Jonathan Griffin

Criticism and essays on art and culture

Month: April, 2011

April 21, 2011

Jim Lambie

Goss Michael Foundation, Dallas

Jim Lambie made his first ‘Zobop’– the multicoloured, multilayered vinyl floor installation for which he is most widely recognised – in 1999. If a thing’s worth doing, the saying goes, it’s worth overdoing; for his exhibition at the Goss Michael Foundation in Dallas, the Glasgow-based artist reprised his 2004 iteration of the work, Zobop Fluoro, in the foundation’s expansive new premises. (His exhibition was the first solo presentation after an inaugural group show.)

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April 3, 2011

All of This and Nothing

Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

The Hammer Invitational is a biannual survey exhibition that has never called itself a biennial. That is about to change: next year it will be superseded by the new Los Angeles Biennial, organized jointly by the Hammer Museum and LAXART. For the time being, however, it remains an impressionistic report on the weather over LA’s contemporary art landscape. The latest incarnation, ‘All of This and Nothing’, is notable for including only seven artists (out of a selected 14) who currently live in LA; Hammer curators Douglas Fogle and Anne Ellegood, in their first exhibition together, are more interested in identifying the global currents of influence and parity that pass through the city. Read the rest of this entry »

April 2, 2011

Paul Stoelting

Pepin Moore, Los Angeles

Paul Stoelting’s sculptures always seem to be sliding away from you. Objects that at first appear relatively straightforward – a length of timber, a picture frame – soon reveal themselves to be unstable, skewed and evasive. Stoelting’s exhibition Content Aware is dominated by a series of sculptures that look like supports for paintings: rectangular frames of wood hung on or propped against the wall. Closer inspection reveals the wood to be uniformly bevelled at 45 degrees, giving the impression that the object is oriented towards a vanishing point somewhere beyond one or the other of its corners. Since the frames hang against the wall on (what one assumes is) a deliberately ugly, pragmatic block screwed into the masonry, those rectangles whose bevels slope upwards are incapable of hanging without sliding off. Hence their positioning on the floor.

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April 1, 2011

Vanessa Billy

Equilibrium and tension; nature and vegetables

Conceptions of nature and naturalness have grown so ragged through contradiction and ambiguity that, as terms, they’ve become almost unusable. This is no deterrent to Swiss artist Vanessa Billy. The title of her exhibition of sculptures and collages at Christina Wilson Gallery earlier this year declared that ‘Natural means something like vegetables’. This guilelessly simple statement is, for Billy, a characteristic blend of irony and sincerity. As she sees it, ‘natural’ does mean something simultaneously as earthy and as cultivated as vegetables; naturalness inheres in matter, and extends to everything around us. Billy sees it as her job to point this out.

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