Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Archives for June 2019

Michael Ajerman’s Possessions And Marty Schnapf’s Loves and Lovers

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at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles (through August 17)
Reviewed by Genie Davis

Michael Ajerman and Marty Schnapf each offer their own elegant and sensual images in two strong solo shows at Diane Rosenstein Gallery. While Ajerman works with vivid colors in his figurative oil paintings, Schnapf’s current body of work is in nearly-life-size black and white. Both offer deeply intimate expressions that are filled with energy and pulsing with life. There is a physicality to both artists’ work that makes them ideally paired, although the outward appearance of each exhibition is visually diverse in palette and style. [Read more…]

The Formidable And Innovative Lee Krasner

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Lee Krasner: Living Colour, at the Barbican Centre, London (through 1 September)
Reviewed by Christopher P Jones

Sometimes a retrospective can abbreviate an artistic life into a series of airless high-peaks without taking notice of the lower-lying ground. Lee Krasner’s exceptional exhibition, Living Colour, at the Barbican Centre in London, achieves the exact opposite. The 100 or so works on display flesh out a life with all the territory – high and low – accounted for, so that every piece lends itself towards a greater whole. In doing so, the exhibition reveals why Krasner is rightly regarded as an artist of pioneering significance, whose development from cubist collage to expressionistic vigour accounts for an important story in 20th century American art. [Read more…]

3.14

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That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe

Suitcase Joe. "That Evening Sun," a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row, is at Riot Material Magazine.

I usually see Jerry a couple times a week hanging around the corner of 6th and Los Angeles. Last time I spoke with him he was having some trouble with his lungs. Recently he told me he now visits a hospital twice a week where they hook him up to a respiratory machine to help with his breathing. They’re also giving him steroids in the form of an inhaler. Like always, Jerry was in high spirits. For those unfamiliar with Jerry, his deformity comes from being shot in the face with a shotgun at point blank range. Jerry is lucky to have lived through the incident. [Read more…]

The Incidental Orifice In Sarah Lucas’s Au Naturel

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At UCLA’s Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (through September 1)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

It’s been said that all great artists have only a few “real” subjects and those subjects nearly always reference love, sex or death. In fact, these pivotal subjects could arguably be the holy trinity when it comes to the imagination and the deeper impulses that drive the creative process. So, Picasso had his underage lovers, his bull testicles and his minotaur. Magritte his pipe, umbrellas and top hats and Cezanne his monumental, sacred mountain.  [Read more…]

Against Our Will: Sexual Trauma In American Art Since 1970

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Reviewed by Coco Fusco

Against Our Will: Sexual Trauma in American Art Since 1970
by Vivien Green Fryd
Pennsylvania State University Press, 349 pp., $49.95
Review courtesy of The New York Review of Books

In 1974 the performance artist Marina Abramovic stood naked and immobile in a Naples gallery. Next to her was a table with seventy-two objects, including a loaded gun. Beside the objects was a document absolving the audience of responsibility for whatever they might choose to do to her with those objects.  [Read more…]

3.11

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That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe

Suitcase Joe. "That Evening Sun," a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row, is at Riot Material Magazine.

The woman on the left brought news that a man around the corner known as New York had just passed away in his tent. That’s how word travels in Skid Row. Fortunately it wasn’t anyone that Tiffany knew. Tiffany (photo right) is a heroin addict. While I was speaking with her, I noticed blood on her shirt and a bloody cloth wrapped around her arm that served as a crude bandage. She tells me, two years ago a couple of abscess’ formed on her arm caused by shooting up and they quickly became infected. The infection continued to grow and spread throughout her entire arm. From my observation her arm cannot be far off from needing to be amputated. However, the state of her arm does not keep her from continuing to use. Addiction is more powerful than some people understand. It’s not as easy as just getting clean and starting over. It’s something you will always have to deal with once it rears its ugly head into your life. [Read more…]

3.8

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That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe

Suitcase Joe. "That Evening Sun," a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row, is at Riot Material Magazine.

Her name is Julie Pacheco. She doesn’t speak much English and regardless of the language barrier, I’m told she doesn’t speak much at all. She’s skittish and hides her eyes beneath her black beanie, but she seems very aware of her surroundings. Her body is covered in little scabs and scratches where she picks at herself and she moves with a nervous energy. Julie lives with a man who looks out for her and he is very fond of Julie. He tells me she was a sex slave in Mexico for 10 years, where she was kept in a cage, abused and mistreated. The man has also lived through his own personal trauma and it was evident to me that they have a connection founded in what they’ve been through. He tells me, he’d like to marry her someday, but she doesn’t have any papers. Regardless he is protective over her and takes care of her just the same. I’ll be following up with Julie in the near future after I bring an interpreter with me to help me translate our conversation. I’d like to learn more about her backstory and share it with you all. [Read more…]

Remembering Cassius Co-Collaborator And Producer-Extraordinaire Philippe Zdar

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RIP
1967 | 2019

Cassius, “See Me Now” 

Cassius, “Fame”

Etienne De Crecy, “Prix Choc”

Phoenix, “1901”

Cat Power, “Manhattan”

Sébastien Tellier, “La Ritournelle”

as mere impression, and fraction, of Zdar’s incredible body of work…

Philippe "Zdar" Cerboneschi, left, and Hubert Blanc-Francard (aka "Boom Bass") of Cassius. Zdar died today after accidentally falling through a high-rise window in Paris.

Philippe “Zdar” Cerboneschi, left, and Hubert Blanc-Francard (aka “Boom Bass”) of Cassius. Zdar died today after accidentally falling through a high-rise window in Paris.

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese

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Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

Will we ever see the likes of Bob Dylan again? It is a question easily inspired by Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, a sprawling, indeed thundering chronicle, now streaming on Netflix, of one of the American bard’s most legendary travels across the United States. What made this particular venture unique was the transitional phase the country was enduring, emerging from the tumult of the 1960s, its self-trust scarred, possibly beyond repair. Fittingly, this tale is told by Martin Scorsese, not only a great filmmaker but an artist obsessed with the past.  [Read more…]

Ari Aster’s Midsommar Is A Horrifying And Exhilarating Follow-Up To Hereditary

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

“I wrote this while going through a break-up,” Ari Aster said at the special advance screening of Midsommar. “I’m better now.”

The filmmaker’s darkly humorous confession played well to the crowd at Brooklyn’s Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, where press and select members of the public gathered to see Aster’s hotly anticipated follow-up to his wildly praised debut, Hereditary. As the crowd chuckled at Aster’s softly spoken introduction, a mix of excitement and anxiety hung in the air. With his first film, Aster had offered a scorching exploration of family trauma with a unique brand of horror grounded by an impeccable performance from a riveting leading lady. Basically, Hereditary was so outstanding, how could Midsommar possibly compete? [Read more…]

Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark

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Reviewed by Christopher Tayler

Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark
by Cecelia Watson
Ecco. 224 pp. $19.99
Courtesy of Harper’s Magazine

Pietro Bembo, a Venetian poet and scholar, staked his first claim to fame in a short book he published in 1496, when he was in his mid-­twenties. De Aetna described, in Latin, a hike Bembo had made to the top of Mount Etna in Sicily. Even in summer, he observed, there was snow on the peak. An ancient Greek geographer, Strabo, had said that there wasn’t, but the evidence of one’s own eyes, Bembo wrote, was “no less an authority.” This was Renaissance humanism flexing its muscles—a few generations earlier, an ancient geographer might have carried more authority than a firsthand report—and it wasn’t the only instance of that in Bembo’s book. Various marks subdivided his text. One of them, which signaled both a medium-length pause and a semantic boundary inside a sentence, hadn’t been used for that particular function before. Between them, Bembo; his publisher, Aldus Manutius; and Manutius’s type maker, Francesco Griffo, were introducing the world to a new punctuation mark: the semicolon. [Read more…]

3.6

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That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe

Suitcase Joe. "That Evening Sun," a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row, is at Riot Material Magazine.

While visiting Crushow, I was lucky to catch this moment of his daughter coming to see him. It was a moving day for him. Every two weeks the residents have to move their tents and belongings to a different location while the city comes and cleans the streets and sidewalks. Anything that is not removed is thrown away. Sometimes people lose invaluable possessions that cannot be replaced. But Crushow says the upside of the street cleaning is people don’t accumulate too much stuff, which in itself can drag you down. [Read more…]

Christina Quarles And The Aesthetics Of Ambiguity

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by Lita Barrie

Christina Quarles is at the forefront of a generation of millennial artists who are making ambiguity the aesthetic of our time. Few artists can incorporate as many painting styles as fluidly as Quarles does because few artists have the chops to paint and draw as well as she does. Even fewer have the philosophic rigor and intellectual muscle to upturn the cultural assumptions underlying the history of painting – and have such obvious pleasure doing it. [Read more…]

The Last Black Man In San Francisco

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Reviewed by Seren Sensei

Life is stranger than fiction. Things happen without rhyme or reason, and we, the living, are pulled along, anchoring ourselves to friends, family, lovers; people, places, and things in an effort to stay afloat, to make sense of it all. In The Last Black Man in San Francisco the protagonist, a Black American named Jimmie Fails (played by himself and loosely based on his real life), is anchored to a house. His grandfather built it, he insists, and he’s drawn to it, returning repeatedly despite the fact that his family lost it in a wave of gentrification and it has had new owners for the last 12 years. They’re well-meaning older white liberals that were clearly beatnik artists once, dropping “hey man” into their sentences and saying they don’t want to call the cops if they catch him on the property again — but they will. It’s a thinly veiled threat couched in the kind of casual racism that hovers throughout the film, even after said owners lose the house themselves in a serendipitous twist of fate. [Read more…]

The Apocalypse Is Agreeably Upon Us In The Dead Don’t Die

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and we say, ‘Fine.’ That’s the criticism that cuts through Jim Jarmusch’s star-stuffed zombie-comedy The Dead Don’t Die, where the undead not only feast on human flesh but also gravitate toward the distractions they were obsessed with in life, be it coffee, cell phones, or Chardonaaaaaaay! It’s a strange journey that is savagely funny, sophisticated and unnerving.  [Read more…]