The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
The Object of Existence, the show held recently at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, starts off with a very interesting premise. Acutely, putting her finger on a trend in Australian art of the '90s, curator Clare Williamson selects fourteen young artists who make their work out of "real" objects. They do this, she says, in order to “examine the nature of our daily lives through the complex relationships which we establish with often banal or commonplace things". This use of everyday or disposable materials, she then goes on to argue, constitutes a “re-interpretation of modernism and its particular frameworks for the art object''. This, of course, is shorthand for the by-now standard critique of the supposed autonomy of the modernist work of art, the separation it apparently enforces between life and art.
Amongst the artists included in the show are Lauren Berkowitz, who arranges a number of found glass bottles on shelves; Amanda Ahmed, who constructs a series of cubes out of brightly coloured kitchen scourers; Margaret Morgan, who disposes a group of cookie cutters in a minimalist grid; Callum Morton, who constructs a strange trompe l'oeil window; and Rodney Spooner, who hangs a number of his well-known cement and cardboard moulds across the walls of the gallery. Acknowledging the "readymade" inspiration for the show in Duchamp's inaugural act of simply representing a “real" object as art, Williamson concludes her catalogue essay: “The Object of Existence locates itself at the very particular intersection of art and life in which we find ourselves in the '90s. It examines the collapse of the borders between the two in some aspects while admitting the transformative effect which the gallery space continues... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline