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Riot Material Magazine

RIOT MATERIAL is LA’s premier literary-cultural magazine with an eye on art, word and forward-aiming thought. We cover Los Angeles, New York City, and London, with a focus on Art, niche cinema — Cinema Disordinaire is our best of — Riot Sounds (tracks representing the best in new music) and the latest in Jazz. Our vision, much in the spirit of these three great cities, is ever-global, working as we do with the best writers, artists, critical and imaginative thinkers from around the world.

We welcome your ideas for reviewing art, literature, music and film, and will consider interviews, profiles of interesting personalities and scenes, social and political commentary, and illustrations entering the public discourse from angles preferably humorous, satirical or of lacerating wit. 

If pursuing the review, we encourage you to lean toward an era not long passed when reviews themselves were of an art, a distillation of blood and breath. To that end, let your literary heart, which is adverse to formula, lead.

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Proposals can be sent to submissions(at)riotmaterial.com, with subject lines such as Review, Interview, Illustration, etc — designations adding considerably to our timeliness in response. Thank you so much in advance!!

RM | Los Angeles

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The Line

Presence as Abstraction, as Beguiling Obfuscation, in the Works of Leon Kossoff

Leon Kossoff: A Life in Painting, at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NYC (with concurrent exhibitions at LA Louver in Los Angeles, through 9 April 2022, and Annely Juda Fine Art in London) Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx The first painting greeting us in the Mitchell-Innes & Nash exhibition is, aptly, a self portrait. Smaller than […]

Noah Davis, Untitled (2015)

The Haunt of One Yet Faintly Present: Noah Davis, Still at Home

Noah Davis, at the Underground Museum, Los Angeles Reviewed by Ricky Amadour Directly across from the entrance, an opening statement to Noah Davis, at the Underground Museum, reads “many of the paintings you are about to see were painted in this space.” Smudges, dribbles, and droplets on the floor embody the physical notion of Davis […]

Robert Lowell's "Skunk Hour" is critically reflected on at Riot Material.

“Skunk Hour,” by Robert Lowell: A Reflection

by James McWilliams Robert Lowell Life Studies / From the Union Dead Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 176pp In 1958, The Partisan Review published Robert Lowell’s poem “Skunk Hour.” This was a notable moment in American literary history. The poem was closely linked to Lowell’s friendship with Elizabeth Bishop. Reading and re-reading Bishop’s work allowed Lowell […]

The Ephemeral Palace: Alexey Titarenko’s City of Shadows

at Nailya Alexander Gallery Booth, Paris Photo 2021 by Allyn Aglaïa Aumand The Ephemeral Palace . I walked across Paris to the Palais Éphémère to go to Paris Photo. I walked Across Paris, Dense with ghosts. I walked between selves. I walked to the future. I walk. I walked.

Entering the Mind, by C von Hassett

The View Into Your Already Awakened Mind

In his new book, Entering the Mind, C von Hassett takes us luminously into the life-affirming, heart-awakening, consciousness-altering terrains of mind in its natural state, where he shows us how to recognize it within ourselves, then realize it through holistic, wholly committed practice. “EtM is a singular accomplishment, remarkable for its clarity as well as its […]

Albert Pinkham Ryder, The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse), (c. 1896–1908)

Albert Pinkham Ryder: White Whale of American Art

by Christopher Benfey A Wild Note of Longing: Albert Pinkham Ryder and a Century of American Art at New Bedford Whaling Museum, MA NYR “American history is haunted by nightbirds in the nineteenth century,” Lewis Mumford wrote in The Brown Decades, his landmark 1931 study of Gilded Age culture. Chief among these nocturnal artists, for Mumford, was […]

Savage Journey: Hunter S. Thompson and the Weird Road to Gonzo

Fifty years after the publication of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and more than a decade after his death, Hunter S. Thompson’s celebrity continues to obscure his literary achievement. Savage Journey refocuses our understanding of that achievement by mapping Thompson’s influences, probing the development of his signature style, and tracing the reception of his major works. […]

An interview with Alison Saar, at Riot Material magazine.

An Interview with Alison Saar

By Ricky Amadour As an indefatigable voice for women of color and the greater human spirit, Alison Saar recomposes fractured histories into multivalent sculptures. Saar curated SeenUNseen, a group exhibition at L.A. Louver Gallery, with a focus on spirit portraiture. Throughout human existence there has been a predilection to the allure of the unseen. Hidden […]

William S. Burroughs on a bed, smoking a cigarette.

“The Opposite of Literature:” Mary McCarthy’s Feb. ’63 Review of Naked Lunch

From the inaugural print edition of The New York Review of Books In remembrance of Jason Epstein, originator and co-founder of NYRB RIP 1928-2022 by Mary McCarthy Naked Lunch  by William S. Burroughs Grove Press, 304pp., $14.49 “You can cut into The Naked Lunch at any intersection point,” says Burroughs, suiting the action to the […]

Remembered and Remade: James Castle’s Conjurings of Mind

James Castle at David Zwirner, NYC (through 12 February 2022) by Andrew Martin James Castle: Memory Palace John Beardsley Yale University Press, 280pp., $65.00 NYR Every James Castle picture seems to contain a secret. Approaching one of his works for the first time, you peer into pockets of shadow and smudge, examining the depopulated landscapes […]

I Am Not Your Cis

by Hypatia The verve of English is under house-arrest by the under-educated: the students of Ivy League universities. They are the standard-bearers — Premium Woke — of our freshly scoured language. Still hallowed as God’s little incubators of future elites, America’s most prestigious universities began their decline in the 1980s. The humanities became a forum for […]

Vulgar Genres: Gay Pornographic Writing and Contemporary Fiction

Vulgar Genres: Gay Pornographic Writing and Contemporary Fiction

An excerpt from a new book which examines gay pornographic writing, showing how literary fiction was both informed by pornography and amounts to a commentary on the genre’s relation to queer male erotic life. —The University of Chicago Press Vulgar Genres: Gay Pornographic Writing and Contemporary Fiction by Steven Ruszczycky University of Chicago Press, 216pp., $30.00 In the United […]

Hilary Brace, Drawings and Tapestries, is reviewed at Riot Material magazine.

Darkness Made Visible in Hilary Brace’s Drawings and Tapestries

at Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station (through 19 February 2022) Reviewed by Eve Wood The intricacies and inherent beauty of the natural world are rarely celebrated these days, and when artists do turn their attention to the surrounding landscape, the resulting images are usually ones of devastation and chaos — charting the movement of fires, […]

The Tragedy of Macbeth 

A film written and directed by Joel Coen Reviewed by James Shapiro NYR Those who have long followed the Coen brothers and their cinematic universe of criminals, nihilists, and overreachers may see in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021) a long-deferred reckoning with Shakespeare, who has been there before them. We don’t typically think of Shakespeare […]

John Divola, From Dogs Chasing My Car In The Desert,1996-98,

Illuminating Images: Liquid Light and Golden Hour and the Affective Force of Non-Didactic Art

at the Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles (through 5 February 2022) Reviewed by Johanna Drucker What is the difference between a wall label and a work of art? The unrelenting didacticism that prevails in current gallery and museum exhibits of contemporary art makes it seem that many curators and artists cannot answer that question. […]

The Occult Works of Ray Robinson, with an essay by Christopher Ian Lutz, is at Riot Material Magazine.

The Brush as Luminous Torch: Ray Robinson’s Blazing Portals Into the Divine Feminine

The Third Door:Occult Works of Ray Robinson, at the Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magic (through 15 January) by Christopher Ian Lutz Burn the Sun The persecution of the witch is a war of the hours. The Inquisition that charged women with witchcraft was not just about controlling women’s bodies – it was a crusade to extinguish […]

An Interview with Artist Gala Porras-Kim is at Riot Material Magazine.

An Interview with Artist Gala Porras-Kim

by Ricky Amadour . Interdisciplinary artist Gala Porras-Kim frames her research to highlight and question the current institutional practices of conservation, acquisition, and deaccession. Acting as an investigator of cultural artifacts that correspond to institutional collections, Porras-Kim deep dives into the expansive histories, stories, and functions of those objects. The artist’s first solo exhibition in […]

Seizing the Snowmelt: Industrial Agriculture is Draining Our State Dry

by Mark Arax The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California by Mark Arax Knopf, 576pp., $25.00 MITTR The wind finally blew the other way last night and kicked out the smoke from the burning Sierra. Down here in the flatland of California, we used to regard the granite mountain as a place apart, our […]

The Great Flood of 1862

The Looming Catastrophe Few in California Are Aware Of (or in Want to Address)

An excerpt from Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent it, by Tom Philpott. THE FLOOD NEXT TIME In November 1860, a young scientist from upstate New York named William Brewer disembarked in San Francisco after a long journey that took him from New York City through Panama and then […]

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RIOT MATERIAL
art. word. thought.