Vaughan Grylls
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Vaughan Grylls is an English sculptor, collage artist and photographer.
Contents |
[edit] Early Life
Vaughan Grylls was born in Newark, Nottinghamshire on 10 December 1943 to an Oxford-educated secondary school headmaster and his much younger wife, a former showgirl. He attended six different types of schools ranging from St Paul's Cathedral Choir School to Skegness Secondary Modern. He attended four art colleges - Nottingham, Wolverhampton, Goldsmiths' and the Slade School of Fine Art where he studied under the sculptors Reg Butler and Phillip King and the philosopher Richard Wollheim.
[edit] Pun-Sculptures
At Goldsmiths' College in 1968, Vaughan Grylls produced an exhibition of his first pun-sculptures each made from cardboard and called collectively 'Ludwig Wittgenstein's Palace of Pun'. He took this with him to the Slade and continued to make more pun-sculptures. His work was noticed at his final show in 1970 by Jasia Reichardt, art critic and assistant director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). She offered Grylls his first gallery show in London. It was held at the ICA in October 1970 as one room in an exhibition entitled 'Ten Sitting Rooms'. Works shown by Grylls at the ICA included 'A Case for Wittgenstein' (two white suitcases on one of which he had scrawled ‘I brought this in Case’ and on the other screened a photograph of the first case with ‘A Case for Wittgenstein' by Vaughan Grylls’ printed underneath in large black letters) and 'The Wittgenstein Lectern' (a black and white sculpture shaped as a lectern with a spoof linguistic philosophy question and answer examination paper scrawled on the top in black felt pen e.g. Question: Why are words used? Answer: Philosofreasons. In October 1970 in the The Sunday Telegraph, the art critic Michael Shepherd described Grylls works as having 'delicious verbal wit.' In the October 1970 edition of Arts Review the art critic Peter Fuller made the prescient observation that Vaughan Grylls' work was 'poker-faced'. In November 1970 Grylls showed 'Headcase, Bookcase' at the Young Contemporaries which was held that year at the Royal Academy. Grylls work consisted of a life-sized photograph of himself lying in front of a spoof library with punning titles written on the spines of the books. 'Headcase, Bookcase' was awarded the Marlborough Gallery Prize. The following year Vaughan Grylls set up a pun-sculpture in the form of a one-person exhibition at the Greenwich Theatre Gallery. In The Guardian, the art critic Caroline Tisdall described it as 'an exhibition of an exhibition' further explaining that it included ' some critical judgment - 2 clever x 1/2 - and mock philosophical asides "Deep down most people are shallow' '. A visitor to the exhibition subsequently added in lipstick to that particular work, 'Well you should know'. This was not the first time the public had reacted to a Grylls pun-sculpture or used lipstick in doing so. In May 1970 a passer-by had torn off part of Grylls large work 'The Emperor's New Clothes' which was showing outside Euston Station as part of the Camden Festival. The object the passer-by removed could be seen as a leaf on one side, on which Grylls had written 'see overleaf' and a penis on the other. The passer-by left his name and address adding that he had vandalised Grylls work on the grounds of its decadence.' In July 1970 Vaughan Grylls showed a large bed-shaped sculpture in Paternoster Square as part of the City of London Festival. It was chosen by Peter Fuller who was organising the Festival's art exhibition. The bed-head consisted of a photo enlargement of a sugary love-scene copied from the magazine 'Womans Own'. At one end of the 'bedspread', made from a white plasticated sheet of wood, Grylls had written 'A Woman's Own Eye View of the World' and on the other 'A Woman's Eye-Level View of the World'. This provoked several responses in lipstick from women. In the Summer of 1971 Vaughan Grylls showed several life-sized photographs throughout Alexandra Palace as his contribution to the exhibition 'Art Spectrum'. The photographs consisted of Grylls standing in front of other artists' submitted work. Some of the works Grylls photographed were subsequently rejected which meant that there were artists who found their work rejected from the show yet a photograph of their work included with Grylls standing pointing at it. One artist, a Peruvian felt sufficiently affronted to state publicly that he would not hesitate to kill Grylls should he show up at the opening. Grylls stayed away.
[edit] The Gallery, 65a Lisson Street NW1
The Gallery had been set up in 1972 by fellow Slade graduate Nicholas Wegner. Before Grylls arrival, Wegner had been showing invented artists, a group of whom had been exhibited unwittingly at the ICA. Wegner invited Vaughan Grylls to show at The Gallery. The work Grylls exhibited in 1973 entitled 'An Indo-Chinese Punsculpture' was a large photo-mural commenting on the signing of the so-called Paris Peace Treaty. Although a pun-sculpture it marked Grylls return to overtly political subject matter, something he had not undertaken since 1964, when as a student at Wolverhampton he had constructed a 2.5 metre high fibreglass sculpture Ku Klux Klan as a response to the 1964 racially-charged General Election in that city.
After showing 'An Indo-Chinese Pun-Sculpture’, Vaughan Grylls joined Nicholas Wegner as co-director of The Gallery. Together they travelled to the 7th Cologne Art Fair where Grylls photographed the commercial dealers operating in their temporary, standardised ‘galleries’. On their return Wegner and Grylls transformed the layout of The Gallery into one exactly mirroring those at Cologne. This design was to remain unchanged for the rest of The Gallery’s operating life. Grylls and Wegner’s first exhibition together consisted of a selection of the photographs taken at Cologne. Following this, 'Display exhibitions' were invented. These were based on a modular system of photo-stands and wall-based units. Subjects such as ‘Drug Abuse In Maine’, ‘The Floods in Egypt’, ‘Mine’, ‘Contemporary Art’, ‘Belfast In Art and ‘Photography Hasselblad’ were shown. Thus The Gallery replaced the invented artist with no artist. Grylls stated later in a radio interview with Anthea Lahr broadcast on [[WBAI]] New York that ‘a bland corporate-style presentation, used for each and every show was inspired by my first visit to America in 1973 where I was impressed by The Kodak Galleries with their huge attention to presentation and none to content’. In 1974-75 Grylls and Wegner invited other artists to collaborate by showing their works in the presentation format of The Gallery e.g. John Latham, Gerald Newman and Rita Donagh. Caroline Tisdall in The Guardian wrote of this period " The Gallery (65a Lisson Street NW1) continues its enterprising programme of processing and packaging. This has by now become the closest to a house style that any London gallery has,” In 1975 Vaughan Grylls left The Gallery to return to working on his own while Wegner continued with Display exhibitions and other shows until 1978.
In 2006 The Centre of Attention re-presented a selection of radical galleries, publications and televisions shows covering the period 1956-2006 in a survey exhibition entitled 'Fast and Loose (my dead gallery)'. This was shown at the Fieldgate Gallery London at the same time as the Frieze Art Fair. The exhibition featured several enterprises from the period including the Indica Gallery , the Women's Art Library, Make, BANK and The Gallery. In 2007 in the art magazine Art on Paper, New York City, the art critic Sarah Andress wrote 'In one of two rooms dedicated to The Gallery (1972-78) hung six large photographs of other galleries' booths at the 1973 Cologne Kunstmarkt. after which the Gallery's directors remodeled their space. A book of photographs of Frieze 2006 sat on a table in that room, a subtle reminder of how truly prescient the Gallery's project really was.'
[edit] The River Chemical Company
In 1975 Vaughan Grylls, inherited responsibility for a small company in Nottingham specialising in selling chemicals and laboratory equipment. It had been established by his great uncle with a First World War invalid gratuity and had been in decline for at least 25 years. Vaughan Grylls changed its unfortunate title to River Scientific but his attempt to revitalize it was limited as the first Thatcher government was set on squeezing fragile companies as well as the unions. River Scientific was sold to its biggest creditor in 1981. Grylls said in 2005 ‘The only positive elements for me was first in keeping the employees of River Scientific in jobs as long as possible and second in giving me some experience of running something. That became valuable when I started running art colleges.’
[edit] Photo-collages
It is for his huge photo-collages on serious historical and political subjects that Vaughan Grylls is perhaps best known. Grylls attributed his change of emotional gear to making these instead of his pun-sculptures to the death of his father in 1977. In 1978 he made ‘Hagia Sophia Istanbul’ . It was constructed from myriads of tele-photo images joined together which revealed the whole interior of the building at one glance. Selected for exhibition by Nicholas Serota, at that time director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, it was shown that year at the ‘Whitechapel Open.’ Grylls followed this in 1979 with ‘The Wailing Wall Jerusalem’ in which a photograph was assigned to each ancient stone and then with the 8 metre wide ‘In Flanders Fields, shown at the Whitechapel Open in 1980. In this, one of his most evocative works, the grid of gravestones and the grid of Grylls’ tele-photo images physically correlate and there is also an implied philosophical correlation between the passing of time, which he has captured by taking the photographs over several hours, and his subject matter. Grylls approach to his photo-collages could be generally regarded as analogous to that of a film-maker.
Perhaps his most remembered photo-collage is Site of the Assassination of President Kennedy (1980). In the British Journal of Photography of 5 February 1982, in which he describes his working method for several of his photo-collages, Vaughan Grylls wrote about this particular work:
‘I studied the Warren Report on the assassination, in particular the photographs and plans of the assassination site. There was also the problem of the ‘unknown assassin’, not acknowledged in the Warren Commission’s report, but nevertheless a crucial element in the construction of the piece. After making, as usual, a large number of drawings and sketches, I set off for Dallas. I had decided to position the camera in Dealey Plaza, on the south side of Elm Street, and not far from where Joseph Zapruder, the amateur movie-maker happened to be standing when the President’s motorcade passed by and rifle shots were fired from a window in the top right hand corner of the Texas School Book Depository, a building I thought I could feature on the right hand side of my picture. Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullets struck Kennedy at a point that would become the left centre of my picture, and it is believed that a second assassin struck from the left of this – an area referred to as the ‘grassy knoll.’ The motorcade then raced off towards the far left of my picture. I positioned the tripod at an angle so that the camera carrying a 300mm lens swung through an arc that followed the line of Oswald’s bullets. Because an angle was set up from the right, another one was conversely set up from the left. This latter angle followed a line from the grassy knoll to where Kennedy sat in the back seat of his open-topped car with his wife Jackie, and the Governor of Texas. This line represented the line of the bullets fired by the assassin who escaped in the resulting confusion.’
In February 1983, in The Observer, the art critic William Feaver, wrote about Grylls’ large Arnolfini Gallery exhibition ‘Views of our Time: ‘The sites Vaughan Grylls chooses for his elaborate photographic inspections are those where ‘X’ marked the spot. ‘X ‘ for where the Fuhrer stood, Oswald aimed, the boat exploded, the panic began. The inked cross that singles out one headstone among thousands in a war cemetery…. Sometimes with Grylls acting like a deranged bill-sticker, his basic grid-pattern is disturbed. Whole areas tilt sideways or fan out and extra details, fitted into the gaps, add a kaleidoscopic element to the confusion…. His ‘Views of out Time’ are news story, relocation and news-gathering recombined.’
The largest work Vaughan Grylls has made is his 24metre wide ‘The Nuclear War Triptych’ of 1981-82. The art historian and critic Brandon Taylor writing in the art journal Aspects in 1984 said ‘…by 1980 various events had taken place in world politics to make nuclear war the most urgent overall question in the international arena. It was against this awesome background that Grylls began a large three-part work which constitutes a meditation on this system of tensions and a wry comment on our human fallibility.’ The left panel of this work is called ‘Nuclear War in the UK’. It was photographed at an England/Scotland Football match at Wembley. The right panel is called ‘Nuclear War in the USA’ and it was photographed at Disneyland, California. Of this panel, Grylls said in an article published by the Arnolfini Gallery in 1983 ‘ I found Disneyland at once cheerful and sinister…(there was) a jokey obsession with death, almost an attempt to exorcise it. I have tried to show people being swept into their own creation.’ The central panel is called ‘Dachau Railway Station’. ic Brandon Taylor wrote in Aspects in 1984, ‘Completed in 1982, it shows modern day commuters waiting for trains beneath the signs which, to the rest of the world, can only signify the place where abysmal atrocities were once performed. Grylls pictures himself in the work (12th frame from the right) wearing the bemused expression of someone who finds that the horrific events of forty years ago have already been covered over by the sands of time.’
In April 1983, Artscribe described Grylls as ‘an effective political artist who uses collage in much the same way as the collage-satirists of pre-War Germany, but without such sardonic humour. He is unremittingly straight-faced throughout, in works that might appear quirky but are unfailingly compelling’.
[edit] The Grylls/ Hockney Controversy
By 1982 David Hockney was also constructing pictures from several photographic images. To massive media attention, Hockney declared that he himself had invented what he dubbed ’joiner' photography and in so doing had discovered a new way of seeing, in particular the ability to include the passing of time in one static work. Although by 1984, art critics such as Waldemar Januszczak writing in The Guardian had acknowledged 'Long before Hockney, Grylls was assembling powerful, single images out of myriads of smaller details' and John Spurling in the New Statesman had said ‘ Vaughan Grylls has been at it for longer’ and ‘Hockney’s genius for composition makes his work more immediately appealing but his content is characteristically superficial – an ad-man’s view of the world. Grylls is heavier on both counts: he plods rather too squarely over his space, but he takes on much more ambitious subjects', Hockney's long-established fame and formidable media machine meant that to those outside the art world a Vaughan Grylls could now be regarded simply as an imitation of a David Hockney ‘joiner’. Grylls issued a statement in Art Monthly in January 1984. ‘Vaughan Grylls would like to say that he does not feel that David Hockney has intentionally copied his work’. Whether his decision to do so was influenced by this controversy or not, in August 1984 at the height of his reputation, Grylls left England for America to accept an offer made by Williams College Massachusetts to set up and run a new department of Photography and Video. Yet comparison with Hockney would follow Grylls across the Atlantic. At an extensive retrospective of his work held at the Elvehjem Museum of Art, (now the Chazen Museum of Art) University of Wisconsin in 1985/6, the art critic Robert Silberman wrote in Art in America , ‘’Grylls reveals a concern with public life that makes the murals function something like history painting. His public themes set Grylls’s work off clearly from the photographic collages of David Hockney, whatever the superficial resemblance. Hockney, in playing Cubist with a camera, is more concerned with private, individual; experience, shying away from the larger social issues Grylls confronts.’
[edit] Art School Administrator
In 1989 Grylls returned to the UK to become Head of Art & Design at Wolverhampton Polytechnic, later the University of Wolverhampton where he oversaw the growth of the School from 400 to 1200 students. In 1996 he became director of the Kent Institute of Art & Design (KIAD) made up of the well-known Canterbury, Maidstone and Rochester art colleges which together had 2700 and 600 staff. Alumni include the fashion designers Zandra Rhodes, Karen Millen and Wendy Dagworthy, the graphic designer Martin Lambie-Nairn and the artists Humphrey Ocean and Tracy Emin.
In 2003, as government legislation now allowed it, Grylls proposed creating a new university of 6000+ students studying art, design, and architecture by merging the Kent Institute with the Surrey Institute of Art & Design. He did this he said, to prevent these art colleges eventually becoming absorbed into their local universities which is what had happened in the past to most art colleges in the country. The merged institution was called the University College for the Creative Arts at Canterbury, Epsom, Farnham, Maidstone & Rochester. (since 2009 the more reasonably-titled University for the Creative Arts.) As soon as the merger was completed in August 2005, Grylls as founding Chief Executive resigned to return full time to his own work after a break of twenty years. He became an emeritus professor of the new university in 2006. In September 2008, in a letter in Art Monthly responding to an article published in the previous edition criticising the management of the university since his departure, Grylls wished the university well but said that there had been a dispute between himself and the institution which he had decided to resolve by leaving in 2005. He added that in any case he had found it intolerable that the pressures of the merger had taken him away entirely from his own work.
[edit] Recent Events
In October 2006 Vaughan Grylls and Nicholas Wegner (now known as Nicholas James) exhibited a selection of works from The Gallery in 'Fast and Loose (my dead gallery) at the Fieldgate Gallery London in an exhibition organised by the Centre for Attention.
In April 2007 Vaughan Grylls exhibited Places that Shaped Today's Middle East at the Old Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, London E1. The works were constructed from photographs Grylls had taken the year before whilst travelling in the Levant. Although digital they echoed his long-established style of work.
In February 2009 Grylls broke new ground in his working style in a one person exhibition held at Sadler’s Wells called ‘Mother’. The exhibition consisted of ten ‘hyper-real’ life-sized photographic portraits of women his mother had admired. In an article published in Time Out London on February 12 2009 about this exhibition, the art critic Helen Sumpter, quoted Grylls as saying " I'm an emerging artist all over again. But I'm no YBA (Young British Artist) I'm an EVOBA - an Emerging Very Old British Artist".
As at November 2009, exhibitions by Vaughan Grylls are scheduled in November 2009 at the Nomad Galleries, Windsor House, 55 St James's Street, London SW1 and at the Slade School of Fine Art in Summer 2010 which will be a recreation of his 1970 postgraduate diploma exhibition. Currently he is working on two series of new works - 'Down Under!' and 'Statues Today'.
[edit] Public Collections
Arts Council of Wales; Contemporary Arts Society; Kwazulu Natal Technikon, South Africa; Mark Twain Bank, St Louis; Museum of Modern Art Library, New York; National Museum of Media, Bradford; Pfizer Research, Sandwich; Polaroid, Boston; Unilever; University of Greenwich; University of Roehampton; The Open University; Williams College Massachusetts.
[edit] Selected References
Myfanwy Kitchin The Guardian London 27 February 1970
Ten Sitting Rooms’. Exhibition catalogue edited by Jasia Reichardt and published by the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London October 1970
Caroline Tisdall, The Guardian London 8 February 1970
Vaughan Grylls ‘A Case in Point’, The Sunday Times London 28 March 1971
This is not an advertisement’, Studio International London, Vol 182 no 935 July/August 1971
Vaughan Grylls, ‘Benefitting from a Holiday’, The Sunday Times London 29 August 1971
John A Walker, ‘Contemporary Art, Flash Art Milan, nos 48/49 October/November 1974
‘Time, Words and the Camera’ Exhibition catalogue edited by Jasia Reichardt and published by Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum Graz, Austria 1976
Vaughan Grylls, ‘Artists Thoughts on the 70’s in Words and Pictures’ Studio International London vol 195 no 991 1981
Waldemar Januszczak, The Guardian 6 January 1981
Richard Cork, The Standard London 22 January 1981
Brandon Taylor, Introductory essay to ‘The Panoramic Image’ exhibition catalogue published by John Hansard Gallery, University of Southampton 1981
Vaughan Grylls’ Essay on Working Methods The British Journal of Photography February 1981
‘Vaughan Grylls. Views of Our Time’. Exhibition catalogue with notes by the artist an introductory essay by Brandon Taylor published by The Arnolfini Gallery Bristol January 1983
William Feaver, The Observer London 6 February 1983
Martin Holman, Artscribe London no 40 April 1983
Brandon Taylor Aspects Newcastle-upon-Tyne ‘Art Against Conflict: the Photocollages of Vaughan Grylls’ Spring 1984
‘Vaughan Grylls. Through the Looking Glass’ Exhibition catalogue with notes by the artist and an introductory essay by John Carlin Published by the University of Wisconsin Elvehjem Museum of Art Madison Wisconsin November 1985
Robert Silberman Art in America New York March 1986
Philip Core The Independent London 16 December 1988
‘Vaughan Grylls. Wolverhampton Return’ Exhibition catalogue with notes by the artist and an introductory essay by Christopher Bailey. Published jointly by Wolverhampton Art Gallery September 1989
‘Vaughan Grylls. White Man’s Tales’ Exhibition catalogue with notes by the artist and an introductory essay by Professor Ann H Murray Published by Wheaton College Massachusetts November 1995
Helen Sumpter 'In the Studio -Vaughan Grylls' , Time Out London, February 12-18 2009
Vaughan Grylls lives in London and Kent and is married to the publisher Polly Powell, daughter of the architect, Geoffry Powell of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon. They have two children, Hattie, born 1992 and George, born 1994. He was married previously to the artist and theatre designer Gillian Daniell and their daughter is the film-maker Pinny Grylls, born 1978. His son-in-law is the actor Sam Crane, born 1979. His brother is the Oxford academic and Sunday Times and Times Literary Supplement contributing book critic, David Grylls.
