In 2015, Colombian filmmaker Ciro Guerra won the world’s attention with his Oscar-nominated Embrace The Serpent, a bold black-and-white drama that followed an Amazonian tribesman as he leads white scientists into the wild in search of a curative plant. Culture clash also plays at the heart of his much-anticipated follow-up, Birds of Passage (A.K.A. Pájaros de verano), which was Columbia’s submission for the Best Foreign-Language Academy Award this year. In the 1970s, the Wayúu community of northern Colombia’s Guajira Desert was dedicated to its traditions, observant of omens, and suspicious of outsiders. But as an emerging drug trade gave them access to wealth and power, their community became less isolated and less united. [Read more…]
Archives for February 2019
Xiu Xiu’s Girl With Basket of Fruit
This all by way of passing comment on the challenging Xiu Xiu, never an easy thing to do. A couple of years ago I talked to the band’s main male Jamie Stewart. He was forthcoming and amenable, not a difficult artiste, and he talked about what he does with a seriousness that I liked very much. He thinks he’s a cranky, pretentious arsehole, but I don’t. Anyway, I do think it’s interesting that Stewart’s openly human persona doesn’t always reconcile with the often sonically and lyrically traumatized music he makes. There is some backstory: He told me about his father, a drug addict who died by suicide. It’s hard for me now to not project a lot of liteweight pop psychology upon Stewart’s musical madness. Like, a-ha [Read more…]
Hunting in the Dark
Joan was convinced she had cancer. Sometimes it was a dull ache in her side, sometimes a cut that didn’t heal. She knew of a woman with Crohn’s Disease and just recently an old friend of hers died of pancreatic cancer. It was just a matter of time before those alien cells took over her body. Her body was on the edge of a cliff, ready to fall. When she got out her Tarot deck, she always drew the Fool. Once she saw the Hermit in a dream. He dropped his lantern and the light tumbled down into a rocky canyon, glowing on the silver cliffs as it fell. It was winter, with pockets of snow on the peaks. [Read more…]
Jeff Koons At The Ashmolean
Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford UK (through 9 Jun 2019)
Reviewed by Christopher P Jones
To say that a work of art holds up a mirror to the world is to recognise an attempt by the artist at portraying the truth. “See what the world really looks like” is the message. Art like this – that seeks to show us the reality of things – does so by parodying, exposing, lampooning and taunting. It invites you to peer into the fracture it has opened up, and when you do so, it’s like standing beside the artist and peering in together. With Jeff Koons it’s always a bit trickier. You sense that he too is holding up a mirror, but what kind of fracture is he asking you to peer into? One that, when the light reaches the depths, you see Koons’ own smile gleaming back at you? [Read more…]
Alone Within the Revolution: Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment
The writer wanders the seaside of a great island lost in his own thoughts, lovesick and grappling with a changing world. Such is the enduring image of Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s masterpiece Memories of Underdevelopment, which remains the greatest jewel of Cuban cinema. First released in that fevered year of 1968 to worldwide acclaim, it remained largely unavailable in the United States for decades, eternally referenced in film scholarship yet not easy to actually view. Now thanks to the Criterion Collection, it has returned to us, beautifully remastered and stunningly relevant. Made when the Cuban Revolution was merely a decade old and still enflaming passions in the hemisphere, it now speaks to us in a restless yet post-revolutionary moment, when its audience sees it from a the vantage point of dashed dreams and uncertain hopes. When Alea first made this movie his protagonist was an intellectual questioning himself within a society determined to inaugurate a Marxist future, today he would feel at home in a world where nobody can say what is coming. [Read more…]
Saw-Whipping Techno-Trance From Toby Dreher: “Orkan”
From the new release, Ohrwurm
on Acker Dub
La Raza And The Onetime Voice Of Chicano Activism
at the Autry Museum, Los Angeles (through February 10)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner
You know something is happening but you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?
–Bob Dylan, “Ballad Of A Thin Man”
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
–George Santayana
The sixties was a tumultuous decade, filled with assassinations, race, student and antiwar riots. This traumatic and dangerous time, when the social fabric was being torn apart, also gave birth to many civil rights movements for marginalized people such as women, gay/lesbian/transgender and people of color. This exhibition at The Autry Museum focuses on the Chicano movement specifically and on La Raza, a newspaper/zine that was crucial to exposing, through text and image, the Chicano movements struggle for social justice from 1967-77. [Read more…]
New Work From Toro Y Moi: “Laws Of The Universe”
From the Outer Peace release
on Carpark Records
Serpentine Fire: Radical Artists and Innovative Mediums
at Quotidian, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Genie Davis
With Serpentine Fire, now at Quotidian, curator and gallerist Jill Moniz has assembled an astoundingly innovative, resonant show from artists who have pushed the limits of their materials and subjects. The title of the show is taken from an Earth, Wind, & Fire song, and just as the band offered a breath of exciting fresh air with its early music, so does this exhibition. [Read more…]
Asghar Farhadi Misfires With Abduction-Thriller Everybody Knows
Everybody knows. It’s not just a title. It’s a promise. It’s a threat. It’s a bombshell. In a cozy, sun-dappled village outside Madrid, everybody knows Laura (Penélope Cruz) and Paco (Javier Bardem) were childhood sweethearts. Everybody knows their break-up was brutal and strange, with her leaving for Argentina while leaving Paco her share of her family’s land. Everybody knows Laura’s husband is wealthy and too busy to join her at her sister’s wedding. But when her happy homecoming is derailed by a shocking abduction, nobody knows who might be to blame. In this time of impossible despair, Laura and Paco become uneasy allies in this treacherous terrain of ransom, resentments, distrust, and deeply buried family secrets. [Read more…]
James Siena: Painting
at Pace Gallery, NYC (through February 9)
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban
James Siena has had what might be called a linear career. Whether painted, drawn or sculpted, his work is purely line-based. Yet his art always avoids the shortest distance between two points; i.e. the simple straight line. Instead he has continued to evolve work based on what he calls “a visual algorithm,” creating recursive labyrinthine canvases; intense but relatively small-scale repetitive patterns painted in enamel on aluminum. [Read more…]
Smoked Lavender And Berry Compote
Small pack of blueberries
Small pack of raspberries
Small pack of blackberries
Fresh lavender
1½ pinch Hepps smoked salt
¾ cup raw cane sugar
Place all the ingredients in a pot and simmer on a medium flame until it turns to mush. Let cool and refrigerate. Serve on bread, a scone, and the compote goes wonderfully with cheese, crackers and a glass of wine. Will last up to 10 days refrigerated. [Read more…]
Velvet Buzzsaw Offers Artfully Dark Fun, But Makes A Mess Of Its Horror
With Nightcrawler, writer/director Dan Gilroy teamed with Jake Gyllenhaal for a deliciously vicious evisceration of news media’s “if it bleeds it leads” culture with a format that was one-part thriller to one-part dark comedy. The result was a film that was wickedly entertaining and thought provoking, while proving Gyllenhaal is one of the most exhilarating actors of his generation. For all these reasons, I was positively giddy in anticipation of the pair’s reunion, Velvet Buzzsaw. Here Gilroy satirizes the snooty and sordid world of high art by blending dark humor and horror. But to my horror, lightning doesn’t strike twice. [Read more…]
Joan Semmel: A Necessary Elaboration
at Alexander Gray Associates, NYC (through February 16)
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban
Joan Semmel is the master of the anti-Selfie. For decades she has turned the camera on herself, using candid photographs as references for her large-scale nudes, which are both sumptuous and unsettlingly intimate. For an age obsessed with instant, miniature self-branding imagery, pervasively produced by iPhones and through Instagram, her large, flawed, vulnerable figures open a nearly forgotten door onto the pure pleasure of painted flesh. [Read more…]