REVIEWS ALEXANDRA GRANT
ALEXANDRA
GRANT
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART,
LOS ANGELES
26 APRIL – 13 AUGUST
We are awash in language. From literature to
keyboards, from newspapers to the Internet
to advertisements, some scholars believe that a
thing does not exist in human consciousness until it
is given a name – or as those with a more theoretical
bent might put it, a sign. Alexandra Grant is an artist
of a more theoretical bent. In her museum debut
in the MOCA Focus series of solo presentations,
Grant traces her way through a labyrinth of language,
using her paintbrush and a series of source texts as
her guides.
The exhibition, comprising a revolving wire
sculpture, a limited-edition and non-repeating
wallpaper design of a digital scan of the sculpture
and four works on paper, deals with the strange
nature of language. Her investigations with language
and literature play out in gorgeously sprawling
text pieces; the words, drawn backwards, from
various languages and through seemingly infi nite
interconnecting networks, play with signs in such
a way that the struggle to read and the obsession
with language bows to the overwhelming visual
quality of the work. Though composed within a
methodology that is almost Oulipian, the mode
breaks down and becomes increasingly personal
and expressive as the piece maps landscapes of its
own devising.
But where does the language lead? If the
paintings map a text, where does the map lead us?
The French theorist Hélène Cixous believed that it led
us into ‘mysteries’, the relentless ambiguities that lead to further questions. Self-consciously taking pages from writers Let’s (After Michael Joyce’s ‘Ladders’, 2004), 2005, mixed
as diverse as Michael Joyce, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, Wislawa Szymborska, Jorge Volpi and postmodern media on paper, 305 x 203 cm.
theorists such as Cixous and Deleuze and Guattari, Grant combines these texts with a studio practice; as much Photo Brian Forrest. Private Collection, Los Angeles
as she’s interested in ideas, she engages them through paint to follow the breakdown of language. The anxiety
of infl uence from this party of writers pervades, but Grant’s painterly personal misinterpretation of her mentors
(to rely myself on Harold Bloom) ultimately leaves direct signifi cation behind and follows its own process: expressive,
intuitive, and delightfully strange.
Her sprawling paintings on paper have everything I always wanted from Julie Mehretu, but could never fi nd.
Sprawling systems that incorporate architecture and a visually spectacular sense of hypermodernity and transnational
identity, but Mehretu’s semi-abstractions always stumble into the decorative, while Grant’s reliance on language
grounds me in my attempts to read the text, to follow the maps of their meaning. In each piece, I try to read the words,
get lost, stop struggling and fi nally enjoy the rush of language, the lost truth of these fl oating signs. But Grant always
keeps me aware of the troubling implications of this. As the late Jean Baudrillard writes in the opening of his landmark
Simulations (1983), ‘The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth – it is the truth that conceals that there is
none. The simulacrum is true.’ Andrew Berardini
ARTREVIEW one.lintwo.linsix.lin
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