Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

An Interview With Artist and Critic Rose Vickers

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By Sam Trioli

With the recent group exhibition Future Starts Slow at LAUNCH F18, participating artist Rose Vickers and I took the occasion to discuss her artmaking and extensive writing practices. Rose grew up in Australia and has spent time living and traveling throughout many regions of the world. Rose and I both discovered each other’s work through Instagram and followed one another for many years before finally meeting in 2018.

While many know Rose for her writing, which has been published in Mousse Magazine, Oyster, and Artist Profile among others, she in her own right is an incredibly talented visual artist. The way in which she views her subject matter has always stood out to me as an incredibly unique perspective. We began our conversation about her work and duality of her combined artistic practices and where throughout her process they converge. [Read more…]

Michael Ajerman’s Possessions And Marty Schnapf’s Loves and Lovers

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at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles (through August 17)
Reviewed by Genie Davis

Michael Ajerman and Marty Schnapf each offer their own elegant and sensual images in two strong solo shows at Diane Rosenstein Gallery. While Ajerman works with vivid colors in his figurative oil paintings, Schnapf’s current body of work is in nearly-life-size black and white. Both offer deeply intimate expressions that are filled with energy and pulsing with life. There is a physicality to both artists’ work that makes them ideally paired, although the outward appearance of each exhibition is visually diverse in palette and style. [Read more…]

Against Our Will: Sexual Trauma In American Art Since 1970

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Reviewed by Coco Fusco

Against Our Will: Sexual Trauma in American Art Since 1970
by Vivien Green Fryd
Pennsylvania State University Press, 349 pp., $49.95
Review courtesy of The New York Review of Books

In 1974 the performance artist Marina Abramovic stood naked and immobile in a Naples gallery. Next to her was a table with seventy-two objects, including a loaded gun. Beside the objects was a document absolving the audience of responsibility for whatever they might choose to do to her with those objects.  [Read more…]

Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark

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Reviewed by Christopher Tayler

Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark
by Cecelia Watson
Ecco. 224 pp. $19.99
Courtesy of Harper’s Magazine

Pietro Bembo, a Venetian poet and scholar, staked his first claim to fame in a short book he published in 1496, when he was in his mid-­twenties. De Aetna described, in Latin, a hike Bembo had made to the top of Mount Etna in Sicily. Even in summer, he observed, there was snow on the peak. An ancient Greek geographer, Strabo, had said that there wasn’t, but the evidence of one’s own eyes, Bembo wrote, was “no less an authority.” This was Renaissance humanism flexing its muscles—a few generations earlier, an ancient geographer might have carried more authority than a firsthand report—and it wasn’t the only instance of that in Bembo’s book. Various marks subdivided his text. One of them, which signaled both a medium-length pause and a semantic boundary inside a sentence, hadn’t been used for that particular function before. Between them, Bembo; his publisher, Aldus Manutius; and Manutius’s type maker, Francesco Griffo, were introducing the world to a new punctuation mark: the semicolon. [Read more…]

Kristen Roupenian’s You Know You Want This: “Cat Person” and Other Stories

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Reviewed by Ruth Franklin

You Know You Want This: “Cat Person” and Other Stories
by Kristen Roupenian
Scout, 225 pp., $24.99
Courtesy of The New York Review of Books

It has happened only twice in nearly seventy years: a short story appears in The New Yorker and goes viral, setting off an avalanche of responses. Some readers, fooled by its up-to-date style, misinterpret it as a piece of reportage. Others attack the author as a sadist or a misanthrope. And many more are simply confused about what it means. Is it an allegory for the suffering that women face under patriarchy? A screed that indicts contemporary society more generally? Or just a tale taken from everyday life in which something goes horribly wrong? [Read more…]

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

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Reviewed by Caroline Fraser

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth
by Sarah Smarsh
Scribner, 290 pp., $26.00
Courtesy of The New York Review of Books

As told in her ambitious and moving new memoir, Heartland, Sarah Smarsh’s life was ripped right out of a Bruce Springsteen song. “Spare Parts,” for one: “Bobby said he’d pull out Bobby stayed in/Janey had a baby it wasn’t any sin.”

That’s pretty much the tale the author tells of her own conception, except that her father was Nick and her mother was seventeen-year-old Jeannie. On Halloween night, 1979, Nick and Jeannie are having sex in his parents’ basement when Jeannie says, “Don’t come in me!” Nick pays no attention. Like most Springsteen songs, the story ends in melancholy, or what Thomas Hardy, in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, his great Victorian novel about the debasement of poor country women, called “the ache of modernism.” [Read more…]

Riot At The Astor Place Opera House

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by Steven Rosenthal

My first historical theater experience was at 16, when my mom took me to see Jason Robards star as Hickey in The Iceman Cometh, by Eugene O’Neil. The dialogue was deep, fast-paced, dramatic, the characters themselves characteristically downmarket. The play, in brief, revolves around a classic crew of bottom-of-the-barrel drunks, has-beens who never were, pimps who claimed they were bartenders and their sleazy whores in a bar at the bottom of a flophouse in lower Manhattan in 1907. Harry Hope, the benevolent proprietor of the Greenwich Village Saloon, had not been outside the establishment in the years since his sainted wife had met her maker. [Read more…]

Jan Švankmajer’s Insects: On Meaning in Surrealist Film

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by Timofei Gerber

Last year, Jan Švankmajer, the great master of surrealist cinema, returned to his roots with another stop-motion film mixed with live footage in the same vein as his classics Alice (1988) and Faust (1994). Yet there is something that is immediately striking in Insects (2018), namely that it keeps breaking the fourth wall and working with meta-levels. There is, first, an introduction where Švankmajer speaks directly to the audience, offering cues to how the movie is supposed to be understood. Then, throughout the film we see how the practical and stop-motion effects were created; we witness various stage directions to the actors, who each talk about their dreams to the camera. Finally, as Insects is somewhat of an adaptation of a play by the brothers Čapek, we ourselves witness an amateur theatre group working on its adaptation. [Read more…]

Norman Rockwell v. The State Of Public Art

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Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt, & The Four Freedoms
A traveling exhibition, with Reimagining the Four Freedoms
currently at The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum, Washington, DC (through April 29)
Reviewed by Kevin Baker
Courtesy of Harper’s Magazine

The fight over which of our public monuments should remain where they are is as complicated as the American past they commemorate. For all the fighting over who and what we should not honor from our past, there is one vital element that has been missing from the argument: that is, what we should honor and aspire to now. [Read more…]

Caramelized Onion, Mushroom, Kale & Aged Gruyere Quiche

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by Anuja Rane

1 Trader Joe’s pie crust
1 big or two small sweet yellow onions
4-5 leaves Tuscan kale
1 pack 3/4 oz Oyster mushrooms
1/2 pack 3/4 oz Shitake mushrooms
1 1/4 cup grated  Cave aged Gruyere cheese
2 sprigs fresh thyme
Butter, as needed for sautéing 
3/4 cup heavy cream
3/4 cup whole milk
4 eggs
Salt to taste 
Ground White pepper to taste
Fresh cracked Black pepper to taste
9-10” pie dish for baking

Remove pie curst and let sit at room temperature for an hour or hour and a half. Unroll pie crust without removing the plastic film on both sides. If you see cracks take a rolling pin and smooth out the cracks and the edges rolling over the plastic films. Remove one side of the plastic film and place the crust facing down in your pie dish. Remove the other side of the film and bake the pie crust as instructed on the Trader Joe’s pie crust package. Do not forget to prick holes in the crust before baking as suggested. After baking let cool at room temperature. [Read more…]

Theatricum Botanicum Sees Plants As Dynamic Agents Of History

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Reviewed by Robin Scher

“I am far from convinced that being released from the African witch doctor was worthwhile if I am now — in order to support the moral contradictions of and the spiritual aridity of life — expected to become dependent on the American psychiatrist. It is a bargain I refuse. The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want is power — and no one holds power forever.”  –James Baldwin, Letter from a Region in my Mind

In November 2017, at the University of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, French president Emmanuel Macron delivered a speech that cracked open a pandora’s box of sorts. “I cannot accept that a large part of cultural heritage from several African countries is in France,” Macron told a rather skeptical audience, further proclaiming that he expected within five years “the conditions to be met for the temporary or permanent restitution of African heritage to Africa.” Whether or not this was intended as a diplomatic platitude, almost a year to the day a landmark report on the question of repatriation, commissioned by Macron, was published. And with that report, a wider crack appeared. [Read more…]

Hunting in the Dark

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by Kika Dorsey

Joan was convinced she had cancer. Sometimes it was a dull ache in her side, sometimes a cut that didn’t heal. She knew of a woman with Crohn’s Disease and just recently an old friend of hers died of pancreatic cancer. It was just a matter of time before those alien cells took over her body. Her body was on the edge of a cliff, ready to fall. When she got out her Tarot deck, she always drew the Fool. Once she saw the Hermit in a dream. He dropped his lantern and the light tumbled down into a rocky canyon, glowing on the silver cliffs as it fell. It was winter, with pockets of snow on the peaks. [Read more…]

Smoked Lavender And Berry Compote

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by Anuja Rane

Small pack of blueberries
Small pack of raspberries
Small pack of blackberries
Fresh lavender
1½  pinch Hepps smoked salt
¾ cup raw cane sugar

Place all the ingredients in a pot and simmer on a medium flame until it turns to mush. Let cool and refrigerate. Serve on bread, a scone, and the compote goes wonderfully with cheese, crackers and a glass of wine. Will last up to 10 days refrigerated. [Read more…]

Where to Begin?

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by Jacques J. Rancourt

First, we’re skinny-dipping,
Sam & I, in a pond in Tennessee,

which is his idea, I should say,
& the tree with the rope swing
looms darker

than the dark night sky.

Second, the harvest moon,
which we came here to see,

is nowhere to be found,
instead the sky burning with stars
I can’t see without my glasses [Read more…]

Penal Cistern Lightning Throne Lightning Rebounded

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by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Back into the body all the lightning goes
back into the body. Up through the crown
of the skull and round again like the Whip-It
at the fairgrounds. Pushing the boundaries
of the light body. Overloading the light
body. Silly bowl shaking above the bowl
of the skull, which is a bowl holding court over
bowl the brain. Bowl into bowl into bowl.
All the curves pressing together. Too much
light in the light body. Body of cattle after long [Read more…]