We’re having a Post-Critical moment, according to Rex Butler. And according to the IMA in Brisbane Scott Redford and Michael Zavros are currently sharing this moment. Strangely then the exhibition is entitled Scott Redford vs. Michael Zavros. Redford is somehow placed against Zavros in terms of their shared ‘post-critical’ turn.
The opening text does little to explain the competitive title, rather adding to the confusion with several vague statements on what each artist is meant to be doing. It’s a little unfair on the artists, as both have their practices simplified in this text, and it does not encourage a deeper reading.
It is unusual for a gallery to berate the art that it is showing, and certainly not helpful to confuse the viewer in the first wall-text. The reason for Redford and Zavros being squared off against each other is unclear as the text makes it readily apparent that if anything, they should be on the same team.
But that is only if that first wall text were valid. The post-critical period that Butler suggests does not apply to Zavros or Redford. Art is critical by its very nature, art that is not critical is better known as craft. Art is shown in galleries and museums because it is part of a critical discourse that artists have continued for centuries, if it has nothing to say it has no place in a gallery.
But the exhibition is in a gallery, and it does have something to say. The opening text, for all of its flaws, does get something right in suggesting that both artists’ practices are post-Warholian. The whole of Pop Art existed as a critical reaction to the excessive, consumer driven capitalist society dominant at the time. It’s the continuation of those circumstances, especially in places like the Gold Coast that have allowed for Redford and Zavros to remain relevant. Zavros’ fascination with surface, the shiny, alluring iconography all perfectly rendered in paint takes little to be translated as metaphor for the attitudes he invokes. Redford sits somewhere between Warhol and Jeff Koons making art of the everyday, but avoids the extra step by not making it part of the everyday.
There is an interesting dialogue that occurs between the works of Zavros and Redford, although Zavros focuses on excessive wealth, or as the text puts it “refinement, privilege, and perfection.” Redford on the other hand favours, “youth and pop-culture”. Occasionally the two intersect. Again, I wouldn’t say one comes out over the other, but that something new is created. They don’t really oppose one another; the title is just an unfortunate red herring. The person Redford and Zavros should be picking a fight with is the curator Robert Leonard. But perhaps they are all in on it together, having made a straw man that forces the viewer to engage, where otherwise they would have walked straight by to the Shaun Gladwell exhibition next door.