flower power 1960s/1990s

RARELY has a slighter show had a more grandiloquent title than To Make A Work Of Timeless Art. […] The title work of this show, To Make A Work Of Timeless Art (1996), is an installation by Gail Hastings (born 1965), which has never previously been shown at the MCA even though it was acquired in 1997. One can only marvel at the sense of urgency that drove the purchase of this work, then mothballed it for more than a decade. The great achievement of Hastings’s installation is that it manages to be simultaneously pretentious and nondescript. We are told that, in some mysterious fashion, the artist “extends and enriches the minimalist project of the 1960s” by setting up “sculptural situations” that make us “interrogate art itself and its relationship with its audience.”

There is so much “interrogation” and “subversion” in the language of contemporary art that it sometimes sounds like an induction course for the KGB. In reference to one of my old essays, a well-known artist was known to exclaim: “Criticism like this must be liquidated!”

Perhaps the only credible way to read Hastings’s title about “a work of timeless art” is to see it as broadly ironic. The work of timeless art is a pipe dream, a chimera, a bourgeois fantasy. We imagine some masterpiece by Rembrandt or Velasquez but find, instead, a few white boxes and a couple of framed diagrams. This is not, alas, the kind of experience that anybody but a curator of contemporary art might find satisfying or enlightening.

Hastings’s work may be timeless, but if we take the new Art And Australia publication Current as a guide, it does not appear to be current.

[NB: A negative response]