Kayne Griffin Corcoran Gallery, Los Angeles
Agnes Pelton, Star Gazer, 1929
The eye, wrote Jacques Lacan in his essay ‘The Line and the Light’, ‘is a sort of bowl’ which light is wont to overflow. ‘A whole series of organs, mechanisms, defences’arerequired to deal with this excess; the shrinking pupil, in bright conditions, ‘has to protect what takes place at the bottom of the bowl.’ Read the rest of this entry »
David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
It is possible to argue—and, indeed, I heard it argued while visiting this exhibition—that Evan Holloway belongs to the first generation of artists in Los Angeles that did not look outside of California, to New York or to Europe, to define their work, whether through aspiration or through contradistinction. If that sounds like hyperbole, it may not be as far-fetched as it initially seems. In any case, it is undeniable that in the late 1990s, a loose group of L.A. artists—including Holloway, Liz Craft, Jason Meadows, Jeff Ono and Kristin Calabrese—emerged with a distinctly homegrown vernacular. Read the rest of this entry »
Various Small Fires, Los Angeles
Every day, about US$1.2 billion worth of cargo flows in and out of the Port of Los Angeles. It is the busiest container port in the US, seconded by the Port of Long Beach, which directly adjoins it. Amy Yao, whose studio is situated near the ports, has to contend with queues of thundering lorries every time she drives to work. Some of their cargo found its way, circuitously, into her exhibition ‘Bay of Smokes’, as indeed it probably does into most exhibitions by most artists in the country. Read the rest of this entry »
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
In Diana Thater’s survey “The Sympathetic Imagination,” organized by the National Gallery’s Lynne Cooke and LACMA’s Christine Y. Kim and gathering work made between 1992 and the present, the artist floods many of her exhibition spaces with colored light. This technique and its philosophical implications may remind visitors of James Turrell’s use of light in his 2013-14 LACMA retrospective. Color is fundamentally illusory; it is humans who make the sky blue, thanks to the cones in our retinas. Further, in an environment saturated with blue light, every other perceptible color is revealed to be contingent. The absolute purity of nature is impossible, Thater shows; all is culture, or something between nature and culture. Read the rest of this entry »
Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles
Brown furniture, they call it. It’s the stuff that nobody wants: wooden wardrobes, dining tables and armoires, too bulky for the contemporary home, once family heirlooms but now superseded by disposable Ikea furniture. When an artist needs some wood, the source closest at hand is usually not the lumberyard but the thrift store. Read the rest of this entry »
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
I don’t believe it is cruel or unfair to say that a museum is probably not the natural home for Frances Stark’s work. The artworks that she has made over the past 24 years (the timespan covered by this retrospective) are many things – epistolary, diaristic, notational, self-referential, accretive, serial, slapdash, intricate – but they are not, in the main, the kinds of forms that museums are traditionally built to house. Read the rest of this entry »
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Noah Purifoy, Earl Fatha Hines, 1990, mixed media, 1.3 x 1 m
There are two entry points – architecturally but also thematically – to ‘Junk Dada’, the exhibition of sculpture by Noah Purifoy housed on the top floor of Renzo Piano’s Broad Contemporary Art Museum, at LACMA, curated by Franklin Sirmans and Yael Lipschutz. Read the rest of this entry »
CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco
We all know that Random International’s Rain Room (2012), drawing crowds most recently at MoMA, and Carsten Holler’s slides, coming soon to the Hayward Gallery, signal the end of days for art. Or at least that’s the established view amongst the cognoscenti. Hands-on experiences in art galleries, the argument goes, turn the brain off. Read the rest of this entry »
The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles
The sheer physics involved in keeping something like this off the ground are staggering. The flag is nearly five metres high by 14 metres long, and weighs God knows how much in polyester and reinforced stitching. It should be noted that, in American flag terms, William Pope.L’ s Trinket (2008/2015) is not an XXL or even an XL but, in the warehouse galleries of the MOCA Geffen, where it flies only a couple of metres off the ground and reaches nearly to the ceiling, it feels colossal. Four thundering Ritter fans, their blades as tall as a man, keep it perpetually roiling in the air. Read the rest of this entry »
The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Cynical commentators often point out that politically activist or socially-engaged art isn’t going to save the world. The position has become something of a truism, even among proponents of the genre. The question, these days, is just what can art achieve? Read the rest of this entry »
Jonathan Griffin 