Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body And Other Parties

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Reviewed by John Biscello

Her Body and Other Parties
by Carmen Maria Machado
Graywolf Press, 264 pp., $16.00

Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other PartiesMy body is a haunted
house that I am lost in.
There are no doors but there are knives
and a hundred windows.
                                           –Jacui Germain

Imagine, now, an episode of Black Mirror, in which the female-body-as-haunted-house is the prime subject, a corporeal metaphor undergoing a cinematic vivisection. A symphonic series of camera angles, close-ups, rapid cuts and fade-outs commingle with bones-in-the-attic narrative and feminist bloodletting, Camille Paglia channeling Shirley Jackson, and we, the viewers, are riveted to the screen, to the exposed interior of a haunted house that seems never-ending in its shadowed corridors and passageways. The episode closes with an appropriately unsettling final scene, a cryptic air that slows time and promises an emotional hangover. You stare at the silent blackened void of the screen, waiting for music to play, for credits to roll, for something to happen. Finally, words appear in white block letters — Written by Carmen Maria Machado. This stirring episode hasn’t yet aired, because it hasn’t been written, but in a parallel realm where I get to play Netflix exec, Machado has been commissioned to contribute her unique and considerable talents to the Black Mirror universe.   [Read more…]

The Riveting Rauschenberg: The ¼ Mile

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at LACMA (through June 9, 2019)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner       

“Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction”
–Pablo Picasso

 “There is no reason not to consider the world as one gigantic painting”
–Robert Rauschenberg

Run, don’t walk to see the revelatory exhibition entitled Rauschenberg: The ¼ Mile, at LACMA. The large-scale, enormously ambitious work shown here (together for the first time) as one long piece was done over seventeen years and is a joyful trip through Rauschenberg’s absolutely pristine craftsmanship, complex imagery and his many cultural touchstones. These works were started in 1981 when there was a Rauschenberg retrospective in Europe and clearly the artist is ruminating on his previous bodies of work such as his iconoclastic “Combines” from the fifties and sixties and his “Spreads” series from 1975-83. [Read more…]

Clara’s Ghost Is A Twisted Family Affair

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

There’s a unique kind of horror found within families. Inside jokes can become a cozy place to nestle insults. Old wounds and deepening resentments can be papered over with any new bit of family gossip or for any get together. But in the horror-comedy Clara’s Ghost, a brush with the potentially paranormal pushes a mild-mannered mom to lash out against the family that’s tradition is casually berating her. [Read more…]

James Dickey’s Black Mask: Deliverance as a Runaway Slave Narrative

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by James McWilliams

When Burt Reynolds died last August, the obits recounted the strange life of an iconic American actor. Particularly weird was how Reynolds often lied about where he was born. He said he was born Waycross, Georgia. Why anyone born in Lansing, Michigan would want to be from Waycross, Georgia is a baffling question. What we do know is that Reynolds, who always identified as southern, and even affected a twang to fit the image, was, with this odd fib, participating in a cultural practice with roots dating back to nineteenth-century plantation culture. Burt Reynolds was “storying.” [Read more…]

Why Frank Zappa Is The Voice America (Still) Needs

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by Molly MacGilbert

“It’s time for a revolution, but probably not in the terms that people imagine it.” –Frank Zappa

This December marks 25 years since the death of DIY genius, comical cynic, lyrical satirist, musical innovator, social commentator, sardonic iconoclast, political debater, and composer-slash-rock-star Frank Zappa.

Throughout his eyebrow-raising career, Zappa parodied the plastic people, brain police, valley girls, dancing fools, and hungry freaks across America. His prolific body of work is a symphony of observations of human absurdity, expressed through such mediums as political meetings in the Soviet Union and the former Czechoslovakia, experimental advertisements for razors and cough drops, a violin bow tickling a bicycle wheel, a surrealist claymation music video, and a grotesque potato-headed puppet named Thing-Fish. He aimed to “shake people out of their complacency… and make them question things.”   [Read more…]

Mary Queen of Scots is a Messy But Marvelous Bit Of Feminist Fan (Non)Fiction

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

A legendary beauty with a string of dead lovers and a dangerous claim to the English throne, Mary Stuart is a figure who has long fascinated historians. She has been painted as a murderer, a traitor, and a slut. But Mary Queen of Scots reconsiders this bad reputation and reconstructs her as a proto-feminist heroine who was condemned for her ambition, her beauty, and for trying to have it all. [Read more…]

Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson’s Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism

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Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson’s Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism
by Timothy Denevi
PublicAffairs, 416 pp., $18.30

Timothy Denevi's Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson’s Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American FascismOn a cloudy Tuesday afternoon I found myself by a train station in Santa Monica ordering an Uber ride. To ride the train through the bowels of the city can be a daily reminder that quite a sector of our civilization has gone completely insane, but the Uber ride itself put the icing on the cake and confirmed this dark suspicion. The driver, who shall remain unnamed, was a jolly type with a curious name. I have a bad habit of getting easily into conversation with any human who crosses my path and asked where the driver hailed from. Poland was the answer. Ah yes, Poland. I mentioned that Poland has been undergoing quite the political sea change, using those words as to not say the current government as right-wing and nationalist. This was my second mistake. The driver quickly announced himself as a partisan of the ruling Law and Justice Party (what a shudder to even type such a name) because, hey, they were getting rid of “the Communists still left over from the past,” who are inevitably “controlled by the Jews.” [Read more…]

Haruki Murakami’s “The Wind Cave”

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Excerpted from Murakami's recent novel, Killing Commendatore
Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel
Read Riot Material's review of Killing Commedatore

When I was fifteen, my younger sister died. It happened very suddenly. She was twelve then, in her first year of junior high. She had been born with a congenital heart problem, but since her last surgeries, in the upper grades of elementary school, she hadn’t shown any more symptoms, and our family had felt reassured, holding on to the faint hope that her life would go on without incident. But, in May of that year, her heartbeat became more irregular. It was especially bad when she lay down, and she suffered many sleepless nights. She underwent tests at the university hospital, but no matter how detailed the tests the doctors couldn’t pinpoint any changes in her physical condition. The basic issue had ostensibly been resolved by the operations, and they were baffled. [Read more…]

Julie Heffernan’s Hunter Gatherer

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at P·P·O·W, NYC
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

Both a multi-faceted spin on the pervasive selfie and an erudite capsule of feminist history, Hunter Gatherer, Julie Heffernan’s epic show at P·P·O·W, her first in five years, is far too much to absorb in one viewing—or even a dozen. Typically, Heffernan’s painterly technique is classical, almost atavistic. In a series of nine extraordinarily detailed images, all completed in 2018, Heffernan creates a personal diary cum feminist manifesto with an overtly political content seemingly at odds with its self-consciously pretty form. [Read more…]

In Search Of Lost Time In Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma

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Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

As time moves forward we find ourselves attempting to recover its fragments. In the earliest youth time can lose its very meaning, but as the years accumulate we then look back, as if trying to find photographs in a vast galaxy of memories. Alfonso Cuaron wants to use the very essence of cinema to recover the past in Roma. His first feature film for Netflix is also one of the year’s best — a haunted, detailed, personal rendering of his memories growing up in 1970s Mexico. A serene rush of recollections, sights, sounds and sensations, it is a thriving example of the artist attempting ever so thoroughly to render for us what he experienced as a child. In its grander scope it is a tapestry of a society in a specific moment of time, at a more intimate level it conjures that sensation we feel when attempting to remember how the air smelled during a trip to the desert, how the night glowed when we were lost in the woods, or what her eyes looked like when you found her weeping on the balcony. [Read more…]

Outliers and American Vanguard Art

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at LACMA (through March 17, 2019)
Reviewed by Genie Davis

What is an outlier? Is it someone outside conventional norms, beyond the commonplace? In art, both are almost certain true, and among outlier artists are the seeds of innovation, change, and a fearless evocation of what constitutes art. Boundaries are pushed, both in terms of content and creation. We may love this art, be drawn to it, seek out individual artists, but it is rare to see a wide-ranging collection of these works in a major museum. With that in mind, the west coast presentation of the National Gallery of Art-curated Outliers and American Vanguard Art at LACMA is in and of itself an outlier of an exhibition. [Read more…]

Shoplifters Delivers A Defiantly Joyful Drama About An Unusual ‘Chosen Family’

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

“Chosen family” is a term most often associated with the LGBTQA+ community. It’s used to describe a close circle of friends who love each other like family, though there is no shared blood between them. Chosen families are how many queer people find community, comfort, and home after their biological relatives have offered them rejection, scorn, or outright ostracizing. Acclaimed Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda creates a unique and heart-warming tale of such a family with Shoplifters.  [Read more…]

Director Nathaniel Khan Talks About The Price Of Everything

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by Cynthia Biret

Few ever dream of owning a masterpiece; even fewer know the intrinsic value of an art piece in today’s hyper inflated art market. Brilliantly directed by Nathaniel Khan, The Price of Everything is a fascinating journey into the personalities at the forefront of this phenomenon, from high-end investors to auctioneers, historians, art critics, collectors and artists. [Read more…]

Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future

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at The Guggenheim Museum, NYC (through April 23, 2019)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

The Hilma af Klint retrospective, currently at The Guggenheim Museum, is a game changer. This astonishing exhibition alters the way one must view the trajectory of abstract painting (almost always male dominated) in the early twentieth century. The mystery of how a classically trained female painter in Sweden at the turn of the century moved confidently away from realism to large-scale abstraction before any other painters did (and kept it secret) is a fascinating tale. [Read more…]

The Farce of Imperial Pageantry In Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite

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By Alci Rengifo

We begin with an evening walking through the artificial cities of the Fox Studios lot, accompanied by a Turk who can read a star map, graced with a name that has a royal origin. She inevitably helps us find our way among the maze of this place. It is but a day after the republic has cast its vote in another election embodying well these mad times. We walk through the false New York streets of the lot, nestled within the west side of Los Angeles. Like power, the city within this city is but an illusion. Such are the perfect conditions to enter the world of The Favourite, the new film by Greek enfant terrible Yorgos Lanthimos. Like his ancestors, Luis Bunuel, Tristan Tzara and other practitioners of the surreal arts, Lanthimos captures this era in civilization better than almost any other director. This new work reaches back into the past, yet has a timeless force in its dissection and sheer mocking of the pageantry of empire. [Read more…]

Helmut Newton: Private Property

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at 10 Corso Como, NYC
Reviewed by Jill Connor

The infamous partnership between art and fashion is receiving overwhelming recognition throughout New York galleries and museums this Fall. From September to November, 10 Corso Como introduced Private Property by the world-renowned fashion photographer, Helmut Newton. Although Newton passed away in 2004, this specific set of photographs had never been exhibited in the United States. Initially Private Property was created in 1984, but Newton had not intended for these photographs to be seen publicly. This dossier of 45 gelatin silver prints covers a decade of Newton’s career, from 1971 to 1983, and presents a mix of unknown models with well-known celebrities who, at that time, were beginning to gain notoriety. [Read more…]

A Critical Look At Deborah Sengl’s The Last Days of Mankind

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The Last Days of Mankind
Artwork by Deborah Sengl
Contributions by Marjorie Perloff, Matthias Goldmann, Anna Souchuk and Paul Reitter
DoppelHouse Press, 176 pp., $38.95
doppelhouse.com

Excerpted from the DoppelHouse Press edition, publishing at the end of the month, which examines Deborah Sengl’s The Last Days of Mankind.

“The Document Is a Figure”
by Matthias Goldmann

Deborah Sengl's The Last Days of MankindDeborah Sengl’s project The Last Days of Mankind originated as an exhibition at the Essl Museum in Klosterneuburg in early 2014, the year that marked the centennial of the beginning of World War I. The artist used 176 taxidermied white rats as actors presenting forty-four scenes from Karl Kraus’ documentary anti-war play The Last Days of Mankind (Die letzten Tage der Menschheit), which comprises 220 scenes and filled 800 pages in the original edition. Due to its length and stage directions, which include the appearance of 12,000 horses, the play has never been performed in full. This “horrible symphony of deeds”[i] is, as Kraus’s preface puts it, unsuited for human audiences and “intended for a theater on Mars.”[ii] There have been numerous attempts since the nineteen sixties to stage this unstageable play; Sengl’s installation was not the only one in 2014, though certainly it was one of the most commended. [iii] [Read more…]

Ron Baron’s Ode to a Void

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at Studio 10, Brooklyn
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

In his ghostly installation, Ode to a Void, at Studio10, Brooklyn, artist Ron Baron has channeled a literally granular level of grief. Particles of pearlite, salt, sand and broken glass are sprinkled on the gallery floor in the pattern of a room-sized spiral resembling a cosmic corona. Placed seemingly at random on this winding road to nowhere — or at least nowhere on earth — are some 60 pairs of shoes, ranging from baby’s shoes to adult cowboy boots. They have been slip-cast in ceramic, and whatever their past life was, they are now frozen in time. [Read more…]