Free Parking

Free Parking: Unitec bDes Painting Graduates Show:
It can be fairly said for current art production in general that artistic autonomy is often one of the immediate demands put upon the viewer. Very loosely put, as part of a conceptual stance autonomy often reflects the desire of content providers such as painters to avoid the cultural censorship that can result (for instance) from the modernist rhetoric of occasionally miscalculated formalist analysis.

Similarly and in addition to this observation, Charles Esche notes the aforementioned tendency of artists as “a state of being or action, rather than something vested in the objects of production. To act autonomously, while committing the results of those acts to specific contexts and conditions, is the move that might preserve the idea of the autonomy of art from its total commodification.”

To a certain extent this approach risks obviating the unknowing art viewer to drawing such negative collusions as befits the villager confronted by a barely comprehensible Zarathrusta type figure, newly arrived in town from his alpine cave and proclaiming the death of something important. What then to make of a selection of graduate art students? Each of this years emerging artists from Unitec’s Bachelor of Design Painting programme have undertaken a period of concentrated study and reflection and have graduated with a variety of autonomous aesthetic practices. It is however as a collective artists show that the viewer in this instance occupies a privileged position, namely through an opportunity of experiencing the varied outcomes of the semi-communal collective which constitutes Unitec’s School of Design.

An investigation of the range of views, beliefs and hypotheses in this show is beyond the scope of this introduction. Nevertheless you are hereby invited to investigate, form and enjoy your own opinions; hopefully emerging with further insight into the study and practice of contemporary art.

MJ Kjarr (catalogue text)