Exhibitions
Reinhardt Dammn's Cold War
Scott Redford interviewed by Malcolm Smith
MALCOLM SMITH: Who is Reinhardt Dammn? What does he look like, where does he come from, where does he live, what does he do?
SCOTT REDFORD: Reinhardt Dammn is not his real name. He changed it by deed poll when he turned eighteen. His name is part-Dickens, part-punk. He renamed himself in the manner of Sid Vicious, Johnny Rotten and Billy Idol, confl ating the name of American painter Ad Reinhardt and the word 'damn'. Reinhardt is twenty-two and looks like a blond-haired surfer dude. He surfs, paints and sings in his band, whose name keeps changing but is usually Reinhardt Dammn + Honey Pump. It is rumoured that Reinhardt sells recreational drugs to his mates, to whom he is 'King of the Kids'. He is trying to break into the art world but, as he didn't go to art school and comes from a regional area, he has a hard time of it. He has some artworld supporters as he does have talent and more importantly 'front', but his relationship with art's 'powers that be' is fraught. In short, he hates them! Reinhardt is a conflicted lad. As one of his songs says, quoting Hamlet: 'Nothing's good or bad, but thinking makes it so' ('Me Hamlet NOT'). We don't know much about Reinhardt's early life. He lived with his mother at the Tugun/Currumbin end of the Gold Coast. His father was never around. It's debatable whether his mother knows for sure who his father was. She was a Suzi-Quatro-ish singer in a band in the early 1970s and now lives in Tasmania with her current husband. Reinhardt left Palm Beach/Currumbin High School at 15 (actually 14) and has lived in share houses ever since.
What is your relationship with Reinhardt?
Reinhardt is not an alter ego, he is a fictional character. I'm working on the proposed film of Reinhardt's life as a scriptwriter and set designer, maybe also as co-director if it comes off. It's one of two screenplays I'm writing. I dream up songs for Reinhardt's band (and new band names). I make new artworks for him, often based on styles of my work from the 1980s, mainly the black combine-paintings and the six metre wedge-shaped Cold War paintings. Having been consigned to the discount bin of that 'power mirror' we call local Cold War art history, these works have become 'useful' again. (Actually Power Mirror could be a good Honey Pump album title).
When you made the Cold War paintings, they referred to American abstraction from the Cold War 1950s to the 1970s, from Ellsworth Kelly to Ronald Bladen and Richard Serra. But what are Reinhardt's 'wedges' about? What inspired him to create them? What does he think they mean? How does he want us to respond to them?
I suspect he's read those conspiracy theories regarding the CIA's deployment of American modernist art as propaganda during the Cold War. Reinhardt knows fine art is an inherently elitist, aristocratic medium. He is very suspicious of the motives of art's powers that be. He has regenerated what he believes might be art from that period in order to assume some of its power for himself, the power he knows he needs to combat 'them', those who deny him power. The hugeness of the wedges makes him feel powerful even though he knows he isn't powerful and never will be. They are big enough to be skateboard ramps. They are menacing too, like stealth bombers.
But people will immediately say that Reinhardt is a surrogate you, if not an alter ego then at least a projection of your attitudes towards art and the art world. You made big wedges first.
Well, novelists are regularly accused of writing autobiography, especially with their first books. On the one hand, novelists and artists must be implicated in their work if it is to have any validity. And I felt I needed to use my own work as a kind of 'guinea pig'. On the other hand, the true meaning of art now doesn't reside in the actual work or with the artist, but is a kind of group fiction prone to conflation and manipulation, very much like popular culture. Reinhardt is an experiment in art to test the limits of current notions of originality and authorship. He's like a form of 'interactive fiction', that late 1980s text-only precursor to Second Life that is more like collaborative fiction or even the participatory novel. Others—my friends, assistants, curators, gallerists—now all have input into Reinhardt, sometimes very emphatic input! A gay friend was affronted when I said that at a crucial point in the plot we find out that Reinhardt is bisexual. He wanted Reinhardt 'pure het'!
Are you as paranoid as Reinhardt?
I have certainly been wondering how art as we know it can be sustained, given that art today isn't original, co-opting more and more from the outside world and from prior art. The idea of meaningful 'originality' in art is now untenable. And yet the art world keeps coming up with drastic measures to keep the art system standing and plausible. So much art borrows—steals really—from elements found in the outside world that there's almost no difference now between art and the everyday. Once the high/low debate provided a point of theoretical distinction, but that's long gone. Now art either mimics forms from the outside world or it takes from prior art and design, anything slightly outre, out enough to be modishly ushered back in.
But your work does this too. You use surfboards, Las Vegas signage, stickers, Gold Coast imagery, fashion photography, etc, as well as artists, Jim Dine, Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Serra... You name it, on it goes.
Well, every artist does that now. No one owns such imagery, it belongs to the world. The membrane between art and not-art is so thin now. I agree with Jean Baudrillard quoting Marshall McLuhan: 'We have now become aware of the possibility of arranging the entire human environment as a work of art.' We must approach contemporary art as a kind of fiction. So Reinhardt is a fiction invented to make sense of another fiction: current art.
Young artists like Reinhardt have grown up in a world witnessing the disintegration of copyright, where everything can be downloaded for free and remade to suit their 'custom' specifications. They know it's no longer about the author but about the audience. So it makes sense to me that Reinhardt would recreate the 'wedges' for his own needs. But what about you; by handing your 1980s works over to him, are you disowning them?
When I was a young artist in the 1980s I used to notice those looks of deja vu on the faces of older artists when viewing 'new' work. Now I understand. So much work gets consigned to the historical cutting room fl oor only for something doing exactly the same thing to appear as wildly 'new' a little later. Recently I have started to notice a certain similarity between my 1980s black works and the work of young overseas artists such as Anslem Reyle and Terence Koh. Of course these artists had no idea of my work (why would they?). But it is strange to see work so similar to that 1980s work now being lauded overseas. It creates a feeling of unreality in my brain. Suddenly all contemporary art seems like a kind of fiction, the product of a seemingly arbitrary system of value-adding, not about the actual objects. I mean let's face it, a wedge is a wedge is a wedge.
I'm suspicious of artworks that make grand claims and require lots of explanation. Personally I like new things. I suspect provenance and pedigree. Nods and winks to the past are just devices to help big collecting institutions maintain the value of the old things in their storerooms. So I like the idea of setting the wedges free, letting them speak for themselves.
Last year an artist friend compared art-objects to Hitchcock's concept of the 'MacGuffin'. For Hitchcock the MacGuffin is an arbitrary thing used to advance a film's story (it's the roll of microfilm, the secret formula or the diamonds that impel characters to pursue one another through convoluted plots). For the audience, the MacGuffin is ultimately unimportant in itself. It is only significant for what it reveals in the desire and actions of the characters. That's the artworld.
So artworks are MacGuffins, activating a nuanced ritual that nobody really understands?
Some artists working now—such as Takashi Murakami, Anselm Reyle and John Armleder (who talks of art and culture now as being a 'B-movie' situation)—know what's up. They are just not letting the info out at present, like Freemasons hoarding the truth. This is what Reinhardt suspects. The Truth is out there, cracking 'their' code is the key! Of course by wanting to join in you maintain the power. I'm in the joke too. But I'm enjoying it more by working through Reinhardt. Without Reinhardt I couldn't conceive of making art within art as it is now. To escape fiction, you must loose yourself in it.