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"It seems to me our dialogue does not break the silence we are floundering in ...”
Edmond Jabes
"The work is deeply concerned for art. This is to say that for the work, art is never given, and that the work can find art only by continuing towards its own completion in radical uncertainty, for it cannot know in advance whether art is what it is."
Maurice Blanchot
1. While the works of Judith Wright, Jill Barker, Sally Cox, Judith Kentish and Janet Callinicos appear quite disparate, there are striking similarities in the ways the five Brisbane-based artists position themselves in relationship to their art practices. Each has a marked tendency to privilege her overall practice as being something more than simply a body, or collection, of self attributable art works. These artists ' engagement with practice equates to a total involvement with, and commitment to, process. Process, used in this sense, is not simply the making or manufacturing of artwork, but an operation in which all the attendant issues of making- thinking, looking, researching, feeling , responding, being- are given equal attention and priority. For these artists, it is almost as though practice is seen as a working involvement with those evanescent and continually fluxing sets of structures and familiarities we label the self.
What further particularises these practices, and will be focused upon in the course of this essay, is the seeming ambivalence felt by each of the artists to the situation I describe. And around this ambivalence there is a tension: a tension that relates to the nature of art and exhibition, wherein the... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline