Author: Lyra
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Arid Empire of Signs – Thom Andersen’s film
A city like Los Angeles can nearly disappear beneath its own mythos. Deemed a city of quartz, of “dreadful joy,” of golden dreams, an “autotopia,” a paradise, and hell, it has provided a malleable stage set, reborn in thousands of scripts and assumptions. The most popular myths are the sun-kissed rise to fame and its…
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Aldous Huxley on Mescaline, Botticelli, Scissors
David King Dunaway’s biography of Aldous Huxley, Huxley in Hollywood (1991) touches on the history and difficulties of pacifism in the years leading up to World War II; Hollywood’s ingestion of fine writers for schlocky screenplays in the 1940s; Huxley’s blindness and subsequent obsession with metaphors of vision; his prescient awareness of ecological damage; how the horrors…
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Nostalgia for the Future/Future of Nostalgia
The Future of the Past: The World Trade Center Memorial and the Politics of Memory, surveys monuments to major political and national events, tracing their arc from triumphant and chauvinistic to melancholic and contrite. It sits unpublished on my bookshelf in severe black hardcover binding. Above is Deborah Aschheim’s lovely drawing of the Theme Building at…
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Profile of Trevor Paglen
I interviewed Trevor Paglen at Eyebeam, in New York, one afternoon in the fall of 2007. In talking with him about his work, and the research that goes into it, it was easy to get caught up in the dark tangles of government espionage. But he soberly asked me to view his work as art,…
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Lunchfilms
One day in New York in early 2006, Mike Plante, a film programmer for the Sundance Film Festival and Cinevegas, a film festival in Las Vegas, went out to lunch with his friend, the Chicago-based filmmaker James Fotopoulos. The two men spent much of their meal complaining about clichés in independent films, like the plot…
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Venice Biennale – First Emirati Pavilion
For the May issue of Modern Painters I interviewed Tirdad Zolghadr, curator of the first UAE Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which features the work of Lamya Gargash (above). A couple excerpts: LK: Hasn’t the idea of a national pavilion been something that artists and curators at Venice have chosen to critique or obscure rather than…
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Book Review: Silvia Kolbowski and Walid Raad
Between Artists: Silvia Kolbowski and Walid Raad A.R.T. Press, 2008 “Do you think that a body of work can somatize such cultural trauma?” Silvia Kolboswki asks Walid Raad in the beginning of an email exchange that soon and unexpectedly begins to mirror such attempts. Raad received Kolbowski’s question last July at his home in Beirut…
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The Bubble of Bubbles (2008)
Jan Brueghel the Younger’s Allegory upon the Tulip Mania In the article A Second Tulip Mania in Prospect magazine this month, Ben Lewis and Jonathan Ford compare the contemporary art market of the past five years to the legendary tulipomania of 17th century Holland, when a single bulb sold for 40 times an average annual…
Lyra Kilston 