miniature weather event that also brought to mind workshop activity, or car detailing. Minimalist and reductive, these pieces were a type of negative painting, similar to the erasure of graffiti with water jets, which simultaneously prepares old walls for new paintings. While these earlier series referenced modern manufacturing processes in their production and materiality, Lock’s later works appear more the sites of stripped, abandoned factories, or the leftover remnants of social strife. Gradually Lock’s canvases have begun to leave their stretchers altogether, hanging over crossbars and appearing as pulleddown wallpaper, or clothing drying. The optimistic, glassy surfaces of his earlier works have instead become the sites of forced, improvised repairs. THE BLACK WORKS At ACE Open, Lock presented paintings alongside black resin-coated objects, frozen over large, grid-like steel structures. These were the direct descendants of Lock’s loose stretcher paintings – now fully active in the third dimension. Loose black monochrome paintings – hanging like enormous protest banners – were the main focus of the gallery, and referenced in the title of the exhibition. Monochromes have always been predominant in Lock’s work – his large rectangular canvases were often a hard jet-black (or, alternatively, a soft, milky-white). Just as black pigment absorbs visible light, these black flags managed to absorb all meaning. By way of a condensed list, black flags have, in history, been flown by revolutionary farmers during the German Peasant Wars, by Confederate guerrilla militias, by ultra-Orthodox, anti-Zionist Jews, by colonial traders, by both fascists and antifascists, pirates, and surrendering naval ships. The
banner of the cruel Lord Morgoth, in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion was completely black, as was the Ahmadiyya ‘Black Standard’ of the second Caliphate (said to represent the absorption of all spiritual light). The music reference in Lock’s title focused us somewhat towards antifascist movements, however protests and their burnt remnants were more generally felt. Black’s ability to negate signs also enables it to, conversely, attach itself to a wide range of associations. Its power is perhaps magnified when it makes full use of these references. An example is the flag of the Bikini Atoll, designed by its forty or so families who – under the misunderstanding that they were being given a ‘second sun’ in the 1940s – were displaced from their homes by atomic tests. The islanders designed a recognisable version of the US flag, only with one white star blackened for each of the islands they lost during the subsequent twenty-three tests. Despite claims to be a reduced artistic zero point, historical and conceptual readings have always been attached to black monochrome paintings. Malevich’s Suprematist works drew on the associative power of Russian icon paintings in their placement, whilst through puncture marks Lucio Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale of 1952 sought to unite his monochromes with the walls around them – and ultimately with all space and time. Robert Rauschenberg similarly referenced other dimensions by building outwards with paper, before later reducing his abstract reliefs with thick black paint.
Below: Christian Lock, BLACKFLAG, 2017, installation view, ACE Open. Image courtesy of the artist and GAGPROJECTS, Adelaide. Photo: Jessica Clark.
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