The Samstag Alumni

The 1998 Anne & Gordon Samstag
International Visual Arts Scholarships

Craige Andrae | John Derrick | Chistopher Howlett | Shaun Kirby | Anne Walton

So dissolved are categories of practice in the present productions of Shaun Kirby, it's impossible to refer to him as a painter, a sculptor, a bricoleur or an installer, though he is each of those. Certainly he is an artist, but one for whom art is less a defining noun than an indefinite article. Flux, not fixity, is his element. His avowal is for ambiguity of meaning, or multiplicity of it, to the extent that any uni-dimensional reading of the work depraves it.

This is not to rank Kirby as an author of artistic non-sequiturs, though he can be relished for his irrationality. As with any playful undertaking, including the most playful of all - psychoanalysis - grim belief is required to begin, as well as to conclude, the session. We come to Kirby as player-patients. He's our compere-therapist.

The title of his recent miscellany, International Headache Conference , advertised a pedigree at the fantastic end of art-historical style, as though early Dada was projectile-vomiting toward the late Surreal. Comprising several independent conceptions in apparent conversation, this crypto-aesthetic event was dominated by a pavilion propped on a Dali-esque armature of sticks. An architectural escapee from the wilder backwoods of the psyche, it boasted the appellation, Next To Nothing , a position it dared to occupy authoritatively.

Bruce James
from the 1998 Samstag catalogue
Samstag 98 : This Thing Called Art

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• The Samstag Alumni

Leave Having
(detail of installation, International Headache Congress) 1997
wood, foam rubber, light fitting, rubber nose, electrical conduit
200 x 100 cm and variable conduit
© the artist

Next to nothing 1997
timber and printed fabric
800 x 300 x 400 cm
© the artist

International Headache Congress 1997
mixed media installation
© the artist