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In Full Surrender to the Wylie Eye

April 28, 2022 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

Rose Wylie: Which One, at David Zwirner, NYC (through 12 June)
Reviewed by David Salle

Rose Wylie: Which One
by Rose Wylie; with Barry Schwabsky, Judith Bernstein, and Hans Ulrich Obrist
David Zwirner Books, 196pp., $75.00
NYRB

Rose Wylie, who is now eighty-seven, has been painting in the same rural studio in Kent, England, since the late 1960s, but she has only recently shimmered into wide public view. Incredibly, the show of large-scale paintings held last spring at David Zwirner was only her third appearance in New York, and the first in a big-time gallery.

She who laughs last and all that. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

The Supremely Humanistic Hand of Julian Schnabel

April 16, 2022 By Eve Wood Leave a Comment

For Esmé – With Love and Squalor, at Pace Gallery, Los Angeles (through 21 May 2022)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

How does one represent, let alone quantify hope, hate, grief, love, joy, tragedy, or anything, for that matter, which stands in opposition to something else? Throughout his illustrious career, Julian Schnabel has always been one to take chances, both materially and metaphorically, and this, his newest exhibition at Pace Gallery, Los Angeles, is no exception. Working with molding paste, oil and spray paint on velvet, these thirteen largely abstract paintings function much like a scream under water, their metaphoric power mitigated by abstraction. The result is that, when looking at them, we experience a wide array of emotional responses while all-the-while the deeper hidden content somehow eludes us, yet it is this elusive quality specifically that makes these paintings so ambitious and so unnerving. They are at once abstract yet perniciously narrative. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Beyond the Canonical Cube: Whitney Biennial’s Quiet As It’s Kept Sings

April 7, 2022 By Jill Conner Leave a Comment

at Whitney Museum of American Art, Curated by David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards (6 April – 5 September 2022)
Reviewed by Jill Conner

Throughout Quiet As It’s Kept, the Whitney Museum of American Art has finally reached beyond the limitations of the white cube in order to bring 63 artists and collectives together in what has resulted in a cathartically gripping exhibition that is pieced together mostly by artists of Native American, African American, Latino, and Asian descent. By presenting the voices of those who have thrived creatively beyond the filters of Western entertainment and popular culture, Quiet As It’s Kept carries the flair of a cinematic documentary, while calling attention to the ongoing, multi-faceted contexts of American life. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, The Line

In Studio With Pavel Kraus

April 2, 2022 By Jill Conner Leave a Comment

by Jill Conner

There is usually nothing to say in the wake of violent conflict. The history of forms is bound to the dynamic of time, as a rendering of thoughts on survival. Perceptions create and deconstruct what one sees and experiences before them. Sometimes essence is all that we are left with, because words and forms do not effectively inform one another. Within Pavel Kraus’s sculptures and paintings, there is no time like the present. Although his work has been inspired by the structural tenets of the Classical era and the dynasties of Europe, Kraus’s conceptually abstract artworks remain complex and stand as critical responses to the state of disillusion. While utilizing the visual language of abstraction, Kraus attempts to unwind the past. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Presence as Abstraction, as Beguiling Obfuscation, in the Works of Leon Kossoff

March 24, 2022 By Arabella Hutter von Arx Leave a Comment

Leon Kossoff: A Life in Painting, at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NYC (with concurrent exhibitions at LA Louver in Los Angeles, through 9 April 2022, and Annely Juda Fine Art in London)
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

The first painting greeting us in the Mitchell-Innes & Nash exhibition is, aptly, a self portrait. Smaller than the other pieces in the show, monochromatic, it packs the power of dynamite. The man represented closeup looks aghast, terrified even. His eyes stare down with dismay at something off canvas, an abyss? Hell? Malleable, the face is agitated by a chaos of brushstrokes. The boundaries between the head and its surroundings are unclear, as if everything was made of the same substance: mud. Mud, here, is nicely symbolic not only for its biblical intimation — Man being dipped, thrown, trampled in and yanked from the “miry mud” — but the muddiness of mind is also equally appropriate. While his portraits often halted at an opacity in the sitter, Kossoff had a pretty good idea of what he was about: uncertain about everything. He could, he tells us, hold onto nothing solid, either on the outside or the inside. “The important thing is to somehow keep going. This is ‘the straw to which we cling.” This credo, shared in a rare interview, could serve as caption for all of his mature paintings. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

The Haunt of One Yet Faintly Present: Noah Davis, Still at Home

March 22, 2022 By Ricky Amadour Leave a Comment

Noah Davis, at the Underground Museum, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Ricky Amadour

Directly across from the entrance, an opening statement to Noah Davis, at the Underground Museum, reads “many of the paintings you are about to see were painted in this space.” Smudges, dribbles, and droplets on the floor embody the physical notion of Davis activating the now museological edifice. Until this very writing, The Underground Museum was the gathering space for black culture in greater Los Angeles. As a Delphic entity, Davis predates the popularity of figurative works that are today commonplace in the art world. One cannot escape the imagining of Davis negotiating his thought process, laboring to organize an institution, and sketching together a community that would build its own familiarity and create an indelible mark. Curated by Helen Molesworth and Justin Leroy, this exhibition morphs Noah Davis the man, the architecture, and his paintings, jointly as one indivisible existence.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

The Ephemeral Palace: Alexey Titarenko’s City of Shadows

March 8, 2022 By Allyn Aglaïa Aumand Leave a Comment

at Nailya Alexander Gallery Booth, Paris Photo 2021
by Allyn Aglaïa Aumand
The Ephemeral Palace
.

I walked across Paris to the Palais Éphémère to go to Paris Photo.
I walked
Across
Paris,
Dense with ghosts.
I walked between selves. I walked to the future. I walk. I walked.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Image, The Line

Albert Pinkham Ryder: White Whale of American Art

February 21, 2022 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

by Christopher Benfey

A Wild Note of Longing: Albert Pinkham Ryder and a Century of American Art
at New Bedford Whaling Museum, MA
NYR

“American history is haunted by nightbirds in the nineteenth century,” Lewis Mumford wrote in The Brown Decades, his landmark 1931 study of Gilded Age culture. Chief among these nocturnal artists, for Mumford, was the painter Albert Pinkham Ryder, who was given to long, solitary nighttime walks in Lower Manhattan. Born in 1847, Ryder was a virtuoso of turbulent moonlit skies, ships lost at sea, and nightmare images—drawn from Poe, another nightbird, among other sources—that stick like burrs in the memory. In The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse), inspired by a waiter who killed himself after making a bad wager, a skeletal figure armed with a scythe rides a pale horse, while a menacing snake monitors his progress. “One might call Ryder the Blake or the Melville or the Emily Dickinson of American painting,” Mumford mused, “and thus define, after a fashion, one or another phase of his art; but the fact is that Ryder was Ryder. Like every great artist, he belonged to that rare class of which there is only one example.” [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Remembered and Remade: James Castle’s Conjurings of Mind

February 3, 2022 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

James Castle at David Zwirner, NYC (through 12 February 2022)
by Andrew Martin

James Castle: Memory Palace
John Beardsley
Yale University Press, 280pp., $65.00
NYR

Every James Castle picture seems to contain a secret. Approaching one of his works for the first time, you peer into pockets of shadow and smudge, examining the depopulated landscapes and interiors for explanations. Here, an empty rural road, with telephone poles standing like sentries at precise intervals, stretching to the drawing’s vanishing point; there, a cryptic attic space with a yawning doorway, captured on disintegrating paper that is then stitched to cardboard backing with red string. A series of drawings from multiple angles depicts the walls of an unloved upstairs bedroom, which seem to be shadowed by cage-like patterns hovering behind the brooding furniture arranged haphazardly around the space. Another piece shows two empty blue coats standing upright in front of a farmhouse next to an overturned bottle, a spiritual cousin of American Gothic. Even after repeated viewings and an immersion in Castle’s sprawling, insular oeuvre, these works refuse to yield their intentions. Their power lies in their ability to remain in one’s mind like half-remembered dreams. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Books, The Line

Darkness Made Visible in Hilary Brace’s Drawings and Tapestries

January 14, 2022 By Eve Wood Leave a Comment

at Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station (through 19 February 2022)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

The intricacies and inherent beauty of the natural world are rarely celebrated these days, and when artists do turn their attention to the surrounding landscape, the resulting images are usually ones of devastation and chaos — charting the movement of fires, the aftermaths of raging tornadoes, biblical floods and the myriad other requisite depictions of an apocalypse surely at hand. We’re all, it seems, arriving at the unfortunate knowing of a planet changing much-too rapidly due none other than to our own arrogance and our earth-devouring tendencies toward near-total consumption. Climate change, in other words, is now a very real and terrifying reality. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Illuminating Images: Liquid Light and Golden Hour and the Affective Force of Non-Didactic Art

January 12, 2022 By Johanna Drucker Leave a Comment

at the Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles (through 5 February 2022)
Reviewed by Johanna Drucker

What is the difference between a wall label and a work of art? The unrelenting didacticism that prevails in current gallery and museum exhibits of contemporary art makes it seem that many curators and artists cannot answer that question. Works serve as mere illustrations of some finger-wagging statement that is itself a recycled thought-form extracted from some current revisionist seminar-speak for the nth time.

But two stunning installations at the Vincent Price Art Museum, at the East Los Angeles Community College, make strong arguments for the way visual art offers illuminating awareness of the multifaceted complexity of current cultural issues. Liquid Light and Golden Hour, quite distinct in their approaches and materials, are each visually smart exhibitions that show ways to understand and interrogate identity, geography, and ecology without reducing them to didactic messaging. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Image, The Line, Thought

The Brush as Luminous Torch: Ray Robinson’s Blazing Portals Into the Divine Feminine

January 6, 2022 By Christopher Lutz Leave a Comment

The Third Door:Occult Works of Ray Robinson, at the Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magic (through 15 January)
by Christopher Ian Lutz

Burn the Sun

The persecution of the witch is a war of the hours. The Inquisition that charged women with witchcraft was not just about controlling women’s bodies – it was a crusade to extinguish illumination. The Catholic church is a solar religion, channeling divinity through the Son (sun). The sun is the origin of light. Thus, the church considers its institution synonymous with God. As worshipers of the source of illumination, the church claims to be the only true medium of heavenly light. The Morning Star, Lucifer, signifying the master, is not a true source of enlightenment. Its illumination is merely a reflection of the sun. For this reason, the church regards Lucifer as a deceiver of spiritual enlightenment, as is the Moon. The illumination of lunar knowledge is considered an illusion by the church. It is the enlightenment of darkness. It is knowledge absent of the sun, absent of God, the source of knowledge. Therefore, lunar knowledge symbolizes the antichrist, the anti-sun. The female body is considered a vessel, not a source of divinity, and thereby, if filled with false light, she becomes the mother of the antichrist, the antithesis of the holy Madonna. Although it is through the womb of the mother that the sun is born, the church denies the female body as the vessel of divine light. They instead demand her vessel to remain empty, like a virgin. However, the Mother is nature. She is not an astral virgin. She is celestial and terrestrial. She is the creator. She is God. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

An Interview with Artist Gala Porras-Kim

January 5, 2022 By Ricky Amadour Leave a Comment

by Ricky Amadour
.
Interdisciplinary artist Gala Porras-Kim frames her research to highlight and question the current institutional practices of conservation, acquisition, and deaccession. Acting as an investigator of cultural artifacts that correspond to institutional collections, Porras-Kim deep dives into the expansive histories, stories, and functions of those objects. The artist’s first solo exhibition in New York City, Precipitation for an Arid Landscape, opened at Amant — a non-profit arts organization based in Brooklyn.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Interview, The Line

An Atmospheric River of Wonder in Laurie Anderson’s The Weather

December 16, 2021 By Nancy Kay Turner 1 Comment

at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (through 31 July 2022) 
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

            “What are the days for? To put between the endless nights. What are the nights for? To slip through time into another world.”  –Laurie Anderson

            “Stories are our weather”  –Laurie Anderson

Laurie Anderson is a Renaissance polymath whose staggering breadth of knowledge, insatiable curiosity, technical virtuosity and conceptual rigor form the basis for her superb exhibit at The Hirshhorn. Simply titled (though not so simple) The Weather, it is billed as an immersive multimedia experimental exhibit, but really it is an otherworldly investigation into what it means to be a human in this twenty-first century. Intensely personal as well as political, it is a revelation, encompassing eerie video projections, kinetic talking sculpture, operatic oil paintings, invented conceptual violins, complex installations, multiple soundscapes, and everywhere words static and moving painted on floors and walls surrounding the viewer. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Maria Lassnig: The Paris Years, 1960–68

December 10, 2021 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

at Petzel Gallery, New York City
Reviewed by James Quandt

Maria Lassnig: Film Works
edited by Eszter Kondor, Michael Loebenstein, Peter Pakesch, and Hans Werner Poschauko
FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen, 189 pp., $35.00
NYRB

Many female artists — most recently Carmen Herrera, Faith Ringgold, and Lorraine O’Grady — have had to wait a lifetime to be accorded the recognition of a major museum retrospective. The Austrian painter and filmmaker Maria Lassnig abided many decades of curatorial slights and oversights before being granted one at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2008, six years before her death at the age of ninety-four. Astonished by the revelation of Lassnig’s extreme paintings, with their sometimes bilious palettes and gleeful emphasis on aged, corpulent, and deliquescing flesh, The Guardian’s reviewer, Laura Cumming, proclaimed, “Maria Lassnig is the discovery of the year—of the century.” [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Books, The Line

Marcellina Akpojotor’s Sublime Matriarchy

November 18, 2021 By Eve Wood Leave a Comment

Daughters of Esan at Rele Gallery, Los Angeles (through 4 December 2021)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

Marcellina Akpojotor’s second solo exhibition, Daughters of Esan, continues her exploration into notions of personal intimacy, drawing on her own relationships with her family and the tremendously powerful and transformational possibilities of education and love. Inspired by her great-grandmother’s impassioned commitment to learning and to literacy specifically, Akpojotor has fashioned a series of deeply intimate portraits that insist on knowledge as an essential means of crafting an individual’s sense of self and how to operate within the greater world at large. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Fear and Self-Loathing in Rachael Tarravechia’s Wish You Were Here

November 18, 2021 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

at Launch F18, NYC (through 4 December 2021)
by Danielle Dewar

The horror genre is rooted in a desire for catharsis by means of dispelling fears and anxieties that live deep within a subconscious mind. Since we often crave a controlled release of such emotions, the use of the macabre within an artist’s practice allows for a quick glimpse into a unique psyche while highlighting our collective societal fears. Brooklyn-based artist Rachael Tarravechia delivers just that in her new, exciting body of work currently on view at Launch F18 in Manhattan. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Interview, The Line

Histories Disembowled in Umar Rashid’s En Garde/On God

November 16, 2021 By Ellen C. Caldwell Leave a Comment

at Blum and Poe, Los Angeles (through 18 December 2021)
Reviewed by Ellen C. Caldwell

In En Garde/On God, Blum & Poe showcases the work of artist Umar Rashid (also known by the pen name Frohawk Two Feathers). Featuring thirteen large paintings and one sculpture in Rashid’s hallmark style, the exhibition highlights works that are bold in both color and story, backed by lengthy titles which are equally vivid and emotive in their humor and wit. Using his imagined “Frenglish Empire” as key players in a revisionist history, Rashid uses biting humor to question, underline, and undermine contemporary and historical issues around the construction of race and class, the perpetual cycle of colonial violence, the historical erasure and survivance of Los Angeles’ Tongva and Chumash people, and the legacies of imperialism that haunt the present and future. Building on a practice of about 18 years, En Garde/On God moves Rashid’s work into decidedly new territory. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Break//Breathe: Broken Men That Glitter

October 25, 2021 By Allyn Aglaïa Aumand Leave a Comment

by Allyn Aglaïa Aumand

On the coherence of fracture
an essay in fragments on fragments

*

I had a lover once, who self described as a volcano, but fully encased.
Make space to let it out sometimes, I told him.
That’s why I wanted to see you today, he said.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Beyond the Pleasure Dome: The Lost Occult World of Burt Shonberg

October 12, 2021 By Riot Material 3 Comments

at Buckland Museum, Cleveland (through 1 November 2021). Presented by Stephen Romano Gallery, Brooklyn

by Robin Scher

“The truth is out there,” that quintessentially quotable tagline from the hit 90s TV series The X Files, reflects an ongoing fascination. The obsession with this statement lies in its absolute nature: the truth, not a truth. This idea speaks to an objective reality, a place that lies beyond our subjective perceptions and experiences of the world. The paths toward reaching this destination take many forms, encompassing spiritual practices, creative expression and psychonautical exploration. And while the combination of these pursuits was once the remit of counterculture, today they could not be more interconnected and mainstream. To know why is interesting unto itself, but let’s look beyond that to the more curious nature of this recurring curiosity. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

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Riot Sounds

Dälek "Decimation (Dis Nation)"

“Decimation (Dis Nation)” is a Visual Stunner

Dälek
Feat MC dälek & Mike Mare

Directed by Will Brooks
.
from Precipice
out now on Ipecac Recordings
.

The Line

Hilary Brace, Drawings and Tapestries, is reviewed at Riot Material magazine.

Darkness Made Visible in Hilary Brace’s Drawings and Tapestries

at Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station (through 19 February 2022) Reviewed by Eve Wood The intricacies and inherent beauty of the natural world are rarely celebrated these days, and when artists do turn their attention to the surrounding landscape, the resulting images are usually ones of devastation and chaos — charting the movement of fires, […]

The Tragedy of Macbeth 

A film written and directed by Joel Coen Reviewed by James Shapiro NYR Those who have long followed the Coen brothers and their cinematic universe of criminals, nihilists, and overreachers may see in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021) a long-deferred reckoning with Shakespeare, who has been there before them. We don’t typically think of Shakespeare […]

John Divola, From Dogs Chasing My Car In The Desert,1996-98,

Illuminating Images: Liquid Light and Golden Hour and the Affective Force of Non-Didactic Art

at the Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles (through 5 February 2022) Reviewed by Johanna Drucker What is the difference between a wall label and a work of art? The unrelenting didacticism that prevails in current gallery and museum exhibits of contemporary art makes it seem that many curators and artists cannot answer that question. […]

The Occult Works of Ray Robinson, with an essay by Christopher Ian Lutz, is at Riot Material Magazine.

The Brush as Luminous Torch: Ray Robinson’s Blazing Portals Into the Divine Feminine

The Third Door:Occult Works of Ray Robinson, at the Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magic (through 15 January) by Christopher Ian Lutz Burn the Sun The persecution of the witch is a war of the hours. The Inquisition that charged women with witchcraft was not just about controlling women’s bodies – it was a crusade to extinguish […]

An Interview with Artist Gala Porras-Kim is at Riot Material Magazine.

An Interview with Artist Gala Porras-Kim

by Ricky Amadour . Interdisciplinary artist Gala Porras-Kim frames her research to highlight and question the current institutional practices of conservation, acquisition, and deaccession. Acting as an investigator of cultural artifacts that correspond to institutional collections, Porras-Kim deep dives into the expansive histories, stories, and functions of those objects. The artist’s first solo exhibition in […]

Seizing the Snowmelt: Industrial Agriculture is Draining Our State Dry

by Mark Arax The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California by Mark Arax Knopf, 576pp., $25.00 MITTR The wind finally blew the other way last night and kicked out the smoke from the burning Sierra. Down here in the flatland of California, we used to regard the granite mountain as a place apart, our […]

The Great Flood of 1862

The Looming Catastrophe Few in California Are Aware Of (or in Want to Address)

An excerpt from Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent it, by Tom Philpott. THE FLOOD NEXT TIME In November 1860, a young scientist from upstate New York named William Brewer disembarked in San Francisco after a long journey that took him from New York City through Panama and then […]

Precontact California Indians: Their Life Prior to Genocide

An excerpt from the first chapter of An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, by Benjamin Madley. CALIFORNIA INDIANS BEFORE 1846 Within a few days, eleven little babies of this mission, one after the other, took their flight to heaven. -Fray Junipero Serra, 1774 We were always trembling with fear of […]

Laurie Anderson's "The Weather," is reviewed at Riot Material magazine.

An Atmospheric River of Wonder in Laurie Anderson’s The Weather

at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (through 31 July 2022)  Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner             “What are the days for? To put between the endless nights. What are the nights for? To slip through time into another world.”  –Laurie Anderson             “Stories are our weather”  –Laurie Anderson Laurie Anderson is a Renaissance polymath whose […]

Maria Lassnig Augenglaeser - Autoportraets (1965)

Maria Lassnig: The Paris Years, 1960–68

at Petzel Gallery, New York City Reviewed by James Quandt Maria Lassnig: Film Works edited by Eszter Kondor, Michael Loebenstein, Peter Pakesch, and Hans Werner Poschauko FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen, 189 pp., $35.00 NYRB Many female artists — most recently Carmen Herrera, Faith Ringgold, and Lorraine O’Grady — have had to wait a lifetime to be accorded the recognition […]

Marcellina Akpojotor’s Sublime Matriarchy

Daughters of Esan at Rele Gallery, Los Angeles (through 4 December 2021) Reviewed by Eve Wood Marcellina Akpojotor’s second solo exhibition, Daughters of Esan, continues her exploration into notions of personal intimacy, drawing on her own relationships with her family and the tremendously powerful and transformational possibilities of education and love. Inspired by her great-grandmother’s […]

An interview with Rachael Tarravechia, at Riot Material

Fear and Self-Loathing in Rachael Tarravechia’s Wish You Were Here

at Launch F18, NYC (through 4 December 2021) by Danielle Dewar The horror genre is rooted in a desire for catharsis by means of dispelling fears and anxieties that live deep within a subconscious mind. Since we often crave a controlled release of such emotions, the use of the macabre within an artist’s practice allows […]

Umar Rashid, aka Frohawk Two Feathers, exhibition review of En Garde/On God is at Riot Material magazine

Histories Disembowled in Umar Rashid’s En Garde/On God

at Blum and Poe, Los Angeles (through 18 December 2021) Reviewed by Ellen C. Caldwell In En Garde/On God, Blum & Poe showcases the work of artist Umar Rashid (also known by the pen name Frohawk Two Feathers). Featuring thirteen large paintings and one sculpture in Rashid’s hallmark style, the exhibition highlights works that are bold […]

A Grid Gone Wholly Off in My Monticello

Reviewed by Bridgett M. Davis My Monticello By Jocelyn Nicole Johnson Henry Holt & Company, 210 pp., $13.49 NYT In the essay “The Site of Memory,” Toni Morrison described the crafting of her fictional worlds as a quest to access the interior lives of her ancestors. “It’s a kind of literary archeology,” she explained. “On the […]

The Web of Mind Throughout Our Earth

Reviewed by Zoë Schlanger Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake Random House, 352 pp., $28.00; $15.48 NYRB Imagine that you are afloat on your back in the sea. You have some sense of its vast, unknowable depths—worlds of life are surely darting about beneath […]

Drugs Amongst Other Adult Liberties

Reviewed by Mike Jay Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear by Dr. Carl L. Hart Penguin Press, 290 pp., $16.94 NYRB The modern meaning of “drugs” is of surprisingly recent origin. Until the twentieth century, the word referred to all medications (as it still does in “drugstore”); it was only […]

Rashid Johnson, Anxious Red Painting August 20th. At Riot Material

Break//Breathe: Broken Men That Glitter

by Allyn Aglaïa Aumand On the coherence of fracture an essay in fragments on fragments * I had a lover once, who self described as a volcano, but fully encased. Make space to let it out sometimes, I told him. That’s why I wanted to see you today, he said.

Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

An excerpt from a new book W. W. Norton calls “a radically inclusive, intersectional, and transnational approach to the fight for women’s rights.”  Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption by Rafia Zakaria W. W. Norton, 256pp., $23.95 There is an important distinction between what Nancy Fraser calls “affirmative change” and actual transformational change. The former is […]

Burt Shonberg. A review of "Beyond the Pleasuredome" is at Riot Material magazine

Beyond the Pleasure Dome: The Lost Occult World of Burt Shonberg

at Buckland Museum, Cleveland (through 1 November 2021). Presented by Stephen Romano Gallery, Brooklyn by Robin Scher “The truth is out there,” that quintessentially quotable tagline from the hit 90s TV series The X Files, reflects an ongoing fascination. The obsession with this statement lies in its absolute nature: the truth, not a truth. This idea speaks to an […]

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