A L E X G A W R O N S K I

Alex Gawronski: Logical Volume Identifier, 2014

Plimsoll gallery, the University of Tasmania, Hobart

(HD video, acrylic on canvas, gouache on canvas, timber, enamel, perspex, Artforum magazine, signed, altered colour photographs)

Despite the many drastic changes that have occurred within art since Modernism, usually when we look at art we still logically expect to easily identify what we see. Nonetheless, art as we understand it today is never just itself; it is framed, marketed, presented and globally disseminated in a perpetual multiplicity of ways. In fact, the highly visible but, to all intents, invisible structures by which contemporary art is understood and consumed, create underlying meanings of their own. Interestingly, much contemporary art adverting draws on Modernist formalist language to communicate its content.

The installation, Logical Volume Identifier, using painting, video, photography and sculpture, implicitly asked what would happen if the invisible commercial structures of art were made the aesthetic content of art rather than simply accepting their habitually assumed supplementary role. Beyond merely relying on an obvious Pop lineage, could such art stand as ‘art’?  Alternatively, the exhibition also questioned what would happen to contemporary art as we know it, if the immense scaffolding of advertising and promotion on which the global art world depends, were dismantled. What would art ‘mean’ then and furthermore how would it be understood and valued?