Robert Grosvenor at Fridericianum

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A mass-production car must be designed for the broadest appeal, but the magic of art is in engineering a desire to an end where it meets no consumer need. This is the only magic of art. (Though its failure at this is routine.) This is the magic of Grosvenor, for whom objects seem bent to some ultraspecifc whim. You can work backwards from the object toward its desire, its impetus. This is how you see a subject. You make out reason in Grosvenor's over and under engineered oddities, aerodynamic goofiness, his minor surprises. They come out of left field. For all their design, they magically end up artless. It's nearly outsider art. Full of polish for the id. Full of concepts that are never capitalized.  They feel in-process, provisional. It makes them feel like drawings, actual ideas. 

See too: Richard Rezac at The Renaissance Society, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi, Naoki Sutter-Shudo at Bodega

Robert Grosvenor at The Renaissance Society

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Amongst the sterility of minimalist forms Grosvenor's like the subtle bulge in the zubaz of propriety it reminds us of. Grosnevor's doesn't feel naturalized, but constructed, affected, conjuring the sweat of effort and work that minimalism tried to avoid through industrial process and design. Grosvenor's minimalism reminds us of work and sweat and bodies, of the designer, the sun baked engineer. Grosvenor's minimalism reconsiders the earthliness that minimalism tried to disavow, work.

Robert Grosvenor at Karma

Robert Grosvenor at Karma

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The awkward of minimalism of Grosvenor, a sort of cartoony literalness. The “sculpture” here, the triangular vehicle, becomes dreamlike fetish or totem. Impossible to understand as either sculpture or functional object, it’s surreal like all those lobster telephones or floating basketballs, suspended between art and enterprise.
Best in the artless construction, the simple cum uncanny, off. Photos of vernacular construction whose means make a sort of sense, but odd. Makers who follow their own impossibly developed logic to its own ends. The blue steps. The impossibly phallic car. The little wheel.