Articles
FUCKING WITH AUTOBIOGRAPHY The Films of Martine Syms
How do we tell our stories? Martine Syms is rewriting the terms. In addition to sculptures, installations and text-based projects, the polymath Angeleno artist has made a string of ambitious films. Her work in FAV extends as far back as her solo show at MoMA in 2017, where the then 29-year-old artist debuted her first feature-length film, Incense Sweaters & Ice, as part of the exhibition “Projects 106.” The show was arranged so that the viewer navigated multimedia collages around the centrally placed three-channel film. Describing the experience of walking around “Projects 106,” New Yorker critic Doreen St. Félix observed, “I had the...
MALKA GERMANIA Yael Bartana's Jungian Journey Into the Past and Present
In an age when so much gratuitous violence pervades our screens, the three-channel film Malka Germania presents a gentle Jungian perspective on the effects of the Holocaust on today’s German citizens. The film alludes to collective trauma about war and subjugation, while transforming that trauma into manna. Malka Germania (Queen Germania in Hebrew), created by Israeli native/Berlin resident Yael Bartana, features the elegantly androgynous Malka (Gala Moody) moving slowly through Berlin while attired in a long, hooded robe. She dominates the city—portrayed in the film as the locus of Germany’s draconian past—and observes people going about...
The Complex Stuff is the Best Keith Haring at The Broad
“Children know something that most people have forgotten.” —Keith Haring’s journal entry from July 7, 1986. In the spirit of Keith Haring’s retrospective, “Art Is For Everybody,” I decided to seek a child’s perspective on his work, enlisting my friend’s eight-year-old son, Oscar Forbes, to get his thoughts about the exhibition. After setting up tickets for our visit, the museum’s PR team emailed me, warning that “the exhibition contains adult themes and sexual content that some parents may deem inappropriate for children.” When I shared this information with Oscar’s mother, she responded, “I don’t think there’s anything at the Broad that’s...
New Art in the Metro System
With the opening of Metro’s Regional Connector on June 16, three new Downtown Los Angeles stations have site-responsive art installations by eight artists in them. The artists were carefully chosen through a multi-stage process, and their designs became integral parts of the station’s architecture—whether part of solid walls or glass panels. What I’ve found particularly interesting is that Metro Art, the transportation agency’s public art program, required a public engagement component for every project, and the artists found different ways to make those connections meaningful. Mark Steven Greenfield’s Red Car Requiem at Historic Broadway...
THE BURDEN OF MISREPRESENTATION Documentaries Trumped by Biopics
Artists and the art world are a source of endless fascination for the movies. They seem inherently romantic or scandalous—or both—and in the past these movies usually featured white guys such as Michelangelo, van Gogh or Jackson Pollock in postures of tragic genius. Fortunately, we’ve moved away from the Great White Male Artist trope, especially as some neglected women artists have been rediscovered. One would be Hilma af Klint (1862–1944), a visionary Swedish artist now credited as being one of the first abstract painters, predating Kandinsky and Mondrian. Her life has been imagined into the biopic Hilma, directed by veteran director Lasse...
