Art as conversation

Craigie Horsfield Broadway, 14th day, 12 minutes from dusk, New York September 2001 (2005)

Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art is currently showing the first exhibition in Australia to explore the hauntingly beautiful imagery of internationally renowned artist Craigie Horsfield.

Organised in collaboration with the Jeu de Paume in Paris, Craigie Horsfield: Relation spans a period of 35 years and covers all aspects of Horsfield’s practice including film, photography, social projects and sound work.

Born in England in 1949 and short-listed for the Turner Prize in 1996, Horsfield presents us with a complex and integrated vision of humanity and art. He initiated the concept of ‘slow time’ and continues to explore it in works that are concerned with duration and challenge our inclination towards instantaneous responses.

A radical proponent of ideas concerning art and community since the 1960s, Horsfield examines how the individual relates to society and the role of the audience in relation to a work of art.

According to the artist, “All art is, in some sense, conversation”. It arises from the relation between viewer and image, photographer and subject, person and place.

Working as a disc jockey in Eastern Europe in the 1970s, Horsfield returned to London in the 1980s and became a crucial player in the transformation of photography at the end of the decade. In the 1990s he was a driving force behind the development of social art and collaborative projects. He is also a long-standing advocate for the introduction of sound work into the museum and the use of multi-screen projections as social spaces. One room of the MCA exhibition will be devoted to a creating a new sound work that will incorporate the sounds of Sydney.

Portraits have also been central to Horsfield’s practice since the early 1970s, with a number of his large-scale, black-and-white photographs featured in the exhibition, alongside a selection of drawings, collages, photograuves and colour photographs of vegetables and flowers in bloom and decay.

Horsfield will initiate a new project specifically for this exhibition: a gallery-based program of events that provide different ways for the wider community to relate to the museum. The project, called “Conversation”, commences on Friday 16 March with a discussion in the MCA galleries between the artist and Professor Ien Ang, founding Director of the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney.

The exhibition has been organized by the Jeu de Paume, with the collaboration of Centro de Arte Moderna José de Azeredo Perdigão / Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian Lisbon and the MCA.

David Edwards

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Craigie Horsfield: Relation

Venue: Museum of Contemporary Art,
Circular Quay, Sydney
Dates: to 3 June 2007
Cost: Free

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