Livre £tirling
Liz Sterling is an Australian artist who lives in Paris. Her new show at the George Paten Gallery, Livre £tirling, shows definite Gallic allegiance. Should the nationality of an art audience matter?
Stirling graduated from painting at RMIT in 1981 and after one solo show began to move around the world, living for periods in Berlin and Africa before settling in Paris in 1984. Since she has been overseas Stirling has lost interest in painting and taken up the computer as a tool for constructing her images. Livre £tirling is Stirling's third solo show in Melbourne and continues her interest in the consumer image of art.
Stirling's intention in Livre £tirling is to deal with the consumer image of the artist. This is the artist as financial hero, displaying cunning through manoeuvres in the market - insider trading in the studio. To orchestrate this idea she has made her show resemble a business conference. Rows of chairs in the middle of the gallery face a lectern behind which a carousel shows fragments of text from the hung works. To either side of the chairs there are six sets of works each telling a different story about the selling of a mythical artist named Livre £tirling ("Pound note"). The three triptychs in French are doctored newspaper reports that tell of £tirling paintings being damaged by acid in Munich, being stolen from a museum in Amsterdam, and causing riots in Berlin. In each of these narratives, the vicissitudes of the works in the market is granted significance, while their actual substance is ignored. This is part of the point being made: that in an international art market the art itself has