Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Archives for July 2017

Material as Metaphor

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at Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

“What I am trying to get across is that material is a means of communication.”
Anni Albers

An exhibition entitled Material as Metaphor, currently at the Craft and Folk Art Museum, brings together eleven contemporary West Coast sculptors (Lloyd Hamrol, Victoria May, Lisa C Soto, Joel Allen, Miyoshi Barosh, Mary Little, Phyllis Green, Christy Matson, Senga Nengudi, Kay Whitney, May Wilson) who mostly use non-traditional materials such as industrial felt, vinyl, pantyhose, found thrift store crocheted blankets, rubber inner tubes, and other organic or manufactured items to create the predominately soft, sensuous, and idiosyncratic free standing and wall pieces. [Read more…]

New Work From Jazz Pianist Jon Davis: Happy Juice

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In their review of Happy Juice, all⋅about⋅jazz says “This album, once again, reminds us that Jon Davis remains one of the most important voices in the Posi-Tone stable and one of the most underappreciated pianists out there.” Audiophile Audition says “Davis’ compositions draw on rhythm complexities . . . the piano runs are intriguing, reminiscent of the unbridled freedom of the era of jazz explored on this album.” Listen to the title track below:

Entries Into The Circular Self

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Philosophical Perspectives on Emerson and Ashwini Bhat
by Stephen S. Bush

The geometer’s circle is a perfect abstraction, a static and timeless singularity. The naturalist prefers ripples on a pond: plural, overlapping, and dynamic. Throughout their histories, much of philosophy and art have sided with the geometer, regarding the eternal form as more real, more substantial. This perspective denounces the transitional for its decay and change; it sees permanence as superior.

In his essay “Circles,” Ralph Waldo Emerson takes a different approach. He says, “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.” [Read more…]

The Importance Of Bruce Conner To 20th Century Cinema

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In seeking the magic of Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver, Robin Scher speaks of Bruce Conner’s Cosmic Ray as not only shaking “the very bedrock of pop culture” but essentially becoming the first music video through harnessing the full power of rock ‘n roll in support of his imagery.

In the video below, Dennis Hopper, David James, Bruce Jenkins, Michael Kohn, Gerald Casale and others consider the importance of Bruce Conner in 20th century cinema. Dennis Hopper, in fact, calls Bruce Conner the most important artist of the 20th Century. Bruce Jenkins, more fundamentally, says Conner was “first and foremost a visual artist, somebody who was always drawing, who really understood the world through a visual lens [and] understood the power of the scale of cinema.” Michael Kohn sees “a great spirituality” in Conner’s work, a “sense of mysticism [that] is not going to be made clear for you but is going to be made manifest for you through his work.” See the interview and snippets of Conner’s work in the video below: 

Born of Cosmic Rays and Rock ‘n Roll: Baby Driver

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by Robin Scher

There was a time when the term ‘summer blockbuster’ meant an original, thrilling ride. But as Transformers: Who Gives a Shit and Spider-Man: Yes, Another Reboot attest, nowadays those words tend not to be worth the promotional material they’re printed on. Which is why it is nothing short of a small wonder to have received a glimmer of hope this year in the form of British director Edgar Wright’s homage to heist films, Baby Driver. [Read more…]

Pit Bull Without Papers

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An Interview with Victor Gastelum
by Pancho Lipschitz

Don’t call Victor Gastelum a stencil artist. Yes he wields an X-Acto blade like the Master of the Flying Guillotine, but long before Bansky was spraying 2-D cliches onto London walls, Victor was creating images that resonated like stills from an unknown film noir. It’s hard to remember now that there was a time when low riders and Mexican wrestlers were not in rap videos and beer commercials, but it was during those late 80’s and 90’s that Victor took the stuff of his childhood visual culture and created images that contain both literal and figurative depth. We sat in his studio in Long Beach and talked about his journey from making Punk flyers to working at SST Records and navigating the art world like Mr. Magoo. [Read more…]

Betye Saar’s Keepin’ It Clean

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at Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

Oh, wash-woman
Arms elbow deep in white suds,
Soul washed clean,
Clothes washed clean,–
I have many songs to sing you
Could I but find the words

“A Song to a Negro Wash-Woman”
by Langston Hughes

Wall text of the first (above) and last stanza of this Langston Hughes poem, an elegiac ode to the over worked and unappreciated Negro wash-woman, coupled with ten of Betye Saar’s own vintage washboards, set the tone for this poignant, powerful, and political show entitled Keepin’ it Clean. At 90, the venerable Betye Saar still clearly has plenty of “fire power,” as demonstrated by this quietly explosive body of work—about half from the mid to late 1990’s (Saar began collecting washboards in the 1990’s) and the other, more recent pieces are from 2015-17. [Read more…]

Not Even the Art of the Fool: Trump’s the Tsar’s Dupe

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by Michael D. Kennedy

July 18, 2017

Famous for the Art of the Deal even before reality shows became a big thing, Donald J. Trump has demonstrated this week that he does not even know how to play the game in Washington DC. Legislation is not the same as a political campaign. “Repeal and Replace” Obamacare was a great slogan for mobilizing those who didn’t really understand the complexity of health care (as this president himself admitted) but who hated that last guy in the White House. But without an alternative to Obamacare, this is not even a good con, as the failure in the Senate illustrates. We might then rework Trump’s sole literary claim into something more appropriate: perhaps the Art of the Fool?

Trump, however, is no fool, at least not in the tradition of the venerated Fool. [Read more…]

The Meta-Outsider Work of Carol Rama

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Antibodies
at New Museum, NYC
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

The art of Carol Rama occupies a strange and singular space; Rama, a self-confirmed outsider, is poised on a chosen cusp. Not a true outsider artist herself (her intense, self-conscious stoking of her own particular obsessive-compulsive neuroses precludes that) she provides a unique meta-vision — even a celebration — of the outsider mindset. She is a self-proclaimed insider of an outsider world, which she obsessively observes, reveling in recording its scatological and erotic impulses.

Henry Darger and Martin Ramirez were equally obsessed: it is fair to say that they all, including Rama, suffered from some degree of obsessive-compulsive disorder, just as does the uber-successful artist Yayoi Kusama. Louise Bourgeois once famously called her art “a form of therapy.” Or, as Rama put it, “We all have our own tropical disease within us, for which we seek a remedy. My remedy is painting.” [Read more…]

Phantasmatic Conditions: Symbolic Abuse And Systematic Destruction

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by Johanna Drucker

Epigraph: The German philosopher, Hannah Arendt, once said that ‘factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the non-totalitarian world” (Origins of Totalitarianism, p.388). What if instead of construing Trump as an instrument, cause, an agent of his own will and power, we consider him a symptom, an extrusion of a set of complex conditions manifesting itself in the opportunistic formation that identifies as this man. Configurations of power are always dependent upon the conditions of their emergence. Mechanistically speaking, we know some of the conditions—erosion of public education, the exaggerated income gap, increased inequity mapped onto race, class, and ethnicity, the destruction of the working class and its guarantees or even possibility of a secure lifestyle. The breakdown of a democratic system rotted by the diseases of capitalism is easily trackable. We can see all of the elements of our condition and how they combine to create anger. Add to this the various drugs: literal drugs, the opiates, and the psychic drugs, the fantasy products pumped into the social system in the form of entertainment, the unreality television, the nighttime series the daytime rants–all part of the frenzy of consumption.

Power is never as effective as when it is abusive. And abuse is never so effective as when it is arbitrary. Combine these insights with a few others and the shape of the current political climate emerges starkly [Read more…]

David Lynch’s The Amputee

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1973. David Lynch had been shooting Eraserhead for roughly one year when he ran out of cash. The film was suddenly and indefinitely on hold. It was, he says, “a depressing time.” It was also this time that the American Film Institute asked a friend of his, Fred, to shoot a test using two different black and white video stocks to determine which stock was best, because, as Lynch tells it, “they were going to buy a bunch.” Lynch says when he heard AFI was buying video tapes, “it gave me a sadness, and I worried they were going to have to change the name of the place” (from American Film Institute to American Video Institute). “So I looked at Fred, and I got an idea, and I said, um, ‘Fred, does it matter what you shoot?’ And he said, ‘Well, what are you talking about?” And I said ‘Could you shoot anything you want? Twice. One with one stock and one with the other, and go like that, for the test?’ And he said, ‘Well, I don’t see why not.’ So I said, ‘Could I write something and make something for tomorrow?’ And he said, ‘Okay.’”

That evening Lynch wrote The Amputee. The next day he shot this video:

The 1978 Paper That Predicted Our Nearing “Disaster”

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Christopher Hassett

If the greenhouse warming effect of the resultant increasing atmospheric CO2 is as great as the most advanced current models suggest, a critical level of warmth will have been passed in high southern latitudes 50 years from now, and deglaciation of West Antarctica will be imminent or in progress. De­glaciation would probably be rapid once it had started, and when complete would have led to a rise in sea level of about 5m along most coasts.  

–Prof. John H. Mercer, 26 January 1978

12 July 2017

A trillion-ton iceberg totaling 2,240 square miles, or 12% of the Antarctic peninsula, and 40 trillion cubic feet of ice — a volume twice that of Lake Erie — today broke free from the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica. Following the collapse of the Larsen A ice shelf in 1995 and the Larsen B ice shelf in 2002, today’s calving further weakens the entire continental glacier and sets in motion what scientist believe is the first stage of total glacial collapse. [Read more…]

Getting To A New Place: Three Ways Black English Outdoes Standard English

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From Talking Back, Talking Black
by John McWhorter

No more should Black English be presented largely as a dialect that leaves out this and reverses that, with specialists then wondering why the public continues to think of it as a cluster of errors and isn’t impressed that the errors are systematic. Rather, Black English must be introduced via a col­lection of ways in which it is more complex than Standard English, not less.

People respect complexity. People like sim­plicity in their music and in ways of preparing food, but in terms of grammar, not so much. Some people involved with presenting Black English to the public might wonder just what such a collection of complex features would consist of, other than the shadings of verb usage I just mentioned. The simple fact is that specialists in Black English have not been primed to seek out those features that outdo Standard Eng­lish in complexity. Systematicity will intringue and stimulate academic linguistic analysis, but the public isn’t having it, so we must change the lens.

Below I will discuss five things in the dialect that demonstrate that anyone speaking Black English is doing some­thing subtle and complex.

1.  Up what?

I once had occasion to ask a black American with a solid command of Ebonics what up means in a sentence like “We was up in here havin’ a good time:’  [Read more…]

Good English And Bad

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From The Mother Tongue
by Bill Bryson

Consider the parts of speech. In Latin, the verb has up to 120 inflections. In English it never has more than five (e.g., see, sees, saw, seeing, seen) and often it gets by with just three (hit, hits, hitting). Instead of using loads of different verb forms, we use just a few forms but employ them in loads of ways. We need just five inflections to deal with the act of propelling a car — drive, drives, drove, driving, and driven — yet with these we can express quite complex and subtle variations of tense: “I drive to work every day,” “I have been driving since I was sixteen,” “I will have driven 20,000 miles by the end of this year.” This system, for all its ease of use, makes labeling difficult. According to any textbook, the present tense of the verb drive is drive. Every junior high school pupil knows that. Yet if we say, “I used to drive to work but now I don’t,” we are clearly using the present tense drive in a past tense sense. Equally if we say, “I will drive you to work tomorrow,” we are using it in a future sense. And if we say, “I would drive if could afford to,” we are using it in a conditional sense. In fact, almost the only form of sentence in which we cannot use the present tense form of drive is, yes, the present tense. When we need to indicate an action going on right now, we must use the participial form driving. We don’t say, “I drive the car now,” but rather ‘I’m  driving the car now.” Not to put too fine a point on it, the labels are largely meaningless. [Read more…]