1) 2011/ Oct-Dec
Known Knowns 2011
Alex Gawronski: Known Knowns, 2011
The Institute of Contemporary Art Newtown (ICAN), Sydney
(False wall – timber, mdf – acrylic paint, photograph, spotlights)
Art galleries range from large, highly visible, institutionally funded and critically acclaimed edifices to DIY affairs selling predictably conventional paintings, photographs and art objects. Given the immense disparity this spectrum suggests, what is it that defines an art gallery as such? Is self-declaration enough?
Such questions inevitably lead to the many issues raised by legacies of institutional critique and their relevance today. Indeed, in today’s worlds of art there are many who have again become comfortable with forgetting those (inconvenient) ‘extraneous’ legacies, merely going about the ‘business’ of making and exhibiting art. Nonetheless, it is impossible to simply expunge the irresolvable tension that exists between the role of institutions and contemporary possibilities of autonomy: surely the latter cannot be simply ‘accommodated’ by the former at the same time as the former undermines the latter. Thus the relationship cannot be formally equitable either, ‘a collaboration’, for in the mediated scheme of things, the institution will always hold the upper hand. That is not to say the institution is necessarily a mindless monster either. Certainly the ‘institution of art’ exits outside its most visible representative entities. The point therefore is not to discount the important role of institutions but more precisely to acknowledge that art’s relationship to its institutions will always be both complex and fraught. Too often these days recognition of such tension is entirely dissolved, by artists and ‘arts workers’, for the benefit of the institution at the expense of art’s remaining capacity for legitimate and autonomous questioning of its framing.
With notions of this sort in mind, ‘Known Knowns’ is a deliberate overstatement, a literally literal doubling of a pre-existing fact. The work came about after hearing a mother outside the gallery reply to her son, who queried her about what the space was, telling him it was a ‘shop’. This was regardless of the fact that the gallery at the time was exhibiting paintings and drawings, the most reliable indicators of art’s presence. In response, ‘Known Knowns’ does not do what it should as art by automatically fantasising the (ultimately institutional) space within the gallery as necessarily somewhere else. Instead, the work overstates the art gallery’s existence as absolutely incontrovertible. Now the art gallery conceals nothing; what is exhibited in the gallery is the gallery’s self-awareness of itself. Subverting the standard expectation of the art gallery as a haven for ‘the imagination’, here the gallery states only its presence. At the same time, it alludes to an underlying anxiety founded on the potential inability of galleries to say anything else: what is there to say when everything has been said, when an ‘art gallery’ is always already simulacral? Moreover, what does an art gallery primarily exhibit if not its ‘art galleryness’? In the end, it is the perceived attribute of ‘art galleryness’ that permits a space, any space potentially, to be recognised in this way. Furthermore, in a contemporary world granting little time for reflection or ‘purposeless’ activity, actual contemplation is replaced by instant visual impact or with narrative legibility; the literal becomes a temporal short cut attuned to a scenario where genuine thinking is habitually reduced.
Untitled (Capital) 2011
Alex Gawronski: Untitled (Capital), 2011
‘We Are all Transistors’, Aratoi/Wairapa Museum of Art and History, Masterton, NZ
(Paper, papier mache, plaster, acrylic paint, enamel, steel wool, concrete)
This work was conceived as part of the exhibition ‘We Are all Transistors’ curated by the Institute of Contemporary Art (I.C.A.N.) at the Aratoi/Wairapa Museum of Art and History, Masterton NZ. (www.icanart.wordpress.com. Offsite Projects)
Much critical theory of the 1980s sought to distance itself overtly from what, by then had come to seem the burdensome and unwieldy legacy of Marxist analysis. This was especially the case after 1989 and the collapse of communist regimes around Eastern Europe. As many commentators have mentioned, this period was also contemporaneous with the rise of much opportunistic writing touting the ultimate triumph of Western neoliberalism.
As perhaps something of a revenge on the self-serving orientation of such self-congratulatory ‘critical’ musings, ‘the Spectres of Marx’ – so presciently noted by Jacques Derrida at the time – have made an undeniable comeback. Note the global phenomenon of the Occupy Wall Street protests, but one of a multitude of related oppositional events that have increased in frequency and magnitude over past years. While such mass expressions are by no means ‘solutions’ or even strictly ‘Marxist’, they are a very visible indicator of the significant disaffection of an undeniable percentage of contemporary subjects unsold on the dominant values of the contemporary West.
In this work Untitled (Capital)… Marx has ascended from the bottom of the pile to the top while still unable to escape the rubble of history, the stack of blank concrete ‘tomes’ upon which he is perched. Here an approximation of the iconic once mass-produced, bust of the Marx appears as a type of cipher; a hand-made ‘folk icon’ suggesting Marx’s re-emergence in the present. Certainly the contemporary ‘sketch’ of his image is proving particularly compelling for those previously unexposed to the extent of his critique. Yet what is the place of Marx in art? Obviously the answer to this question remains, and must remain, ambiguous and insoluble. Certainly there is no such thing as ‘Marxist art’ that could be genuinely named as such. Nonetheless, there are practices capable of an awareness of Marxist legacies that perceive a greater role for art other than as inventive decoration or convenient capitalist spectacle.
Summit 2011
Alex Gawronski: Summit, 2011
‘Auction’, Institute of Contemporary Art Newtown (I.C.A.N.)
(Timber, mdf, hand altered coin)
A self-referential auction work, ‘Summit’ symbolically crowns references to Malevich’s model for a constructed utopia, the ‘architekton’, with a triumphalist symbol of today’s most revered value. Literally de-faced though this supposedly universal value suggests itself to be ultimately representational and arbitrary.
Giving/Taking 2011
Alex Gawronski: Giving/Taking, 2011
‘Auction’, 55 Sydenham Rd, Marrickville NSW
(Perspex, screws, coins)
Another self-reflexive auction work: a perspex ‘money box’ already containing 20c pieces the same dimensions as the holes cut in its face. Tributes are payed to the collectible artwork, votives are offered through the hollow eyes of the dedicated fetish-object.
Maximum Content 2011
Alex Gawronski: Maximum Content, 2011
‘The Rest is Silence’, Death Be Kind, Brunswick, Melbourne, VIC
(Cast plaster, steel, screws)
This work was produced for Death Be Kind’s final exhibition, ‘The Rest is Silence’. The theme of this exhibition was the human skull. The piece was conceived as a means of essentially eliding the overstatement and clichés that attend much contemporary skull imagery. I chose instead to consider what the skull contains, the negative spaces and unseen portions of the skull that conceal that which animates the skull (and the individual) in life. Despite the sophistication of contemporary science, this remains largely mysterious. Indeed, attempts to reduce the vagaries of human thought to pure scientific determinism are largely absurd. Similarly absurd are attempts to reduce art to its formal constituents. In fact, this work could be seen to ironically materialise the impossibly literal ‘dimensions’ of thought, in contemporary art as well as in our heads: the cast plaster cube represents 1900cc the maximum cranial capacity of human beings (ironically it could also be seen to physically – and forlornly – embody the maximum extent of human intelligence).
Untitled (Words Travel) 2011
Alex Gawronski: Untitled (Words Travel), 2011
‘Parataxis III’, The Hair Cut Before the Party (THCBTP), London, UK
(Digital prints – WORDS, TRAVEL – mounted on pasteboard)
photos: Eleanor Weber
A simple text intervention as part of ‘Parataxis III’ at ‘The Hair Cut Before the Party’ (www.thehaircutbeforetheparty.net) London, the latest in an ongoing series conceived and curated by Eleanor Weber (www.raddestrightnow.blogspot.com). Parataxis is a term coined by Jacques Rancière pertaining to his elaboration and celebration of montagist principles of discursiveness and generative chaos. This particular work considers what it is to participate discursively in an event from afar especially in a cultural climate ever proclaiming the value of instantaneity and the supposed eradication of distances.
Here, words are cast as material signs physically posted into an unseen space. Installed, the words ‘WORDS’ and ‘TRAVEL’ face one another high across the room. Apprehended individually, ‘WORDS’ conjures in advance and in absence, the words spoken in the space on the night of the event. ‘TRAVEL’ obviously refers to the international(ist) paradigm of parataxis and the fact that the words themselves have literally traveled to be in the show/event. Conjoined, the phrase ‘WORDS TRAVEL’ alludes to the inevitable mobility of language but also of language’s alternate solidity, it’s simultaneous capacity to ‘mean’ and ‘not mean’. On either side of the room these words subtly bracket the action therein.
