CACSA CONTEMPORARY 2012: IBIDEM
Participating Artists: George Popperwell, Craig Andrae, Anna Horne, Johnnie Dady and Christine Collins.
Curatorium- Alan Cruickshank, Monte Masi and Logan Macdonald
CACSA CONTEMPORARY 2012 as part of the 2012 SALA Festival, comprising two concurrent projects in the Adelaide CBD, IBIDEM and CACSA CONTEMPORARY: New South Australian Art. IBIDEM presents 5 temporary public artworks—“in the same place”—by South Australian artists in response to longstanding existing public artworks that have ‘disappeared’ into the public’s everyday subconscious. Many existing CBD public artworks have remained static in terms of an awareness of their presence, fusing into varying realms of ‘invisibility’ in their immediate environs and public consciousness.
The catalyst for this project is the Donald Judd triangular artwork at the rear of the Art Gallery of South Australia—Untitled, (1974-75). Controversial in the time of its implementation, this large concrete form has resided on the lawns at the rear of the Gallery, both seen and ‘unseen’ by Art Gallery of South Australia visitors, University of Adelaide students and café/restaurant clients. Judd’s work is both (visually) monumental and ‘invisible’ to varying degrees in an apparent synthesis with the rear environment of the Gallery.
The artists participating in IBIDEM are George Popperwell—Donald Judd’s Untitled at the rear courtyard of the Art Gallery of SA; Christine Collins—Light Square (western side), adjacent to Richard Tipping’s The Eternal Question; Craige Andrae—Shaun Kirby’s Talking Our Way Home, Torrens River/Elder Park; Johnny Dady—Aleks Danko’s Songs of Australia Volume Three At Home, Lions Arts Centre courtyard, North Terrace; and Anna Horne—Confluence of sculptural artworks at Adelaide Festival Centre, being Bert Flugelman’s Tetrahydrons and Otto Herbert Hajek’s Adelaide Urban Iconography.
Launching IBIDEM will be George Popperwell, with his considerations of Judd’s methodologies, concepts, attitude to form and materials. Popperwell’s artwork abuts the steps directly in front of the Gallery’s North Terrace entrance, therefore physically and visually interrupting the conventional passage and eyeline of those people entering and exiting the Gallery. This echoes the installation of the Judd sculpture itself, which was conceived and proposed as an obtuse work, defining a space, through its dimensions and then unfashionable concrete finish. What was a public lawn area became a sculptural space. Popperwell’s work arrests the interest and anticipated approach of those pedestrians who use the walkways in between the State Library and the Adelaide University. Patrons to the Gallery, pedestrians and passersby will engage in its mystery as an object—what to make of it, where it came from, what does it do… Tardis like, its appearance and eventual disappearance, the matter of further questioning.
IBIDEM was generously supported by the Art Gallery of SA, Arts SA Public Art Commission and Adelaide City Council Art & Living Culture Programs, and is presented in conjunction with the Art Gallery SA.
