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Elektra, An Opera In One Act

April 6, 2018 By Donald Lindeman Leave a Comment

by Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal
at Metropolitan Opera, New York City
Reviewed by Donald Lindeman  

Pity the legendary royal families of ancient Greece. Their stories, so incredibly complex, rarely end well. Blood feuds abound, and seldom are they fully resolved. Richard Strauss’ and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s opera, Elektra, debuted in Dresden in 1909, bringing Sophocles’ account of the Argive house of Agamemnon to a modern iteration. In ancient Athens, everyone would have known the story of Electra before they’d even seen Sophocles’ telling of it. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Opera, The Line

The Exterminating Angel

November 21, 2017 By Donald Lindeman Leave a Comment

An Opera In Three Acts
at Metropolitan Opera, New York City
Reviewed by Donald Lindeman

Hailing from Salzburg and London, Thomas Adès’ opera The Exterminating Angel made its much anticipated New York debut on October 26th at the Metropolitan Opera. Adès himself conducted, and the opening night audience greeted him, the opera, and its superlative vocalists with considerable enthusiasm. The opera is based on the 1962 surrealist film by Luis Buñuel of the same name, featuring an elegant after-opera dinner party attended by upper-crust denizens of Francisco Franco’s Spain. It should be noted that Adès and director Tom Cairns eschew the deeply ironic and grim conclusion found in Luis Buñuel’s film in their opera. Instead they opt for a more ambiguous outcome and fate for their characters. This marks a significant alteration to the filmic source, and it invites alternative interpretations to the original tale. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Opera, The Line

James Welling’s Seascape

September 6, 2017 By Donald Lindeman Leave a Comment

at David Zwirner, NYC
Reviewed by Donald Lindeman

Vacation-starved New Yorkers could nonetheless repair to David Zwirner gallery this summer, on West 19th St. and view James Welling’s short film Seascape (2017). The film provides an ingratiating encounter with the storied, rock-festooned Maine coast, accompanied by an audio of accordion and taped ocean sound. There is no narration, just image, sound and elegiac music, as ocean waves endlessly and variously crash upon the rocks, the sun becomes clouded then bright again, and water and sky ever change hue. America “grew up” with landscape painting of the Romantic era, beginning effectively with Thomas Cole, and, continuing in the dramatic seascape narratives of the Maine coast by Winslow Homer. Welling’s film adds yet another iteration of aesthetic and method to this tradition [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Current Exhibit, Film, The Line

Ellsworth Kelly’s Plant Drawings

June 26, 2017 By Donald Lindeman Leave a Comment

at Matthew Marks Gallery, NYC
Reviewed by Donald Lindeman

This exhibition of Ellsworth Kelly’s plant drawings is a companion exhibition to Ellsworth Kelly, Last Paintings, shown at the Matthew Marks space directly next door on West 22nd Street. The late Ellsworth Kelly’s oeuvre is unusual in that he pursued quite various themes and ways of artmaking in a range of media, including painting, drawing, prints, and photographs. Ellsworth Kelly had wanted to pursue art from a young age, and following a tour of service in the Army during World War II, he studied art in Boston and then Paris. He began making drawings of plants in the late 1940s in both of these cities, and his fascination with plants as subject continued throughout his career. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Current Exhibit, The Line

Creatures Present And In Wait: Marcel Eichner’s Point Blank

May 3, 2017 By Donald Lindeman Leave a Comment

at James Fuentes Gallery, NYC
Reviewed by Donald Lindeman

Point Blank is the title of the exhibition of four new paintings by Berlin based German painter Marcel Eichner (b. 1977, Siegburg, Germany) at James Fuentes Gallery, New York. In this show, Eichner works in acrylic and ink, with vigorous ink drawing and marks on broad washes of acrylic ground in pastel pinks and blues, and areas of white. These paintings mark the fulfillment of a new phase in Eichner’s approach to painting, since he has now moved away from his earlier idiom derived from the style of his mentor at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Jörg Immendorff. In his earlier work, Eichner emulated the piecework integration of figure and ground that is characteristic of Immendorff, an almost claustrophobic “interior-view” aesthetic so often found in the German Expressionist tradition. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Current Exhibit, The Line

Vija Celmins’ Splendor Of Stars

March 22, 2017 By Donald Lindeman Leave a Comment

Matthew Marks Gallery, NYC  
Reviewed by Donald Lindeman

A confusion about media is at the heart of Vija Celmins‘ artmaking. In her new show at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, are paintings, prints and sculptures, but we soon learn that things are seldom what they seem in Celmins’ art. The paintings and prints are based on photographs made by her, and some of the sculptures are ‘real’ found objects, e.g. stones, writing tablets, that are juxtaposed to mind-boggling “doubles” crafted by the artist. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Current Exhibit, The Line

Riot Sounds

New Work From Black Milk: “Laugh Now Cry Later”

New Work From Black Milk: “Laugh Now Cry Later”

From the Fever release:

Kendrick Lamar’s Pre-Pulitzer, “untitled 06 l 06.30.2014.”

Kendrick Lamar’s Pre-Pulitzer, “untitled 06 l 06.30.2014.”

In salute to Kendrick Lamar’s historic Pulitzer Prize for DAMN.; this isn’t from DAMN. (ha ha!), but it points nevertheless to some high Lamarian sound. From the untitled unmastered release. Featuring  CeeLo Green:

https://www.riotmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/06-untitled-06-l-06.30.2014..m4a

on Aftermath/Interscope

From <i>Blonde,</i> Frank Ocean’s “Pink + White”

From Blonde, Frank Ocean’s “Pink + White”

Featuring Beyoncé

Directed by Mikhail Mutskyi
Blonde, on Boys Don’t Cry Records

The Line

Chaplin’s Stuttering Body And The Utopian Potential Of Film

Chaplin’s Stuttering Body And The Utopian Potential Of Film

By Timofei Gerber Courtesy of Epoché (ἐποχή) “With time, the invention of printing has rendered the human face unreadable. […] By that, the visible being [Geist] has turned into a readable being, and the visualculture has turned into a conceptual one. […] Nowadays, another machine is at work, which is turning culture back to the visual and is […]

The Cross-Bordered <i>DeLIMITations</i> Bridges An Era’s Divide

The Cross-Bordered DeLIMITations Bridges An Era’s Divide

at Museo De La Artes, Guadalajara, Mexico Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner “Delimitation means the act or process of fixing limits or boundaries of territorial constituencies in a country or province having a legislative body” A timely and compelling installation at Museo De La Artes, Guadalajara, Mexico, entitled DeLIMITations by Mexican artist Marcus Ramirez ERRE […]

Wes Anderson’s <i>Isle of Dogs</i> Is As Whimsical As It Is Wearying

Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs Is As Whimsical As It Is Wearying

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko Nearly nine years after the success of his charming heist flick Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson returns to stop-motion animation and tales of untamed yet lovable animals with Isle of Dogs. With this original story set in a dystopian Japan, the acclaimed filmmaker steps out of his comfort zone, creating an […]

Lauren Halsey: we still here, there

Lauren Halsey: we still here, there

at MOCA Grand Avenue (Through September 3, 2018) Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch Appearing simultaneously prehistoric and futuristic, the labyrinthine cave formations presented in MOCA Grand Avenue’s fantastical current installation, Lauren Halsey: we still here, there are bathed in ethereal suffusions of cerulean, emerald, magenta, and violet light. This site-specific showing presents maximalism at its most […]

On Bruno Mars

On Bruno Mars

by Seren Sensei Bruno Mars is an agent of the system of white supremacy. There. I said it. More pointedly, Mars is representative of a system that smudges out Black people, specifically Black Americans, while white and non-Black persons of color benefit from anti-Black racism and white supremacy. If Mars were white, we—the Black community—would […]

The City as an Abyss of Dreams: Michael Chrisoulakis’s <i>Los Angeles Overnight</i>

The City as an Abyss of Dreams: Michael Chrisoulakis’s Los Angeles Overnight

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo Los Angeles. The city is damned and neon-lit, devourer of the modern-day wanderer in search of gold and social stability, like some hip reincarnation of the Conquistadors. Pauline Kael once wrote that L.A. is the city “where people have given in to the beauty that always looks unreal.” This is ever […]

Real Worlds: Brassaï, Arbus, Goldin

Real Worlds: Brassaï, Arbus, Goldin

at MOCA Grand Avenue (Through September 3, 2018) Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch Borrowing from its vast and momentous photography collection, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) is currently exploring themes of intimacy, non-traditional relationships, and marginalized people through Real Worlds: Brassaï, Arbus, Goldin. This gripping group exhibition centers around images from Brassaï’s provocative […]

<i>Won’t You Be My Neighbor?</i> Is A Gentle And Needed Battle Cry

Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Is A Gentle And Needed Battle Cry

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko It seems almost impossible. For 33 years, Fred Rogers switched into sneakers and a cozy cardigan, and nestled in to host a children’s show called Mister Rogers Neighborhood. The times changed. TV became flooded with loud and violent cartoons that were basically thinly-veiled toy commercials. But Rogers was a constant, always […]

The Great Crime Decline, Yet The War On Crime Rages On

The Great Crime Decline, Yet The War On Crime Rages On

by Adam Gopnik Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, The Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence by Patrick Sharkey W. W. Norton & Company. 272 pp. $26.95 Excerpt courtesy of Adam Gopnik and The New Yorker […] In the United States over the past three decades, while people argue about tax cuts […]

The Chosen One: A Conversation With Celebrated Photographer Gusmano Cesaretti

The Chosen One: A Conversation With Celebrated Photographer Gusmano Cesaretti

by Pancho Lipschitz Gusmano Cesaretti pulls a book off the shelf in his South Pasadena studio and hands it to me. The book is on Chaz Bojorquez, the Godfather of East L.A. graffiti. He opens the front cover and shows me where Chaz has written in beautiful stylish script, “To El más chingón. You started […]

Self Excavating In John Biscello’s <i>Raking The Dust</i>

Self Excavating In John Biscello’s Raking The Dust

Reviewed by Ashleigh Grycner Raking the Dust (forthcoming on Unsolicited Press–April 3)  By John Biscello 452 pp. Raking the Dust, John Biscello‘s masterful second novel, is first and foremost a novel about second chances. It’s about addiction, obsession, and ultimately, salvation. It’s about the fact that “all roads lead to Heaven,” and sometimes one needs to get lost […]

X Artists’ Books: Literatures Of Displacement And Permission

X Artists’ Books: Literatures Of Displacement And Permission

By Shana Nys Dambrot “What is your secret book?” Alexandra Grant asks the assembled audience. “Everyone has one.” This was in response to a question from the evening’s moderator, as to how and why she as an artist and actor Keanu Reeves came to be partners in the limited-run indie publishing company, X Artists’ Books, […]

Love in the Shadowland of Myth: Rainer Sarnet’s <i>November</i>

Love in the Shadowland of Myth: Rainer Sarnet’s November

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo Cinema has the capacity to become a conduit for dreams and nightmares, combining both into something the ancients could have scarcely imagined- the physical manifestation of myth. If critics such as Roland Barthes and Octavio Paz are correct, then the ritual of cinema or television has replaced the pagan rituals of […]

Judy Chicago’s <i>PowerPlay: A Prediction</i>

Judy Chicago’s PowerPlay: A Prediction

at Salon 94, NYC Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban Consistently miles ahead of the curve, the uber-feminist Judy Chicago has been so prescient that it has, at various key moments, worked against her. It sometimes seemed—and certainly must have felt—that despite presaging much of our current predicament, she was, unfortunately, pissing into the wind for entirely […]

Emmeric Konrad: Walking On Thin Ice Just To See My Reflection

Emmeric Konrad: Walking On Thin Ice Just To See My Reflection

at Tieken Gallery, Los Angeles (through March 31, 2018) Reviewed by Shana Nys Dambrot Emmeric Konrad paints angels with dirty faces, serafim porn stars, saints with reality-hangovers, and refugees from justice in rags of former couture. Chainsmokers at church, day-drinkers at Disneyland. His fraught and tectonic compositions are like stream of consciousness literature or automatic […]

The Nightmare of History: Ahmed Saadawi’s <i>Frankenstein in Baghdad</i>

The Nightmare of History: Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo The spirit of an age is best captured in the artistic visions inspired by the times. This rings true in both the visual and literary arts. The Middle East has been the center of the world situation for so long that in the West we cannot think of the region without […]

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art. word. thought.