Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

The Psyche of Migration in Igor Posner’s Cargó

By

Reviewed by Justin Herfst

In the opening sequence of Igor Posner’s Cargó, two images are stacked on top of each other. In the top image is a green thicket, and in the bottom a black and white image of an elderly gentleman dressed in a long coat walking in the dark. The man appears deep in thought, the very top of his head cut out by the frame almost as though his head were filled with the imaginations of the thicket. The sequence is pure intuition, an inner movement that has been refined over the ten years Posner worked on Cargó. Like two disparate sounds brought together into harmony, the sequence intuitively makes sense. On the following page are two black and white images, one of a women’s legs on a bed and the other a boy looking on into the camera. In the low light, the shutter speed is slowed and both images are blurred. Black space in both photographs reach across the page so no border separates the images and there is no frame save for the rectangle of the page. Gone are any presuppositions of tradition and bookmaking. In its edit and its subject, Cargó is loosed from the material present and handed over to the subliminal.    [Read more…]

The Julian Lennon Interview

By

by Amadour

In this conversation, I speak to Julian Lennon from his home in Monaco about his recent exhibition, ATMOSPHERIA, at William Turner Gallery in Santa Monica. These works capture magnificent aerial landscapes from the vantage point of an airplane. A fascinating, multi-hyphenate creator, Lennon shares his insights on photography, the curiosity behind his painterly images, and the world travels that cultivate his passion for humanity and the natural environment. [Read more…]

Meditations on the Mystical Sublime: Kourosh Beigpour’s Mandal

By

at Advocartsy, Los Angeles (through 4 February 2023)
Reviewed by Christopher Ian Lutz

The human mind seeks connectivity. The writing of letters and numbers, and the drawing of lines in a painting, are acts of connecting points. Furthermore, geometry, language, narration, astrology, and philosophy are intellectual means to connect points that align with our thoughts and emotions. This symmetry of our subjective experience with the objective physical world and universal phenomenon provides us with a sense of completeness. Our nature is complete, but we do not always have a sense of fullness. We design and search for wholeness in things outside ourselves to understand our identity. Even with such a sense of self-realization in our minute incarnation, there is a need for absolute truth to understand our relationship with the greater wholeness of the universe. Therefore, we extend a connection to all things to conceive of a divine form. However we conceive of divinity, whether spiritually or materially, the source of creation is pertinent to our sense of self. It is fundamental to our conception of perfection, for which we shape morals and law. The letter, the number, and the shape are not merely instrumental marks but are philosophical arguments that are elemental to our religious, political, and social ideologies. [Read more…]

Ibrahim El-Salahi Pain Relief Drawings

By

at The Drawing Center, NYC (through 15 January)
Reviewed by Robyn Creswell

Pain Relief Drawings
by Ibrahim El-Salahi
Contributors: Laura Hoptman, Hassan Musa
Exhibition Catalogue, 157pp, $35.00
NYR

The face is a mask, vaguely leonine, narrowing from its enormous eyes to a snout of flared nostrils and a small mouth, twisted into what might be a grimace or a grin. The contours of the nose branch up into a network of wrinkles around the eyes, then extend out into fiddlehead ferns sprouting from the temples. The gaze is so insistent that it is easy to ignore the virtuosity of all the little lines: the sagging pouches of the eyes, the subdued yet prickly whiskers along the jaws, the dots of stubble on the upper lip and double creases at the knuckles, the striped upholstery of the chair. Strikingly, the sitter’s left arm seems to reach out beyond the frame, which crops the arm at its wrist. Is he holding up a mirror to himself (or a phone)? It is a self-portrait of the artist in an armchair, examining himself—and us—through a screen. [Read more…]

Glenn Hardy’s Who Am I If I Don’t Represent?

By

at Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles (through 11 February 2023)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

Glenn Hardy’s second solo exhibition, aptly title Who Am I If I Don’t Represent? — at Charlie James Gallery in LA’s Chinatown — comprises a visual investigation into the complex nature of black identity while also standing as positive visual documents of daily activities, personal victories, triumphs, and moments of deep introspection as well. Hardy is a master of the nuanced narrative, telling stories of seemingly ordinary occurrences, like playing basketball, for instance, or drinking Pina Coladas in the pool, or enjoying a day in the sun at a family reunion. Yet beneath the surface of these apparent innocuous actions is, on the part of the artist, an abiding commitment to social justice. Deeply affected by the barrage of negative images that horribly misrepresent the black experience within social media, Hardy has chosen to amplify the positive aspects of his own lived human experience, declaring a personal and communal commitment to reassert his personal identity and to “live unapologetically and without fear” within today’s troublingly present moment. [Read more…]

Martin Puryear and the Volumes Voiced From Within

By

at Matthew Marks Gallery, Los Angeles (through 8 April 2023)
Reviewed by Lorraine Heitzman

In the midst of the frenzy of Frieze week, the quiet of Martin Puryear’s show at Matthew Marks Gallery was practically deafening. Admittedly, Puryear’s art has always been somewhat monastic, even restrained, and the sculptures in this show are no less hushed. Over the course of his career the world has only become louder and more vitriolic, and the stillness that is his stock-in-trade is amplified against the atmospheric noise that is now so prevalent. Like an admonished child, Puryear has learned to use his inside voice, but he has also mastered the ability to make his voice heard above the din. Through impeccable craftsmanship and a minimalist sensibility, his sculptures speak louder than the clamoring voices of countless others. [Read more…]

Susan Kaprov: Conversations on Art, Technology and The Space Age

By

by Jill Conner      

In some respects Susan Kaprov’s art has remained elusive, until now. Her experimental photomontages are included in the permanent collections of museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Susan Kaprov was born in 1946 and grew up in New York City when the verve of women’s liberation and the haze of the sexual revolution continued to circulate. Shortly before finishing high school, The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan, and The Group, by Mary McCarthy, both appeared in 1963, and Elizabeth Hardwick had co-founded The New York Review of Books while The New York Times remained on a 4-month strike.  When Susan Kaprov received a Bachelor of Science degree from the City University of New York in 1970, Kate Millet’s groundbreaking book, Sexual Politics, was published. A new realism was flourishing throughout contemporary art at this time. [Read more…]

American Agri-Giants Are Swallowing Us Whole

By

Reviewed by Ian Frazier

We are eating a big hole in the middle of the Midwest and sucking up California’s ancient aquifers until the land collapses like an empty juice box. The awe that new arrivals from other countries feel when they see the bounty in a US supermarket is an illusion—more like what one might experience when stepping from a cold night into a nice, warm house where they’re burning the furniture. In short, we are plundering the natural sources of our food production and can’t go on this way. [Read more…]

With a Fierceness Greater Than the Beast She Births: A Review of Chouette

By

Reviewed by Jennifer Kurdyla

Chouette
by Claire Oshetsky
Ecco Press, 256pp., $13.29
HR

If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, then Claire Oshetsky’s delightfully disturbing novel, Chouette, offers a nonplanetary paradigm through which to view the female experience: the bestial. Equal parts magical realist and radical feminist, the novel follows the plight of Tiny, a woman whose journey through pregnancy and motherhood vies with the most dramatic of Hollywood depictions. For Tiny is not with child per se — not a human child — but rather an owlet, the offspring of an affair she has with a wild female owl in a dream. Through her experience we see motherhood and associated notions of sacrifice, compassion, and belonging upended and redefined. [Read more…]

An Interview with Pae White

By

Slow Winter Sun, at Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco (through 25 February 2023)
by Amadour

Artist Pae White captivates her audience with a solo exhibition, Slow Winter Sun, at Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco, featuring new monochromatic paper-clay paintings on wood, iridescent ceramic sculptures, and tapestries. Timed in proximity to the city’s FOG Design+Art Fair, this show centers on the relationship between humanity, nature, and technology. We discuss the artist’s connection to California, her shapeshifting materials, and her processes in the studio. [Read more…]

Luminosities Beyond the Eye in Yehonatan Koenig’s Ink on Paper

By

at The BAG, Los Angeles (through 19 February)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

Yehonatan Koenig’s luminous ink drawings are studies in both absence and presence, suspension and saturation, death and rebirth. The patterns he creates in his drawings repudiate any obvious associations one might have when considering the act of mark-making and, indeed, the process by which he creates these works is in-and-of-itself an act of both defiance and meditation. One might attempt to configure a story from these images, or at the very least, contrive some kind of skeletal narrative. However, the beauty of Koenig’s process insists upon a commitment to the unknown, and the ability, on the part of the viewer, to completely surrender to the idea, famously penned by Gertrude Stein, that “there is no there there.” [Read more…]

Dystopia Borne Alive in No Land in Sight

By

Reviewed by Jason Tandon

No Land in Sight
by Charles Simic
Knopf, 96pp., $23.95
HR

Charles Simic is not just one of the most celebrated and honored poets of the last fifty years; now in his eighties, he remains one of the most prolific, having released four books since 2015. Fans of Simic’s poetry who have especially enjoyed his newer work, such as Come Closer and Listen (2019) and Scribbled in the Dark (2017), will find many of the hallmarks of his recent style in his latest collection, No Land in Sight. The poems are brief, often ten lines or fewer, and they are primarily set in a city (presumably New York City, where Simic has spent much of his time when not in New Hampshire). His persona is a solitary figure who suffers from insomnia and roams the streets at all hours or lies in bed listening to the wind, a portentous sound in Simic’s work. He routinely shows empathy for the homeless, disdain for political leaders, and bemusement at the masses who blindly follow them. [Read more…]

In Conversation with Artist Jim Shaw

By

Jim Shaw: Thinking the Unthinkable, at Gagosian, Beverly Hills (12 January – 25 February 2023)
by Amadour

Artist Jim Shaw captures the tantalizing spectacle of Hollywood in a new series of paintings and sculptures in his exhibition Thinking the Unthinkable, opening at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills. Last month I visited the artist at his studio in Highland Park, Los Angeles, to view the work for this show and to speak with him about his many muses. A prolific drawer, Shaw has mountains of sketches from which he prepares his ideas for forthcoming paintings. In this interview, we plug into his infatuation with film, stories of Hollywood personalities, and secret societies. [Read more…]

Freedom and the Postwar Avant-Garde

By

Reviewed by Erik Hmiel

The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War
by Louis Menand
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 880pp., $18.89

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I played in punk-rock bands. Not just punk-rock bands, hardcore-punk-rock bands, bands you might even call post-punk. We played shows in basements and garages, record stores and art spaces, cafes and homeless shelters. We played to 100 people and to zero. We hated the radio and were enthralled by our involvement with a national network of young people who made music outside of the confines of a commercial ecosystem. I even came to disdain the calls of older independent musicians who–suddenly confronted with a loss of revenue from illegal downloading services like Napster and the bootleg copies offered by the CD-R—made genuine, heartfelt appeals to the connection between artistic labor and material compensation. Punk was “beyond” such an outdated way of thinking about art. What was truly radical and inspirational about punk-rock was that no one cared about money. We existed in our own ecosystem, played to each other, patronized specific record stores, and otherwise went on with our lives without the metaphysical baggage associated with being ‘Artists’. Without knowing it, we simultaneously embraced the abiding ideal of the historical avant-garde’s sense of radicality—art as oblique challenge to staid conventions—and what the German art historian Hans Belting, writing in 1987, called ‘The End of the History of Art.’[1] [Read more…]

The Best Jazz Guitar is Jeff Parker’s Jazz Guitar

By

Best Jazz Record of 2022
Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy
Eremite Records

Reviewed by Henry Cherry

Four selections of sets from Jeff Parker’s Monday evening live performances with his quartet are the basis of his most recent release, Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy. There is no actual tennis involved. ETA is a small restaurant venue in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. The extended name is a nod to late writer David Foster Wallace. It’s that sort of place, oranges in a bowl on the bar, oysters on the half-shell, and Jeff Parker working his way through the situational complications of jazz in the digital era. [Read more…]

Stalking the Atomic City

By

Reviewed by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.

Stalking the Atomic City
by Markiyan Kamysh
translated by Hanna Leliv and Reilly Costigan-Humes
Astra House, 160pp., $13.59
HR

The disaster at the nuclear power plant at Chornobyl in April 1986 created, in real life, a geography people had only imagined. The Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation is the size of Luxembourg, a thousand square miles of marsh, ponds, forest, villages, towns, and large-scale industrial ruins, frozen in time. We’ve seen the photos of swing sets and classrooms overrun with vines, the abandoned high-rises in Pripyat. We’ve heard the stories of boar and lynx and deer and birds reclaiming their ancestral wilderness and harboring who knows what genetic mutations. The Red Forest is the most toxic place on Earth. In a hospital basement is a pile of firefighters’ uniforms that will remain deadly to the touch for centuries. [Read more…]

An Interview with Gerard & Kelly

By

by Amadour
.

Artist duo Gerard & Kelly personify the collaborative nature of art making. Their exhibition, Panorama, at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, displays a dynamic video with three dancers questioning the colonialist narratives on the ceiling mural of the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, now the Pinault Collection. The artists also work with silkscreening in their Glyphs series, which explores notions of  “orientation” and the multilayered works of composer Julius Eastman. In this conversation, we discuss the duo’s many collaborators and influences, how they articulate their vision for performance, and their time in art school. [Read more…]

It Begins with a Corpse: New Work from Cormac McCarthy

By

Reviewed by Michael Gorra
The Passenger
by Cormac McCarthy
Knopf, 383 pp., $20.22
Stella Maris
by Cormac McCarthy
Knopf, 190 pp., $19.99
NYR

No regular reader of Cormac McCarthy will be surprised to find that The Passenger begins with a corpse. Or two corpses, really, one of which has gone missing. The one we see, in the italicized, single-page prologue with which the book begins, is of a frozen golden-haired girl found hanging “among the bare gray poles of the winter trees.” Her name is Alicia Western, and she’s dressed in white, with a red sash that makes her easy to spot against the snow, a “bit of color in the scrupulous desolation.” It is Christmas 1972, a forest near the Wisconsin sanitarium where the twenty-year-old has checked herself in—a place she’s been before. [Read more…]

On Wing With Word Through Anselm Kiefer’s Exodus

By

Gagosian at Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles (through 25 March 2023)
by Rachel Reid Wilkie

Los Angeles poet Rachel Reid Wilkie was given the task of walking into Anselm Kiefer’s Exodus — a literally monumental exhibition, in that each of these paintings are upwards of 30’ tall — and addressing the colossal artworks “cold,” as in spontaneously on the spot. Below is her 7-part response, with each video speaking to one painting as Wilkie circles through the cavernous, faintly-lit room: [Read more…]

Henry Taylor’s B Side: Where Mind Shapes Itself to Canvas

By

Henry Taylor: B Side
at MOCA Grand, Los Angeles (through 30 April 2023)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

Ages ago when there were LP records and 45s, the B side of a popular single made allowances for experimentation and could be counted on as an alternative vision to the more mainstream and compulsory hit single. B sides were not the reason you bought the album, but they were perhaps a more authentic representation of the artist’s vision, and every so often a great B side would feel akin to unearthing gold. Henry Taylor’s thirty-year retrospective at MOCA Grand pays homage to the unexpected, the visceral, and the odd man out, and like any successful B side, you want to keep listening. [Read more…]