Richard Prince: Bob Dylan

Alex Israel</a>.</p><p>An LA artist who doesn’t reckon with noir is a flickering bulb that lures no moths, and maybe no bulb at all. So I was glad to hear that Alex Israel, who was born and grew up here, who lives and works and belongs here, was doing the native reckoning where else but Warner Bros., or what’s left of it, where John Huston and Humphrey Bogart (and Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet) made The Maltese Falcon for six summer weeks of 1941. If anyone called it the first noir, I wouldn’t fight them.</p><p>Some say noir is a genre, to which I would argue, there are noir musicals; others have said, with better evidence, that noir is a style, but it takes more than shadowed light through venetian blinds to do the dirty deed. I’ve heard it said that noir is a mood: doom, but Titanic (1997) is no Criss Cross (1949).&nbsp;</p><p>Like the filmmakers before him, Israel is defining the noir tendency in his own way, through images. These are painted streetscapes. They began, though, as photos and sketches, visual ideas that Israel enhanced with reference material—the purplish-blue gradients he wanted for the night sky, for instance, or specific Mexican fan palm silhouettes to dot their horizons—in order to create blueprints for what would become at first digital renderings, and then ultimately finished paintings. Beginning in 2021, these blueprints went back and forth between Israel and a pair of animators. Years of additions and subtractions produced renderings that were then painted in acrylic on canvas by an artist in the Scenic Art department at Warner Bros.</p><p>Upon first seeing the works in a warehouse-like space on the edge of the Burbank backlot, I was home. The Troubadour, the Cadillac dealership in the Valley, the Bruin Theater in Westwood . . . The combination of their CinemaScope proportions and my memory—our memory, if you’re one of ours—put me there in the virtual reality of a beloved present/past. Or is it “past/present”? The locations Israel picked for his pictures are undeniably of their time—the 1940s car dealership, the ’50s diner, the ’60s gas station, the ’70s lingerie shop, the ’80s yogurt spot—but still a part of the present. When you add to that your own memories, the temporal effect on the brain is kaleidoscopic. Not where am I, but when am I?</p><p>There are no people, only mannequins, in a lingerie shop window, no cars except behind glass in a Van Nuys showroom all done up for Christmas. I wouldn’t say it’s a nightmare, but it’s certainly some kind of a dream, like one of those video games where the player— whose “crime” is unknown, and whose mystery is their past—wakes up somewhere strange and has to figure out how they got there. And this feeling is essential to the thing we call “noir,” the haunting that crept into Hollywood with World War II, its visual and psychological disorientations of time and space, the cinematic analogues to a modern world suddenly unmoored.&nbsp;</p><p>If Israel’s pictures are seductive, they should be. Femmes wouldn’t be fatales if they weren’t. The paintings’ rich, pulpy candy colors and nostalgic lure, their slick, sensual surfaces that say come hither . . . these are not the girls next door. Something of this duplicity, the uncanny appeal of each building’s façade, is conscientiously layered into Israel’s process. The photographs and references of Israel’s blueprints are not retouched but redrawn, and in this redrawing they are heightened by local myth and redescribed through the lens of Israel’s memory in dramatic, theatrical lighting and exaggerated, impossible perspective. These places only seem natural. They are to be loved, but not trusted.&nbsp;</p><p>And those who love Los Angeles share Israel’s view that our city can be beautified by illusions. We know that “Hollywood Liquor”—to borrow from a cheery, brightly lit sign on Israel’s Hollywood Boulevard—is better than no liquor at all, and that those who don’t dream don’t know they’re already dead. Look at Israel’s skies: it’s night, yes, but what a night.</p><p><br></p>" />

works by Marlene Dumas</a>, <a target="_blank" href=https://www.mutualart.com/Exhibition/Richard-Prince--Bob-Dylan/"/Artist/Llyn-Foulkes/1B0AD63DFAC65B19">Llyn Foulkes</a>, <a target="_blank" href=https://www.mutualart.com/Exhibition/Richard-Prince--Bob-Dylan/"/Artist/William-Pope-L/53C4589A38730913">Pope L</a>., <a target="_blank" href=https://www.mutualart.com/Exhibition/Richard-Prince--Bob-Dylan/"/Artist/Jim-Shaw/4BD3C6D6FFCCC69D">Jim Shaw</a>, <a target="_blank" href=https://www.mutualart.com/Exhibition/Richard-Prince--Bob-Dylan/"/Artist/Cindy-Sherman/A4D76AC3888E6ADA">Cindy Sherman</a>, <a target="_blank" href=https://www.mutualart.com/Exhibition/Richard-Prince--Bob-Dylan/"/Artist/Luc-Tuymans/20BD20675DA71979">Luc Tuymans</a>, <a target="_blank" href=https://www.mutualart.com/Exhibition/Richard-Prince--Bob-Dylan/"/Artist/Lynette-Yiadom-Boakye/9E079816794C5A08">Lynette Yiadom-Boakye</a> and <a target="_blank" href=https://www.mutualart.com/Exhibition/Richard-Prince--Bob-Dylan/"/Artist/Thomas-Houseago/355CB904200E0A53">Thomas Houseago</a>. The artists in this exhibition place viewers in a dynamic encounter with their fellow human beings, face to face and eye to eye.<p><br></p>" />

Michelle Uckotter</a>’s (b. 1992, Cincinnati, OH) Moviestar unfolds in three interconnected parts: a solo exhibition at Matthew Brown, a parallel exhibition at Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Camden Annex, juxtaposed with an exhibition of works by Marjorie Cameron (1955–1992), curated by Uckotter, and the debut of a short film by the same title directed by Uckotter and co-written by poet Riley Mac.&nbsp;</p><p>The paintings in Moviestar, inspired by stills from the film, position the viewer as both witness and accomplice, immersed in Uckotter’s “cinema of painting.” These works, rendered in dusky jewel tones of oil pastel, show a sequence of events—perhaps a night of partying gone very, very wrong, or a Manson-style cult ritual––that devolve into a fever dream of violence and eroticism. These scenes, in both content and sensation, are reminiscent of 1970s B-horror and exploitation films, like the final acts of Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), where surreal Hollywood decadence spirals into the psychedelic carnage of a cast of Playboy Bunnies, or the dinner table scene in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), where domesticity is reconfigured as a sadistic ritual. In both of these climaxes, the bodies of the villains and victims shift between states––idolized, violated, consumed––while identities remain in flux. In Moviestar, Uckotter’s figures slip and shift between archetypes in a similar fashion: starlet and sacrifice, predator and prey, their roles never fully fixed.&nbsp;</p><p>By modifying stills from her own film to fit the confines of the compositions, Uckotter assumes the role of artist-as-director, orchestrating the viewer’s gaze—but also disrupting the passive consumption of violence.</p><p>Removed from their original context, these images resist narrative closure, allowing the tenuous boundaries between violence and pleasure to exist as something sublimely unresolved: the paintings reclaim agency from the cinema of exploitation, and reposition the act of looking as both an indictment and an invitation.</p><p>Uckotter’s articulation of the interiors of her paintings is crucial: in contrast to the violence and laborious intensity of her markmaking, her fastidious ability to render architecture allows for the precariousness and sensuality of her scenes to take full effect. The set constructed for Moviestar is, in a way, Uckotter’s own Étant donnés (Marcel Duchamp, 1946–1966). The rigidity of the constructed set contrasts with the painterly, impressionistic fluidity of the image viewed through the “peephole,” in this case her direction of the camera in the film and the viewer’s gaze in the paintings. The scene in one painting easily flows into another based on individual interpretation, asserting focus on the organic disorder of the posed female figures.&nbsp;</p><p>These figures, in Uckotter’s paintings and film are more “archetypes” than subjects, styled and posed in ways that interrogate anxieties surrounding unstable bodies and identity, where the boundaries of the feminine exist as sites of both desire and destruction. Like the lustmord painting of the Neue Sachlichkeit painters of Weimar Germany, where scenes of sexual murder represented a desire for agency with shifting gender and societal norms after the ravages of World War I, Uckotter’s figures address the contradictions of how a woman can create herself––or be destroyed––in a world not built for her.&nbsp;</p><p>Uckotter’s Moviestar walks the thin, volatile line between agency and objectification, spectacle and destruction. In her world, femininity is unstable, slipping between performance and erasure, violence and becoming. Like the experience of womanhood itself, her scenes resist resolution, caught in the tension between transformation and the structures that seek to contain it. In reanimating the language of exploitation cinema, Uckotter exposes and shatters the frame, but never fully reveals her own role in the production. Like any skilled director, she is everywhere in the scene—yet nowhere to be found.</p><p><br></p>" />