sampling of the 70 year old artist’s drawings and watercolors, the majority of which were dated from 2008 through 2014. Though most of these works have been previously exhibited, it was a welcome reprise, and Lynch’s works on paper addressed threads that also repeatedly emerge in the auteur’s better known film oeuvre—the desire to probe the unconscious mind, the sense of the uncanny, the need to stare directly into the murky depths of humanity’s darkness. But as is the nature of small works on paper, they are quieter than his film work, and more reflective. [Read more…]
Doron Langberg, Now And Memory
at 1969 Gallery, LES
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban
Elizabeth Peyton’s portraits of both her friends and members of the cultural elite of her era, (Kurt Cobain comes to mind), first gained celebrity in the mid-to-late 90s. Since then, there has been what one might informally call a Peyton school of portraiture, particularly among young or emerging artists. Peyton herself owes a debt to the great portrait painter Alice Neel, known for her incisive psychological studies, and in fact paid homage to Neel with a nude image of the artist (referencing Neel’s own famous nude self-portrait at age 80.) [Read more…]
Patti Smith And David Lynch Speak Of Film, Music, And The Creative Impulse
A Visitor
Who are you and what do you want here?
Upon your arrival, birds swooped into the trees,
dogs cowered in the bushes,
and the one cat stepped through her own shadow
on a wall and disappeared.
Because you could only have come from one direction– [Read more…]
Michael Ackerman And The Current Mood
Michael Ackerman [Read more…]