Russell Starer, one of the catalogue essayists for David Griggs and Shaun Gladwell 's dual exhibition at Sydney's new Boutwell Draper Gallery, recently wrote in Postwest: 'We've all winced at the overuse of "exploring ideas" and "challenging notions", or whatever. This tendency has got to stop-surely there isn't anything left to challenge.'1 The initial impression of David Griggs's Radio Death Camp and Shaun Gladwell's Covers and Compressions paintings is that, together, they're 'exploring ideas' of identity, anonymity and iconicity. However, once we've given up looking for such 'depth' in these works, something more interesting emerges.
Griggs's Radio Death Camp series of paintings brings together skulls, camouflage, Balaclavas, gothic churches and B-grade horror- flick text with a graphic quality somewhere between billboard advertising and graffiti. In visual terms this is a death-file vocabulary of pop culture iconography. However, in both titles and images there is some indication that the artist is concerned with heavy issues of death. For example, in We sport fatigues but not for fashion, a graffiti-rendered figure wears fashion-label fatigues for guerrilla warfare, completing a circular exchange from military camouflage, to fad, to mercenary uniform. Similarly, it ain't all that (Waco) shows a white paint-splatter ghost hanging with its toppled KKK hat lying on the ground. Here Griggs implies that the 1993 Waco siege 'ain't all that' it was made out to be by the FBI and the press at the time. Certainly, Waco is one of a series events that scarred America's confidence in its own government-the monumental blunder that inspired Timothy McVeigh's Oklahoma bombing. But then again, we know this, and Griggs's stylised, iconic and rhetorical pop-culture rendition tells us nothing new. The same goes with death