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Enigmatically titled Give, Stephen Little's installation at CBD Gallery consisted of one yellow monochrome on the wall facing the entrance and a number of wooden pallets lining both walls and floor of the gallery. Similar to the artist’s past works, this installation exacted a discussion of the relationship between painting and the readymade.
Thierry de Duve's re-reading of Duchamp’s oeuvre in Pictorial Nominalism, provides a lineage from which one might view Little's artistic practice. According to de Duve the readymade is an alteration of pictorial representation, but it is not necessarily a development that precludes the demise of painting. Different from other art historical accounts positing the readymade as a departure, de Duve surmises that the readymade is linked to the history of painting in the way that it signifies the moment of its 'impossibility'. Little's practice pursues this nexus between painting and the readymade, since his 'paintings' are paintings in title and description only. The yellow monochrome in Give, for example, is considered a painting even though it does not utilize paint and canvas as convention would dictate. Despite its resemblance to a painting, the monochrome consists of mass-produced fabric covering a stretcher. Both fabric and stretcher are industrially manufactured materials which invoke a tradition of the readymade, acknowledging it as a development parallel to industrialisation.
In past works, Little's monochrome paintings have characterised his investigation of both the readymade and painting. For instance, Negative One (1994) comprised five paintings executed with taut clear plastic across a painting stretcher, differentiated only by the presence of a cross-bar on the reverse. In contrast to the definite focus of the monochrome in Give, Negative One suggests an inherent