'21ST CENTURY'

INSTALLATION ART IN ITS PRIME

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To collect and engage with the art of the present requires us to take something of a leap of faith. It’s a bit like the moment when you step into Carsten Höller’s enormous slide…that moment when you let go and let gravity draw you down the spiralling slide, uncertain of where you will find yourself at the other end.

Tony Ellwood¹

Tony Ellwood’s metaphor of a spiralling slide to uncertainty held no purchase with Weekend Australian’s art critic, Christopher Allen. In a somewhat scathing review of ‘21st Century: Art in the First Decade’ at Queensland’s Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), Allen labelled the show as carnivalesque, and cast Carsten Höller’s Left/Right Slide (2010) (which precedes the main body of the exhibition) as entry to a ‘rambling circus’ trafficking in low-brow populism and ‘meretricious and opportunistic work’.² For some reason Allen seemed particularly bothered by the audience, describing them as ‘people from the shopping centre’, or ‘Families in shorts and leisure wear, children and teenagers, girls and young women…with sad, hopeful or even slightly shame-faced expressions…rather pathetic’.

The day this review was published the exhibition was indeed pumping with people from a broad demographic scope and, good grief, some even may have come from shopping centres! The idea that contemporary art itself aims for a more broad-based popular appeal than art of the past is not in Allen’s radar, nor any reference to how immersion within a vast accumulation of Spectacle is one of the defining characteristics of our time. This exhibition, after all, is all about ‘our time’. But the most telling aspect of Allen’s review is his attitude to ‘meaningfulness’, and more importantly how he expects... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Olaf Breuning, Easter bunnies, 2004. Type C Photograph, 122 x 155cm. Purchased 2010 with a special allocation from the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation. Collection Queensland Art Gallery.

SUPERFLEX, Flooded McDonalds, 2009. RED video installation, 16:9, 20 mins, colour, sound, ed. 3/5. 400 x 700cm (variable). Purchased 2010 with funds from Tim Fairfax, AM, through the Queensland Art Gallery
Foundation. Collection Queensland Art Gallery.