Jonathan Griffin

Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

The Hammer Invitational is a biannual survey exhibition that has never called itself a biennial. That is about to change: next year it will be superseded by the new Los Angeles Biennial, organized jointly by the Hammer Museum and LAXART. For the time being, however, it remains an impressionistic report on the weather over LA’s contemporary art landscape. The latest incarnation, ‘All of This and Nothing’, is notable for including only seven artists (out of a selected 14) who currently live in LA; Hammer curators Douglas Fogle and Anne Ellegood, in their first exhibition together, are more interested in identifying the global currents of influence and parity that pass through the city. Read the rest of this entry »

Cherry & Martin, Los Angeles

The unresolved debate around the work of Nathan Mabry seems to hinge on a question of belief: to what extent does Mabry mean what he says? Is the cynical humour and teenage innuendo in his work an expression of a mind deeply concerned with the unstable meanings and values of cultural artefacts, or is the artist just playing wilfully, provocatively dumb?

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China Art Objects Galleries, Los Angeles

There is a moment in Thomas Helbig’s exhibition ‘Use Your Relatives’ that I can’t stop thinking about. A large oil painting comprises two pale pink egg shapes on a dirty white ground. The forms touch – kiss – at one edge; as we approach, the mess around them clarifies into a constellation of distinct, deliberate marks. In its lower left corner, a caterpillar-sized lozenge of paint, straight from the tube, has rolled from the point where it was applied and come to rest against the bottom edge of the frame, leaving sticky lemon-yellow tracks across the surface of the painting. Where it began, another squeeze of paint has been applied, making the trail double-headed and seemingly offering an inversion of the work’s downward gravitational pull.

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Overduin & Kite, Los Angeles

There’s a song by the band Silver Jews that contains the line: ‘Punk rock died when the first kid said / “Punk’s not dead. Punk’s not dead.”’ The man often credited with inventing Punk in the UK, Malcolm McLaren, died earlier this year. New York-based British artist Nick Relph’s exhibition was, in one sense, a tribute to McLaren’s enduring influence, and in another, an examination of the way that this short-lived countercultural movement has been mummified – or, worse, reanimated into a walking corpse – in the years since someone first insisted that ‘Punk’s not dead’.

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David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

Featuring condensation in advertisements for soft drinks or beer is a great way of bringing the inside out: droplets of water on a bottle, can or glass are an index of the cool, refreshing contents within. Somewhere in this visual archetype’s DNA we might also trace the contradictory associations of sweat (our own) and the unsullied freshness of morning dew on grass.

Water droplets covered the walls of Aaron Curry’s exhibition ‘Two Sheets Thick’ at David Kordansky Gallery. Unlike the glinting moisture in Coca-Cola advertisements, however, these were dully printed onto large sheets of cardboard in uneven shades of grey, resembling the output of a failing photocopier. This, as with many things in ‘Two Sheets Thick’, was something of an illusion. They were in fact reproductions of photorealist drawings that the artist made by hand using a digital stylus (an oxymoronic tool if ever there was one), subsequently enlarged and screen-printed onto primed sheets of card. A fair degree of craftsmanship attended images that went out of their way to look dashed-off.

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Cottage Home, Los Angeles

‘it’s all about …’ trilled the perky, lower case script, ‘gaylen gerber!’. The text ran across two billboards affixed to the exterior of Cottage Home, the former cinema that has served as a project space for three commercial galleries: Kathryn Brennan Gallery, China Art Objects and Thomas Solomon Gallery. For what it’s worth, ‘Support Group’ took place at the instigation of the latter, although Solomon’s contribution seems to have been limited to inviting critic Michael Ned Holte to curate the show, which featured none of Solomon’s gallery artists. This was just the first sequence in a complicated game of authorial ‘pass the parcel’, in which no one, it seemed, quite knew who would be the one with the package in their hands when the music stopped.

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