Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Archives for October 2019

Mary Corse: A Survey in Light

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at LACMA (through November 11)
Reviewed by Lita Barrie

Mary Corse is finally having her moment in a breakout role as the luminary of  “light painting.” Although Corse has received critical acclaim since the sixties she has been overshadowed by male SoCal Light and Space artists. Interestingly, it took New York women curators to revise the canon with a fresh spin on Corse’s singular importance as the first light painter because she does not depict light as a subject but paints with light as her source material. [Read more…]

Wangari Methenge’s Aura of Quiet

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at Roberts Projects (through November 16)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

How do artists convey silence within two-dimensional space? I would argue that it is difficult to create an authentic connection between the subject and the viewer, and it is even more difficult to create a space of quietude and self-reflection even as the artist is in the active process of divining another person’s inner life. Yet all great portraiture is as much about the artist as it is the subject. There are many great examples of artists who have successfully explored their own personal connections to their subjects and, by extension, their viewers. Alice Neel, for example, whose portraits of friends and family are extraordinary in that they encapsulate not only a specific character but the breadth and tempo of the artist’s relationship with that specific person. [Read more…]

CUP’s Hydra-Headed Spinning Creature

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on Northern Spy
Reviewed by John Payne

Wherein the husband and wife team up to rinse and shine the aural punchbowl, no squabbling. Nels Cline & Yuka Honda are Cup, co-cookers of rich, musically nutritious stuff packed with savory, skewed nuance that reflects their artistic differences and affinities. Guitar visionary Cline’s scope, skills and, yes, taste, are renowned of late. His fiercely inventive rock/jazz/other playing with Wilco has boosted his fame-o-meter quite a bit, as have his numerous collaborations with the multifarious likes of Medeski Martin & Wood, Deerhoof, Charlie Haden, Julius Hemphill and Mike Watt, and his own all-instrumental Nels Cline Singers. Keyboardist/electronicist/producer Honda of the late avant-pop duo Cibo Matto has played a vital role in Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon’s bands and is a crucial presence on the downtown NYC new-thing/non-genre/performance-art scene. [Read more…]

Enrique Martínez Celaya’s The Tears of Things

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at Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles ( through November 2)
Reviewed by Lita Barrie

Enrique Martínez Celaya’s haunting exhibition at Kohn Gallery is conceived as visual poetry predicated upon Virgil’s phrase “the tears of things,” from Aeneid ( Book 1, line 462), about an encounter with a mural of the battle of Troy which made the Trojan hero weep as he remembered those he had loved and lost. This famous poetic passage about the power of painting continues to fascinate scholars because it is open to  multiple subjective and objective interpretations. [Read more…]

Atmosphere So Thick You’ll Choke: Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

In 2016, production designer turned writer/director Robert Eggers awed critics with his directorial debut, The Witch, a daring horror film set in the 1630s. Now, for his ferociously anticipated follow-up, he and his brother/co-writer Max Eggers have journeyed 200-some years to a rocky and remote island off the New England coast to tell a tale of isolation, envy, intimacy, wrath, and regret with The Lighthouse. [Read more…]

Laura Krifka’s Wickedly Deviant The Game of Patience

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at Luis De Jesus (through October 26)
Reviewed by Lita Barrie

Laura Krifka enjoys doing things she is not supposed to do. Having absorbed the tenets of neoclassical painting, she bypasses high-minded seriousness by adding a candy-coated veneer of hyper-artificiality adopted from 1950s MGM musicals to the domestic decor of private scenes she then undercuts with a deviant sexual subtext recalling David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. This irresistible mix of dexterity, decor, decorum and deviance makes viewing her paintings a guilty pleasure — rather like sneaking into a peep show or secretly spying on neighbor’s forbidden acts. We can view the conventions of art, cinema and domestic life through a bemused female gaze with no-holds-barred on taking delight in human foibles.  [Read more…]

How to Hate the City: A Storyboard Of Canvases

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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
at The Neue Galerie, NYC (through January 13)
Reviewed by John Haber

No movement in early modern art was as cosmopolitan as German Expressionism — and the group that called itself Die Brücke. Who else took to the streets when Picasso was just finding his way from circus performers to still life? Who else first exhibited in a former butcher’s shop, where it also met? When, decades later, Adolf Hitler denounced the movement as “degenerate art,” his rhetoric feels familiar from religious conservatives even now blaming a perceived moral decline on urban liberals. And who in Die Brücke was as cosmopolitan as its oldest founding member, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner? [Read more…]

The Lighthouse

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

In 2016, production designer turned writer/director Robert Eggers awed critics with his directorial debut, The Witch, a daring horror film set in the 1630s. Now, for his ferociously anticipated follow-up, he and his brother/co-writer Max Eggers have journeyed 200-some years to a rocky and remote island off the New England coast to tell a tale of isolation, envy, intimacy, wrath, and regret with The Lighthouse (2019). [Read more…]

The Vast of Night

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

There’s something in the air on a crisp night in 1950s Cayuga, New Mexico. Sure, there’s excitement as basketball season begins with a game so anticipated that nearly the entirety of this rural town has convened upon the high school’s gymnasium. But then there’s something stranger, a crackle on the phone lines, a light in the skies. In The Vast of Night (2019), this mystery will be cracked wide open by an unlikely pair of amateur detectives. The result is an ode to The Twilight Zone series that is fittingly riveting, exhilaratingly daring, and a whiz-bang technical marvel. [Read more…]

Sound Itself As The Only Way Forward In Swans’ Leaving Meaning

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out October 25 on Young God Records
Reviewed by John Payne

Michael Gira founded/guiding-lighted the sort of no-wave / noise / spiritual-purification band Swans in NYC 35 some odd years ago, and, roughly, he’s made a career out of trying musically to express the inexpressible ever since. After a hiatus of a few years, during which he formed Angels of Light, Gira re-formed Swans in 2010 and proceeded to release a series of exceedingly, brutally beautiful double-CDs of mental mayhem-catharsis. [Read more…]

In Jaw-Dropping Homage To The Twilight Zone, The Exhilarating The Vast of Night

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

There’s something in the air on a crisp night in 1950s Cayuga, New Mexico. Sure, there’s excitement as basketball season begins with a game so anticipated that nearly the entirety of this rural town has convened upon the high school’s gymnasium. But then there’s something stranger, a crackle on the phone lines, a light in the skies. In The Vast of Night, this mystery will be cracked wide open by an unlikely pair of amateur detectives. The result is an ode to The Twilight Zone series that is fittingly riveting, exhilaratingly daring, and a whiz-bang technical marvel. [Read more…]

Resilience: Philip Guston In 1971

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at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles (through January 5, 2020)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

…there’s no success like failure and failure’s no success at all
Bob Dylan
The painter’s first duty is to be free
Philip Guston

In 1970, New York City was the undisputed center of the art world and 57th street in midtown Manhattan was the epicenter of New York’s art world with its plethora of blue chip galleries. Art and theater critics reigned supreme – they could and would ruin careers with a gleeful flourish of their poison pens. When Philip Guston, acclaimed Abstract-Expressionist, showed his new large-scale paintings at Marlborough in October, 1970, he was roundly excoriated for his switch from abstract art to figuration. Not only was the work (horrors!) figurative, it was rudely cartoonish and crudely drawn. [Read more…]

Process And Fierce Redemption In Betye Saar’s Call and Response

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at LACMA (through April 5, 2020)
Reviewed by Genie Davis

Betye Saar’s riveting, 40-object exhibition currently at LACMA offers a fascinating insight into the artist’s process. It’s strong focus on the power of redemptive faith and personal strength in the face of adversity is passionate and compelling – which can be frankly said of all Saar’s work. The exhibition also aches with possibility: Saar is a prolific artist, and as extensive as this exhibition is in terms of an insightful view of her sketchbooks, the longing remains to see more of her finished works, of which there are fewer than 20 exhibited here. [Read more…]

Audacious Digs In Virgil Abloh’s Figures of Speech

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at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Reviewed by Seren Sensei

In a short video clip during Figures of Speech, Virgil Abloh’s show at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago, he mused on his upbringing and influences. Born the son of Ghanaian immigrants in a small town in Illinois, he discussed the wonders of growing up “in the middle of nowhere,” and the freedom it gave him to explore, and to create, without feeling beholden to any predominant ideology or method of production. [Read more…]

Lightly Through The Looking Glass With Apple’s [AR]T Walk

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By Mayne

Alert the critics: The cutting edge of New York City’s art avantgarde can now be found at the Fifth Avenue Apple Store. Amid the blistering doldrums of summer, Apple has offered [AR]T Walk a guided tour of their new augmented reality exhibit. Co-curated with the New Museum, the tour is being offered in five other cities around the world: London, Paris, San Francisco, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, though the latter has been suspended indefinitely due to the political instability. [Read more…]

Wounds Of Desire In Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain And Glory

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Reviewed by John Payne

Were you looking for such a thing, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more humanizing film than Pedro Almodóvar’s latest little miracle. The Spanish director/writer’s Pain and Glory is a story about an artist, who suffers, and remembers, and relives. This tale is only somewhat the story of people in general, though it’s easy and quite wrenching to project ourselves onto the life of Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas), a veteran film director afflicted by several physical maladies. His bodily decline brings him great pain, physical and mental. Of course he can’t work, can’t create, in this deteriorating state. He spends his days mostly prostrate in bed, having gobbled a vast regimen of pills and yogurts, and just recently has dabbled in heroin. [Read more…]

Hiroko Oyamada’s Mordant Fable, The Factory

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Reviewed by John Biscello

The Factory
by Hiroko Oyamada
New Directions, 128pp., $13.95

The year was 1936, when an indefatigable tramp served as a working-class Virgil in guiding audiences through the hellscape of big industry and assembly line madness. The tramp, of course, was Charlie Chaplin in his iconic film, Modern Times, which applied fool’s wisdom in overlaying its satire with calculated mania, circus-like antics, romantic aspirations, and a punch-drunk heart that refuses to throw in the towel. There is a visually brilliant scene in which the tramp gets swallowed up in the machine on which he’s working, a hapless Jonah churning within the gear-heavy belly of the industrial whale, and this image metaphorically underscored what Chaplin saw as the threats of dehumanization confronting “modern man.” [Read more…]