Phillip Griffith

Phillip Griffith is a writer, editor, and scholar living in New York City. 

This book offers a study of queer American artists in contact with modernist avant-garde movements, but striking out in new directions in their lives and works.
Body Language: The Queer Staged Photographs of George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa
Whereas in Kienle’s estimation much of the existing scholarship presents a historical/anecdotal view of Johnson’s queer milieu or explains his queer/homoerotic puns and references, she stakes a claim for “the structurally queer manner” in which Johnson carried out his work, and not simply its queer content.
Queer Networks: Ray Johnson's Correspondence Art
What can be done about rural voters? As the US election cycle keeps turning toward 2024, we’ll be reading and hearing more of this question in its various permutations. The columns and commentary will sound the same, rehashing what we’ve read before. Andrea Geyer’s exhibition plein-air turns a similar line of questioning inside out, offering facts gathered as part of her research-based practice to delve into the ideological uses of nature by the far right.
Andrea Geyer, never yet, 2023. 6-channel synchronized video, audio, audiorama speakers, and chairs, 36:05 min, Edition of 3 (#1/3). Courtesy the artist and Hales, London and New York. Photo: JSP Art Photography.
The fifteen mostly untitled enamel works on paper on view at the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, all made between 1981 and 1987 (though including several undated works), flirt in the border territory between abstraction and figuration.
Jake Berthot, # 2, undated. Enamel on paper, 30 x 22 1/2 inches. Courtesy the Estate of Jake Berthot and Betty Cuningham Gallery.
Chloë Bass’s The Parts, organized by the Brooklyn Public Library’s curator for visual art programming Cora Fisher outside the Central Branch in Grand Army Plaza and the Center for Brooklyn History in Brooklyn Heights, addresses both the isolation brought on by the pandemic and the trauma and exasperation of Black and brown Americans brought on by police killings.
Installation view: Chloë Bass: The Parts, Brooklyn Public Library, New York, 2021. Courtesy Brooklyn Public Library. Photo: Gregg Richards.
An examination into how Robert Duncan and Jess transformed the benignly bourgeois domestic space into a political one, making this newly imagined domesticity the grounds for the work of artistic creation.
Jess, The Enamord Mage: Translation #6, 1965. Oil on canvas over wood, 24 x 30 inches. Collection of The M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. © The Jess Collins Trust.
Origins and foreseen endings bookend each moment of Me, Myself and …, Lucas Samaras’s latest exhibition of digitally produced photos and photomontages. “My mother brought her dress from Paris,” begins a line of text that introduces the exhibition.
Lucas Samaras, Untitled, 2019. Pure pigment on paper print, 13 x 13 inches. © Lucas Samaras. Courtesy Pace Gallery.
In May 2008, as the Parisian daylight stretched into summer hours, Richard Serra’s set of five 56-foot-tall steel plates, Promenade, had taken over the city’s cavernous, glass-roofed Grand Palais. In the Tuileries Garden, Serra’s 1983 work Clara-Clara, with its paired, inverted semicircles (or more precisely, conical sections), had been reinstalled in its original location at the garden’s gate to accompany the new work.
Conversations About Sculpture
Several blocks downtown, at the intersection of 7th Avenue and Christopher Street, a billboard presides over Sheridan Square, Pride’s epicenter. At first, it seems a vacancy; the billboard is black with two stacked lines of simple white text running along the bottom edge.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled, 1989. Billboard, dimensions vary with installation. © Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Courtesy the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation. Installation view: Sheridan Square, New York, 2019. Presented by Public Art Fund. Courtesy Public Art Fund, New York. Photo: Nicholas Knight.
The paintings that occupy the main space of Richard Pousette-Dart: Works 1940 – 1992 create full visual environments, like a sun filling the sky with heat or a carpet of vegetation covering a lawn.
Richard Pousette-Dart, Presence, Amaranth Garden Number 2, 1975-76, oil on linen, 58 x 45 inches. © 2019 Estate of Richard Pousette-Dart / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Hauser & Wirth's exhibition Günther Förg: Works from 1986 – 2007 presents painting, sculpture, and photography by the German artist, whose estate is now represented by the gallery, in a new institutional setting.
Günther Förg, Untitled, 2007. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 114 1/8 x 157 1/2 inches. Courtesy Hauser + Wirth.
Knowles and Schneemann, in their own ways, indelibly shaped performance art’s trajectory throughout the late 20th century. In October, the two artists met at Knowles’s Manhattan loft to discuss Fluxus, feminism, life with partners, friendships, families, and art.
Naked Ice Skating, (1972), Fluxus event photographed by Anthony McCall in London.
After the death of the artist and poet Joe Brainard in 1994, his friend, the poet John Ashbery, recovered an envelope of paper cuttings Brainard had collected for use in collages. The envelope was a posthumous message for Ashbery and reminded him of the collages he had made while spending time with Brainard and the poet James Schuyler in the 1970s. For Ashbery, who died in September 2017, the envelope was a fond reminder of his friend and signaled a return to his work as a collagist.
John Ashbery, Bingo Beethoven, 2014. Collage on vintage Bingo board, 8 1/4 x 7 1/2 inches. © Estate of John Ashbery. Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.
Adrian Piper has long grappled with the immediate, present-tense experience of the viewer in front of an artwork—an art encounter that can bring awareness of what she calls the “indexical present.
Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965 – 2016 and Adrian Piper: A Reader
Being, MoMA’s current iteration of the “New Photography” exhibition series, assumes an unwieldy, ambitious title but offers work often in portraiture, that appeals to our intimate understandings of our selves.
Sam Contis, Denim Dress, 2014. Pigmented inkjet print, 31 5/8 x 41 11/16. © 2018 Sam Contis.
In the wake of the #MeToo moment, time’s up as they say. As accusation and confession give voice to new power dynamics, the cultural spasm promises to reverberate throughout our cultural, business, and political worlds. The stories of those whose voices were previously devalued to the point of silence may even give us a framework for re-reading some of the foundational myths of our culture.
Jon Wang, Gardens of Perfect Exposure, 2018. Installation view, SculptureCenter, New York, 2018. Chromed bath fixtures, silkworms, roof repair fabric, laminated hair, glass gobs, TV, selfie ring lights, plexiglass, earrings, HD camcorders, rehydrated mulberry leaves, silk, magnets. Dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Kyle Knodell.
“First the air is blue and then,” as reports the diver, “it is bluer and then green and then / black I am blacking out and yet / my mask is powerful / it pumps my blood with power.”
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme's And Yet My Mask Is Powerful
In July 1971, poet Bernadette Mayer set out to complete what she called an “emotional science project” by setting a set of constraints for herself: to shoot one roll of Kodachrome film on a 35mm camera each day of the month while simultaneously keeping a set of journals.
Bernadette Mayer, Memory, 1972 (2017 reinstallation). Image courtesy of CANADA, LLC.
In her 1930 masterpiece Disavowals: or Cancelled Confessions (French title: Aveux non avenus), Claude Cahun offers her reader the following provocation: “Only with the very tip would I wish to sew, sting, kill.
Jennifer L. Shaw, Exist Otherwise: The Life and Works of Claude Cahun
“It is a sacrilege,” bell hooks wrote in a 1994 essay about the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “to reserve this beauty solely for art.” The latest exhibition of his work, and the first at David Zwirner Gallery, arrives on the occasion of the artist's longtime gallerist and estate executor Andrea Rosen’s recently announced co-representation of Gonzales-Torres’s estate with David Zwirner.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled" (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991. Wood, light bulbs, acrylic paint, and Go-Go dancer in silver lamé bikini, sneakers and personal listening device. Overall dimensions vary with installation. Platform: 21 1/2 × 72 × 72 inches. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation. Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York and David Zwirner, New York/London.
Ariel Goldberg borrows the title of their book-length essay on queer art, The Estrangement Principle, from the experimental writer Renee Gladman, who edited the “dyke zine” Clamour from 1996 to 1999.
The Estrangement Principle
The fourteen stoneware sculptural works in Simone Fattal’s first New York City solo exhibition resonate with a curious force of intimate gravity. Taken individually, they convey monumentality; stepping back, each could be easily held—delicately—in your hands or arms.
Installation view: Simone Fattal, kaufmann repetto New York, February 23 – April 8, 2017. Courtesy the artist and kaufmann repetto Milan/New York.
The relational spaces opened by the images in Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s Figures, Grounds and Studies are a happy disturbance to the homogenizing squares and grids of social media and dating app profile photos.
Paul Sepuya, Mirror Study, 2016. Archival pigment print. 51 x 34 inches. Edition of 5. (c) Paul Mpagi Sepuya. Courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery.
What do we do when we journal, or keep a diary? To follow the example of Rosemary Mayer’s newly excerpted and edited journals, which document a pivotal year in Mayer’s life and career, one might recount one’s thoughts on the relation of beauty to the art object or what it takes to be an artist, along with impressions of concerts attended, friends visited, lovers lost or found, and meals eaten.
Rosemary Mayer, Untitled (RMSDGM05), 1972. Watercolors, colored pencil and graphite on paper. 8 1/2 x 11”. Courtesy Southfirst Gallery.
Anne Carson’s Float flirts with the genre of the artist’s book just as did her somber, brilliant Nox and Antigonick, her collaborative edition (with illustrations by Bianca Stone) of Sophocles’s Antigone.
Float
When the New York poet Eileen Myles appeared in a brief cameo in the second season of Transparent, it felt like an experience of New York City had been turned inside out.
Cecil Beaton, Andy Warhol and Candy Darling, New York, 1969. © The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s.
Like any election year, 2016 is a year of slogans. Make America great again. With the recent vote on Brexit in the United Kingdom, slogans there, too, where politicians like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage peddled: Take back control.
Victor Burgin, Mirror Lake, 2013. Digital projection work. 14:37 minutes. Edition of 3 and 1 artist's proof. Courtesy the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York.
A cresting hill forces a sharp incline in the otherwise flat highway. Industrial grays and frontage greens fly by the window in the driver’s periphery. From over the hill, a figure emerges into view, a woman’s outline—an apparition sheathed in a sheer curtain—imposes itself on the landscape.
Peter Piller, Erscheinungen #18, 2016. Inkjet print on Alu-dibond. 59 1/16 x 56 1/3 inches. Edition 3 of 3, with 1 AP. Courtesy Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.
Downtown around City Hall Park, where the Public Art Fund currently presents The Language of Things, an exhibition of sculptural works, the various rhythms spoken by the city include those of tourists, street performers, and office workers—not to mention that particular rhythm of summertime city heat that expresses itself in shared encounters of sound, stench, and sweat.
Carol Bove, Lingam, 2015. Petrified wood and steel. Courtesy the artist, Maccarone New York/Los Angeles and David Zwirner New York/London. Photo: Jason Wyche, Courtesy Public Art Fund, NY.
Harmony Hammond made her start as an artist in the feminist milieu of 1970s New York, co-founding A.I.R. Gallery, the first women’s gallery, in 1972. Her early artwork developed a feminist and lesbian idiom for painting and sculpture, especially in such celebrated works as her woven and painted Floorpieces (1973) and wrapped sculptures, like Hunkertime (1979 – 80).
Harmony Hammond, Things Various, 2015. Oil and mixed media on canvas. 80 1/4 x 54 1/4 x 5 inches. Courtesy the artist and Alexander Gray Associates. © 2016 Harmony Hammond. Licensed by VAGA, New York.
A large blank white paper sheet with an inch-wide black border, from Untitled (The End) (1990), a paper-stack work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, hangs on my bedroom wall. Friends react variously to this sheet taken from its stack, often with confusion at how slapdash it looks taped up there, sometimes making fun of the idea that it’s an artwork, with pause for its perceived melancholy.
David Deitcher, Stone's Throw
Everyday life presents each of us with the opportunity to play out a carefully choreographed (if unrecognized) performance: I rise, I shower, I dress, I walk. In Juliana Cerqueira Leite’s set of five sculptural works, exhibited under the title INTRANSITIVE, pink, yellow, and purple Hydrocal casts of the artist’s body document her interaction with a collection of DIY furniture built for the exhibit.
Installation View: Juliana Cerqueira Leite: INTRANSITIVE. Regina Rex, February 28 – April 10, 2016. Courtesy Regina Rex.
An imaginary fence runs between the new work of William Pope.L and Will Boone on view at Andrea Rosen Gallery. It fences in and fences out, work and viewer.
Pope.L, Cone in a Forest and Cone for My Sister (Private Language Problem), 2015. Plywood letter cutouts, hot glue and corrugated plastic, 47 × 47 × 45 inches. © Pope.L. Courtesy the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery. Photo: Pierre Le Hors.
On November 11, art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty and artists Zoe Beloff and Katarina Burin gathered at the Graduate Center, CUNY, to discuss “Fabulated Archives.”
Installation view, Andrea Geyer. Insistence. 2013. Video (color, sound). 15:21 min. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Modern Women’s Fund. ©2015 Andrea Geyer, courtesy Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne. The Museum of Modern Art (October 16–November 15, 2015). Digital image © 2015 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: John Wronn.
Collaboration can be a strange affair. Some tantalize with the right combustion of kindred spirits. But some go no further than creating two distinct, if complementary, halves of a work clearly produced by their respective artists.
Horacio Coppola, Still Life with Egg and Twine, 1932. Gelatin silver print, 8 1/8 Ã?â?? 10 1/8 inches. Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Thomas Walther Collection. © 2015, Estate of Horacio Coppola.
On September 21st at The Kitchen, Wayne Koestenbaum performed a suite of trance-like Sprechstimme improvisations at the piano to mark the publication of his new book, The Pink Trance Notebooks, a series of poems assembled from a yearlong experiment in journaling (Nightboat, 2015).
Portrait of Wayne Koestenbaum by Phong Bui, pencil on paper. From a photo by Taylor Dafoe.
Two shows on view at the Studio Museum of Harlem dramatize the resistance of art to fixity and stability, through the abstract paintings in Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange and what might today be termed the “socially-engaged” photographs in Lorraine O’Grady: Art Is….
Lorraine O'Grady, Art Is... (Cop Framed), 1983/2009. Chromogenic color print 16 × 20 in. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York © 2015 Lorraine O'Grady/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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