Art. Word. Thought.
A wisdom transmission by Samaneri Jayasāra
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at George Billis Gallery, Los Angeles (through 8 October 2022)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner
“Things are not what they seem: nor are they otherwise.”
–Buddha
Margaret Lazzari’s luminous solo exhibition of paintings, entitled Breathing Space, were painted during the pandemic, and the exhibition title is indeed significant. It’s defined as a respite, a hiatus, or an interval where one takes time to recover. The paintings themselves shift seamlessly between abstraction and figuration, observation and invention evoking both delight and anxiety. Her painting process informs this ever-changing perspective that intrigues, confounds and compels the viewer upon sustained investigation of the images. [Read more…]
Reviewed by William Bibbiani
Ti West’s Pearl (2022) is an oddity amongst horror sequels and prequels. The fact of its existence is not the remarkable part. What’s actually extraordinary is that Pearl is more than just a fantastic prequel: it successfully illuminates and recontextualizes its predecessor, dramatically improving a film that was already acclaimed to begin with. Pearl is a prequel to West’s retro slasher X, which takes place in the 1970s and follows a group of independent filmmakers who rent a cabin on a farm from an elderly couple. Their mission is clandestine, to secretly film a pornographic movie starring Maxine Minx (Mia Goth, Emma) under the farmers’ noses. But when they’re not having spirited debates about sex-positivity, they’re getting murdered one-by-one by Pearl (also played by Goth), an old woman who longs for her sexual prime. [Read more…]
Mad God
Dir. Phil Tippett
Reviewed by Nicholas Goldwin
Technically astonishing and immersive to a fault, director Phil Tippett successfully demonstrates that thirty years of relentless dedication to your craft can lead to cinematic innovations even his old stomping grounds – the sets of Star Wars and Jurassic Park – have yet to catch up. Not to disparage either of those staples of cinema, but neither Tyrannosaurs nor Tatooine have anything on Tippett.
by Jarrett Earnest
Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art
by Daniel Oppenheimer
University of Texas Press, 141 pp., $24.95
The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, Revised and Expanded
by Dave Hickey
University of Chicago Press, 123 pp., $15.00 (paper)
Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy
by Dave Hickey
Art Issues Press, 215 pp., $19.95 (paper)
NYR
When Dave Hickey died last fall at the age of eighty-two, he left behind a singular contribution to the history of art writing, along with a badly bruised reputation, both routinely called “iconoclastic” for lack of anything more precise. The magazines he’d published in since the 1960s hardly took notice. The perfunctory obituaries that did appear treated him as a kind of Hunter S. Thompson of the contemporary art world, ensconced as he was in Las Vegas at the height of his fame. But alongside the bluster of “the bad boy of art criticism” was a neon Walter Pater of the Southwest who almost single-handedly remade the practice of art writing with his first two collections, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (1993) and Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (1997). In Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art, Daniel Oppenheimer complicates the cartoon version of his life that continues to shadow his reputation as a writer. What remains is the difficult task of taking stock of Hickey’s literary achievement. [Read more…]