2) 2011/Aug-Sep
Making Space 2011
Alex Gawronski: Making Space, 2011
55 Sydenham Rd, Marrickville, NSW
(Mdf, timber, brackets, acrylic paint, digital print, found text)
The architecture and underlying assumptions of contemporary art fairs configure the meaning and role of art in very particular ways. Art fairs neatly compartmentalise heterogeneities for the benefit of connoisseurship and commodification. Neatly housed in separate makeshift cubicles, little thought is usually given to the relationship between one artwork and another or between one stall and another. In fact, the entire apparatus of art fairs (of course there are ‘better’ and ‘worse’) adopts in the least ambiguous way, the general appearance and functioning of retail merchandising. Thus, the attendant architecture of art fairs simply attempts to maximise space as much as possible in order to generate sales. In the process, artworks, once again habitually relegated to traditional wall space, are simultaneously simplified and conceptually degraded for consumerist ends. At the same time, each artwork seemingly attempts to reinstate as convincingly as possible a firm belief in aesthetic invention and of aesthetics generally. Likewise encouraged is a myth of choice between more or less equally ‘inventive’ works.
However, what is an art fair if not an installation that totalises and subsumes everything discreetly on display? The real art of the art fair therefore is the spatial relations it establishes or imposes. In this space, heterogeneous proliferation is actually enclosed by an overall hegemonic system. Where will this system ultimately lead? What will there be to see when everything has already been seen? If anything, there will always be the hope of altering the expectations and rules of the game. For example, we could displace the expectation of representation as a fundamental separation preempting private possession, for the experience of the gallery/frame as a representation of itself in the absence of a represented artist. This would render the spaces of art endlessly metamorphic. With nothing to ‘see’, the viewer as a participant is left with the option of projecting their own desires into space. Who knows, those desires might even be for more space and not more ‘art’ as it is automatically understood.
(images 1-4: installation views/ image 5: gallery before installation/ image 6: found text accompanying exhibition)
Floor Piece/Wall Piece 2011
Alex Gawronski: Floor Piece/ Wall Piece, 2011
(Hand-cut plywood, mdf, wood stain, polyurethane)
A work with dual functions: originally conceived as a floor-piece, this work takes literally the minimalist legacy of art executed for gallery floors. The work implicitly asks under what circumstances a Carl Andre floor-piece for example – daring gallery visitors to walk over it – could be considered just a floor? What is it about such work, literally functioning as a floor, that ultimately frees it from association with mundane experience other than its designation, ‘art’? At the same time, ‘Floor Piece/ Wall Piece’ considers the herringbone flooring specific to classic ‘historical’ museums and galleries particularly in Europe. These floors, often suitably creaky, subtly signify a whole world of tradition and art veneration. In this instance, occupying the corner of a gallery floor, it as if the maker responsible for hand-cutting each individual piece of timber in painstaking homage to the ‘old world’ had simply given up. The task at hand appears to have been either too difficult or, in the end, too unconvincing. All that is left is a finished fragment never to be completed suggesting only what could have been. As a wall work, the piece recalls the hard edges and angular dynamics of Constructivism. Alternatively, it also absurdly proposes the commercial floor ‘sample’ moved to the wall, as a kind of do-it-yourself ‘ready-made’ painting.
