Billy

Gruner

Collective Monochrome 8

23-06-07

As a part of an ongoing series visitors are asked to participate in the making of the CM 8 project work. They can add a layer of paint to the canvas supplied and leave their name and e-mail address on the record sheet. Blue paints are only used in this series so works relate to each other and an earlier trajectory; Kline, Palermo, Burn et al.

As a paricipant, your hand like others forms a significant layer in the painting. Your personal addition to the patina of a presentational work registers as a personal and social action. What is produced is an artifact and representative of an exotic gesture- of local fans, enthusiasts, or even those normally critical of contemporary formalist styles of art making. For whatever reason each person constitutes a form of ownership of a work linked to the rest- a project that has begun to have a life of its own, to travel and become known by others. There will be four other works produced including the Brussels work- in Tulette France, Bonn Germany, Den Hag Holland and Copenhagen Denmark this year- adding to those from the USA & Australia. When complete the works will be shown in various places as a final set.

In the CM process individuality and collectivity are joined within an overall gesture. The collective act of pure radical painting attempts to manage a space within a known binary in art. Personally I think a distinction long upheld between realism and its supposed antipathy, pure abstraction, is likewise arbitated. CM 8, in joining the previous post-formalist works outlined, and while remaining a discreet part of an overall project, may also be exhibited elswhere as stand-alone works.

Billy Gruner, 2007

related link: http://www.sno.org.au