The Path of Duty is the Way to Glory

The Path of Duty is the Way to Glory
(I Am Never Sure of My Place)
1991
photographs, metallic and enamel paint, adhesive lettering on custom board
20 panels, each 400 x 300 x 40mms
for exhibition Cite, Sight, Site, curator Linda Sproul, Linden Gallery


'Going beyond the iconographic content of the brief, Fereday comments on the position of the (contemporary) critical artist in terms of that of Tucker and his ilk in the context of the history of Australian art. She executes a witty reworking of Matisse's ideal of "Art as a comfortable armchair" in the age of the corporate image and ergonomic furniture. A small image of a state of the art corporate "erg-chair" alongside the name of an equally impressive, blue-chip investment artist is depicted on a series of panels juxtaposed against an identically configured series of panels containing minimal subject/verb constructions such as, "I Resist" or "I Reject".. On either side are a pair of Krugeresque aphorisms, "I am never sure of my place" and "The path of duty is the road to glory" . Ambiguities arise when we look deeper into this apparently self-evident deconstruction of the corporate art structure: the deliberate simplicity of the critical gesture suggests the way in which criticality itself is so easily absorbed by "the system".'

Patricia Piccinini and Peter Hennessey, exhibition review Cite, Sight, Site, Eyeline, Spring 1991


 
 
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