Trevor Pye: Hypothetical Portraits and Other Things

'I can do no better than begin with a quote from this year's Sydney Biennale catalogue:

"Art is both a representation and an embodiment of views of the world, created out of the responsibility of an individual or group. In a sense all representations are political - they express attitudes towards history, culture, relationships and power... Ideas of beauty and quality in art also, inevitably, reflect back on the world itself and on the different systems of value sustained within it. The making of good art is never a passive act and, more often than not, both the quality and the beauty of a work are expressed in its timely self-consciousness and critical distance".

The processes I employ include both traditional art media as well as non-art materials like cloth, cardboard, cutouts, wood and whatever other materials seem appropriate to the particular piece. A device I also use is that of mixing denotation systems in order to disrupt meaning and to subvert notions like the idea of history as a linear narrative or traditional roles in terms of race, class and gender.

The use of inconsistent mixtures of ways-of-working serves also to destroys the illusion, flattens the pictorial image, and draws attention to the work as a collection of marks on a surface rather than the pretense of offering a glimpse of any 'real' world.

The intention of the work is primarily to encourage a space for thinking, or better still, a space for dialogue. It is important for it to function on a formal level, and be interesting, or even beautiful to look at, but once the viewer's attention is captured, then layerings, disconnects, recontextualisations and ambiguous meanings are presented, primarily in order to turn the viewer's attention back on itself in an act of self-consideration or self-questioning. For those who aren't of such a conceptual turn of mind, the work could just be enjoyed as an interesting 'picture' and nothing else.

The viewer must never forget, however, that whatever opinion is formed as a response to a work of art, that response inevitably states more about the viewer than it does about the work itself.'

- Trevor Pye (2010)

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