Reinhardt Dammn

Reinhardt Dammn

IMA at TCB

28 June–27 July 200828 Jun–27 Jul 2008

Audiences for contemporary art are increasing worldwide. The public have graduated from an awareness of music, through fashion and design, to art. Scott Redford sees this development as both a continuation of the early modernist avant-garde’s utopian desire for a universal visual language and a challenge to traditional notions of originality. To signal these developments, Redford is writing and designing a film about Reinhardt Dammn, a twenty-two-year-old who surfs, makes art, and sings in a band. Reinhardt is cocky and always the showman but his bravado masks vulnerability. Spurned by the official art world because of his youth, Reinhardt is also rejected because he refuses to ignore the obvious: a canvas painted one colour is not a ‘monochrome signalling art’s autonomy’, it is a one-colour canvas; a soup tin is a soup tin; an installation is just objects placed in a room. Daring to speak with the innocence of a wild child, Reinhardt challenges the complacency of art’s powers-that-be.