Articles
LOST IN SPACE The New Restoration of Franco Rossi's "Smog"
Franco Rossi’s restored Smog plays like a Nouvelle Vague travelogue, with protagonists seemingly lost in an urban landscape that amplifies their inner malaise. That backdrop is Los Angeles and the long-lost 1962 film (now finally available in a pristine 4K restoration by Cineteca di Bologna and UCLA Film & Television Archives) is also a snapshot of the city in its modernist “adolescence.” At the time Rossi was one of the very first European directors to film entirely on location in the US, and director of photography Ted McCord (East of Eden (1955), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)) captured the sprawl in stark black and white,...
FIELD REPORT Art For All: The Gilbert & George Centre, London
Gilbert & George, the quintessentially British pioneering queer artist-duo have staked a clear position within the milieu in which they operate. They have scant tolerance for art-world conventions, yet it is precisely that peevishness and their enduring, long-term collaboration that created the context for the creation of their provocatively lurid and iconic works. On a recent trip to London, I made my way to their fairly new public art center—situated in the once dodgy Spitalfields district of East London. Gentrification has since transformed the area into a fashionable yet unpretentious neighborhood. The entrance to the Centre,...
STAYING INSIDE THE LINES Painting AI's Possible Future
Many consider the AARON project the earliest use of AI in artwork. If AI is the most recent and advanced example of humans using automated processes to make art, then its history goes back much further. So why all the fuss now? Is AI so different than John Cage flipping coins or Jeff Koons exploiting labor? As AI ramps up from being a tool of human artists, could it become autonomously creative? Currently, most of the people who are asserting AI’s ability to independently create are entities that stand to benefit monetarily from AI’s acceptance. But it’s fair to say that creativity is built on learned experience, and AI is a fast learner....
FURIOUSLY JUMPED UP Poor Things Delivers Visceral and Cerebral Thrills
"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 unequivocal: I think, therefore, I am. The human being is a thinking being. Doing is another issue. Likewise, the earliest test for the presence of machine intelligence—proposed by Alan Turing—indexed the ability to engage in identifiably human conversation: to represent thinking verbally. Such views are relentlessly contested by Yorgos Lanthimos in his newly released film...
SHOPTALK: LA ART NEWS Welcome, Year of the Dragon
It’s the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese lunar calendar, which began February 10, and several museums are featuring Asian/Asian-American artists. Appropriately timed, or maybe just high time to feature them. For those who did not grow up Chinese, or are not Bruce Lee fans, the dragon is the most powerful creature in the Chinese zodiac, and the only mythological one. (Lee’s Chinese name is “Little Dragon.”) The dragon, or one of the myriad dragons in the mytho-verse, is said to control water in its various forms—rivers and lakes and even the clouds. By this logic, some dragon has been conjuring up the “atmospheric river” that’s deluging...
