Review: Whose news? Artist Kahlil Joseph’s ‘BLKNWS®’ delivers what CNN or Fox do not
The Hammer Museum at UCLA offers collections, exhibitions, and programs that span the classic to the contemporary in art, architecture, and design. The Hammer’s international exhibition program focuses on wide-ranging thematic and monographic exhibitions, highlighting contemporary art since the 1960s and the work of emerging artists through Hammer Projects and the Hammer’s biennial, Made in L.A. As a cultural center, the Hammer Museum offers nearly 300 free public programs a year, including lectures, readings, symposia, film screenings, and music performances.
"News channels like CNN or Fox broadcast all day, every day, on television screens mounted in public places all across American life. At the doctor’s office, in an airport lounge, at a coffee shop — you name it, cable news is not just in your living room.
Kahlil Joseph’s “BLKNWS®" plays on a pair of screens at Bloom & Plume coffee shop in Historic Filipinotown.
(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)The programming tends to be loud, graphically and otherwise. It lands somewhere between an occasionally jolting dose of infotainment, sometimes useful and often not, and a visual and aural distraction serving dull commercial ends.
But not “BLKNWS®.”
Artist and filmmaker Kahlil Joseph’s self-described “conceptual news program,” which he began producing in 2018, is different from the sleekly produced merchandise of corporate television. Yes, his can be noisy too, and the pace of his editing is quick. But the stories don’t develop, they accrue. Joseph’s programming is textured and eccentric, which is not the stuff of cable. The whole is bigger than the sum of its parts.
“BLKNWS®" is part of “Made in LA 2020: a version,” the latest installment of the UCLA Hammer Museum’s biennial survey of new art. Co-sponsored this year with the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, the show’s run has been postponed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Originally scheduled for the summer months, it should be a receding memory by now.
Joseph’s presentation was co-produced with Los Angeles Nomadic Division, which organizes site-specific public art exhibitions around the city. Nine venues host “BLKNWS®,” and the Hammer will become the 10th site when health restrictions that have kept the museum shuttered finally lift.
I visited four of them. Various mixes of the TV program are at each one, but perception of what’s on-screen shifted a bit depending on the circumstance." — Christopher Knight, Oct. 27, 2020
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Los Angeles Times website.
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