Jonathan Griffin

Criticism and essays on art and culture

Category: Feature

December 28, 2011

Peter Shire

Photograph: Tim Street Porter

Mid-Century Modified

 

‘The famous photograph’, as Peter Shire calls it, hangs over the dining table in his Los Angeles home. It shows the moment that his parents, Henry and Barbara, first met. The story is almost too good to be true: she was working for the San Francisco longshoremen’s union, he for IATSE – the union for technicians working in the theatre and entertainment industries. At a longshoremen’s fundraiser, a photographer snapped Henry delivering magazines to Barbara’s table. This being 1946, the early days of McCarthyism and Communist paranoia, the photographer sent one copy of his picture to Peter’s parents and one to the FBI. Peter, an artist famous for his work with the 1980s’ design collective Memphis, was born about nine months later.

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October 18, 2011

Everything But

The Museum of Everything opened in London in 2009. Describing itself as ‘a space for artists and creators outside modern society’, it was popular with the general public and the critical press. However, its presentation of what is often termed ‘outsider art’ is, argues Jonathan Griffin, ethically problematic and curatorially irresponsible. The fourth incarnation of The Museum of Everything opens in September 2011 in Selfridges department store, London.

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October 11, 2011

Mateo Tannatt

The urban homeless are particularly afflicted by a lack of privacy; faced with performing their private lives in humiliating visibility, many compensate by retreating into the city’s cracks and shadows. When, in 2010, Mateo Tannatt was offered his second solo exhibition at Marc Foxx, he wanted to acknowledge the bustling mid-city environs, adjacent to Beverly Hills, in which the gallery is located. He was surprised to come upon a derelict restaurant, a few blocks from the gallery, which two homeless men had claimed as a temporary dwelling. ‘Rendezvous Vous’, the exhibition that emerged from Tannatt’s fascination with this overlooked space, was a meditation on public performance and invisibility, on social alienation and the role of the artist.

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September 19, 2011

John Martin

AAAARGH!

‘The Big Five’ is what scientists call the earth’s major known extinction events, during each of which over half of the earth’s species were wiped out. The most recent was 65 million years ago. According to a survey conducted in 1998 by the American Museum of Natural History, seven out of ten biologists believe the world is now entering a sixth.

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September 2, 2011

Paul McCarthy

Paul McCarthy Loses his Shit

‘An inflatable dog turd the size of a house has blown away from a modern art exhibition in a Swiss museum before bringing down an electricity line and smashing a greenhouse window.’ The Telegraph, London, 12th August 2008

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June 1, 2011

William Leavitt

California Dreaming: The work of William Leavitt reflects upon Los Angeles’ faded visions of the future, bourgeois taste and the scientific sublime

It is evening in the backyard and garden of a contemporary hillside home in Southern California. There is a swimming pool, a flagstone patio, a redwood fence, some lawn and the usual tropical landscaping of succulents, ferns, leafy plants, and flowering shrubs. The beauty of the scene is most evident at this time of day when the combination of lighted pool, soft garden lights, black sky and the lights of surrounding homes comes into play.

On this particular evening a small cocktail party is being held on the patio adjoining the house. The guests are all close friends of the host and hostess. Their presence adds the elements of motion and sound to the setting; the men stand near the edge of the patio engaged in relaxed conversation, while the women sit in a loose circle of garden chairs arranged on the lawn. Now the hostess comes out through the sliding glass door to announce that a light buffet supper is ready inside.

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May 26, 2011

Annika Ström

Personal Delivery

Annika Strom in performance, CAAC Seville, 2011

Guitar slung low, legs spread wide apart, neck craning up towards the microphone, the young man screws his features into an expression that looks like something between grief and sexual ecstasy. He sings:

‘I – will be – the one – to turn you on!

On the bed

I – will be – the one – tonight.’

Between the assembled bar crowd and the shallow, six-inch high stage, in front of clusters of people clutching bottles of beer and raising their voices to the ears of their friends, in front of other people who stare expressionlessly at the singer, surrounded by movement and noise, stands the singer’s mother, holding a video camera which she points at her son for the whole duration of his performance.

No one seems to find this strange, or embarrassing, or worthy of comment.

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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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January 3, 2011

Brian Kennon

Spread the Word

Over the past few years, Brian Kennon has emerged as one of the most active and generous participants in the Los Angeles art scene. Aside from his practice as an artist, which regularly involves collaboration or appropriation of other artists’ work (many of them his friends or mentors), he single-handedly runs 2nd Cannons Publications, an independent publishing house that produces a wide range of artists’ books and editions. In 2008, 2nd Cannons opened a project space, a glass-fronted vitrine in Los Angeles’ Chinatown; the current exhibition, by The Institute of Social Hypocrisy, will be its last. Kennon’s work as an artist has taken the form of prints and publications, and his latest exhibition, ‘Documents Remain’, will be at BQ, Berlin, until 25th February 2011.

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October 1, 2010

City Report: Los Angeles

Everybody thinks they know Los Angeles. It’s one of the most filmed, photographed and sung-about cities in the world. However, archetypes of gridlocked traffic, plastic surgery, Finish Fetish, smog and gang violence sell short the city’s many surprises. Originally a city of farmers, LA is spacious enough for everyone to tend their own patch without trampling their neighbours’ crops. It’s also elemental; flanked by mountains and ocean, its steep hills attest to its energetic seismic geology. And it teems with wildlife: mountain lions and bobcats prowl the foothills of Hollywood and bears are regularly rescued from Beverly Hills swimming pools.

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