Bibliography
Alexander George,
‘Primed Suspects: Gail Hastings’ Sculptural Situations’,
But is it Art?: Sculptural Situations by Gail Hastings,
exhibition catalogue,
The Cross Art Projects,
Sydney
2003.
Excerpt
Called sculptural situations, paintings look like pages torn from an encyclopaedia, and sculpture looks like furniture. […] As in a detective story, or the scene of a crime, everything is primed or poised for meaning. That corridor to the library and that picture on the wall: everything in the mystery seems chosen, asking us why it is there. Everyone becomes a suspect. We bring our private eyes along and take partial views of the whole. In the meantime we interview eyewitnesses, flick through art catalogues, and try to second-guess the spooks. It’s an environment of suspicion, and we have to read between the lines.
Kelly Lisa,
‘If Anything.’,
in Gwynneth Porter and Dan Arps (ed.),
Natural Selection Magazine,
issue 1,
2004,
pp.7.1–7.2
.
Excerpt
Hastings’ recurring construct or motif is the detective story, whose various tropes and characters frame the alternating presence, absence or very question of the ‘work of art’. […] Here the viewer is implored to investigate a ‘big cover-up’, to ‘go disguised as an art viewer and note all suspicious circumstances – such as other art viewers. And remember, nothing is ever nothing’. If anything, that is.
Lewis Ruark,
‘An emailed note concerning an art talk by Gail Hastings’,
in Gwynneth Porter and Dan Arps (ed.),
Natural Selection Magazine,
issue 1,
2004,
p.7.3,
.
Excerpt
I went to a curious event where the artist Gail Hastings spoke […] As a leftist I was not convinced in the slightest. But I was prepared to enjoy something else – I liked the theatre of her proposition. The proposition didn’t matter for me, the rhetoric couldn’t have been better, the body language attractive, her mannerisms unique and almost televisual.
Holdings
But is it art? red, blue, violet
is in a private collection: Chicago, 2009.
