Not all films about artists and the art world are silly, but most of them are. To paraphrase a Mark Twain quote, “There are lies, damned lies, and films about artists and the art world.” (Twain linked “statistics” with lies and damned lies.) From such films as the...
In an episode of Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Louis CK takes Seinfeld out on his boat on the Hudson River. Looking across the water and admiring the skyline, Louis says, “New York makes me crazy. I love New York City. I love the different brick...
Seeming to arise from the video music world this past summer to land at MOCA, the path of “Kahlil Joseph: Double Conscience” may seem roundabout if one only follows the trails of his dreamlike images. Digging a bit deeper unearths multiple contemporary art...
We live in interesting times—possibly the end of time, or at least the end of history as humans have conceived it over the last few millennia (an irony Francis Fukuyama never considered in the dislocated thesis for his 1989 essay and 1992 book, nor for that matter...
Octavio Paz wrote, “this hour has the shape of a pause.” Adriana Salazar’s videos situate us inside such a pause, places where we are in nature while watching human artifacts become nature. I met Salazar in Mexico City this past November, though I knew of her work...
In the late ‘70s, I would carry the Sony Portapak for my artist stepmother, Rabyn Blake, across muddy fields in Southern France as she filmed a shepherdess whose name sounded like “leg of lamb” in French, or shot shimmering vistas of Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire....
Ten years ago, when I learned of the existence of a film called Trona, shot in the desert hellhole of the same name, I feared the worst, especially when I learned that it was a thesis film by a CalArts graduate. It was hard to imagine anybody associated with that...
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,...
To find a curatorial through-line for the wildly varied career of Frank Stella must be an enormous challenge. Hanging opposite the elevators on the new Whitney’s fifth floor, as a kind of preamble to “Frank Stella: A Retrospective,” are Pratfall (1974), a precise...
Laurie Anderson fairly disappeared in the gaping vastness of the darkened Park Avenue Armory. Standing, violin in hand, next to a Lincoln Memorial–sized plaster sculpture of an armchair, she told the story of Mohammed el Gharani.El Gharani—or rather his shimmering...
The sculptures and videos in Same Rock are based on a “little Switzerland” in Appalachia, founded on the promise of its similarity to the Alps, and explore myths of universality, aesthetic deception, and the politics and economics of mountains. Please Enjoy… offers...
Part journey of self-discovery, part family history, part window into an artist’s oeuvre, Sally Mann’s memoir Hold Still is simply wonderful, sharing that same combination of hauntingly beautiful lyricism and truth that are the hallmarks of her photographs.For most...
With trunk tucked up compactly—the elephant’s signof defeat—he resisted, but is the child of reason now. His straight trunk seems to say: when what we hoped for came to nothing, we revived.—From “Elephants,” Marianne Moore Dick Blau uses his camera to map...
According to his Wikipedia entry, this is Michael Peppiatt’s eighth book about Francis Bacon. If all of his Bacon books were packaged like a deluxe DVD, this would be the really good feature length documentary about the “making of.” He certainly deserves to tell his...
Last year I was invited to view a controversial painting that the owner claimed to be a genuine Rothko he bought at a small LA auction many years ago. The painting was not officially included in the Rothko catalogue raisonné despite the fact that the owner discovered...
Archiving cultural ephemera is a tricky business. Anyone who’s followed my writing for even a brief time will have encountered some kind of rant about how the institutional canonization of cultural insurrections like Punk, zine culture, hippies, beats, etc.,—or...
Long films aren’t new. As early as 1914, there was a film (The Photo-Drama of Creation) that ran eight hours. Wikipedia lists at least five films from that decade, which ran at least six hours. In 1971 Jacques Rivette made a famous 13-hour film (Out: One) that had one...
The most famous Hollywood movie I appeared in was Roger Corman's Death Race 2000, which was bizarre because coming from New York, I didn’t know how to drive yet. Over the years the movie became one of the most popular American films in Europe, including France....
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