ARTEXT : La Biennale di Venezia
53 Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte
Giardini di Castello - Australia 

SHUAN GLADWELL
Shuan Gladwell

" In Maddest Maximus, the new body of work to be exhibited in Venice, it is as if Gladwell has muscled up his imagery to face the responsibility of filling a national pavilion. He also addresses the vexed issue of nationality in a direct way, exchanging the intimate stages of his earlier urban pieces for the vast, epic space of the Australian outback.

Gladwell has borrowed his title from George Miller’s trilogy of “Mad Max” films (1978-84), which gave his generation of urban Australians—as well as millions of movie-goers around the world—their first view of their country’s parched interior. Max’s customised black Ford Falcon became another of Gladwell’s fetishised means of transport—“I’m obsessed with it,” he says, gesturing towards the extensive collection of scale models in his studio—and his own copy of the original, used in the shooting of his video works, will be exhibited outside the Australian pavilion, complete with the impacted red dirt of the outback.

In the video, we track the car as it drives down an endless straight road through the dusty scrub. A black-clad figure in a vizored helmet emerges from the passenger window, climbs on to the roof, and stretches his arms out—Vitruvian Man again, but in Venice also reminiscent of the crucifixions in so much Renaissance art.
“I set out to use aesthetic cues referencing the ‘Mad Max’ films by hijacking one of the props into a very different scenario,” Gladwell explains. “Also, I used to do car-surfing when I was a teenager,” he adds, characteristically rooting the image in his own experience as a suburban kid.

The artist is fascinated by “double looking” - we are looking from behind at the figure who is looking at the landscape, “like Caspar David Friedrich or the filmmaker Gus Van Sant”. Friedrich brings us back to the romantic notion of the sublime in nature, at once beautiful and terrible. “I’m still thinking around the idea of the sublime, a very old idea, but all these kinds of contemporary experiences we have connect us to this idea. The experience of the desert still offers the possibility of the sublime.”
Although his car surfing was performed at considerable speed—the viewer can see the scrub rushing by—it is shown in slow motion, like most of Gladwell’s pieces. “Slow motion gets away from the high-speed, high-impact imagery of MTV that was also part of the ‘Mad Max’ films. I’m more interested in distilling, slowing down ”.

Curatori : Felicity Fenner

Artisti : Shuan Gladwell

Web site: http://www.australiavenicebiennale.com.au