Jonathan Griffin

Criticism and essays on art and culture

Category: Review

January 31, 2017

Betye Saar

Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles

Betye Saar, Museum Het Domein, Sittard, the Netherlands, 2015.

Betye Saar, Pause Here – Spirit Chair, 1996, Mixed media assemblage with metal garden chair and neon, 31.5 x 24.5 x 20.5 in

Betye Saar’s double exhibition at Roberts & Tilton coincides with the opening of her career survey at the Fondazione Prada, Milan. The first exhibition, titled Black White (which opened a month before the second exhibition), is a more concise presentation in the gallery’s project space that arranges assemblage sculptures and collages spanning from the present back to an early etching by the artist – now a nonagenarian – from 1964. Blend, the second and more generously spaced display (actually including fewer works), occupies the main gallery. Its focus is the major mixed media installation Mojotech (1987), which stretches nearly 7.5 metres along one wall and was the outcome of a residency Saar undertook at the List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in Cambridge. Read the rest of this entry »

November 30, 2016

SITElines.2016

Site Santa Fe, New Mexico

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Javier Tellez, To Have Done with the Judgment of God, 2016, digital film, 37 minutes

On the campus of the Santa Fe Indian School (SFIS), about a mile from SITE Santa Fe, one of Italian architect Paolo Soleri’s most important buildings is crumbling behind a chain-link fence, out of bounds to students and the public alike. The extraordinary cast-concrete Paolo Soleri Amphitheater was commissioned in 1964 by Lloyd Kiva New, the Cherokee cofounder of the Institute of American Indian Arts. New’s vision for the school was to use Native American heritage as the basis for contemporary artistic expression. Conservative Pueblo tribal leaders were skeptical of this approach, however, and in 1981 the All Indian Pueblo Council routed the school from its premises and replaced it with the more traditional SFIS, which had formerly occupied the campus and, after a complicated history (it was originally a government institution devoted to forced assimilation, for instance) and a dissolution, was being reformed under the leadership of the Pueblo tribes. Read the rest of this entry »

November 18, 2016

Ry Rocklen

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Ry Rocklen, Head Planter, 2016, Terracotta, sonotube and paint, 48 x 18 x 18 inches    Courtesy the artist and Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo by Brian Forrest

Humility has been a consistently appealing quality in Ry Rocklen’s work over his decade-long career. Even when it approaches bling – as with his polished bronze cast of a punctured Humvee wheel (Untitled Hummer Flat, 2014) ­– his work is inflected with a down-home wit and a self-deprecating localism. Rocklen, an LA native who also studied in the city, is more entitled than most to call it his muse. The press release for ‘L.A. Relics’, incredibly the artist’s first exhibition in Los Angeles since 2009, curiously notes that his memories of the 1984 LA Olympics were particularly influential on the series that shares the show’s title. Read the rest of this entry »

November 16, 2016

Tinseltown in the Rain

Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles

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Man Ray once commented that ‘there was more surrealism rampant in Hollywood than all the surrealists could invent in a lifetime’. The line comes to us via William Copley, who, in 1949, exhibited canonical works by Max Ernst, René Magritte, Man Ray and others in a short-lived gallery in Beverly Hills, to almost universal indifference. There were, however, a handful of Los Angeles artists who took notice, including Lorser Feitelson, Helen Lundeberg, Peter Krasnow and Knud Merrild. These artists and many more are brought together by curator Max Maslansky in ‘Tinseltown in the Rain: The Surrealist Diaspora in Los Angeles 1935–69’. Read the rest of this entry »

November 1, 2016

Pentti Monkkonen

Jenny’s, Los Angeles

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Pentti Monkkonen, T.R.E.A.M. (2016). Wood, sand, acrylic, and aluminum

Before there were art schools and galleries in Los Angeles, there were murals. The tradition has a long and distinguished history, dating from the city’s eighteenth-century Hispanic founders, and it continues to thrive and evolve. LA-based artist Pentti Monkkonen’s exhibition of new works (all 2016) at Jenny’s smartly engaged with this history, drawing on retrospective time frames both micro and macro.

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November 1, 2016

Carl Cheng

Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles

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Carl Cheng, Erosion Machine (detail), 1969, Plexiglas, metal racks and fittings, plastic, water pump, LED lights, black light, pebbles, 4 erosion rocks and wood base, 38 x 64 x 23 cm. All images courtesy: the artist and Cherry & Martin, Los Angeles

In 1967, the year he graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, Carl Cheng registered the trade name John Doe Co. and, soon after, began stamping it on his sculptures. Up to this point, much of Cheng’s work had a formal relationship to photography – he was taught by the influential artist-photographer Robert Heinecken, who was instrumental in widening the field – but, as John Doe Co., Cheng began producing objects that seem more like crackpot inventions than image-based sculptures. Read the rest of this entry »

October 7, 2016

Benjamin Carlson

Park View, Los Angeles

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What more obvious subject could there be for a painting that deconstructs the mechanics of representation than a still life in front of a window? The window, as a picture within a picture, traditionally stands as a proxy for the painting – the painting’s self-image, as it were – while the still life has for centuries been a convenient armature for everything from allegories of mortality to investigations into optical perception. Read the rest of this entry »

September 28, 2016

Joan Snyder

Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, Los Angeles

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The New York-based painter Joan Snyder came to attention quite suddenly, in 1971 at the age of thirty-one, when she exhibited a body of work that she referred to as her ‘stroke paintings’. These large canvases, both abstract and expressionist, though ambivalent towards the orthodoxies of the masculine Abstract Expressionist movement, arranged discontinuous strokes of different colours on horizontal grids. Snyder’s Spring 1971 (1971), which introduces her exhibition at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, is a classic work from this pivotal moment in her career. Read the rest of this entry »

August 16, 2016

Routine Pleasures

MAK Center, Los Angeles

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Manny Farber, Birthplace: Douglas, Ariz. (1979). Oil on board. Image courtesy of the MAK Center and Doug Simay. Photo: Joshua White.

How would you like to be labeled a termite? Or rather, to cite the term that Manny Farber coined in 1962, a “termite artist”? Farber—the San Diego painter and film critic who died in 2008—was writing in the now defunct magazine Film Culture, expanding on his opposing terms “termite art” and “white elephant art.” Read the rest of this entry »

July 24, 2016

Los Angeles Reflections

Alex Israel and Brett Easton Ellis, Gagosian, Beverly Hills

Catherine Opie, MOCA Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles

“West Hollywood”, AA|LA, Los Angeles

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Alex Israel and Bret Easton Ellis: Different Kind of Star, 2016, acrylic and UV ink on canvas, 7 by 14 feet; at Gagosian Beverly Hills. © Alex Israel and Bret Easton Ellis; image courtesy iStock and Gagosian Gallery. Photography: Jeff McLane.

Type “Los Angeles” into the search box of iStockphoto.com and you will see over seventy thousand images, many of which look very much the same. For the works in a recent exhibition at Gagosian in Beverly Hills, Alex Israel spent what must have been many grueling hours scouring the database, finally selecting a group of images that distill the clichés underwriting the romantic fantasy that—for some—is Los Angeles. He then UV-printed the photos on large panoramic canvases, with words by Bret Easton Ellis, his collaborator for the show, displayed across them. Read the rest of this entry »