Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Archives for December 2021

Seizing the Snowmelt: Industrial Agriculture is Draining Our State Dry

By Leave a Comment

by Mark Arax

The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California
by Mark Arax
Knopf, 576pp., $25.00
MITTR

The wind finally blew the other way last night and kicked out the smoke from the burning Sierra. Down here in the flatland of California, we used to regard the granite mountain as a place apart, our getaway. But the distance is no more. With all those dead pine trees in thrall to wildfire, the Sierra, transmuted into ash, is right outside our door. 

We have learned to watch the sky with an uncanny eye. We measure its peril. Some days, we breathe the worst air in the world. On those few days when we can walk outside without risking harm to our lungs and brains, we greet each other with new benedictions. May the shift in winds prevail, I tell my neighbor. May there be only the dust clouds from the almond harvest to contend with. In the meantime, I don’t dare quiet the turbo on my HEPA filters, hum of this new life.  [Read more…]

The Looming Catastrophe Few in California Are Aware Of (or in Want to Address)

By Leave a Comment

An excerpt from Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent it, by Tom Philpott.

THE FLOOD NEXT TIME

In November 1860, a young scientist from upstate New York named William Brewer disembarked in San Francisco after a long journey that took him from New York City through Panama and then north along the Pacific coast. “The weather is perfectly heavenly,” he enthused in a letter to his brother back east. “They say this is a fair specimen of winter here, yet the weather is very like the finest of our Indian summer, only not so smoky-warm, balmy, not hot, clear, bracing.” The fast-growing metropolis was already revealing its charms: “large streets, magnificent buildings of brick, and many even of granite, built in a substantial manner, give a look of much greater age than the city has.” He described San Francisco as a kind of gorgeous urban garden, graced by “many flowers we [northeasterners] see only in house cultivations: various kinds of geraniums growing of immense size, dew plant growing like a weed, acacia, fuchsia, etc. growing in the open air.” [Read more…]

Precontact California Indians: Their Life Prior to Genocide

By Leave a Comment

An excerpt from the first chapter of An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, by Benjamin Madley.

CALIFORNIA INDIANS BEFORE 1846

Within a few days, eleven little babies of this mission, one after the other, took their flight to heaven.
-Fray Junipero Serra, 1774

We were always trembling with fear of the lash.
– Lorenzo Asisara (Costanoan), 1890

In the centuries before Europeans arrived, California Indians inhabited a world different from the California we know today. Rivers ran undammed to the Pacific, man-made lakes like the Salton Sea and Lake Shasta had yet to be imagined, and vast wetlands bordered many rivers and bays. Other bodies of water were far larger than they are today. Eastern California’s now mostly dry Owens Lake covered more than 100 square miles, San Francisco Bay was almost a third larger, and the San Joaquin Valley’s now vanished Tulare Lake was the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi. [Read more…]

An Atmospheric River of Wonder in Laurie Anderson’s The Weather

By 2 Comments

at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (through 31 July 2022) 
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

            “What are the days for? To put between the endless nights. What are the nights for? To slip through time into another world.”  –Laurie Anderson

            “Stories are our weather”  –Laurie Anderson

Laurie Anderson is a Renaissance polymath whose staggering breadth of knowledge, insatiable curiosity, technical virtuosity and conceptual rigor form the basis for her superb exhibit at The Hirshhorn. Simply titled (though not so simple) The Weather, it is billed as an immersive multimedia experimental exhibit, but really it is an otherworldly investigation into what it means to be a human in this twenty-first century. Intensely personal as well as political, it is a revelation, encompassing eerie video projections, kinetic talking sculpture, operatic oil paintings, invented conceptual violins, complex installations, multiple soundscapes, and everywhere words static and moving painted on floors and walls surrounding the viewer. [Read more…]

Maria Lassnig: The Paris Years, 1960–68

By Leave a Comment

at Petzel Gallery, New York City
Reviewed by James Quandt

Maria Lassnig: Film Works
edited by Eszter Kondor, Michael Loebenstein, Peter Pakesch, and Hans Werner Poschauko
FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen, 189 pp., $35.00
NYRB

Many female artists — most recently Carmen Herrera, Faith Ringgold, and Lorraine O’Grady — have had to wait a lifetime to be accorded the recognition of a major museum retrospective. The Austrian painter and filmmaker Maria Lassnig abided many decades of curatorial slights and oversights before being granted one at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2008, six years before her death at the age of ninety-four. Astonished by the revelation of Lassnig’s extreme paintings, with their sometimes bilious palettes and gleeful emphasis on aged, corpulent, and deliquescing flesh, The Guardian’s reviewer, Laura Cumming, proclaimed, “Maria Lassnig is the discovery of the year—of the century.” [Read more…]