Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

A Word With Performa 17 Artists Kemang Wa Lehulere & Nicholas Hlobo

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I cut my skin to liberate the splinter, at Connelly Theater, East Village;
umBhovuzo: The Parable of the Sower, at Harlem Parish, Harlem
Part of Performa Biennial, NYC
by Robin Scher

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” begins Charles Dickens’ epic A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens goes on to describe the novel’s period, set against the French Revolution, as an age of “wisdom” and “foolishness.” The context may have changed since those words were written, but the sentiment remains true. Here we are in 2017, arguably more conscious than ever to the plights of the dispossessed, yet somehow still stuck in the mires of narrow mindedness. Why do we seem doomed to repeat the errors of our ways? How can we better draw on lessons from history? In November, at New York’s Performa Biennial, these were questions at the heart of at least two South African artists’ commissioned performances. [Read more…]

That Loftily-Roofed Monument: The Palindrome

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by Colin Dickey

In the strange annals of medieval manuscripts is one held by the British Library designated as Royal 2 A XX, which contains the Lord’s Prayer, sections from the Gospels, several hymns and litanies—and several “Blutsegens,” or “blood charms”: series of prayers and magical incantations to ward against excessive and painful menstruation. The manuscript, which dates to the ninth century, contains at least three different blood charms, though the second is what concerns us here. The passage begins by calling three times on Beronice, an apocryphal figure who was supposedly cured by excessive bleeding after she touched the hem of Jesus’s garment. There is a line from Psalm 51:14: “Deliver me from bloods, O God, thou God of my salvation,” and transcriptions of some older chants and spells, once passed down orally, resulting in an odd blend of early Christian belief and pagan magic. [Read more…]

Lou Reed: A Life

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A New Biography By Anthony DeCurtis
Reviewed David Yaffe

An extract from “Lou’s Wild Side,” in the November 23 issue of The New York Review of Books

“Just a perfect day/You made me forget myself/I thought I was someone else/Someone good.” These lines—sung indifferently over swelling, glam rock strings—are from “Perfect Day,” an achingly gorgeous and brutally honest song by Lou Reed, who died of liver disease four years ago at the age of seventy-one. Some people thought the song was about addiction—how a junkie escaping from reality also feeds on the escape of romance. But the song could also be about how pleasurable, yet impossible, it is to escape from your true self, and about how easy it is to deceive yourself when you’ve disappointed your own expectations. [Read more…]

Anarchy & Desire: The Cinema of Luis Buñuel In Our Time

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by Alci Rengifo

It is quite possible that the most fitting work of art to premiere onstage this year as an appropriate expression of the times is Thomas Ades’s searing opera, The Exterminating Angel. Apocalyptic, cataclysmic, it tells the story of a group of wealthy dinner guests who cannot leave a mansion, pushed back by an invisible force. Civilization soon crumbles and they become savages. The opera is noteworthy as both a work by Ades, certainly one of the great modern composers, and because it is an adaptation of a film by Luis Buñuel. More than most filmmakers, Buñuel’s cinema endures as both landmark filmmaking and as a powerful set of visions which interpret the human condition. His body of work spans from 1929 to 1977, yet feels even more at home now, in this age of surreal gestures and civilization as madhouse. Buñuel was keenly aware that humans are driven by desire, tribalism, and the power of fantasy. It is when these three mix within his cinema that even his lesser films maintain a dangerous undercurrent. [Read more…]

Guillermo del Toro Delivers An Enchanting, Exquisite Fairy Tale With The Shape of Water

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

Visionary filmmaker Guillermo del Toro has long been enchanted by monsters. From chilling yet tender films like The Devil’s Backbone to Pan’s Labyrinth, and Crimson Peak, he’s offered creatures terrifying, yet uniquely beautiful. In Hellboy he made his monsters unabashed heroes. With his latest, del Toro turns an aquatic “affront” into a swoon-inducing romantic lead. The Shape of Water is a positively enchanting fairy tale that celebrates misfits, and reveals true monsters. [Read more…]

Vulnerability: The Space Between

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Young Projects Gallery, Los Angeles (through December 29, 2017)
By Shana Nys Dambrot

The show starts quietly with an historical video program of classics that set a tone and context for what comes after. Works by Marina Abramovic, Bas Jan Ader, Sam Taylor Wood, Yoko Ono, and others who explicitly offered physical and emotional intimacy, created art experiences that were intense and dangerous and made people very uncomfortable. They made themselves vulnerable, their bodies were sites and spectacles of potential transgression and trauma. This was done in order to deconstruct basics of Post-Modern human behavior. As with so many other art historical tropes, versions of this dynamic inquiry exist in an updated public sphere — the digital world of technology and social media. And that’s where Vulnerability: The Space Between picks up the thread and takes it to increasingly inventive, uncanny, and strangely familiar places. [Read more…]

Eugen Gabritschevsky: 1893–1979

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at La Maison Rouge, Paris
Reviewed by Sanford Schwartz

An extract from “The Master of Eglfing-Haar” in the October 16 Issue of The New York Review of Books

It is possible that the people who run the American Folk Art Museum have wondered in recent years about the name of their institution. Works by American folk artists make up the majority of its exhibitions, it is true. In the last decade or more, however, the museum has become an invaluable part of New York’s cultural life because it has produced a little stream of full-fledged introductions to figures who are much the opposite of folk artists and frequently are not American. The term “folk art” implies an art for a wide, popular, and perhaps not overly discriminating audience—ingenious and lovely as folk-art creations can be. But the day has passed when this kind of work, which was at its most vibrant in the early decades of the nineteenth century, was crowded with figures waiting to be discovered. [Read more…]

The Oozing, Undulating Forms of Lynda Benglis

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at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles (Through December 16, 2017)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

As a legendary and enduring figure on the international art stage, Louisiana-born conceptual sculptor Lynda Benglis is renowned for crafting pained yet sensual anthropomorphic works out of melted bronze, latex, ceramics, polyurethane, and glass. Bursting into the public consciousness with her transgressive, fearless, and unforgettable nude advertisement in Artforum (the magazine refused to give her editorial space for the image) in 1974, the artist garnered much public praise and shock for posing with a dildo between her legs in order to subvert the male gaze, binary gender roles, and notions of bodily objectification. After decades of consistently producing arresting and audacious sculptures with themes of sexuality and mortality, Benglis is once again in the public eye with her current solo retrospective at Culver City’s prestigious Blum & Poe.  [Read more…]

The Diminished Value Of Human Life In A Capitalist Society

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by Seren Sensei

The flowery language of the United States Declaration of Independence would have you believe that human life has an inherent value, one that includes inalienable rights such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But in America, a major indicator of value is actually placed on being a productive member of society, which typically means working a job that creates monetary revenue (especially if the end result is accumulated wealth and suffering was inherently involved in the process). “Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps,” being a “self-made” man or woman, and “rags to riches” stories permeate our collective consciousness, creating an overarching culture that links work, jobs and money to morality and value. The system of higher education has also been tied to this toxic concept, as we have equated more education to being better qualified for said jobs. And so the equation becomes: more education leads to more jobs, which leads to more earned and accumulated revenue, which leads to more “value.” [Read more…]

Kukuli Velarde’s Plunder Me, Baby

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Reviewed by Christopher Michno

Plunder Me, Baby—sounds like an invitation, but an invitation to what? There’s irony aplenty in that title and it leaves a sickening aftertaste, as it’s meant. Kukuli Velarde’s trenchant and caustically humorous ceramic sculptures fix within their sights the conquest—both cultural and corporeal—of Latin America. This widely exhibited series, now in a PST: LA/LA exhibition at the American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA), is fashioned after traditional pre-Columbian ceramic objects, but Velarde, who brings a distinctive lens to themes of identity and cultural appropriation, creates each object as a kind of self portrait. Each sculpture bears her visage and expresses a reaction to the realities of conquest: defiance, anger, mockery, subversion, and the like. [Read more…]

Darkest Chambers: Wormwood And The Underground Of American History

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by Alci Rengifo

As the year reaches its twilight, it is becoming clear that 2017 was the year of iconoclasm. The wave of scandals and shocking revelations (shocking to those unaware of the habits of the elite) has cracked the great marble edifices of many a celebrity or political persona. For a population as addicted to social media and the religion of fads as ours, it is very telling that it has taken sex to shock the public consciousness into the realization that fame is a mask, popularity a vulgar makeup. But the current, lurid headlines still distract from a truth everyone knows but would prefer to whisper: There are darker ceremonies taking place in the deepest, darkest chambers of the American halls of power.

[Read more…]

The Exterminating Angel: An Opera In Three Acts

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at Metropolitan Opera, New York City
Reviewed by Donald Lindeman

Hailing from Salzburg and London, Thomas Adès’ opera The Exterminating Angel made its much anticipated New York debut on October 26th at the Metropolitan Opera. Adès himself conducted, and the opening night audience greeted him, the opera, and its superlative vocalists with considerable enthusiasm. The opera is based on the 1962 surrealist film by Luis Buñuel of the same name, featuring an elegant after-opera dinner party attended by upper-crust denizens of Francisco Franco’s Spain. It should be noted that Adès and director Tom Cairns eschew the deeply ironic and grim conclusion found in Luis Buñuel’s film in their opera. Instead they opt for a more ambiguous outcome and fate for their characters. This marks a significant alteration to the filmic source, and it invites alternative interpretations to the original tale. [Read more…]

Adrián Villar Rojas: The Theater of Disappearance

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At the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (Through May 13, 2018)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

As a meditation on the flexible nature of time and an ode to the objet trouvé readymades of French-born Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, Argentinian conceptual installation artist Adrián Villar Rojas’s current showing at Little Tokyo’s Geffen Contemporary at MOCA offers frozen cases of preserved organic and manmade materials, as well as layered, almost geological or landfill-like gallery floors infused with packed dirt, multicolored concrete, clay, old tennis shoes, and fruit peels. These modern and seemingly ancient items reveal Adrián Villar Rojas: The Theater of Disappearance be an excavation of sorts, or even perhaps a burial.  [Read more…]

Through The Soundless Lens, Darkly

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Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin & Peter Hujar
At Matthew Marks, Los Angeles (Through December 22, 2017)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

As three supremely unconventional 20th century portrait photographers, Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, and Peter Hujar are currently the subjects of an exhaustive, evocative and eponymous retrospective at Matthew Marks, Los Angeles. 

With twenty-two poignant prints spanning sixty years proudly on display here, the viewer can detect the overwhelming similarities and differences between these widely adored artists. Although all three chose the same medium and subject, each photographer approached the human form and spirit in a completely unique manner.  [Read more…]

Nan Goldin Breathes Word Into Her Seminal Work, The Ballad Of Sexual Dependency

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On view at Matthew Marks, Los Angeles, are a selection of photographs from Nan Goldin’s hypnotic and haunting series, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which in its original format is a 48 minute slideshow documenting Goldin’s life in over 700 photographs and 30 songs, the text of which, those songs, acting as the narrative for the “film.”

In her introduction to the book, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Goldin writes:

I was eleven when my sister committed suicide. This was in 1965, when teenage suicide was a taboo subject. I was very close to my sister and aware of some of the forces that led her to choose suicide. I saw the role that her sexuality and its repression played in her destruction.  [Read more…]

Dee Rees Delivers A Must-See Drama with Mudbound

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Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

Writer-director Dee Rees earned buzz out the gate in 2011, with the compelling coming-of-age drama Pariah. She followed this up with the bawdy and bold Bessie, a made-for-TV biopic that starred Queen Latifah as legendary blues siren Bessie Smith. Now, after months of touring film festivals, winning praise, and sparking Oscar speculation, Rees’ latest, Mudbound, is coming to select theaters and Netflix to offer a bittersweet period piece that’s ripe with political undertones. [Read more…]

Visionary Artist And Statesman Of The Street, William Hall

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by Lorraine Heitzman

This is a sort of Cinderella story, if Cinderella was a 74 year-old man with a penchant for drawing fantastical landscapes, imaginary cars, trains and figures. William Hall may look like a character actor with Santa Claus on his resume, but he harbors an interior life that is far more unique than his appearance suggests. Outwardly there are no clues to imply the fullness of his imagination, nor his impressive talents, yet like the kernel of truth buried within any fable, his story reveals the strength of the human spirit in the face of adversity. [Read more…]

An Interview With Theo Anthony, Director Of Rat Film

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By Cynthia Biret

Rat Film, a riveting new feature by Theo Anthony, plunges into the dark recesses of Baltimore’s rat-infested streets; in  doing so, it takes its viewers into the gaping breach of socio-economic segregation. 

Once upon a time – because all tales innocuously anchor their footprints in reality – Anthony notices a rat desperately trying to jump out of the confinement of a trashcan. This momentary experience soon leads the director into the chaos of the human condition, which the film masterfully begins to explore while an eerily autocratic voice over (Maureen Jones) ushers us into behavioral neuroscience with references to Curt Richter’s experiments compiled into his book: “Rats, Man and the Welfare State”. [Read more…]

The Seditious, Colorless Eye Of Richard Avedon and James Baldwin

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1964. Richard Avedon and James Baldwin publish their spare yet radical treatise shot through to the arrow’s heart of America and much-adored Americana. Their collection, perhaps even more radically, was titled  Nothing Personal, and nothing at the time could have been further from the blood-slaked truth. One can only imagine how so very personal, and how lacerating, these images must have been in the high epoch of Jim Crow, where the unsilenced shot of pistol, the swift stroke of knife, the snap of rope, the strike of skin-crackling fire were the unmitigated and unmediated means of cage-keeping of the day. This fall Taschen will republish a facsimile edition of  Nothing Personal, with unpublished photographs and a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Hilton Als. Als’ introduction is excerpted below. An exhibition of images from Nothing Personal will be on view at Pace Gallery, NYC, from 17 November through 13 January, 2018. — CvH

Nothing Personal
by Richard Avedon and James Baldwin
Introduced by Hilton Als

I am about thirteen years old and my body and mind are carried along by the energy that thinking engenders in me—the nearly phosphorescent ideas and possibilities I find in books, looking at pictures, and whenever I visit a museum. Some of the photo books I covet the most can’t be checked out from the Brooklyn Public Library, so, day after day, I duck out of my junior high school, in Crown Heights, and, walking past the Brooklyn Museum, then through the Botanic Garden, I go to look at them in the stacks. [Read more…]