Jonathan Griffin

Criticism and essays on art and culture

Category: Interview

April 14, 2023

Richard Tuttle

‘Calder/Tuttle:Tentative’, 2023, installation view. Courtesy: © 2023 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists RightsSociety (ARS), New York; photograph: Pace Gallery

Richard Tuttle’s work in sculpture, drawing, installation and poetry is delicate and attenuated, rarely exceeding the bounds of carefully measured economy. Subtlety and ambivalence have long defined his oeuvre. This month in Los Angeles, however, he is the architect of something close to a grandiose gesture. ‘Calder/Tuttle: Tentative’ spans two neighbouring galleries, David Kordansky Gallery and Pace Gallery, and platforms a conversation between two artists and two bodies of work, over eight decades apart.

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February 27, 2023

Don Bachardy

Don Bachardy in his studio in Santa Monica, November 2022. Courtesy: Chad Unger

Beyond the French windows in Don Bachardy’s Santa Monica portrait studio, a canyon studded with white-painted houses, palm trees, pines and eucalyptus tumbles down to the gleaming blue Pacific Ocean. It’s the kind of view that epitomizes visitors’ fantasies of Los Angeles, but which people who live here seldom get to enjoy firsthand, and certainly not on a daily basis.

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June 1, 2022

Larry Bell

‘Pacific Red (II)’ (2017) at the Whitney Museum © Larry Bell. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Timothy Schenk

Although he has lived in Taos, New Mexico, since 1973, Larry Bell is still chiefly associated with the Light and Space movement that emerged in southern California in the 1960s. His early works epitomised the group: semi-mirrored glass cubes that, through their fleeting reflectivity, reacted to — as advertised — the light and space around them, deft exercises in highlighting the processes of perception.

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April 19, 2022

Suzanne Lacy

Suzanne Lacy, Los Angeles, 2022. Yudi Ela for The New York Times

On a cold day last December, sitting outside her studio in Santa Monica, Calif., the artist Suzanne Lacy  talked excitedly about the coming year. In Manchester, England, exhibitions of her work were already open at the Whitworth Art Gallery and the Manchester Art Gallery. She looked forward to a prestigious fellowship at the University of Manchester in the spring.

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April 5, 2022

Charles Ray

Unbaled Truck (2021), Charles Ray.  Photo: Josh White; courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery; © Charles Ray

In May 2020, the sculptor Charles Ray was driving north from his home in Los Angeles to Anacortes, in Washington state, to see a man about a boat. Locked up in the early months of the pandemic, the restless Ray got what he calls ‘Covid fever’ and, despite the entreaties of his wife Sylvia, threw a sleeping bag into the back of his car and set off for the boatyard, near the Canadian border, where he needed to make some decisions about the layout of a sailing boat that was being built for him. Ray takes sailing very seriously indeed. In 2003 he was nearly shipwrecked in the Pacific Ocean when an unlit military vessel collided with him in the middle of the night; this new boat, he tells me, is designed to accommodate his wife and her friends so Ray will not have to sail alone.

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February 5, 2022

Howardena Pindell

Howardena Pindell, Untitled #100, 1979, Mixed media on board, 13 1/2 x 10 1/2 inches, Courtesy: Garth Greenan, New York

Many – if not all – artists eventually acquire origin stories, formative experiences to which all their subsequent artistic achievements can plausibly be traced. Tony Smith had his night-time drive on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike; Louise Bourgeois had her father’s affair; Andy Warhol had his time drawing ads for shoes. Such stories become more meaningful as they recede in time, ossifying with use and reuse.

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December 6, 2021

Beatriz Cortez

Beatriz Cortez with Chultún El Semillero, 2021, in ‘FUTURES’, Arts and Industries Building, Washington DC © Greg Kahn

The Arts and Industries Building, built in 1881 by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, began life as a place to house artefacts from the 1876 World’s Fair in Philadelphia. It became the US’s first national museum. Over the years, its purpose was rejigged as new Smithsonian museums spawned around it, and it accrued various nicknames from “the Mother of Museums” to “the Palace of Invention”.

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November 1, 2021

Sarah Cain

Sarah Cain, “My favorite season is the fall of the patriarchy,” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., 2021 Photograph: Rob Shelley

Last summer, the painter Sarah Cain was contemplating the biggest project of her career: a 45-foot-long painting for the East Building Atrium of the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C. Cain, 42, has been making caustically colorful, improvised abstractions since the mid-2000s and had been commissioned to hide construction walls during refurbishment of the atrium’s skylight. Nearby sculptures by Max Ernst, Isamu Noguchi and Richard Serra, too large to relocate, were protected by wooden boxes. Cain was tasked with painting on the boxes, too — each bigger than her studio. (And she needed a title.)

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June 22, 2021

Rachel Kushner

The writer on what she takes from art and artists

Rachel Kushner at home in Los Angeles. Clifford Prince King for The New York Times

At one point in Rachel Kushner’s recently published novella, “The Mayor of Leipzig,” the narrator, an American artist, reveals: “I personally know the author of this story you’re reading. Because she thinks of herself as an art-world type, a hanger-on.”

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April 1, 2021

Charles Gaines

‘Numbers and Trees: London Series 1, Tree #6, Fetter Lane’ (2020), photo: Fredrik Nilsen; © Charles Gaines, Hauser & Wirth

When Charles Gaines was in elementary school in Newark, New Jersey, in the 1950s, he showed an aptitude for drawing. His well-meaning teacher suggested to his mother that perhaps he should be an artist. He could be the first black artist in the history of the world, she said.

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