Rowley Kennerk gallery is pleased to present Joseph Grigely's solo exhibition, "The Gregory Battcock Archive." The exhibition will run from December 11th 2009 until January 30, 2010.

"Art criticism is not, in any sense of the word a form of criticism.  It rarely involves critical principles.  Today, art criticism is an industry that supports art and artist.  It is also a leisure activity that is generally limited to those born to special circumstances, for it is not an activity that can be used to support a person.  But, more importantly, it belongs to those who have no need, no wish, no stake in genuinely provoking the established culture." (Gregory Battcock, "A Critic of Art," 1979).

"Dear Gregory..Don't correct my English...60's is over...it is time to disrupt English grammar after having disrupted FCC TV scanning lines" (Nam June Paik & Charlotte Moorman, unpublished essay "On Cagean Interpretation of Cage")

"We received the latest photographs; they are very good.  But, of course, we particularly like the very nice drawing of two young men enjoying a fist fuck.  It's very lovely and we are delighted to have it." (Gregory Battcock, letter  to G.K. Bodanza and Jean-François Boussat, November 14, 1979)

"As you have undoubtedly experienced many times in your career as a prolific writer, the relationship of the writer and his editor is always a friend-enemy-friend situation.  It is same thing in TV. " (Nam June Paik, ALS to Gregory Battcock, Undated (?) 1979)

The story of Gregory Battcock is difficult to document.  Born in 1937, Battcock was a painter in the early 1960s who found his way into several of Andy Warhol's films (he starred in "Horse" and "Drunk"), and later he became a critic with eclectic interests--he wrote about minimalism and performance and video art as well as the aesthetics of ocean liners.  His best-known book is entitled Why Art: Casual Notes on the Aesthetics of the Immediate Past (Dutton, 1977).  In the 1970s Battcock's influence was quite broad--he was editor of Arts magazine for a while--and among his more adventurous projects was a short-lived magazine called Trylon & Perisphere, which explored the underside of the New York art world.  Everything came to a quick and sudden end on Christmas day in 1980, when he was found dead on the balcony of his 10th floor condo in San Juan, Puerto Rico.  His body had 102 stab wounds.

Through a fortuitous series of events that took place in Jersey City, N.J. 1992,  Grigely discovered and preserved parts of the Battcock's archive, and is exhibiting a selection of its contents in custom designed vitrines arranged as a modular grid within the gallery.  The archive is rich with correspondence, unpublished essays & photographs, postcards, keepsakes, and other remnants of the New York art world in the 60's and 70's.  Grigely's manner of selecting and arranging pushes the project beyond the person of Battcock. The viewer recognizes that these materials are not simply 'presenting' Battcock, but 'representing' him.  Grigely's investigation, as is evident in his other works, is not simply an homage, but a nuanced exploration of the relationship between text, image, and the complexities of interpretation and misinterpretation.  There is an inherently interactive component to the show, as the viewer walks, hunches, reads, and pieces together the life of a man that embraced the complexity of interpreting the art of his day.

Grigely lives and works in Chicago, where he is Professor of Visual & Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  His exhibitions include solo shows at the Musée d'art Moderne in Paris; The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; The Whitney Museum of American Art; and the MCA, Chicago.  His group shows include the Whitney, Venice, Berlin, Istanbul and Sydney Biennials, as well as shows at Kunstmuseum, Bern, De Appel, Amsterdam, and Portikus, Frankfurt. In 2007 the Baltimore Contemporary and Tang Museum published a monograph on his work, Joseph Grigely: St. Cecilia.   Grigely's books include Textualterity: Art, Theory, and Textual Criticism (1995), Conversation Pieces (1998) Blueberry Surprise (2006), and [Imbrie] (2009).  His most recent book is Exhibition Prosthetics, which will be released in January 2010.