New Ideas For Cake
Art is full of clichés, and so is the world beyond. So, are art works made by remixing clichés and conventions bound to taste the same? Will the flavour of the raw ingredients overpower the result, or will something magical happen in the process? This is what is at stake as we navigate the linguistic minefield of meaning and meaninglessness in the video work of Grant Stevens. In ‘New Ideas For Cake’ Stevens’ final PhD exhibition, and, like television ads during Superbowl, he’s turned it up a notch. Gone is the familiar white text flashing against a neutral black ground; instead, we see colour, music, three-dimensionality (albeit virtual), and a large-scale dual screen installation. The three ingredients—or new ideas—for ‘Cake’ seem exotic at first, but they are actually as familiar as the staples with which Stevens usually cooks. Like reworking the ingredients of a family recipe, Stevens has simply added a different dressing to a seasoned favourite while the substance remains the same.
The catacomb-like space of The Block, bathed in an ethereal mango-coloured glow (‘visiting shades of peach and nectarine’) envelops the viewer as they stand before the split projection of Turtle Twilight (2006). The left screen rapidly displays a handwritten font revealing the personal yet banal details of a sailing trip gone awry (skimmed from an online travel blog). Pseudo-philosophical musings on the stars and quasi-profound commentary on the state of the world are interspersed with the mundane specifics of holiday diet and sleeping patterns. (Anyone with friends overseas knows just how painfully boring the minutiae of daily travel life is) However the speed of the text and its very insistence as language means it is hard to