by Christopher Hassett
The 1978 Paper That Predicted Our Approaching Climate Disaster
If the greenhouse warming effect of the resultant increasing atmospheric CO2 is as great as the most advanced current models suggest, a critical level of warmth will have been passed in high southern latitudes 50 years from now, and deglaciation of West Antarctica will be imminent or in progress. Deglaciation would probably be rapid once it had started, and when complete would have led to a rise in sea level of about 5m along most coasts.
–Prof. John H. Mercer, 26 January 1978
12 July 2017
A trillion-ton iceberg totaling 2,240 square miles, or 12% of the Antarctic peninsula, and 40 trillion cubic feet of ice — a volume twice that of Lake Erie — today broke free from the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica. Following the collapse of the Larsen A ice shelf in 1995 and the Larsen B ice shelf in 2002, today’s calving further weakens the entire continental glacier and sets in motion what scientist believe is the first stage of total glacial collapse. [Read more…]
Cracked Actor To Cracked Actor
.♦
Cracked Actor (Live, Los Angeles ’74)
Sweet Thing/Candidate (Live, Los Angeles ’74)
.♦
In honor and in celebration of Cracked Actor, the new live release from David Bowie’s infamously depraved yet musically stellar ’74 tour, Riot Material scratched up a BBC documentary from that same tour — titled Cracked Actor: A Film About David Bowie. The 1975 film, viewable in four parts below, is directed by Alan Yentob. The new album narrows in on one evening, his September 5th show at Los Angeles’s Universal Amphitheater. Above are two tracks from the Cracked Actor release.
.
Arcturus
from Last Poems
by Anthony Hassett
A new day comes
like something you cannot name.
And perhaps because once again,
you must bend yourself
to the task of living
you begin to hack your way
through the mute glyphs
and weird print of your own thinking.
Searching among the splayed alphabet
of time and space
for the word’s cordite shape. [Read more…]
From The World
A heel is not a hammer
But whatever fulfills
The function of a god
Is a God.
I feel, when you sleep beside me,
The touch of your familiar breath
On my mouth.
It is in this place
Where, through some concentration
Of emptiness,
That ghosts are changed into men…
♦
From Gazette.
Belkis Ayón’s Nkame, A Remarkable Retrospective
Fowler Museum, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Lorraine Heitzman
The recent show at The Fowler Museum, Nkame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón, was the first major retrospective of Ayón’s powerful and emotional work in the United States and inarguably one of the most significant exhibitions that opened in Los Angeles last year. Nkame, meaning “greeting” or “praise” in the language of Abakuá, was a welcome homage to Ayón’s signature black and white prints and featured a comprehensive selection of her work never-before shown together outside of Cuba. [Read more…]
The Primitive, Expressive Figurations Of David Lynch
Works On Paper And Sculpture Art Los Angeles Contemporary / Kayne Griffin Corcoran By Christopher Michno
At this year’s Art Los Angeles Contemporary, the international contemporary art fair of the West Coast, the Los Angeles gallery Kayne Griffin Corcoran devoted its booth to a display of 46 works on paper and two mixed media sculptures by David Lynch. The four day affair, running January 26-29, 2017, offered a dense sampling of the 70 year old artist’s drawings and watercolors, the majority of which were dated from 2008 through 2014. Though most of these works have been previously exhibited, it was a welcome reprise, and Lynch’s works on paper addressed threads that also repeatedly emerge in the auteur’s better known film oeuvre—the desire to probe the unconscious mind, the sense of the uncanny, the need to stare directly into the murky depths of humanity’s darkness. But as is the nature of small works on paper, they are quieter than his film work, and more reflective. [Read more…]
Doron Langberg, Now And Memory
at 1969 Gallery, LES
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban
Elizabeth Peyton’s portraits of both her friends and members of the cultural elite of her era, (Kurt Cobain comes to mind), first gained celebrity in the mid-to-late 90s. Since then, there has been what one might informally call a Peyton school of portraiture, particularly among young or emerging artists. Peyton herself owes a debt to the great portrait painter Alice Neel, known for her incisive psychological studies, and in fact paid homage to Neel with a nude image of the artist (referencing Neel’s own famous nude self-portrait at age 80.) [Read more…]
In Memoriam, 20 January 2017: What Have We Done?
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…]
A Quiet, Cutting Torch Toward Activism
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…]
Kikuji Kawada, April Chaos Cloud
Kikuji Kawada and the current mood [Read more…]
Igor Posner, Tabletop and Glass
East Village, 6 a.m.
Anselm Kiefer’s Walhalla Warns Of The Nightmare Of Nationalism
at White Cube Bermondsey, London
Audio commentary by Rachel Reid Wilkie
Rachel Reid Wilkie examines Anselm Kiefer’s exceptional exhibition, Walhalla. The five audio tracks below address the five main rooms of Kiefer’s sprawling underworld. Press play and imaginatively amble through the halls of this dark yet deeply affecting show. [Read more…]
An Envisioned Aftermath: Four Years Into A State of DTs
In 2012 Justice David Souter anticipated an “invasion of ignorance” which a mere four years on, at the close of 2016, bares its unsightly teeth. RIOT MATERIAL, lacking all the foresight of the good judge, holds out its own prognosticatory lens and aims it four years further. That lens, naturally, peers through art, and though art has the timeless ability to show the way forward, it can equally enlighten as to which way we should not go.
Below is one scenario of a nation, 2020, gone prophetically grate.
Many thanks to the great artist Roger Ballen for this apocalyptic short, Outland.
The Moment Worth Struggling Toward
An Interview with Erin Currier
CHRISTOPHER HASSETT: There seems to be an explicit call to action in much of your work, or at the very least the demand that one take note of some supreme injustice in the land or amongst peoples. Yet what I appreciate about your work is that, more than it being mere critique or some one-dimensional, stop-action capture, it instead offers a way forward, and in my mind that way forward is dependably the right way forward. I’m thinking of, as an example, a new work of yours titled American Women (Dismantling the Border). Can you speak more to this idea of there being a constructive framework or, rather, this inherently optimistic baseline level of production which seems not only to shape but lay a distinctive stamp across your entire arc of expression? [Read more…]
Pipilotti Rist Dreams Us In Return
Pixel Forest
New Museum, NYC
The New Museum’s three-floor exhibition, Pixel Forest, from Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist, is an immersive wonder. If you’re looking for an enchanting, into-the-wilds experience where you can literally lie around — beds and floor cushions are in plenty — then this is the show for you.
We could drive into the desert
by Reid Wilkie
“I will give you space,” he said.
“I wouldn’t disturb you,” he promised.
We could drive into the desert and hold the
Sand between our bodies. [Read more…]
The Trump Era Takes Off
Ascension at Rox Gallery
The press release for Ascension describes an exhibition where “fragmentation abounds in multitudinous ‘selves’, highlighting large-scale interactions between national and, arguably, mystical realms.”
Moving through the Rox Gallery’s two-level group show, however, my impression was that the artists in the gallery’s meandering lower level were engaged in a far more interesting and urgent discussion about a virulent kind of masculinity that is proving to be not just failed but fatal to the longterm existence of our species. [Read more…]