Archives: Events
DUCHAMP & PROUST: Renaissance of Perspectives
ISBN: 978-3-86442-397-0
Mercedes-Benz Art Collection
192 pages, softcover, 230 x 150 mm, approx. 50 colour illustrations
Texts in German and EnglishTo be released spring [in Germany] 2023
Art Journal
Muttering and Listening
Editorial work involves listening, opening one’s senses to silenced voices, to the quiet whispering at the porous edges of our consciousness. Gail Hastings notes that sometimes artworks seem to be reticent teachers, “muttering a lesson,” which we have to pry out of them. As both an artist and scholar reading the material and spatial in Donald Judd’s sculpture Untitled (DSS 33), Hastings rejects this metaphor, stating with and through Judd’s works and words that “The knowledge we therefore seek of DSS 33‘s space cannot be found as a critically apt, well-packaged utterance detachable from the work. It is found, instead, in the reciprocal movement of the work’s self-determination, the ‘living force of its existence,’ forever in process of creating space while perpetually wading through the ‘natural confusion’ of life this embroils.” (A pause, here, to agree wholeheartedly with Hastings’s formulation while recognising it as, indeed, a well-packaged utterance of the highest calibre, one that does not deliver a didactic lesson.)Rebecca M. Brown, ‘In This Issue: Muttering and Listening’, in Rebecca M. Brown (ed.), Art Journal, College Art Association, New York, vol.77 no.3, Fall 2018, p.5.
Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize
The 2018 Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize was today awarded to Melbourne-based artist Gail Hastings and Sydney-based emerging artist Adrian McDonald. Celebrating its 22nd year, the Prize is among Australia’s best-known art awards, spanning all mediums and offering a total of $36,000 in prize money. Hastings was awarded the established artist category ($25,000) for colour circle: four colour scheme for a room (2018) and McDonald was awarded the emerging artist category ($10,000) for Approximating a Circle (2018).
9 X 5 NOW Exhibition: ART150
9 X 5 NOW, at the Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne, 16–25 June, showcases generations of practicing artists who have studied or taught at the National Gallery School or VCA Art. The most experienced artist represented attended the National Gallery School in the 1940s, and the youngest completed studies at the Victorian College of the Arts just one year ago.
The exhibition title and concept references the famous 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition held at the Buxton Rooms, Swanston Street Melbourne in 1889. All seven artists in that exhibition, Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Frederick McCubbin, Charles Conder, C. Douglas Richardson, R.E. Falls and Herbert Daly, were National Gallery School alumni. McCubbin was also a staff member and Louis Abrahams, also a former student, supplied the 9 x 5 inch cedar cigar box lids on which the works were painted.
The Missing Space Project: Six Interviews
Gail Hastings’ collection of interviews seeks to counter narrow interpretations of Minimal art, especially those claiming that Minimal art, which emerged in the mid 1960s, is a reductive practice. That misunderstanding dates to its earliest critics, but it neither fits her own experiences nor what she thinks the artists proclaimed. Minimal art is spring loaded with creative energy, and what that force creates is space.
The central issues debated by Hastings and the six scholars, curators and collectors she interviewed in 2015 determine whether Minimal art is a subtractive formal practice or an expansive sensual one and, also, whether it was a short-lived American movement or a widespread tendency in Western art and culture that spanned the twentieth century. For readers new to Minimal art, this volume is a good introduction to historical practices and changing understandings. For artists and art historians, these conversations hold fresh insights into prominent figures, from Kazimir Malevich to Sol LeWitt, while also engage in many who are little known or largely forgotten, such as Charlotte Posenenske and George Ortman. For scholars, there are remarks that invite further research, such as the names of adventurous gallerists in Europe in the 1960s who first showed this art.
Excerpt from David Raskin, ‘Introduction’, The Missing Space Project: Six Interviews, Pigment Publisher, Sydney, 2015, p.8.
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Taking it all away: MCA collection
Exhibition curatorial
Natasha Bullock
Taking it all away [is] an exhibition of works drawn from the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.
Diverse in form and character, the works in Taking it all away set the dynamics of space and time against the complexities of modern existence. Together, these works speak to the importance of art history and to the vigorous, evolving nature of contemporary art.
The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia dedicates this exhibition to the memory of artists Gordon Bennett and Robert Hunter, who sadly passed away during its development.
Natasha Bullock, curator, 2015
Exhibition: To Do
A review
by Chloé Wolifson
Gail Hastings’ major new work Exhibition: To Do is anchored around a large square plywood structure that sits on the earth’s axis – the walls respectively facing north, south, east and west.
The visitor is invited to enter the structure, also entitled Exhibition: To Do, via an opening in its eastern wall. This has the effect of placing the viewer at the centre of Hastings’ universe. The surrounding construction is an assemblage of partitions of varying height, which expand incrementally and symmetrically on the pre-existing dimensions of the plywood (18 millimetres thick).
Only once standing inside the work, Exhibition: To Do, can the visitor view three works on paper created specifically to sit inside the structure. Hastings’ two-dimensional works appear to act as blueprints or drafts for the sculptural components of the artist’s practice, both in the sense of their execution but also their subject matter.
Delicately rendered in watercolour with ruled pencil lines emerging from the edges of the translucent wash, these pieces depict the To Do list in question. One such reminder, the instruction: ‘Build racks in which to store the art after the exhibition’, speaks volumes about the established systems of the art world, and the particular approach artists must take when they create work which sits outside the conventionally commercial.
Exhibition: To Do is grounded in an awareness of space. It is a show which, while rooted in existing patterns and geometries, maintains a sense of humanity and emotion within each ruled, sawed, sanded and watercoloured line.
Excerpt from Chloé Wolifson, ‘Gail Hastings – Exhibition: To Do’, in Deborah Stone (ed.), Visual Arts Hub: Reviews, 2014, http://visual.artshub.com.au/news-article/reviews/visual-arts/exhibition-to-do-243240, accessed 23 September 2016.
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Missing: four sculptuations by Gail Hastings
A REVIEW
by Annabel Crabb
When Charles Saatchi’s gallery opened in South Bank, with its notorious list of headliners (chunks of frozen human blood, sump oil lagoons and rooms full of chopped-up cattle), one small corner was devoted to a collection of newspaper cartoons lampooning the works.
My favourite was one in which an Eskimo, gazing at Damien Hirst’s pickled tiger shark, turned to a fellow visitor with the remark: “My five-year-old son could’ve done that.”
Interaction with art can be an occasion for hilariously multi-directional anxiety. The artist, observing someone observing her work, feels an unbearable cocktail of solicitude and vulnerability. The observer, knowing she is observed, frets that she’s missing something.
Is loud art — sledgehammer art — trying to abolish this moment of tender confusion? A message delivered by means of a decomposing rattlesnake chained to a chocolate wheel may still prove confounding to some viewers, but at least there’s something to talk about in the interim. No awkwardness need ensue, when the spectacle itself fills the silence.
Quiet art, like the work of Gail Hastings, chooses instead to inhabit that moment and furnish it with humour.
Am I missing something? — the timeless fretful self-interrogation of the enthusiastic but apprehensive gallery-creeper — becomes, in Missing, the shape of the artwork itself.
It’s funny, because everyone recognizes this tendency in the civilian art-lover; this scrupulous and obedient hunt for scraps of meaning hidden here and there by the artist, failure to spot any of which might constitute a serious inadequacy.
It’s courageous, because of all the compulsions that I imagine might grip an artist in the act of creation, the temptation to spell it out must surely be one of the hardest to resist.
And it’s generous, because the greatest expression of faith and trust an artist can possibly articulate in the unknown person who will — somewhere down the track — pause in front of her work is to invite them in to it. To allow them the run of the place. To give them the thrill of being in on the joke.
Gail Hastings’ work achieves quite a remarkable state of grace. Taut control in design and execution, coupled with an exhilarating and generous capacity to turn things over, at exactly the right time, to the viewer.
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Sydney Contemporary 13
It is with great pleasure that The Commercial Gallery announces it now represents Gail Hastings and will present a solo exhibition of her work at the inaugural Sydney Contemporary art fair between 19 and 22 September at Carriageworks, Sydney (Booth PC102). It is exciting to be showing new work by this important mid-career Australian artist at what will be the first presentation for the gallery at an art fair.
Press Release: The Commercial Gallery
JANIS II
Janis encompasses a range of activities initiated by Kelly Doley (a member of Brown Council) focusing on female artists, writers and thinkers allowing them “to be heard a little louder, to take up more space and more time in the world” (website). She has teamed up with Amanda Rowell to curate the second Janis exhibition spanning two Sydney inner city galleries, The Commercial and MCLEMOI. Janis II features abstract, conceptual and minimalist work by Bonita Bub, Jenny Christmann, Sarah Goffman, Gail Hastings and Sarah Rodigari (who will be performing at the opening, 26 July). A publication featuring short pieces by an impressive list of female artists and thinkers will also accompany the exhibition. (For the amusing significance of the Lee Bontecou image read Gail Hastings’ insightful essay Thank goodness Donald Judd wasn’t a misogynist.)
by Virginia Baxter and Keith Gallasch, ‘In the loop July 24: quick picks‘, Realtime, issue 115, Sydney, June-July 2013.
Gallery Central studio residency
The residency is on site at the Central Institute of Technology, wherein thrives a wonderfully supportive art school for those preparing to study at tertiary level, right in the heart of a cluster of cultural identities that include the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, the State Library, Theatre and State Museum.
I am forever thankful for this impromptu studio residency, where I was fortunate to make Difficult art decisions: The Blue Pattern, Measuring the missing, Background, and Corner — all of which were exhibited at the inaugural Sydney Contemporary Art Fair later that year, in September.
It was also wonderful to meet Yuhsin U Chang, the international artist who took up residency at the time, whose tentative ventures into Perth’s vast space — the width of an everyday footpath, for instance, and distance travelled from one door to the next compared to Taipei’s — delivered observations of delight to witness.
The residency concluded on 16 August 2013 with an artists talk I gave to students studying art. The talk turned into an unexpected pleasure given the challenging sparks of interest and engagement I encountered from the students during question time.
Gail Hastings, 2013
Direct Democracy
Exhibition curatorial
by Geraldine Barlow
As Individuals we are capable, but so much more so when we act together. The collective body is a complex mechanism: a layering of systems, societies, generations, inheritances and innovations. Groups of human beings have developed numerous models to identify with each other, work together, build societies and exercise power. Democracy is just one of these; with a long history of development. […] How can we actively revitalise, rebuild and own this collective body? What is the place of democracy in the process and what opportunities are there for the development of existing and jew democratic mechanisms?
Direct Democracy explores these questions through the work of nineteen contemporary artists and artist collectives. […]
Gail Hastings offers an abstracted map of the ayes (yellow), the nos (in red) and a space in between in white, in her 2012 work Space holder for a yellow, white and red space. What is the purpose of this space in between? Hastings maps out a sculptural volume for each side of the proposition […] As Hastings’ work states, ‘Until such time as the debate is resumed, the before-mentioned space will remain on hold’.
Excerpt from Geraldine Barlow, ‘Direct Democracy’, in Geraldine Barlow (ed.), exhibition catalogue, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne 2013, p. 91, 98-98.
A review
by Suzanne Fraser
The modern development of a “good form of government”, as articulated by John Stuart Mill in the sixteenth century, finds contemporary articulation in an infinitely fascinating sculpture by Gail Hastings entitled Space holder for a yellow, white and red space (2012). Here the mechanisms of voting, competition, representation, and bureaucracy are lent an elegant and quietly humorous disposition that contorts the understanding of the viewer through ambiguity and metanarrative.
Excerpt from Suzanne Fraser, web review, Melbourne, 28/05/2013.
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Less is More: Minimal and Post-Minimal Art in Australia [withdrawal]
01/09/2012 withdrawal of ABC art: red cube from the exhibition upon receiving the exhibition’s catalogue and reading the curatorial premise for the work’s inclusion, where I gave reasons for the withdrawal that include:
[The curatorial essay mentions] my art (with reference to Floor plan: Empty, except) within the context of Robert Morris’ essay. Not only is this misrepresentative of the place from which my art stems, but I hadn’t even read his notes on Sculpture at that time! Not until some years later.
The text in my art is not narrative. It does not tell a story about Jack and Jill running over a hill that exists externally to the sculptuation it is in. If it were narrative, it would not read the way it does, often stilted, chopped, awkward, blocky, non eventful, monotonous, etc. […] The text is not a bad nor a good story — it’s not a story at all. It functions as a spatial aspect of the sculptuation, that’s all. So people walk away disappointed with my art, with the conclusion I’m a bad writer. But the text has nothing to do with being a writer.
Gail Hastings, excerpts from email to the curator, 31 August 2012
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Notes towards contemporary post-minimalism [withdrawal]
Several ideas stemming from Minimalism, though controversial in the 1960s, are now widely accepted as part of the landscape of contemporary art: for example, the artwork can be fabricated by someone other than the artist; it can comprise modules or units used singularly or repeated, and its governing concept is more important than any craft or technical skills. Minimal artists dispensed with plinths, frames and other distancing devices, thereby activating real space with their works and more directly addressing the viewer. Heide curator Sue Cramer talks with artists Janet Burchill, Gail Hastings, John Nixon and Kathy Temin about the reworking of Minimalism within contemporary art today. The evening will begin with a film viewing, wine and cheese.
Space you can’t sit on: The space in Today
Half exhibition, half archival room – this exhibition presents a number of sculptuations that focus on the creation of space. The exhibition’s title refers, in part, to an included work in which the spatially isolated letters of the word ‘today’ invoke a daily fragmentation that nevertheless come together as one in the end – as ‘Today’. Called a sculptuation, these watercolour floorplans appear, at first, to be far from ‘sculptural’. Yet a sculptuation consists not of solid but of spatial objects that we, admittedly, cannot sit on but which, nevertheless, are just as concrete in guiding the passage of our day.
Gail Hastings, exhibition statement, October 2011
Encounter: Stephen Sinn
In this exhibition there is one work, ‘encounter: Stephen Sinn’. The word ‘encounter’ surfaced during discussion after Fr Steve spent some very long moments silently looking at the work for the first time. For him, the term tended to encapsulate not only the movement happening in the work, but its parallel with what was most meaningful for him in his work with others, especially the homeless – the encounter. It is, as he describes it, the heroic dignity of street people that takes his breath away every day and gives him breath: where it is this encounter that forms him, that makes him Stephen Sinn.
Gail Hastings, exhibition statement, June 2011
Minimalism And Applied II: Dialogues of contemporary art with aspects of 20th century design and architecture
photos:
(upper) Gail Hastings, Charlotte Perriand/Jean Prouvé
(lower) Gail Hastings, Charlotte Perriand
Mercedes-Benz Art Collection
Taint
Taint observed the continued currency of minimalism through the work of six contemporary Australian artists. Formal and conceptual links can be made between their work and the Minimal project of the 1960s; their art is spare with an emphasis on geometric form, their works articulate space and in doing so acknowledge the audience and their role in creating meaning. These tendencies are shared with Minimalism, and yet these works are ever conscious of the archive.
Leave the line standing
After much squabbling over how best to cut the piece of wood, with jigsaw in hand I decided to ignore Mick and get on with the job as I always do — uncomfortable with his audience but, nevertheless — when Mick made a last ditched effort and said, ‘leave the line standing’. Standing? Line? I put down the jigsaw and added ‘baffled’ to annoyed and uncomfortable. I asked what he meant. ‘You either cut the line off or leave the line standing’. Suddenly I realised there was no line standing between us, we had been saying the same thing, just differently. I had been building a wall at the time. When, months later, I came to exhibit my art in the same room, our agreement seemed the right type of line to leave standing.
The process of specific space: Minimal art generally, Donald Judd’s art particularly
When Donald Judd described the new art as neither painting nor sculpture in his essay ‘Specific Objects’ published in 1965, few appear to have taken him at his word. At best, people understood this to be a new form of art that was both painting and sculpture — a hybrid. This hybrid however, is far from a specific object and further still from a specific space. Nevertheless, the hybrid acquired a spatial heritage from both painting and sculpture. Thought to have escaped modernism’s self-critical tendency that had each art medium jettison all it might share with another to retain a successively revived specificity, the hybrid gained not only a medium-plurality in opposition to this tendency, but became entrenched in the specificity of both art mediums, as well, in accordance with it. From painting, the hybrid inherited an expungement of space. From sculpture, the hybrid inherited a phenomenological framework generally mistaken to be space. Together, they did not spell space, far from it. Rather, they spelt the expectation of it, one little serviced by the definition of minimalism that ensued, a definition based not on space, but on materials and techniques that exclude space — with an adjunct added elsewhere that mentions it.
Art from a Hundred Years 1909–2009: Highlights of the Daimler Art Collection
The third presentation of the Daimler Art Collection in South Germany (following the extensive survey at ZKM Karlsruhe 2003 and at the Galerie der Stadt Sindelfingen 2004) at Museum Prediger Schwäbisch Gmünd concentrates on Highlights from the Collection with around 100 works spanning nearly 10 decades – from Adolf Hölzel, the main teacher in the area of South West German classical movements, through to young New York sculptor Vincent Szarek; from classical Modernism through to international contemporary art; from painting and drawing via photography to Installation and Video Art. [… ] Contemporary international art is represented in our exhibition with famous names as well as with young upcoming artists. Their work most often can be read as a continuation of abstract-minimal positions. Artists forming part of Classical Modernism and the avant-gardes of the 1960s/70s—like Josef Albers, Daniel Buren, Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, Richard Artschwager or Robert Ryman—are positioned beside leading contemporary artists as John M Armleder, Sylvie Fleury, Gail Hastings, Kirsten Mosher, Simone Westerwinter or Andrea Zittel.
Faith and Lust: Various Approaches to Formalist Abstraction
Faith and Lust: Various Approaches to Formalist Abstraction takes as a departure point Bruce Nauman’s Vices and Virtues of 1988, which features ‘Faith and Lust’ in neon light, wrapped around a major building at the University of California in San Diego. The exhibition will explore the psychological implications of various modes of production in formalist art.
The exhibition brings together artists from the early years of Australian hard-edged abstraction (Sydney Ball & Tony McGillick) with contemporary artists from Europe (Frank Altmann, Christoph Bruckner & Guido Münch) as well as mid career and emerging artists from Australia who are influenced by and engaged with the legacy of formalist abstraction.
To make a work of timeless art: MCA Primavera Acquisitions
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.
Everyone wants to be close to ‘the wheel of history’, to be remembered, to occupy a place within the wider schema of recent art history; and yet, 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’ being exhibited here for the first time.
Isabel Finch and Clare Lewis, ‘To make a work of timeless art’, in To make a work of timeless art: MCA Primavera Acquisitions, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 2008, p.2.
Sculptural Situations: Gail Hastings
Perth born Hastings is a singular artist distinguished by the extraordinary focus of her practice. … Consistently describing her work as ‘a space made for others’ Hastings creates what she calls ‘invisible architectures’ that invite the viewer to enter a dialogue with what they observe. … As ‘the artist’ Hastings eschews a central position in her work in order to vacate this space for the viewer. … she has invited PICA’s Director Amy Barrett-Lennard and Curator Melissa Keys to contribute a collection of novels to this iteration of her work, further disorienting and de-stabilising the impulse to search for authorial essential meaning.
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