Scrolling through a list of recently opened exhibitions, one name gave me pause: Cumwizard69420. A name that reads as if birthed—or shat—straight from the bowels of the Internet. Cumwizard69420. A name that seems as if typed by a snickering teen signing into a chatroom in 1997. In fact, that name would not be out of … Continue reading
Category Archives: Art
Lo! A Monster Is Born: “The Horror Show!” at London’s Somerset House Is Everything an Exhibition Should Be
“Everywhere I seem to go on this island seems to me I find degeneracy. There is brawling in bars. There is indecency in public places. And there is the corruption of the young. And now I see it all stems from here—it stems from the FILTH taught here in this very school room!” So spits … Continue reading
Maxo Vanka’s Murals at St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church Are Pittsburgh’s Hidden Radical Masterpieces
On New Year’s Eve, the electricity in my family’s home in Pittsburgh flickered ominously and then, went dark. In the distance, orange and pink lights flashed vibrantly like strobe lights in the sky, as a buzzing sound, reminiscent of Dean Hurley’s ever-present static bursts in Twin Peaks: The Return, echoed furiously. If the impromptu disco … Continue reading
K8 Hardy Documents Her Revolutionary Costumes for Today in “Outfitumentary”
K8 Hardy’s Outfitumentary should be a mind-numbing watch. About an hour and twenty minutes of the artist and filmmaker showing off her eccentric outfits in head-to-toe shots almost daily for over a decade on a crappy lo-fi mini-DV camera, the delightfully and perfectly titled 2016 film, directed, produced, photographed, and edited by Hardy, could easily … Continue reading
No Twerk Zones: Tirzah and Henrike Naumann at SculptureCenter
The Tirzah exhibition at SculptureCenter is as basic and enchanting as Tirzah’s music, which would perhaps be best described as mellow melancholia with spasms of grunge. If you weren’t already enamored with Tirzah, you’d probably walk into the exhibition, comprised of just two modestly scaled screens displaying music videos, all of which are readily available … Continue reading
God Is on the Dance Floor in Joseph Liatela’s “Nothing Under Heaven”
I don’t think I’ve ever come closer to seeing the face of God than when listening to Sylvester’s manic, soaring gospel cry, “Take Me to Heaven.” It’s not a fluke. Sylvester, too, saw his music in religious terms. In the biography The Fabulous Sylvester, Joshua Gamson reveals that after a particularly transcendent show, Sylvester, along … Continue reading
Fear and Loathing at MoMA: A Conversation on Wolfgang Tillmans and Meret Oppenheim
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
Worshipping at the Feet of Greer Lankton’s Sacred Stilettos, “JESUS’S CHA-CHA HEELS”
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
Is That You Mo-Dean?: Esther Pearl Watson’s “Guardian of Eden”
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
Purgatorial Aesthetics: Chris Lloyd at Entrance and Gina Fischli at Swiss Institute
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