Duck-rabbit problem
1991
- Medium
- synthetic fur on composition board, cotton, dacron, polystyrene, wire and enamel paint
- Measurements
- (a-c) 52.5 × 187.8 × 124.0 cm (installation) (variable)
- Inscription
- (c) inscribed in black fibre-tipped pen under base c.: Kathy Temin / Base of the Duck-Rabbit Problem 1991. [underlined]
- Accession Number
- 1998.282.a-c
- Department
- Contemporary Art
- Credit Line
- National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of the Rudy Komon Fund, Governor, 1998
© Kathy Temin - Gallery location
- Not on display
- About this work
-
‘Marrying fake fur to formalism, Kathy Temin is [American art critic] Clement Greenberg’s worst nightmare.’ So wrote the artist and critic Jeff Gibson in Art & Text in 1993. For Gibson, Temin’s work exemplified a trend he observed in Australian art in the early 1990s concerned with ‘the representation of paradox’, through its use of ‘supremely kitsch materials (synthetic fibre, vinyl, plastic, etc.) in the execution of figurative and nonfigurative works that clearly parody the taste-bound conventions of high modernist painting and sculpture’, as championed by Greenberg.
