print September 2018

OPENINGS: FLANNERY SILVA

FLANNERY SILVA MAKES COVERS. That is, she takes already-extant cultural works, whether they be songs or signifiers, and adapts these pieces of media into cover versions—music, sculptures, digital-print collages, or labyrinthine websites that bear hazy traces of a beloved original. The act of creating a cover is different from appropriation. While appropriation is a crisp or violent steal, a repurposed excision or theft from a culture, a cover can oscillate wildly. It may be the poor performance—made degraded and lossy through a translation of one personal expression into another—or

previews September 2018

“REE MORTON: THE PLANT THAT HEALS MAY ALSO POISON”

The first major US retrospective in nearly forty years of the sculptor, painter, and installation maven Ree Morton is upon us—praise be! When a car crash tragically cut her life short in 1977, Morton was forty and just hitting her stride. Riffing on the ascetic forms of her Minimalist peers, she incorporated markers of more quotidian affairs: The recurring dotted lines in her work bear a similarity to craft-project instructions. Then there are the flouncy, poetic, banner-like sculptures, one of which serves as the namesake of the exhibition: The Plant That Heals May Also

previews September 2018

LILY VAN DER STOKKER

Bubbly fonts, floral doodles, medicinal pinks, buttercup yellows, and rolls of toilet paper: These are motifs and hues one might expect to find decorating a day care or in a supply closet. Lily van der Stokker liberated such unassuming forms and scoff-worthy aesthetics long ago, fluffing her conceptualist gestures with the pathos of the pooh-poohed. This survey of the Dutch artist’s work, focusing on her output from the late 1980s to the present, will include drawings and wall paintings, such as the proudly declarative I am an artwork and I am 3 years old, 2004; the

interviews May 18, 2018

Amalia Ulman

Amalia Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections, 2014, a durational performance that took place on her Instagram account, featured the artist playing a young ingénue with the kinds of finely calibrated displays of taste we’ve come to recognize as typical of the pageantry of aspiration many people gamely engage in across social media platforms. By virtue of the work's placement on Instagram, the artist garnered attention for being a person she wasn’t, just as the rest of us do all the time. The posts, along with public comments, were published earlier this month in a book by Prestel that also includes

film February 02, 2018

Dear You

HOW LUXURIOUS TO BE ALONE in a theater for a double-bill screening of two love-rhymes-with-hideous-car-wreck films at Spectacle Theater. French director and actor Emmanuelle Bercot’s Backstage (2005) and German director and writer Eckhart Schmidt’s Der Fan (1982) suggest that fandom, like a diamond, is forever. In each, the center of gravity is a younger girl pining for an older pop star, seeing her idol as the physical embodiment of the love that she longs for—at least as a one-way ticket out of banality.

Horror makes a major of the minor, an opera out of suggestion, and treats fantasy as

diary November 21, 2017

Welcome to (ようこそ) the Jungle

“THERE WERE SIGNS.” A small Totoro charm hanging off a mini Fjallraven just so, spotted on the Q train; the Shoto Aizawa from My Hero Academia button on a backpack moving along Thirty-Fourth Street. Clearly something was afoot.

’Twas an anime convention, dear reader, the inaugural edition of a gathering of weebs in New York: AnimeNYC. Held for three days last weekend at Hillary Clinton’s Waterloo (though most around these parts just call it the Javits Center), it marked a terrific opportunity for Midtown councilman Ben Kallos (D) to hail the money and tax dollars that this fan base would bring

slant October 20, 2017

The Unbearable Lightness of Paris / I Know What I Did Last Summer

Since I’m already screwed

Here’s a message to you

My heart’s wide open

I’m just not getting through to the lover in you

Yet I’m still hoping

That tonight, tonight, you’re gonna turn down the lights

And give me a little more room just to prove it to you

THAT’S HOW SHE PUT IT ON “SCREWED,” the eighth track of her debut album, Paris, released in August 2006. Screwed, with an open heart and hope for a little more room, that’s as much as any femme is allowed to be in this world.

Bio: She was born in the 1980s in Los Angeles to wealth and privilege. Her middle name is Whitney. Her middle name is Katharine.

picks October 18, 2017

Yokohama Triennale 2017: “Islands, Constellations, & Galapagos”

With thirty-eight artists and two collectives represented, the 2017 Yokohama Triennale is kitted out in cheap plywood scaffolding and furniture, courtesy of architect Teppei Fujiwara, in aid of its mission to tackle flotsam, jetsam, and aftermath. The show holds all this up as if to query whether, in a future comprising a bit of land, some people, and quite a lot of ocean and trash, we might want to prepare ourselves ahead of time and learn how to read today’s excess and tragedy to anticipate tomorrow’s reality and refuse.

Reappearances and returns make a strong case here for a circulation that

diary May 05, 2017

Game On

IF YOU AREN’T THERE TO SHOP, art fairs are like plugging into a video game where someone’s already taken care of the bosses. Down this aisle, a friend to talk to, down that one a costumed bear spinning out on the floor at your feet; maybe go watch a digital film, ogle some colors, take the ferry—it doesn’t matter what you do, so long as you ride the ride. It all blurs and holds together if you don’t slow down to remember you’ve been chewing on dried mango all day.

Relentless attention to art and society keeps the body’s needs at bay—at least until a rainy day, with storm clouds looming over the

picks April 14, 2017

Rene Ricard

The poet Rene Ricard, who died in 2014, was once called “as hip as it gets . . . but he wasn’t cool.” There’s nothing cool about staking your own heart before a hardened audience. And in a post-Barthes world, neither is lavishing your authorial signature all over everything. “Rene Ricard,” or his initials, often scrawled on the works here, are at the same scale as his painted poems, which are accusations, recriminations, reproaches, and, of course, odes. Over and over, spoken and written, he insisted on his name, not as a point of pride but rather as resignation to an inescapable fate. What a

film April 13, 2017

It Takes Two

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING MORE POPULAR.

Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name (2016) is the highest-grossing anime film, ever. Bulldozing through Hayao Miyazaki’s previous box-office record for Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away, 2001), it’s a perfect introduction for the anime newbie, cannily weaving together so many of the genre’s tropes—an apocalyptic event with a high school innocently built into the middle of its path, teenagers who are the only ones willing to accept that everything can be swept away in an instant, a love that defies the rules of time and space, and, of course, a few shots up

interviews April 04, 2017

Vanessa Place

Vanessa Place is a writer, artist, and criminal defense attorney who currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Her 2010 book The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality, and Law critically examined the laws and punitive measures currently employed in the US regarding sex crimes, in addition to proposing that we expand our conception of “rape culture” into an understanding of culture broadly. She has for the past year been touring a recent work, a set of rape jokes, If I Wanted Your Opinion, I’d Remove the Duct Tape, 2016–, which she performed most recently in the Nu Performance Festival in Tallinn, Estonia,

film March 30, 2017

Extraordinary Machine

THE PROBLEM WITH BEING SEMINAL IS THE SHRINKAGE. In 1995, Mamoru Oshii adapted Masamune Shirow’s late 1980s manga Mobile Armored Riot Police, subtitled Ghost in the Shell in tribute to Arthur Koestler’s 1967 book The Ghost in the Machine, into an anime film that for many years functioned as a subcultural gateway drug, hiding out in the more unclassifiable sections of American video stores. Its VHS cover design threw it under the cartoon category, but the prominent display of heroine Motoko Kusanagi’s enormous tits and her gun hovering over the title gave pause as to its suitability for children,

interviews February 21, 2017

Jamie Stewart

Across thirteen albums and a handful of EPs, Xiu Xiu have remained a prickly, relentless force, inspiring loyalty, love, annoyance, and disgust in equal measure. Some people never get over their music, and some you couldn’t pay to even approach it. On the occasion of the release of their latest album, FORGET, the band’s mainstay Jamie Stewart discusses how he met Vaginal Davis (who performs on its last track), the band’s collaborations with Danh Vō, and the concept behind the record’s title. Polyvinyl will release FORGET on February 24, 2017.

HOW I MET VAGINAL DAVIS is actually a long story and

slant December 12, 2016

On the Ground: New York

THERE WERE SIGNS.

History doesn’t graciously step aside for the new to waltz into the future. Remember how the 2016 calendar year began prematurely? Well, the untimely is the very rhythm of suicide—Chantal Akerman departed the October before last, and more heroes dropped off the further we hurtled along the narrowing line. The slow-burn view of her films, how the world looked when veiled in her stark patience, the picture never ending even after the movie was through, like a dire infection. Isn’t that how despair moves, spreading and multiplying across bodies, through the blood of trauma’s

picks October 28, 2016

Ree Morton

Ree Morton flew her own flags—for proof, see a whole wall of them displayed here. Made of nylon and emblazoned with the names of her nearest and dearest, Something in the Wind, 1975, was strung up on a ship docked at the South Street Seaport that same year, gaily sending affections and affirmations in the breeze. Morton dealt in giddy ideals—if a rose could last, then a prince for a princess, always. For Kate, 1976, a bouquet of roses frozen mid-scatter and made of her sensational celastic—a plastic-impregnated fabric—is a dedication. Hers were works that were always made for. Rather than staging

picks September 16, 2016

Suellen Rocca

Paintings, drawings, purses—if one of these things does not belong, then who really wants to be in that club? Suellen Rocca’s show of twenty-five works from 1965 to 1969, featuring that happy trio, blithely goes its own way, giving pointers to younger artists who incorporate the bold outlines and bright colors of comics, animation, and traditional illustration in their paintings. Mind you, this isn’t some wiseass appropriationist’s high/low move—Rocca’s pictures are resolutely hieroglyphic, and what they take from the ancients gets made up into wiggly modern forms with funky, plastic colors. A

interviews August 30, 2016

Andrew Norman Wilson

Andrew Norman Wilson is an artist and curator based in Los Angeles whose videos and installations address a heady rush of images, technology, and bodies caught in the streams of circulation and representation that our era demands. He has recently had work featured in the seventh Bucharest Biennale, the ninth Berlin Biennale, and will have a new video installation as part of the eleventh edition of the Gwangju Biennale, curated by Maria Lind, which opens on September 2, 2016.

ODE TO SEEKERS 2012 is a looped video that celebrates mosquitoes, syringes, and oil derricks. Not only are they symbols of

slant August 27, 2016

War Lorde

MUSIC VIDEOS ARE BACK—even the New York Times thinks so. But one of the year’s best won’t be anywhere near this weekend’s MTV Video Music Awards. The montage for “A World Alone,” the closing track of producer Airport’s cassette-tape album Lorde Playlist, released earlier this spring by label Afternoonsmodeling, marries an amateur cover by American teenager Claire Maisto of the New Zealand pop artist’s closing track to her 2013 album Pure Heroine with combat footage, tragic accident replays, and other stumblings and sheddings of sovereignty. Some clips are branded with the name “War Clashes,”

interviews June 28, 2016

Jibade-Khalil Huffman

Jibade-Khalil Huffman is an artist working fluidly across poetry, video, photography, and installation. Fence Books has published most of his poetry—including the collections Sleeper Hold (2015) and 19 Names for Our Band (2008). Currently an artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, he will present recent works in the group show “Tenses,” which is on view there from July 14 through October 30, 2016. Huffman is also opening a solo show in Los Angeles of a newly commissioned series of works. Titled “Verse, Chorus, Verse,” this exhibition is on view at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions

Paige K. Bradley