Sydney Art Scene

Jul 19

MOVE: The Exhibition | GOMA Brisbane

MOVE: The Exhibition

Away from the crowds gathering to see the Ron Mueck exhibition at the GOMA in Brisbane is a little room with 12 videos playing. The twelve videos have all been produced by Australian artists to be included in this travelling exhibition.

The exhibition is the product of a Kaldor Public Art Project, MOVE: Video Art in Schools and forms a part of the syllabus for the majority of government schools in Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia. It’s also available to private schools for a small fee. It has been around for a few years now in the states mentioned, and is about to be introduced into Queensland where the Gallery of Modern At has begun conducting regional workshops.

Although video art has been established for half a century, it is yet to be fully understood by artists or the public. The project is then timely, as video art is increasingly prominent (a walk around Cockatoo Island during the Biennale of Sydney will verify this).

As it is a new medium it has its own language and concerns that a traditional art education will not give a viewer access to; video is often ignored because it takes too long or is seen as obscure.

This new language is the focus of many of the works included in MOVE. Each artist uses video with unique concerns that relate to their practices. Shaun Gladwell in his Blue & white linework composition (2008) traces road markings on a skateboard and mountain bike, exploring the formalist aspects of the medium through a study in experimental drawing, using the body as marker and the video as record for a canvas too large to be replicated by any other means.

Similarly John Tonkin in air, water part 2 (2007) embraces the digital world and chooses not to try and replicate our reality but rather creates a digital landscape almost entirely foreign, bar for the natural laws that the objects seem to obey, embracing a virtual reality entire possible, a shift from the imaginary worlds concealed in paintings.

No longer a passing movement, video is a medium that relates to how we perceive the world. The fear that enveloped society decades ago has been forgotten, and technology is now embraced whole-heartedly. Such is the commitment that much of our interaction with each other and the world is mediated through a monitor. If art is to truly fulfil its role in society, then video will remain a prominent medium, and having a society that is able to understand and communicate with the medium will become vital.

Thanks to Detached all secondary schools in Tasmania will be receiving MOVE, and in October the program will be launched in Western Australia to the government secondary schools. Perhaps if we’d had this a decade or so earlier the crowds would be in the little room with 12 videos instead of taking photos of the giant baby.

Jul 18

Scott Redford vs. Michael Zavros | IMA Brisbane

We’re having a Post-Critical moment, according to Rex Butler. And according to the IMA in Brisbane Scott Redford and Michael Zavros are currently sharing this moment. Strangely then the exhibition is entitled Scott Redford vs. Michael Zavros. Redford is somehow placed against Zavros in terms of their shared ‘post-critical’ turn.

The opening text does little to explain the competitive title, rather adding to the confusion with several vague statements on what each artist is meant to be doing. It’s a little unfair on the artists, as both have their practices simplified in this text, and it does not encourage a deeper reading.

It is unusual for a gallery to berate the art that it is showing, and certainly not helpful to confuse the viewer in the first wall-text. The reason for Redford and Zavros being squared off against each other is unclear as the text makes it readily apparent that if anything, they should be on the same team.

Michael Zavros Debaser/Polka Dot 2010. Courtesy GRANTPIRRIE, Sydney, and Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane.

But that is only if that first wall text were valid. The post-critical period that Butler suggests does not apply to Zavros or Redford. Art is critical by its very nature, art that is not critical is better known as craft. Art is shown in galleries and museums because it is part of a critical discourse that artists have continued for centuries, if it has nothing to say it has no place in a gallery.

But the exhibition is in a gallery, and it does have something to say. The opening text, for all of its flaws, does get something right in suggesting that both artists’ practices are post-Warholian. The whole of Pop Art existed as a critical reaction to the excessive, consumer driven capitalist society dominant at the time. It’s the continuation of those circumstances, especially in places like the Gold Coast that have allowed for Redford and Zavros to remain relevant. Zavros’ fascination with surface, the shiny, alluring iconography all perfectly rendered in paint takes little to be translated as metaphor for the attitudes he invokes. Redford sits somewhere between Warhol and Jeff Koons making art of the everyday, but avoids the extra step by not making it part of the everyday.

There is an interesting dialogue that occurs between the works of Zavros and Redford, although Zavros focuses on excessive wealth, or as the text puts it “refinement, privilege, and perfection.” Redford on the other hand favours, “youth and pop-culture”. Occasionally the two intersect. Again, I wouldn’t say one comes out over the other, but that something new is created. They don’t really oppose one another; the title is just an unfortunate red herring. The person Redford and Zavros should be picking a fight with is the curator Robert Leonard. But perhaps they are all in on it together, having made a straw man that forces the viewer to engage, where otherwise they would have walked straight by to the Shaun Gladwell exhibition next door.

Scott Redford vs. Michael Zavros is open 5 June – 31 July as is Shaun Gladwell: MADDESTMAXIMVS