Bibliography
Finch Isabel, Lewis Clare,
‘Gail Hastings’,
To make a work of timeless art: MCA Primavera Acquisitions,
exhibition catalogue,
Museum of Contemporary Art,
Sydney
2008.
Excerpt
The decision to acquire the work of Primavera artists began in 1993, the first purchase being a suite of works by Gail Hastings, an artist included in the inaugural Primavera exhibition. […] it is only with the benefit of hindsight that the relative importance of an artist’s work can be determined. The exhibition aims to reflect this tendency by taking its title from one of Gail Hastings’ ‘sculptural situations’ [To make a work of timeless art — 1996].
McDonald John,
‘Trash or treasure’,
The Sydney Morning Herald,
17 January
2009,
.
Excerpt
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]
Michael Linda,
‘No time like the present’,
Gail Hastings: To make a work of timeless art,
exhibition catalogue,
Artspace,
Sydney
1996,
pp.3–9.
Excerpt
Our contrary disregard for objects is challenged by uncertainties that demand we slow down and look now, in ‘this moment’ in ‘the room for finding time’. Perception is phenomenologically present, making it necessary for a work to ‘happen’ in the mind of each and every viewer.
Tharunka ———,
‘To Make a Timeless Piece of Art’,
Tharunka,
University of New South Wales Students’ Union,
Sydney
issue 2,
, vol.42
Tuesday 19 March
1996,
p.33.
Excerpt
Almost daily, we ask “What is the time?”. Gail Hastings’ installation inspires the viewer to ask a much more difficult question: “What is Time”, and with ingenious simplicity (simplexity?) she problemetises the issues of time and timelessness. Her installation consists of three watercolours and four objects with a wall drawing which represents the time and space continuum for the viewer as she/he absorbs the work. Without giving away the show, the artist has provided detailed instructions for dealing with a point in time which disturbs us. She directs the viewer to incise a moment in our history, to create a symbol for it and to bring this symbol into our present as an object. By making its place and form definite and permanent, she simultaneously demonstrates how this past moment may move into our future . Confusion sets in. As we read her directions, imagine ourselves completing them in the (near) future we find that they are already completed by the artist herself. Thus we are made conscious of the “pastness” of her work. Of course, the artist has already experienced this tripality: her image of the future was that of the viewer envisioning her working in their past; a neat twist on the way in which we perceive the past and future to preside over our present. Another level on which the installation works in describing our relationship with time is her very description of the faithful reverence we have for certain moments in history and our determination to preserve them in the context of our present and future. Souvenirs, photographs and the other bric-a-brac with which we fill our homes all symbolise moments in our lives. The very staticity of their nature is revealed by the fact that we outgrow them . When “times have changcd” we are so unable to invoke the meaning of these symbols that we discard them. But what happens to the time whose symbol has been discarded? Unless it is invoked in the present, does the past disappear? The artist solves this problem, in her installation, by ensuring that the viewer is conscious not only of the work as it appears in the present, but also of its life in the past and future. This indeed makes it a timeless piece of art, one so attentive to time as a concept, that its process of creation is never complete.
