Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

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

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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 and terrorism, the wave of social change that has most altered the shape of American life, as much as the new embankments of the Thames changed life then, has been what the N.Y.U. sociologist Patrick Sharkey calls “the great crime decline.” The term, which seems to have originated with the influential Berkeley criminologist Franklin E. Zimring, refers to the still puzzling disappearance from our big-city streets of violent crime, so long the warping force of American life—driving white flight to the suburbs and fuelling the rise of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, not to mention the career of Martin Scorsese. (“Taxi Driver” is the great poem of New York around the height of high crime, with steam coming out of the hellish manholes and violence recumbent in the back seat.) No one saw it coming, and the still odder thing is that, once it came, no one seemed adequately equipped to praise it. [Read more…]

Self Excavating In John Biscello’s Raking The Dust

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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 in order to get found. That things at times need to get crazy, hairy, utterly confused before arriving  face to face with that which we most fear. Ultimately, it is in the grip of our own terror that we find the courage to say the brave No that is a Yes to our own Innocence. [Read more…]

Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre?

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an exhibition at the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam, (through March 25, 2018)
Reviewed by Lisa Appignanesi

Life? or Theatre?
by Charlotte Salomon
Overlook Duckworth, 815 pp., $150.00

Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre?: A Selection of 450 Gouaches
Taschen, 599 pp., $35.00

Excerpted from Painting on the Precipice, in  the 22 February issue of  NYRB 

A woman walks down the red stairs of a tall roofless building. Her dress is almost black. Her hair is pulled back, her arms crossed against the cold, her face melancholy. She walks past denuded trees up a darkened street, curves into another, and another. The wind seems to be propelling her, tugging at her, so that at one point her hair tumbles free, her dress whirls. Lamplight turns pavement and road a stormy sea blue. As she comes closer her path is outlined in blood red, until red takes her over to transform her into a drowning figure in a blackened lake. [Read more…]

Glenn Harcourt’s The Artist, The Censor, And The Nude

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Excerpt published with permission of DoppelHouse Press, Los Angeles.

The Artist, The Censor, and The Nude: A Tale of Morality and Appropriation
By Glenn Harcourt
DoppelHouse Press. 190 pp. $34.95

by Glenn Harcourt

Of all the topographies that exist in the world, that of the human body is perhaps the one that has been the most relentlessly contested – both the actual body comprising flesh and blood, and the virtual body as it is written and visualized in representation. This is true of the body both male and female, and of the body both clothed and unclothed. Issues of personal and cultural identity; of sexual and theological politics; of religious and political ideology are all articulated in terms of the body and its represented image. The body as it is lived and pictured serves both to instantiate and to adjudicate cultural norms and to facilitate their transgression.

Thus it is that both the body and its image have come to be censored, at various places and times, and under many cultural regimes. That censorship has certainly been a fact in post-Revolutionary Iran, where laws governing the dressing, adornment, and deportment of the physical body, as well as the body’s image in cultural production have been continuously in place, if at times somewhat erratically enforced. [Read more…]

Art et Liberté: Rupture, War and Surrealism in Egypt (1938–1948)

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at the Tate Liverpool (through March 18, 2018)
Reviewed by Charles Shafaieh

Excerpted from Art et Liberté: Egypt’s Surrealists in the 3 February NYRB

Marcel-Laurent Salinas. Birth, 1944.

In March 1938, the Egyptian poet and critic Georges Henein and a small group of friends disrupted a lecture in Cairo given by the Alexandria-born Italian Futurist F.T. Marinetti, who was an outspoken supporter of Mussolini. Six months later, Henein, along with the Egyptian writer Anwar Kamel, the Italian anarchist painter Angelo de Riz, and thirty-four other artists, writers, journalists, and lawyers, signed the manifesto “Vive l’Art Dégénéré!” (“Long Live Degenerate Art!”) that would inaugurate Art et Liberté, a short-lived but influential artists’ collective based in Egypt that is the focus of an illuminating exhibition currently at the Tate Liverpool, in Britain, covering the years 1938–1948. Printed in Arabic and French, with a facsimile of Guernica on its reverse, the declaration was a direct challenge to the previous year’s Nazi-organized exhibition “Entartete ‘Kunst’” (“Degenerate ‘Art’”), which presented art by Chagall, Kandinsky and other modern artists, largely Jewish, that the Nazi Party deemed decadent, morally reprehensible or otherwise harmful to the German people. [Read more…]

The Great Deflowering, or How Gay Marriage Took The Queer Out Of Gay Culture

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by Fenton Johnson

Excerpted from “The Future of Queer: A Manifesto,” 
in the January issues of Harper’s Magazine

In the spring of 2017, for the first time since publishing a memoir set at the height of San Francisco’s AIDS epidemic, I summoned the nerve to teach a course on memoir—which is to say, at least as I taught it, a course on the necessity of personal witness, a course against forgetting. Mostly I avoided the subject of AIDS, not wanting to be the grizzled old veteran croaking war stories to a classroom of undergraduates. But since AIDS memoirs are among the best examples of the genre, I decided I had to foray into the minefields of those memories. I surprised myself by choosing not one of several poignant memoirs but the edgy anger of Close to the Knives, by the artist David Wojnarowicz, with its hustler sex and pickup sex and anonymous sex on the decaying piers of Chelsea and amid the bleak emptiness of the Arizona desert, one eye cocked at the rearview mirror to watch for the cop who might appear and haul your naked ass to the county jail, sixty miles of rock and creosote bushes distant.* Wojnarowicz was thirty-seven years old when he died of AIDS in 1992. [Read more…]

The Rediscovered Art of Gil Cuatrecasas

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at the LA Art Show 2018, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Janna Avner

The paintings of Gil Cuatrecasas were exhibited at the LA Art Show 2018 last week (Jan 10-14th). His booth of large acrylics—depicting vibrant, botanical chucks of color crosshatched like Joseph Albers’ early optical studies and densely layered like white noise or confetti— will be the prelude to a major 2020 retrospective at American University Museum in Washington, D.C. [Read more…]

Every Moment Was One Of Dying

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After 79 Years, Joe Frank Departs
RIP
1938 | 2018

The two samples below are enough to show Frank’s savage (and hysterical!) brilliance, but if you need further proof, or merely more of Joe Frank’s wonderous vision, go to joefrank.com and listen to virtually his entire career. Below, Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin & Mao speak of tailors, floral arrangements, paint colors and books while the lesser-breeds, those less brilliant and accomplished — the pikey-lot of Gary Gilmore, Jeffrey Dahmer, JW Gacy, T-Bone Bundy and Charlie Manson sit with party hats at a nearby children’s table, wordless, inconsequential, shunned. In the second clip, a preacher speaks in Old Nick’s tongue:

“No More my Lord,” from Bad Karma (2000).

“Telephone Prayer,” a clip from Joe Frank’s Men of the Cloth (2001).

[Read more…]

The Incidental Beauty Of Birthing A Pencil

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Inside General Pencil Company, Jersey City
Photographs by Christopher Payne
Text by Sam Anderson

Excerpted from “Inside One of America’s Last Pencil Factories,” 
in the 12 January The New York Times Magazine

A pencil is a little wonder-wand: a stick of wood that traces the tiniest motions of your hand as it moves across a surface. I am using one now, making weird little loops and slashes to write these words. As a tool, it is admirably sensitive. The lines it makes can be fat or thin, screams or whispers, blocks of concrete or blades of grass, all depending on changes of pressure so subtle that we would hardly notice them in any other context. (The difference in force between a bold line and nothing at all would hardly tip a domino.) And while a pencil is sophisticated enough to track every gradation of the human hand, it is also simple enough for a toddler to use. [Read more…]

The Frosty, Scintillanting Aesthetic Of Alex Katz

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at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York City
Reviewed by David Salle

Catalog of the exhibition with essays by Frank O’Hara and Tom McGlynn
Gavin Brown’s enterprise, 72 pp. $20. (paper)
From “Playing It Cool” in the 18 January 2018 NYRB 

Other animals use tools, but as far as I know, we’re the only ones to make paintbrushes. Painting is a physical thing, like sports or ballet. There are important exceptions, of course, like Wade Guyton and his followers, who use computers, scanners, and inkjet printers to make paintings, but for anyone not placing a heavy bet on digital tech, how one grips the brush matters, as does each finely calibrated aspect in the chain of command from brain to canvas: the size and shape of the brush, the viscosity of the paint, and the pressure exerted by the shoulder-arm-hand continuum, its direction and velocity. That’s what painting is on a physical level: brush hitting canvas. It’s been going on for a long time because the way it links perception with action intersects with something elemental about humans. Painting is no more passé than drumming or, for that matter, pole-vaulting, which is not to say that we all need to do it, or can. [Read more…]

“The Curtain,” by Hayden Carruth

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From Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey: Poems, 1991-1995
(Copper Canyon Press)
Just over the horizon a great machine of death is roaring and rearing.
We can hear it always. Earthquake, starvation, the ever-renewing sump of corpse-flesh.
But in this valley the snow falls silently all day, and out our window
We see the curtain of it shifting and folding, hiding us away in our little house,
We see earth smoothened and beautified, made like a fantasy, the snow-clad trees
So graceful.

[Read more…]

Barbara Comyns, The Juniper Tree

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by Christine Smallwood

The Juniper Tree
by Barbara Comyns
NYRB Classics. 192pp. $14.95
From December 2017, Harper’s Magazine

When you consider the savagery of your run-of-the-mill fairy tale, our use of the term to connote “romance” or “idealization” smacks of nothing more than romance and idealization — a semantic circle of willful delusion. Take “The Juniper Tree,” by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. A woman longs for a child, gets pregnant, gives birth to a son, and dies. The father remarries. One day, while the little boy has his head in a chest filled with apples, his stepmother slams down the lid, decapitating him. “Maybe I can get out of this,” she thinks. She ties the boy’s head back on with a scarf, convinces her daughter that she killed him, and cooks him into a stew. The truth comes out when a bird, channeling the boy’s spirit, crushes the stepmother with a millstone. It’s gruesome. But the story’s most grotesque feature is this mild sentence about the first wife: “Then she had a child as white as snow and as red as blood, and when she saw it, she was so happy that she died.” [Read more…]