Jonathan Griffin

Criticism and essays on art and culture

Month: November, 2010

November 19, 2010

A Different Country

On Gerard Byrne’s ongoing series of photographs Images and Shadows of Divine Things (2005 –)

It is so dry here. Things never disappear, never rot, are not washed into storm drains or blown into gutters. Sometimes it feels like the moon, where a flag unfurled four decades ago still hangs in the vacuum. The pale stone facing on these walls remains unstained, pristine. Chrome does not rust. Rubber does not perish. Paint does not peel from timber.

There is no weather. The cold and the heat are the same, indifferent to us and equally tolerable. Only wind and moisture could dramatise the atmosphere, and allow us to feel the air on our skin. We have neither.

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November 2, 2010

Jen DeNike

The Company, Los Angeles

In occultism, the verb ‘to see’ usually refers not to the ordinary processes of visual apperception but to psychic insight. ‘Seers’, as those gifted in this area are known, sometimes adopt the practice of scrying – an ill-defined process of divination that uses repetitive gestures around substances such as crystals, mirrors or water to conjure visions from beyond.

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November 1, 2010

Nick Relph

Overduin & Kite, Los Angeles

There’s a song by the band Silver Jews that contains the line: ‘Punk rock died when the first kid said / “Punk’s not dead. Punk’s not dead.”’ The man often credited with inventing Punk in the UK, Malcolm McLaren, died earlier this year. New York-based British artist Nick Relph’s exhibition was, in one sense, a tribute to McLaren’s enduring influence, and in another, an examination of the way that this short-lived countercultural movement has been mummified – or, worse, reanimated into a walking corpse – in the years since someone first insisted that ‘Punk’s not dead’.

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