Art. Word. Thought.
Reviewed by Dan Chiasson
The Philosophy of Modern Song
by Bob Dylan
Simon & Schuster, 352pp., $28.93
NYR
Bob Dylan’s new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, is a kind of music-appreciation course open to auditors and members of the general public. It is best savored one chapter, one song, at a time, while listening to the accompanying playlists, which its readers have assembled on music-streaming platforms. Professor Dylan lectures a little, then you press play. [Read more…]
Knowing Not Knowing, at Matt Drey Arts (presenting with the Kava Collective)
by Mat Gleason
The art of Yehonatan Koenig is a subatomic soiree, every mark-making molecule involved in contributing to a higher purpose along the way.
There is form and structure revealed here, an elegant point in the digressions of a thousand or more marks, each its own act of lending to the whole. [Read more…]
Grant Wallace: Over the Psychic Radio
at Ricco/Maresca Gallery, NYC (through 3 December 2022)
By Michael Bonesteel
Freelance writer and editor Deborah Coffin of Albany, California, was in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley in 1997 when she first encountered street musician Brian Wallace at a party. “I had a friend who knew Brian,” she recalled. “Brian was obsessing about my friend because her red hair reminded him of this drawing by his grandfather, and he wanted her to see it.”
That may sound like a rather lame variation on the old pick-up line “come up and see my etchings,” but Brian was specifically thinking about his grandfather Grant Wallace’s portrait of the ravishing celestial goddess “Zu La Zu Lé.” [Read more…]
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 100 works that are personal, experimental, and revealing. The installation is dense and full of relatively small works, mostly hung salon style. It takes patience to go through the exhibit, but it is rewarding for its psychological complexity and conceptual richness. [Read more…]
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 expressed through the film in its alternations between rare footage of early concerts and interviews, expressive animated renderings of the science-fiction imagery laden throughout Bowie’s oeuvre and various examples of Bowie’s own artwork, both visual and musical. In doing this, Morgen allows the true scope of Bowie’s career as an artist and innovator to be appreciated by the audience in a truly all-encompassing way. Yet despite the astounding variety of ways in which Bowie is portrayed in Moonage Daydream, there is nonetheless a disarming absence of any significant insight or depth given to Bowie as an individual. This makes the film’s attempt to give Bowie himself — the man, the individual — the spotlight seem lacklustre in execution, in that Morgen can’t seem to help but identify him as anything other than an icon. [Read more…]
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
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 or an abstract phenomenon, but within the narrative context, a vehicle functionally serves as a symbol. The symbol is required because fantasy is not merely about the sensational physical immersion of the character but is more about the subjective experience the character undergoes while on their adventure. The otherworld represents the character’s unexplored subconscious mind and deeper emotional state. Furthermore, the entire narrative itself is symbolic for the audience. Within the narrative, the fictional “real” world and the fantastic world function as symbols to immerse the audience in their unmanifest subconscious. [Read more…]
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 new large-scale paintings, bronze sculptures, watercolors on paper, and photography. Khan’s first Los Angeles presentation features music and text, fitting for an area predominantly known for legendary recording studios and music venues. Based in London, the artist speaks about his meticulous artistic process, lyrical expression, and affinity to architecture.
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 interval where one takes time to recover. The paintings themselves shift seamlessly between abstraction and figuration, observation and invention evoking both delight and anxiety. Her painting process informs this ever-changing perspective that intrigues, confounds and compels the viewer upon sustained investigation of the images. [Read more…]
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, direct, I thought, “wow, what a master,” and also “ouch,” but in a good way. We became friends there, and a few years later she brought out some drawings at a meal we were having, of people, animals with wide eyes, craggy lines. Sparse, comical and awkward, eyes staring back at you or away. Up until that point I had no idea Eve was also a visual artist. I had come from a performance art background but was also starting to get more engaged in 2 dimensions. She was eager to do a trade. It seemed we shared a similar concern for the human condition. And because we humans are funny in our grotesqueness, our derangement, our folly, we didn’t think it unusual to portray that. We also felt the comradery of being outsiders, even though we both grew up here in LA and went to art school here.
So, when Eve asked me to interview her for this publication, I did not hesitate. It’s been wonderful to burrow in with her on the ways and means of her process. She’s really not an outsider (nor am I.) She is as inside as it gets. [Read more…]
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 by. It was a charming, homemade ad, shot on grainy video, full of beautiful women dressed in international garb like they were animatronic dolls in Disneyland’s It’s a Small World ride. [Read more…]
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 for a kiss in a nearly abstract closeup, Kissed. The subject of a Turkish Girl exhibits her vulva by holding up her legs at an unlikely angle. Finally, in the small loose drawing About Heaven, unidentified objects are flanked by a Dumas poem about death and eroticism. The visitor is warned: the exhibition shows sexually explicit works, contemplates issues of our common humanity such as race, and does not shrink from the esoteric. Anyone seeking a comfortable experience better turn back. [Read more…]
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 victim, they pack a sucker punch directly to the gut. [Read more…]
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 symbols. Therefore, a symbol’s form or essence can outlive the original contextual boundaries that generated its living meaning. [Read more…]
July 2022, Los Angeles
by Margaret Lazzari
“An iceberg is 10% above water and 90% below. When we talk about our work, artists all talk about the stuff above water, but we never talk about all the stuff way beneath the work. Who knows what their work will be until they do it, until they do the investigation, until they get surprised?” –Nancy Kay Turner
This article is about the whole iceberg of Nancy Kay Turner’s artwork, discussing the 10% above but also illuminating some below, including the chance occurrences and unplanned upheavals that shaped her work just as much as her conscious intention form them. –ML [Read more…]
at Rory Devine Fine Art, Los Angeles (through 6 August)
Reviewed by Eve Wood
Albert Camus once famously asked, “Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?” One can only hope that this was a rhetorical question, yet however ironic, it is still a sentiment worth pondering, especially considering today’s current socio-political climate of daily hate crimes, bigotry and mass shootings. Let’s face it — if you happen to have been born into a corporeal, human existence, you will inevitably suffer some sort of trauma, either real or imagined, over the course of your lifetime. Hell, even the act of being born, is enough to scare any living creature back into the womb. Still, we persist because, in the end, as Camus suggests, we must all take solace in the smallest mundane tasks that frame our lives and make them bearable. It’s rare that an artist is a direct conduit to both grief and absurdity simultaneously, yet Georganne Deen is exactly that, relishing in the absolute bizarreness that often encompasses a life well lived. [Read more…]
at Fondation Vincent Van Gogh Arles, France (through 23 October 2022)
Reviewed by Eve Wood
Art is never made in a vacuum, as all visual iterations must derive from something: a momentary glimpse of refracted light, a train pulling out of the station, a woman lying languorously on a bed. Whatever it is we are witness to, at least in the context of art, it has been done before. The trick is to create a compelling conversation between the ‘now’ and the ‘then,’ to find threads of association, of understanding and celebration.
Nicole Eisenman has always been a renegade maker of things that are at once luminous and sardonic. She is an artist who asks the questions we are too afraid to ponder, and then she answers them for us – with wit, grace and infinite wisdom. Her answers may not always be what we want to hear, but rest assured they are true. Nicole Eisenman and the Moderns. Heads, Kisses, Battles establishes what the catalogue essay describes as an unprecedented dialogue between the artist’s own oeuvre and that of twenty-seven modern artists, including (and perhaps most importantly) Vincent Van Gogh. This, to be sure, is not an easy task, and it is one that could easily have slipped into sentimentality were it not for the fact that there is not one sentimental bone in Eisenman’s body. [Read more…]
JOEUN KIM AATCHIM
사자굴 [SAJAGUL] — THEN, OUT OF THE DEN
at MAKE ROOM LOS ANGELES (through June 4th 2022)
Rachel Reid Wilkie: There seems to be a shamanistic quality to your work. You summon your family members into the architectural space of your paintings and beckon them to dream with you, as a collective consciousness, as a collective dream-body. Did you journey together into the dreamscape? Or did you collect your family memories piece by piece?
Joeun Kim Aatchim: It was piece by piece, or more precisely, space by space, then object by object. [Read more…]
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…]
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…]