Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Though Flawed, The Field Guide To Evil Is A Must-See For True Horror Fans

By

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

Among my most anticipated films at the SXSW Conference was The Field Guide to Evil. The film festival section of SXSW tends to boast stellar horror in their Midnighters slate. But this title, in particular, stood out, packing together filmmakers responsible for some of the most inventive, darkly funny, and deeply twisted debuts in the past decade. Austrian writer/directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala teamed up for the electrifying Goodnight Mommy, a psychological thriller about twin boys who suspect their mother is not what she seems. Polish helmer Agnieszka Smoczynska directed the trippy and feral horror-musical The Lure, which centers on a pair of man-eating mermaids who become a cabaret sensation. And these were just three of the talents asked to make horror shorts for this tantalizing title! [Read more…]

The Universe As Canvas For Inscrutable Wonder

By 

Vija Celmins
at Matthew Marks Gallery, West Hollywood
Reviewed by Christopher Michno

In a world increasingly short of attention, Vija Celmins has for more than four decades been depicting a narrowly delimited set of subjects with a degree of emotional distance that has offered expansive space for reflective thought. In her current exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery in West Hollywood, Celmins returns again to these same subjects—the surface of the ocean and views of the night sky, littered, as it were, with stars. Accompanying the paintings, mezzotints and drypoints of these familiar motifs are examples of Celmins’ formal dexterity applied to trompe l’oeil objects, paired with real world counterparts: two rocks, one, a painted bronze, the other, geologic artifact; and two sets of blackboards, each set comprised of a fabrication and its found partner. These six objects engage themes that run beneath the immediate surface of her constructions: the natural world, and human systems of knowledge that reflect our constant probing of that world. [Read more…]

Hereditary Introduces a New Master Of Terror

By

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

We are in a glorious moment for horror. Boldly original and deeply terrifying directorial debuts like Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, Julia Ducournau’s Raw, and Jordan Peele’s Get Out have not only had critics cheering, and audiences screaming, but also announced the arrival of daring new visionaries to the genre. Next to join this esteemed company of masterful horror makers is Ari Aster. This ruthlessly talented writer/director makes his feature film debut with the Sundance-heralded Hereditary, which turns family dysfunction into pure, unfiltered nightmare fuel. [Read more…]

Dark Waters: Director John Curran On The Making of Chappaquiddick

By

By Alci Rengifo

The myths have not left us even in a supposedly rational age. Especially in an imperial society what is past is prologue. With every passing year historical memory takes on a new gloss, and the darker shades are colored over with wishful thinking. In the United States the Kennedy family personifies the very idea of national myth. Chiseled in stone, the personas of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, both assassinated in their political primes in the 1960s, are equally romanticized and debated. Admired for their patrician air in a culture that worships opulence, yet deconstructed by scholars of realpolitik, the twin gods of American liberalism evoke a special allure via grainy photographs and film reels. It is the third brother, Edward Kennedy, denied his turn at the throne, who wanders under a shadow infused with that most bitter of phrases, “what could have been.” [Read more…]

Ingrid Allen and Liv Saether’s Liv-Ing With Art: A Creative Mother-Daughter Painting Duo

By 

at the Ebell of Los Angeles (April 5 - 27)
by Daniel Rolnik

The faded black and white photograph [below] of people sitting in a Minnesota prairie has a lot to do with the story of an art show taking place 156 years after it was taken. The photo was shot by a college dropout named Adrian John Ebell. A young man that had come to Minnesota to document Native Americans for the purposes of their exploitation. See, Ebell was a travelling showman that needed more content for his magic lantern act. An act, which was essentially a slide show performance accompanied by live music and sound effects. [Read more…]

Chaplin’s Stuttering Body And The Utopian Potential Of Film

By

By Timofei Gerber

Courtesy of Epoché (ἐποχή)

“With time, the invention of printing has rendered the human face unreadable. […] By that, the visible being [Geist] has turned into a readable being, and the visualculture has turned into a conceptual one. […] Nowadays, another machine is at work, which is turning culture back to the visual and is giving humans a new face. It is called the cinematograph” (Balázs, p. 16)

With these optimistic words, the early film theorist Béla Balázs summarised the advent of (silent) film. The year was 1924, a tumultuous time between the two World Wars, one that witnessed a vast amount of changes — the rise of the modern metropolises with their busy streets and vitrines, a plethora of political movements giving a face to urban mass culture, the deaths and abdigations of the last European emperors, and a new popular medium — film. And Berlin, where Balázs was writing these lines, was in the midst of it all. The new experience of seeing moving faces and bodies on the big screen, so much more intense than the memories convened in the family photo album, promised a fundamental change in the cultural landscape — the birth of visual culture. [Read more…]

The Cross-Bordered DeLIMITations Bridges An Era’s Divide

By 

at Museo De La Artes, Guadalajara, Mexico
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

“Delimitation means the act or process of fixing limits or boundaries of territorial constituencies in a country or province having a legislative body”

A timely and compelling installation at Museo De La Artes, Guadalajara, Mexico, entitled DeLIMITations by Mexican artist Marcus Ramirez ERRE and American artist David Taylor, examines and documents through stills, a documentary film, large-scale graphics, a solid-steel obelisk and historical research presented as wall text, the original border between the United States and Mexico as determined by the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1821. Their historical, political and cultural piece sets about to establish a border that was never physically marked by placing 47 steel obelisks along the 2400 mile border that never was. The treaty was rescinded 27 years later, after the Mexican-American War of 1846-8, when Mexico ceded 55% of its land to the United States in a land grab disguised as a war. Ulysses S. Grant was then a young lieutenant who fought in the war, and later admitted (and is quoted here in the exhibition) “I do not think there was ever a more wicked war…I thought so at the time…only I had not the moral courage to resign.” [Read more…]

Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs Is As Whimsical As It Is Wearying

By

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

Nearly nine years after the success of his charming heist flick Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson returns to stop-motion animation and tales of untamed yet lovable animals with Isle of Dogs. With this original story set in a dystopian Japan, the acclaimed filmmaker steps out of his comfort zone, creating an adventure that’s whimsical, bittersweet, and uncomfortably problematic. [Read more…]

Lauren Halsey: we still here, there

By

at MOCA Grand Avenue (Through September 3, 2018)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

Appearing simultaneously prehistoric and futuristic, the labyrinthine cave formations presented in MOCA Grand Avenue’s fantastical current installation, Lauren Halsey: we still here, there are bathed in ethereal suffusions of cerulean, emerald, magenta, and violet light. This site-specific showing presents maximalism at its most celebratory and poignant with several diverse sources of inspiration, including Chinese-Buddhist caves, the neighborhoods of South Los Angeles and Watts, the sculptural architecture of André Bloc, and the music of Parliament-Funkadelic. Punctuated with a plethora of tropical potted plants, reflection pools, and found objects, this exhibition exists as a wondrous, whimsical realm, a vision of a just and inclusive society. [Read more…]

On Bruno Mars

By

by Seren Sensei

Bruno Mars is an agent of the system of white supremacy. There. I said it.

More pointedly, Mars is representative of a system that smudges out Black people, specifically Black Americans, while white and non-Black persons of color benefit from anti-Black racism and white supremacy. If Mars were white, we—the Black community—would not be okay with it. Yet despite the fact that he is not white, that still does not make him Black, and it in no way indicates that he is not benefitting from anti-Black racism as a non-Black person of color. Rather, the stark and barefaced opposite is true. [Read more…]

The City as an Abyss of Dreams: Michael Chrisoulakis’s Los Angeles Overnight

By

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

Los Angeles. The city is damned and neon-lit, devourer of the modern-day wanderer in search of gold and social stability, like some hip reincarnation of the Conquistadors. Pauline Kael once wrote that L.A. is the city “where people have given in to the beauty that always looks unreal.” This is ever so true about those glassy-eyed souls who leave home to settle into this pitiless city to make a dream reality, or at least come close to touching it. Director Michael Chrisoulakis’s Los Angeles Overnight is a true and raw portrait of the spirit of LA, even if the film masquerades as an engaging dark comedy—which it no less is. Flirting with surrealism, this low-budget film moves with an immersive energy and a dark heart. It takes the romanticized image of the struggling artist trying to get a call back and twists it back into its true self, full of despair and willing to indulge in the criminal netherworld. [Read more…]

Real Worlds: Brassaï, Arbus, Goldin

By

at MOCA Grand Avenue (Through September 3, 2018)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

Borrowing from its vast and momentous photography collection, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) is currently exploring themes of intimacy, non-traditional relationships, and marginalized people through Real Worlds: Brassaï, Arbus, Goldin. This gripping group exhibition centers around images from Brassaï’s provocative 1976 photobook, The Secret Paris of the 30’s, Arbus’s posthumous treatise, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (1972), and Nan Goldin’s famed autobiographical slideshow, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986). These honest and intimate depictions of young lovers, prostitutes, and gathered friends form a timeless bond between viewer and subject and reveal the perennial desire to be loved and accepted. [Read more…]

Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Is A Gentle And Needed Battle Cry

By

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

It seems almost impossible. For 33 years, Fred Rogers switched into sneakers and a cozy cardigan, and nestled in to host a children’s show called Mister Rogers Neighborhood. The times changed. TV became flooded with loud and violent cartoons that were basically thinly-veiled toy commercials. But Rogers was a constant, always there to smile and encourage. But what do we–the generations who grew up watching him–really know about Mister Rogers? Through interviews with family and friends and a deep dive into the show’s archive and Rogers’ personal letters, Morgan Neville’s documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? reveals the complexity, doubts, and curiosities of the man behind the beatific grin and cardigan. [Read more…]

The Great Crime Decline, Yet The War On Crime Rages On

By

by Adam Gopnik

Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, The Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence
by Patrick Sharkey
W. W. Norton & Company. 272 pp. $26.95

Excerpt courtesy of Adam Gopnik and The New Yorker

[…]

In the United States over the past three decades, while people argue about tax cuts and terrorism, the wave of social change that has most altered the shape of American life, as much as the new embankments of the Thames changed life then, has been what the N.Y.U. sociologist Patrick Sharkey calls “the great crime decline.” The term, which seems to have originated with the influential Berkeley criminologist Franklin E. Zimring, refers to the still puzzling disappearance from our big-city streets of violent crime, so long the warping force of American life—driving white flight to the suburbs and fuelling the rise of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, not to mention the career of Martin Scorsese. (“Taxi Driver” is the great poem of New York around the height of high crime, with steam coming out of the hellish manholes and violence recumbent in the back seat.) No one saw it coming, and the still odder thing is that, once it came, no one seemed adequately equipped to praise it. [Read more…]

The Chosen One: A Conversation With Celebrated Photographer Gusmano Cesaretti

By

by Pancho Lipschitz

Gusmano Cesaretti pulls a book off the shelf in his South Pasadena studio and hands it to me. The book is on Chaz Bojorquez, the Godfather of East L.A. graffiti. He opens the front cover and shows me where Chaz has written in beautiful stylish script, “To El más chingón. You started my career. Thank you. Chaz.” The story of how an Italian kid obsessed with American culture ended up documenting the birth of East L.A. graffiti culture is just one chapter in the crazy fairy-tale that is Cesaretti’s life. [Read more…]

Self Excavating In John Biscello’s Raking The Dust

By

Reviewed by Ashleigh Grycner

Raking the Dust (forthcoming on Unsolicited Press–April 3) 
By John Biscello
452 pp.

Raking the Dust, John Biscello‘s masterful second novel, is first and foremost a novel about second chances. It’s about addiction, obsession, and ultimately, salvation. It’s about the fact that “all roads lead to Heaven,” and sometimes one needs to get lost in order to get found. That things at times need to get crazy, hairy, utterly confused before arriving  face to face with that which we most fear. Ultimately, it is in the grip of our own terror that we find the courage to say the brave No that is a Yes to our own Innocence. [Read more…]

X Artists’ Books: Literatures Of Displacement And Permission

By

By Shana Nys Dambrot

“What is your secret book?” Alexandra Grant asks the assembled audience. “Everyone has one.” This was in response to a question from the evening’s moderator, as to how and why she as an artist and actor Keanu Reeves came to be partners in the limited-run indie publishing company, X Artists’ Books, XAB for short. They, along with author Sylvan Oswald, gathered under the aegis of the PEN USA Center to present their project and celebrate its newest title, Oswald’s High Winds. It’s the last in what may be the only four titles they’ll present. As of now it’s unclear if they have another one in mind; when they undertook the task, they had four, and that was supposed to be that. But considering the critical and even popular (for arcane avant-garde literary art projects at least) acclaim, and that one of their mantras is “honoring the compulsion to create,” it seems likely we will hear from them again before too long. [Read more…]

Love in the Shadowland of Myth: Rainer Sarnet’s November

By

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

Cinema has the capacity to become a conduit for dreams and nightmares, combining both into something the ancients could have scarcely imagined- the physical manifestation of myth. If critics such as Roland Barthes and Octavio Paz are correct, then the ritual of cinema or television has replaced the pagan rituals of old. Yet the primitive force of myth remains embedded in human expression, no matter if the medium has changed. Estonian filmmaker Rainer Sarnet’s new film, November (2017), is pure myth, a fairy tale lifted from the page and given life by moving images, the reverie of cinematography and the atmosphere of music. It is imagined and produced with a vivid sense of time and place, yet creating an environment outside of time. And like all myths, its grand and magical flourishes are decorations for a story that is simple in its evocation of human feelings, desires and experiences. [Read more…]

Judy Chicago’s PowerPlay: A Prediction

By

at Salon 94, NYC
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

Consistently miles ahead of the curve, the uber-feminist Judy Chicago has been so prescient that it has, at various key moments, worked against her. It sometimes seemed—and certainly must have felt—that despite presaging much of our current predicament, she was, unfortunately, pissing into the wind for entirely different reasons than the super-hero-sized malevolent male in her series, PowerPlay: A Prediction, shown at Salon 94. This evil-looking, nearly headless giant boasts a six-pack and a relatively small member, which he sprays like a brainless hose, heedlessly poisoning the hills and valleys of our planet. The painting, done in 1984, is called, appropriately enough, Pissing on Nature. [Read more…]

Emmeric Konrad: Walking On Thin Ice Just To See My Reflection

By

at Tieken Gallery, Los Angeles (through March 31, 2018)
Reviewed by Shana Nys Dambrot

Emmeric Konrad paints angels with dirty faces, serafim porn stars, saints with reality-hangovers, and refugees from justice in rags of former couture. Chainsmokers at church, day-drinkers at Disneyland. His fraught and tectonic compositions are like stream of consciousness literature or automatic drawing, a madman writing complex pictographic equations. One imagines him painting in a trance, a frantic archeological dig for visions that spring forth; however almost nothing you see is random. Any given 12 square inch passages of a single panel contains multitudes enough to make a fine painting on its own, already as dense with detail as a neutron star is packed with atoms and also infinite invisible unfathomable emptiness.  [Read more…]