A Website of the Radical Imagination
Dennis Myers was First‘s eye on the street on April 5th. (More photos by him after the jump.)
This series of protest signs won Micah Sifry’s prize for best in show on April 19.
(Sifry regrets not getting a photo of “Have You No Beer?”/Brett Kavanaugh.)
The condom in Sean Baker’s Anora (2024) haunts me. Early in the Oscar-minted film, the titular adult entertainer presents a golden packet to Vanya, her callow yet absurdly wealthy young client, in advance of sexual intercourse. “You want to put this on? Or do you want me to put it on for you?” she coos, cleverly offering an illusion of choice while communicating that one way or the other, the condom is going on.
Only it doesn’t go on – ever. Not only because a shot of Mark Eydelshteyn’s genitals would bust through the film’s R rating – the MPA’s sexed bias is well documented – the application of the condom is neither mimed nor further referenced. The scene cuts jarringly to the couple mid-coitus, with Vanya on the brink of orgasm and Ani, of course, doing all the work. Then it cuts again to Ani dressing herself, Vanya’s lap coyly hidden beneath the sheets and the condom presumably discarded. That fleeting glimpse of its shimmery wrapper suggests an omnipresence that the film ultimately has no interest in depicting.
The condom is not only Ani’s golden ticket into Vanya’s lavish world, ushering Anora into an ongoing media trend that lampoons the ultra-wealthy’s heartlessness but too often hangs its critique on titillating wealth-porn. It’s also the means by which she protects herself, even as the thin latex sheath cannot shield her fully from the torrent of exploitation and abandonment to come. It’s a very real boundary she enforces in service of her own health and sexual privacy, a momentary inconvenience rupturing Vanya’s – and let’s be honest, the viewer’s – fantasy of unbarred access to the sex worker’s limitlessly porous body.
For this reason, I do not think the condom could have ceased to be a point of contention between Ani and Vanya. The princeling is accustomed to owning, not renting. He has clearly never been denied his immediate wishes, never been asked to consider the feelings or material conditions of the workers his family employs. His artless fucking makes it clear that Ani is no exception. When he purchases her uninterrupted service for a full week, and especially when the unlikely couple weds in a slapdash Vegas ceremony, are we expected to believe the condom stays on? Why was it ever there in the first place, if the film cannot stand to unwrap it?
A surprise turn into rooms at MoMA PS1 presenting Sohrab Hura’s oeuvre—far from art-wank—electrified our old friends’ winter break reunion trip to the museum.
The day was too good: arepas in Jackson Heights, Central Park night walk, a warm, free crib at the apartment where Dash was dog-sitting.
Now, we’ve come back together to mull over how Sohrab Hura’s work affected us that day and how he might get you going too…
The first-floor windows of the Life Sciences building sit one step above sidewalk level, flush to the floor. They are recessed far enough in from the outside edge of the building to allow an elderly woman in a heavy, hooded blue coat, a black “I (Heart) SF” sweatshirt, and a patterned dress over jeans to sleep there.
The woman sleeps surrounded by her possessions, which, so far as Goshkin can catalog from his seat in the café across the street, consist of a shopping cart, several stuffed large plastic bags, a yellow blanket, a rug depicting a horse on hind legs, an umbrella, two tubes of glittering steel pipe, and a crooked, leafless tree branch as tall as she is. Once she has awakened, the woman begins to move her belongings to the sidewalk.
She arranges them as if assembling a train. What connects the cars of the train is unclear. So is how it will move forward. She takes her time, sometimes removing an item from a shopping bag and adding it to the exterior, sometimes shifting items she has placed in one position to another.
Did anyone in 2024 make a work of art as wide or deep as Lynsey Addario’s photo from The Darien Gap (“the most perilous crossing for migrants in the world”)?
“Reaction Time”, 2024, oil on linen, 20 x 16 inches.
A ballsy one from “Quickies”—Larry Madrigal’s new solo exhibition at Nicodim Gallery in Los Angeles.
Image by Ben Kessler
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The day after Biden won in 2020, Fredric Smoler mused on the nature of the president-elect…
‘Kitchen Fire’, 2023, oil on linen, 24 x 18 inches.
I’ve had an ongoing series of paintings about lovemaking that pop up every now and then. Depicting intimacy in a way that is a tad voyeuristic yet never prurient is challenging, but I find that it works when the moment is somehow eclipsed by the periphery of life lived.
This short film was made on the occasion of this summer’s ABQ Museum show, Danny Lyon – Journey West.
Philip Guston, the influential North American painter who died in 1980, has been on my mind lately. This essay is about why. It is also a belated thank you note to him. I say this because, half a lifetime ago, my awareness of this hero/bad boy of Twentieth Century art saved my hide. Or, more realistically, to take my grandiose appreciation of his efforts down a few notches, a job talk I gave at Purdue about Guston in 1994 clinched my unlikely shot at a permanent academic career in the humanities. (I am ashamed to admit that when I was thirty, landing safely on the tenure track felt like a life-or-death matter.) Can I recover what Guston’s art meant to me back then on a gut level? I can certainly remember the outlines of my precarious situation back then, and why Guston’s late trauma-filled work would have appealed to me on a deep personal level.
Persuaded by James to go downtown (from where we lived so close in Echo Park many years) first time in five years (shocked at new residential skyscrapers we were told are including formerly homeless), to The Broad’s superb “Keith Haring” exhibition which I had otherwise intended to avoid (given what I knew would be a kind of “euphoric fear flashback” to the even-pre-AIDS rough-around-town NYC 70-80 years before we moved to LA when we then really did swing into ACT UP action). Glad I went but no nostalgia.
Photos by James Rosen
“New York: 1962-1964 explores a pivotal three-year period in the history of art and culture in New York City, examining how artists living and working in New York responded to their rapidly changing world, through more than 180 works of art—all made or seen in New York between 1962-1964.”
Go see Baldwin Lee’s everyday people from the Black Belt (at the Greenberg Gallery in NYC through November 22). You’ll feel their nappy edges and big brown eyes, their limbs and skins they’re in…
xxx
LAST DAY TO SEE LARRY MADRIGAL’S EXHIBIT IN NYC!!!
Nicodim Gallery is tucked behind a temporary girder due to road work on Greene Street. It’s a little odd to open the door and walk right in on intimate scenes from Larry Madrigal’s marriage. Per the exhibition’s press release:
Over the course of creating Work / Life, the artist and his wife conceived their second child. He watched his wife’s body change while his pretty-much stayed the same. She is a mother, he is still Larry…
He’s out to make himself useful. Madrigal confessed somewhere — maybe on his instagram — that he wasn’t sure his massage below was doing any good, until his wife put her book down…
A 1964 painting in the current exhibition, Bob Thompson: This House is Mine, at Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art.
This Q&A with Robert Farris Thompson was originally posted at the Sotheby’s website in 2020, when the auction house was charged with selling paintings given to Thompson by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring.
