“It’s the stark-open when / the sky disappears into the lake without aid”
Often, you'll hear a painter mutter enviously while looking at a painting something along the lines of ”Damn. He just did whatever the hell he wanted.” Variations of this phrase were doubtlessly uttered many times over the last month throughout the adjoining galleries of David Zwirner’s 19th Street location, where Raoul de Keyser’s paintings hang on the walls, their apparent haphazardness inoffensively contrasting with the sky-lit gallery space.
I knew I wanted to write a review of Steven Soderbergh’s Presence when I walked out of the theater and a man in front of me exclaimed to a woman by his side, "That was dogshit!"
The composer La Monte Young remarked that if he doesn't transport his listeners to heaven, he's not doing his job. How many artists today work by such ambitious standards, let alone do their job? What do critics then do when artists go on a disorganized anti-art strike?
There’s something pathetic about contemporary attempts to paint the present as an opportunity for art. Too late! If all it takes to “change” art is a change in the American president, there’s not much there to change. This is indeed an opportunity, but it is a shallow opportunity. If change might so easily be had, why was this opportunity not posed in 2020? Better yet, 2016?
My entry into art was haphazard. Beyond the general presence of images of art in my home (reproductions of Gauguin, Matisse, and Picasso) and now-forgotten visits to museums at an early age, my first real encounters with art occurred at the movie theater, to which my parents would take me often . . .
Often, you'll hear a painter mutter enviously while looking at a painting something along the lines of ”Damn. He just did whatever the hell he wanted.” Variations of this phrase were doubtlessly uttered many times over the last month throughout the adjoining galleries of David Zwirner’s 19th Street location, where Raoul de Keyser’s paintings hang on the walls, their apparent haphazardness inoffensively contrasting with the sky-lit gallery space.
I knew I wanted to write a review of Steven Soderbergh’s Presence when I walked out of the theater and a man in front of me exclaimed to a woman by his side, "That was dogshit!"
Ken Collins’s portrait of Richard Diebenkorn, used to promote the recent L.A. Louver show of his works on paper, is peculiar in its emphasis on the distance between the camera and its subject . . .
Bret Schneider delves into everything from Indian ragas to Bach’s recreation of the mind with composer and pianist Michael Harrison.
Bret Schneider speaks with composer Katrina Krimsky about her career spanning half a century.
Politically, melancholia may be more destructive than idealism, but aesthetically, doesn’t melancholia, as a kind of negative idealism, seem almost natural?
Victor Cova introduces a 1941 exchange between Claude Lévi-Strauss and André Breton.
Gilberto Perez’s commentary on history as seen through the lens of the filmmaker duo Straub-Huillet.
“It’s the stark-open when / the sky disappears into the lake without aid”
Bret Schneider delves into everything from Indian ragas to Bach’s recreation of the mind with composer and pianist Michael Harrison.
A vision of the grotesque, our morbid fascination with violence, and the aestheticization of war…
Failure of failures. Gluck and Vika’s adventure comes to an end…for now!
Gluck turns a corner and encounters a challenge he’d never anticipated, revealing the true scale of his conflict. Will he give up…or find new strength?
Breaking out of jail is something of a specialty for Gluck. Finding his way around an unfamiliar city isn’t hard either. What does Gluck struggle with? I’m glad you asked!
“Film is, for me, an art of composition.”