To look without fear. That’s the title of Wolfgang Tillmans’s current dizzying retrospective at MoMA. But this begs questions, namely, who is supposed to be looking without fear? Tillmans? The audience? If it’s the viewers, what are we bravely confronting? Berlin clubs? Photographs of Frank Ocean, Kate Moss, and Chloë Sevigny? A whole lot of images … Continue reading
I fell into Greer Lankton’s exhibition DOLL PARTY at Company—or more precisely, I stumbled. I don’t mean I stumbled upon the show at random. I actually caught myself before I went tumbling off the bottom step of the steep staircase that led to the dim black-walled gallery space, stabilizing my unsteady legs before my joints … Continue reading
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, dearest Filthy Dreams readers, but I have a tendency to be a little, um, WORDY. Because we all need a break sometimes from my unending (draining) gush of thoughts and because there are shows closing soon still worthy of our attention, I thought we’d try something different: brevity! So … Continue reading
In a basement not so far, far away from whence I came, I saw hell. Or, rather, the charred gates of hell, engulfed in flames, so papery thin that a devilish visitor could tear their way through them in an instant. Continue reading
Jesus Christ. This shit is fucking ugly. That’s the immediate thought I had upon clicking on the installation views of the current exhibition Painting in New York: 1971-83 at the two Karma spaces on 2nd Street. My eyes watered staring at squiggles of bold yellow paint resembling squirts of yellow mustard on a hot dog … Continue reading
Natalya Hughes’s The Interior, presently on view at the IMA in Brisbane, is in essence an abstraction of Freud’s consultation rooms during and after the Second World War, from Vienna to London. Hughes cordons off the threshold of her exhibition with a blue curtain on a metal rod, reminiscent of a makeshift hospital ward. The … Continue reading
Two sultry gazes stare sightlessly from a weathered window or a picture frame as if stolen from the bedroom wall of a fanatical teenage girl in 1955. James Dean and Elvis Presley, icons of mid-20th century rebels without causes. Ripping it up, hip thrusting, jailhouse rocking, Vampira attracting, drag racing, they are double martyrs to … Continue reading
In his Last Will and Testament made in 1987, on view in the sprawling exhibition Stranger Than Kindness: The Nick Cave Exhibition, Nick Cave requested: “…money earned on records, both publishing and record sales, should be used to have and maintain a small but adequate room or rooms that will serve as the “Nick Cave … Continue reading
In the nebulous period of 1983 and 1984 between the drug-fueled dissolution of the trash can-driving, six-inch-gold-blade-slicing, zoo-music-girl-lusting, junkyard royalty The Birthday Party and the official designation of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Nick Cave played a smattering of clubs under a few different titles. There was Nick Cave and the Cavemen, which is … Continue reading
Stepping closer to inspect the rouged cheeks of an otherwise black-and-white photograph of Nico, I neglected to notice Sarah Ortmeyer’s diminutive DIABOLUS (PROTECTOR), a cast aluminum sculpture roughly three inches in height, kicking it on its side. Continue reading