Jonathan Griffin

Criticism and essays on art and culture

Category: Review

March 10, 2015

Alma Allen

Blum and Poe, Los Angeles

AlmaAllen

An artist like Alma Allen causes certain categorical predicaments for those who try to write about the extraordinary objects he has been quietly making for over two decades. He is a self-taught artist who is far from Outsider, a craftsman who makes furniture as well as functionless objects, an artist who in 2013 was plying his trade at the Echo Park Craft Fair and in 2014 was lauded as a highlight of the Whitney Biennial, and a private figure whose troubled backstory adds gravitas to his outwardly quixotic creations. Read the rest of this entry »

December 23, 2014

Cayetano Ferrer

Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles

Cayetano Ferrer

I was once in the house of some very wealthy people (OK, some billionaires), and the French curator of their furniture collection was showing me how a sheet of marble can be folded, with 45-degree cuts, to create the impression of a solid block. He told me that he was surprised how easy it was in Los Angeles to find the craftsmen skilled enough to achieve such seamless illusion. Read the rest of this entry »

December 1, 2014

Sayre Gomez and JPW3

François Ghebaly / Night Gallery, Los Angeles

Sayre Gomez, 'I'm Different'

Sayre Gomez, ‘I’m Different’

Someone has cut a large hole in the chain-link fence that separates Los Angeles’s François Ghebaly Gallery and Night Gallery. Perhaps eight feet in diameter, it is large enough to drive a car through and at the opening of concurrent recent exhibitions by Sayre Gomez (at Ghebaly) and JPW3 (at Night), the circumference of the hole was dressed with burning incense sticks, like a low-fi ceremonial portal from one dimension to another. Read the rest of this entry »

November 14, 2014

Alex Becerra

LTD, Los Angeles

Becerra

Alex Becerra is a young painter who seems to value freedom over pretty much everything else, even at the expense of such musty old notions as moral responsibility or restraint. Left to its own devices, his mind goes, most often, to the naked human form: to pictures of fulsome ladies in compromising positions, up-skirt shots caught in mirrors, women with legs akimbo, examining themselves. In this exhibition, Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) is evoked more than once. Becerra makes unapologetically reckless pictures that are, at their best, thrilling to look at and, at their worst, vexing to think about. In this exhibition, there is never a dull moment. Read the rest of this entry »

October 31, 2014

The History of Technology

Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco

Philipp Timischl

When Aristotle imagined a technological future in which ‘every instrument could accomplish its own work’, it was to the weaver’s shuttle and the lyre-player’s plectrum that he turned for examples. It is probably just coincidence but, in ‘The History of Technology’, woven fabrics and the sonorous tones of a stringed instrument featured prominently. Read the rest of this entry »

October 28, 2014

Daniel von Sturmer

Young Projects, Los Angeles

danielvonsturmer-cinemacomplex

Upstairs in the polished, air-conditioned and usually deserted corridors of West Hollywood’s huge Pacific Design Center, time seems to move at a slower pace than on the noisy summertime streets outside. Where better, then, for an extensive survey of the patient studio experiments of Melbourne-based video artist Daniel von Sturmer? Read the rest of this entry »

October 20, 2014

Korakrit Arunanondchai

Arunanondchai7

The Mistake Room, Los Angeles

I seem to be in the minority in my cautious enjoyment of Korakrit Arunanondchai’s spectacular installation Letters to Chantri #1: The lady at the door/The gift that keeps on giving (2014) (made in collaboration with transgender artist boychild). Most people I spoke to professed to hating it. Arunanondchai is a divisive figure, as is any young artist who rises rapidly to international prominence on waves of hyperbole and who enjoys the rewards of a buoyant market enamoured with large abstract paintings made by people with unusual biographies. Read the rest of this entry »

September 23, 2014

Josh Mannis

Thomas Solomon Gallery, Los Angeles04 - Upstairs, Downstairs

A couple lie naked on a rug with their feet lolling in the air. She smokes; he holds his chin in his hands and gazes sideways at her, a quiet smile on his lips. They’ve probably just had sex. She is looking directly at us, or she would be – except her large, oval eyes have been entirely blacked out by the artist. They are unnerving empty holes. Read the rest of this entry »

September 16, 2014

Tony Greene

MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles

Tony Greene, …understand…, 1989 Courtesy of Judie Bamber © The Estate of Tony Greene

Tony Greene, …understand…, 1989
Courtesy of Judie Bamber © The Estate of Tony Greene

 

When Tony Greene made the 20-odd works in this exhibition, all dated between 1987 and 1990, he knew he was dying of AIDS. This very fact makes even his least political paintings almost unbearably poignant. Greene’s art is devastating and immediate because it is his answer to a question that everyone should consider from time to time: What would you make if you knew you only had a few years to live? Read the rest of this entry »

July 31, 2014

Joe Goode

Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles

goode_flatscreennature

Joe Goode has long made pictures designed to be looked through, not at. His work is deadpan, and seemingly innocuous. The LA Times critic William Wilson, in 1971, called it ‘neutrality-style art’. Perhaps this mildness is why he never got quite as much attention as his childhood friend Ed Ruscha, who also does deadpan but who usually cuts his neutrality with non-sequiturs (often verbal) that are arresting and funny. Goode only trades in the very lightest of humorous touches – a milk bottle painted mauve, for instance, placed on a shelf in front of a mauve monochrome canvas. That was his early Milk Bottle series, (1961-2), still amongst his best-known work. Read the rest of this entry »