Shirin Neshat
From Women of Allah series
Art. Word. Thought.
Denis Johnson
From Tree of Smoke
Last night at 3:00 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed. Seaman Houston and the other two recruits slept while the first reports traveled around the world. There was one small nightspot on the island, a dilapidated club with big revolving fans in the ceiling and one bar and one pinball game; the two marines who ran the club had come by to wake them up and tell them what had happened to the President. The two marines sat with the three sailors on the bunks in the Quonset hut for transient enlisted men, watching the air conditioner drip water into a coffee can and drinking beer. The Armed Forces Network from Subic Bay stayed on through the night, broadcasting bulletins about the unfathomable murder. [Read more…]
The Astrology chart of the United States, Inauguration Day, 2017
by Julie Kelly
The Astrology Chart for the 2017 Presidential Inauguration has a Sun in Aquarius and a Taurus Rising, representing 2/3 of the total makeup of the chart for the incoming government. This reading will begin with covering these aspects and will include planetary influences from the Tenth and Eleventh houses. [Read more…]
by Anthony Hassett (3 of 3)
And the order among them was very strange, for they worship a cow, and they have idols in the woods. Some be like a monkey, and some like the devil.
Icons in Ash: Cremation Portraits
Ubu Gallery, NYC
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban
Somewhat hidden, the small, subterranean Ubu Gallery, on 59th Street, close to the East River, is the perfect place for the haunting show by Heide Hatry, known for her use of unique or transgressive materials–such as fashioning flowers out of animal offal, something she artfully did in a previous series. [Read more…]
May Be Seen Moskowitz Bayse Gallery, Los Angeles Reviewed by Christopher Michno
Loosely speaking, Jack Hoyer is a painter of landscapes. May Be Seen, his debut exhibition at Moskowitz Bayse in Hollywood, expresses the hallmarks of modern landscape painting, identified by some historians as beginning with Gustave Courbet: eschewing romanticism in favor of empiricism and the conveyance of inner states of mind. Strictly speaking, only three of his seven oil-on-linen paintings are landscapes; the other four are scenes – places in Los Angeles, or unremarkable locations chosen by the artist on lengthy road trips – that include concrete, buildings and infrastructure. [Read more…]
An Interview With Jael Hoffmann
By Rachel Reid Wilkie
Jael Hoffmann is a metal sculpture artist living in the Northern Mojave Desert, just north of Los Angeles. Her rough, nearly primitive sculptures stand at highway’s edge like creatures in a mythic scene, their anointed god a sleepy chief who towers just west in the form of 12,132’ Olancha Peak. Large, wind-worn, lively on the land, they are in constant, animated banter with drivers who speed past, and all the more friendly and engaging for those who stop, stretch their legs, and stroll about the land. Rachel Reid Wilkie spoke with Jael on a gorgeous winter day following heavy snowfall in the Sierras. [Read more…]
Chicano artist Harry Gamboa Jr. talks about the creation of No Movies with ASCO [Read more…]
Millions of marchers, worldwide, jammed streets and transit routes. In Los Angeles, the mood was jubilant and festive, with a family outing atmosphere. We waited for two and a half hours on the Metro platform, cheering one jammed train after another. Placards flat against the windows proclaimed every possible version of equal rights, reproductive choice, attention to the earth, and the need for health care. Solidarity was assumed, and spontaneous conversation broke out everywhere. [Read more…]
by Anthony Hassett (2 of 3) Amongst their kind was one thrust through, who fell off from his house and made such a lowing that we Christians thanked Almighty God for his delivery, and fell straight way to our labor with full power upon his body. [Read more...]
An Interview With Harry Gamboa Jr.
by Pancho Lipschitz
Harry Gamboa Jr. is best known as the co-founder of ASCO, the mas chingon performance art group to emerge from the 70’s and 80’s. But his post-ASCO output, in a wide variety of media, has continued to defy the boundaries of categorization and commodification. Working with a new group of performers he published the photo-novela Aztlángst 2, a poetic grito against corporate culture, constant wars, digital surveillance and the criminalization of “others”. [Read more…]
Reviewed by John Biscello
In many respects a window is a writer’s best friend. It can give the unrelenting “I” a break from inner-space-gazing, extend depth and perspective, offer slice-of-life unscripted cinema, frame the world in manageable portions. It is also the voyeur’s privileged peephole, and this is the spy-glass through which Ann Nietzke covers the whirligig waterfront of Venice, California. [Read more…]
by Jacqueline Bell Johnson
We have entered uncertain times. While I keep moving forward, fulfilling my roles at home, at work, and out in the art world, I’m aware that I have also been wandering aimlessly since early November. Questioning the validity of my life choices, especially my career path, asking, “What do I do now?” and wondering if any of my own wants and goals are even worth pursuing. [Read more…]
An excerpt from James Marcus’s excellent, if at times blistering refutation of the incoming jester-in-chief, in the January issue of Harper’s Magazine:
…There is endless, feverish speculation about what Trump will do, now that he has won the office he often seemed to be pursuing as a promotional stunt. The thing is, he has already provided us with a road map. In late October, on the day that he delivered his own Gettysburg Address—name-checking Lincoln and the “hallowed ground” on which he stood, while threatening to sue every woman who had accused him of sexual harassment—Trump released a game plan for his first hundred days in office. The “Donald J. Trump Contract with the American Voter” is essentially a laundry list of conservative pipe dreams and petulant fantasies (or so we thought). [Read more…]
Kikuji Kawada and the current mood [Read more…]
by Anthony Hassett (1 of 3)
For three months, and in a confusion of names now vanished, our rotting vessels made slow headway through the strange aberrant splendors of the sea. Finally, in a state of madness, we ran our ships on shore, and so embedded them forever in sand.