in collaboration with Helga Groves and Clint Doyle
3 States1. The ecstasy of nature2. The state of ordinary life, work and nostalgia3. The state of intuition and the death of linear time1
That John Young described his most recent exhibition of six works as virtually the same painting, discloses an erasure rather than an absence of repetition and difference. The serialism of Pop and Minimalist Art was based on an idea that repetition and difference could be thought of as two separate operations. For example, the first section of a work would contain an arrangement of elements that would be repeated, each additional section altering one or more of the preceding elements by either progression, rotation, permutation or reversal.2 Thus the work and each of its stages could be understood as a divisible composite (a set), as opposed to an indivisible whole. The mechanistic or numerical nature of change would proceed by differences in degree rather than differences in kind.3
Young's work similarly evidences a montage of elements which occurs across the work: the grid, the veil, pastiched Derain paintings, strips of grey canvas, allusion to Goethe's colour theory of lightened black and darkened white, slate tablets denoting specific years, the residue of kitsch naturalism. But within each work these tropes or elements remain uncomposed; the method is parataxical (1+1+1+1 or this and this and this). This refusal to submit to composition is repeated in the three authorial hands - Helga Groves, John Young, Clint Doyle; and in the three states - the ecstasy of nature; the state of ordinary life, work, nostalgia; the state of intuition and the death of linear time; and in the multiplicity of standpoints
John Young, Installation view, The Floating World and Charred Head Silhouette Painting, 1988. Courtesy Yuill/Crowley, Sydney.
