Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Archives for September 2017

Rei Kawakubo / Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between

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at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC
Reviewed by David Salle

An extract from “Clothes That Don’t Need You,” in the September 28th issue of The New York Review of Books.

The first time I visited Japan I fell hard for the highly abstract, ritualized form of musical drama called Noh. My Japanese friends found this a little puzzling, since I couldn’t understand the dialogue, and there was no simultaneous translation such as one finds at the opera. Even they didn’t understand the arcane Japanese dialect from hundreds of years earlier. There were synopses of the plays, of course—usually just a few lines in a mimeographed program. My traveling companion and I were often the only Westerners at these performances, which were held in the late afternoon, adding to the oddness of the experience. The atmosphere was very different from the more popular Kabuki. No beer. No cheering, no talking in the house at all. Pretty soon, as the intricate rhythms and the rising and falling pitch of the atonal chanting start to work on your brain, you begin to get a feeling for the dramatic arcs. [Read more…]

Intellectually Ambitious Yet Ultimately Inept: 78/52 Fails Hitchcock’s Psycho

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

The shower scene in Psycho is easily one of the most iconic scenes in cinema history. Even those who’ve never seen Alfred Hitchcock’s notorious 1960 thriller know its shrieking strings score, and have surely seen it mimicked in a bevy of film and TV shows. Beyond that blood-splashed shower curtain, there’s a whole world to be explored. Documentarian Alexandre O. Philippe dives in with 78/52 [Read more…]

Carlos Almaraz, Playing With Fire

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Part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA
at The Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

Pacific Standard Time/LA/LA (Los Angeles, Latin America) is the second installment of a widespread series of exhibitions sponsored by The Getty. This incarnation involves over 70 institutions (art galleries, museums, and other cultural venues) from all over Southern California, including Palm Springs, to showcase Chicano and Latino art — ancient through contemporary.

As part of PST/LA/LA, The Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art (LACMA) shows a survey of painting from the prolific and prodigiously gifted Carlos Almaraz, who died too young of AIDS in 1989. From 1973-83, Almaraz was part of a Chicano (though that term was new) Collective, called Los Four, which included Frank Romero, Gilbert Magu Lujan, and Roberto de la Rocha. They worked together, painted and sculpted many of the same images (cars, cacti, dogs, chairs, flames) as they developed a Chicano lexicon of imagery. They are all being recognized anew. Frank Romero just had an outstanding retrospective at MOLAA last spring and Gilbert Magu Lujan will have a huge retrospective (over 200 works) at UCI this fall. The fourth member, Roberto de la Rocha, unfortunately destroyed all his works, went into seclusion for 20 years and is just now rejoining the Los Angeles artistic community. [Read more…]

See/Saw: Siegfried Tieber is Ready for His Close-Up

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By Shana Nys Dambrot

Up-Close Magic — sometimes called Micromagic — is a genre of cards and coins, not smoke and mirrors. It’s an arena where the audience is small, perhaps a dozen, or twenty, and they are watching the performer from mere feet or inches away. There’s a lot of eye contact, audience participation is central to almost every trick, and the magician is basically daring you to figure out what he’s doing and how he’s doing it. [Read more…]

Traumatizing, Tragic, Grimly Comedic: Yorgos Lanthimos Unnerves Fantastic Fest

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The Killing Of A Sacred Deer
Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos has raised eyebrows and sunk hearts with his heralded drama Dogtooth and his Colin Farrell-fronted dark comedy The Lobster. Now he reteams with Farrell for The Killing of A Sacred Deer, an enigmatic bit of slow burn horror that boasts a streak of pitch-black humor. Not nearly as accessible or silly as The Lobster, it’s nonetheless breathlessly daring and unnerving. [Read more…]

Stories of Desolation, Dystopia And Joyous Dance

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Simphiwe Ndzube’s Bhabharosi 
at Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles (through October 14, 2017)
By Lorraine Heitzman

Simphiwe Ndzube, in his bold debut at the Nicodim Gallery, has produced a personal and political tragicomedy that is an insightful commentary on the human condition. Set against the backdrop of South Africa where Ndzube was born, Bhabharosi tells the timely story of the hero’s journey that is steeped in the colors and customs of his birthplace but speaks to universal themes. His fresh perspective resonates with a vocabulary that is both witty and visually stunning. [Read more…]

Hagazussa

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Stephen Dalton

[from old High-German, a Hagazussa refers to the fence sitter, or one who lives between two worlds]

Anyone who found the deranged cannibalistic excesses of Darren Arofonsky’s mother! a little too vanilla should feast their senses on the deliciously dark flavors of Hagazussa (2017). An atmospheric folk-horror fable that combines a constant undertow of creeping dread with a striking avant-gothic visual style, it marks the feature debut of Vienna-born, Berlin-based director Lukas Feigelfeld. The title draws on an ancient term used to describe witches and female demons across German-speaking Europe in the Middle Ages. [Read more…]

New Work From Erin Currier

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American Women (dismantling the border) II

American Women (dismantling the border) II (48″x60″) depicts the U.S. Mexico wall being dismantled by American Indigenous women (Comanche, Navajo, on the U.S. side; Aztec, Miztec, Mayan, on the Mexican side). Most borders which define Nation States — topics of such heated debate — were only recently built, created by Colonial conquest, and are false constructs: hastily drawn lines etching across and carving up lands inhabited for millennia by Indigenous peoples. Thus, it is the right of the Indigenous to dismantle the oppressive walls and artificial distinctions of the world: walls that slice through the heart of communities and ecosystems, the only function of which is fear based exclusion. [Read more…]

Gathered Crumbs From A Lost Cake

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A Review of Elizabeth Ellen’s Person/a
by John Biscello

I

In the 2004 film, The Libertine, Johnny Depp, playing the Earl of Rochester, delivers an acidic opening monologue, which begins, “Allow me to be frank at the commencement, you will not like me. The gentlemen will be envious and the ladies will be repelled. You will not like me now and you will like me a good deal less as you go on.”

The ego, as a mouthpiece for rebellion, as an exiled priest dispatching its sermon-of-self from a rogue pulpit, creates itself through voice. In the “Letter from the Editor” section of Elizabeth Ellen’s new novel, Person/a, the author states: “… I write this letter to you, dear reader, as both editor and author of this novel, with full awareness and with full admission that if there is a ‘Monster at the End of this Book,’ that monster is I. I am that monster. Let this then serve as an introduction.” [Read more…]

The Substantial, Steady Shadow Of Harry Dean Stanton

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by Manohla Dargis
From “Harry Dean Stanton: Fully Inhabiting Scenes, Not Stealing Them,” in the September 17 edition of the New York Times

Soon after the start of “Paris, Texas,” Harry Dean Stanton appears in an astonishing gorge called the Devil’s Graveyard. He’s playing a lost soul, Travis, who will spend the rest of the film getting found. Right now, though, surrounded by rock formations that evoke the westerns of John Ford, Travis is an enigma. On foot and wholly alone save for a watchful eagle, wearing a red cap and an inexplicable double-breasted suit, Travis looks like a former cowboy or maybe a businessman who took a wrong turn. He looks like someone Dorothea Lange might have photographed during the Great Depression. He looks like the American West, all sinew, dust and resolve. [Read more…]

Enigmatic and Unnerving, Mother! Might Be a Modern Horror Masterpiece

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! is his Mona Lisa. Maybe a masterpiece, but most definitely crafted to capture the public with its mystery. Following its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival, the art-horror offering has ignited furious debate over its meaning, and even basic plot points. Sure, the trailer suggests this is a creepy cult thriller about a married couple whose happy home is unsettled by some unexpected–and sexy–guests. But the truth is something more complicated and far trickier to define. [Read more…]

James Welling’s Seascape

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at David Zwirner, NYC
Reviewed by Donald Lindeman

Vacation-starved New Yorkers could nonetheless repair to David Zwirner gallery this summer, on West 19th St. and view James Welling’s short film Seascape (2017). The film provides an ingratiating encounter with the storied, rock-festooned Maine coast, accompanied by an audio of accordion and taped ocean sound. There is no narration, just image, sound and elegiac music, as ocean waves endlessly and variously crash upon the rocks, the sun becomes clouded then bright again, and water and sky ever change hue. America “grew up” with landscape painting of the Romantic era, beginning effectively with Thomas Cole, and, continuing in the dramatic seascape narratives of the Maine coast by Winslow Homer. Welling’s film adds yet another iteration of aesthetic and method to this tradition [Read more…]