Reinhardt Dammn: Burn Rate
If you're confused by this show, the artist has kindly included a manual.
Overview
Chippendale's MOP gallery is currently full of record players, spray painted uniformly black and popping out of the white walls. On one of these walls, in an MTV-style spoof video clip, almost naked women leap around, spray painting more record players and themselves. The show is called Reinhardt Dammn: Burn Rate, and it’s by a Brisbane artist, Scott Redford.
For those often confused by the contents of art galleries and their bottomless avenues of interpretation, Scott Redford has a remedy: he’s provided a short, zine-ish publication that more fully explains the ideas behind his work. It’s a welcome effort after all, the context surrounding an artwork doesn’t just affect the work, it changes what the work is.
It turns out Redford's show is stuffed full of ideas but it's difficult to find a coherent stream within his manifesto. The publication, and the show itself, read like an unfinished thought, flitting between the artist's frustrations about the reliance of Australia's art world on government funding, what he sees as the redundant concepts of high and low art and the impact of manic media consumption on contemporary art. As a result, not all the dots are connected and the purpose of the blackened, technologically redundant record players remains a little elusive.
What’s most interesting are the zine’s final pages, which contain Redford's application for a grant to the Australia Council (the government art body that funded this exhibition), as well as a previous, unsuccessful application. It's an unusually honest and transparent move. There's a lot going on in Reinhardt Dammn: Burn Rate, but it's still refreshing to see someone unveil the usually opaque machinations of the art world.
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