Jonathan Griffin

Donald Judd

Donald Judd, 101 Spring Street, 1970. Photo by Paul Katz.
© Judd Foundation. Courtesy Judd Foundation Archives

How do you feel about the term Minimal Art?’ asks the art historian Barbara Rose. ‘Well I don’t like it,’ replies Donald Judd, leaning into the table and smiling shyly. ‘What’s minimal about it?’ Scattered across the bare floorboards of the warehouse loft behind him are a tricycle, a child’s painting, a small forest of cacti in terracotta pots, a toy truck and an open trunk. Read the rest of this entry »

August 5, 2013

Richard Greaves

Photo: Mario del Curto

Richard Greaves turned his back on the city in 1984. In Montreal he had studied hotel management, graphic design and then theology. Unfulfilled, he packed his bags and settled on a mile-long strip of land in the Quebec backwoods that he had purchased some years before with a group of friends as a weekend getaway. The plot, when they bought it, was untouched save for two modest houses at one end, beside an unpaved track. Greaves began to build. Read the rest of this entry »

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July 17, 2013

Charles Garabedian

LA Louver Gallery, Los Angeles

There is a painting in Charles Garabedian’s current exhibition at LA Louver titled Beauty (2013). It is one of the ugliest works in the show – and it has some stiff competition. Blue Lipstick (2013), for instance, portrays the cyanotic features of a person of indeterminate gender who appears to have been recently chewing on an ink cartridge. Giotto’s Tree (2012) shows an ungainly woman with big legs and no arms (literally – no arms!) entangled in the branches of a sapling. Read the rest of this entry »

July 9, 2013

John Divola

John Divola, from the ‘Dark Star’ series, 2008

In the distance, a soaring elevated freeway intersection frames a widescreen view of the San Gabriel mountains. The dissonance is typical of Southern California: awesome nature matched by equally awesome urban development. Despite the seemingly endless sprawl, it is rare in the Los Angeles basin that one cannot see out of it to the wilderness beyond.

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June 25, 2013

Prison Landscapes

Alyse Emdur, Four Corners Books

Remi Emdur, Bruce Emdur and Alyse Emdur, Bayside State Prison, Leesburg, N.J. 1988

“MY SISTER AND I could go to the beach,” writes the artist Alyse Emdur, “but our brother could not go with us.” That is because he was incarcerated at the Bayside State Prison, in Leesburg, New Jersey. Instead, the trio posed in front of a photograph of a tropical beach at sunset, two palm trees framing the glowing sky. A Polaroid photograph of the make-believe excursion, taken in the late 1980s, is included on the back cover of Emdur’s recent book, Prison Landscapes. Read the rest of this entry »

June 10, 2013

MHMMML

International Art Objects Galleries, Los Angeles

The cartoon is from the Daily Mirror, 6 January 1967. In an art gallery, a man is pinned to the wall inside a picture frame. The caption underneath reads ‘… and then I thought to myself, what can I put in the exhibition this year?’ It’s a lame joke. But it seemed fitting in this extraordinary exhibition, in which intense blooms of sensation were prised from their original habitats and transplanted into the subdued environment of an art gallery. Read the rest of this entry »

June 5, 2013

James Turrell

“This used to be my studio!” announces James Turrell to the customers of Starbucks in Ocean Park, Santa Monica. The coffee drinkers seem nonplussed. Little do they know that this white-haired, extravagantly bearded figure has a triumvirate of retrospectives this summer at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Guggenheim Museum, New York, as well as a solo exhibition at LA’s Kayne Griffin Corcoran gallery.

May 26, 2013

Olga Koumoundouros

Suzanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

In February 2012, Olga Koumoundouros broke into her neighbour’s abandoned house in east Los Angeles, thinking that she and her partner might squat there while they rented their own home. They were struggling on mortgage payments and feared repossession. Instead, as she became embroiled in the lives of the house’s former occupants, she made art from their discarded belongings and spray-painted a rainbow that wove across the walls of every room. She painted the outside of the house gold, and titled it Notorious Possession (2012). Read the rest of this entry »

May 17, 2013

Llyn Foulkes

Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

‘I guess I do a lot of complaining,’ admitted Llyn Foulkes recently. ‘But I think I have a lot to complain about!’ His comment came during a performance at the Hammer Museum of the byzantine musical apparatus he calls the Machine; it is just like Foulkes to toss out an acerbic aside even when it looks like he’s having fun. Over half a century since Foulkes began his career, he shows little sign of mellowing. Read the rest of this entry »

April 15, 2013

Laura Owens

356 South Mission Road

You should have seen them at the opening. The people, that is – moving slowly through the large warehouse and thronging around two bars, a taco stand, a ping-pong table and a dance floor in the yard behind the building. The paintings, too, looked terrific. Twelve huge canvases, each approximately three-and-a-half metres high, faced each other on opposite walls of the space. They seemed to smile down on the bustle of sociability that unfolded between them. Read the rest of this entry »