Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan with Tony Twigg
Collaboration comes in many forms. One extreme could be the 1982 collaboration of Imants Tillers and John Nixon, Honour and Glory that superimposed a Nixon image on the corner of a Tillers painting. It maintained the identity of each artist. Another extreme could be the work of the Filipino collective, Sanggawa that produced mural sized paintings seemingly executed by a single artist. This collaboration began on Sunday evening when we were sitting with the cardboard drinking red wine and eating pizza. I went to bed. In the morning on my way to buy breakfast I stopped and looked. The chaos was transformed – art works were loosely propped against the walls as bundles of cardboard – our project could have been completed while I slept.
Then Fredi spent another day tidying. He explained that in his mind art making is tidying – that each day after working on an installation he likes to tidy the space, cleaning his tools in readiness for the next day’s work. In readiness for my time as the maker Fredi left bundles of cardboard leaning against the walls, boxes full of cardboard off cuts,
his box cutter, sticks of glue and his glue gun. I realised that the bundled cardboard had been prepared as a series of propositions. As summer wore on and constructions started appearing it occurred to me that my role in the project was that of “realisateur”– a French word meaning movie director, the author who crafts a script into an apparent reality. With work coalescing, usually where Fredi had left a proposition, I began applying paint. Being painted is a distinction between my work and Fredi’s – his isn’t - mine is – but that might change, suggesting an objective to this collaboration. To approach a conclusion, that neither of us would have considered without the intervention of the other.
gary deirmendjian
15 March - 20 April 2024
Gary Deirmendjian’s exhibition of found objects, eroded by natural forces and urban ware is undeniable beautiful. It also asks the question, are these objects inherently beautiful or do we understand them as beautiful because they mimic objects that art history has taught us to think of as beautiful art?
Central to Gary’s consideration is his assertion that here beauty and perhaps the associated status of pseudo or provisional art is acquired through the application of nil aesthetic intent. Is Gary suggesting that aesthetic quality and by extension art is usually achieved through the application of intent? What then of the vast body of artistic endeavour made with sincere intent that achieves neither aesthetic merit nor artistic quality? In an era of equal opportunity might we then abandon subjective
measures of quality and judge art by intent? A joke perhaps, but the subsequent question – what is the intent of the artist, is most defiantly no joke.
Here, the readymade works of Marcel Duchamp can be dismissed. A human agency is at work, be it unintended or even accidental. Rather than pondering quandaries posed by his objects Gary offers anecdotes about how they came into existence and fell into his hands. These apparently self-generated artefacts, assembled through time as a museum collection identify Gary as a curator with a particular interest in erosion. Beyond providing an
opportunity to appreciate these objects by placing them in a gallery-like setting Gary has avoided adding a layer of artifice to them. That is, he hasn’t done anything to them, which sets him apart from the vast majority of other artists working with found objects. They need to make something out of their found objects, in other words, add a layer of artifice to them. Some people see artists as exceptional people
in command of their medium, while others see them as people so much like you and me that they are you and me. These artefacts that are a consequence of our lives present a truth to Gary unsullied by spurious intent and distracting artifice. His art making that is an observation of our inadvertent truth-telling poses a final question. When someone makes a painting is it the paint smeared on a canvas or the residual empty tubes of paint that is the art work? Given the effluxions of art history and Gary’s observations it seems that
the used paint tubes would be the clear demonstration of our desire to make art as opposed to render what art history has taught us to think of as beautiful art.
Sun
The dream of Hydrogen.
Here is gold
and here is grain
and the nub of thought.
Without this fusion there are no stories
Moon
Dark in the light
because always the myth
of dying and being reborn.
A million moons
shattered on water,
the steps of a dancing child.
Beginning
Somehow time began.
Something set it going.
Then sun made soil,
a thread made braid
and you (DNA.)
Something sprouted.
Days
From shards of intentions
the days form circles.
Motivations and mistakes
tangents and arcs.
Why so serious?
Play, play! It's a game.
Monument
A presence here.
Made to re (mind)
re (collect.)
Echoes of Sanskrit.
A memory of being
before being.
Myth
Creation stories
of sea, land and sky,
stone, wood and field.
Infant myths.
Tales we knew
before we could tell them