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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

New Work From Planningtorock: “Beulah Loves Dancing”

December 21, 2018 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

from Powerhouse

https://www.riotmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/11179934_Beulah_Loves_Dancing_Original_Mix.mp3

on DFA Records

Filed Under: Riot Sounds

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 Riot Material 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 and 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 Riot Material Leave a Comment

From Heavy Meta

on New West Records

Filed Under: Riot Sounds, Video

Good Shite From Shame: “Concrete”

December 12, 2018 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

Single

Directed by Homer & Farley

Filed Under: Riot Sounds

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

December 12, 2018 By Ellen C. Caldwell Leave a 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 Leave a Comment

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

In Memory Of The Great Pete Shelley: “Autonomy”

December 9, 2018 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

RIP
1955 – 2018

https://www.riotmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/09-Autonomy-1996-Remastered-Version.m4a

From Another Music in a Different Kitchen (1977)

Filed Under: Riot Sounds

“Public Image” On Its 40th Anniversary

December 8, 2018 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

Public Image’s greatest song, and one of the all-time greats! From their initial release, First Issue (1978).

on Virgin

Filed Under: Riot Sounds, Video

Deep House With Some Sparkle: “Cookie Man”

December 8, 2018 By Riot Material 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

Surging New Sounds From John Tejada: “Subsumed”

December 8, 2018 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

from Live Rytm Trax

https://www.riotmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/01-Subsumed.m4a

on Palette Recordings

Filed Under: Riot Sounds

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The Line

Chuck D's Border Kids, reviewed at Riot Material Magazine

Fuck The Game If It Ain’t Saying Nothing

Chuck D: Artmageddon at Subliminal Projects, Los Angeles (through January 26) Reviewed by Henry Cherry While Subliminal Projects, owned by the artist Shepard Fairey, is a small space, it resembles a Philadelphia graffiti crew’s warehouse loft with brick flooring in one room and sheets of plywood serving as support in all other parts of the […]

Village Voice Covers, a wood-block print on newsprint, by Nils Karsten © The artist..

Gary Indiana’s Vile Days

Reviewed by Lidija Haas Vile Days, by Gary Indiana, edited by Bruce Hainley.  Semiotext(e). 600 pages. $29.95. Courtesy of Harper’s Magazine How unromantic can a deathbed scene get? A test case: one day in 2015, The New Yorker’s art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, makes his way to the Village Voice’s Cooper Square offices, seeking to rescue the columns he […]

Seeing Allred (2018). Interview with Gloria Allred at Riot Material magazine.

A Word With Seeing Allred Co-Director Sophie Sartain

by Cynthia Biret Seeing Allred is a fascinating documentary about one of the most powerful and outspoken discrimination attorney and women’s rights advocates of our times: Gloria Allred. Co-directed by Sophie Sartain and Roberta Grossman, the film gets up-close and personal with this formidable woman, from her high profile cases and strategic presence in the […]

Supertalls in NYC

A City No More: The Rise Of The World’s Largest Gated Community

by Kevin Baker From “Death of a Once Great City” Courtesy of Harper’s Magazine New York has been my home for more than forty years, from the year after the city’s supposed nadir in 1975, when it nearly went bankrupt. I have seen all the periods of boom and bust since, almost all of them […]

"Supertalls" in NYC

NYC Supertalls And The Narrowfication Of The City’s Architecture

by Aaron Timms From “The Needles and the Damage Done” Courtesy of The Baffler What kinds of people did I expect to find here, in the public garden at the foot of 432 Park Avenue, New York’s tallest residential building? In the days before I arrived in Manhattan to chart a course across the city, […]

Charles Mingus, at Riot Material Magazine

Playing the Truth: Charles Mingus’s Jazz in Detroit/ Strata Concert Gallery/ 46 Selden

Reviewed by Henry Cherry In January of 1979, two extraordinary losses occurred in Mexico. 56 sperm whales beached themselves on the country’s coast line. Reportedly on the same day, fabled jazz composer and bassist Charles Mingus died of heart failure related to ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). He was 56. Mingus had gone to Mexico in […]

Thelonious Monk, Mønk, Reviewed at Riot Material Magazine

Thelonious Monk, Not Yet At The End

Mønk on Gearbox Records Reviewed by Henry Cherry Jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk loved Laurel and Hardy, and playing Yahtzee with his wife Nellie, and ping pong. He once played 60 consecutive games of pong against John Coltrane, Monk winning all but one. He also lost his cabaret card (a license to play in […]

Touch Me Not (2018)

Bodies, And Limits, Beyond The Norm In Touch Me Not

Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx At the start of Touch Me Not, which opened the 2018 Romanian Film Festival in New York City, two men set up a device involving a glass plate and a camera. This is followed by a panning shot in shallow focus detailing the landscape of a male body, skin, […]

Deana Lawson at The Underground Museum, Los Angeles

Deana Lawson’s Planes Soars

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 […]

Dhatu (2009) — James Turrell

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

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 […]

Sally Mann

Southern Discomfort: The Photographs of Sally Mann

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, […]

Christian Bale (left) as Dick Cheney and Sam Rockwell (right) as George W. Bush in Adam McKay’s VICE,

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

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 […]

Ethan Hawke in First Reformed (2018)

Visions of the Age: A Top 10 Of 2018

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 […]

Robert Pruitt's Devotion, Installation View

Robert Pruitt: Devotion

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 and muse-experience. California African American Museum (CAAM) features Devotion in a large interior room, with plenty of light and […]

Vivian Maier

Vivian Maier: Photographic Poetry Swathed in Mystery

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 […]

Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse

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

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 […]

Umar Rashid, aka Frohawk Two Feathers

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

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, […]

Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties

Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body And Other Parties

Reviewed by John Biscello Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado Graywolf Press, 264 pp., $16.00 My body is a haunted house that I am lost in. There are no doors but there are knives and a hundred windows.                             […]

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