Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

  • Home
  • Riot Material Magazine
    • About RM / Subscribe
    • Entering The Mind
      • 3-Part Podcast
    • Contributors
    • Categories >
      • Art
      • Artist
      • Books
      • Thought
      • Film
      • Cinema Disordinaire
      • Riot Sounds
      • Records
      • Jazz
      • Interview
      • More   >
        • Architecture
        • Image
        • The Line
        • The New Word
        • That Evening Sun
        • The Natural World
        • Video
    • Contact
    • Masthead
  • Art
    • Art Reviews
  • Books
    • Book Reviews
  • Film
    • Film Reviews
  • Records
    • Jazz Reviews
    • All Reviews
  • Riot Sounds
  • Cinema Disordinaire
    • Riot Cinema

Search Results for: david lynch

Pandemic Musings: A From-The-Bag Q&A With David Lynch

September 25, 2020 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

From David Lynch Theater Presents: “Do You Have a Question for David? Part 1” [Read more…]

Filed Under: Artist, The Line, Video

Storytime With David Lynch

March 14, 2020 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

Today’s Topic: Accessing the Unified Field

 

Filed Under: Mind, The Line, Thought

Beat Tales From Flying Lotus And David Lynch: “Fire Is Coming”

May 24, 2019 By Cvon Leave a Comment

From Flamagra

Released today on Warp Records
Film directed by Steven Ellison & David Firth

https://www.riotmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/13-Fire-Is-Coming-feat.-David-Lynch.m4a

Flying Lotus, “Fire is Coming” (feat. David Lynch)
[full track]

Filed Under: Riot Sounds, Video

The Horror Of Our Seed: Revisiting David Lynch’s The Grandmother

October 31, 2018 By Alci Rengifo 3 Comments

By Alci Rengifo

If there is ever a core idea behind our modern-day celebration of Halloween it is the need to escape. We run from ourselves into masks and costumes, for one night becoming that which we wish we had been. Sometimes we choose the face of a monster, only because we as mere humans are the most monstrous creations of all. Fear of oneself is essentially fear of your seed, of your origins. No filmmaker has captured the very psychology of America like David Lynch, and even in his early student and short film work, one finds an artist digging into the depths of his psychic plane, and our own. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

David Lynch: I Was A Teenage Insect

September 28, 2018 By Emily Nimptsch Leave a Comment

at Kayne Griffin Corcoran (Through November 10, 2018)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

Disturbing yet mesmerizing depictions of death, decay, and deformity bestrew beloved neo-noir director David Lynch’s latest collection of multimedia paintings, watercolors, and drawings currently on display at Kayne Griffin Corcoran. This series of dark, violent, and surreal meditations on childhood and adolescence offers a rare and tantalizing peek into the celebrated film legend’s perplexing psyche. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

David Lynch’s Room To Dream, A Bio-Memoir

September 6, 2018 By John Biscello Leave a Comment

Reviewed by John Biscello

Room to Dream
by David Lynch and Kristine McKenna
Random House, 592 pp., $32.00

All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream. 
                   — Edgar Allan Poe

David Lynch, Room To DreamFor the past forty somewhat years, David Lynch has dreamscaped a long day’s journey into night, taking audiences on a hallucinated tour through the underworld of their own splintered psyche. In a world, or perhaps I should say industry, often bereft of visionary spellcasting, Lynch has been the equivalent of a cinematic shaman, a goofball deviant in bi-polar shades, trafficking in symbols, archetypes, glyphs, images and impressions, fished out from a fathomless substratum. His oeuvre, a steam-punk Frankenstein of interchangeable parts, speaks to the savvy and glee of a mad scientist at play, while his blending of the eternal with American pop has given us a surrealistic soap-opera with an eye toward the numinous. Carl Jung eating apple pie in a diner while riffing on anima with a gum-clacking waitress named Flo; the red-jacketed ghost of James Dean partying on top of a toxic mushroom cloud while Marilyn Monroe lip-syncs “Happy Birthday” in Yiddish; a blue jukebox isolated in the desert where it serves as an altar for a congregation of devout rabbits . . . these could be dispatches from a world of Lynch’s making. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, The Line

Cooking Quinoa With David Lynch

September 4, 2017 By Riot Material 1 Comment

Kitchen Talk. A Long Smoke. A Story (of course!).

“It was dark. I mean, a moonless night, barren landscape. And suddenly the train slows, and stops. And somehow the message went out that we could disembark, go off the train, because there was an opportunity to buy some drinks. But there was no station. You come off the metal stairs on the train, and go across, dust, dust was blowing, dust was filling the air, and it was somehow warmly lilt from the interior lights on the train that was spilling out from this barren, dust-filled landscape. And there, through the dust, we saw this little stand, canvas and wood, with some small lamps around it. And as we got closer we saw bottles: yellow bottles, green bottles. The bottles were clear, but the fluid inside was green or yellow or red or violet. And it was sugar water. It wasn’t, you know, chilled. It was just absolutely the temperature of the outdoors. And for the smallest amount of money you could get a bottle of this sugar water. So I gave the man there in this small tent — moths were flipping and flying like frogs, frog moths were pulling themselves out of the earth and flying up in front of the stand, dust was blowing, it was like a mysterious strange-wind sound, and out came the tiniest little copper coin that I got somewhere, and I gave it to this man. I gave the man the coin. He gave me a bottle of, I don’t know if I got violet sugar water or what. I got this bottle. And, in addition, I got a paper, a piece of paper money — four inches by three inches — the most beautiful, intricately designed gold and green and blue, red, a piece of paper money, and the bottle, for just giving him this small copper coin. Back I went into the train . . .”

Filed Under: The Line, Video

David Lynch’s Dadaist Apocalypse Via Twin Peaks

September 1, 2017 By Alci Rengifo 1 Comment

Episode 8
by Alci Rengifo

Madness grips the airwaves like a deafening transmission, and the overlords of the earth seem to speak in terrifyingly grim visions. Thank the gods that every age produces its own soothsayers. It is fitting, then, that just as a surreal state of affairs takes hold, David Lynch returned to us with Twin Peaks: The Return, a continuation of his landmark cult 1990s series that combined melodrama with the director’s brand of surrealist imaginings. But not only did Lynch return, he also shows himself to be fully in tune with these new dark ages. Episode 8 of the revival in particular goes beyond television or even cinema — it is one mad flow about our civilization’s communion with dark forces to unleash absolute destruction. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Film, The Line

The New Avant-Garde: David Lynch’s Glorious Late-Career Vision

August 24, 2017 By C von Hassett 5 Comments

Episode 3
by C von Hassett

The new Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) finds David Lynch working in fresh and sublimely haunting domains, ones that pleasurably flirt or unnervingly skirt the spectral drop-offs of some charged and sinister abyss. This seems no visional or evolutional change of tack, nor does it appear, at least in these early episodes, Lynch is newly surveying unmapped terrains. Rather, there is something more elevated in this late-career landscape, and something far more intimate as well. One senses, when viewing this new series, particularly his excursions into Lynchian Other-Realms, that his articulation of these doppelgänging worlds feel more experiential than conceptual, more occupied than conceptualized.

Cinema Disordinaire: Twin Peaks, Episode 3
Cinema Disordinaire: Twin Peaks, Episode 3

Less dream (or dreamy) than earlier movements into surrealist expression, the first quarter of Episode 3, for instance, shows Lynch, in an extraordinary way, to be as clear-eyed and sure-footed as he’s ever been in these ghostly yet thoroughly gripping realms. It’s as if, rather than imagining, some doppelgänger of himself now inhabits these realms, sending in return faint coordinates and word; or Lynch, figuratively, has set foot in them himself, excursioned through them in a near-corporeal way, and now with intimate familiarity he is able to speak cinematically to their airy constructions, and he does this with such nuance that they feel like alternate extents of consciousness and being: expansive, elusive, wholly mercurial states of mind-borne self. 

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Film, The Line

David Lynch’s The Amputee

July 13, 2017 By C von Hassett 2 Comments

1973. David Lynch had been shooting Eraserhead for roughly one year when he ran out of cash. The film was suddenly and indefinitely on hold. It was, he says, “a depressing time.” Yet it was also at this time that the American Film Institute asked a friend of his, Fred, to shoot a test using two different black and white video stocks to determine which stock was best, because, as Lynch tells it, “they were going to buy a bunch.” Lynch says when he heard AFI was buying video tapes, “it gave me a sadness, and I worried they were going to have to change the name of the place” (from American Film Institute to American Video Institute). “So I looked at Fred, and I got an idea, and I said, um, ‘Fred, does it matter what you shoot?’ And he said, ‘Well, what are you talking about?’ And I said, ‘Could you shoot anything you want? Twice. One with one stock and one with the other, and go like that, for the test?’ And he said, ‘Well, I don’t see why not.’ So I said, ‘Could I write something and make something for tomorrow?’ And he said, ‘Okay.’”

That evening Lynch wrote The Amputee. The next day he shot this video:

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Film, The Line, Video

The Primitive, Expressive Figurations Of David Lynch

February 14, 2017 By Christopher Michno 2 Comments

Works On Paper And Sculpture
Art Los Angeles Contemporary / Kayne Griffin Corcoran
By Christopher Michno

At this year’s Art Los Angeles Contemporary, the international contemporary art fair of the West Coast, the Los Angeles gallery Kayne Griffin Corcoran devoted its booth to a display of 46 works on paper and two mixed media sculptures by David Lynch. The four day affair, running January 26-29, 2017, offered a dense sampling of the 70 year old artist’s drawings and watercolors, the majority of which were dated from 2008 through 2014. Though most of these works have been previously exhibited, it was a welcome reprise, and Lynch’s works on paper addressed threads that also repeatedly emerge in the auteur’s better known film oeuvre—the desire to probe the unconscious mind, the sense of the uncanny, the need to stare directly into the murky depths of humanity’s darkness. But as is the nature of small works on paper, they are quieter than his film work, and more reflective. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Patti Smith And David Lynch Speak Of Film, Music, And The Creative Impulse

February 13, 2017 By Riot Material 1 Comment

Filed Under: Interview, The Line, Video

Entering The Mind 3-Part Podcast

March 21, 2022 By Riot Material 1 Comment

Riot Material Presents

Entering The Mind 3-Part Podcast

Entering The Mind 3-Part Podcast is an intimate discussion on “the nature of mind” and how we as meditators can recognize it within ourselves, then realize it through day-to-day practice. But the conversation is so much more than that, for it is an intimate discussion between two intimates — husband and wife duo C von Hassett and Rachel Reid Wilkie, both of whom are practitioner’s of a timeless wisdom practice known as Dzogchen, which points the meditation practitioner directly into the fertile interiors of their own mind. Not the conceptual mind, which we are all too familiar with. The mind referred to here is the naturally occurring one, the innate mind, or what is known in Dzogchen as “mind in its natural state.” It has been called the awakened mind, or the fully realized one, and not only is this mind within each of us, it is also ever-so close – as close to us as our finger is to touching space. How far must we move our finger to touch space? Our own natural state is this close, and we must only turn inward to first see it, then familiarize ourselves with it, before intimately coming to know it.

The rich discussion in the series below speaks to the key concepts in C von Hassett’s new book, Entering the Mind, excerpts from which can be read here. We hope you enjoy the 3-Part Podcast, and we likewise hope you enjoy the book.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, Entering the Mind, Interview, Mind, Riot Material Presents

Dune

October 22, 2021 By Cvon Leave a Comment

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

By Manohla Dargis

In a galaxy far, far away, a young man in a sea of sand faces a foreboding destiny. The threat of war hangs in the air. At the brink of a crisis, he navigates a feudalistic world with an evil emperor, noble houses and subjugated peoples, a tale right out of mythology and right at home in George Lucas’s brainpan. But this is Dune (2021), baby, Frank Herbert’s science-fiction opus, which is making another run at global box-office domination even as it heads toward controversy about what it and its messianic protagonist signify. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cinema Disordinaire

Stalking Memory to Spy Out One’s Self in Patrick Modiano’s Invisible Ink

October 30, 2020 By John Biscello Leave a Comment

Reviewed by John Biscello

Invisible Ink
by Patrick Modiano
Yale University Press, 176 pp., $24.00

If there is a suitcase, forged documentation, café-life and tons of mileage accumulated tramping the streets of Paris, it’s a pretty safe guess that you are inside a Patrick Modiano novel. The French writer, whose Nobel Prize in 2014 launched him into a new stratosphere of exposure, acclaim and readership (with many of his works now having been translated into English), has been haunting a familiar path, a twilit phantom territory all his own, for the past fifty-plus years. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, The Line

Cinema Disordinaire: A List Of Infectiously Strange Must-See Films For The End Times

March 22, 2020 By Cvon Leave a Comment

Cinema Disordinaire, aka Riot Cinema, is a uniquely selective entry of films that showcase the singular in all of cinema, the seminal, and the utterly sublime come to screen this past half century. For these particularly disordinary times, where self-isolation is our newly mandated norm, we offer up a distilled list from Cinema Disordinaire’s five-decade accounting. These are must-see films — if you’re a lover of cutting-edge or entirely uncommon cinema — beginning with the latest (2019) and working backwards to high cult-bizarro, 1972. Soderbergh’s Contagion, the current streaming darling of this moment, is surely not amongst these greats, but an infectious strangeness runs throughout them all. They are, in other words, Riot Material’s favorites, offered up for those with a latently wicked heart. Below you’ll find links that take you to the original reviews of each film. Enjoy: [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

Into the Abyss With Jonathan Glazer’s Feral Short: The Fall

December 9, 2019 By Alci Rengifo Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

Jonathan Glazer emerges every so often with work that above all is constructed by a powerful aesthetic. More than narratives, what Glazer crafts are images combined with soundscapes which immerse the viewer in moments of dread, hallucination and discovery. Moments which could have the feel of a common day action suddenly take on a dreamlike ambiance. In Glazer’s underrated 2004 film, Birth, Nicole Kidman plays an upper class New Yorker confronted with the possibility that a young boy is her reincarnated husband. His 2013 Under the Skin finds a silent woman played by Scarlett Johansson, an extraterrestrial in human form, drives through grey streets seeking male prospects for the purpose of consuming their physical essence for an unclear plan. In both films familiar settings, whether upscale dinner parties or gritty alleyways, are touched by extreme possibilities. But how does the artist respond to the world when it actually does become extreme? [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

Laura Krifka’s Wickedly Deviant The Game of Patience

October 18, 2019 By Lita Barrie Leave a Comment

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…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

The Surreal Spirit Of Salvador Simo Busom’s Buñuel In The Labyrinth Of The Turtles

August 27, 2019 By Alci Rengifo Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

An animated movie by GKIDS Films about one of the great iconoclasts and rebels of the cinema is fittingly surreal when the subject in question is Luis Buñuel. The Spanish master has been conjured in numerous films about other people over the years, from his comic-light appearance in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris to Little Ashes, an altogether not uninteresting drama about Buñuel’s broken friendship with Salvador Dali. That, too, was a surreal experience in that Dali was interpreted no less by Robert Pattinson. I have to report, however, that this new animated feature, Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles, is till now the best dramatization of Buñuel’s early years, since it’s illustrated approach is free to imagine the master’s mind as a landscape of distorting dreams while still wisely interpreting the world around him. Director Salvador Simo also understands something elemental about Surrealism as a movement: that it was not simply about trippy images but, perhaps more so, about the revolutionary transformation of life and the world. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

Visions of the Age: A Top 10 Of 2018

December 19, 2018 By Alci Rengifo Leave a Comment

by Alci Rengifo

It is the cinema which chronicles the passions, nightmares and dreams of an era. To look back at the movies of any given decade is to peer into the very fabric of an age’s consciousness. We are currently living through a period of historical transition, a moment Gramsci would recognize as a moment when an old world is beginning to die and what will come forth we do not yet know. Paris is burning, new parties worship the cult of blood and land. This helps explain why much of the year’s defining cinema obsesses itself with the past, the present and an aching uncertainty over what is to come. Yet some movies were also full of hope and tenderness, wisdom and the reverie of romance. I spent much of this year in darkened screening rooms all over Los Angeles. Whether in a hidden corner of Rodeo Drive or in some distant multiplex in Burbank, I found myself moved, exhilarated or challenged with despair. Here are ten offerings which defined the year in film, and crystalize our place in this current passage of time. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • Next Page »

The Line

An interview with Alison Saar, at Riot Material magazine.

An Interview with Alison Saar

By Ricky Amadour As an indefatigable voice for women of color and the greater human spirit, Alison Saar recomposes fractured histories into multivalent sculptures. Saar curated SeenUNseen, a group exhibition at L.A. Louver Gallery, with a focus on spirit portraiture. Throughout human existence there has been a predilection to the allure of the unseen. Hidden […]

William S. Burroughs on a bed, smoking a cigarette.

“The Opposite of Literature:” Mary McCarthy’s Feb. ’63 Review of Naked Lunch

From the inaugural print edition of The New York Review of Books In remembrance of Jason Epstein, originator and co-founder of NYRB RIP 1928-2022 by Mary McCarthy Naked Lunch  by William S. Burroughs Grove Press, 304pp., $14.49 “You can cut into The Naked Lunch at any intersection point,” says Burroughs, suiting the action to the […]

Remembered and Remade: James Castle’s Conjurings of Mind

James Castle at David Zwirner, NYC (through 12 February 2022) by Andrew Martin James Castle: Memory Palace John Beardsley Yale University Press, 280pp., $65.00 NYR Every James Castle picture seems to contain a secret. Approaching one of his works for the first time, you peer into pockets of shadow and smudge, examining the depopulated landscapes […]

Vulgar Genres: Gay Pornographic Writing and Contemporary Fiction

Vulgar Genres: Gay Pornographic Writing and Contemporary Fiction

An excerpt from a new book which examines gay pornographic writing, showing how literary fiction was both informed by pornography and amounts to a commentary on the genre’s relation to queer male erotic life. —The University of Chicago Press Vulgar Genres: Gay Pornographic Writing and Contemporary Fiction by Steven Ruszczycky University of Chicago Press, 216pp., $30.00 In the United […]

Hilary Brace, Drawings and Tapestries, is reviewed at Riot Material magazine.

Darkness Made Visible in Hilary Brace’s Drawings and Tapestries

at Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station (through 19 February 2022) Reviewed by Eve Wood The intricacies and inherent beauty of the natural world are rarely celebrated these days, and when artists do turn their attention to the surrounding landscape, the resulting images are usually ones of devastation and chaos — charting the movement of fires, […]

The Tragedy of Macbeth 

A film written and directed by Joel Coen Reviewed by James Shapiro NYR Those who have long followed the Coen brothers and their cinematic universe of criminals, nihilists, and overreachers may see in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021) a long-deferred reckoning with Shakespeare, who has been there before them. We don’t typically think of Shakespeare […]

John Divola, From Dogs Chasing My Car In The Desert,1996-98,

Illuminating Images: Liquid Light and Golden Hour and the Affective Force of Non-Didactic Art

at the Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles (through 5 February 2022) Reviewed by Johanna Drucker What is the difference between a wall label and a work of art? The unrelenting didacticism that prevails in current gallery and museum exhibits of contemporary art makes it seem that many curators and artists cannot answer that question. […]

The Occult Works of Ray Robinson, with an essay by Christopher Ian Lutz, is at Riot Material Magazine.

The Brush as Luminous Torch: Ray Robinson’s Blazing Portals Into the Divine Feminine

The Third Door:Occult Works of Ray Robinson, at the Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magic (through 15 January) by Christopher Ian Lutz Burn the Sun The persecution of the witch is a war of the hours. The Inquisition that charged women with witchcraft was not just about controlling women’s bodies – it was a crusade to extinguish […]

An Interview with Artist Gala Porras-Kim is at Riot Material Magazine.

An Interview with Artist Gala Porras-Kim

by Ricky Amadour . Interdisciplinary artist Gala Porras-Kim frames her research to highlight and question the current institutional practices of conservation, acquisition, and deaccession. Acting as an investigator of cultural artifacts that correspond to institutional collections, Porras-Kim deep dives into the expansive histories, stories, and functions of those objects. The artist’s first solo exhibition in […]

Seizing the Snowmelt: Industrial Agriculture is Draining Our State Dry

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 […]

The Great Flood of 1862

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

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 […]

Precontact California Indians: Their Life Prior to Genocide

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 […]

Laurie Anderson's "The Weather," is reviewed at Riot Material magazine.

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

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 […]

Maria Lassnig Augenglaeser - Autoportraets (1965)

Maria Lassnig: The Paris Years, 1960–68

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 […]

Marcellina Akpojotor’s Sublime Matriarchy

Daughters of Esan at Rele Gallery, Los Angeles (through 4 December 2021) Reviewed by Eve Wood Marcellina Akpojotor’s second solo exhibition, Daughters of Esan, continues her exploration into notions of personal intimacy, drawing on her own relationships with her family and the tremendously powerful and transformational possibilities of education and love. Inspired by her great-grandmother’s […]

An interview with Rachael Tarravechia, at Riot Material

Fear and Self-Loathing in Rachael Tarravechia’s Wish You Were Here

at Launch F18, NYC (through 4 December 2021) by Danielle Dewar The horror genre is rooted in a desire for catharsis by means of dispelling fears and anxieties that live deep within a subconscious mind. Since we often crave a controlled release of such emotions, the use of the macabre within an artist’s practice allows […]

Umar Rashid, aka Frohawk Two Feathers, exhibition review of En Garde/On God is at Riot Material magazine

Histories Disembowled in Umar Rashid’s En Garde/On God

at Blum and Poe, Los Angeles (through 18 December 2021) Reviewed by Ellen C. Caldwell In En Garde/On God, Blum & Poe showcases the work of artist Umar Rashid (also known by the pen name Frohawk Two Feathers). Featuring thirteen large paintings and one sculpture in Rashid’s hallmark style, the exhibition highlights works that are bold […]

A Grid Gone Wholly Off in My Monticello

Reviewed by Bridgett M. Davis My Monticello By Jocelyn Nicole Johnson Henry Holt & Company, 210 pp., $13.49 NYT In the essay “The Site of Memory,” Toni Morrison described the crafting of her fictional worlds as a quest to access the interior lives of her ancestors. “It’s a kind of literary archeology,” she explained. “On the […]

The Web of Mind Throughout Our Earth

Reviewed by Zoë Schlanger Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake Random House, 352 pp., $28.00; $15.48 NYRB Imagine that you are afloat on your back in the sea. You have some sense of its vast, unknowable depths—worlds of life are surely darting about beneath […]

Drugs Amongst Other Adult Liberties

Reviewed by Mike Jay Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear by Dr. Carl L. Hart Penguin Press, 290 pp., $16.94 NYRB The modern meaning of “drugs” is of surprisingly recent origin. Until the twentieth century, the word referred to all medications (as it still does in “drugstore”); it was only […]

Rashid Johnson, Anxious Red Painting August 20th. At Riot Material

Break//Breathe: Broken Men That Glitter

by Allyn Aglaïa Aumand On the coherence of fracture an essay in fragments on fragments * I had a lover once, who self described as a volcano, but fully encased. Make space to let it out sometimes, I told him. That’s why I wanted to see you today, he said.

Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

An excerpt from a new book W. W. Norton calls “a radically inclusive, intersectional, and transnational approach to the fight for women’s rights.”  Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption by Rafia Zakaria W. W. Norton, 256pp., $23.95 There is an important distinction between what Nancy Fraser calls “affirmative change” and actual transformational change. The former is […]

join our mailing list

Enter your email and click 'SUBSCRIBE' to receive our end-of-month recap of reviews, interviews, the latest in song, cinema, the state of Art and other cerebral musings. The last day of every month, from RIOT MATERIAL.
  • Instagram

Writers

  • Alci Rengifo
  • Allyn A. Aumand
  • Ann Landi
  • Annabel Osberg
  • A. Hutter von Arx
  • Barrett Martin
  • C von Hassett
  • Christopher Lutz
  • Christopher Michno
  • Christopher P Jones
  • Cvon
  • Cynthia Biret
  • Donald Lindeman
  • Ellen C. Caldwell
  • Emily Nimptsch
  • Erin Currier
  • Eve Wood
  • Genie Davis
  • Henry Cherry
  • Hoyt Hilsman
  • James McWilliams
  • Jill Conner
  • Johanna Drucker
  • John Biscello
  • John Haber
  • John Payne
  • Kristy Puchko
  • Lisa Zeiger
  • Lita Barrie
  • Lorraine Heitzman
  • Max King Cap
  • Nancy Kay Turner
  • Pancho Lipschitz
  • Phoebe Hoban
  • Rachel Reid Wilkie
  • Ricky Amadour
  • Riot Material
  • Seren Sensei
  • Shana Nys Dambrot

Community Links

  • Black Lives Matter
  • Black Radical Congress
  • Assata’s Daughters
  • Dream Defenders
  • EJI
  • NAACP
  • ACLU
  • BAMN
  • NUL
  • UNCF
  • HRC
  • NOW
  • AWID
  • Planned Parenthood
  • Reproductive Rights
  • Nonhuman Rights
  • PETA
  • LANAIC
  • NARF
  • AICF
  • IEN
  • MPV
  • NGLTF
  • GLAAD
  • NCLR
  • LULAC
  • MALDEF
  • Fight for $15
  • Working Families
  • Rendition Project
  • Amnesty Int.
  • Democracy Now
  • Critical Resistance
  • Progressive Change
  • Justice Democrats
  • Swing Left
  • Prison Policy Init.
  • Progressive Orgs

Museums

  • The Broad
  • MOCA
  • Geffen
  • LACMA
  • The Getty
  • Annenberg
  • Hammer
  • Marciano
  • CAFAM
  • CAAM
  • MAF
  • MOLAA
  • LBMA
  • MOMA
  • PS1
  • Whitney
  • The Met
  • Brooklyn
  • New
  • Neue
  • Guggenheim
  • El Museo Del Barrio
  • Tate Modern
  • White Cube
  • National Portrait

Categories

  • Architecture
  • Art
  • Artist
  • Books
  • Cinema Disordinaire
  • Entering the Mind
  • Fiction
  • Film
  • From The Shelf
  • Image
  • Inside The Image
  • Interview
  • Jazz
  • Mind
  • Opera
  • Profile
  • Records
  • Riot Material Presents
  • Riot Sounds
  • Short Film
  • sound
  • Subscribe
  • That Evening Sun
  • The Line
  • The Mother Tongue
  • The Natural World
  • The New Word
  • Theater
  • Thought
  • Twenty Que
  • Video

Archives

  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
RIOT MATERIAL
art. word. thought.