Skip to main content

The Review’s Review: En Garde

Umar Rashid, F Anon Is Me (Fanonisme as an answer to the scourge of colonialism) However, sometimes it is difficult to get to the ringleaders atop the pyramid and one must be satisfied by dispatching proxies. Ultimately, a wasted effort. Or, red woman on a horse, 2021. Acrylic and spray paint on canvas. 72 x 72 x 1 1/2 inches. Photo: Josh Schaedel

For the past few months, I’ve been avoiding museums. Even the smallest among them overwhelms me, a side effect, I assume, of the simultaneous overstimulation and sensory deprivation of life (my life) during the pandemic. It’s not their fault, really, and galleries are hardly the solution, but when I visited En Garde / On God, Umar Rashid’s first solo show at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles earlier this week, I felt the exhibition to be a kind of relief. In a series of large-scale paintings (and one sculpture), Rashid meticulously documents artifacts belonging to the fictitious Frenglish Empire (1658–1880), a portmanteau ushered in by the consolidation of French and English colonial powers. Together, the works read as something of an oblique but determining taxonomy, like the consequential false memories of a bad dream. Missionaries take the form of conversion therapists, white Jesus and black Jesus share the same lowrider, and everyone seems as if they might be on the verge of losing their heads. The show is up until December 18, and images of Rashid’s older works, belonging to the same narrative, are archived online. —Maya Binyam

I’m feeling like it’s been a while since this column has done something meta, so I’m recommending the UK magazine The Happy Reader as an excellent source for recommendations, both in their print issue’s Snippets column and their newsletter. From Denton Welch’s 1945 novel In Youth Is Pleasure to Stoicon (a convention for Stoics held annually in Toronto) to maxims overheard in Paris, reading their breezy appreciations is like skimming through a feed curated by your coolest friend’s algorithm. —Lauren Kane

The guitarist and living jazz legend Pat Metheny is a sort of guilty pleasure of mine, like listening to Rush—both are sometimes a bit too cheesy for their, and my, own good. But when the mood’s right, nothing else will work. I’ve been swooning a bit over Metheny’s latest, Side-Eye NYC (V1.IV), a live trio recording featuring the keyboardist James Francies (who seems to have twenty hands and at least as many keyboards at his disposal) and the drummer Marcus Gilmore, one of my favorites. They tackle old and new Metheny songs, with synths and effect-heavy guitar washing over Gilmore’s crumbly rhythms. Nothing here will surprise Metheny fans, but that’s part of what makes this disc so delicious. —Craig Morgan Teicher

I recently visited the Met’s phenomenal Surrealism Beyond Borders exhibition, an in-depth look at the global impact of surrealism in the twentieth century. Works by the usual suspects—a painting by Leonora Carrington, a sculpture by Dali—are included, but so too are wide-ranging examples from artists active in South Korea, Iran, Greece, and more. My particular favorites include the U.S. poet and artist Ted Joans’s “outographs,” a series of ghostly-looking photos with the subjects’ faces cut out; photographs of members of the Cairo surrealist collective al-Fann wa-I-Hurriya (Art et Liberté) by the Egyptian artist Georges Henein; manifestos from the Montreal-based Les Automatistes; and the 1954 Colombian film The Blue Lobster, featuring contributions from a young Gabriel García Márquez. With a firm emphasis on the politically revolutionary potential of surrealism and its various outgrowths, it’s a thought-provoking, creatively invigorating way to spend an afternoon. —Rhian Sasseen



from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/2Z4AS3P

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...
Post a Comment
Read more

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .   In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...
Post a Comment
Read more