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...
AWOL
“To Hell With Love”
REPORT, a film by Bruce Conner Media Culture and the on-going ceremony of barbarism
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...
Fran Lebowitz Will Judge You Now Fran Lebowitz at The Broad Stage, April 30, 2022
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...
In Our Daughter’s Eyes — opera by Du Yun, created with Nathan Gunn Self-definition and reconstruction as post-catastrophic workaround
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. ...
Yuja Wang — April 6, 2022, Disney Hall Aerial feats and blues for Ukraine
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 Witness Trees, Melting Gates, and Quiet Breathing
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...
Julian Stanczak: The Light Inside Other Horizons, Other Lights
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...
Mapping Fiction — The Huntington Plotting the Dimensional Fictional World
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...
Ten More to Remember — or simply bring to Los Angeles Postscript to the 2021 Artillery Top Ten
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...
Jean-Yves Thibaudet at Disney Hall — Through the fog and straight to the moon Jean-Yves Thibaudet plays the complete Debussy Préludes — December 1, 2021, Walt Disney Concert Hall
“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...
Brave New World: Handel’s Alcina The English Concert & soloists, conducted by Harry Bicket — Los Angeles Opera, November 2, 2021
“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...
Sun & Sea — Geffen Contemporary, MOCA, October 15, 2021 On the Beach — Now and Forever
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...
Agnus of God — “Lamb” for the Apocalypse The pursuit of happiness and the surrender of Hope in Valdimar Jóhannsson’s “Lamb”
One thing Orson Welles understood about movie-making was that a great motion picture, like any great work of art, tapped into a sense of the magical. He also understood that the magic was not simply the final studio product, however released or presented...
Emblazoned World — Bel Ami Where “Everything Is Illuminated” — Lucy Bull & friends find the light in the dust.
It was really a break from a break from a break from a longer art project (which is what art features turn into after they’ve been festering and metastasizing for more than a month or two) that brought me out to Bel Ami – a gallery I’d never been to located in the...
Phil Connell’s Jump, Darling (at OUTFEST Los Angeles) Making a creative life at the culture’s edge – Jump, Darling (Big Island Productions/2645850 Ontario/LevelFILM) - directed by Phil Connell
Identity evolution, struggles and troubled transitions are familiar themes and storylines in Outfest fare, and Phil Connell’s Jump, Darling (the U.S. release of which was delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic) fits neatly if slightly awkwardly into this category. What’s...
Susan Silton: WE at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles WE WILL BE SEEING IT DIFFERENTLY—ALWAYS: SUSAN SILTON’S MORPHOLOGY OF IMAGE AND WORD
“What are we looking at?” You hear that (usually rhetorical) question a lot in art galleries and design houses – also in accounting firms, screening rooms, at construction sites, and (really) business meetings of any kind – frequently spoken with some impatience. ...
Saved by Simone Gad and Other Souvenirs Simone Gad (1947-2021): Les Souvenirs, sauvetages, et jouets jetés bien-chéris de mon amie inoubliable
I’m preoccupied lately with appearance and disappearance; the motions that simulate appearance and disappearance. It’s the sort of simulation that dates back to childhood for many of us—say, hide-and-seek for starters. I remember my brother and I trying to make...
Deep Listening By the Light of a “Full Pink Moon”: Opera Povera in Quarantine
The planet, some of us might say, is having a moment. Panic, collapse, disruption—with the tables turned on the principal disrupting species by an errant configuration of protein presumably just doing its thing in the carbon cycle; also course-correction, regrouping,...
