Exhibitions / Taking it all away

18.12.2014 to 22.02.2015

Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney

What might happen if you took away time, so a 24-hour day was condensed into 18 hours? What are you left with after 260 volunteers have spent five years erasing a magazine by hand – page by page?

These questions about our relationship to time, and how it might be spent and measured, represent one line of enquiry within Taking it all away, an exhibition of works drawn from the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. This selection of work also speculates upon the continued importance of minimalism and conceptual art, the processes of erasure and abstraction, and the social impact of art. The exhibition includes work by Gordon Bennett, Christian Capurro et al. (feat. Chris Bond), Peter Cripps, Gail Hastings, Robert Hunter, Rose Nolan and Stuart Ringholt.

Diverse in form and character, the works in Taking it all away set the dynamics of space and time against the complexities of modern existence. Together, these works speak to the importance of art history and to the vigorous, evolving nature of contemporary art.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia dedicates this exhibition to the memory of artists Gordon Bennett and Robert Hunter, who sadly passed away during its development.

http://www.mca.com.au/exhibition/taking-it-all-away-mca-collection/

Artist Statement:

Chris Bond

Vogue Hommes, September 1986, Mirror

A few thoughts

I can’t remember when I first met Christian Capurro, or when I heard about his erased magazine, Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette. It feels like forever, but it must have been sometime in the early 2000s, probably at about the time I was undertaking a studio residency at 200 Gertrude Street. The timing is important, as I’ve attempted to make my response to his work using thinking, materials and techniques common to my practice at that time.

In terms of methodology, it fits with my current interest in what I call fictional play, an invented term that describes the performing of fictional variations of self-identity through the use of role-playing, pseudonym, identity simulation and self-deception. Previously, I’ve used it as a technique to side-step self-conditioned responses to ideas, materials, and forms, inhabiting the bodies and minds of invented artists and writers to generate new form. Here, however, I’ve used it to try to step back into an earlier version of myself.

In the early 2000s I used one material above all others- artists’ linen, either in its raw state for sculptural work, or coated with rabbit skin glue to make a surface for painting. For me it represented tradition and the void, a mid-toned ground that bridged my interest in conventional materials and the allure of nothingness.

I made a lot of work at that time that was reactionary and oppositional. I painted ravens from bird watching manuals in negative so that they looked like white doves, turned stretcher bars into linen-clad memorials to Greenbergian Formalism, painted replicas of 1970s paperback book covers with all the text removed, exhibited landscape paintings at artist run spaces, wrote essays of postmodern gibberish, and was generally a pain.

So my response to Christian’s work feels right. It’s an exact replica of the original magazine in its freshest state, before it accumulated wear and tear by handling (and erasure), but made entirely in reverse. The spine is on the opposite side, and all the imagery and text is mirror-reversed.

The mirroring turns the vague comprehensibility of the French text of the source magazine into something less comprehensible. As a result it becomes somewhat less useful, though it still retains the formal components that make it interesting as an object. Nothing is gained here. It takes a turn away from the erased magazine, which instead gains something through the process of it being worked upon. Importantly, the hours of labour involved in attending to the painted detail forms a conceptual bridge to the toil involved in the erasure of text in Christian’s work. Both are equally absurd endeavours.

The innards are made entirely of rabbit skin glue coated linen, as is the cover. The process of painting directly onto the rabbit skin glue coated linen surface without a white primer results in a painting that has a strange flatness, a technique I abandoned a decade ago, but have returned to here.