Scott Redford

(Australia 1962– )

Title

PHOTO: the pizza boy...

Year

1995

Media category

Materials used

vinyl lettering on wall, Converse trainers, black Doc Martin boots, black leather jacket, black studded leather belt, Silvio's pizza warmer, bathroom mirror with surf stickers, car tyre

Dimensions

320.0 x 380.0cm approx.

Signature & date

Not signed. Not dated.

Credit

Gift of the artist 2004

Accession number

143.2004.a-h

Copyright

Location

Not on display

Further information

Conditioned to living with the possibility of a nuclear barbecue, as well as with the threat of HIV/AIDS, many young people have lost the instinct for imagining a future stretching too far beyond their own goals. Scott Redford feeds off and exacerbates the aesthetics and sociology of pop youth culture. The mood of his work is a cocktail of longing and erotic fatality. Redford blends perfect pitch with a sharp critical sensibility, to get us to the future fast. Some of his work actually keys in future dates, impossibly far off ones, like AD 5062 or 7066. There is yearning in that, from a boy who grew up in Surfers Paradise on Queensland’s Gold Coast, where survival as an artist in the teeth of all its hedonism and tourist glitz must also have been a challenge. Recalling his all-black paintings and coated enamel floor-pieces from 1984, there is as well an ironic response to a place with a vested interest in the obliteration of history (Redford quotes sociologist Hugh Mackay to this effect).

The mix of promise and loss can be revealed in a work such as the 1990 series ‘After drawings by my brother Adam McCaull’, which reproduced on stretched paper his brother’s ballpoint pen drawings of football players. His brother had died of heart complications at the age of fourteen. Made up of vinyl lettering on a wall with real objects on the floor, ‘PHOTO: the pizza boy ...’, also resonates with this air of elegy. The two larger texts on the wall read: ‘The pizza boy doesn’t deliver anymore’, and, ‘And the motorcycle boy’s never coming back’. The first refers to porn scenarios with the delivery boy; the second recalls the biker character in the 1983 movie ‘Rumble fish’ by Francis Ford Coppola. On the floor is a black rubber tyre making an ‘O’, a black leather jacket, a pair of Doc Martens, a studded belt and a vinyl pizza warmer. The clothes suggest presence and absence, and the bittersweet sense that the experience has and has not taken place.

Bibliography (5)

Anthony Bond (England; Australia) (Commissioning Editor), Wayne Tunnicliffe (New Zealand; Australia) (Commissioning Editor), Contemporary: Art Gallery of New South Wales Contemporary Collection, 2006, 236 (colour illus.).

Editor Unknown (Editor), Gay and Lesbian perspectives 4, Sydney, 1998.

Scott Redford (Australia, b.1962), Guy in the dunes, Brisbane, 1997, 47 (illus.).

Peter Hallinan (Editor), Surf or Die, selected essays, reviews, interviews and articles - on the work of Scott Redford 1986-1996, Queensland, 1996, 123 (illus.), 143 (illus.).

'My own private Idaho: recent works by Scott Redford' by Christopher Chapman, Art and Australia (Vol. 33, No. 3) Autumn 1996, Autumn 1996.

Exhibition history (3)

Photo: Surf or Die/ No Radio, Bellas Milani Gallery, 1995–1995.

Unscripted, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 20 May 2005–24 Jul 2005.

Bricks are Heavy, Institute of Modern Art, 02 Dec 2006–03 Feb 2007.