Jonathan Griffin

Criticism and essays on art and culture
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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September 17, 2021

SoiL Thornton

Morán Morán, Los Angeles

SoiL Thornton, Bench/barrier (314 lbs), 2021, Aluminum foil and aluminum foil tape compressed to the combined weight of momma and deddy, 29x25x16 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Morán Morán, Los Angeles

A squat, silver boulder partially blocks the entrance to SoiL Thornton’s deceptively loose exhibition at Morán Morán, Los Angeles. Bench/Barrier (314 lbs) (all works 2021) consists of a rolled ball of aluminium foil ‘compressed to the combined weight of momma and deddy’, the checklist reveals. Within the ordinarily starchy format of the gallery checklist, the fond familiarity in the way Thornton acknowledges this detail of the work’s media is jarring, cloying even. Throughout their practice, the artist prises open such spaces for vulnerability and revelation within the stringent conventions of conceptual and systems art.

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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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May 13, 2021

Shahryar Nashat

8762 Holloway Drive, Los Angeles

Shahryar Nashat, “THEY COME TO TOUCH”, 2021.
Courtesy of the artist; David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles; and Gladstone Gallery, New York. Photo by Elon Schoenholz.

I still do not really know what color the fitted carpet is that runs through the three floors of 8762 Holloway Drive in West Hollywood. Some shade of sage green, I’d guess, but it could be more lime, maybe more grass, maybe more gold. I do not know because Shahryar Nashat has covered every window in the building with a pink film (again, hard for my dazzled eyes to calibrate) that suffuses the space in a discombobulating, low-contrast pall—akin to the pulsing non-color that appears when you face into the sun with your eyes closed. 

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April 22, 2021

Made in L.A.

The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and the Huntington Museum, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino

Fulton Leroy Washington (aka MR. WASH), Mr. Rene # MAN POWER, 2011, oil on stretched canvas, 61 × 50.8 cm.
Courtesy: the artist, The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Before entering the long-delayed (and now revised) ‘Made in L.A. 2020: a version’, I pitied its poor curators, whose exhibition has been kyboshed by a succession of lockdowns. Originally scheduled to open in June, the biennial – split this year between the Hammer Museum and the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino – has lain partly dormant, partly unfinished. With (almost) all works installed, museum leaders allowed in a few members of the press, who, they hoped, might grant ‘Made in L.A. 2020’ a little exposure to daylight. (The biennial is currently expected to open to the public next year.)1

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April 10, 2021

Caitlin Keogh

Overduin & Co, Los Angeles

Caitlin Keogh, Waxing Year 1 and Waxing Year 2, (both 2020)
Courtesy: the artist and Overduin & Co., Los Angeles

Caitlin Keogh’s ambitious exhibition, ‘Waxing Year’, at Overduin & Co in Los Angeles – which includes a group of seven large paintings interspersed with ten small, mixed-media assemblages – is, in many respects, a tour de force. Why, then, does it leave me wanting something more? 

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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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March 1, 2021

Lisa Yuskavage

The Tongue Tondo (2018), Lisa Yuskavage. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner; © Lisa Yuskavage

Sometime not long ago, before the pandemic rendered such gatherings unconscionable, I met up with a few fellow critics for drinks at a friend’s house. At one point in the evening, during a boisterous discussion about artists’ personal politics, someone casually remarked that so-and-so was ‘definitely a misogynist’, and everyone roundly agreed before cantering on with the conversation.

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January 21, 2021

Robert Longo

Robert Longo, Untitled (Capitol), (2012-13)
© Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles

Robert Longo makes aggressive, powerful images. They are usually big. Sometimes very big. High-definition, high-contrast, high-octane. Stereotypically masculine, he’d be the first to admit. Emphatically American.

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December 17, 2020

John Cage

Cage Foraging in Grenoble, France, 1971. 
Photograph by James Klosty.
1.

In 1959, composer John Cage appeared on the popular Italian TV game show Lascia o Raddoppia? (Double or Nothing?). Specialist subject: mushroom identification. Cage was in Milan as the guest of fellow avant-garde composer Luciano Berio, and was performing a series of concerts. Berio was at that time working for Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI), the state media channel that included, improbably, an “experimental studio for audio research.” Others in Berio’s circle, including writer Umberto Eco and sound engineer Marino Zuccheri, also worked with RAI, and together the cohort had finagled Cage a spot on the show. 

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