Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Now All The Plagues That In The Pendulous Air Hang Fated O’er Men’s Faults

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by Emma Smith
The New York Times

Plague erased social, gender and personal differences. Shakespeare responded by emphasizing people’s unique and inerasable difference. His work is a narrative vaccine.

Twitter has been taunting us: When he was in quarantine from the plague, William Shakespeare wrote King Lear. He had an advantage, of sorts: Shakespeare’s life was marked by plague. Just weeks after his baptism at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, the register read, “Hic incepit pestis” (Here begins the plague). Mortality rates in the town were four times that of the previous, plague-free year. Shakespeare, the son of the town’s glover, survived it and many further outbreaks. Much of his work was composed, if not in lockdown, then in the shadow of a highly infectious disease without a known cure. [Read more…]

Miraculous And Peculiar: Gerhard Richter’s Solemn Retrospective, Painting After All

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at Met Breuer, NYC (through 5 July 2020)
Reviewed by Peter Schjeldahl
The New Yorker

“Birkenau.” The dread name—of the main death facilities at Auschwitz—entitles four large abstract paintings and four full-sized digital reproductions of them in the last gallery of Painting After All, a peculiarly solemn Gerhard Richter retrospective at the Met Breuer. The works are based on four clandestine photographs that were smuggled out of the concentration camp in 1944. Two, taken from the shadowed exit of a gas chamber, show naked corpses strewn on the ground and smoke rising from bodies afire in a trench beyond them. Men in uniform stand at ease—two appear to chat—amid the shambles. Richter first saw the images in the fifties. He encountered them again in 2008 and kept the worst of them hanging in his studio in Cologne. In 2014, he projected them onto canvas and traced them. As he worked, they became illegible. The finished paintings exemplify Richter’s frequent style of densely layered, dragged pigments. They are unusually harsh in aspect, with clashing red and green, sickly whites, and grim blacks. But you’d hardly guess, by looking, their awful inspiration. [Read more…]

Cornel West’s “Democracy Matters in Race Matters”

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Preface to the 25th Anniversary Edition to Race Matters

Race Matters
by Cornel West
Beacon Press, 110pp., $11.60

Black people in the United States differ from all other modern people owing to the unprecedented levels of unregulated and unrestrained violence directed at them. No other people have been taught systematically to hate themselves — psychic violence — reinforced by the powers of state and civic coercion — physical violence — for the primary purpose of controlling their minds and exploiting their labor for nearly four hundred years. The unique combination of American terrorism — Jim Crow and lynching — as well as American barbarism — slave trade and slave labor — bears witness to the distinctive American assault on black humanity. This vicious ideology and practice of white supremacy has left its indelible mark on all spheres of American life — from the prevailing crimes of Amerindian reservations to the discriminatory realities against Spanish-speaking Latinos to racial stereotypes against Asians. Yet the fundamental litmus test for American democracy — its economy, government, criminal justice system, education, mass media, and culture — remains: how broad and intense are the arbitrary powers used and deployed against black people. In this sense, the problem of the twenty-first century remains the prob­lem of the color line. [Read more…]

Subversion As Transmission In klipschutz’s Premeditations

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Reviewed by James McWilliams

Premeditations
by klipschutz
Hoot n Waddle, 120pp., $16.00

Premeditations is a poet’s ode to poets. With wry nostalgia, klipschutz (the name author Kurt Lipschutz goes by), a San Francisco poet and songwriter (who works closely with the musician Chuck Prophet), opens his paean to poetry by defending the increasingly endangered sacred space where one typically discovers words that fuel the spirit: a bookstore. “North Beach Threnody,” the volume’s opening poem, leads with this stanza:

A landmark, registered, and us inside it,
folded up in folding chairs, with
everything outside moving
fast in another direction.
 [Read more…]

McCoy Tyner, The Greatest Jazz Pianist Of All Time, Is Dead at 81

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By Ben Ratliff
The New York Times

McCoy Tyner, a cornerstone of John Coltrane’s groundbreaking 1960s quartet and one of the most influential pianists in jazz history, has died. He was 81. His death was announced on his Facebook page, which gave no further details. Along with Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and only a few others, Mr. Tyner was one of the main expressways of modern jazz piano. Nearly every jazz pianist since Mr. Tyner’s years with Coltrane has had to learn his lessons, whether they ultimately discarded them or not. [Read more…]

Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright

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Reviewed by Christopher Benfey

Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright
Paul Hendrickson
Knopf, 624 pp., $35.00
Harper’s Magazine

Frank Lloyd Wright isn’t just the greatest of all American architects. He has so eclipsed the competition that he can sometimes seem the only one. Who are his potential rivals? Henry Hobson Richardson, that Gilded Age starchitect in monumental stone? Louis Sullivan, lyric poet of the office building and Wright’s own Chicago mentor, best known for his dictum that form follows function? “Yes,” Wright corrected him with typical one-upmanship, “but more important now, form and function are one.” For architects with the misfortune to follow him, Wright is seen as having created the standards by which they are judged. If we know the name Frank Gehry, it’s probably because he designed the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, in 1997. And Gehry’s deconstructed ship of titanium and glass would be unimaginable if Wright hadn’t built his own astonishing Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue some forty years earlier. [Read more…]

The Slave Trade

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by Iman Mersal 
translated from the Arabic by Robyn Creswell
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            I went down the narrow passage, wide enough for one slave at a time, to the harbor.
            An Englishman inspects the line of those leaving the fort—maybe he has unloaded his cargo of missionaries and guns and now waits for a ship to carry him over the ocean to the cane fields. A handsome man, in fact. Why is he smiling at me?
            Piles of gold beneath the palms, piles of salt under the sun.
            When will a sailor come unfasten the iron ball from my feet? I want to make sure the pencil and Moleskin notebook are still in my backpack, since I plan to turn whatever happens to me into heart-wrenching prose.

[Read more…]

A Labyrinth Of Interlocking Lives In Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies

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Reviewed by Ruth Franklin

Celestial Bodies
by Jokha Alharthi, translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth
Catapult, 243 pp., $16.95 (paper)
Review courtesy of The New York Review of Books

In an engrossing book published last spring called Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, the Australian writer Jane Alison makes a trenchant observation about the “dramatic arc” long considered the foundation for plot. Swelling to a climax and then deflating, it resembles nothing so much as a phallus: “Bit masculo-sexual, no?” Alison’s book offers alternative possibilities for fiction based on patterns found in nature, such as the spirals of fiddlehead ferns, seashells, or whirlpools; the meandering path of a river; the radiating shape of a flower; the self-replication of trees or clouds; or the cells in a honeycomb. These structures aren’t necessarily feminine—as it happens, Alison’s investigation of them is inspired by her reading of W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, a work of fiction written by a man with predominantly male characters. But if the dramatic arc has often been associated with the “hero’s journey” model of fiction writing (a lone man goes off on a quest to conquer something), it stands to reason that a novel centered on the stories of women—often communal, connected, operating on many layers—might best be served by a different narrative form. [Read more…]

Art Of The Calculus: Triangulating The Deadly Glowing Crown

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A lucid and most luminous accounting of the Wuhan coronavirus and its numerous potentials.
by Dan Werb
Courtesy of The NY Times

Five cases of the mysterious Wuhan coronavirus have been confirmed in the United States, giving rise to concerns about a potential global pandemic. We’ve seen this story before, as health authorities working with threadbare data try to walk the line between epidemic readiness and needless panic. Is this new outbreak poised to become the next AIDS pandemic or a new SARS, which was stopped in its tracks after 774 deaths? To cut through the headlines, we can use a simple concept called the “epidemic triangle.” Employed by epidemiologists since the discipline’s earliest days, it is indispensable in predicting whether localized outbreaks will transform into full-blown epidemics. [Read more…]

Beauty In The Slaughterhouse: Francis Bacon’s Books And Painting

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Bacon en toutes lettres, Centre Pompidou, Paris (through January 20)
Francis Bacon: Late Paintings, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (February 23 – May 25)

Reviewed by Sarah Stewart-Kroeker and Stephen S. Bush

Humans are susceptible to puncture and cut, and in the end, like all dead organic matter, we’ll spoil. Whatever else we are, we’re meat. Francis Bacon’s paintings incessantly remind us of these truths. Whereas Pablo Picasso’s cubism was perspectival and worked from side to side—merging left, center, and right, Bacon’s is physiological and works from the inside out: interior, surface, and exterior. Organs and bones intermingle with skin and hair. In his oeuvre, the human subject itself serves as the memento mori, it is always figured and disfigured, fleshy and skeletal, animated and decaying.  [Read more…]

The Dagger-Like Behemoth Of MoMA’s Conjoined Super-Tall

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by Martin Filler
Filler examines the “colossal imposition” of 53W53, wherein he states MoMA must now “bear responsibility for making local environmental quality even worse.”
Courtesy of  The New York Review of Books

Among the plethora of disturbingly disproportionate, super-tall, super-thin condominium towers that have spiked the New York City skyline since the turn of the millennium and that graphically symbolize America’s concomitant surge in income inequality, the most recently completed of them marks the spot of the Museum of Modern Art, which inaugurated its latest building project in October, two weeks before its ninetieth anniversary. The dagger-like ultra-high-rise component of the conjoined complex was built to the plans of the French architect Jean Nouvel, while the enlargement of the museum itself is the work of the New York partnership Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) in association with Gensler, the powerhouse multinational firm that often provides technical and construction management expertise on high-style projects conceived by less full-service practitioners. [Read more…]

Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative

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Reviewed by Katie Waldman

Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative
by Jane Alison
Catapult, 272 pp., $12.81(paper)
Review courtesy of the New Yorker

I was in the seventh grade when Jane Alison’s début novel, The Love-Artist fell into my hands, and its effect on me was like a full-body blush. The book, which imagines an answer to the mystery of why Ovid was exiled to the edge of the Black Sea, in 8 A.D., stars a witch whom Ovid first glimpses rising from a pool in strands of water and wild grass. Everything is sensuous. Flowers are carnal. Alison has since written three more novels; she is also a translator and the author of a memoir, The Sisters Antipodes. [Read more…]

Memory Palaces & The Hidden Art: Works And Studies Within The Collection Of Audrey B. Heckler

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Reviewed by Sanford Schwartz
Memory Palaces: Inside the Collection of Audrey B. Heckler (through January 26)
an exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum, NYC, January 26, 2020
 
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There are two stories, one might say, being told at the American Folk Art Museum’s current show Memory Palaces: Inside the Collection of Audrey B. Heckler. The first and more clear-cut is that the exhibition gives us a chance to see what must be one of the most discerning and wide-ranging collections of self-taught, or outsider, art in this country. There are top-notch works here by artists of varying degrees of recognition, many of whom were active in the middle and later years of the last century. Some, including Carlo Zinelli, William Hawkins, Adolf Wölfli, Thornton Dial, and Madge Gill, are known to people who follow this art but are not quite household names. There are strong works here as well by artists—such as Christine Sefolosha, Malcolm McKesson, and Edmund Monsiel—whose pictures may come as a welcome surprise to nearly everybody. And there are fine pieces by Bill Traylor and James Castle, and extraordinary ones by Martín Ramírez, who are all becoming widely known.

[Read more…]

Lightly Through The Looking Glass With Apple’s [AR]T Walk

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By Mayne

Alert the critics: The cutting edge of New York City’s art avantgarde can now be found at the Fifth Avenue Apple Store. Amid the blistering doldrums of summer, Apple has offered [AR]T Walk a guided tour of their new augmented reality exhibit. Co-curated with the New Museum, the tour is being offered in five other cities around the world: London, Paris, San Francisco, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, though the latter has been suspended indefinitely due to the political instability. [Read more…]

Lilly Bright’s American Standard: A Story of Enough

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at Highways Performance Space, Los Angeles (through September 28)
By Steven Mirkin

Although the Los Angeles premiere of her one-woman show, American Standard: A Story of Enough, is just a few weeks away, Lilly Bright sounds relaxed and self-possessed talking on the phone. It’s more impressive when you find out she’s working with a new director, Valerie Hager. This makes a bit more sense if you’ve seen the play. A wrenching story of bulimia, family secrets, addictions and cures, the show ends with Bright finding comfort and understanding in an unexpected manner and place, American Standard is unsparing in its self-examination, but leavened by Bright’s humor, sharp ear for detail, and arresting presence. The story is told through voice (she’s a wicked, precise mimic) and stylized movement (she studied in Tel Aviv with Ohad Naharin and the Batsheva Dance Company, learning his Gaga movement language). [Read more…]