Jonathan Griffin

Criticism and essays on art and culture

Month: October, 2013

October 30, 2013

John Wesley

 

David Kordansky Gallery, Los AngelesJohn Wesley 3

 

When John Wesley makes paintings of women, which he does very often, he makes paintings about men. Against powder-blue backgrounds, he floods their lithe bodies with a flat shade of pale pink, except for a hotter tone used for lips, nails and nipples. These are pictures of heterosexual male desire. When men appear, they tend to be woefully disproportioned and eccentrically dressed. His women, by contrast, are the sylphs of an imagination fired by the dreamy perfection of women in magazines and dampened by the comic pathos of real-life encounters. Read the rest of this entry »

October 15, 2013

Ed Fornieles

 

Mihai Nicodim Gallery, Los AngelesFornieles

If Britney Rivers didn’t exist, someone would have to invent her. She is the epitome of Generation Y narcissism and vapidity, a creature who gives fullest expression to her life on Facebook and Instagram, whose pronouncements are specially keyed to half-bored, half-horny social media browsers. Her Tweets include such gems as: ‘Cute guy emails 2 ask me out on coffee date but “sent from droid” so now i’m like :-/’. I’m Facebook friends with her. You should be too. Read the rest of this entry »

October 9, 2013

Seeds of Destruction

A History of Iconoclasm in British Art

Dead Christ (1500–20) Courtesy: The Mercers' Company

Dead Christ (1500–20)
Courtesy: The Mercers’ Company

In 1957, the artist Gustav Metzger mounted an exhibition of damaged art in King’s Lynn. ‘Treasures from East Anglian Churches’ was a selection of sacred artefacts that had been attacked during the period of iconoclasm between the English Reformation in the 1530s and the Commonwealth of 1649–60 when Britain, under the Puritan Oliver Cromwell, was effectively a republic. Metzger already knew plenty about annihilation. Born to Jewish parents in Nuremburg, he was evacuated via Kindertransport to England in 1939 at the age of twelve, just as Nazi Germany was engaging in genocide against its own people. His parents disappeared soon after. In the 1950s he was involved in activism, first with the Committee for Nuclear Disarmament and then as a founder of the Committee of 100. Later he made art born of material violence; nylon panels that he corroded with acid, and liquid crystal projections that melted and reformed under the heat of the projectors. He called it Auto-Destructive Art.

Read the rest of this entry »