Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Archives for June 2018

Lynn Tejada’s Green Galactic Sees Its Silver Reign

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By Steven Mirkin

Twenty-five years is a long time for any business to survive. Many marriages don’t make it to their Silver Anniversary, much less businesses. Throw in a rapidly changing media marketplace, and the idea that Green Galactic, a boutique publicity firm owned by Lynn Tejada and devoted to some of the most adventurous and experimental artists out there, made it to 25 is even more impressive.

Think about it: When Tejada started Green Galactic, dial-up modems were the norm and CDs were the future of the music industry. Few people had an email address, and most of those ended in “@aol.com.” Social media was unknown, Mark Zuckerberg was nine years old, and the words “blog,” “vlog” and “website” were yet to be coined; you’d be more likely to come across the word “streaming” in a copy of Outside than Rolling Stone. A large part of a publicist’s job was rolling calls, working the phones, and they were judged by the size of their Rolodexes.    [Read more…]

Death By Streaming: Is Cult Cinema At An End?

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by Judy Berman
Courtesy of The Baffler

The defining cult film of the Twenty-First Century is neither a mirror held up to nature or a hammer used to shape reality. The Room, released in 2003, is like a ninety-nine-minute episode of The Real World as performed by the inmates of the asylum of Charenton under the direction of no one. It is an incoherent broadside against evil women (or all women) and a backwards vindication of all-American male breadwinners who buy their girls roses and befriend at-risk teens. It’s a tragedy not just because it ends with a suicide, but also because sitting through it requires a robust Dionysian death drive. The Room is so bad that when you point out its idiocy, the idiocy of stating the obvious bounces back and sticks to you. [Read more…]

Factory Farming, Though Vile, Does Not Equate To Chattel Slavery

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by Seren Sensei

A quiet wave of veganism has tacked its roots in pop culture. Veganism, vegetarianism and to a lesser extent, pescetarianism — existing for so long on the fringe — are finally having their moment in the mainstream, with many adopting the practices of eating solely vegetables and/or cutting out red meat, pork, poultry and dairy. Celebrity chefs, actors, athletes and musicians extoll the virtues of going vegan. Vegan challenges, wherein participants attempt to go entirely vegan for an allotted amount of time, are wildly popular. Smoothie bowls run rampant on social media; vegan options have crept onto menus everywhere from five star restaurants to fast food restaurants. (The popular California hamburger chain Fatburger, was recently the first fast food chain to introduce The Impossible Burger, made entirely of plant protein.) [Read more…]

Hung Viet Nguyen’s Artistic and Spiritual Alchemy

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by Genie Davis

Artist Hung Viet Nguyen is a magician and an alchemist. His paintings evoke the beauty of nature, its wonder and its spiritual quality. He takes the real and reconfigures it, shapes it into a mysterious, reverent space. With images that are both landscapes and stunning mosaic-like patterns, the Vietnamese-born, Los Angeles-based artist transports viewers into paintings that resemble an enchanted realm. [Read more…]

Tomas Saraceno’s Literally Uplifting Solar Rhythms

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at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NYC
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

As much a visionary as he is an artist, Tomas Saraceno, a visionary artist, clearly follows in the footsteps of such innovators as Buckminster Fuller, Paolo Soleri, and others whose aesthetic brilliance parallels their deep desire to sustain humanity on this planet. The influence of his friend, the great Olafur Eliasson, for whom he briefly worked as a studio assistant, is obvious. But Saraceno goes beyond flexing the muscles of his considerable technical flair to invent designs that are or can be implemented as part of his Aerocene project, started in 2015, the stated goal of which “proposes a new epoch, one of atmospherical [sic] and ecological consciousness, where we together earn how to float and live in the air, and to achieve an ethical collaboration with the environment.” [Read more…]

Rage And Grace In Paul Schrader’s First Reformed

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by Alci Rengifo

There can be nothing more dangerous than an awakened consciousness. Paul Schrader’s new and fierce work, First Reformed, is a portrait of a man connecting with a world in crisis, even as he is silently torn by his own scars. Beautifully composed, it is a film that reaches well beyond the surface of its story. It is about the very condition and mood of our times, and the palpable sense of some oncoming cataclysm.

We are but individuals operating within the larger panorama of societies and nations. Some of us are bond strong by belief systems; others despair within their beliefs at a world symbolically ready to burn. Paul Schrader has been a filmmaker of the latter ilk since his early days when he composed furious, violent works which, even when featuring traditional plots, displayed an artist grappling with the spirit and the flesh. [Read more…]

Iranian Art, Past and Present: In The Field Of Empty Days

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at Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

“Lovers find secret places inside this violent world where they make transactions with beauty.”  Rumi, 13thcentury Persian Poet

The poetically entitled In The Field of Empty Days: The Intersection of Past and Present in Iranian Art is a dense yet sprawling exhibit that features compelling images from artists whom we may not have seen before. A hallmark of these modern and contemporary Iranian artists is their ingenious blending of images related to myth, history, social disruption, political upheaval and religious restriction in their work. They, like so many contemporary artists, are mining the past for re-presentation in the present. [Read more…]

Cultural Processes: A Quantum Approach

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An Interview with Artist and Theorist Johanna Drucker
by Broc Rossell

Johanna Drucker’s newly published work, The General Theory of Social Relativity, addresses the fundamental question of how we are to understand the forces at work in the social world, and presents a radically innovative framework for thinking about social processes. A century ago theories of quantum physics and general relativity exposed the limits of Newton’s classical, mechanical, approach to explaining the forces at work in the physical world. But the social sciences, including critical aesthetics rooted in 19th century political theory, remain caught in a mechanistic paradigm. Drucker’s formulation offers a non-mechanistic approach to the understanding workings of the social world and the affective forces at work in non-linear politics and aesthetics.* Broc Rossell, publisher of The Elephants, spoke with author Johanna Drucker in Vancouver and Los Angeles last month regarding her new book with The Elephants, The General Theory of Social Relativity. [Read more…]

Laurie Simmons: Avatar Artist For Our Age

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From two concurrent exhibitions:
Clothes Make The Man: Works from 1990-1994, at Mary Boone Gallery
2017: The Mess and Some New, at Salon 94, NYC
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

We live in the age of the avatar, and over the course of several decades, Laurie Simmons has proven herself to be the ultimate avatar artist for our age. (Think of her shocking 2015 “The Love Doll” series: sophisticated Japanese sex toys beautifully chronicled in suburban household settings, like Dare Star’s classic 1950s character “The Lonely Doll.”) [Read more…]

David Bowie’s Glorious “Sweet Thing / Candidate”

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In tandem with Angelica Villa’s review of the wonderful Brooklyn Museum exhibition, David Bowie is, here is a dark suite to set a backroom mood. The exhibition is by no means dark, but Bowie had that lovely netherworld strain which, for those predisposed to the condition, felt viral and thereby one with all high occasions. Sonic theater at its most operatic and sublime:

From Diamond Dogs

An Expansive, Boundary-Blurring Exhibition In David Bowie is

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at the Brooklyn Museum, NYC
Reviewed by Angelica Villa

Arranged in a matchless array of material from David Bowie’s archive, the Brooklyn Museum’s David Bowie is encapsulates the icon’s expansive complexity. The exhibition explores the breadth of visual and musical inventions and collaborations of the artist’s prolific career. Posing challenge to social convention and encouraging freedom of self-identification for several decades, the artist’s cultural relevance is beyond compare or distillation. Including 400 objects sourced from the musician’s archive, the interdisciplinary range of material showcasing album covers, drafts of handwritten lyrics, costumes, photographs, film and audio of Bowie’s career draw together a kaleidoscopic retrospective portrait of the artist’s many selves. [Read more…]