Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

A Look Back on an Iconoclast: Art Critic Dave Hickey

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by Jarrett Earnest

Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art
by Daniel Oppenheimer
University of Texas Press, 141 pp., $24.95

The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, Revised and Expanded
by Dave Hickey
University of Chicago Press, 123 pp., $15.00 (paper)

Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy
by Dave Hickey
Art Issues Press, 215 pp., $19.95 (paper)
NYR

When Dave Hickey died last fall at the age of eighty-two, he left behind a singular contribution to the history of art writing, along with a badly bruised reputation, both routinely called “iconoclastic” for lack of anything more precise. The magazines he’d published in since the 1960s hardly took notice. The perfunctory obituaries that did appear treated him as a kind of Hunter S. Thompson of the contemporary art world, ensconced as he was in Las Vegas at the height of his fame. But alongside the bluster of “the bad boy of art criticism” was a neon Walter Pater of the Southwest who almost single-handedly remade the practice of art writing with his first two collections, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (1993) and Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (1997). In Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art, Daniel Oppenheimer complicates the cartoon version of his life that continues to shadow his reputation as a writer. What remains is the difficult task of taking stock of Hickey’s literary achievement. [Read more…]

Ed Moses: Through the Looking Glass

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at William Turner Gallery, Santa Monica (through March 30)
Reviewed by Genie Davis

To say that the opening of Ed Moses Through the Looking Glass, was crowded with fans and art lovers is an understatement. Moses is an LA icon of art, and the collection of his recent works on display here underscore the reasons for that honorific. That he continues to draw and fascinate viewers is unsurprising; his works are a magnet, deeply attractive, alive and engaging. [Read more…]

Passing Through Time, Memory, Decay: A Journey That Wasn’t

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at the Broad Museum (through February 2019)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

Time. It can be both friend and foe. It eludes us, slips through our fingers and yet also seemingly extends ad infinitum. The fourth dimension in all of its frustratingly enigmatic glory serves as spellbinding subject matter for the Broad Museum’s current group showcase, A Journey That Wasn’t. Rather than focus on a particular artist, movement, or epoch, co-curators Ed Schad and Sarah Loyer instead chose to delve into this abstract, multifaceted concept. Comprised of 55 rarely seen works, all from the Broad’s vast collection, this sweeping exhibition acts as a philosophical treatise on the passage of time, memory, and decay. [Read more…]

The Divine Unity Of Man, Machine, And The Moon

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Billy Al Bengston’s It is the Moon Doggie
at Various Small Fires, Los Angeles (through October 28, 2017)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

Known for his eccentric personality, flock of famous artists he calls friends, and wildly experimental geometric paintings, Billy Al Bengston is currently the subject of a much-anticipated retrospective featuring 30 years of his beloved moon paintings at Hollywood’s trendy Various Small Fires Gallery.

Captivated by the seas of stars and luminous moonscapes he witnessed while on a motorcycle trip down the breathtaking Baja Peninsula, Bengston began capturing this incandescent starlight on canvas. He debuted his first moon painting collection at Santa Monica’s James Corcoran Gallery in 1987. The artist has since added to that original series over the years, but never before have they all been displayed together, making this exhibition an incredibly rare opportunity for fans of the artist. [Read more…]

The Cool, Ruminative Palette Of Glen Rubsamen

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The Disguise Was Almost Perfect
at Christopher Grimes Gallery, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Christopher Michno

Glen Rubsamen’s paintings of locales around the Los Angeles region, which are selected using a conceptual schema based on virtual mapping, combine idealized images of landscapes pared down to essentials, and a sense of detached irony. Visually reminiscent of Ed Ruscha’s paintings of Los Angeles and the West—but without the conceptual text-based play or the monumentality and horizontal scale, they rely on clichés of Los Angeles to reproduce a kind of iconography that is familiar and, like Ruscha’s, cinematic: palm trees (and the occasional eucalyptus) and vast expanses of sky, rendered in heightened, lozenge colored hues. Rubsamen’s paintings, exhibited at Christopher Grimes Gallery this summer under the title “The Disguise Was Almost Perfect,” are accompanied by a poster sized map, available as take-away, adapted from a hand-drawn 1915 Automobile Club map of the region, on which the artist has overlaid graphics of his paintings push-pinned to their correlated location. [Read more…]