One of the most provocative implications of Belgian art theorist Thierry de Duve's article "The Readymade and the Tube of Paint" (1986) is the idea, developed from the writings and remarks of Marcel Duchamp, that all forms of painting are always and already ready-made objects. What is at stake in this process is, for de Duve, not so much an expanded definition of the categories of either painting or the ready-made, but an understanding of an art practice that, while no longer painting as such, is intrinsically about painting itself. In an oblique manner, de Duve goes on to describe such a practice, in reference to the work of Duchamp, as "apropos of painting".1
Semblance, a recent exhibition at Canberra Contemporary Artspace, elucidated a more general strand of this often unacknowledged tendency within contemporary art practice. That is, as stated by Melissa Chiu in a catalogue essay accompanying the exhibition, the common utilisation by artists of the formal conventions and principles of a genre or discipline- such as painting, photography or sculpture- while at the same time incorporating materials and ideas apart from, if not in direct opposition to, that genre or discipline.2 To outline the pervasiveness of this practice, the exhibition contained the work of three young Australian artists (Helga Groves, Shane Breynard and Robert Pulie) and one New Zealand artist (Toby Curnow).
A good example of this practice were Toby Curnow's colour-field 'paintings' which consisted of two black-box television monitors continuously displaying static blocks of bright colour. One monitor, Untitled (1996), contained a monochrome while the other, Untitled (1993), displayed a series of coloured vertical stripes. Although at first reminiscent of a television test pattern, these flat and