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

Alex Gawronski, Unavailable, 2023

(Timber, acrylic paint, glass, Perspex, brackets, pvc, steel, adhesive acrylic sheet)

KNULP, Sydney

In a shop setting, it is ‘material’ that is normally for sale whether in the form of raw materials or consumer products (including art). In this instance, the material simply comprised the supporting structures for what was otherwise absent from the fictional shop context, the consumables that ‘should’ have been there. The handmade facsimile structures – shelves, booths, display cabinet – were simulacra of the functional scaffolding typically used to display commodities. These were the only ‘objects’ viewable.  

In the so-called ‘advanced’ West, we expect practically everything to be always available and we are often annoyed when something we want is inexplicably unavailable. In less fortunate parts of the world, consumer expectations are much lower if not almost non-existent. Availability therefore is simultaneously a question of geopolitical favouring.

However, the West’s ‘natural’ expectation of unending access to goods and commodities in the face of multiplying crises – foremost perhaps of which is mounting climate catastrophe but also global wars – is not guaranteed. A world predicated on ceaseless capitalist growth, on the expectation of eternal access to ‘things’ as ours is after decades of neoliberal ‘free market’ fetishism, is a world disappearing itself for the sake of a, frankly, defunct ideology.

The empty shop physically proximate to KNULP on which this installation is based that also incidentally happened to formally mimic minimalist sculpture, physically represents a template for evermore unavailability.

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