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Archives for December 2018

Deana Lawson’s Planes Soars

December 24, 2018 By Ellen C. Caldwell Leave a Comment

Deana Lawson: Planes
at The Underground Museum, Los Angeles (through February 17th, 2019)
Reviewed by Ellen C. Caldwell 

The space of The Underground Museum might be what you expect, but it might not be. It is housed in an unassuming storefront on a busy street in Arlington Heights, Los Angeles. As visitors enter, they appear in a small museum gift store, with the usual items expected there: books about featured and past artists, some trinkets, and a sign-in registry for the museum’s mailing list. Just past the entry door and counter is another door. This is a carved wooden door, more like an ornate front door, if memory serves correctly, and here is the true entrance to the museum space and to Deana Lawson’s exhibit, Planes. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Image, The Line

Transforming Light Into Art: A Look At The Movement Of Light And Space

December 24, 2018 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

by Ryan Guerrero

During the mid 1960’s, Light and Space became a loosely affiliated art movement related to Op Art, Minimalism and Abstraction. Influenced by American artist John McLaughlin, the movement was characterized by a focus on perceptual phenomenon and became well known throughout California. Artists integrated ideas of light, volume and scale, and the use of materials such as glass, neon, fluorescent lights and cast acrylic. Led by installation artists Robert Irwin and James Turrell, the pair specialized in the phenomenon of sensory deprivation and became curious about pushing the boundaries of art and perception.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, The Line

Southern Discomfort: The Photographs of Sally Mann

December 21, 2018 By Nancy Kay Turner Leave a Comment

Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings
at Getty Center, Los Angeles (through February 10, 2019)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

Abide with me! Fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens: Lord, with me abide!  –Hymn

Sally Mann’s haunting black and white photographs are a hymn to the South she loves so ferociously, with all its troubled, tangled, twisted history filled with bitter defeats. The charismatic photographs of her children, of her own black nanny Virginia, who also cared for her children, and of the Civil War battlefields are poignant, bittersweet narratives examining the complexities of race, place, family and faded memory. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Image, The Line

Dick Cheney’s Imperial Shadow Looms Large in Adam McKay’s Vice

December 21, 2018 By Alci Rengifo Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

One can only imagine what the great Roman historians like Tacitus and Suetonius would write about our own imperial moment. From rugged colonial stock the union sprout, liberated itself from the British crown, declared itself the United States, expanded in both territory and military might, and birthed characters like Richard Bruce Cheney. Forever imbedded in the world’s bloody consciousness as “Dick,” Cheney’s shadow looms large over the last 40 years of American history in Adam McKay’s brilliant, savagely insightful Vice. It is both a biography of power and a reckoning with the republic’s spiral into a capitalist behemoth straddling the globe. Some may be taken aback by McKay’s sense of dark comedy, in which the halls of power are exposed as a nest of minds which are not particularly cultured, but ruthlessly focused on the wielding of influence for profit and control. In that great American tradition going back to Mark Twain and Gore Vidal, McKay is using his own art form as a tool of scorching iconoclasm, rendering official histories to dust and transforming Dick Cheney himself into a figure both titanic and tragic. It falls on Christian Bale and Amy Adams’s shoulders to embody figures full of pain and ravenous villainy who perform their drama on the world stage. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

Visions of the Age: A Top 10 Of 2018

December 19, 2018 By Alci Rengifo Leave a Comment

by Alci Rengifo

It is the cinema which chronicles the passions, nightmares and dreams of an era. To look back at the movies of any given decade is to peer into the very fabric of an age’s consciousness. We are currently living through a period of historical transition, a moment Gramsci would recognize as a moment when an old world is beginning to die and what will come forth we do not yet know. Paris is burning, new parties worship the cult of blood and land. This helps explain why much of the year’s defining cinema obsesses itself with the past, the present and an aching uncertainty over what is to come. Yet some movies were also full of hope and tenderness, wisdom and the reverie of romance. I spent much of this year in darkened screening rooms all over Los Angeles. Whether in a hidden corner of Rodeo Drive or in some distant multiplex in Burbank, I found myself moved, exhilarated or challenged with despair. Here are ten offerings which defined the year in film, and crystalize our place in this current passage of time. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

Peggy Gou’s “It Makes You Forget” (the Itgehane edit)

December 18, 2018 By Cvon Leave a Comment

from the recent Once 

https://www.riotmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/10181142_It_Makes_You_Forget__Itgehane__Edit.mp3

on Ninja Tune

Filed Under: Riot Sounds

Robert Pruitt: Devotion

December 17, 2018 By Ellen C. Caldwell Leave a Comment

at California African American Museum, Los Angeles (through February 17, 2019)
Reviewed by Ellen C. Caldwell

Robert Pruitt: Devotion is Houston-born and New York-based Robert Pruitt’s first major museum exhibit in Los Angeles, and it is a must-see muse-experience! California African American Museum (CAAM) features Devotion in a large interior room, with plenty of light and room for a show with large-scale charcoal works on paper, paintings, sculptures, and installations. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Vivian Maier: Photographic Poetry Swathed in Mystery

December 14, 2018 By Genie Davis Leave a Comment

Vivian Maier: Living Color
at KP Projects La Brea Gallery, Los Angeles (through December 29)
Reviewed by Genie Davis

Vivian Maier has been called a street photographer, although many of her photographic works are less about capturing the action around her and more about revealing a certain intimacy in her subjects. She was meticulous in her work; unedited and unculled, her images have an amazing range of power and depth. She has been called the nanny photographer, and while it is true that she spent forty years working as a nanny, she spent more time than that perfecting her craft. She has been called a mystery and an enigma, and to some extent, surely, she was that, having hidden her work from view, stored it in storage lockers, and then let those storage units fall into arears. Much speculation has been made as to whether or not Maier wanted her work discovered or cared little if it was lost. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Image, The Line

Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse Brings New Life To The Superhero Genre

December 14, 2018 By Kristy Puchko Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

A rush of air snatched out of my lungs, up my throat and through my lips, which sit agape in awe. Breathtaking. Too often “breathtaking” is employed as a casual synonym for beautiful. But Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse is literally breathtaking. With an inventive animation style so groundbreaking that Sony is patenting its process, this superhero adventure pushes the boundaries of a genre that risked stagnation in live-action. But a bold look that blends CG animation with an illustrator’s flare is just one of the big risks this mainstream movie dares to take. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

Ron Gallo’s “Young Lady, You’re Scaring Me”

December 13, 2018 By Cvon Leave a Comment

From Heavy Meta

on New West Records

Filed Under: Riot Sounds, Video

Umar Rashid’s What is the Color, When Black is Burned?

December 12, 2018 By Ellen C. Caldwell 1 Comment

What is the Color, When Black is Burned? The Gold War. Part I
at University of Arizona Museum of Art (through March 24th, 2019)
Reviewed by Ellen C. Caldwell

The University of Arizona Museum of Art’s solo exhibition What is the Color, When Black is Burned? The Gold War. Part I  features the work of master storyteller, artist, and historian Umar Rashid (also known under the alias of Frohawk Two Feathers).

Chicago-born and Los Angeles-based, Rashid has been sowing his saga of the Frenglish Empire for fifteen years. He began this body of work by imagining the unification of France and England, exploring visually how centuries of colonial history could have played out differently (or exactly the same in many ways) had this union occurred.   [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body And Other Parties

December 11, 2018 By John Biscello 2 Comments

Reviewed by John Biscello

Her Body and Other Parties
by Carmen Maria Machado
Graywolf Press, 264 pp., $16.00

Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other PartiesMy body is a haunted
house that I am lost in.
There are no doors but there are knives
and a hundred windows.
                                           –Jacui Germain

Imagine, now, an episode of Black Mirror, in which the female-body-as-haunted-house is the prime subject, a corporeal metaphor undergoing a cinematic vivisection. A symphonic series of camera angles, close-ups, rapid cuts and fade-outs commingle with bones-in-the-attic narrative and feminist bloodletting, Camille Paglia channeling Shirley Jackson, and we, the viewers, are riveted to the screen, to the exposed interior of a haunted house that seems never-ending in its shadowed corridors and passageways. The episode closes with an appropriately unsettling final scene, a cryptic air that slows time and promises an emotional hangover. You stare at the silent blackened void of the screen, waiting for music to play, for credits to roll, for something to happen. Finally, words appear in white block letters — Written by Carmen Maria Machado. This stirring episode hasn’t yet aired, because it hasn’t been written, but in a parallel realm where I get to play Netflix exec, Machado has been commissioned to contribute her unique and considerable talents to the Black Mirror universe.   [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, The Line

The Riveting Rauschenberg: The ¼ Mile

December 10, 2018 By Nancy Kay Turner Leave a Comment

at LACMA (through June 9, 2019)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner       

“Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction”
–Pablo Picasso

 “There is no reason not to consider the world as one gigantic painting”
–Robert Rauschenberg

Run, don’t walk to see the revelatory exhibition entitled Rauschenberg: The ¼ Mile, at LACMA. The large-scale, enormously ambitious work shown here (together for the first time) as one long piece was done over seventeen years and is a joyful trip through Rauschenberg’s absolutely pristine craftsmanship, complex imagery and his many cultural touchstones. These works were started in 1981 when there was a Rauschenberg retrospective in Europe and clearly the artist is ruminating on his previous bodies of work such as his iconoclastic “Combines” from the fifties and sixties and his “Spreads” series from 1975-83. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

“Public Image” On Its 40th Anniversary

December 8, 2018 By Cvon Leave a Comment

Well, it is without a doubt one of the greatest songs of all time. From their initial release, First Issue (1978).

on Virgin

Filed Under: Riot Sounds, Video

Deep House With A Bit Of Sparkle: “Cookie Man”

December 8, 2018 By Cvon Leave a Comment

From the new Cioz EP: Lucky Man

https://www.riotmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/02-Cookie-Man-Original-Mix.mp3

on Get Physical

Filed Under: Riot Sounds

Vox Lux Falls Short Of Its Bold Ambition

December 8, 2018 By Kristy Puchko Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

What to make of the deeply strange Vox Lux? Actor turned writer/director Brady Corbet centers on the tragedy-strewn life of a female pop star to explore celebrity, sisterhood, motherhood, and terrorism. But while his sophomore effort is wildly ambitious, it’s more confounding than captivating, and ultimately underwhelming. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

Clara’s Ghost Is A Twisted Family Affair

December 7, 2018 By Kristy Puchko Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

There’s a unique kind of horror found within families. Inside jokes can become a cozy place to nestle insults. Old wounds and deepening resentments can be papered over with any new bit of family gossip or for any get together. But in the horror-comedy Clara’s Ghost, a brush with the potentially paranormal pushes a mild-mannered mom to lash out against the family that’s tradition is casually berating her. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

A Tender, Spindly New Track From Jeff Tweedy

December 5, 2018 By Cvon Leave a Comment

“How Hard Is It For A Desert To Die”

https://www.riotmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/04-How-Hard-It-Is-for-a-Desert-To-Die.m4a

from his latest solo release, Warm
on dBpm Records

Filed Under: Riot Sounds

Why Frank Zappa Is The Voice America (Still) Needs

December 3, 2018 By Riot Material 2 Comments

by Molly MacGilbert

“It’s time for a revolution, but probably not in the terms that people imagine it.” –Frank Zappa

This December marks 25 years since the death of DIY genius, comical cynic, lyrical satirist, musical innovator, social commentator, sardonic iconoclast, political debater, and composer-slash-rock-star Frank Zappa.

Throughout his eyebrow-raising career, Zappa parodied the plastic people, brain police, valley girls, dancing fools, and hungry freaks across America. His prolific body of work is a symphony of observations of human absurdity, expressed through such mediums as political meetings in the Soviet Union and the former Czechoslovakia, experimental advertisements for razors and cough drops, a violin bow tickling a bicycle wheel, a surrealist claymation music video, and a grotesque potato-headed puppet named Thing-Fish. He aimed to “shake people out of their complacency… and make them question things.”   [Read more…]

Filed Under: The Line, Thought

Out Of Thailand: Onuma Singsiri’s “Mae Kha Som Tam”

December 2, 2018 By Cvon Leave a Comment

from Sound of Siam: Leftfield Luk Thung, Jazz & Molam in Thailand 1964​-​1975

https://www.riotmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/03-Mae-Kha-Som-Tam.mp3

on Soundway Records

 

Filed Under: Riot Sounds

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The Line

A poetic interpretation of Anselm Kiefer's Exodus, at Los Angeles Marciano Art Foundation, is at Riot Material.

On Wing With Word Through Anselm Kiefer’s Exodus

Gagosian at Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles (through 25 March 2023) by Rachel Reid Wilkie Los Angeles poet Rachel Reid Wilkie was given the task of walking into Anselm Kiefer’s Exodus — a literally monumental exhibition, in that each of these paintings are upwards of 30’ tall — and addressing the colossal artworks “cold,” as in […]

Detail of Henry Taylor, "Warning shots not required," 2011. At Riot Material magazine.

Henry Taylor’s B Side: Where Mind Shapes Itself to Canvas

Henry Taylor: B Side at MOCA Grand, Los Angeles (through 30 April 2023) Reviewed by Eve Wood Ages ago when there were LP records and 45s, the B side of a popular single made allowances for experimentation and could be counted on as an alternative vision to the more mainstream and compulsory hit single. B […]

Songbook of a Bygone Dead: Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song

Reviewed by Dan Chiasson The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan Simon & Schuster, 352pp., $28.93 NYR Bob Dylan’s new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, is a kind of music-appreciation course open to auditors and members of the general public. It is best savored one chapter, one song, at a time, while listening to the […]

Smoking the Bible by Chris Abani

Words To Wrap Around A Dying Brother

Smoking the Bible Reviewed by Rhony Bhopla Smoking the Bible by Chris Abani Copper Canyon Press, 96pp., $15.99 HR Chris Abani’s autobiographical book of poems, Smoking the Bible, centers on the relationship of two brothers growing up in Nigeria with an Igbo father and an English mother. The poems, which incorporate the Igbo language along […]

Grant Wallace, “Through Evolution Comes Revelation.” at Riot Material magazine.

Communication Breakdown: Grant Wallace, His Heirs & the Legacy of a Forgotten Genius

Grant Wallace: Over the Psychic Radio at Ricco/Maresca Gallery, NYC (through 3 December 2022) By Michael Bonesteel Freelance writer and editor Deborah Coffin of Albany, California, was in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley in 1997 when she first encountered street musician Brian Wallace at a party. “I had a friend who knew Brian,” […]

The Joshua Tree Talk

A Conversation on Dzogchen C von Hassett & Rachel Reid Wilkie at Joshua Tree Retreat Center 

Louise Bourgeois: What Is The Shape of This Problem?

at University of Southern California, Fisher Museum of Art. (through 3 December 3, 2022) Reviewed by Margaret Lazzari Louise Bourgeois is widely recognized for her sculptures and installations, but Louise Bourgeois: What is The Shape of This Problem is a wonderful opportunity to immerse yourself in her perhaps-lesser-known prints, fabric work and writings. This exhibit contains over […]

Moonage Daydream Conveys More Myth Than Man

Moonage Daydream Dir. Brett Morgan Reviewed by Nicholas Goldwin As one of the greatest shapeshifters in the expansive history of rock music, it seems only fitting that the documentary with David Bowie as its subject never seems content to express the trials, tribulations and artistic triumphs of Bowie in any one fixed way. This is […]

Carnación di Rocío Molina, at Riot Material Magazine.

On Binding: Notes from Venice

Bienalle Arte and Bienalle Danza, Venice 2022 By Allyn Aglaïa Chest bound, lips sealed, I walked through Venice alone, quiet, and: thought about narratives that bind us to erotic binds

Mohammad Barrangi's Guardians of Eden (Dreamscape #8), at Riot Material magazine.

Transcendence Beyond Erasure in Mohammad Barrangi’s Dreamscape

at Advocartsy, Los Angeles (thru 5 November 2022) Reviewed by Christopher Ian Lutz Fantasy requires a symbolic vehicle to transport a character from the real world into the imaginary realm, where the laws of reality are subverted or obscured to justify an otherwise absurd event. The artist might depict the vehicle as a real object […]

Soul Crash: Our Slow, Inexorable Release Into the Metaverse

by Sue Halpern The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball Liveright 352pp., $18.89 NYR In October 2021, when Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would now be called Meta and its business interests would be pivoting to the metaverse, there was almost universal confusion: most observers had no idea what he was […]

green tara

Pointing the Staff at the Old Man

A wisdom transmission by Samaneri Jayasāra Excerpted from —  Advice from the Lotus Born  from the chapter “Pointing the Staff at the Old Man” Translated by Eric Pema Kunsang Rangjung Yeshe Publications, 184pp., $21.95 . .

Margaret Lazzari’s "Shimmer." From the exhibition "Breathing Space."

Margaret Lazzari’s Luminous Breathing Space

at George Billis Gallery, Los Angeles (through 8 October 2022) Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner “Things are not what they seem: nor are they otherwise.” –Buddha Margaret Lazzari’s luminous solo exhibition of paintings, entitled Breathing Space, were painted during the pandemic, and the exhibition title is indeed significant. It’s defined as a respite, a hiatus, or an […]

From Phil Tippet's Mad God, reviewed at Riot Material magazine.

Nihilism Births Its Own Interminable Hell

Mad God Dir. Phil Tippett Reviewed by Nicholas Goldwin Technically astonishing and immersive to a fault, director Phil Tippett successfully demonstrates that thirty years of relentless dedication to your craft can lead to cinematic innovations even his old stomping grounds – the sets of Star Wars and Jurassic Park – have yet to catch up. […]

A Look Back on an Iconoclast: Art Critic Dave Hickey

by Jarrett Earnest Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art by Daniel Oppenheimer University of Texas Press, 141 pp., $24.95 The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, Revised and Expanded by Dave Hickey University of Chicago Press, 123 pp., $15.00 (paper) Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy by Dave Hickey Art Issues Press, 215 […]

John Lurie’s The History of Bones

Reviewed by Cintra Wilson The History of Bones: A Memoir by John Lurie Random House, 435 pp., $28.00 NYRB It was 1989 when I saw John Lurie on TV in a late-night advertisement for the new Lounge Lizards album, Voice of Chunk, which was “not available in stores” and selling exclusively through an 800 number. Operators were standing […]

Marlene Dumas, "Losing (Her Meaning)," 1988. At Riot Material magazine.

Marlene Dumas’ Masks of Inborn Gods

open-end, at Palazzo Grassi, Venice (through 8 January 2023) Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx Four relatively small artworks greet the visitor in the first room of the Marlene Dumas exhibit, open-end, at Palazzo Grassi. D-rection shows a young man contemplating his rather large and purple erection. A bluish white face and a brown face unite […]

Clarice Lispector

Baffling the Sphinx: The Enigmatic World of Clarice Lispector

Reviewed by John Biscello Água Viva by Clarice Lispector New Directions Publishing 88pp., $14.95 Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas by Clarice Lispector New Directions Publishing 864pp., $29.95 The word is my fourth dimension –Clarice Lispector And on the eighth and endless day, where the bottomless hallelujah meets Ouroboros, God created Clarice Lispector. Maybe. […]

Donna Ferrato "Diamond, Minneapolis, MN 1987." At Riot Material magazine

Donna Ferrato’s Magnificent Holy

at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, NYC (through July 29 2022) Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban The small scale of Donna Ferrato’s snapshot-like black-and-white photographs belies their personal and political power. Whether they document the medical sinks and shelves in a now-shuttered Texas abortion clinic, or hone in on the badly bruised face of a domestic violence […]

Darcilio Lima Unknown Lithograph, 1972. At Riot Material magazine.

Magia Protetora: The Art of Luciana Lupe Vasconcelos and Darcilio Lima

at the Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick, Cleveland OH (through 30 September 2022) Curated by Stephen Romano Gallery Reviewed by Christopher Ian Lutz The extension of a lineage occurs not merely by the repetition of form, but by the intersection of conservation and revolution. Transformation is fundamental to preserving the essence of a given tradition’s rituals and […]

Eve Wood's A Cadence for Redemption, written in the fictive voice of Abraham Lincoln, is excerpted at Riot Material magazine.

Songs For Our Higher Selves

A Cadence for Redemption: Conversations With Abraham Lincoln by Eve Wood Del Sol Press, 46pp., $5.99 Employing the fictive voice of a former president, Eve Wood shifts the perspective on the happenings of our times – where all indicators point to the slow, inexorable collapse of the American Experiment – to the one man who […]

The Clear, Crisp Taste of Cronenberg

Crimes of the Future Reviewed by Anna Shechtman and D.A. Miller Neon NYRB A line from Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg’s latest film, has been trailing it around with the campy insistence of an old-fashioned ad campaign: “Surgery is the new sex.” On receiving this information, a skeptical Saul Tenser, played by Viggo Mortensen, asks, “Does there have […]

Georganne Deen, How to prepare people for your weirdness (Painting for a gifted child) 2022

Conjuring a Divine Silence in Georganne Deen’s The Lyric Escape

at Rory Devine Fine Art, Los Angeles (through 6 August) Reviewed by Eve Wood Albert Camus once famously asked, “Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?” One can only hope that this was a rhetorical question, yet however ironic, it is still a sentiment worth pondering, especially considering today’s current socio-political climate […]

Pesticides in our foods inevitably enter the body and will have the intended effect of killing the organism. Which is to say you are certain to become diseased and evenutally die from the longterm ingestion of industrial pesticides.

A Strictly Organic Diet is Good Enough to Save Your Life

A chapter excerpt from Entering the Mind, the new book from C von Hassett which speaks to an ageless way of resting the mind in meditation to both recognize and stabilize in its already Awakened state. Yet to do this successfully, we must first cleanse the body of its myriad mind-fogging toxins taken in through […]

Milton’s Quotidian Paradise, Lost

By Catherine Nicholson Katie Kadue: Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton Timothy M. Harrison: Coming To: Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England Nicholas McDowell: Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton Joe Moshenska: Making Darkness Light: A Life of John Milton NYRB Of the many liberties John Milton took in writing Paradise Lost, his 1667 epic […]

Foucault in Warsaw and the Shapeless, Shaping Gaze of the Surveillance State

Reviewed by Marcel Radosław Garboś Foucault in Warsaw by Remigiusz Ryziński  translated by Sean Gasper Bye Open Letter Books, 220pp., $15.95 Harvard Review Since Poland’s state socialist system collapsed in 1989, the records of its police agencies and security services have gone to a government commission entrusted with the “prosecution of crimes against the Polish […]

Noah Davis, Untitled (2015)

The Haunt of One Yet Faintly Present: Noah Davis, Still at Home

Noah Davis, at the Underground Museum, Los Angeles Reviewed by Ricky Amadour Directly across from the entrance, an opening statement to Noah Davis, at the Underground Museum, reads “many of the paintings you are about to see were painted in this space.” Smudges, dribbles, and droplets on the floor embody the physical notion of Davis […]

Julian Schnabel, The Chimes of Freedom Flashing (detail), 2022

The Supremely Humanistic Hand of Julian Schnabel

For Esmé – With Love and Squalor, at Pace Gallery, Los Angeles (through 21 May 2022) Reviewed by Eve Wood How does one represent, let alone quantify hope, hate, grief, love, joy, tragedy, or anything, for that matter, which stands in opposition to something else? Throughout his illustrious career, Julian Schnabel has always been one to […]

Rose Wylie, "I Like To Be" (2020)

In Full Surrender to the Wylie Eye

Rose Wylie: Which One, at David Zwirner, NYC (through 12 June) Reviewed by David Salle Rose Wylie: Which One by Rose Wylie; with Barry Schwabsky, Judith Bernstein, and Hans Ulrich Obrist David Zwirner Books, 196pp., $75.00 NYRB Rose Wylie, who is now eighty-seven, has been painting in the same rural studio in Kent, England, since […]

The Artful Construction of The ‘I’

by Merve Emre NYR The essay form…bears some responsibility for the fact that bad essays tell stories about people instead of elucidating the matter at hand. —Theodor Adorno The personal essay is a genre that is difficult to define but easy to denounce. The offending element is rarely the essay as a form, but its […]

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