Kathy Temin, Indoor Monument . . . Soft Dis-play, Australin Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 1995

Personal, social and unconscious memories (as in the evocation of the labyrinth which has many different connotations for different cultures) were appealed to as specific sensations via Temin's continuing play on the aesthetic tradition. As the monuments' received meaning fluctuates with the changes of cultural standardisation and time, the sculptural form and style of the monument also recasts itself. Transformation is a strategy that effects a shift of standardisation and thus affects our perception of tradition, and the aesthetic value of objects.

Since the late 1980s, Kathy Temin's work has considered the canonical domains of art making processes as a highly subjective collection of accumulated objects, gathered and held tightly together by a formal set of rules. Temin's work might appear at first glance, to simply be a pun - linguistic, or formal - upon an art object, or upon an object as art, but this is not the case. The work is concerned with more than simply rendering the canonical minimalist's and post-minimalist's forms in fur, felt, plastic, or any other readily accessible fabric for the purpose of transgressing an art boundary. The frontier here is not exposing or illustrating any particularly revelatory concern, notwithstanding Kathy Temin's personal and public references to Jewish history or to the holocaust - the point is a perceptual expression of objects. These objects have social, political, cultural references, but as Andrew Renton described in his essay for the catalogue which accompanied this exhibition, a key point made by Temin's work is the idea of the possibility of a definition (of things) via expression of continuity.

The monumental was wryly expressed in Indoor Monument . . . Hard Dis-play, the work literally an environment of one of Frank Stella's black paintings, Die Fahne Hoch (Raise the Flag). Rendered into a sculptural form, it became a three dimensional spectacle into which the viewer could venture. Thus the painting had life breathed into it; its forms suggestive of labyrinthine structures. This work became a curious portrait of Stella that represented the ambiguous nature of the intention and interpretation of artworks - by artists and critics alike. A labyrinth which has no solution, unlike that final one advocated by Nazism, and uneasily evoked by the title of Stella's work -taken from the first phrase of the official marching song of the Nazi party. The referential potency of political symbols is undeniable, but unclear with Stella's work. The same reference, used as an object, had more specific political and cultural agenda in Hans Haacke's 1991 installation of the same name: Die Fahne Hoch in an outdoor exhibition "Argus Auge" held on the Konigsplatz in Munich.

In Temin's work, Die Fahn Hoch becomes a gesture toward feeling; the sculptural form becomes an accumulated block of memory. The viewer can choose how far they want to pierce that secret space. Gesture means demonstration, or indication, which in turn implies manifestation. Thus, the gesture of the brush stroke has become display, or 'dis-play', as the titles of Temin's works of the past two years attest. In Indoor Monument . . . Hard Dis-play, the gesture of the brushstroke was quite obvious. Frank Stella's black lacquered canvases are thus speculated upon as problem - linguistic and formal - the intended (aesthetic) meaning forever suspended.

Indoor monument . . . Soft Dis-play played out perception as a corporeal act. A tactile room of feeling was set up as a shrine, where the act of mourning invokes the presence of those absent.

In the third room, Indoor Monument . . . A Monument to the Home, the modernist works on the walls of the room are not models, in the way that Indoor Monument . . . Hard Dis-play operates as a reproduction, as something of an architectural model of Stella's work. The works in this installation are like souvenirs; the intangible information of heritage.

As monuments the three environments addressed an experience of thought outside the defined perimeter of prescribed social experience of remembrance of culture. Art's aesthetic facility is the ability via expression of ideas, to offer an expanded way of thinking about things. To allow a different way to see, and to perceive the world in general; differently, but as more than a simple conundrum. As in concrete poetry, experience and beliefs are demonstrated by form; the structure of the memento.

Felicity Coleman.
1996

Kathy Temin, Indoor Monument . . . Hard Dis-play,, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 1995

Kathy Temin, Indoor Monument . . . A Monument to the Home: detail, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 1995