Author(s): Wes Hill (Editor)

Artists & Art History

Jeff Gibson’s relationship to art could hardly be described as narrow in its focus.  For the best part of forty years, the Australian artist’s output has spanned continents and approaches, reflecting and refracting the tangle of images, texts and broader cultural phenomena that crowds the contemporary. 

Written and edited by art historian Wes Hill – with critical contributions from key international voices, including Thomas Crow, Susan Best, Tara Heffernan, and Angela Goddard – Jeff Gibson: False Gestalt takes a comprehensive deep dive into Gibson’s career as an artist, writer and editor. From his formative years immersed in the Brisbane and Toowoomba punk and new wave scenes, and his excavations of the Pictures Generation, Neo-Pop, and public art in Sydney, to his more recent explorations of typological collage and the countertype – comprising precisely cropped, layered and arranged internet and mass-media imagery – Gibson’s practice is characterised by an appetite for scouring, re-appropriating and reframing an ocean of images, graphic materials and cultural flotsam.

His time as a senior editor of the influential Art & Text, and his ongoing two-decade tenure as managing editor of Artforum in New York, only work to enrich our reading of his broader oeuvre. 

As Hill suggests, Gibson’s work hovers amid what W.J.T. Mitchell frames as the ‘double consciousness’ of images – the unique ability of pictures to induce naive belief and analytical suspicion. In Jeff Gibson: False Gestalt, the artist emerges as both a cultural sponge and a critical mirror, enmeshed wholly in the viewing, making and discursive wrangling of the image. 

His artworks are starting points rather than conclusions.  Just as we make pictures, pictures make us.