From Baudrillard to Greenberg?—The polite art of the '90s
The American formalist art critic of the 1950s Clement Greenberg-the man who advocated flatness as the intrinsic characteristic of painterly art- would have enjoyed visiting the 1993 Perspecta. He would have enjoyed its elegance and its High Modernist restraint and stasis. The show was coherent, polite, restrained-and profoundly conservative. If this is an accurate picture of what Australian artists have to offer our culture as it wends its way towards the 21st century, then the prognosis is
not encouraging. It is as if all the avant-gardist excitement and the intellectual rigour of the 1980s has been forgotten in favour of a bland, genteel de-conceptualised version of minimalist modernism-very gently spiced with a little tastefully arranged 'grunge' and a discrete dash of political commentary.
The margins of this exhibition were infinitely more interesting than its core. These included: the anti-aesthetic grunge set up in the gallery foyer; plus the one example of technological art (a video by Andrew Frost); Barbara Campbell's performance Backwash; and lastly the virtually inaccessible satellite exhibition set up in a housing estate in Prospect (a $40 one-way taxi ride from the Art Gallery of New South Wales-perhaps the Gallery could have provided a mini-bus service?).
It was these few marginalised works which, in the context of this exhibition, continued the criticality of '80s art, an art which has a legacy in the dynamic heritage of anti-art and its deconstructive and dialectical questioning of the interaction between art and life.
The core of this show had nothing to do with life-it was safely encapsulated in the ivory (or marble) tower of the Church of Art, and many of the works looked like icons to the... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline