the faulding exhibition
CHEMISTRY played out in a number of ways: as the various shows it might have been and seemed to be. The casual punter looking to see what 'Art's up to' would have found an interesting assortment of new things-and a pointer to what has been going on lately, specifically among South Australian artists. it might have seemed a show of recent Gallery acquisitions of South Australian work, or of Faulding Bequest purchases. Chemistry could be seen as the Gallery's take on the truth' of recent history, or the bet it was placing-which one could accept, persuaded or otherwise-or judge against one's own conception of these years. The exact status of the works was not clear. Some were neither Faulding, nor even Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) pieces. A number, in fact, were loaned by the artists. The catalogue had it that the Faulding Bequest purchases provided the exhibition 'core '. Worrying about who had 'made it' served to make the art community a little nervous and querulous but was pretty much a distraction. As a survey show it was interesting and probably more generous in point of numbers than it could have been if limited to recent gallery acquisitions. Still curator Sarah Thomas was able to avoid at least some gallery purchases. In having collected work by artists who were arousing interest over this last decade, Chemistry-and by extension the Gallery-was pretty much on the money. it registered accurately the character of South Australian-read largely Adelaide-art. Chemistry was dominated by installation and a fairly high degree of abstraction in its thought: the legacies anddicta of conceptualism being grafted on to the neo-minimalism and kinds of postmodernism that have since