7/3/14

Redacted was made on site, prior to the opening of the festival and remained in-situ throughout. In context the work owes more to a Duchampian approach to the manner in which an art work is defined and considered than it does to a materials and process relationship to, say, the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. This Duchampian contextual lineage to Redacted is perhaps best plotted through Piero Manzoni’s Linee works and their associated production and certification, whilst references to the Bomb works of Petros Efstathiadis afford an obfuscation of our understanding of material and form. The camouflaging of such materiality and form, the redaction caused by the process of wrapping and making surface quality uniform becomes an oppositional strategy wherein the unknowing of constituent objects and resultant form are wholly culturally accessible yet their combination at best suggests an unknown intent, at worst a sinister consequence. Thus, the work taps into our acceptance of those benign systems, which we accept and subscribe to whilst simultaneously acknowledging structures, objects and systems where disguise belies underhand or subversive motives.

The questioning of what constitutes sculptural form in the 21st century is further expanded upon through the siting of the work within the grounds of the Villa Bardini, dating from the 17th century. Here, Redacted acts as a foil to classical sculpture and architectural form. The white wrapping recalls marble, the scale of the work is not dissimilar to some statuary, the implied contrapposto within the work is a dynamic appropriated from earlier figuration. Cornelia Parker’s The Distance (A Kiss with a String Attached) with its own appropriation of the figuration of Rodin and the use of a mile of string after Duchamp’s 1942 obscuring device of the New York exhibition First Papers of Surrealism form a further pertinent context for the work.