Lessons in self-adulation
What is the status of the artist in relation to the work of art? While, in general, installation art could be said to have pioneered the idea of the artist as curator, performance art the idea of the artist as actor, conceptual art the idea of the artist as author, the status of the artist in relation to more contemporary multimedia practices is both complex and indeterminate. Part of this indeterminacy arises from the increasingly technical and technological character of the processes of the production of works of art. Often working with commercial specialists and state-of-the-art imaging equipment, the artist takes on a selection and organisational roles akin, at times, to that of a film director. Abstracted from the processes of making, one could legitimately ask, of whom or of what is the work of art an expression? Does the work of art reflect the artist or does it reveal something else altogether?
These question return us to an old but increasingly relevant concern. That is, the status of authorship in relation to contemporary visual arts. Is the artist as producer dead? Or is s/he alive in a more subtle and sophisticated form? One contemporary artist exploring these issues is Adam Geczy. For a recent exhibition at the Basement Gallery, Melbourne, provocatively titled Lessons in Self-Adulation, Geczy produced a series of computer-enhanced images, scanned from found books including an obscure 1960s encyclopedia, starring himself as an object of heroic adoration and sexual desire. While the formal technique employed is common, found in the work of Tracey Moffatt and Hou Leong for instance, the rendering of the substitution is new. Inserting his naked body (as a form of artistic readymade) into