Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

  • Home
  • Riot Material Magazine
    • About RM / Subscribe
    • Entering The Mind
      • 3-Part Podcast
    • Contributors
    • Categories >
      • Art
      • Artist
      • Books
      • Thought
      • Film
      • Cinema Disordinaire
      • Riot Sounds
      • Records
      • Jazz
      • Interview
      • More   >
        • Architecture
        • Image
        • The Line
        • The New Word
        • That Evening Sun
        • The Natural World
        • Video
    • Contact
    • Masthead
  • Art
    • Art Reviews
  • Books
    • Book Reviews
  • Film
    • Film Reviews
  • Records
    • Jazz Reviews
    • All Reviews
  • Riot Sounds
  • Cinema Disordinaire
    • Riot Cinema

Museum of Injury: Musings on the New MoMA

April 13, 2021 By Allyn Aglaïa Aumand Leave a Comment

by Allyn Aglaïa Aumand

In New York, briefly at the beginning of the year, I stayed at the home of friends: a documentary filmmaker and a photographer, both from Italy. Another friend, a former farmer turned urbanist and dancer came by the house for tea. She marveled at the space, which had an aesthetic completely distinct from her own. “There are so many ways to be in the world,” she said. She had an energy of admiration, and also liberation, tinged with a small sense of why didn’t anyone tell me? “The more I see other ways of being, the more free I feel to live however I choose,” she said. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Architecture, Art, The Line

Dismantling One of the Great Encyclopedic Museums in the Country: The Regrettable LACMA Redesign

October 10, 2020 By Riot Material 2 Comments

by Joseph Giovannini
NYRB Online

“This is a hostile takeover of the museum, and if the design succeeds in hijacking the institution, Los Angeles will be living for a long time with a wanton act of architecture, and the bitter memory of a very expensive betrayal of the public trust.”  —Joseph Giovannini

There are two demolitions going on at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the largest encyclopedic museum west of the Mississippi, with collections spanning many historical periods and cultures. Over the last several months, the museum has razed three of the four structures on the East Campus, the original core of the institution—themselves only sixty years old—and excavators are now polishing off the last and largest, the Ahmanson Building. The East Campus will soon be a bowl of dust. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Architecture, Art, The Line

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

February 28, 2020 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

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…]

Filed Under: Architecture, Books, The Line

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

January 3, 2020 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

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.”
C
ourtesy 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…]

Filed Under: Architecture, The Line

An Army Of Women Warriors In Ann Shostrom’s The Rising

July 23, 2019 By Phoebe Hoban 2 Comments

at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, NYC
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

Ann Shostrom’s army of women warriors fills the front room of the Elizabeth Harris Gallery, a ghostly troop draped in shades of white: the traditional color of virgins, brides and suffragettes. Tall and graceful, evoking Corinthian columns, these seventeen fabric figures are both timeless and completely of the moment. Elegantly pieced together from sinuous scraps of material foraged from salvage sales, thrift stores, friends’ childhood wardrobes and Shostrom’s own closet, they simultaneously suggest Miss Havisham’s endless jilted vigil, the courageous members of the #Metoo Movement, and the chorus of 100-something congresswomen who earlier this year proudly wore ivory, ecru and alabaster to President Trump’s second State of the Union address. While explicitly feminine, they are also plainly phallic, iron fists within velvet — or in this case lace, linen and silk — gloves. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Architecture, Art, The Line

A City No More: The Rise Of The World’s Largest Gated Community

January 14, 2019 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

by Kevin Baker
From “Death of a Once Great City”
Courtesy of Harper’s Magazine

New York has been my home for more than forty years, from the year after the city’s supposed nadir in 1975, when it nearly went bankrupt. I have seen all the periods of boom and bust since, almost all of them related to the “paper economy” of finance and real estate speculation that took over the city long before it did the rest of the nation. But I have never seen what is going on now: the systematic, wholesale transformation of New York into a reserve of the obscenely wealthy and the barely here—a place increasingly devoid of the idiosyncrasy, the complexity, the opportunity, and the roiling excitement that make a city great. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Architecture, The Line, Thought

NYC Supertalls And The Narrowfication Of The City’s Architecture

January 14, 2019 By Riot Material 1 Comment

by Aaron Timms
From “The Needles and the Damage Done”
Courtesy of The Baffler

What kinds of people did I expect to find here, in the public garden at the foot of 432 Park Avenue, New York’s tallest residential building? In the days before I arrived in Manhattan to chart a course across the city, I’d studied the plans and websites of the “supertalls,” the new crop of skeletal residential towers rising one thousand feet and more above midtown. The architects’ renderings of these new superstructures were charged with all the clichés of the genre: the plate-glass exteriors knifing skyward, the unobstructed views of the miniature city below, the lobbies at once massive and discreet. The humans were harder to grasp. Artists’ impressions showed the supertalls’ residents-to-be in a variety of unnatural poses: a couple in formal wear touching each other next to a baby grand, a woman alone on a balcony with a dining table set for eight. But it was the passers-by sketched at the periphery who interested me most. Would the people here be like they were there, smudged and passive with the bready limbs of a disaster movie’s sacrificial-crowd-in-waiting? [Read more…]

Filed Under: Architecture, The Line, Thought

Minoru Yamasaki: Humanist Architecture for a Modernist World

September 4, 2018 By Riot Material 1 Comment

Reviewed by Martin Filler

Minoru Yamasaki: Humanist Architecture for a Modernist World
by Dale Allen Gyure
Yale University Press, 283 pp., $65.00
Courtesy of The New York Review of Books

Minoru Yamasaki: Humanist Architecture for a Modernist World

Now that I’m about to turn seventy I finally feel able to reveal a shameful secret: I was a teenage Yamasaki addict. I have no good excuse for why I got hooked, but Minoru Yamasaki was the first contemporary architect who entranced me. I had already begun my architectural self-education with the early writings of Ada Louise Huxtable in The New York Times, where in 1962 she praised the plans for Yamasaki’s Robertson Hall of 1961–1965 (home of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs) for the way in which “Greco-Roman and Far Eastern influences blend in a series of slender classic columns of Oriental lightness, in a top floor suggesting the cornice of a temple, and in a reflecting pool” and for how “the undertones of the past emerge subtly in a quite advanced and experimental construction.” I thought it was wonderful, too. So much so that as editor-in-chief of my high school yearbook, I dragged the baffled members of the National Honor Society fifty miles northeast from our unphotogenic hometown of Camden, New Jersey, to have a group picture taken with us lined up along the white quartzite colonnade of Yamasaki’s newly completed Princeton Parthenon. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Architecture, Books, The Line

An Interview With Frank Lloyd Wright

August 8, 2017 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

In a somewhat combative 1957 interview, a flinty and surprisingly conventional Mike Wallace interrogates an unwavering yet ever-thoughtful Frank Lloyd Wright. 

Filed Under: Architecture, Interview, The Line, Video

Twelve Ways Of Looking At Frank Lloyd Wright

August 8, 2017 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

by Martin Filler

In his New York Review of Books commentary, excerpted below, Martin Filler speaks to the wealth of new material out on Frank Lloyd Wright, including two current exhibitions and four new books. You can read the full review in the August 17 issue, or read it on site at nybooks.com

1.

Few things are more satisfying in the arts than unjustly forgotten figures at last accorded a rightful place in the canon, as has happened in recent decades with such neglected but worthy twentieth-century architects as the Slovenian Jože Plečnik, the Austrian Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, the Austrian-Swedish Josef Frank, and the Italian-Brazilian Lina Bo Bardi, among others. Then there are the perennially celebrated artists who are so important that they must be presented anew to each successive generation, a daunting task for museums, especially encyclopedic ones that are expected to revisit the major masters over and over again while finding fresh reasons for their relevance. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Architecture, Artist, Books, The Line

The World Trade Center’s Grand Architectural Failure

February 18, 2017 By Riot Material 1 Comment

In his commentary preceding a review of three new books in The New York Review of Books, excerpted below, Martin Filler speaks to a failure of imagination and architecture at Manhattan’s Ground Zero. You can read the full review in the March 9 issue, or read it on site at nybooks.com

by Martin Filler

No urban design project in modern American experience has aroused such high expectations and intense scrutiny as the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site in New York City. It has taken fifteen years since the terrorist assault of September 11, 2001, for the principal structures of this sixteen-acre parcel in Lower Manhattan to be completed. In a field where time is money in a very direct sense (because of interest payments on the vast sums borrowed to finance big construction schemes), such a long gestation period usually signifies not judicious deliberation on the part of planners, developers, designers, engineers, and contractors, but rather economic, political, or bureaucratic problems that can impede a speedy and cost-efficient conclusion. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Architecture, The Line

riot sounds

Into the Triangular Warp, Without Tether

New from Mandy, Indiana
“Injury Detail”

on Fire Talk Records

The Line

Louise Bourgeois: What Is The Shape of This Problem?

at University of Southern California, Fisher Museum of Art. (through 3 December 3, 2022) Reviewed by Margaret Lazzari Louise Bourgeois is widely recognized for her sculptures and installations, but Louise Bourgeois: What is The Shape of This Problem is a wonderful opportunity to immerse yourself in her perhaps-lesser-known prints, fabric work and writings. This exhibit contains over […]

Moonage Daydream Conveys More Myth Than Man

Moonage Daydream Dir. Brett Morgan Reviewed by Nicholas Goldwin As one of the greatest shapeshifters in the expansive history of rock music, it seems only fitting that the documentary with David Bowie as its subject never seems content to express the trials, tribulations and artistic triumphs of Bowie in any one fixed way. This is […]

The Artful Construction of The ‘I’

by Merve Emre NYR The essay form…bears some responsibility for the fact that bad essays tell stories about people instead of elucidating the matter at hand. —Theodor Adorno The personal essay is a genre that is difficult to define but easy to denounce. The offending element is rarely the essay as a form, but its […]

Carnación di Rocío Molina, at Riot Material Magazine.

On Binding: Notes from Venice

Bienalle Arte and Bienalle Danza, Venice 2022 By Allyn Aglaïa Chest bound, lips sealed, I walked through Venice alone, quiet, and: thought about narratives that bind us to erotic binds

Mohammad Barrangi's Guardians of Eden (Dreamscape #8), at Riot Material magazine.

Transcendence Beyond Erasure in Mohammad Barrangi’s Dreamscape

at Advocartsy, Los Angeles (thru 5 November 2022) Reviewed by Christopher Ian Lutz Fantasy requires a symbolic vehicle to transport a character from the real world into the imaginary realm, where the laws of reality are subverted or obscured to justify an otherwise absurd event. The artist might depict the vehicle as a real object […]

Idris Khan's The Pattern of Landscape at Sean Kelly Gallery, Los Angeles. An interview with Idris is at Riot Material magazine.

An Interview with Idris Khan

The Pattern of Landscape, at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles (through 5 November 2022) by Ricky Amadour Opening on the corner of Highland and De Longpre Avenues in the heart of Hollywood, Idris Khan’s The Pattern of Landscape is the inaugural exhibition at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles. Khan investigates color theory, text, and musical concepts through […]

Soul Crash: Our Slow, Inexorable Release Into the Metaverse

by Sue Halpern The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball Liveright 352pp., $18.89 NYR In October 2021, when Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would now be called Meta and its business interests would be pivoting to the metaverse, there was almost universal confusion: most observers had no idea what he was […]

green tara

Pointing the Staff at the Old Man

A wisdom transmission by Samaneri Jayasāra Excerpted from —  Advice from the Lotus Born  from the chapter “Pointing the Staff at the Old Man” Translated by Eric Pema Kunsang Rangjung Yeshe Publications, 184pp., $21.95 . .

Margaret Lazzari’s "Shimmer." From the exhibition "Breathing Space."

Margaret Lazzari’s Luminous Breathing Space

at George Billis Gallery, Los Angeles (through 8 October 2022) Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner “Things are not what they seem: nor are they otherwise.” –Buddha Margaret Lazzari’s luminous solo exhibition of paintings, entitled Breathing Space, were painted during the pandemic, and the exhibition title is indeed significant. It’s defined as a respite, a hiatus, or an […]

A Look Back on an Iconoclast: Art Critic Dave Hickey

by Jarrett Earnest Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art by Daniel Oppenheimer University of Texas Press, 141 pp., $24.95 The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, Revised and Expanded by Dave Hickey University of Chicago Press, 123 pp., $15.00 (paper) Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy by Dave Hickey Art Issues Press, 215 […]

From Phil Tippet's Mad God, reviewed at Riot Material magazine.

Nihilism Births Its Own Interminable Hell

Mad God Dir. Phil Tippett Reviewed by Nicholas Goldwin Technically astonishing and immersive to a fault, director Phil Tippett successfully demonstrates that thirty years of relentless dedication to your craft can lead to cinematic innovations even his old stomping grounds – the sets of Star Wars and Jurassic Park – have yet to catch up. […]

Eve Wood, "Ostrich Pretending To Be A Francis Bacon Painting." At Riot Material.

An Interview with Artist Eve Wood

Eve Wood: Hanging in There to Hang On at Track 16 Gallery, Los Angeles (opening reception: Saturday, September 10, 7-10pm) by Julie Adler I met Eve Wood at Holly Matter, an art gallery on Heliotrope in East Hollywood, 22 years ago now. I recall she got up and read some of her poems. Incisive, cutting, […]

John Lurie’s The History of Bones

Reviewed by Cintra Wilson The History of Bones: A Memoir by John Lurie Random House, 435 pp., $28.00 NYRB It was 1989 when I saw John Lurie on TV in a late-night advertisement for the new Lounge Lizards album, Voice of Chunk, which was “not available in stores” and selling exclusively through an 800 number. Operators were standing […]

Marlene Dumas, "Losing (Her Meaning)," 1988. At Riot Material magazine.

Marlene Dumas’ Masks of Inborn Gods

open-end, at Palazzo Grassi, Venice (through 8 January 2023) Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx Four relatively small artworks greet the visitor in the first room of the Marlene Dumas exhibit, open-end, at Palazzo Grassi. D-rection shows a young man contemplating his rather large and purple erection. A bluish white face and a brown face unite […]

Clarice Lispector

Baffling the Sphinx: The Enigmatic World of Clarice Lispector

Reviewed by John Biscello Água Viva by Clarice Lispector New Directions Publishing 88pp., $14.95 Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas by Clarice Lispector New Directions Publishing 864pp., $29.95 The word is my fourth dimension –Clarice Lispector And on the eighth and endless day, where the bottomless hallelujah meets Ouroboros, God created Clarice Lispector. Maybe. […]

Donna Ferrato "Diamond, Minneapolis, MN 1987." At Riot Material magazine

Donna Ferrato’s Magnificent Holy

at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, NYC (through July 29 2022) Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban The small scale of Donna Ferrato’s snapshot-like black-and-white photographs belies their personal and political power. Whether they document the medical sinks and shelves in a now-shuttered Texas abortion clinic, or hone in on the badly bruised face of a domestic violence […]

Darcilio Lima Unknown Lithograph, 1972. At Riot Material magazine.

Magia Protetora: The Art of Luciana Lupe Vasconcelos and Darcilio Lima

at the Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick, Cleveland OH (through 30 September 2022) Curated by Stephen Romano Gallery Reviewed by Christopher Ian Lutz The extension of a lineage occurs not merely by the repetition of form, but by the intersection of conservation and revolution. Transformation is fundamental to preserving the essence of a given tradition’s rituals and […]

Eve Wood's A Cadence for Redemption, written in the fictive voice of Abraham Lincoln, is excerpted at Riot Material magazine.

Songs For Our Higher Selves

A Cadence for Redemption: Conversations With Abraham Lincoln by Eve Wood Del Sol Press, 46pp., $5.99 Employing the fictive voice of a former president, Eve Wood shifts the perspective on the happenings of our times – where all indicators point to the slow, inexorable collapse of the American Experiment – to the one man who […]

join our mailing list

Enter your email and click 'SUBSCRIBE' to receive our end-of-month recap of reviews, interviews, the latest in song, cinema, the state of Art and other cerebral musings. The last day of every month, from RIOT MATERIAL.
  • Instagram

Writers

  • Alci Rengifo
  • Allyn A. Aumand
  • Amadour
  • Ann Landi
  • Annabel Osberg
  • A. Hutter von Arx
  • Barrett Martin
  • C von Hassett
  • Christopher Lutz
  • Christopher Michno
  • Christopher P Jones
  • Cvon
  • Cynthia Biret
  • Donald Lindeman
  • Ellen C. Caldwell
  • Emily Nimptsch
  • Erik Hmiel
  • Erin Currier
  • Eve Wood
  • Genie Davis
  • Henry Cherry
  • Hoyt Hilsman
  • James McWilliams
  • Jill Conner
  • Johanna Drucker
  • John Biscello
  • John Haber
  • John Payne
  • Kristy Puchko
  • Lisa Zeiger
  • Lita Barrie
  • Lorraine Heitzman
  • Margaret Lazzari
  • Max King Cap
  • Michael Bonesteel
  • Nancy Kay Turner
  • Nicholas Goldwin
  • Pancho Lipschitz
  • Phoebe Hoban
  • Rachel Reid Wilkie
  • Riot Material
  • Seren Sensei
  • Shana Nys Dambrot

Community Links

  • Black Lives Matter
  • Black Radical Congress
  • Assata’s Daughters
  • Dream Defenders
  • EJI
  • NAACP
  • ACLU
  • BAMN
  • NUL
  • UNCF
  • HRC
  • NOW
  • AWID
  • Planned Parenthood
  • Reproductive Rights
  • Nonhuman Rights
  • PETA
  • LANAIC
  • NARF
  • AICF
  • IEN
  • MPV
  • NGLTF
  • GLAAD
  • NCLR
  • LULAC
  • MALDEF
  • Fight for $15
  • Working Families
  • Rendition Project
  • Amnesty Int.
  • Democracy Now
  • Critical Resistance
  • Progressive Change
  • Justice Democrats
  • Swing Left
  • Prison Policy Init.
  • Progressive Orgs

Museums

  • The Broad
  • MOCA
  • Geffen
  • LACMA
  • The Getty
  • Annenberg
  • Hammer
  • Marciano
  • CAFAM
  • CAAM
  • MAF
  • MOLAA
  • LBMA
  • MOMA
  • PS1
  • Whitney
  • The Met
  • Brooklyn
  • New
  • Neue
  • Guggenheim
  • El Museo Del Barrio
  • Tate Modern
  • White Cube
  • National Portrait

Categories

  • Architecture
  • Art
  • Artist
  • Books
  • Cinema Disordinaire
  • Entering the Mind
  • Fiction
  • Film
  • From The Shelf
  • Image
  • Inside The Image
  • Interview
  • Jazz
  • Mind
  • Opera
  • Profile
  • Records
  • Riot Material Presents
  • Riot Sounds
  • Short Film
  • sound
  • Subscribe
  • That Evening Sun
  • The Line
  • The Mother Tongue
  • The Natural World
  • The New Word
  • Theater
  • Thought
  • Twenty Que
  • Video

Archives

RIOT MATERIAL
art. word. thought.