In curating this exhibition I wanted to create an opportunity for examining some aspects of contemporary abstraction which are emerging from the strong and energetic context of the independent exhibition space, Store 5, which focuses (though not exclusively) on exhibition work by abstract artists. Apart from their emergence in this context and their commitment to the language of abstraction, the artists - Bronwyn Clark-Coolee, Andrew Edwards and Anne-Marie May - do not represent a united group of practitioners. A careful assertion of faith in the possibilities for abstraction to function as something more than a sign for the production of art, does not ignore that they are differentiated by geography, ideology and intention. Neither am I interested in presenting their divergence as the kind that articulates clear categories of practice towards defining a unity of contentions. What I hope will be more beneficial is to explore the general framework of their language to see what this might explain about their context.
Store 5 was established by Gary Wilson in recognition of the difficulties of finding, not just exposure, but the frequent and sustained exposure required for project-based practice in the existing system. This is not to claim a position of blanket opposition to the institutional public or private galleries (as is evinced by this exhibition), or that the authorisation such a setting offers is irrelevant to or refused by the artists involved. If there is any opposition in operation, it sets itself rather against complacency and conservatism perceived both in the gallery system and the practice of their peers, though the broad indistinctness even of this suggests a type of freedom-to-change created by the choice not to name or explain. The vigorous and uncompromising abstraction shown at Store 5 proposes a more interesting understanding of the space as a strategy that facilitates authorisation occurring and in a way which allows the "resistant" elements of the work to assert their vitality in different settings.
Another important aspect of this strategy is that it can be understood as a response to the broader problems abstraction is faced with. At a time when discourse is characterised by elegant revelations of a deathly nihilism at one extreme, and at the other by a neo-conservative call to champion abstraction as a form that demonstrates proficiency and apriori communicates "inner truths", the problem is one of finding a position from which the subject might effectively speak. Moreover, abstraction can appear as particularly problematic because, as the emblem used to chart the demise of modernism, its critical potential can seem thwarted by a residue of historical failure. So there is a sense in which abstraction at Store 5 may gain a specific questioning energy from a view that the melancholic language of postmodernism has failed abstraction in particular, and that its critical impetus is not favoured by an easy relationship with the fine art, museum values of craft and marketability.
None of the artists in this exhibition sees their work occurring at an ironic remove from modernism, but rather as a process that problematises and explores the relationship between it and their postmodern context. But what aspects of modernism do they see as significant? Here it is important to acknowledge an affiliation these artists have with the practice of John Nixon, whose influence is sometimes used to "explain" the existence of abstraction by this generation of artists. However, perhaps what better helps to explain the continuity between generations, is an ongoing belief in art's capacity to be vitally connected with the world through a program of continual experiment and an associated commitment to strategies of empowerment.
An aspect of practice these artists also share is an interest in the process of making art, and its serialisation. Each works with often-repeated elements, precisely focused, varied and aimed as individual units, and subsequently built up in pictorial series which form an ever-expanding framework for investigation. This concern for contiguous relations begins to suggest their regard for process as an acknowledgement of the specificity of context and contiguencies of meaning. If this is so, Clark-Coolee's star, May's stripes and Edwards' geometric shapes, can be approached as elements in an argued exploration which re-contextualises the self-reflexive language of modernism by referring to the specific contemporary history of its own making, and futhermore as a coded desire to anchor practice within a diffuse and mutable web of cultural meaning.
For these three artists the link between repetition and economical/social/political conditions found in the theories of Walter Benjamin and the early modernist avant gardes, tends to be a given. They are less driven by the need to engage with the arguments in specific detail than they are to accept them as general propositions which frame their point ofdeparture. As such, the serial production of images does not so much function as an avowal of the effective political and social operations of art, as it alludes in various ways (rhetorically, unrhetorically, and sometimes unselfconsciously) to mass-production and the patterns of proliferation which determine the existence and meaning of signs in capitalist society.
May, Edwards and Clark-Coolee- to quite different ends - assert a concern to use abstraction in a way
which serves to challenge conventionalism in current art and museum practice. There is a kind of anti-painting process of "democratisation" at work, a factualness stated that asks for belief in the possibility of meaning, though splintered and elusive, and begins to distinguish between the differing uses and values that attend its possible contexts. This is to say that there is a political and historical self-consciousness which appears, most obviously in the use of materials by May and Clark-Coolee, which critiques the institutionality of art and strives for a function of meaning apart from those of institutions, and which simultaneously asserts its own importance to the institution through working methods which to some extent presuppose its historicising function.
Because I think that the institutional setting of this exhibition begs particular questions in relation to these artists, I have attempted to address some of these,and have referred only generally to the specifics of the work, leaving close analysis to others. What draws these artists together in a more concrete sense is their commitment not to a style or specific ideology, but to an exploration of the discursive realm. Where Edwards seeks to test the capacity of a formal and more private investigation to provoke apublic response, and May pursues the primary usefulness of her everyday materials (to draw on a pool of public understanding and meaning which exists in the private pleasures of making or building), Clark-Coolee uses a symbol of guidance and location to negotiate possibilities in play with the languages and authority of art.
At this point it is probably not very useful to attempt a closer definition of the individual or collective positions of these artists in relation to modernism, but rather to recognise its importance in an ongoing process that is unusually strong, open, interesting and committed to experimentation; re-solving rather than resolved.
As lan Burn and Lyotard have put it: "With the new art being authorised by the institution, more frac-
tured and fragmented forms of expression could be pursued with the values being more illegible and elusive than had conventionally been the case with modern art. The effect was . . .to refine our sensitiv- ity to differences and to increase out tolerance for incommensurability."