Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

An Eye Through The Knotted Peephole In Junichiro Tanizaki’s Devils in Daylight

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Reviewed by John Biscello

Devils in Daylight
by Junichiro Tanizaki
New Directions Publishing, 96pp., $9.95

“I would call back at least for literature this world of shadows we are losing. In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the thing that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration. I do not ask that this be done everywhere, but perhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them.”– Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

Early 20thcentury, Japan. You, caped in shadows, find yourself watching two men who are watching, through a grainy peephole, two other people, a man and a woman, who are seemingly killing another man. The entire thing is busy, complex, furtive; erotic in its staggered geometry. Outside, where you are and where you aren’t, the rain-slicked street holds tiny concentric halos of light projected out from the window of an Inn that dizzies its patrons with licentious allure, while Rockwell’s paranoia blares from a jukebox — It always feels like somebody’s watching me, tell me is it just a dream — and you can’t help but look over your shoulder as you see a lantern-eyed black cat, smiling. Mind you, the song and the jukebox haven’t been invented yet, and Rockwell lingers as a figment awaiting popstar iteration, but still, they are there, this is happening, a confluence of elements, which includes you and five other people (one of them now very much dead), and the whole thing gets you thinking about the dreamlike immediacy of voyeurism, or the pyramidic folds of role-playing. You have entered that place between realms, where the novelist Junichiro Tanizaki so comfortably dwells. [Read more…]

Against Our Will: Sexual Trauma In American Art Since 1970

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Reviewed by Coco Fusco

Against Our Will: Sexual Trauma in American Art Since 1970
by Vivien Green Fryd
Pennsylvania State University Press, 349 pp., $49.95
NYR

In 1974 the performance artist Marina Abramovic stood naked and immobile in a Naples gallery. Next to her was a table with seventy-two objects, including a loaded gun. Beside the objects was a document absolving the audience of responsibility for whatever they might choose to do to her with those objects.  [Read more…]

An Army Of Women Warriors In Ann Shostrom’s The Rising

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at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, NYC
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

Ann Shostrom’s army of women warriors fills the front room of the Elizabeth Harris Gallery, a ghostly troop draped in shades of white: the traditional color of virgins, brides and suffragettes. Tall and graceful, evoking Corinthian columns, these seventeen fabric figures are both timeless and completely of the moment. Elegantly pieced together from sinuous scraps of material foraged from salvage sales, thrift stores, friends’ childhood wardrobes and Shostrom’s own closet, they simultaneously suggest Miss Havisham’s endless jilted vigil, the courageous members of the #Metoo Movement, and the chorus of 100-something congresswomen who earlier this year proudly wore ivory, ecru and alabaster to President Trump’s second State of the Union address. While explicitly feminine, they are also plainly phallic, iron fists within velvet — or in this case lace, linen and silk — gloves. [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 in 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…]

Benjamin Naishtat’s Rojo And A Region’s Cinematic Reckoning

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Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

The cinema of the Andes is a haunted art form. Rojo is set in the Argentina of the 1970s, plotted and shot like a classic noir, with a dark political subtext. Like many of the best recent films from this particular South American country and its neighbor Chile, the crime genre is used to tackle the legacy of the neo-fascist military regimes that governed these countries during the Cold War. This adds a layer of richness to the storytelling you don’t find in most U.S. movies or shows about detectives and murder. Noir has of course always been a vehicle to express the deepest recesses of any society, going back to films made by German expatriates in the U.S. during and after World War II. Fleeing the Nazis, directors like Fritz Lang framed the American underbelly with titles like The Big Heat and Scarlet Street. Now it is Latin American directors coming of age in the lingering aftermath of political terror who are refurnishing the genre in new ways. [Read more…]

The Walls Speak: Art And The Revolution In May ’68

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by Alci Rengifo

The streets have always been where the masses bring their voices and grievances. It is a practice as old as Ancient Rome. It is when the city rises and a sense of social war penetrates the air that even art itself cannot help but be transformed. This year marks a half century since the great convulsions of 1968, when art itself became the vehicle of capturing and giving voice to the emerging, clashing ideals of that heroic generation. The tail-end of the sixties featured much of the imagery, cultural shifts and pop evolution that define the decade in the world consciousness. Acid rock was in, fashion was taking leaps so colorful and free that trends were established which have not gone out of style. But an aesthetic not readily discussed in the mainstream is the aesthetic of revolution. [Read more…]

Mrinalini Mukherjee’s Phenomenal Nature

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at The Met Breuer
Reviewed by John Haber

Mrinalini Mukherjee had a dual fascination, with Modernism and the myths of her native India. If they seem impossible to reconcile, they both drew her to local materials to make the myths her own. Mukherjee worked in fiber for more than forty years, so it seems only natural that her retrospective at the Met Breuer opens not with a wall but a curtain. The entry holds barely a clue to what comes next beyond the artist’s name and a title, Phenomenal Nature — not even wall text at the side by the stairs. Penetrate within, and the curtains multiply, almost sheer but thoroughly opaque. One can still marvel at the former Whitney Museum, but its movable partitions have fallen completely away. They leave a space no less divided and mysterious for that. One might have stepped behind a stage curtain, only to find that the performance is just underway. [Read more…]

Firecrackers Is A Raw Nerve Of A Film And An Explosive Debut

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

“Why are you so angry all the time?” The heroines of writer/director Jasmin Mozaffari’s debut feature Firecrackers have plenty of reasons to rage. Living in poverty in a suffocatingly small Ontario town, recent high school graduates Lou (Michaela Kurimsky) and Chantal (Karena Evans) have little hope for their futures. All they see around them is squalor, crappy jobs, abusive boys, addiction, intolerance, and violence. This is why these battle-hardened besties, who throw punches as easily as f-bombs, have plotted a way out. For a year, they’ve scraped together the wages earned cleaning scuzzy motel rooms so they can runoff to New York. They’ve slung they’re possessions into a pair of garbage bags, compiled one thousand dollars into a tattered envelope, and arranged a ride with a pick-up truck-owning pal. But a horrid incident derails the pair’s plan, pitching them down a path littered with stinging tears, shattered glass, and wretched compromises. [Read more…]

The Deeper You Dig Makes Horror A Twisted Family Affair

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

It was an accident. A dark night. A remote road. A girl sledding alone. A man driving home. And just like that, 14-year-old Echo Allen is dead. A tragedy to be sure. But what happens next is true horror. By following her killer and the mother Echo has left behind, The Deeper You Dig explores grief and guilt while traveling down a twisted road into the supernatural. [Read more…]

Twenty Que with Larry Bell

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by Erin Currier

Even a cursory investigation into nearly any seminal cultural moment, institution, or movement in the latter half of the 20th century, reveals the presence of artist Larry Bell. Bell’s presence in the Arts is akin to the glass boxes that he is most known for, that, at once, reflect, reveal, and transform their environment. The works are mirrors, windows, lenses, yet are also self-contained and complete in and of themselves. From Disney animation, to Abstract Expressionism, to the West Coast Light and Space movement, to the famed Ferus Gallery, to Dennis Hopper’s legendary Taos scene, to the Venice Beach scene (he even has a bar named after him: “Larry’s”), to the iconic cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Bell was there, and none of it — and, in turn, the Arts today — would be the same without his presence.  [Read more…]

Anthony Braxton’s Accessibly Antithetical Quartet (New Haven) 2014

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on Firehouse 12 Records
Reviewed by John Payne

This monumental four-CD box set photographs the one-time meeting of an avant all-star and super-like-minded foursome: The infamously abstruse saxophonist and conceptualist Anthony Braxton partnered with Nels Cline (guitar), Greg Saunier (drums) and Taylor Ho Bynum (brass). It is music that, because of the heavily theoretical predilections of its “bandleader,” might suggest a sound that reeks of a dry formality. It doesn’t. It does present a number of issues and questions. [Read more…]

Existential Angst In The Haunting Expressions Of Sedrick Chisom and Dan Herschlein

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Concurrent solo exhibitions at Matthew Brown Los Angeles
Reviewed by Eve Wood

Our world was forged in dissonance, and as a species we seek out discordance, adversity, pain and violence, and not only in the living world, but in fantasy as well. We relish the death of the villain at the hands of the hero. These are very old stories – tales, as the great Joseph Campbell once stated, where “the hero must give up the life he has planned in order to have the life that is waiting for him.” [Read more…]

The Art of Self-Defense Makes A Menacing Joke Of Toxic Masculinity

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

You probably think you can kick Jesse Eisenberg’s ass. Which makes him perfectly cast as the protagonist of The Art of Self-Defense, a dark comedy exploring the allure and dangers of toxic masculinity. Writer/director Riley Stearns applies a crisp and dark sense of humor to a low-key thriller about one man’s quest to become the thing that scares him most: a man’s man. [Read more…]

Nick Broomfield on Muses and Bohemian Memories in Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love

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By Alci Rengifo

Nick Broomfield is now 71 years old, and while he has not lost the feisty, investigative energy of a born muckraker, he is now continuously traveling back into the past. In his memories, two figures have been manifesting themselves as of late: Leonard Cohen, poet, songwriter, almost mystical icon and Marianne Christine Ihlen, Cohen’s muse whom he first encountered on the Greek island of Hydra in the 1960s. Broomfield’s new documentary, Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love, chronicles not only Cohen’s development as an artist but his more intimate self as well, and the love affair that stayed with him until the very end. [Read more…]

Alfred Stieglitz: Taking Pictures, Making Painters

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Reviewed by Ann Landi

Alfred Stieglitz: Taking Pictures, Making Painters
by Phyllis Rose
Yale University Press, 272 pp, $26.00

We live in an age when shows of photography are a mainstay of many major museums, and a handful of artists who seriously pursue the medium have even achieved celebrity status (think Sherman, Arbus, Mapplethorpe). So it’s almost mind-boggling to realize that the struggle to get photography considered a “fine art” rather than simply a mechanical craft, at least in this country, is little more than a hundred years old, and that the medium’s meteoric launch into the public consciousness is largely thanks to the efforts of one man: Alfred Steiglitz. [Read more…]

Captive State And The Sacrificial Maze Of Mutiny

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Reviewed by Seren Sensei

Captive State was initially misunderstood. Released in March, it received mixed reviews, described by some critics as ‘murky,’ ‘lugubrious,’ and ‘unexciting.’ Despite star turns by brooding young upstart Ashton Sanders (Moonlight, Native Son), indie darling Jonathan Majors (The Last Black Man In San Francisco) and industry veteran John Goodman, it grossed only $8 million against a $25 million dollar budget, making it a box-office bomb. But this film has the density and complexity to develop a cult following of its own in the coming years. It’s depiction of a group of political anarchists attempting to overthrow an alien-controlled government is inventive, if not downright ingenious, and their foundational codes — the ideals for which these men and women live and die for — are as equally powerful and persuasive as they are heartening, yet no less disturbing. [Read more…]

Michael Ajerman’s Possessions And Marty Schnapf’s Loves and Lovers

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at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles (through August 17)
Reviewed by Genie Davis

Michael Ajerman and Marty Schnapf each offer their own elegant and sensual images in two strong solo shows at Diane Rosenstein Gallery. While Ajerman works with vivid colors in his figurative oil paintings, Schnapf’s current body of work is in nearly-life-size black and white. Both offer deeply intimate expressions that are filled with energy and pulsing with life. There is a physicality to both artists’ work that makes them ideally paired, although the outward appearance of each exhibition is visually diverse in palette and style. [Read more…]

The Formidable And Innovative Lee Krasner

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Lee Krasner: Living Colour, at the Barbican Centre, London (through 1 September)
Reviewed by Christopher P Jones

Sometimes a retrospective can abbreviate an artistic life into a series of airless high-peaks without taking notice of the lower-lying ground. Lee Krasner’s exceptional exhibition, Living Colour, at the Barbican Centre in London, achieves the exact opposite. The 100 or so works on display flesh out a life with all the territory – high and low – accounted for, so that every piece lends itself towards a greater whole. In doing so, the exhibition reveals why Krasner is rightly regarded as an artist of pioneering significance, whose development from cubist collage to expressionistic vigour accounts for an important story in 20th century American art. [Read more…]

The Incidental Orifice In Sarah Lucas’s Au Naturel

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At UCLA’s Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (through September 1)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

It’s been said that all great artists have only a few “real” subjects and those subjects nearly always reference love, sex or death. In fact, these pivotal subjects could arguably be the holy trinity when it comes to the imagination and the deeper impulses that drive the creative process. So, Picasso had his underage lovers, his bull testicles and his minotaur. Magritte his pipe, umbrellas and top hats and Cezanne his monumental, sacred mountain.  [Read more…]

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese

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Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

Will we ever see the likes of Bob Dylan again? It is a question easily inspired by Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, a sprawling, indeed thundering chronicle, now streaming on Netflix, of one of the American bard’s most legendary travels across the United States. What made this particular venture unique was the transitional phase the country was enduring, emerging from the tumult of the 1960s, its self-trust scarred, possibly beyond repair. Fittingly, this tale is told by Martin Scorsese, not only a great filmmaker but an artist obsessed with the past.  [Read more…]