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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

The New Word

Cathexis

When we say the world is haunted
we mean untranslated

as yet.

[Read More…]

The Line

The Lesson. Enrique Martinez Celaya’s current exhibition at Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, is reviewed at RIot Material magazine.

Enrique Martínez Celaya’s The Tears of Things

at Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles ( through November 2) Reviewed by Lita Barrie Enrique Martínez Celaya’s haunting exhibition at Kohn Gallery is conceived as visual poetry predicated upon Virgil’s phrase “the tears of things,” from Aeneid ( Book 1, line 462), about an encounter with a mural of the battle of Troy which made the […]

Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson in Robert Eggers' The Lighthouse, reviewed at Riot Material magazine.

Atmosphere So Thick You’ll Choke: Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko In 2016, production designer turned writer/director Robert Eggers awed critics with his directorial debut, The Witch, a daring horror film set in the 1630s. Now, for his ferociously anticipated follow-up, he and his brother/co-writer Max Eggers have journeyed 200-some years to a rocky and remote island off the New England coast […]

Pink Peep (detail). Laura Krifka's latest exhibition at Luis De Jesus is reviewed at Riot Material, LA's premier art magazine.

Laura Krifka’s Wickedly Deviant The Game of Patience

at Luis De Jesus (through October 26) Reviewed by Lita Barrie Laura Krifka enjoys doing things she is not supposed to do. Having absorbed the tenets of neoclassical painting, she bypasses high-minded seriousness by adding a candy-coated veneer of hyper-artificiality adopted from 1950s MGM musicals to the domestic decor of private scenes she then undercuts […]

How to Hate the City: A Storyboard Of Canvases

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner at The Neue Galerie, NYC (through January 13) Reviewed by John Haber No movement in early modern art was as cosmopolitan as German Expressionism — and the group that called itself Die Brücke. Who else took to the streets when Picasso was just finding his way from circus performers to still life? […]

Swans' Leaving Meaning, Various Personnel. Leaving Meaning is reviewed at Riot Material, LA's premier magazine for art and sound.

Sound Itself As The Only Way Forward In Swans’ Leaving Meaning

out October 25 on Young God Records Reviewed by John Payne Michael Gira founded/guiding-lighted the sort of no-wave / noise / spiritual-purification band Swans in NYC 35 some odd years ago, and, roughly, he’s made a career out of trying musically to express the inexpressible ever since. After a hiatus of a few years, during which […]

The Vast of Night, dir. by Andrew Patterson, is reviewed at Riot Material, LA's premier magazine for art and film

In Jaw-Dropping Homage To The Twilight Zone, The Exhilarating The Vast of Night

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko There’s something in the air on a crisp night in 1950s Cayuga, New Mexico. Sure, there’s excitement as basketball season begins with a game so anticipated that nearly the entirety of this rural town has convened upon the high school’s gymnasium. But then there’s something stranger, a crackle on the phone […]

Resilience: Philip Guston In 1971

at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles (through January 5, 2020) Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner …there’s no success like failure and failure’s no success at all Bob Dylan The painter’s first duty is to be free Philip Guston In 1970, New York City was the undisputed center of the art world and 57th street in […]

Betye Saar’s Call and Response, at LACMA, is reviewed at Riot Material magazine, LA's premier art magazine.

Process And Fierce Redemption In Betye Saar’s Call and Response

at LACMA (through April 5, 2020) Reviewed by Genie Davis Betye Saar’s riveting, 40-object exhibition currently at LACMA offers a fascinating insight into the artist’s process. It’s strong focus on the power of redemptive faith and personal strength in the face of adversity is passionate and compelling – which can be frankly said of all Saar’s […]

Virgil Abloh, from Figures of Speech. Reviewed at Riot Material, LA's premier magazine for art and fashion

Audacious Digs In Virgil Abloh’s Figures of Speech

at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago Reviewed by Seren Sensei In a short video clip during Figures of Speech, Virgil Abloh’s show at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago, he mused on his upbringing and influences. Born the son of Ghanaian immigrants in a small town in Illinois, he discussed the wonders of growing […]

Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg’s This Is It. As part of Apple's [AR]T Walk, reviewed at Riot Material.

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

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 […]

Antonio Banderas and Nora Navas in Pain and Glory (Dolor y gloria), directed by Pedro Almodóvar and reviewed at Riot Material magazine.

Wounds Of Desire In Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain And Glory

Reviewed by John Payne Were you looking for such a thing, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more humanizing film than Pedro Almodóvar’s latest little miracle. The Spanish director/writer’s Pain and Glory is a story about an artist, who suffers, and remembers, and relives. This tale is only somewhat the story of people in general, […]

Review of Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory at Riot Material magazine

Hiroko Oyamada’s Mordant Fable, The Factory

Reviewed by John Biscello The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada New Directions, 128pp., $13.95 The year was 1936, when an indefatigable tramp served as a working-class Virgil in guiding audiences through the hellscape of big industry and assembly line madness. The tramp, of course, was Charlie Chaplin in his iconic film, Modern Times, which applied fool’s […]

Peter Doig, Music (2 Trees). Doig's latest exhibition is reviewed at Riot Material magazine.

Corrosion And Other Maladies In Peter Doig’s Latest, Paintings

Paintings, at Michael Werner Gallery, London (16 November) Reviewed by Christopher P Jones With Peter Doig – who has a collection of new paintings on show at the Michael Werner Gallery, London – corrosion is paramount. His paintings seek to overturn themselves from within, alluding to altered states, to dreams and hallucinations. His paint has become […]

Alexandra Masangkay in The Platform (El Hoyo) 2019, reviewed at Riot Material, LA's premier magazine for art and film,

A Movable Feast In The Dystopic The Platform

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko Imagine: you awake in a cold, concrete prison cell. There are no windows, no doors, one cellmate, and a big, square hole in the center of the floor. Should you peek down into it, you’d see a cell below the same as yours. And beneath that lie so many more that […]

Robert Gunderman's latest exhibition, This End, is reviewed at Riot Material, LA's premier art and culture magazine.

Transits Through Finalities In Robert Gunderman’s This End

at AF Projects, Los Angeles (through October 12) Reviewed by Eve Wood Robert Gunderman’s current exhibition at AF Projects could be understood as both a meditation on the nature of time and an investigation into the elusiveness of memory. The title of the exhibition, This End, powerfully yet simply encapsulates and personalizes the idea of transition […]

The Lodge, the follow up film to Goodnight Mommy, is reviewed at Riot Material Magazine.

The Lodge Offers a Chilling Follow-Up To Goodnight Mommy

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko In 2015, Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz dropped jaws and blew minds with their harrowing–and at points hilarious–debut narrative feature, Goodnight Mommy. Last year, they offered a fresh taste in terror with a vignette in the folklore-inspired horror anthology, The Field Guide To Evil. Now, this heralded Austrian pair of co-writers/co-directors is […]

Takashi Miike's First Love, reviewed at Riot Material, LA's premier magazine for art, film, and forward-leaning thought.

Takashi Miike’s First Love Is A Delightfully Earnest Rom-Com Set To An Onslaught Of Slaughter

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko As you might anticipate, First Love is a story of boy meets girl, but coming from Takashi Miike, the visionary director behind Ichi the Killer, Audition, and 13 Assasins, you might rightly anticipate this romantic-comedy is less flowers and kisses and more yakuzas and blood. There is also a high-kicking revenge […]

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RIOT MATERIAL
art. word. thought.