Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers At Winterland

October 3, 2017 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

New Year’s Eve 1978

Jeffrey Vallance Interview: The Story Behind Blinky

by Lita Barrie Jeffrey Vallance has loved pranks since he was at high school but it did not occur to him that they could be called “performance art” until he went to art school. Vallance is so guileless he did not understand why he was called a “prankster” at first because he was making a […]

Beyond The Weeping Muse: Dora Maar

at Tate Modern, London (through 15 March 2020) Reviewed by Christopher P Jones There was a decade in Dora Maar’s life when anything seemed possible. During the 1930s she opened her own studio in Paris with art director Pierre Kéfer. She shared a darkroom with the Hungarian-French photographer Brassaï. She showed her work in Dada […]

The Dagger-Like Behemoth Of MoMA’s Conjoined Super-Tall

by Martin Filler Filler examines the “colossal imposition” of 53W53, wherein he states MoMA must now “bear responsibility for making local environmental quality even worse.” Courtesy of The New York Review of Books Among the plethora of disturbingly disproportionate, super-tall, super-thin condominium towers that have spiked the New York City skyline since the turn of the […]

Giving Voice To The Voiceless In Christopher Myers’ Drapetomania

at Fort Gansevoort, Los Angeles (through February 8) Reviewed by Genie Davis Opening an outpost in Los Angeles, the well-known New York-based gallery, Fort Gansevoort, chose artist, author, and play-write Christopher Myers’ Drapetomania as its inaugural exhibition in this city. Myers’ large-scale, mural-sized textile works and powerfully bleak sculptures create a stirring initial show.

Philipp Kremer: With Lovers

at Nicodem Gallery, Los Angeles (through February 1) Reviewed by Eve Wood Imagine a faceless orgy, a concupiscence of bodies – colliding, embracing, penetrating, wherein the entirety of the surrounding picture plane is reduced to a senseless expanse of writhing and roiling flesh. In Philipp Kremer’s work, the notion of desire is determined by an […]

Sites Of Love And Desire In Lari Pittman: Declaration Of Independence

at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (through January 5) Reviewed by Lita Barrie Lari Pittman’s momentous retrospective at Hammer Museum, is not only the most ambitious exhibition organized by the museum but arguably the most important exhibition anywhere in the country — or perhaps the world, today. This career-spanning exhibition of 80 densely layered monumental paintings and […]

The ’10s: Best Jazz Releases Of The Decade

by Henry Cherry In the last decade of his life, Duke Ellington, probably America’s greatest composer, had a resurgence. Jazz was in turmoil, expanding and contracting at the same time, not unlike a star going supernova. In Ellington’s case, he was reincorporating various musical influences. He returned to the sacred music of his early life, […]

Memories and Despair: The 10 Best Films of the Year

by Alci Rengifo The year 2019 was reflected in its cinema like few before it. Fittingly, the decade closes with movies that obsessively gazed upon the passage of time and the social realities which are setting parts of the world aflame. It is hard for the art of an era to escape its dominant forces. […]

The Overlooked Ten From 2019’s Jazz Bin

by Henry Cherry Choosing music outside of the constraints of marketing and modishness is a difficult practice that for some is an absolute chore. In this technocratic age of curated playlists, there is less exploration among individuals. While online encyclopedias continue to define and annotate the music of the past along with current releases, it […]

Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative

Reviewed by Katie Waldman Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative by Jane Alison Catapult, 272 pp., $12.81(paper) Review courtesy of the New Yorker I was in the seventh grade when Jane Alison’s début novel, The Love-Artist fell into my hands, and its effect on me was like a full-body blush. The book, which imagines […]

Memory Palaces & The Hidden Art: Works And Studies Within The Collection Of Audrey B. Heckler

Reviewed by Sanford Schwartz Memory Palaces: Inside the Collection of Audrey B. Heckler (through January 26) an exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum, NYC, January 26, 2020 The Hidden Art: 20th- and 21st-Century Self-Taught Artists from the Audrey B. Heckler Collection by Valérie Rousseau with Jane Kallir, Anne-Imelda Radice, and others American Folk […]

Into the Abyss With Jonathan Glazer’s Feral Short: The Fall

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo Jonathan Glazer emerges every so often with work that above all is constructed by a powerful aesthetic. More than narratives, what Glazer crafts are images combined with soundscapes which immerse the viewer in moments of dread, hallucination and discovery. Moments which could have the feel of a common day action suddenly […]

Hazards Of Alienation In The Fool (and Other Moral Tales)

Reviewed by John Biscello The Fool (and Other Moral Tales) by Anne Serre Translated by Mark Hutchinson New Directions, 228pp., $13.97 Among the linty cling of rumors and backwashed gossip spread around the barrooms and laundromats of the universe, circulates this mortuary nugget: Hey, did you know that Ego, when it dies, would love nothing […]

Twenty Que With J. Matthew Thomas

By Erin Currier The appearance of J. Matthew Thomas on our Earth is a rare and fortuitous event, akin to a special comet or eclipse that occurs once every 500 hundred years or so. He is the DaVinci of our day-and-age, a true Visionary bringing together community, education, environment and art with international events such […]

Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet The Sun Again

at The Broad, Los Angeles (through February 16) Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner “Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.” —Edward Said “To […]

A Portrait Of Bolivian Heartbreak

By Alci Rengifo An Associated Press photo by Natasha Pisarenko shows an indigenous Bolivian woman standing amid clouds of tear gas, holding the national flag and at its tip, the Wiphala flag of the nation’s indigenous peoples. Her society is again a victim of history. Its dreams vanished in acrid smoke. The photo’s aesthetic is […]

The Breathless Charm Of Tina Brooks’s Minor Move

on Blue Note Records Reviewed by Henry Cherry Soulster James Brown was known as the godfather of soul for a reason. His syncopated music had the sound of a crisp, rehearsed band that could stop on a dime. In live shows, the singer demanded that same precision found on his studio recordings. Brown regularly fined […]

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