Jonathan Griffin

Criticism and essays on art and culture

Month: April, 2014

April 28, 2014

Joel Kyack

François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles

kyack_still2_web

Joel Kyack is an artist not naturally given to subtlety. His last, maniacally overhung exhibition at François Ghebaly Gallery, in 2011, was titled Escape to Shit Mountain, and it included a large banner painted with the words ‘Kill all endings’. Old Sailors Never Die, his latest outing and only the second exhibition to take on Ghebaly’s new and enormous gallery space, reveals some remarkable and uncharacteristic moments of restraint. Read the rest of this entry »

April 18, 2014

Take It or Leave It

Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Gober September 12

Large-scale historical shows, when done in a certain way, can be intellectual steamrollers. A museum exhibition is a powerful rhetorical device; gallery after gallery of judiciously selected aesthetic material beside didactic wall texts can make a particular hypothesis or observation seem indisputable, or a historical moment appear satisfyingly coherent. 
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April 14, 2014

Bill Viola

bill viola

When Bill Viola talks about his art, he refers to it as ‘our work’. He and his wife, Kira Perov, have been working together since they met in Melbourne, Australia, in 1977. The first thing Viola tells me, when I sit down with him at his studio in Long Beach, California, is that it is most important that my interview include Kira. Read the rest of this entry »

April 14, 2014

Samara Golden

SamaraNG2014-4-CMYK

Like many children, when she was young Samara Golden liked to lie with her legs over the back of the sofa and look at the room upside down. She was fascinated by the space that appeared: when the ceiling became the floor, the room became strange, much bigger, more exciting – large items of furniture now dangling down from above and all the clutter lofted up there too – and though physically real, only accessible from Golden’s singular, inverted viewpoint. Read the rest of this entry »