David Griggs: The sort of black claymore paintings

Enter the dragon. In 1988 when Dave Hickey proclaimed that the issues for artists during the 90s would be beauty, pleasure and efficacy, he was not prepared for the response. The majority of art world insiders (those who had at least come across a Hickey text) saw his call to beauty as something akin to decorativeness, glamour, elegance and grandeur. They thought Hickey had lost-the-plot, that the critic had turned in support of a frivolous, superficial and mechanical art market. Hickey proclaims that when it comes to art and beauty the dealers “only care about how it looks” and the art professionals (everyone who is not a dealer I assume) “really care about what it means”. Just when it seems Hickey is about to languidly explain away the foolishness of making such a claim he fleetingly (and using parenthesis) agrees with the observation. Hickey wants us to think not of what beauty is, but of what it does, its rhetorical function. “Thus, the comfort of the familiar always bore with the frisson of the exotic, and the effect of this conflation, ideally, was persuasive excitement—visual pleasure. As Beaudelaire says, ‘the beautiful is always strange,’ by which he means, of course, that it is always strangely familiar.”

Skipping forward twenty-two years to David Griggs’ “sort of black claymore paintings” Hickey’s beauty, pleasure and efficacy is alive (albeit restlessly and limping in Manila) and well: the beauty in Griggs’ “rhetorical triumph”, the pleasure in the eye of the beholder, and the efficacy in the potent stripping away of the palette, the residue of which is black and relatives of black. Griggs’ painted over black paintings—his sort of claymore paintings—are to Beaudelaire’s bourgeoisie what 60 Minutes is to today’s middle-class. “You can’t make black paintings anymore, you can’t always be where all the atrocities are. Claymore means that at the same time [simultaneously] shit is still really fucked”, but we are not there, we can’t be there. These are amateur paintings Griggs has interfered with, he has touched them, he has molested them, in an unpleasant way. By no means mistake my illusions to molestation and assault as a kind of observational curatorial humour, it is not, this is deadly serious. The deranged smiling retarded teddy bears, the witches and demonic eclipses, floating heads and nervous executioner, dying flowers and floating torsos, all form the black claymore paintings’ rhetorical triumph, all are strangely familiar, and all possess “the comfort of the familiar bore with the frisson of the exotic”. Exit the dragon.

Jarrod Rawlins for David Griggs
March 2010