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| Work:
four recent projects Kate Daw William Mora Galleries March 6 - March 29, 1997 Melbourne |
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Kate Daw, Antique
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Work is
the product of time spent by Australian artist Kate Daw
at the Glasgow School of Art as a Samstag Scholar during
1995 and 96. As a whole, Work is dominated by two
questions: "Why painting now?" (featured in a
letter to Daw's fellow Masters students as documentation
for the project Donated Images for Painting, and
"Have you ever looked at the job description for a
secretary?" (which was put to Daw during a tutorial
on her work at the school). The latter question is quite
literally answered in a work comprised of ninety tiny
stretched canvases on which Daw has typed a transcription
of the catalogue for an auction of antique nik naks and
home-wares. Both questions are understood in the context
of conceptual art. The work in Work is all about artists' work - process, not product - detailing the work an artist does using conceptual art as a job description. In an interview with David Noonan featured in the exhibition's catalogue Daw notes that much conceptual art was about "mapping the ordinary". Certainly, Daw's version of conceptualism foregrounds the ordinary, the personal and the sentimental. In this Daw sidesteps the political proselytising of other modern day conceptualists like Sophie Calle whom Daw references in Poodles in Paris, 1-3 January, 1996 (Looking For Giorgi). Her series of twenty-one colour photographs (accompanied by a map and notes) snapped by Daw whilst on a three day poodle spotting spree in Paris, functions as a send-up of Calle's psychologically charged works. Yet Daw's use of the poodle as research topic, subject and motif locates the personal and kitsch as a pivot in a serious investigation of conceptual art. Smithson's nonsites project is echoed in Daw's twenty-one black and white photographic portraits of unpeopled work spaces at the Glasgow School of Art. Studio Portraits, MFA Department, Glasgow School of Art, November 1995 represents the sites Daw has visited as a secretary of culture: typing pictures up, making notes, bringing back samples and drawing maps. Smithson's re-presentations of exhausted mining sites as objects for aesthetic contemplation raised questions about human misuse of the natural landscape, creating a sculptural "form" from absence and ruin. Similarly Daw's photographs represent the sites from which the artist has extracted the material for her exhibition. The question "Why painting now?" is specifically addressed by Daw in the project Donated Images for Painting. Her method of response is to pose the question to her fellow students by asking them to donate an image they consider to be worthy subject matter for painting now. The paintings are austere affairs where the rendering of each image on it's standard format canvas board in acrylic paint is merely a formality, accomplished as economically as possible. What Daw's work doesn't come up with are specific or eternal answers to her rhetoric, nor is it really clear how Daw will achieve the aims of the conceptual art practices that she seeks to emulate, practices that "involve the questioning of power systems that operate in our culture". The engaging thing about Work is in the artist's representation of a dialogue on the use and significance of painting, and the issue of the artwork's value for both the artist and their audience. |
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Kate Daw, Poodles
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Kate Daw, Studio
Portrait |
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| Andrew McQualter April, 1997 © The
artist and |
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