The Creative Act: Michael Lindeman

Australian artist Michael Lindeman’s exhibition is assembled around a series of large-scale text paintings. Titled The Creative Act, Lindeman’s exhibition references Marcel Duchamp’s lecture in Houston at the meeting of the American Federation of the Arts, April 1957 of the same name. “The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”

Lindeman’s paintings are made specifically for a U.S. audience and presented at The Delaware Contemporary. They consider the realm of the Internet as a venue for buying, selling, and exchanging commodities – calling into question how financial and cultural value is attached to various branches of creative activity. The large-scale text paintings exhibited examine the area of meta-art. With a particular focus on a type of wry institutional critique, the exhibition shines light on Cyberspace through the old media lens of painting while seeking innovation and attempting to push at the edges of the field. The core works in the exhibition replicate genuine published online classifieds, advertising art from various locations across the U.S.

The use of text and deadpan humor is central to Lindeman’s practice, an approach that facilitates an inquiry into applied cultural meaning, value and the commodification of art. Of course, the irony is that Lindeman is a willing participant of the commodity culture that increasingly commands contemporary art.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website