DEBUT XXI Exhibition Text

DEBUT XXI brings together graduate work that marks a shift away from the Melbourne signature of ephemeral or deskilled cool. This ideas-driven style owes much to the post-object art spawned in the late 1960s, when art hybridised with academia and the development of fine art tertiary institutions (such as the VCA) repositioned art-making as a profession. In global terms, many theorists have framed the shift towards deskilled or ideas-based practice against the changing infrastructure of work in a postindustrial era. As Sianne Ngai points out, the “integration of knowledge into production is [...] one of capitalism’s general features, ensuring that artistic labor has followed productive labor in becoming increasingly reliant on concepts, signs, and information in what is sometimes the same process of becoming deskilled.” [1] In this particular arthistorical account, the languages of theory and personal identity legitimise an artist's creations, with manual skill – a hallmark of pre-20th century artistic value – falling to the wayside.

The artists in DEBUT XXI differ in their relationships with politics or theory. Knowledge-work is a shared preoccupation: domestic, familial, cultural, and psychoanalytical themes are threaded throughout their practices. However, they also share an identifiable techne – a reverence for “authentic” modes of production – that celebrates the romance of labour, tradition, and technique as authenticators of artistic value.

Referencing Dutch vanitas, Georgia Naughton elicits sensuous “mouthfeel” with Gravy and Cake, a series of attentive and austere oil paintings depicting lavish foods. Dylan Marriot’s Yellow Chair (Portrait of Dying Man) and Red Chandelier employ photographic “legacy methods” to create still lifes that approximate the feel of baroque oils. Aliza Nickle’s Inheritance panels invoke the abstract-materialism of the modernist grid as a kind of red herring, with each handrolled bead iteratively preserving her family tradition of artisanal craft. Working anachronistically in the medium of tempera, Amelia Gill “cracked an egg to start the day” to paint Sam and Julian; tributes to the recurring historic genre of trompe l'oeil. La’la Zarei’s FRAGMENTS OF MEMORY[...] vessels draw on classical Iranian ceramics in a traditionally decorative medium, showcasing over a decade of the artist’s technical training at the wheel. Mythra Schwartz’ Home Again in the Transit Lounge and The distance of blue reproduce perfect pictorial moments; ”glimpses” that index endless hours in the studio. Celline Mercado’s Breathing Room engulfs the art-as-idea logic of the readymade; subjecting the gimmick of the found object to repetitive and time-consuming labour by meticulously wrapping second-hand furniture in wool.

Graduate artists today are released into a mire of job scarcity and self-marketing, with diminishing returns on their degrees, and a promiscuity of political and theoretical counternarratives to wade through. Not to mention the memetic terminus of AI looming large over the value of their craft. Amid it all, sometimes the weightless exchange of “ideas” can feel like managerial busywork. Revisiting the promise of goldstandard guarantees, these graduates tether the integrity of their thoughts to the deftness of their hands, the visual paradigms of the past, and the virtue of making something beautiful by the sweat of one's brow.

[1]Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form, (Harvard University Press, 2020): 105.