Jonathan Griffin

Atrocity Exhibition

Contemporary art and cruelty from Renzo Martens in the Congo to Adel Abdessemed in the slaughterhouse

Renzo Martens, Episode III (2009)

In 1976, a New York-based group calling themselves Artists Meeting for Cultural Change distributed posters with the headline ‘ARTISTS UNITE!’. They were protesting against the selection of artists in an exhibition titled ‘Three Centuries of American Art’; ‘STOP RACISM & SEXISM’ the poster demanded. Why is it so hard to imagine artists galvanising themselves into equivalently forthright activism today? Not only have most contemporary artists lost faith in the potential of art to effect social or political change, a significant number are actually responding to our current moment by deliberately increasing the total sum of human misery. Cruelty, it seems, has become an artistic position. How exactly did this come about?

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July 30, 2010

Support Group

Cottage Home, Los Angeles

‘it’s all about …’ trilled the perky, lower case script, ‘gaylen gerber!’. The text ran across two billboards affixed to the exterior of Cottage Home, the former cinema that has served as a project space for three commercial galleries: Kathryn Brennan Gallery, China Art Objects and Thomas Solomon Gallery. For what it’s worth, ‘Support Group’ took place at the instigation of the latter, although Solomon’s contribution seems to have been limited to inviting critic Michael Ned Holte to curate the show, which featured none of Solomon’s gallery artists. This was just the first sequence in a complicated game of authorial ‘pass the parcel’, in which no one, it seemed, quite knew who would be the one with the package in their hands when the music stopped.

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June 1, 2010

Ian Kiaer

From Room to Room

Part of Ian Kiaer’s installation Endless House Project: Ulchiro Endnote / Pink (2008) consists of a paper and matchstick construction small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. It resembles a building of some kind; if not a conventional house then perhaps a shop or a commercial premises, with an upper level that juts out over the ground. Most of its walls are created from rectangular images, each one a cell cut from a Manga comic strip, each one joined to its neighbour by way of scarified globs and hairy tendrils of glue, dispensed, it appears, via a hot-melt glue gun.

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April 1, 2010

Cyprien Gaillard

New Romantic

Paris-born, Berlin-based artist Cyprien Gaillard could be described as an archaeologist of recent history. In his films, photographs, collages, sculptures and performances, the Sublime sits alongside the profane, and brutality is underscored by moments of quiet beauty.

Jonathan Griffin: Where is wilderness today and how do you value it?

Cyprien Gaillard: My father was a fly fisherman. He would take me on trips to a river in Oregon, and I would spend my time looking for a parking lot or road so I could skateboard. I think my early relationship to architecture was informed by that.

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March 6, 2010

Bob Law

Karsten Schubert and Thomas Dane Gallery, LondonIn 1959, Bob Law lay in a Cornish field and wondered how to describe the space he was in. His solution was a series of drawings in which figurative elements – such as trees or houses – are arranged along a doddery pencil line at the perimeter of the paper. A year later, Law had distilled this approach to his signature device: the rectangular perimeter alone, bounding empty space, sometimes accompanied by a date, a title or his name, always in block capitals. Read the rest of this entry »

March 2, 2010

Pietro Roccasalva

Through the Looking Glass

Pietro Roccasalva says he doesn’t believe in chronologies, at least not where his work is concerned; every image or idea that arises is the reflection of another that came just before it or a premonition of one to follow. He likes to think of his oeuvre as ready-formed – a magnificent hall of mirrors.

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March 1, 2010

Group Material

Arroz con Mango (What a Mess)

Frustrated by what they saw as the conservatism of the flourishing art market at the start of the 1980s, a group of New York artists chose to work collaboratively on projects ‘dedicated to social communication and political change’. Despite numerous arguments, resignations and changes of direction over their 16-year history, Group Material made a body of work that continues to be influential and inspirational for a younger generation of artists and curators.

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January 12, 2010

Duncan Campbell

Chisenhale Gallery, London

I might as well park it out front: to most people, the name DeLorean will forever be linked to time travel- specifically to the car modified for that purpose by ‘Doc’ Brown in the Back to the Future films (1985–1990). In Duncan Campbell’s film Make It New John (2009), we travel back to the late 1970s, when flamboyant American motor industry supremo John DeLorean elected to manufacture his new company’s only car – the DMC-12 — in West Belfast.

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January 6, 2010

Ben Rivers

A Foundation, Liverpool, UK

Ben Rivers makes films about latter-day hermits and pioneers – usually men – who have chosen to exist at an ideological and geographical remove from the rest of society. The London-based artist journeys into the depths of private, imperfect, perhaps misguided but defiantly hopeful worlds. His use of a wind-up Bolex camera and hand-processed film seems not just to be a matter of interpretation, but the only appropriate response to the jerry-rigged and hamstrung lifestyles he is permitted to witness. Read the rest of this entry »

November 1, 2009

Nasreen Mohamedi

Milton Keynes Gallery, UK

The only dated works in the exhibition ‘Nasreen Mohamedi: Notes’ at Milton Keynes Gallery are the four pages cut from the artist’s diaries. On Friday 3 December 1971, Mohamedi records: ‘EVE BLACKOUT. WAR BEGINS.’ The words are, however, nearly obscured by the page’s ornamention: over the top of the capital letters are tight rows of ruled pencil lines, occasionally punctuated by coin-sized discs of black ink and filled-in rectangles.

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