Retrospective

In 1989, at the old Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in the Domain Gardens, we saw the collaborative duo Russian artists Komar and Melamid talk about their work. We were both fascinated. We loved the sheer skill of the socialist realism of their work, its cleverness, and the weird mysteriousness of not knowing who did what, there being really one artist out of two. Back in the studio, as we talked about it, we gradually realized how relevant this was to us, for we’d been talking about how much we wished elements in photographs, such as the still life bric a brac, the pages of text, the shiny surfaces, could move into paintings, to get the deep somber spaces of Green’s paintings and his background in conceptual art into Brown’s photographs of carefully arranged objects and texts. A recent series of re-created pre-collaboration works (figures 1 and 2) was a way of recapitulat-ing, understanding and absorbing that pre-collaboration history into our work via a retrospectively mapped timeline.