Brian Griffiths

VILMA GOLD
6 Minerva Street
January 12–February 19

View of “The Invisible Show,” 2012.

Brian Griffiths’s brand of quasi-Victorian Arte Povera reanimates the detritus of fantastical culture to carnivalesque effect. He is known for large-scale sculptures and motley object-constellations, which have contained puppet-size porcelain clowns, baby grand pianos perched on dark oak china hutches, and a moon-faced panda head carved into stone. Griffiths’s imagination is baroque––prey to the adventure and exoticism of a certain era of the British Empire (from the invention of science fiction through to the cold war)––and nostalgic for the now-obsolete mechanics of transformation, titillation, and the new.

Yet Griffiths’s current solo show is something of a departure from his recent explorations of antiquated entertainment value. It engages the problem of cultural wastage––the sorry remnants of consumptive pleasure-seekers––in shockingly topical light. Five massive cubes in slightly variable dimensions (two Small-, one Medium-, and two Large Invisibles, each 2012) compel the viewer to trace a labyrinthine circuit through the room. Draped in layers of ungessoed canvas in varying shades of beige, the unspectacular forms obscure a space where a sculpture might stand.

As a kind of verso to the circus tent, “The Invisible Show” remains perfectly coy––the adolescent who has eaten mushrooms and, hiding behind long hair, presumes her presence imperceptible. With nothing much to see, one could accept the premise––the volume, the undulating surface––as antidote to a general exhaustion with imagery, or perhaps find a treatise on contemporary painting’s problematics. In any case, on the back of Griffiths’s previous work, this starkly reduced theatricality approaches the conceptual to rival Minimalism’s iconoclasm, providing a strange relief in aesthetic quietude.

— Kari Rittenbach

Selma Makela and “Solar Do-Nothing Machine”

PEER
97 & 99 Hoxton Street
January 4–February 18

Selma Makela, Hill Walker, 2010, oil on canvas, 10 1/4 x 11 3/4".

Rejecting the tyranny of dreariness typical of London in midwinter, this show expectantly embraces transience in nature. Films by various artists and a group of paintings by Selma Makela touch on the ephemeral. Anna Barriball’s film Projection, 2003, harnesses the intangible: The artist stands at an open window as sun cascades in, reflecting coruscations off her rhinestone shirt. Similarly, Rachel Lowe’s series of video shorts A Letter to an Unknown Person, 2008, captures the artist’s attempts to draw Magic Marker outlines of the fast-moving landscape outside onto a car’s passenger-side window. As the films progress, the traced shapes of fugitive scenery accumulate to obscure the view. Charles and Ray Eames’s Blacktop: A Story of the Washing of a School Play Yard, 1952, also uses passing moments of abstract forms, as soapy water full of bubbles flows wistfully and sinuously across gritty black tarmac to a sound track of the Goldberg Variations. Evocative of “skying,” the British tradition of contemplating clouds as practiced by the likes of John Constable, the film ultimately captures the banal reality of water mixed with soap suds in bewildering formations of transcendent, mesmerizing abstraction. Makela’s small-scale oil paintings of the physical world—ice, snow, meteors, solar storms, and so on—are distillations of the ephemeral environment, made vulnerable as it is made permanent on canvas. Like stars coalescing into a glittering constellation, this dual exhibition quietly provides, through the assembled works, a fresh view of natural phenomena.

— Kathleen Madden

Asier Mendizabal

RAVEN ROW
56 Artillery Lane
December 8–February 12

Asier Mendizabal, Untitled (Memorial), 2009, concrete, 32 x 54 x 10”.

Asier Mendizabal’s latest body of work investigates the capacity of signs to embody ideas. Though the Basque artist draws from a lexicon of political and social visual symbols, including flags, crests, and emblems, he does not attempt to capture the spirit of any specific movement. This artistic decision creates a pronounced tension between the intimate, enigmatic art object—as many of Mendizabal’s works are almost abstract sculptures that invite the viewer into their space—and ideas of mass movements.

Two works show the contrasting fortunes of communist monuments: Untitled (Memorial), 2009, is at first glance purely abstract—a concrete wedge with a strange void at its heart. But the sculpture has local history: It re-creates a structure designed by modernist architect Berthold Lubetkin to house a bust of Lenin in London, yet without the communist leader’s head at its center, it becomes a sculptural form shorn of its purpose. Elsewhere, a photograph depicts an improvised monument in Bilbao that incorporated busts of Lenin and Marx into a concrete block in 1993, running counter to notions of a pan-European rejection of communism in the late twentieth century. As Bilbao is Mendizabal’s home, the complexities of Basque identity inevitably inform his work. See, for example, Auñamendi, 2006–10, where the artist plays on the region’s reputation for violent struggles for independence by presenting a grid of romantic photographs of mountain villages from the Basque Encyclopedia, manipulated with soft focus: The idealized tranquility of these images makes it seem implausible that dissent could foment amid such a bucolic landscape.

An elegant series of works, “Delimitar,” 2009, reduces national and organizational emblems to white outlines on deep brown Gravoply, leaving us to guess at what these hints of eagle wings, laurels, and cogwheels might represent. The teeth of a cogwheel also inspire a concrete and iron sculpture that evokes the kind of improvised stage that might accompany a rally or demonstration. Rather than being upright, the structure leans at an angle. Far from an enduring symbol of industry or strength, it feels neutered and uncertain.

— Ben Luke

Grayson Perry

THE BRITISH MUSEUM
Great Russell Street
October 6–February 26

Grayson Perry, Pilgrimage to the British Museum, 2011, ink and graphite, 23 5/8 x 23 5/8".

Priceless artifacts from the British Museum’s vast collection come into dialogue with Grayson Perry’s sardonic wit in “The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman.” Perry explores his lineage as a textile artist and ceramicist, and places himself in a long line of international craftsmen. He has spent the past two years carefully selecting his favorite pieces by unknown artisans from the British Museum, and then creating his own works in response to them. By locating parallels and discordance alike between his own ideas and those of his artistic predecessors, he is able to address contemporary culture in a manner that is by turns humbling and amusingly poignant. By pairing a gold hoop earring, attached to a shriveled human earlobe, with his Coffin Containing Artist’s Ponytail, 1985, for instance, he venerates these anonymous artists of the past while simultaneously satirizing the contemporary art industry.

The show explores in depth several motifs, including shrines, flags, and sexual imagery; yet a main focus of the show is undoubtedly, in Perry’s own words, “the god of [his] imaginary world”: his fifty-year-old teddy bear, Alan Measles. If much of the show is a documentation of Perry’s pilgrimage into the past as explored through his interaction with pieces from the museum, a large part of the preparation for this artistic journey was an actual trip that Perry and Alan Measles took to Germany, during which Perry also sought to come to terms with the anti-German war games played during the artist’s childhood. Photographs and memorabilia from this trip are displayed at the entrance to the show, as is the bubblegum-pink motorcycle that Perry had built especially for the journey, now converted into a shrine to Alan Measles—who is nonetheless absent; a stunt-double teddy is there in his place. For Perry, Alan Measles is too precious for the British Museum.

— Ashitha Nagesh

Yuri Pattison

SON GALLERY
Unit 9c, 133 Copeland Road, Peckham
December 9–February 11

View of “focal-plane,” 2012.

Yuri Pattison’s current exhibition at this gallery, which is located in an industrial park, gives the archiving of visual information in both real and virtual storage spaces the readymade treatment. Here, three shipping crates underscore the show’s thematic of the gallery as industrial storage unit. Through an investigation of the aesthetic reproducibility of the white cube––its essential four white walls––a spatial comparison is made between the gallery and shipping crates, particularly those transporting artworks across the world. This examination also extends to industrially manufactured digital equipment––cell phones, cameras, camcorders, computers, and laptops––that facilitates the mechanical production, reproduction, and dissemination of images.

Taped to the rear wall is an array of photographs (their subjects ranging from a pile of red sand to a telecommunications outpost housed in two freight shipping containers), while in the center of the room two vitrines each contain flat-screen monitors streaming Internet image feeds, such as found footage of nuclear surveillance following the 2011 Japan earthquake sourced online and Pattison’s own recordings of abandoned 2004 Athens Olympic Games sites. All of the imagery can be viewed at www.focal-plane.org, a website-as–white cube that breaks from temporal or spatial confinement and treats the image itself as a storage unit. Disrupting the frame of the exhibition even further, a rogue screen is placed atop one vitrine in an act of aesthetic rupture. Indeed, as Duchamp used industrial objects to break aesthetic standards within exhibition contexts, the digitized image is here treated in a similar fashion.

— Stephanie Bailey