The Samstag Effect
Do you like American music? We like all kinds of music.But I like American music the BEST!Baby (The Violent Femmes, 'American Music' from Why Do Birds Sing, Slash Records, 1991)
The thing that Anne and Gordon Samstag have become remembered for most in Australia is the Samstag scholarships. Gordon Samstag, obscure American painter and sometime lecturer at the South Australian School of Art, in conjunction with his wife Anne, left a perpetual bequest that has become a perpetual hope for successive waves of emerging Australian artists. The Samstag scholarship enables Australian artists, within five years of graduating, to travel and study at an overseas art school.
'Kindle and Swag' is an exhibition of work from selected Samstag alumni, curated by Samstag Director, Ross Wolfe. Wolfe states that he chose the seven artists on the basis that they are ' ...proven individuals of achievement who already command high professional interest' .1 But also on the basis of diversity. And the artists certainly work in diverse mediums, but share, I think, a sense of polish, of a highly refined, trimmed and packaged aesthetic. This may be the result of working intensively for a year or two in a new and challenging overseas environment, or maybe of recent career developments. Certainly, it seems from this show that the abject slacker aesthetic is out, and a diamond hard gloss in.
Nike Savvas's glittering flock of glass flamingos and rushing waterfall paintings using tinfoil, Zero to Infinity 2003, collapse the sublime and the kitsch into a quivering crystalline haze that makes me simultaneously think of Baudrillard, soap suds bubbles, pictures of the Florida Keys, and $2 shop foil pictures. Despite the kitsch