3) 2011/Jan-Jul
Relative Currency (Homage to James Ensor) 2011
Alex Gawronski: Relative Currency (Homage to James Ensor), 2011
‘It’s About Time’, Death Be Kind, East Brunswick, Melbourne
(Mdf, oregon, acrylic paint, printed photographic paper)
‘Relative Currency (Homage to James Ensor)’ transforms two of ‘Death Be Kind’s’ gallery walls into a mock memorial. The work implicitly asks – specifically in lieu of the gallery’s title – what is in a name? In the art world names are a currency of their own ultimately more valuable than the material worth of physical artworks. Nonetheless, the powerful exchangeability of an artist’s name is, quite literally in the end, seriously relative. Who can tell after an artist’s death whether the currency of their name will prevail? Does this matter in any case? If it doesn’t, then what is the true value, beyond ‘investment’ or monetary significance, of an artist’s output? Such a question is rendered even more opaque and difficult to quantify once the concept of value has been transferred from isolatable objects to the immaterial and spatial dynamics of art genuinely practiced and therefore always already embracing processes of change and decay. Suitably, the subtitle of the installation conceptually conjures eccentric proto-modernist James Ensor’s 1888 etching ‘My Portrait in 1960’. In this work, Ensor sardonically depicted himself as a worm-eaten skeleton casually lounging in the deathbed to which he must have long ago been abandoned; the material and symbolic futures of art jarringly counter-posed.
Untitled (Dead end) 2011
Alex Gawronski: Untitled (Dead end), 2011
‘Precious’, Sydney College of the Arts (SCA) Gallery, Sydney; curated by Nick Tsoutas
(Mdf, timber, brackets, paint)
Art’s relationship to ‘politics’ is complex and often severely simplified. It is readily assumed that an artwork simply expresses its creator’s private thoughts. Of course, private thoughts once made public are no longer private. Therefore an artwork, as a public expression, is always a priori socialised. The inherently social dimension of the artwork though can never provide an antidote to pressing political concerns it might touch on, issues such as internment and the denigration of outsiders and ‘aliens’ for example. In fact, art like politics is representative and as a result will always be forced to confront its representative dimension and the resultant limitations it faces when faced with the ‘real’. Bound up with the politics of representation are the politics of today’s pervasive (and invasive) media. The ‘media’ as it is commonly understood (functioning most often as ‘infotainment’) bears an extremely attenuated relationship to reality while pretending to be as close to it as possible (especially in the case of so-called news media); it is simultaneously excessively vociferous and resoundingly ‘dumb’. The work in this exhibition literally indicates the ‘dead end’ of a ‘political art’ falsely enamoured of its assumed transparent efficacy as a convenient vehicle for political ‘messages’. Art is paradoxical, neurotically or not, as the product of an inevitable underlying tension. That tension itself is political irrespective of ‘political’ content.
Contract 2011
Alex Gawronski: Contract, 2011
‘Salon’, Eastern Bloc, Rozelle, Sydney
(Compressed charcoal, cartridge paper, backing board, glue, frame)
What is a work of art if not just that, a work. It is the culmination of mental and manual processes whose labour conjoin to produce it. Ideally, the artwork is open enough to allow audiences to actively contribute to its meaning. Thus, the audience supplies some of their own labour to the artistic process. However, what is a work of art before it has been recognised as such? Is it just raw material? This question is more complex than it sounds, for what is the line that ultimately separates a bone-fide artwork from the common world of non-art objects? And besides, when is a work of art ever truly finished, how unfinished can an artwork be before being dismissed as mere ‘stuff’?
‘Contract’ poses such questions by presenting the prima-materia of art as the ‘finished’ art work. Entombed within its frame, the work of art yet-to-be is offered to the audience, not so much to symbolically complete, but to effectively start from scratch. At the same time, as the audience is forever physically locked out, the materials on show begin to function as museological artifacts or found objects. In fact, ‘Contract’ challenges the presumed unpremeditated ‘indifference’ of the Duchampian found object: even some of Duchamp’s found objects existed in sketched or pre-notated form. Alternatively in this instance, the lump of charcoal and piece of plain paper suggest their priority over the found-object-to-come by transforming the most basic unaltered physical interface into the idea.
Untitled (No Standing) 2011
Alex Gawronski: Untitled (No Standing) (artist’s mock-up), 2011
‘Chain Letter’, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica California, US; curated by Christian Cummings and Doug Harvey (and Jane Polkinghorne)
(Vinyl lettering on concrete floor)
‘Chain Letter’, the exhibition for which this work was produced, was an exercise in both curatorial inclusion and democratic excess. A number of artists were asked by the show’s primary curators to select 10 artists they admired. The resulting exhibition was a mass amalgam representing a web of affiliated and/or competing artistic voices. Thus ‘Chain Letter’ could be seen to either celebrate multiplicity or to satirise myths of inclusion and the desperation of many artists to appear as insistently as possible. This text piece attached directly to the floor took such considerations into account. On the one hand, it humorously suggested the lack of gallery floor space remaining after installation of works had been completed. On the other hand, it commanded from the audience a much broader and paradoxical feat: to view the art on display without standing. Further questions were implicitly raised regarding the habits of ‘average’ viewers who distractedly graze artworks, a tendency emphasised and exacerbated by the curatorial mechanism of this exhibition.
