SHAUN GLADWELL’S AESTHETIC EXPLORATIONS
Video artist Shaun Gladwell’s rise to prominence has been largely based on his reputation as a subcultural ‘insider’ who turns the actions of skateboarders, freestyling bike riders, graffiti artists and break dancers into aesthetic terms that the art cognoscenti can appreciate. This is however a superficial view of an artist who uses a finely honed aesthetic sense to produce complex and increasingly sophisticated treatments of time, space and states of mind. His characters are usually placed in urban environments and their actions are recorded at various rates of slow motion. This temporal dimension encourages the viewer to observe particular relationships between body, activity and site that the artist describes as a kind of ‘functional sculpture’.
Gladwell began to pursue his interest in the relation between body, space and time in ‘Storm Sequence’ (2000). This video shows the artist working moves on his skateboard on the Bondi Beach sea front. The setting is a calculated staging of the sublime, as white-capped waves and a dark and stormy sky form a backdrop to his actions. The artist uses a contemporary leisure activity as part of an examination of the nature and impact of art iconography and its aesthetic resonances. While the thematic is firmly grounded in the romantic sublime, the work is also part self-portrait, performance and video art. By playing a self-conscious role in this regard Gladwell flirts with a postmodern sensibility, but the overriding concern is to reassess the great romantic tradition. There are various twists to this take, for his use of slow-motion creates a scenario that evacuates a lot of the terror or threat implied by the storm. This strategy realigns the sublime, for it now applies to... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline