Unfinished: Décor

Damiano Bertoli, Peter Burke, Robert Mangion, Elizabeth Newman, David Thomas.

Unfinished: Décor is an ongoing project experimenting with spatial, material, temporal and narrative structures drawn out of historic conceptual-art contexts. The project resists the traditional boundaries that govern artistic presentation and actively seeks to emphasise porosity, precariousness and doubt as strategies for reflection.

Robert Mangion and Peter Burke invited artists Damiano Bertoli, Elizabeth Newman and David Thomas to respond to the notion of the unfinished in art. Together they trace connections between individual work processes that engage with notions of the unfinished, dealing with the indefinite postponement of closure and making inaccessible the object of certainty. The artists attempt to establish contexts by which the art object cannot be edified or concluded. Instead, there is a bid to establish deeper ontological structures through which artworks are revealed.

Unfinished: Décor draws upon the last work by Marcel Broodthaers entitled Décor: A Conquest (1974). Broodthaers’ exhibition was spread over two rooms and formed a temporary structure that framed the artworks as objects in a precarious way. Contemplation of his installation opens various conceptual dialogues for our renewed approach in Unfinished: Décor. It expands on art’s tactile engagement with the gallery as non-space, the proximity to past and present temporal modes of presentation, the tautness between subject and object interactions, and a post-medium shift to a performative ontology as art practice. Unfinished: Décor develops a curatorial structure from this set of ideas, locating notions of contemporaneity from the passive notion of ‘being in time’ to an active notion of temporal disjunction.

The installation consists of sculptural objects, painting, photography, video and performative processes, with particular interest in framing temporal events as material abstraction. It will be a situation that explores material in performative ways. The work incorporates processes of layering, reconfiguration and porosity, as means to extend the art objects spatial boundaries, situated within manifold temporalities. Rather than resorting to descriptions of the artworks properties, the art object will be situated as a series of causal relations. The artworks unfoldment will be surveyed throughout the show. The unity and structure of individual artworks are conceived within the interplay with other works and the renewal of their perimeters over time. We will examine how artworks can undo the gallery boundaries and extend as choreographed events into satellite sites through performative processes.

Images | Elizabeth Newman, To love is to give what one lacks, 2012. Found object. Photo: Kieren Seymour. Courtesy the artists.