Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

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…]

Jordan Wolfson: Art and Objecthood

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at the Broad, Los Angeles (Through January 20, 2019)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

“I was mostly just interested in the physicality of what I’d seen in the animatronic field, and I was also interested in making a sculpture that had the potential to be chronological or structural in the same way a video is. My hope is that the work dips in and out of spectacle.”  一 Jordan Wolfson

Beginning with the iconic Venus of Willendorf and her luscious curves, the Western art historical tradition has long associated the female body with consumption and objecthood. Now, in this modern age of technology and the #MeToo Movement, provocative American sculptor Jordan Wolfson’s hypersexualized animatronic figure currently on view at the Broad Museum deliberately challenges the viewer with its seemingly stereotypical depiction of women. Undoubtedly, this demeaning representation is bound to trigger consternation and spark debate. The artist is no stranger to this kind of controversy. His violent virtual reality-based installation at the 2017 Whitney Biennial shocked and horrified both critics and visitors alike. While the Broad’s (Female Figure) is far tamer in comparison, it does effectively question the progress of gender equality in America and echo Edouard Manet’s Olympia (1863) in its subversion of the male gaze. [Read more…]

The New Blackface

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Or The De Facto Proxy Of Non American Blacks In Black American/DACS Roles
By Seren Sensei

There’s been a quiet hostility simmering within the Black diaspora.

It is most apparent when discussing media representation. It tensed when veteran American actor Samuel L. Jackson wondered what a Black American — what I call the descendants of American chattel slavery (DACS) — might have brought to the American-charged racism of ‘Get Out,’ and when fellow Brits John Boyega and Iris Elba came to star Daniel Kaluuya’s defense. It arose again with the casting of British actor Daniel Ezra as the lead in the CW’S newest teen drama: a football show titled, ironically, ‘All American,’ and based on the life of real life DACS football player Spencer Paysinger. [Read more…]

Twilight of the Idol: Orson Welles’s Long Lost The Other Side of the Wind

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Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

What beautiful fragments the gods leave from their unfinished visions. Orson Welles was cursed with having entered the arena of the cinema by immediately reaching its peak. In 1941 he made Citizen Kane, that grand work of cinematic biography- taking the story of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst and transforming it into a reverie of immortal imagery. Welles was merely 24 at the time and it would be his fate to fall while leaving beautiful trails behind. He would direct titles like Touch of Evil, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Lady from Shanghai, all butchered by the studio system, yet all considered masterful. His 1948 Macbeth is one of the great underappreciated Shakespeare adaptations, a work of brimstone and gothic poetry. [Read more…]

Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore

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Reviewed by John Biscello

Killing Commendatore
by Haruki Murakami
Knopf, 704 pp., $19.49

Haruki Murakami: Killing Commendatore“But at three o’ clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work — and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’ clock in the morning, day after day. At that hour the tendency is to refuse to face things as long as possible by retreating into an infantile dream — but one is continually startled out of this by various contacts with the world. One meets these occasions as quickly and carelessly as possible and retires once more back into the dream, hoping that things will adjust themselves by some great material or spiritual bonanza.  But as the withdrawal persists there is less and less chance of the bonanza — one is not waiting for the fade-out of a single sorrow, but rather being an unwilling witness of an execution, the disintegration of one’s own personality.” –Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up” (1936) [Read more…]

Expansive New Work From The Necks: Body

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on Northern Spy Records

Reviewed by John Payne

The Necks: Body (reviewed at Riot Material magazine)How to better classify an improvisational unit such as the Necks? Since the Australian trio perform their music on instruments associated with jazz — acoustic piano, double bass and drums — they tease us with whether or not they ought to be aligned with the severely rule-bound world of jazz at all. Whatever the case, it is hugely satisfying to hear the group’s lack of reverence for the form’s many hallowed conventions. With a healthy, punky boredom about all that, the Necks poke all ye olde shopworn swinging jazz a certifiably new bumhole. [Read more…]

John Biscello’s Nocturne Variations

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Reviewed by Kindra M. Austin

Nocturne Variations
by John Biscello
Unsolicited Press, 324 pp., $18.00 

John Biscello's Nocturne Variations, reviewed at Riot Material magazineNocturne Variations is a twenty-first century presentation of avant-garde literature.

Super. But what is avant-garde? Avant-garde is a French term that means advance guard — people and ideas that are ahead of their time. It’s a concept that refers to artists, composers, and writers whose works oppose mainstream values. As a noun, avant-garde is defined as new and unusual or experimental ideas in the arts. Often connected to political activism (think of Theater of the Absurd, Bob Dylan, and John and Yoko), there exists a misconception that avant-garde must always be politically driven. [Read more…]

Humor and Horror: A Tale of Two Satirists

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IndigNATION: Political Drawings by Jim Carrey, 2016-2018, Maccarone, Los Angeles (through December 1, 2018)                                                             
Robbie Conal: Cabinet of Horrors, Track 16, Los Angeles (through December 10, 2018)           
Reviewed By Lorraine Heitzman

There are two political shows capturing the attention of Angelenos now, besides, of course, the very real drama playing out in Washington. IndigNATION: Political Drawings by Jim Carrey at the Maccarone Gallery is a series of political cartoons as freewheeling and expressive as Carrey himself, while Robbie Conal: Cabinet of Horrors at Track 16 continues the artist’s well-known practice of skewering those in power in brutal, satiric portraits. Both shows are entertaining and provocative in their use of humor to depict harsh realities. Like Edel Rodriguez, whose graphic and clever depictions of Trump have attained an international following, and the innumerable artists who feel compelled to express their political views, Carrey and Conal are calling attention to what they see as the hypocrisies stemming from the current administration. If art has become the new, preferred method of political persuasion, bring it on. [Read more…]

Fred W. McDarrah: New York Scenes

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at Steven Kasher Gallery, NYC (through November 3)
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

The Village Voice is, sadly, now a hallowed memory of the past, but many of its iconic images live vividly on through the work of Fred W. McDarrah, the publication’s first picture editor and its sole staff photographer for decades.

McDarrah, who died in 2007, aimed a powerful lens at some of the most creative and turbulent times in New York City’s history. Eighty of his vintage black and white photographs are on display at the Steven Kasher gallery, in a show that coincides with the publication of the comprehensive Abrams book, Fred W. McDarrah: New York Scenes. [Read more…]

Adrian Piper: Concepts And Intuitions, 1965-2016

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at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (Through January 6, 2019)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

Societal stereotypes and divisions are unfortunately ubiquitous in our culture. Which begs the question, how should we go about demolishing them? With the nearly 300 photographs, paintings, drawings, videos, and installations currently comprising her blockbuster Hammer Museum retrospective, Adrian Piper: Concepts and Intuitions, 1965-2016, this New York-born, Berlin-based conceptual artist and former philosophy professor obliterates these harmful ideas via self-expression and scholarly inquisition. This comprehensive, almost encyclopedic presentation not only documents fifty years of Piper’s experimental oeuvre but also investigates the genesis of prejudice and embraces a much looser, more liberated sense of self. [Read more…]

You’re Not Prepared For The Genre-Bending Romance In Border

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

You might think yourself a savvy cinephile. Perhaps you’ve heard that Border won Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival and is Sweden’s submission for Best Foreign-Language Film for the upcoming Academy Awards. So you hear the premise of a customs officer who forms an unexpected bond with a stranger she investigates, and assume you have a solid idea of the drama and romance that will unfurl. You’re wrong. Even if you know Border is adapted from a short story from Let The Right One In author and screenwriter John Ajvide Lindqvist, you can’t possibly conceive of the wild, disturbing yet beautiful story that’s lies within. And better yet, its unnerving surprises are just part of what makes this movie absolutely marvelous. [Read more…]

Dear Evan Hansen Delivers Formula But Little Else

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Reviewed by Hoyt Hilsman

The Tony-award winning musical from the composer/lyricist team of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, which is playing at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles, continues the trend towards darker and more internal stories in contemporary musical theater. Pasek and Paul, who wrote the music for the film La-La Land and the Broadway musical A Christmas Story, are following in the footsteps of Next to Normal, which chronicled the story of a dysfunctional American family. [Read more…]

A Time of Monsters: An Updated Suspiria For Our Dark Age

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Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

There are several ways of remembering a nightmare. Interpreting a classic work always requires a true sense of daring. When literature has become canon or a film a cultural staple, updating a story for a new age will bring with it the baggage of decades. For our new era of ghouls and menacing shadows, director Luca Guadagnino has decided to conjure his own interpretation of Dario Argento’s 1977 Suspiria. This new version, nearly 3 hours in length, is not worthy of the label “remake.” Guadagnino has taken Argento’s pulpy, color-strewn cult object and transformed it into a work of an almost occult power. It is a film set in the very decade of the original, but it seems to be channeling our own, present sense that dark forces at work in the world. To compare the two versions is to compare two eras and mindsets, two interpretations of the extreme and satanic. [Read more…]

One Day At A Time: Manny Farber And Termite Art

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at The Museum of Contemporary Art (Through March 11, 2019)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

Life is messy. Art should be, too. In One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, a sweeping group exhibition currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), curator Helen Molesworth, assembles Arizona-born carpenter, film critic, and painter Manny Farber’s most delightfully chaotic and cluttered still-lifes. Vibrantly colored and richly detailed, these monumental canvases elevate and celebrate the mundane through scattered flowers, ripe fruit, and handwritten notes. Presented alongside a slew of over 100 similarly-themed multimedia works from celebrated artists, including Josiah McElheny, Lorna Simpson, and Wolfgang Tillmans, these loose, jazz-like paintings reveal the anarchic yet alluring rhythm of daily life. [Read more…]

Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite Is Ferociously Funny And Delightfully Subversive

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

With The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, director Yorgos Lanthimos has chiseled out a reputation for crafting comedies out of the darkest corners of human experience. Loneliness, jealousy, betrayal and death are his pathways to startling hilarity. Thus, the laughs he earns burst forth as shocked guffaws and obscene barks, as if our joy in the face of such misery is a rude jolt to even ourselves. Admirers of Lanthimos’ twisted humor have new reason to revel. With his most captivating cast yet, he’s created The Favourite, a deranged look at sex and politics within the court of Queen Anne. [Read more…]

Ai Weiwei’s Fraught And Folkloric Life Cycle

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at Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles (through March 3, 2019)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

“Nationality is a Western concept. It was an invention of Western European scholars, who ever since have struggled to explain it.”  
— Joseph Roth, The Wandering Jews, 1927

How do we hold on to hope and humanity in times of upheaval and hardship? Celebrated Chinese conceptual artist Ai Weiwei addresses this very question in his current Marciano Art Foundation installation, Life Cycle (2018). This haunting meditation on the global refugee crisis presents countless figures packed onto an inflatable raft. Resembling a Zodiac boat commonly used in shuttling emigrants to the West, this vessel bursts with human-animal hybrids inspired by the Chinese zodiac. As Ai crafts both of the passengers and the ship here out of bamboo, a building material synonymous with buoyancy and strength, he addresses themes of transition, compassion, and the resilience of the human spirit. [Read more…]

Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination

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at The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Cloisters, NYC
Reviewed by Angelica Villa

The Met’s Heavenly Bodies is a dramatic turn in the museum’s history, a scene where fashion’s indulgence and religious gravity meet in resemblance. In the Costume Institute’s largest exhibition, set in three locations across the museum’s medieval wing, the Anna Wintour Costume Center and the Met Cloisters, darkly lit in stone austerity against opulent detail, walls and figures are adorned in iconic couture and religious relics. Placing modern design amid the Met’s collection of medieval and Byzantine reliquaries creates a variegation of sensory response. The resulting display is a prismatic concoction of the religious, the secular, and all of their conflictions and resonations. [Read more…]

The Active And Eloquent Stills In Out In The Street

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at Muzeumm, Los Angeles (through October 21)
Reviewed by Genie Davis

We ain’t gonna take what they’re handing out
When I’m out in the street
I walk the way I want to walk
When I’m out in the street
I talk the way I want to talk 
— Bruce Springsteen, “Out in the Street”

Thoughtfully, beautifully curated by Juri Koll, the group show Out in the Street, at Muzeumm through October 21st, is a presentation of both the gallery and The Venice Institute of Contemporary Art. The show features the photographic art of Asif Ahmed, Debe Arlook, Sunny Bak, Hasmik Bezirdzhyan, Nick Bradley, Rodrick Bradley, Larry Brownstein, Cosimo Cavallaro, Ray Carofano, Liz Chayes, Jeremiah Chechik, Diane Cockerill, Lynne Deutch, L. Aviva Diamond, Jenny Donaire, Doug Edge, Maureen Haldeman, Louis Jacinto, Josh “Bagel” Klassman, Juri Koll, Eric Kunsman, Stephen Levey, Lawrie Margrave, Leigh Marling, Alberto Mesirca, Stefanie Nafé, Ave Pildas, Osceola Refetoff, Dotan Saguy, Buku Sarkar, Lana Shmulevich, Carl Shubs, Jeffrey Sklan, Ted Soqui, Stephen Spiller, Stephanie Sydney, Edmund Teske, David Valera, and Jody Zellen. [Read more…]