Jonathan Griffin

Criticism and essays on art and culture

Category: Frieze

May 14, 2012

Sanya Kantarovsky

Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles

In Sanya Kantarovsky’s painting Events (2012), a kneeling figure clutches his head and grasps a sheet of paper. The unfortunate conductor in Sinfonia #2 (2012) is frozen in horror as a gust of wind sends his music flying about his head. An empty table and chair awaits the protagonist in A New Talented Writer, while the man from An Episode from History (both 2012) smokes at his desk, gazing into the distance and hoping for inspiration. Read the rest of this entry »

April 12, 2012

David von Schlegell

China Art Objects Galleries, Los Angeles

For all those (myself included) requiring an introduction to David von Schlegell’s art, the sculpture Five Birds and its attendant Untitled Study for Five Birds (both 1988) greeted visitors at the entrance to his exhibition. Birds in flight, cobbled from shards of aluminium tube and hanging on monofilament, cast fluttering shadows over the cut-paper studies on the wall behind. These were far from the most sophisticated works in the show, but they announced, for the uninitiated, the artist’s fascination with dichotomies of form and weightlessness, land and air, the man-made and the natural. Read the rest of this entry »

April 5, 2012

Alex Israel

'As It Lays', 2012. Photograph: Joshua White

The last question that Alex Israel asks each of his celebrity subjects in his video interview series ‘As It Lays’ (2012) is the same: ‘What do you want the world to know about [subject’s name]?’ A surprising number have exactly the same response: ‘Nothing.’ Surprising, because these are people whose very livelihood relies on public visibility, and who are voluntarily submitting to the Los Angeles-based artist’s deadpan interrogation. Their answer points to the open secret of the celebrity system: that the illusion of self-exposure can be the best defence for intensely private personalities. Read the rest of this entry »

March 20, 2012

Nathan Hylden

Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles

The facetious joke – or is it a wry compliment? – about white monochrome paintings is that they hardly differentiate themselves from the walls they hang on. Despite choosing as his pictorial subject rectangles of blank white wall, Nathan Hylden worked hard to make the paintings in his exhibition ‘So There’s That’ as unblank and as unneutral as possible. Read the rest of this entry »

February 28, 2012

Kaari Upson

Life Study

Kaari Upson admits she’s told this story so many times, in so many different ways, that it’s become hard to get it straight any more. Her changing recollection of events has now superseded hard truth. Journalists and critics, falling over themselves to retell the incredible tale, also invariably bungle their facts, and so further pollute her memories. She’ll do her best though. Here goes. Read the rest of this entry »

November 2, 2011

Richard Jackson

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

Richard Jackson’s preferred brand of paint is called BREAK-THROUGH. ‘A new paint chemistry,’ boasts the label, ‘The tradition continues!’ Half-empty tins of BREAK-THROUGH, in primary colours, lay around his cataclysmic installation The Little Girl’s Room (2011), his first solo show in Los Angeles for 20 years. The rest had been pumped through tubes threaded into the penis of an inverted, pink fibreglass unicorn, and exploded out of its anus. Red, yellow and blue paint is spattered all over the floor, the walls, the ceiling and the unicorn himself.

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October 22, 2011

George Herms: Xenophilia

MOCA at the Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles

George Herms must get tired of being referred to as the last of his generation. Born in 1935, he was amongst the youngest of the Beats and a pioneer of the California Assemblage movement. Like many of his peers he saw his lack of art school training as no impediment to combining found objects in the way that he might compose a poem, or jam with jazz musicians. By reputation, and by the evidence of his unkempt but literary art, he’s a free spirit, a mystic. He stands (especially in younger minds) for a now rare artistic archetype, pure of heart and innocent of commercial ambition. Herms is regarded with affection, and, as ‘George Herms: Xenophilia (Love of the Unknown)’ proposes, his work remains a touchstone for a slew of artists working today. Read the rest of this entry »

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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July 26, 2011

David Snyder

Michael Benevento, Los Angeles

‘That old defence – an inch deep smile and a suitcase out the back window.’ It’s a great line, and it comes halfway through David Snyder’s exhibition ‘Face Forward’. To give it a bit of context, we must step away from the CD player from which it emanates, back out through the doorway in the wooden façade that spans the middle of the space, past another CD player and another yammering voice, out the door of the gallery and onto the street.

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June 3, 2011

Henry Taylor

Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

The colour black is, notionally, an absolute. As a racial classification, however, black consists of myriad shades of grey, though it continues to absolutely define many Americans’ lives. In Henry Taylor’s work it appears both as a colour and a condition. In each instance, the Los Angeles-based artist proves black to be a potent but inadequate term when talking about the realities of people’s daily existence.

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