A legendary beauty with a string of dead lovers and a dangerous claim to the English throne, Mary Stuart is a figure who has long fascinated historians. She has been painted as a murderer, a traitor, and a slut. But Mary Queen of Scots reconsiders this bad reputation and reconstructs her as a proto-feminist heroine who was condemned for her ambition, her beauty, and for trying to have it all. [Read more…]
Archives for November 2018
Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson’s Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism
Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson’s Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism
by Timothy Denevi
PublicAffairs, 416 pp., $18.30
On a cloudy Tuesday afternoon I found myself by a train station in Santa Monica ordering an Uber ride. To ride the train through the bowels of the city can be a daily reminder that quite a sector of our civilization has gone completely insane, but the Uber ride itself put the icing on the cake and confirmed this dark suspicion. The driver, who shall remain unnamed, was a jolly type with a curious name. I have a bad habit of getting easily into conversation with any human who crosses my path and asked where the driver hailed from. Poland was the answer. Ah yes, Poland. I mentioned that Poland has been undergoing quite the political sea change, using those words as to not say the current government as right-wing and nationalist. This was my second mistake. The driver quickly announced himself as a partisan of the ruling Law and Justice Party (what a shudder to even type such a name) because, hey, they were getting rid of “the Communists still left over from the past,” who are inevitably “controlled by the Jews.” [Read more…]
New Work From Sampa The Great: “Energy”
feat. Nadeem Din-Gabisi
from the album Energy
on Believe Music
Haruki Murakami’s “The Wind Cave”
Excerpted from Murakami's recent novel, Killing Commendatore Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel Read Riot Material's review of Killing Commedatore
When I was fifteen, my younger sister died. It happened very suddenly. She was twelve then, in her first year of junior high. She had been born with a congenital heart problem, but since her last surgeries, in the upper grades of elementary school, she hadn’t shown any more symptoms, and our family had felt reassured, holding on to the faint hope that her life would go on without incident. But, in May of that year, her heartbeat became more irregular. It was especially bad when she lay down, and she suffered many sleepless nights. She underwent tests at the university hospital, but no matter how detailed the tests the doctors couldn’t pinpoint any changes in her physical condition. The basic issue had ostensibly been resolved by the operations, and they were baffled. [Read more…]
In The Grand Scheme Of Things
It sounds like someone wound up the wrens
and let them go, let them chatter across your lawn
like cheap toys, and from here an airplane
seems to fly only from one tree to another, barely
chalking a line between them. We say the naked eye
as if the eye could be clothed, as if it isn’t the world
that refuses to undress unless we turn our backs.
It shows us what it chooses, nothing more, [Read more…]
Julie Heffernan’s Hunter Gatherer
at P·P·O·W, NYC
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban
Both a multi-faceted spin on the pervasive selfie and an erudite capsule of feminist history, Hunter Gatherer, Julie Heffernan’s epic show at P·P·O·W, her first in five years, is far too much to absorb in one viewing—or even a dozen. Typically, Heffernan’s painterly technique is classical, almost atavistic. In a series of nine extraordinarily detailed images, all completed in 2018, Heffernan creates a personal diary cum feminist manifesto with an overtly political content seemingly at odds with its self-consciously pretty form. [Read more…]
In Search Of Lost Time In Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma
As time moves forward we find ourselves attempting to recover its fragments. In the earliest youth time can lose its very meaning, but as the years accumulate we then look back, as if trying to find photographs in a vast galaxy of memories. Alfonso Cuaron wants to use the very essence of cinema to recover the past in Roma. His first feature film for Netflix is also one of the year’s best — a haunted, detailed, personal rendering of his memories growing up in 1970s Mexico. A serene rush of recollections, sights, sounds and sensations, it is a thriving example of the artist attempting ever so thoroughly to render for us what he experienced as a child. In its grander scope it is a tapestry of a society in a specific moment of time, at a more intimate level it conjures that sensation we feel when attempting to remember how the air smelled during a trip to the desert, how the night glowed when we were lost in the woods, or what her eyes looked like when you found her weeping on the balcony. [Read more…]
Outliers and American Vanguard Art
at LACMA (through March 17, 2019)
Reviewed by Genie Davis
What is an outlier? Is it someone outside conventional norms, beyond the commonplace? In art, both are almost certain true, and among outlier artists are the seeds of innovation, change, and a fearless evocation of what constitutes art. Boundaries are pushed, both in terms of content and creation. We may love this art, be drawn to it, seek out individual artists, but it is rare to see a wide-ranging collection of these works in a major museum. With that in mind, the west coast presentation of the National Gallery of Art-curated Outliers and American Vanguard Art at LACMA is in and of itself an outlier of an exhibition. [Read more…]
Rousing New Afro-Beat From The Public Opinion Afro Orchestra
“Fight So Hard”
from Naming & Blaming
on Hope Street Recordings
Shoplifters Delivers A Defiantly Joyful Drama About An Unusual ‘Chosen Family’
“Chosen family” is a term most often associated with the LGBTQA+ community. It’s used to describe a close circle of friends who love each other like family, though there is no shared blood between them. Chosen families are how many queer people find community, comfort, and home after their biological relatives have offered them rejection, scorn, or outright ostracizing. Acclaimed Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda creates a unique and heart-warming tale of such a family with Shoplifters. [Read more…]
Director Nathaniel Khan Talks About The Price Of Everything
Few ever dream of owning a masterpiece; even fewer know the intrinsic value of an art piece in today’s hyper inflated art market. Brilliantly directed by Nathaniel Khan, The Price of Everything is a fascinating journey into the personalities at the forefront of this phenomenon, from high-end investors to auctioneers, historians, art critics, collectors and artists. [Read more…]
For A Breakout Jig: Dança do Zumbi
by Zombie Disco Squad (feat. MC Oscar)
from Brazil Bass
on Bunda Locca
Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future
at The Guggenheim Museum, NYC (through April 23, 2019)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner
The Hilma af Klint retrospective, currently at The Guggenheim Museum, is a game changer. This astonishing exhibition alters the way one must view the trajectory of abstract painting (almost always male dominated) in the early twentieth century. The mystery of how a classically trained female painter in Sweden at the turn of the century moved confidently away from realism to large-scale abstraction before any other painters did (and kept it secret) is a fascinating tale. [Read more…]
Between Self And Soul: Synthetic Shorelines
at Durden and Ray, Los Angles (through December 1)
Reviewed by Genie Davis
If life is an ocean then art is a wave. The wave carrying this exhibition brings artists from Iceland and Los Angeles together in a dazzling exhibition that fuses elements of technology with images of sea and self. [Read more…]
The Farce of Imperial Pageantry In Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite
We begin with an evening walking through the artificial cities of the Fox Studios lot, accompanied by a Turk who can read a star map, graced with a name that has a royal origin. She inevitably helps us find our way among the maze of this place. It is but a day after the republic has cast its vote in another election embodying well these mad times. We walk through the false New York streets of the lot, nestled within the west side of Los Angeles. Like power, the city within this city is but an illusion. Such are the perfect conditions to enter the world of The Favourite, the new film by Greek enfant terrible Yorgos Lanthimos. Like his ancestors, Luis Bunuel, Tristan Tzara and other practitioners of the surreal arts, Lanthimos captures this era in civilization better than almost any other director. This new work reaches back into the past, yet has a timeless force in its dissection and sheer mocking of the pageantry of empire. [Read more…]
Clipping New House From Steve Spacek: “Gimme Da Love”
The Maghreban Remix
From Moxie Presents Volume Four
on On Loop
Helmut Newton: Private Property
at 10 Corso Como, NYC
Reviewed by Jill Conner
The infamous partnership between art and fashion is receiving overwhelming recognition throughout New York galleries and museums this Fall. From September to November, 10 Corso Como introduced Private Property by the world-renowned fashion photographer, Helmut Newton. Although Newton passed away in 2004, this specific set of photographs had never been exhibited in the United States. Initially Private Property was created in 1984, but Newton had not intended for these photographs to be seen publicly. This dossier of 45 gelatin silver prints covers a decade of Newton’s career, from 1971 to 1983, and presents a mix of unknown models with well-known celebrities who, at that time, were beginning to gain notoriety. [Read more…]
Ron Baron’s Ode to a Void
at Studio 10, Brooklyn
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban
In his ghostly installation, Ode to a Void, at Studio10, Brooklyn, artist Ron Baron has channeled a literally granular level of grief. Particles of pearlite, salt, sand and broken glass are sprinkled on the gallery floor in the pattern of a room-sized spiral resembling a cosmic corona. Placed seemingly at random on this winding road to nowhere — or at least nowhere on earth — are some 60 pairs of shoes, ranging from baby’s shoes to adult cowboy boots. They have been slip-cast in ceramic, and whatever their past life was, they are now frozen in time. [Read more…]
Jordan Wolfson: Art and Objecthood
at the Broad, Los Angeles (Through January 20, 2019)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch
“I was mostly just interested in the physicality of what I’d seen in the animatronic field, and I was also interested in making a sculpture that had the potential to be chronological or structural in the same way a video is. My hope is that the work dips in and out of spectacle.” 一 Jordan Wolfson
Beginning with the iconic Venus of Willendorf and her luscious curves, the Western art historical tradition has long associated the female body with consumption and objecthood. Now, in this modern age of technology and the #MeToo Movement, provocative American sculptor Jordan Wolfson’s hypersexualized animatronic figure currently on view at the Broad Museum deliberately challenges the viewer with its seemingly stereotypical depiction of women. Undoubtedly, this demeaning representation is bound to trigger consternation and spark debate. The artist is no stranger to this kind of controversy. His violent virtual reality-based installation at the 2017 Whitney Biennial shocked and horrified both critics and visitors alike. While the Broad’s (Female Figure) is far tamer in comparison, it does effectively question the progress of gender equality in America and echo Edouard Manet’s Olympia (1863) in its subversion of the male gaze. [Read more…]
The New Blackface
Or The De Facto Proxy Of Non American Blacks In Black American/DACS Roles
By Seren Sensei
There’s been a quiet hostility simmering within the Black diaspora.
It is most apparent when discussing media representation. It tensed when veteran American actor Samuel L. Jackson wondered what a Black American — what I call the descendants of American chattel slavery (DACS) — might have brought to the American-charged racism of ‘Get Out,’ and when fellow Brits John Boyega and Iris Elba came to star Daniel Kaluuya’s defense. It arose again with the casting of British actor Daniel Ezra as the lead in the CW’S newest teen drama: a football show titled, ironically, ‘All American,’ and based on the life of real life DACS football player Spencer Paysinger. [Read more…]