Alex Gawronski, Abstrakt Attack Kabinett [installation detail, 2003]

Andrew Best, Paradise [installation detail, 2003]

ANDREW BEST Paradise ALEX GAWRONSKI Abstrakt Attack Kabinett Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide eaf.asn.au 23 October - 22 November, 2003 CHRIS REID It has become axiomatic that reality is a fiction, a matter of perception and viewpoint, and that we must be wary of taking what we see for granted. This pair of exhibitions at the Experimental Art Foundation extends the detection and exposure of the various realities that we suspect beset our society. Andrew Best's Paradise is a playful installation that evokes an abandoned, even post-apocalyptic work-place by scattering a variety of objects - photocopiers [one lying on its side], indoor pot-plants, lumps of concrete, a discarded mobile phone, and discreetly placed weeds poking through 'cracks' in the floor - in the bare brick and concrete interior of the EAF gallery space. His ironic title prompts us to wonder whether a dysfunctional office might be as good a spiritual destination as we can hope for. But under the glass in one of the copiers is a rubber horror mask of the kind that might suddenly loom up at ghost-train passengers - a jolt of fantasy, or Hell, lurking in the paradisiacal 'reality'. Littering the floor are an empty drink container lying on its side with a light in it to mimic the copiers' internal lights, and some discarded laughing gas capsules, suggesting how the inmates of his paradise - a theme park of simulation and pop culture - find their fun. His work does not quite yield closure - we can even read the plastic plants, weeds and gas capsules as Vanitas objects. Alex Gawronski's installation Abstrakt Attack Kabinett comprises rough wooden partitions that form three sides of a rectangle simulating an artist's studio-space within a partitioned warehouse. In his catalogue essay he analyses the problems faced by artists concerning the nature of representation and their desire or need to address political issues. His installation is a hastily erected bunker from which the artist views war - any war. It is lined with examples of representation - books depicting warfare and landscape in wall-mounted display cases; an outline copy of a Cézanne painting rendered as a diagram; and a landscape whose edge overlaps a painting of camouflage superimposed with text. A large projector screen, mounted on an easel in place of the traditional painting and bearing images of air raids that resemble mere abstract patterns of light, bounds the fourth side of the studio-bunker. The viewers become the artist, trying to decipher and respond to the spectacle. Significantly, the video image is delivered through a hole in the bunker's rear wall rather than from a projector within it. Thus, we artist-viewers lack agency - we're unable to switch off the image, a metaphor for the powerlessness of the home viewer whose view is constrained by a historically determined, modernist viewpoint. Gawronski and Best explore simulation and its effects, Baudrillard's hyperreal. Gawronski addresses the failure or fraudulence of media reporting and artistic and cultural representation. His work is a literal portrayal of his concerns - the bunker in which he locates the viewer is also the classroom of art history, with Cézanne and El Lissitzky as his models. Our reception of news reporting of warfare is seen to be contingent both on modern technologies of representation and description and on modernity's controlling view. Can we trust what we see or read? How should we respond to apparent atrocities? Best examines the constructed, idealised reality in which we seem to exist. His weeds are latex, not real, so they parallel the plastic indoor plants [and obliquely raise the question of why we judge some plants to be aesthetically pleasing and others displeasing]. Both the pot-plants and the weeds simulate real plants and weeds - they are representations of them in the same way that the photocopy is a simulation, concrete mimics stone, and the rubber mask simulates the monstrous within the human. Gawronski's work is in a sense inward looking and self-referential in that it expressly extends the problematisation of art and representation. Best's work is more outward looking in that it begins with what is in the world and refutes its reality and value. Whether by accident or curatorial design, Gawronski's and Best's works complement each other - the former establishes the studio as a metaphor for a mind apprehending ambiguous information and beset with dilemmas, while the latter's drama is symbolic. In exploring ideas about landscape and its territorialisation, both artists seem to be addressing the evaluative, colonising gaze for which male artists in history are renowned, an abiding issue in contemporary art. Each detects weeds, which are an alternative, intrusive, ineradicable reality in the gallery and in the landscape.