Scott Redford, John Stafford, Hiram To, Jay Younger
Art as a Discipline.
The works were all performed with aplomb and a keen sense of mise en scene : objects, images, and text were all arranged very deliberately, as if from story-boards; and the refusal to construct either meaning, artistic personae, or viewer response was the overarching strategy. Cards were played so close to the chest that even the players couldn't read them. But that seems to be the thrust of the whole adventure - to simply play, with scant regard for rules or convention. It is a familiar strategy that has long since worn out its currency as a radical break with Modernism. But, as always with this sort of work, redundancy is an active agent in the game.
A brief description of the single group work tells all: in the middle of a darkened room, off from the gallery full of individual works, a saucer of rancid milk sits atop two bales of hay which are lit theatrically from directly above. Call them neeconceptual, if you have to, but only drop it into the conversation as an aside.
Art as it was Experienced.
Jay Younger offered a new figuration of the post literal. Scott Redford supplied both thick and thin edges of the wedge. Hiram To chose not to identify that hit record. John Stafford produced the desire to kick his pile of plastic binoculars about the gallery. The Group Work was courageous, strong, oblique ...
Art as it is Remembered.
Firstly, I remembered the viewing experience, which was, overall, pretty dull. Then I recalled the intellectual terrain where the works take place. Barren, still, flat, horizonless - a land beyond success and failure, beyond criticism. Australia