...re-reading the catalogue i enjoy Elizabeth Ann Macgregor's account of 'working with a truly visionary artist'... as i enjoy remembering his works, so simple and profound (though political) and so present in the world of art (but not yet, i feel, in the world of everyone)...
... the works i most vividly remember are the electric batteries made by putting zinc and copper strips into potatoes - long trailing wires connect the potato batteries to electric meters (which measure the current) and to a digital clock (which indicates the exact time, powered by nature)...
...i felt, while observing these phenomena, that they are quite magical, even alchemical, though i know them to be simple processes of chemistry and physics that i remember learning at school and in the experiments i did at home with household materials... somehow Victor Grippo, in his way of excluding inessentials, seems to turn the most ordinary things into the most magical... and yet the most sobering...
...but i also remember the tools, workbench, anvil, bricks, stones, raked soil and other simple implements of five basic crafts (carpentry, stone carving, bricklaying, farming and ironwork)... each set of tools and materials being positioned as if in use, the work being incomplete... again there is a contrast between very simple, even crude, elements which, combined by thought and skill, become the immense constructions of the manufactured and invented world (mistaken or alienating as it can be)...
...i could write much more about Victor Grippo's work but perhaps this is enough to describe the essentials of what he did and to indicate its relevance and value to us now... i cannot forget it, it speaks so clearly to our time...
...and i note thet (like so many of the artists i like) he was trained in both science and in art...
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© 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 john chris jonesIf you wish to reproduce any of this text commercially please send a copyright permission request to jcj at publicwriting.net