1930 | 2017
Archives for November 2017
If The World Were Created By A God Then We’d Be Helpless
If the world were created by a god then we’d be helpless. It would not be within our power to do much about our own situation. However, some deity has not created the world, so we have the power to do something about our situation. That is because the situation we are in is the fruition of our own actions; our actions are a cause that has created this particular effect. Therefore it is within our power to abandon the causes of suffering and, likewise, to prevent the experience of suffering. In that same way, it is within our power to do what we want to do. If we want to achieve the higher realms of existence or the state of having crossed beyond all suffering, then we simply begin to engage in the causes that lead to those very realms. [Read more…]
Brilliant Work From Leikeli47: “Miss Me”
Guillermo del Toro Delivers An Enchanting, Exquisite Fairy Tale With The Shape of Water
Visionary filmmaker Guillermo del Toro has long been enchanted by monsters. From chilling yet tender films like The Devil’s Backbone to Pan’s Labyrinth, and Crimson Peak, he’s offered creatures terrifying, yet uniquely beautiful. In Hellboy he made his monsters unabashed heroes. With his latest, del Toro turns an aquatic “affront” into a swoon-inducing romantic lead. The Shape of Water is a positively enchanting fairy tale that celebrates misfits, and reveals true monsters. [Read more…]
Vulnerability: The Space Between
Young Projects Gallery, Los Angeles (through December 29, 2017)
By Shana Nys Dambrot
The show starts quietly with an historical video program of classics that set a tone and context for what comes after. Works by Marina Abramovic, Bas Jan Ader, Sam Taylor Wood, Yoko Ono, and others who explicitly offered physical and emotional intimacy, created art experiences that were intense and dangerous and made people very uncomfortable. They made themselves vulnerable, their bodies were sites and spectacles of potential transgression and trauma. This was done in order to deconstruct basics of Post-Modern human behavior. As with so many other art historical tropes, versions of this dynamic inquiry exist in an updated public sphere — the digital world of technology and social media. And that’s where Vulnerability: The Space Between picks up the thread and takes it to increasingly inventive, uncanny, and strangely familiar places. [Read more…]
Eugen Gabritschevsky: 1893–1979
at La Maison Rouge, Paris
Reviewed by Sanford Schwartz
An extract from “The Master of Eglfing-Haar” in the October 16 Issue of The New York Review of Books
It is possible that the people who run the American Folk Art Museum have wondered in recent years about the name of their institution. Works by American folk artists make up the majority of its exhibitions, it is true. In the last decade or more, however, the museum has become an invaluable part of New York’s cultural life because it has produced a little stream of full-fledged introductions to figures who are much the opposite of folk artists and frequently are not American. The term “folk art” implies an art for a wide, popular, and perhaps not overly discriminating audience—ingenious and lovely as folk-art creations can be. But the day has passed when this kind of work, which was at its most vibrant in the early decades of the nineteenth century, was crowded with figures waiting to be discovered. [Read more…]
The Oozing, Undulating Forms of Lynda Benglis
at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles (Through December 16, 2017)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch
As a legendary and enduring figure on the international art stage, Louisiana-born conceptual sculptor Lynda Benglis is renowned for crafting pained yet sensual anthropomorphic works out of melted bronze, latex, ceramics, polyurethane, and glass. Bursting into the public consciousness with her transgressive, fearless, and unforgettable nude advertisement in Artforum (the magazine refused to give her editorial space for the image) in 1974, the artist garnered much public praise and shock for posing with a dildo between her legs in order to subvert the male gaze, binary gender roles, and notions of bodily objectification. After decades of consistently producing arresting and audacious sculptures with themes of sexuality and mortality, Benglis is once again in the public eye with her current solo retrospective at Culver City’s prestigious Blum & Poe. [Read more…]
The Diminished Value Of Human Life In A Capitalist Society
The flowery language of the United States Declaration of Independence would have you believe that human life has an inherent value, one that includes inalienable rights such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But in America, a major indicator of value is actually placed on being a productive member of society, which typically means working a job that creates monetary revenue (especially if the end result is accumulated wealth and suffering was inherently involved in the process). “Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps,” being a “self-made” man or woman, and “rags to riches” stories permeate our collective consciousness, creating an overarching culture that links work, jobs and money to morality and value. The system of higher education has also been tied to this toxic concept, as we have equated more education to being better qualified for said jobs. And so the equation becomes: more education leads to more jobs, which leads to more earned and accumulated revenue, which leads to more “value.” [Read more…]
Kukuli Velarde’s Plunder Me, Baby
Reviewed by Christopher Michno
Plunder Me, Baby—sounds like an invitation, but an invitation to what? There’s irony aplenty in that title and it leaves a sickening aftertaste, as it’s meant. Kukuli Velarde’s trenchant and caustically humorous ceramic sculptures fix within their sights the conquest—both cultural and corporeal—of Latin America. This widely exhibited series, now in a PST: LA/LA exhibition at the American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA), is fashioned after traditional pre-Columbian ceramic objects, but Velarde, who brings a distinctive lens to themes of identity and cultural appropriation, creates each object as a kind of self portrait. Each sculpture bears her visage and expresses a reaction to the realities of conquest: defiance, anger, mockery, subversion, and the like. [Read more…]
Darkest Chambers: Wormwood And The Underground Of American History
As the year reaches its twilight, it is becoming clear that 2017 was the year of iconoclasm. The wave of scandals and shocking revelations (shocking to those unaware of the habits of the elite) has cracked the great marble edifices of many a celebrity or political persona. For a population as addicted to social media and the religion of fads as ours, it is very telling that it has taken sex to shock the public consciousness into the realization that fame is a mask, popularity a vulgar makeup. But the current, lurid headlines still distract from a truth everyone knows but would prefer to whisper: There are darker ceremonies taking place in the deepest, darkest chambers of the American halls of power.
Poem With Orpheus
Every word in this poem is a dead body.
Each word dies as you read it
and floats behind in a wooden canoe
that covers itself with itself
to make a coffin. A white, historical plane
knits above the dead word to shroud
and replace it. The poem before (this) point
is streaming and invisible. The rivulets
on which the coffin boats float
move backward forever. That last word (word)
and then (last) (that) (forever) (backward)
(move)—you killed those words. [Read more…]
Each word dies as you read it
and floats behind in a wooden canoe
that covers itself with itself
to make a coffin. A white, historical plane
knits above the dead word to shroud
and replace it. The poem before (this) point
is streaming and invisible. The rivulets
on which the coffin boats float
move backward forever. That last word (word)
and then (last) (that) (forever) (backward)
(move)—you killed those words. [Read more…]
The Exterminating Angel: An Opera In Three Acts
at Metropolitan Opera, New York City Reviewed by Donald Lindeman
Hailing from Salzburg and London, Thomas Adès’ opera The Exterminating Angel made its much anticipated New York debut on October 26th at the Metropolitan Opera. Adès himself conducted, and the opening night audience greeted him, the opera, and its superlative vocalists with considerable enthusiasm. The opera is based on the 1962 surrealist film by Luis Buñuel of the same name, featuring an elegant after-opera dinner party attended by upper-crust denizens of Francisco Franco’s Spain. It should be noted that Adès and director Tom Cairns eschew the deeply ironic and grim conclusion found in Luis Buñuel’s film in their opera. Instead they opt for a more ambiguous outcome and fate for their characters. This marks a significant alteration to the filmic source, and it invites alternative interpretations to the original tale. [Read more…]
Adrián Villar Rojas: The Theater of Disappearance
At the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (Through May 13, 2018) Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch
As a meditation on the flexible nature of time and an ode to the objet trouvé readymades of French-born Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, Argentinian conceptual installation artist Adrián Villar Rojas’s current showing at Little Tokyo’s Geffen Contemporary at MOCA offers frozen cases of preserved organic and manmade materials, as well as layered, almost geological or landfill-like gallery floors infused with packed dirt, multicolored concrete, clay, old tennis shoes, and fruit peels. These modern and seemingly ancient items reveal Adrián Villar Rojas: The Theater of Disappearance be an excavation of sorts, or even perhaps a burial. [Read more…]
Charles Manson Dies
Mowgan “Check This,” Feat. Capone Adama
Through The Soundless Lens, Darkly
Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin & Peter Hujar
At Matthew Marks, Los Angeles (Through December 22, 2017)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch
As three supremely unconventional 20th century portrait photographers, Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, and Peter Hujar are currently the subjects of an exhaustive, evocative and eponymous retrospective at Matthew Marks, Los Angeles.
With twenty-two poignant prints spanning sixty years proudly on display here, the viewer can detect the overwhelming similarities and differences between these widely adored artists. Although all three chose the same medium and subject, each photographer approached the human form and spirit in a completely unique manner. [Read more…]
Nan Goldin Breathes Word Into Her Seminal Work, The Ballad Of Sexual Dependency
On view at Matthew Marks, Los Angeles, are a selection of photographs from Nan Goldin’s hypnotic and haunting series, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which in its original format is a 48 minute slideshow documenting Goldin’s life in over 700 photographs and 30 songs, the text of which, those songs, acting as the narrative for the “film.”
In her introduction to the book, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Goldin writes:
I was eleven when my sister committed suicide. This was in 1965, when teenage suicide was a taboo subject. I was very close to my sister and aware of some of the forces that led her to choose suicide. I saw the role that her sexuality and its repression played in her destruction. [Read more…]
Dee Rees Delivers A Must-See Drama with Mudbound
Reviewed by Kristy Puchko
Writer-director Dee Rees earned buzz out the gate in 2011, with the compelling coming-of-age drama Pariah. She followed this up with the bawdy and bold Bessie, a made-for-TV biopic that starred Queen Latifah as legendary blues siren Bessie Smith. Now, after months of touring film festivals, winning praise, and sparking Oscar speculation, Rees’ latest, Mudbound, is coming to select theaters and Netflix to offer a bittersweet period piece that’s ripe with political undertones. [Read more…]
New Work From Destroyer: “Tinseltown Swimming in Blood”
Visionary Artist And Statesman Of The Street, William Hall
This is a sort of Cinderella story, if Cinderella was a 74 year-old man with a penchant for drawing fantastical landscapes, imaginary cars, trains and figures. William Hall may look like a character actor with Santa Claus on his resume, but he harbors an interior life that is far more unique than his appearance suggests. Outwardly there are no clues to imply the fullness of his imagination, nor his impressive talents, yet like the kernel of truth buried within any fable, his story reveals the strength of the human spirit in the face of adversity. [Read more…]