Jonathan Griffin

Criticism and essays on art and culture

Month: March, 2018

March 28, 2018

Tacita Dean

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Tacita Dean, Antigone, 2018, © Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris

It was around 2014, says Tacita Dean, that things got really bad. When she moved from Berlin to Los Angeles to take up a guest scholar position at the Getty Research Institute, she was contemplating the very real possibility that not only would she be unable to make her art in the future, she would not be able to view it either. Nor would she be able to see the work of countless other artists and filmmakers who, like her, shoot their work on celluloid and refuse to have it digitised or presented in anything other than its native medium. Read the rest of this entry »

March 2, 2018

‘Stories of Almost Everyone’

Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

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Kapwani Kiwanga, Flowers for Africa, 2014. Installation view, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua White.

In 1997, artist and scholar Rhonda Roland Shearer published a paper alleging that each and every one of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades was in fact meticulously handmade: in other words, a fake. Though the idea of Duchamp perpetrating such an elaborate (and quintessentially Duchampian) hoax is an appealing one, Shearer’s theory gained little traction within the academic community. (‘If she’s right,’ sniffed Arthur Danto, ‘I have no interest in Duchamp.’) It came to my mind, again, in ‘Stories of Almost Everyone’, organized by Hammer Museum curator Aram Moshayedi, which elaborates not so much on the subject of craft but of craftiness, and on the integral untrustworthiness of the readymade as an artistic form. Read the rest of this entry »