These notes are for Dave Hickey, Paula Rego, and Annie Ross. "Let me be clear about this: I don't have a drug problem, I have a police problem." Keith Richards — flyleaf quotation for Dave Hickey's Air Guitar Just a moment...
The title of the film conveys the dual meaning of the word—as both an accounting and a reverberant or explosive signal, echo or announcement of an event—and the film carries its full freight. The actual fragments of live radio broadcast transmissions that comprise...
There was an almost respirational pacing to this show—taken from a slightly more expansive exhibition of the Montana-based artist’s work at the Missoula Art Museum—between variously light or darkness-drenched works on canvas (and/or panel) and the chromatically...
What is it about a curmudgeon? ...asked a curmudgeon. Or so have I occasionally been obliquely described. ‘Curmudgeonly’, rather than an actual ‘curmudgeon’. So far.... I thought about this inexact and usually quite inaccurate categorization intermittently last...
It may be just me (and the mess that is my life), but my thinking lately is that we’re at a state of human cultural development where most of the noteworthy cultural events—music, theatre, film, fine arts and performing arts generally—are like surprise symphonies. ...
For those of us who have followed Yuja Wang’s career for the last 15 years or so (at least since her major American orchestral debuts) and especially over the last five, we have more or less come to expect two things: to be dazzled and to be surprised. Los Angeles...
Let me talk. How often have I had to say that? Or wanted to say that? Or conversely, put it back to an interlocutor—‘no, go ahead—you talk; I want to hear what you have to say.’ Or in yet another mood or set of conditions, thought to myself, ‘let me hear this...
I had some idea of what to expect when I walked into the Julian Stanczak show at the Diane Rosenstein Gallery a couple Saturdays ago (this is the artist’s fourth exhibition with the gallery). Almost from the outset of his career, Stanczak was identified with the ‘Op...
The landmark exhibition “No Humans Involved” was remarkably compact, filling a single gallery at the Hammer with installations by only seven artists. Its impact, however, was seismic and sustained. Its title alone was enough to take viewers aback—and that was part of...
It is probably safe to say that cartography evolved directly alongside oral and written narrative. Similarly, it is plausible to assume that fictional narrative began to take form as travel between known or proximate locations gave way to voyages across unplotted or...
As I wrote to preface ARTILLERY’s 2021 “Top Ten” compilation, there could have easily been a parallel list of 10 or more shows and exhibitions approaching the level of the ten I selected. At one time, the magazine designated a few “honorable mentions,” usually, as I...
Hilary Baker calls her current show at Rory Devine Fine Art, Predators—which we might loosely define as any species that dares to assert its presence amongst the invasive, marauding, and all-devouring species of apex-predators, we know as humans. Baker’s subtitle is,...
Long-fascinated formally by shape, chromatic modulation, and their definition of a place and its contours, Mary Weatherford’s work has evolved into an abstract geography of incident—a geography that continues to become more expansive in every sense. The title of her...
I resisted compiling this list (the limitations of which are obvious); but then thought: “Wait! In this awkward year of slow emergence from a pandemic that may never really be over, how many really great shows could there actually be?” Until, as I went over the shows...
“Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir.” Charles Baudelaire, “Harmonie du soir,” Les Fleurs du mal (1857) The title of the first of the 12 Preludes in Book II of Debussy’s Préludes is “Brouillards”—and Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s audience at Disney Hall was...
“Now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,...” William Shakespeare, The Tempest Scarcely into the second act of Alcina—the third of Handel’s operas based on material from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso...
The show’s original incarnation was the culmination of the artist’s residency in Critical Race Studies at Michigan State University’s Lansing campus from August 2020 through May 2021. Fastening onto the campus’s most prominent landmark—the statue of Michigan State’s...
Nothing really happens in Sun & Sea, an opera set during a time in which we may expect ‘things’ will more or less stop happening altogether; or in any case, when things only happen to us—excepting possibly those wealthy enough to have provided themselves...
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