Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Jess: Secret Compartments

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Reviewed by Shana Nys Dambrot
at Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles (through September 7, 2018)

A lifetime-spanning survey of works by Jess (1923-2004) is bound to be a bit meta — because the work that Jess produced across his long career was itself always already a survey of his own life and times. From his earliest paintings in the 1950s to his latter-day collage-based compositions made well into the 1990s, with drawing, sculpture, and video collaborations along the way, Jess was at every moment consciously assembling an archive of his own obsessions. These included but were not limited to literature (especially James Joyce), history, science, mythology, flowers, cats, magazines, tag sales, and interior design. His voracious visual appetite ranged from dreamy homoerotic fantasy to pragmatic current-events clippings, and above all he loved a good story. [Read more…]

Getting Lost On The High Ground Of Greater Than L.A.

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at Desert Center, Los Angeles (through 21 July 2018)
Reviewed by Shana Nys Dambrot 

There’s something about Los Angeles that makes people constantly wrestle with what it means and never tire of describing how life is lived here. No other place, not even Paris or New York, has sponsored such a compendium of self-reflexive art and literature, almost all somehow both obsessive and ambivalent at the same time. L.A. is the kind of place where people who’ve never been here have more passion and frequently more insight about its nature than natives, which is to say, Hollywood especially, is such an aspirational, archetypal place, that there’s almost more cultural currency in projection and fantasy than in a direct yet diffuse experience of it. [Read more…]

The Aggressively Uncategorizable Roger Ballen

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Roger Ballen: Ballenesque
at Fahey/Klein Gallery (through June 16, 2018)
Reviewed by Shana Nys Dambrot

Ballenesque: Roger Ballen: A Retrospective
by Roger Ballen and Robert JC Young
Thames & Hudson, 336 pp., $80.00

Sometimes an artist’s style is so aggressively uncategorizable, so interdisciplinary and outside conventions, that it defies not only genre, but any meaningful comparisons to history or peer — and their name simply becomes its own adjective. Meet US/South African artist Roger Ballen, whose sui generis style of photography-based practices has been dubbed Ballenesque, because there’s literally no better way to describe it. Of course, in this case, Ballen himself began referring to his own work that way fairly early on, in the 1990s, and honestly he has a point. [Read more…]

Ed Templeton: Hairdos of Defiance

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at Roberts Projects, Culver City (through April 21)
Reviewed by Shana Nys Dambrot

A good mohawk hairdo is a statement that both deflects and demands attention. “Look at me! What are you looking at?” It’s a uniform of nonconformity. An easily deciphered message that screams trouble with a booming laugh. It’s a sculptural and painterly art form, hard to achieve, defying laws of both gravity and gravitas. It’s tribal plumage, it’s gender neutral, or rather, gender-blasting. It’s inconvenient and amazing. It’s kind of a dare. It’s edgy, it’s aspirational. It’s been the province of the punks, outsiders, and leather-clad. There’s nothing cooler than a mohawk. [Read more…]

X Artists’ Books: Literatures Of Displacement And Permission

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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, XAB for short. They, along with author Sylvan Oswald, gathered under the aegis of the PEN USA Center to present their project and celebrate its newest title, Oswald’s High Winds. It’s the last in what may be the only four titles they’ll present. As of now it’s unclear if they have another one in mind; when they undertook the task, they had four, and that was supposed to be that. But considering the critical and even popular (for arcane avant-garde literary art projects at least) acclaim, and that one of their mantras is “honoring the compulsion to create,” it seems likely we will hear from them again before too long. [Read more…]

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

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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 drawing, a madman writing complex pictographic equations. One imagines him painting in a trance, a frantic archeological dig for visions that spring forth; however almost nothing you see is random. Any given 12 square inch passages of a single panel contains multitudes enough to make a fine painting on its own, already as dense with detail as a neutron star is packed with atoms and also infinite invisible unfathomable emptiness.  [Read more…]

In The Image Of Ourselves: God: A Human History

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Reviewed by Shana Nys Dambrot

God: A Human History
by Reza Aslan
Illustrated. Random House. 320pp. $28.

If you’re looking for some kind of Cartesian logic knot that offers proof of whether God exists or not, this is not the book for you. [Spoiler alert: No one knows for sure.] But if you are a curious-minded folkorist, either secular or believing, with a literary taste for the intersection of science and mythology, physiology and faith, politics and cosmology — then it’s a page-turner. As books about religion go, it’s profoundly unlikely to spark heated debate. Instead, it takes a simple strategy of inversion — the premise that we made God (every version ever) in the image of ourselves, and not the other way around. Not because God does or doesn’t exist or needs to be invented — but rather, because our species has instinctual need to give the abstract concept of our gods an appearance, important symbols, and physical forms, the better to comprehend, explain, and worship them. [Read more…]

Shadowman Is As Intense And Infuriating As Its Protagonist

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By Shana Nys Dambrot

This movie is intense. But then again, Richard Hambleton was kind of intense. Also much like the artist, the documentary itself is infuriating at times, emotionally compelling, and a bit sad. As an early pioneer of the legendary Lower East Side art scene of the early 1980’s, Hambleton cut quite a figure. Stylish, handsome, brilliant, and troubled. He had demons and great ideas. He was friends with Basquiat and Haring. He basically invented a genre — conceptual graffiti. He was famous at home and abroad, in the galleries and the glossies. He had great clothes and gave extensive interviews. He had a slow-moving drug problem that eventually became unmanageable. He disappeared. He was homeless, addicted, evicted. He never stopped painting. “He followed his muse I guess,” says performance artist Penny Arcade at one point in the film. “But Richard’s muse was a cracked out junkie ho.” [Read more…]

Vulnerability: The Space Between

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Young Projects Gallery, Los Angeles (through December 29, 2017)
By Shana Nys Dambrot

The show starts quietly with an historical video program of classics that set a tone and context for what comes after. Works by Marina Abramovic, Bas Jan Ader, Sam Taylor Wood, Yoko Ono, and others who explicitly offered physical and emotional intimacy, created art experiences that were intense and dangerous and made people very uncomfortable. They made themselves vulnerable, their bodies were sites and spectacles of potential transgression and trauma. This was done in order to deconstruct basics of Post-Modern human behavior. As with so many other art historical tropes, versions of this dynamic inquiry exist in an updated public sphere — the digital world of technology and social media. And that’s where Vulnerability: The Space Between picks up the thread and takes it to increasingly inventive, uncanny, and strangely familiar places. [Read more…]

Tom of Finland

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Reviewed by Shana Nys Dambrot

Tom of Finland might not be the movie you’re expecting it to be, but it’s the movie it needs to be. This quiet masterpiece of a biopic assumes that the viewer already knows how the story ends, with its eponymous protagonist becoming a living legend of progressive gay culture in the late 20th century, an artist whose critical and popular claim both celebrated and transcended its context. Tom’s art was boldly proud and beautiful in a specific way that demanded respect for his community, making sure as his partner says in the film, “that everyone knows we exist,” while at the same time, the work was also just so undeniably original and fresh and exuberant that no one could resist its charms. Based only on the art, one might anticipate more of a romp from this film — and there is romping; but its true power lies in its strange subtleties and in Tom himself, an unexpectedly unassuming army vet and urbane ad guy whose inherent sense of dignity and justice combines with his talent to make him exceptional. [Read more…]

Ryoji Ikeda – A [for 100 Cars]

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by Shana Nys Dambrot

The sound of the freeway, the roar and hum, the rumble of lowriders, the rattle of the classic models, the whirr and whine of a proper gear shift, the chortling idle — many creative minds have made hay of the musical, or at least harmoniously hybrid wind-and-percussive, properties of traffic noise. In LA, it’s part of the air. The voice of the freeway, the boulevard, and the sweeping blacktop is our rushing river, it runs through us.  [Read more…]

See/Saw: Siegfried Tieber is Ready for His Close-Up

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By Shana Nys Dambrot

Up-Close Magic — sometimes called Micromagic — is a genre of cards and coins, not smoke and mirrors. It’s an arena where the audience is small, perhaps a dozen, or twenty, and they are watching the performer from mere feet or inches away. There’s a lot of eye contact, audience participation is central to almost every trick, and the magician is basically daring you to figure out what he’s doing and how he’s doing it. [Read more…]