Jonathan Griffin

Tales of Everyday Madness

I worried for weeks about where to meet Eric Bainbridge. I envisaged talking to him in surroundings that are significant for him and his work, somewhere that might lead our conversation in unexpected but fruitful directions. Should I travel up to Hartlepool, the town in the north-east shoulder of England near where he was raised, and where he now lives for part of the week in a cottage by the sea? Or would it be better to visit the art school in nearby Sunderland, where he has taught for the past nine years, and where his office currently doubles as a studio, allowing cups of tea and tangerines to drift into his sculptural combinations? When this became too complicated to arrange, I considered something closer to home: a trawl through London’s second hand shops, where I imagine he finds much of his raw material, or a trip to an out of town D.I.Y. store (it turns out that Greg Hilty already had this idea for an essay he wrote on Bainbridge’s work in 1990).1 Perhaps a market would be appropriate, or, given his interest in the global circulation of goods, a spot out on the Thames estuary where we could watch cargo ships dock and unstack their coloured metal containers. Read the rest of this entry »

February 1, 2008

Trisha Donnelly

Modern Art Oxford

A sign insisted that access to Trisha Donnelly’s exhibition at Modern Art Oxford was gained via the museum’s front stairs; the three spaces that the show inhabited were clearly intended to be experienced in sequence. An optimist might therefore have expected an unfolding narrative, a progression of scenes, or an installation that, in having a front, a best side, signals awareness of the viewer who stands before it. Instead, the untitled installation of diverse objects that filled the galleries hovered uneasily at the edges of the rooms or in corners, like shy children pushed reluctantly into a party.

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January 22, 2008

Alina Szapocznikow

Broadway 1602, New York

While it can be a lazy writer’s crutch to defer too readily to biography, the course of Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow’s extraordinary and painful life is integral to understanding her awkward, restlessly experimental and often darkly hilarious art. A potted history of her life would include the early deaths of her father and brother, her imprisonment during World War II in Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Theresienstadt, her studies in art schools in Prague and Paris after the war and finally her tragic death from breast cancer at the age of 47 in 1973. Read the rest of this entry »

October 6, 2007

Matthew Monahan

A tour across the aesthetic landscape of Matthew Monahan’s figurative sculptures, prints and drawings would make stops in the caves of Lascaux, at archaeological digs in peat bogs, sealed tombs of ancient Egypt and Babylon, Easter Island and the temples of Greek and Roman antiquity – not to mention contemporary Japan, Amsterdam, China and Los Angeles. Read the rest of this entry »

June 15, 2007

Marcus Coates

‘Why do cats understand what you say?’ ‘Where does hair go when you go bald?’ ‘How can the city control illegal bicycle parking?’ These are just some of the questions that Marcus Coates has attempted to answer by descending into the ‘lower world’ and consulting the birds and animals that he encounters there. Usually they respond in cryptic clues; uncharacteristic behaviour is what he is looking out for, which he then does his best to interpret for his audience on his return. Read the rest of this entry »