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Archives for May 2017

Twin Peaks: Episode 3

May 30, 2017 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

Episode 3
by Christopher Hassett

The new Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) finds David Lynch working in fresh and sublimely haunting domains, ones that pleasurably flirt or unnervingly skirt the spectral drop-offs of some charged and sinister abyss. This seems no visional or evolutional change of tack, nor does it appear, at least in these early episodes, Lynch is newly surveying unmapped terrains. Rather, there is something more elevated in this late-career landscape, and something far more intimate as well. One senses, when viewing this new series, particularly his excursions into Lynchian Other-Realms, that his articulation of these doppelgänging worlds feel more experiential than conceptual, more occupied than conceptualized. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Riot Cinema

The Bad Batch

May 28, 2017 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Christopher Hassett

The Bad Batch (2016) is a stark and stunning new film by Ana Lily Amirpour. And timely too, considering every effort by our current regime to cast those of seeming naught into the desperate oblivions of a world only slightly less unhinged than the one depicted in this film. With a nod to the current depravity of our day, the film opens (forgive my indulgence) in the wet dream of said regime whose spooging head is our ever-ranting, ever-pissy Child-in-Chief — let’s call him Boy — he who nightly wets his bed and in the dreamy slosh fingers blindly for his own plundered asshole. Were the Boy blessedly in this film, he’d be swiftly on a sizzling spit: fatted swine for its flesh-hungry natives.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Riot Cinema

Raw

May 28, 2017 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

While most of the republic’s cinema-goers flock to local theaters to indulge in the new incarnation of Stephen King’s It, your local RedBox is harboring a deliciously wicked and original work of cinematic viscera, Julia Ducournau’s Raw (2016). This cannibal parable created quite the stir at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, where audience members were reported to have fainted due to the movie’s bloody moments. As with most movies of this type, the gore doesn’t do justice to the hype. The film’s power resides in what it has to say as opposed to what it wants to show. Like all good satire, it knows that showing too much ruins the effect. Like American Psycho, Raw gets under your skin by casting a mirror. Ducournau is essentially putting on display a civilization eating itself, like Goya’s painting “Saturno devorando a su hijo (Saturn Devouring His Son).” Raw is art as splatter, capturing in its own special way those moments when youth, sexual awakening and finding one’s place in the social labyrinth all crash together. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Riot Cinema

Janet Biggs and Regina José Galindo: Endurance

May 24, 2017 By Robin Scher Leave a Comment

at Cristin Tierney Gallery, NYC
Reviewed by Robin Scher

Picture documentary and artwork as a Venn diagram. Sometimes the line between the two categories is blurred. A fine example of this can be found in Janet Biggs’s three channel installation, Afar, currently on show at New York’s Cristin Tierney gallery, which offers viewers a brief visual sojourn to East Africa’s Great Rift Valley — “the most unlivable place on earth.” [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Denis Johnson

May 24, 2017 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

1949 | 2017

Excerpted from Jesus’ Son

Car Crashing While Hitchhiking

A salesman who shared his liquor and steered while sleeping . . . A Cherokee filled with bourbon . . . A VW no more than a bubble of hashish fumes, captained by a college student . . . 

And a family from Marshalltown who head­onned and killed forever a man driving west out of Bethany, Missouri . . . 

. . . I rose up sopping wet from sleeping under the pouring rain, and something less than conscious, thanks to the first three of the people I’ve already named–the salesman and the Indian and the student–all of whom had given me drugs. At the head of the entrance ramp I waited without hope of a ride. What was the point, even, of rolling up my sleeping bag when I was too wet to be let into anybody’s car? I draped it around me like a cape. The downpour raked the asphalt and gurgled in the ruts. My thoughts zoomed pitifully. The travelling salesman had fed me pills that made the linings of my veins feel scraped out. My jaw ached. I knew every raindrop by its name. I sensed everything before it happened. I knew a certain Oldsmobile would stop for me even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside it I knew we’d have an accident in the storm. 

I didn’t care. They said they’d take me all the way.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Artist, Books, Fiction, From The Shelf, The Line

Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern

May 18, 2017 By Phoebe Hoban Leave a Comment

at Brooklyn Museum, NYC
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

The Georgia O’Keeffe show at the Brooklyn Museum is an ode to the artist as icon. The exhibit combines little-seen early work with the artist’s own clothing–including dresses, jeans, shoes, and hats—as well as photographs taken by her famous husband, Alfred Stieglitz, and a dozen or so other noted photographers, to illustrate the extent to which O’Keefe — much like Warhol — was the brilliant architect of her own enduring image. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

The Figured Absence: Spectral Works From Kang Seung Lee

May 16, 2017 By Christopher Michno Leave a Comment

Leave of absence; Absence without leave
at Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Christopher Michno

Kang Seung Lee’s two part exhibition at Commonwealth & Council reflects in part on photography’s documentary capacity by re-examining and reproducing photographs. Lee’s project grapples with the indexical nature of photography, but moves beyond merely exploring concerns surrounding what Roland Barthes called photography’s “evidential force.” [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

New Work From Kamasi Washington: Truth

May 10, 2017 By Christopher Hassett Leave a Comment

Though New York for years has had an inspiringly lively and progressive jazz scene, Kamasi Washington, approaching the American cultural front, is singlehandedly making the form relevant once more. His forthcoming EP, Harmony of Difference, currently (and exclusively heard) in its own room at the Whitney, will surely set the stage for the long in coming Jazz Renaissance. 

Hands down the best collaborative work at this year’s Biennial, and in fact the single best piece in the exhibition (no diss on an otherwise excellent affair, particularly floor 6), is Washington’s stellar “Truth” and the equally affecting film in accompaniment, Harmony of Difference, written and directed by AG Rojas.  [Read More…]

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Riot Sounds, The Line, Video

It is obvious from the map

May 7, 2017 By Ellen C. Caldwell Leave a Comment

at REDCAT, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Ellen C. Caldwell

It is obvious from the map, an exhibition at REDCAT organized by Thomas Keenan and Sohrab Mohebbi, showcases a variety of maps, videos, archival material, and other multimedia ephemera that highlight migration, migrant rights, and social justice in both the twenty first century and the age of surveillance. This timely exhibit juxtaposes a variety of maps, ranging from hand-drawn maps passed and exchanged by migrants, to governmental maps used for tracking and surveillance purposes, to artistic renderings that visualize various migrants’ stories, to geospatial mappings. [Read more…]

Filed Under: The Line

The ‘Indescribable Fragrance’ of Youths

May 5, 2017 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

A Third Gender: Beautiful Youths in Japanese Edo-Period Prints and Paintings (1600–1868) 
at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto
excerpted from a review by Ian Buruma

Read the full review in the May 11, 2017 issue of New York Review of Books, or read it on site at nybooks.com

Lusting after pretty teenage boys was not considered shameful in premodern Japan. Experienced older women did it. Young women did too. Older men indulged in it (as long as the boys were passive sexual partners). Adultery was not permitted, on the other hand, and it was unseemly for grown men to love other grown men. But the love of older men for young boys, a practice called shudo, literally “the way of boy love,” was considered, especially during the eighteenth century, and notably among samurai, to be a mark of erotic discernment. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, The Line, Thought

The Soft Bite Of Surveillance

May 4, 2017 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

Undercover Boss
at Reyes Projects, Detroit
Reviewed by Megan Garwood

The group exhibition, Undercover Boss, opens a conversation on the ubiquity of surveillance, insofar as the ability to view another’s intimate affairs without their knowledge through social media outlets, the multiplicity of images that dilutes their meaning, and how this information can be mishandled. The inaugural show at metro Detroit-based gallery Reyes Projects features artists Tony Cox, Greg Fadell, Sadie Laska, Jane Moseley, Jonathan Rajewski, Scott Reeder, Tyson Reeder, and Joe Roberts. [Read more…]

Filed Under: The Line

Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery 1959–1971

May 3, 2017 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

at LACMA’s Resnick Pavilion, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Jonathan Griffin

There was no way it was ever not going to be a mess: eleven years of one of the most influential American art galleries, condensed into a 100,000 square foot section of LACMA’s Resnick Pavilion. Consider the fact that many of the artworks in the 134 exhibitions held over those eleven years turned out to be canonical Modernist masterpieces, and were acquired by museums or major private collections around the globe, many now unwilling or unable to lend them. Others were destroyed, or lost, or are too delicate to go on public display. Some – not all of them masterpieces – entered LACMA’s own collection, so of course they wound up in this show, whether they fully deserved to be there or not. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, The Line

Who Left Us Like Orphans?

May 3, 2017 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

by Caroline N. Simpson

US Vice President Joe Biden and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan sat in white and gold upholstered chairs in the Presidential Palace in Ankara. It was August 24, 2016, over one month past the July 15th failed coup attempt in Turkey.

Biden began by thanking Erdoğan for his friendship and for Erdoğan’s condolences when Biden lost his son. He leaned across the gap between chairs, placed his hand atop Erdoğan’s, and said it was hard to fathom that the coup attacked the hotel where he and his family had been staying just 15 minutes after they had left. [Read more…]

Filed Under: The Line

Creatures Present And In Wait: Marcel Eichner’s Point Blank

May 3, 2017 By Donald Lindeman Leave a Comment

at James Fuentes Gallery, NYC
Reviewed by Donald Lindeman

Point Blank is the title of the exhibition of four new paintings by Berlin based German painter Marcel Eichner (b. 1977, Siegburg, Germany) at James Fuentes Gallery, New York. In this show, Eichner works in acrylic and ink, with vigorous ink drawing and marks on broad washes of acrylic ground in pastel pinks and blues, and areas of white. These paintings mark the fulfillment of a new phase in Eichner’s approach to painting, since he has now moved away from his earlier idiom derived from the style of his mentor at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Jörg Immendorff. In his earlier work, Eichner emulated the piecework integration of figure and ground that is characteristic of Immendorff, an almost claustrophobic “interior-view” aesthetic so often found in the German Expressionist tradition. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Dubuffet Drawings, 1935-62

May 2, 2017 By Nancy Kay Turner Leave a Comment

at The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

“The voices of dust, the soul of dust: these things interest me many times more than flowers, trees, or horses because I sense they’re so much stranger.”
Jean Dubuffet

The Hammer Museum’s exhibit entitled Dubuffet Drawings 1935-62 is, according to their literature, the “first in-depth exhibition of Dubuffet’s drawings.”

I’m not sure if they mean in the United States or perhaps even world -wide. No matter. It is an extraordinary grouping of almost 100 works on paper – many borrowed from France – and the sheer volume is not only a treat for the viewer but provides important insights into Dubuffet’s idiosyncratic technique. His “backstory” – as we say here in California – is quite unusual. Apparently, he showed early artistic talent and had many significant artist friends, but for twenty years was a wine merchant. Not until 1942, at the ripe old age of 41, did he finally commit to being a full time artist. He had his first solo show in Paris two years later. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Artist, The Line

Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World

May 2, 2017 By Nancy Kay Turner Leave a Comment

at The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

“I am poor and I am naked, but I am the chief of the nation”
Red Cloud, Oglala Lakota Sioux

The Hammer Museum has mounted a massive, sprawling and entertaining retrospective (the first in North America) of the multi-faceted sculptor, poet and activist Jimmie Durham. He is little known in the United States since moving abroad 30 years ago. In 1990 the United States government passed the Indian Arts and Craft Act requiring Indian artists to register in order to protect the consumer. Durham refused to register and wrote the following tongue in cheek statement:

I am a full – blooded contemporary artist, of the subgroup (or clan) called sculptors. I am not American Indian, nor have I ever seen or sworn loyalty to India. I am not a Native ‘American’, nor do I feel that ‘America’ has any right [Read more…]

Filed Under: Artist, The Line

Short Fiction

Hunting in the Dark, by Kika Dorsey

Hunting in the Dark

by Kika Dorsey

Joan was convinced she had cancer. Sometimes it was a dull ache in her side, sometimes a cut that didn’t heal. She knew of a woman with Crohn’s Disease and just recently an old friend of hers died of pancreatic cancer. It was just a matter of time before those alien cells took over her body. Her body was on the edge of a cliff, ready to fall. When she got out her Tarot deck, she always drew the Fool. Once she saw the Hermit in a dream. He dropped his lantern and the light tumbled down into a rocky canyon, glowing on the silver cliffs as it fell. It was winter, with pockets of snow on the peaks. [Read More…]

Riot Sounds

Tony Dreher's Orkan. Listen to it at Riot Material magazine

Saw-Whipping Techno-Trance From Toby Dreher: “Orkan”

From the new release, Ohrwurm

https://www.riotmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/11480527_Orkan_Original_Mix.mp3

on Acker Dub

Toro y Moi's Laws of the Universe, at Riot Material magazine

New Work From Toro Y Moi: “Laws Of The Universe”

From the Outer Peace release

https://www.riotmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/03-Laws-of-the-Universe.m4a

on Carpark Records

The new word

Where to Begin?

First, we’re skinny-dipping,
Sam & I, in a pond in Tennessee,

which is his idea, I should say,
& the tree with the rope swing
looms darker

than the dark night sky.

Second, the harvest moon,
which we came here to see,

is nowhere to be found,
instead the sky burning with stars
I can’t see without my glasses [Read More…]

The Line

Village Voice Covers, a wood-block print on newsprint, by Nils Karsten © The artist..

Gary Indiana’s Vile Days

Reviewed by Lidija Haas Vile Days, by Gary Indiana, edited by Bruce Hainley.  Semiotext(e). 600 pages. $29.95. Courtesy of Harper’s Magazine How unromantic can a deathbed scene get? A test case: one day in 2015, The New Yorker’s art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, makes his way to the Village Voice’s Cooper Square offices, seeking to rescue the columns he […]

Seeing Allred (2018). Interview with Gloria Allred at Riot Material magazine.

A Word With Seeing Allred Co-Director Sophie Sartain

by Cynthia Biret Seeing Allred is a fascinating documentary about one of the most powerful and outspoken discrimination attorney and women’s rights advocates of our times: Gloria Allred. Co-directed by Sophie Sartain and Roberta Grossman, the film gets up-close and personal with this formidable woman, from her high profile cases and strategic presence in the […]

Supertalls in NYC

A City No More: The Rise Of The World’s Largest Gated Community

by Kevin Baker From “Death of a Once Great City” Courtesy of Harper’s Magazine New York has been my home for more than forty years, from the year after the city’s supposed nadir in 1975, when it nearly went bankrupt. I have seen all the periods of boom and bust since, almost all of them […]

"Supertalls" in NYC

NYC Supertalls And The Narrowfication Of The City’s Architecture

by Aaron Timms From “The Needles and the Damage Done” Courtesy of The Baffler What kinds of people did I expect to find here, in the public garden at the foot of 432 Park Avenue, New York’s tallest residential building? In the days before I arrived in Manhattan to chart a course across the city, […]

Charles Mingus, at Riot Material Magazine

Playing the Truth: Charles Mingus’s Jazz in Detroit/ Strata Concert Gallery/ 46 Selden

Reviewed by Henry Cherry In January of 1979, two extraordinary losses occurred in Mexico. 56 sperm whales beached themselves on the country’s coast line. Reportedly on the same day, fabled jazz composer and bassist Charles Mingus died of heart failure related to ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). He was 56. Mingus had gone to Mexico in […]

Thelonious Monk, Mønk, Reviewed at Riot Material Magazine

Thelonious Monk, Not Yet At The End

Mønk on Gearbox Records Reviewed by Henry Cherry Jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk loved Laurel and Hardy, and playing Yahtzee with his wife Nellie, and ping pong. He once played 60 consecutive games of pong against John Coltrane, Monk winning all but one. He also lost his cabaret card (a license to play in […]

Touch Me Not (2018)

Bodies, And Limits, Beyond The Norm In Touch Me Not

Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx At the start of Touch Me Not, which opened the 2018 Romanian Film Festival in New York City, two men set up a device involving a glass plate and a camera. This is followed by a panning shot in shallow focus detailing the landscape of a male body, skin, […]

Deana Lawson at The Underground Museum, Los Angeles

Deana Lawson’s Planes Soars

Deana Lawson: Planes at The Underground Museum, Los Angeles (through February 17th, 2019) Reviewed by Ellen C. Caldwell  The space of The Underground Museum might be what you expect, but it might not be. It is housed in an unassuming storefront on a busy street in Arlington Heights, Los Angeles. As visitors enter, they appear in […]

Dhatu (2009) — James Turrell

Transforming Light Into Art: A Look At The Movement Of Light And Space

by Ryan Guerrero During the mid 1960’s, Light and Space became a loosely affiliated art movement related to Op Art, Minimalism and Abstraction. Influenced by American artist John McLaughlin, the movement was characterized by a focus on perceptual phenomenon and became well known throughout California. Artists integrated ideas of light, volume and scale, and the use […]

Sally Mann

Southern Discomfort: The Photographs of Sally Mann

Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings at Getty Center, Los Angeles (through February 10, 2019) Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner Abide with me! Fast falls the eventide; The darkness deepens: Lord, with me abide!  –Hymn Sally Mann’s haunting black and white photographs are a hymn to the South she loves so ferociously, with all its troubled, tangled, […]

Christian Bale (left) as Dick Cheney and Sam Rockwell (right) as George W. Bush in Adam McKay’s VICE,

Dick Cheney’s Imperial Shadow Looms Large in Adam McKay’s Vice

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo One can only imagine what the great Roman historians like Tacitus and Suetonius would write about our own imperial moment. From rugged colonial stock the union sprout, liberated itself from the British crown, declared itself the United States, expanded in both territory and military might, and birthed characters like Richard Bruce […]

Ethan Hawke in First Reformed (2018)

Visions of the Age: A Top 10 Of 2018

by Alci Rengifo It is the cinema which chronicles the passions, nightmares and dreams of an era. To look back at the movies of any given decade is to peer into the very fabric of an age’s consciousness. We are currently living through a period of historical transition, a moment Gramsci would recognize as a […]

Robert Pruitt's Devotion, Installation View

Robert Pruitt: Devotion

at California African American Museum, Los Angeles (through February 17, 2019) Reviewed by Ellen C. Caldwell Robert Pruitt: Devotion is Houston-born and New York-based Robert Pruitt’s first major museum exhibit in Los Angeles, and it is a must-see and muse-experience. California African American Museum (CAAM) features Devotion in a large interior room, with plenty of light and […]

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art. word. thought.