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

Untitled (Dead End)

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.