Jonathan Griffin

Criticism and essays on art and culture

Tag: PST

August 6, 2025

Thomas Wilfred

Lumia Suite, Op. 158 (1963–64), Thomas Wilfred. Museum of Modern Art, New York

Between 1964 and 1981, visitors to New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) could sit in a darkened room and contemplate opalescent wisps of colour drifting slowly across a screen. The installation, tucked in the museum’s basement, was a favourite among regulars. At times, the screen – eight feet wide and six high – was filled with diaphanous skeins of pale yellow, green, blue or pink, while at other times the light dwindled, letting most of the picture fall into darkness. It was mesmeric, unlike anything else in the museum. Unlike, probably, anything yet made in the history of humankind.

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December 9, 2011

Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974–81

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

John Divola, Zuma #9 (1978/2006)

Events sometimes tell their own story. 1974: Richard Nixon resigns; Patty Hearst is kidnapped by left-wing terrorists; the U.S. oil crisis continues. 1975: Saigon falls; Gerald Ford survives two assassination attempts, both in California. 1976: Chairman Mao dies. 1977: Elvis Presley dies; Jimmy Carter is sworn in. 1978: Californian cult, the Peoples Temple, commits mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana; Harvey Milk and George Moscone are shot in San Francisco; Proposition 13, limiting Californian property taxation, is passed. 1979: Three Mile Island nuclear disaster; the U.S. embassy in Tehran is seized; revolution in Nicaragua; Soviet Union invades Afghanistan, reigniting the Cold War. 1980: the U.S. and other countries boycott the Summer Olympics in Moscow; John Lennon is murdered. 1981: assassination attempt on the Pope; Egyptian president Anwar Sadat is assassinated; AIDS is identified; Ronald Reagan is sworn in as president. Read the rest of this entry »