"And when we know the world, the world is ours.” —Bella Baxter What is it exactly that makes a being human?” Is it the presence of a human body or a human mind? Or is it some incommensurable, uncanny union between the two? For the philosopher Descartes, the answer was...
The Earth is parched, its water impure. The air is poisonous, awash with industrial effluvia and alive with toxic organisms. Our culture has been radically and relentlessly artificialized, while we are regimented, consumerized, alienated and terrorized. Fortunately,...
Brave New World: A Graphic Novel Adapted and Illustrated by Fred Fordham 234 pages Harper Collins Original Text © 1932, 1946 by Aldous Huxley Oh wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! Oh brave new world that has such people in’t!...
Post York Story and Art by James Romberger with additional material by Crosby Romberger 112 pages Dark Horse Comics/Berger Books “They somehow set fire to what was left of the East Side.” —POST YORK, p.86. The city had been ceded to climate change. It was...
Although it was once relatively straightforward, the relationship between what we refer to as “Nature” and its inverted mirror-image “Culture” has become complicated and problematic. Indeed, the “default position” in the argument as to their reciprocal relationship is...
Minnie Panis has a problem with existence. Minnie, budding Dutch conceptual artist and central character in Niña Weijers’ debut novel The Consequences, finds the idea of her own existence an excruciatingly difficult one. In this, however, she is not alone. The notion...
Nan Goldin, to borrow a phrase from her friend and fellow-artist David Wojnarowicz, has always lived and worked “close to the knives.” Her most recent published collection, Diving for Pearls, can only intensify our appreciation for her images of that pain and that...
Joseph Stashkevetch is a consummate craftsman, his work suspended effortlessly between drawing and photography. In his recent show at Von Lintel Gallery, the addition of a literal third dimension leverages his simple process (conté crayon on rag paper) into an...
Anwar Congo is a stone-cold killer.He is also a petty gangster, a wealthy if somewhat eccentric paterfamilias, something of a dandy (never wear white to an interrogation or a political execution), a local celebrity with connections to an abysmally corrupt government,...
It’s a long way, spatially, temporally and culturally from the cavernous interior of The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA to the idyllic rolling landscape of the Civil War battle field near Bull Run Creek in northern Virginia. But it is precisely that distance (among...
“And so it was I ate my pet [a rabbit] and remembered all of the fun times of summer. [. . .] That was the season when I realized that I must leave my loves behind.”Coming of age on the Norman coast and in the streets of Paris in the shadow of 1968: this delirious...
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Or not. Fred Lonidier’s recent show of photographic work provides a telling demonstration of two inextricably interconnected facts. First, that a vast cultural chasm has opened up between the present world and that of the...
The image of “the road” is one of the metaphors most deeply embedded in the American cultural landscape, perhaps most poignantly for the inter-war generation that produced both Dennis Hopper (born 1936) and Jack Kerouac (born 1922) among so many others.Beginning in...
The rigorous simplicity of Alice Aycock’s early architecturally-based land art, as well as the exuberant complexity and cosmological grandeur toward which she has steadily moved, were both well represented in “Alice Aycock Drawings: Some Stories are Worth Repeating,”...
The photographs by Miles Coolidge recently on display at ACME, Los Angeles, are magnificently beautiful examples of the photographer’s craft. Simply as aesthetic objects, the photos are compelling: composed according to simple underlying geometries, they nonetheless...
“The basic premise of Learning from Las Vegas is that the car has significantly shaped the form of the contemporary American city.” This simple statement seems so manifestly obvious: both trivial and unassailable. Yet in the hands of Martino Stierli, it is embedded...
Any time an artist can invoke Michelangelo and Steve Ditko in the same work, he deserves considerable respect. At least that is the feeling one gets from the impressive show of work by Jim Shaw recently on view at Blum & Poe. As expected, Shaw’s work is erudite...
LA’s rise as a major architectural center, chronicled by the Getty Research Institute in Pacific Standard Time’s ongoing and extensive set of shows, is difficult to reconstruct despite the copious evidence. The architectural history of Los Angeles is multifaceted and...
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