Heartbreak can be a savage thing. It’s a primal ache that creeps up on you in the middle of the night, ferociously roaring and threatening to tear your heart into tiny pieces. This metaphor is made literal in the horror-drama After Midnight, which focuses on a man-versus-monster battle that begins after the dropping of a devastating Dear John letter. [Read more…]
Testaments To Treachery And The Trampling Of Souls In C von Hassett’s Don’t Repeat Don’t Repeat
at MASH Gallery, Los Angeles (through 1 February)
Reviewed by Eve Wood
Hunter S. Thompson once wrote, “For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.” Which is to say, the realization of Man’s or any man’s greatest achievements comes at often dire costs and, perhaps requisitely, at the ravaging expense of the masses. C von Hassett understands this better than most, as his solo exhibition at MASH Gallery reads like a primer for the dispossessed, a lexicon of dark and sinister images that are ominous yet also humorous in a wryly sardonic kind of way. Tackling topics like mass murder, starvation, lynching and, well, Adolf Hitler, Hassett’s images function not so much as dark harbingers from the past or warnings of things to come, but as testaments to the treachery inherent in the human character, which is its own kind of warning. These paintings feel more urgent than ever, as there is an almost palpable sense of dread in the world today, and Hassett does not shy away from the gritty, unnerving truth of where we are and what we’ve come to. [Read more…]
Beauty In The Slaughterhouse: Francis Bacon’s Books And Painting
Bacon en toutes lettres, Centre Pompidou, Paris (through January 20)
Francis Bacon: Late Paintings, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (February 23 – May 25)
Reviewed by Sarah Stewart-Kroeker and Stephen S. Bush
Humans are susceptible to puncture and cut, and in the end, like all dead organic matter, we’ll spoil. Whatever else we are, we’re meat. Francis Bacon’s paintings incessantly remind us of these truths. Whereas Pablo Picasso’s cubism was perspectival and worked from side to side—merging left, center, and right, Bacon’s is physiological and works from the inside out: interior, surface, and exterior. Organs and bones intermingle with skin and hair. In his oeuvre, the human subject itself serves as the memento mori, it is always figured and disfigured, fleshy and skeletal, animated and decaying. [Read more…]
The Savage Wit And Surreal Wonder Of The Wave
You make one little decision and the repercussions hit you like a wave. Boom! You’re knocked out of your cozy footing and swept away into a new reality. There’s a swirl of excitement and terror as you desperately stretch to find your bearings or snatch a breath of air. Maybe you wish you could go back to before, make a new choice, take a new path. All of this is what the trippy sci-fi thriller The Wave is about. [Read more…]
Jeffrey Vallance Interview: The Story Behind Blinky
by Lita Barrie
Jeffrey Vallance has loved pranks since he was at high school but it did not occur to him that they could be called “performance art” until he went to art school. Vallance is so guileless he did not understand why he was called a “prankster” at first because he was making a social point. Since then he has continued to do what came naturally to him: blurring the lines between art and life because it has never occurred to him that they could be separate. Vallance is known as a pioneer of Infiltration Art (a form of Intervention Art) because he interacts with religious and political institutions and foreign dignitaries: traveling throughout Polynesia in search of the origin of the myth of Tiki and meeting with the king of Tonga and the queen and president of Palau; studying Christian relics and meeting Pope John Paul 11 at the Vatican; creating a Richard Nixon Museum; initiating a campaign “Preserving America’s Cultural Heritage” and creating a shamanic magic drum in Lapland. These art performances led to whacky sculptures, phantasmagoric paintings, collages, bricolages and frenzied drawings that draw as much on folk art and pop culture as avant-garde concepts. [Read more…]
Epic Battles In The Epoch Of Streamers
WORLD WAR MEDIA is fast developing at home and around the globe as some of the biggest players in the home and mobile viewing entertainment arena are gearing up to compete for monthly consumer subscription fees. [Read more…]
Beyond The Weeping Muse: Dora Maar
at Tate Modern, London (through 15 March 2020)
Reviewed by Christopher P Jones
There was a decade in Dora Maar’s life when anything seemed possible. During the 1930s she opened her own studio in Paris with art director Pierre Kéfer. She shared a darkroom with the Hungarian-French photographer Brassaï. She showed her work in Dada and Surrealist exhibitions. Her photos began appearing print, from fashion magazines to surrealist catalogues. She worked with May Ray. She met and fell in love with Pablo Picasso. [Read more…]
The Dagger-Like Behemoth Of MoMA’s Conjoined Super-Tall
by Martin Filler
Filler examines the “colossal imposition” of 53W53, wherein he states MoMA must now “bear responsibility for making local environmental quality even worse.”
Courtesy of The New York Review of Books
Among the plethora of disturbingly disproportionate, super-tall, super-thin condominium towers that have spiked the New York City skyline since the turn of the millennium and that graphically symbolize America’s concomitant surge in income inequality, the most recently completed of them marks the spot of the Museum of Modern Art, which inaugurated its latest building project in October, two weeks before its ninetieth anniversary. The dagger-like ultra-high-rise component of the conjoined complex was built to the plans of the French architect Jean Nouvel, while the enlargement of the museum itself is the work of the New York partnership Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) in association with Gensler, the powerhouse multinational firm that often provides technical and construction management expertise on high-style projects conceived by less full-service practitioners. [Read more…]
Giving Voice To The Voiceless In Christopher Myers’ Drapetomania
at Fort Gansevoort, Los Angeles (through February 8)
Reviewed by Genie Davis
Opening an outpost in Los Angeles, the well-known New York-based gallery, Fort Gansevoort, chose artist, author, and play-write Christopher Myers’ Drapetomania as its inaugural exhibition in this city. Myers’ large-scale, mural-sized textile works and powerfully bleak sculptures create a stirring initial show. [Read more…]
Philipp Kremer: With Lovers
at Nicodem Gallery, Los Angeles (through February 1)
Reviewed by Eve Wood
Imagine a faceless orgy, a concupiscence of bodies – colliding, embracing, penetrating, wherein the entirety of the surrounding picture plane is reduced to a senseless expanse of writhing and roiling flesh. In Philipp Kremer’s work, the notion of desire is determined by an exploration into genderless ideation. Sex is not strictly sex, nor is this beauteous lovemaking, but an electrified and energized landscape of human intersections – hand in hand, arm over arm, face into face, thigh across thigh, torsos twisting and contorting in a vaguely nihilistic expanse where no two people ever seem to truly connect. [Read more…]
Sites Of Love And Desire In Lari Pittman: Declaration Of Independence
at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (through January 5)
Reviewed by Lita Barrie
Lari Pittman’s momentous retrospective at Hammer Museum, is not only the most ambitious exhibition organized by the museum but arguably the most important exhibition anywhere in the country — or perhaps the world, today. This career-spanning exhibition of 80 densely layered monumental paintings and 50 vibrant works on paper ends the decade on a jubilant note because as the curator Connie Butler says, “the show is really about revelation.” [Read more…]
The ’10s: Best Jazz Releases Of The Decade
In the last decade of his life, Duke Ellington, probably America’s greatest composer, had a resurgence. Jazz was in turmoil, expanding and contracting at the same time, not unlike a star going supernova. In Ellington’s case, he was reincorporating various musical influences. He returned to the sacred music of his early life, to New Orleans, to the songbook of his musical foil, Billy Strayhorn, after Strayhorn died in 1967. But it is the sacred music that truly reinvigorated what would be the master’s last era. [Read more…]
Memories and Despair: The 10 Best Films of the Year
The year 2019 was reflected in its cinema like few before it. Fittingly, the decade closes with movies that obsessively gazed upon the passage of time and the social realities which are setting parts of the world aflame. It is hard for the art of an era to escape its dominant forces. Since 2016, history has moved in a strange blur, the age of Donald Trump taking on a surrealist hue. From Jordan Peele’s Us to Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, visions of class war and upheaval were expressed through dreamscapes both satirical and haunted. With another decade passing, this was also a year focused on the power of nostalgia and history’s darker edges. Martin Scorsese’s grandiose Netflix saga, The Irishman, followed a de-aged Robert De Niro through the shadowy underworld of American history. Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was pure nostalgia in its reverie, working ever so hard to revive an idea of 1969 Los Angeles. Now the question is if the 2020’s will bring hope or more gazing at what has passed, with fear of what is to come. [Read more…]
The Overlooked Ten From 2019’s Jazz Bin
Choosing music outside of the constraints of marketing and modishness is a difficult practice that for some is an absolute chore. In this technocratic age of curated playlists, there is less exploration among individuals. While online encyclopedias continue to define and annotate the music of the past along with current releases, it is sometimes easier to plug into the mindless algorithmic bliss provided by streaming services. That is NOT wrong. Everybody wants some simplification in these complicated times. [Read more…]
Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative
Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative
by Jane Alison
Catapult, 272 pp., $12.81(paper)
Review courtesy of the New Yorker
I was in the seventh grade when Jane Alison’s début novel, The Love-Artist fell into my hands, and its effect on me was like a full-body blush. The book, which imagines an answer to the mystery of why Ovid was exiled to the edge of the Black Sea, in 8 A.D., stars a witch whom Ovid first glimpses rising from a pool in strands of water and wild grass. Everything is sensuous. Flowers are carnal. Alison has since written three more novels; she is also a translator and the author of a memoir, The Sisters Antipodes. [Read more…]
Memory Palaces & The Hidden Art: Works And Studies Within The Collection Of Audrey B. Heckler
an exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum, NYC, January 26, 2020
by Valérie Rousseau with Jane Kallir, Anne-Imelda Radice, and others
American Folk Art Museum/Skira Rizzoli, 272 pages, $50.00
Review courtesty of The New York Review of Books
Into the Abyss With Jonathan Glazer’s Feral Short: The Fall
Jonathan Glazer emerges every so often with work that above all is constructed by a powerful aesthetic. More than narratives, what Glazer crafts are images combined with soundscapes which immerse the viewer in moments of dread, hallucination and discovery. Moments which could have the feel of a common day action suddenly take on a dreamlike ambiance. In Glazer’s underrated 2004 film, Birth, Nicole Kidman plays an upper class New Yorker confronted with the possibility that a young boy is her reincarnated husband. His 2013 Under the Skin finds a silent woman played by Scarlett Johansson, an extraterrestrial in human form, drives through grey streets seeking male prospects for the purpose of consuming their physical essence for an unclear plan. In both films familiar settings, whether upscale dinner parties or gritty alleyways, are touched by extreme possibilities. But how does the artist respond to the world when it actually does become extreme? [Read more…]
Hazards Of Alienation In The Fool (and Other Moral Tales)
The Fool (and Other Moral Tales)
by Anne Serre
Translated by Mark Hutchinson
New Directions, 228pp., $13.97
Among the linty cling of rumors and backwashed gossip spread around the barrooms and laundromats of the universe, circulates this mortuary nugget: Hey, did you know that Ego, when it dies, would love nothing more than to attend its own funeral? Ego, in brazenly counterpointing Woody Allen’s proclamation — “I don’t mind dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens” — would happily play the role of phantom witness while enjoying the privileged position of being able to float above its own death. It could view itself through the ceremony of mirrored eyes, and gauge its impact upon the audience gathered in its name. Ego, or the I-self, aspires to dream itself into a permanent narrative, to secure tenancy in a time-loop — it longs to know its movements are in accord with something lasting. This fretful existential dilemma, as it relates to writing, to functioning as a writer, and to the amorphic realm of stories and narrative, finds itself swaddled in the gallows’ silk of Love and Death, in Anne Serre’s new book, The Fool (and Other Moral Tales). [Read more…]
Twenty Que With J. Matthew Thomas
The appearance of J. Matthew Thomas on our Earth is a rare and fortuitous event, akin to a special comet or eclipse that occurs once every 500 hundred years or so. He is the DaVinci of our day-and-age, a true Visionary bringing together community, education, environment and art with international events such as the PASEO, programs such as Studio TAOS and Pecha Kucha nights. His tenure at the Harwood Museum in Taos has seen him at the curatorial Vanguard in featuring previously unknown or undervalued works by Women, Indigenous, LGBTQ, and other underrepresented artists. [Read more…]
Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet The Sun Again
at The Broad, Los Angeles (through February 16)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner
“Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.” —Edward Said
“To stay alive you must slay silence” –Simin Behbahani
Shirin Neshat’s dense and nearly overwhelming exhibition I Will Greet The Sun Again interrogates the very nature of reality, myth, perception and memory with her piercing portraits of women whose face, hands and feet are covered with intricate, decorative Farsi text; her haunting videos reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s mysterious starkness, and her later portraits, which compile faces of the exiled. Neshat’s compelling photographs (black and white) and mystical films (black and white as well as color) examine cultural norms surrounding the wearing of the veil, as seen through both the Western and Islamic gaze along with the cultural dislocation suffered by individuals in diaspora. [Read more…]