Fun + Games =
POST CONTEMPORARY ART
SCOTT REDFORD/ FUN + GAMES =
“...for art to have substantial and credible traction on anything beyond or larger than itself, it is necessary to exit contemporary art.”
— Suhail Malik
These works are deliberately populist. They belong to my series dedicated to images and ideas about The Gold Coast. The works needed to be populist to emulate the visual style and appeal of The Gold Coast. In some respects my earlier 80S "black" construction works could be seen as the dystopia to my current utopia.
In these works I am not critical at all of The Gold Coast. My affirmative embrace of the much maligned Australian city (Australia's sixth biggest city) was always meant by me to inherently contain a "LEVER" against the of so-called official culture in Australia. In the manner of Warhol, Murakami and Koons et al, the underlying basis of my gestures has been polemical. Some make shallow criticisms of my "big, glossy" polar bear works BUT those works are glossy for a deliberate reason.
What I have always admired about The Gold Coast is that it deflects all criticism. I have said before that The Gold Coast was Australia's only true post modern city. The Gold Coast is also Australia's home of Post Contemporary Art.
Fine Art is an aristocratic medium, it is inherently elitist. Contemporary Art has become radically homogenous, it all looks the same, it is all "pluralist". This is Contemporary Art's "style", its look. In 50 years we will know the work of the Contemporary Art epoch just as we now recognise Art Deco or Modernist. However Post Contemporary may still look like Contemporary Art as CA looks like everything else in the world. The real new art and the real new artists are to be found on the internet and Social Media, increasingly we see their art on the evening news and the mass media.
Contemporary Art will end and the rise of the consumer/ producer is with us. And yet The Gold Coast always remains the same, it's own shallow self.
Courtesy The Artist, 2015
New paintings and sculptures available from opening night.