review

Brian Griffiths

First published in Art Monthly, February 2016

Bill Murray – a story of distance, size and sincerity
Baltic, 20 November 2015 – 28 February 2016

When news emerged in December 2015 that the Wu-Tang Clan had sold the only copy of their latest album to Martin Shkreli – a ‘big pharma’ bro renowned for the unprecedented price-hike of anti-infective drug Daraprim – the internet practically buckled with indignation. It seemed the only corrective to the injustice could be a collective belief in the tale that US comic actor Bill Murray had been contractually licensed to plot a heist that would liberate the record. While the story turned out to be an optimistic fiction, it betrayed a ubiquitous faith in the actor as a moral ‘everyman’ publicly charged with the righting of wrongs, a responsibility consistent with Murray’s late-life evolution into a self-styled zen pilgrim guided by errancy and penitence.

While holding out for Bill’s miraculous intervention, Brian Griffiths’s poignantly crafted exhibition for the Baltic provides an aptly timed opportunity to speculate on the interior life of this enigmatic character. Subtitled ‘a story of distance, size and sincerity’, the show begins at a remove with an exterior view of the gallery’s facade across the blustery expanse of the Tyne, upon which hangs a huge banner printed with a photograph of the actor courting paparazzi on the red carpet at Cannes. Clutching a tiny camera, Murray mocks the imperative to capture the celebrity image while performing something of his own vulnerability; a subjection to processes of mediation that lie beyond his control.

While the banner effects a hyperbolic announcement of the show’s content, its real value lies in the scale-skewing threshold it creates, distilling the macrocosmic fanfare of show business to the microcosmic interiority of the emotionally challenged characters Murray has chosen to portray. This is played out across a series of miniature houses, intimately lit and arranged with the quaintness of a tumbledown model village beneath the formidably vaulted roof of the Baltic’s ex-industrial gallery space.

Informally pasted with low-resolution portraits of the show’s subject – an off-hand intimation that these maquettes be considered potent ‘head-spaces’ – the houses function as bodily architectures crammed to brimming with filmic references: spot-lit golf balls, whisky mini-bars, clustered seashells and a congregation of marshmallow ‘Stay Puft’ men. These structural transpositions of iconic paraphernalia could be read in a narrative sense, by peeking into the framework of each building and piecing together components like a keen-eyed sleuth.

I was surprised to see how effectively a fan-blown party streamer could evoke a sense of vacancy and hapless isolation, or how a series of Tibetan-singing-bowls-turned-cocktail-shakers suggested a purgatorial space between spiritual contentment and hedonistic self-erasure. Much of my own enjoyment of the show derived from hearing others traverse the display with their own mirthful recognitions of favoured jokes, the houses functioning as anecdotal composites of an expansive career. It raised the question as to what forms of criticality might be constituted by fandom, a mode of engagement usually discounted for its completist tendencies and uncritical enthusiasms rather than valued for its emotional allegiances and sensitivities to nuance and minutiae. These works were made to be talked around, to be joked with.

Griffiths derives his sculptural repertoire from collections of cast-offs, objects the appeal of which stems from their suggestion of a tragicomic drift into the hinterlands of obsolescence. In this instance, the artist’s aptitude for staging encounters with the simplest materials is remarkable: a dark recess entices you towards a structure with the alluring perfume of percolating coffee; a telescope draws the eye ceiling-ward, catching a distant glimpse of a helium-filled Garfield balloon turning slowly in the rafters.

Writing on the miniature, Susan Stewart has notably characterised the peculiar dramaturgy of the doll’s house as a place of stasis in which property relations and social hierarchies find themselves hermetically sealed, the space-time of one’s own perusal extended into the infinite domain of reverie. Griffiths seems to share a tendency towards the architectural cross-section with director and Murray colleague Wes Anderson, but avoids the hideous Victorian class-trappings of Anderson’s auteurism (emblematic of Stewart’s analysis) which rests on a deplorable notion of the supposed dignity of service while mapping human intimacies across striated residences. Griffiths’s interiors are, contrastingly, like their subject: absurd, unpredictable and full of mirthful surprises. The sum of their contents repositions Murray’s filmography as a kind of philosophical corpus, prompting us to consider his life as a symbiosis of the characters we’ve seen him play, and what example we might expect him to set as
a result.