Exhibitions
Follow The Signs
Angela Goddard
What attracts me to Surfers Paradise is that no matter what is said about it, it will be both less and more. It will always exceed and disappoint our expectations. It is a sort of rebus or mirror. It can be projected onto and reviled. It is both beautiful and a whore. Utopia and dystopia. You get the picture? I think it is ART.—Scott Redford1
Scott Redford was born and bred on the Gold Coast (now Australia's sixth largest city) in South-East Queensland (the nation's fastest growing region). The Gold Coast is noted for its peculiar mix of kitsch-modern high-rises, surf culture and Las-Vegas-style 'Googie' roadside signage.2 A tissue of quotations, it seems to simultaneously fulfill and contradict ideas of modern, post-modern and contemporary culture. Redford has explored his hometown through cross-referenced bodies of work, and at last year's survey show Scott Redford And The Gold Coast he unveiled a series of maquettes, proposals for public sculptures based on Gold Coast signs (or more correctly on the post-war American signs they imitated). While resolutely provincial and rooted in popular taste, the Proposals are also art-historically speculative and argumentative. No Place Like Home features five new maquettes.
Reminiscent of promotional models for hard-sell high-rise time-share apartments, Redford's hotted-up Proposals are seductive. Their shiny surfaces, saccharine-sexy colours and amplified theatricality invite us to indulge in '60 STARS!', 'EXCITING ACTS!' and 'GORGEOUS GIRLS!'. In true Redford style, they are engrossed in their own superficial materiality. Their fast-food ethos contrasts with their quality construction. At first glance you would imagine these works were about American culture, until you notice they have been relocated: 'Surfers' has taken the place of 'Stardust', and 'Mermaid Beach' has usurped 'Holiday Inn'. Redford's models are not exact scale replicas either: he and his fabricators take liberties to achieve aesthetic 'rightness'. And while the original signs were monumental—built to be viewed from down the highway—our relation to the models is more cinematic, as if we are approaching them from a swooping crane shot. Robert Smithson's epiphany during a visit to his home town of Passiac, New Jersey, is quoted on one of the signs: 'Noon-day sunshine cinema-ized the site … it was as though I was walking on an enormous photograph.'3
The forms of Redford's Proposals reflect classic 1950s modernism in action. The original American signs were responsive to the needs of the post-war gas-guzzling all-consuming American Dream; with futuristic Space-Race forms designed to lure drivers. But Redford does more than simply look back to the forward-looking 1950s. He juggles temporalities, linking American post-war 'coffee shop moderne', its provincial reiteration on the Gold Coast, and the immediate future, when one of his proposals may yet be realised. They also involve a grander time frame, their texts incorporating Old Testament and inconceivably futuristic references: 'We want to see the newest things because we want to see the future 5062 A.D.' Redford's post-dating reveals a messianic modernism, addressed to the future, redeeming the past. History will prove him correct: the Gold Coast is the future.
Redford's dream of a dynamic future is framed by an initially unlikely marriage of American moderne signage with equally spectacular post-Revolutionary Russian avant-garde 'event architecture'. One of his Proposals is based on El Lissitzky's unrealised modernist pulpit, the 1920 Lenin Tribune, a classic of slanted optimism and utopian sentiment. Redford refits it as a lifesaver's observatory for Broadbeach Surf Club. Desiring to bring 'art into life', Lissitzky and the Russian Constructivists embraced advertising and propaganda. Redford also feels the need for art to survive in contemporary times. His Gold Coast works demand that art confront and compete with the spectacularisation of the contemporary moment. In fact, his Proposals are a thinly veiled attack on current public art in Queensland. Redford acknowledges the Gold Coast's roadside signage is sensitive to its context and much more popular with the public than the art currently foisted upon them. Redford asks: why build public art when we could embrace these already successful forms?
However, the new Proposals continue to raise an issue that has hounded Redford since he began the Gold Coast works: is he really a populist? There is a tension between his pedigreed art references and the popular language he professes to be immersed in. The Gold Coast has become Redford's exemplar of popular taste, of 'the people' and of reality. Tatlin insisted his proposed Monument For The Third International (1919–20) would function as a government building despite its apparent impracticability. Redford's 2005 Proposal For A New Gold Coast City Art Gallery And Museum has a similar utopian import. But Redford recently faced facts. Perhaps the Gold Coast didn't need his art gallery or his cultural politics: 'I felt that curator Brett Adlington and I were putting forward important ideas to explain the Gold Coast and its cultural moment. What came as a shock was the fact that the Gold Coast didn't need itself explained; was very happy in its own image; and indeed probably didn't need art at all.'4
Ironically, the roadside signs that inspire Redford's proposals are fast disappearing under the Gold Coast's heaving insistent growth. The people may have already left Redford and his retro-future behind. Have the chosen lost the faith? Will they enable their own salvation? One sign quotes Proverbs 29:18: 'Where there is no vision, the people suffer.' And Redford adds a warning to his lifesaving Lissitzky platform: 'If we can't see you, we can't save you'. As with Warhol, Redford's perky pop sensibility is haunted by incongruous dreams of salvation and redemption. His evangelistic work mirrors the Gold Coast's simultaneous engagement with and indifference to history.
1. Quoted in Brett Adlington 'Gleaning And/Or Proposing' Scott Redford And The Gold Coast Gold Coast City Art Gallery, 2005, p11.
2. Alan Hess Googie Redux: Ultramodern Roadside Architecture Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 2004.
3. Robert Smithson 'A Tour Of The Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey' (1967) The Writings Of Robert Smithson (ed. Nancy Holt) New York University Press, New York, 1979, pp52-3.
4. Scott Redford 'Post-Art: Learning Some More From Surfers Paradise' (2006) unpublished.