Scott Redford: Stay Forever (Sydney: A Secondary Eye, 2026).
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Griffin Mill: So it’s a psychic political thriller comedy with a heart.
Writer: With a heart, not unlike Ghost meets Manchurian Candidate.
—The Player (1992)

Over the last forty years, Scott Redford has made so much work and such diverse work that it’s hard to sum him up. But, if I had to generalise, I would say he’s a high-concept artist. In the film industry, a ‘high concept’ is a movie idea with commercial appeal that can be sold through a succinct elevator pitch. High concepts are typically ‘What if …’ or ‘X meets Y’ scenarios, offering twists on tried-and-true story elements with demonstrated commercial appeal. The classic example is Snakes on a Plane (2006), whose title says it all. High-concept films rely on a repertoire of familiar genres, styles, and tropes, and are only possible once the works of the past have been reduced to shorthand and can be manipulated like algebra equations or chemistry experiments. Being high concept is not just about the way films are pitched, it’s also about the way they are made and consumed—the takeaway.

Redford emerged in the postmodern 1980s, which set the dial for his high-concept approach. Art had famously lost faith in progress, in formal innovation, in a logical succession of isms. Instead artists revelled in appropriation and quotation, pastiche and irony, and mannerism—everything was fair game. Redford’s work was also informed by the identity politics of the time. Being gay and provincial—coming from the Gold Coast, a province within a province—he felt multiply marginalised. But this would be his calling card, his Archimedean point, his USP, as he negotiated his identification with and exclusion from the art narrative, rewriting it for himself.

Redford entered the conversation with his Black Paintings, a fusion of sculpture and painting, the readymade and the monochrome. He coated assemblages of objects with glossy black paint—sometimes thin, sometimes like sludge—making their components seem all of a piece. Some hung on the wall, working more like paintings; others rested on the floor, more like sculpture. They absorbed all manner of found material: tools (shovels, axes, hammers, spanners, a set square, a saw), music paraphernalia (electric guitars, records), anything to hand (books, boots, a chunk of surfboard, signage, a skull)—everything but the kitchen sink. Redford did little to explain specific inclusions, insisting that his Black Paintings deferred meaning, rendering content blank, even while making suggestive nods to art, theory, and pop culture. 

The Black Paintings were fashionable, funereal, gothic—a bit Siouxsie and the Banshees. They seemed shiny and chic, like shop-window displays, but also petrified, as if today’s cultural rubbish tip had been rediscovered in the distant future, with everything fused and fossilised—like we were looking back on the present. The Black Paintings were deadly black holes, sucking in suprematism and constructivism; dada and abstract expressionism; minimalism, pop, and conceptualism. They excited critics to join the dots: Kasimir Malevich, Ivan Puni, and Kurt Schwitters; Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jim Dine, and Arman; maybe Louise Nevelson, John Latham, and Bertrand Lavier.

In Redford’s works, the queerness was sometimes explicit and political, sometimes implicit and subtle—a matter of sensibility. The Black Paintings could be read as AIDS-period elegies. On the back of Untitled (Stay Forever) (1996), Redford inscribed lyrics from Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America about New Yorkers grappling with the AIDS crisis: ‘I want to be around to see it. I plan to be, I hope to be. This disease will be the end of many of us …’—suggesting that the slogan ‘stay forever’ may be hoping against hope. 

Redford liked to queer the modern-art canon, putting a gay spin on it or imagining it was always already that way inclined. Queering is itself a high-concept strategy. One of Redford’s most memorable works is a series of thirteen photos of sublime glistening metal public urinals in Brisbane and the Gold Coast, spectacularly illuminated by the glare of the flash (2000–1). It suggested a tour of beats, of grotty public toilets, transfigured by grace, by a miraculous light. It was a provincial take on Duchamp’s Fountain (1917)—to Australians personal ceramic urinals seemed exotic back then. If Duchamp laid his urinal on its back and put it on a pedestal to make it art, Redford transformed his into a quasi-religious experience. Lined up, his Urinals remind me of Barnett Newman’s The Stations of the Cross (1958–66). If only Redford had made a fourteenth.

Redford loved the Gold Coast vernacular. He adopted the materials, techniques, and aesthetics used to manufacture surfboards to make paintings. His Surf Paintings offered a twist on languages of modernist painting, abstract and figurative. Some recalled monochromes; others featured brushy images of Surfers Paradise high-rises and palms. They also sported surf-shop trademark decals. And Redford made maquettes, proposals for public sculptures—for monuments—in the form of the Googie roadside signs that already marked the city. The implication was that the Gold Coast didn’t need art as it already was art.

Hollywood profits not just from ticket sales, but from the add ons: the action figures and lunch boxes, the soundtracks and rides. (The Gold Coast is home to Warner Brothers Movie World theme park.) According to Wikipedia, high-concept films typify a marketing philosophy known as ‘the look, the hook, and the book’. The look is their aesthetic appeal, the hook is the story they tell, and the book is the merchandise made to promote and cash in on them. Redford is excited by the art-world equivalent of ‘the book’, the things super-famous blue-chip artists get to make once they become mainstream pop-culture figures, brands. He has collected Damien Hirst’s CD packaging, Takashi Murakami’s figurines, and Marilyn Minter’s skateboards. He’s dabbled in the idea himself, with his canvasboard landscapes and his ceramic polar bears.

Redford began making his canvasboard landscapes, based his Surf paintings, as a diffusion line. He made and showed them en masse, in batches, Warhol style. He now thinks of them as storyboards. Redford covered Sunday-painter canvasboards with flat fluoro pink, then conjured up scenes by adding a few casual washes of black on top, recalling Botticelli (who used to throw a paint-filled sponge at the wall to generate a landscape) and James McNeill Whistler (with his abbreviated nocturnes). We would not recognise them as Gold Coast scenes, were it not for the addition of stylised high rises, made with a few deft strokes, punctuating the horizon. These works are sweet and sour: joyous fluoro pink underneath, brooding black imagery on top. They are oxymorons: part action painting, part pop; part oriental calligraphy, part regional realism; part Andy Warhol, part Bob Ross; part high art, part collectible. And that’s what we take away. Their quick execution is not incidental, but the point, demonstrating the reduction of art to a trick, recipe, manoeuvre, signature. 

Redford is also known for his ubiquitous ceramic multiples, his Polar Bears. They began as part of a larger project. In the early 2000s, Redford started writing a film script about a fictional surfer–musician–artist, Reinhardt Dammn, with the thought that he could make art not as himself but as this fictional artist, as if props for the film. The idea culminated in the 2010 Queensland Art Gallery show Scott Redford: Introducing Reinhart Dammn, but the concept never quite lodged for the audience, who didn’t register the subtle distinction in the already doubly distanced Redford being further distanced as Dammn. Redford’s My Beautiful Polar Bear (2000–) was originally conceived as point-of-sale advertising tool for a single by Dammn and his band Honey Pump—a nod to Joseph Beuys—although why a polar bear was never elaborated. Redford’s Polar Bears were based on a ceramic bear he found in a Paddington antique store (likely a distant echo of François Pompon’s famous art-deco Polar Bear in the Musee D’Orsay). They proved popular, so Redford kept making them, issuing them in different colours, then in mixed custom glazes—a range. Now he’s doing a Puppy. 

Redford was so committed to the collapse of art into design and commerce that, in 2014, while temporarily in exile in Berlin, he and Glenn Geffken founded Burnrate, ‘a store for 1980s postmodern artefacts and an artist’s project space’. But that’s another story …

In 2024, after a hiatus from showing and a protracted illness, Redford reemerged with a new body of work, reiterating the logic of his earlier Surf Paintings but using hot-rod aesthetics and techniques. His Auto-Rothkos look like Mark Rothkos but are painted using custom-car techniques, conflating and countering the existential depth of Rothko’s abstract expressionism with the industrial ‘finish fetish’ of the pop and minimalist artists that superseded him. They play on the way Rothkos and hot-rods resemble each other but are valued differently and by different people. 

I see the Auto-Rothkos as perverse offspring of Rothko and Frank Stella. An artist of the 1950s, Rothko was spiritual, earnest, and tormented. He was so serious, he wouldn’t let his paintings go into the Seagram Hotel’s Four Seasons restaurant, so he wouldn’t have sold out and created a BMW art car. Not that he had the chance, as he killed himself in 1970, before BMW started commissioning them. In many ways, Stella, a 1960s art star, was Rothko’s successor and nemesis, creating angst-free geometric abstractions for corporate foyers, issuing new bodies of work each season routinely, like new-model cars. And he made an art car in 1976. In the twenty-first-century, Redford seems a world apart from Rothko, but not so far from Stella. Redford says he would love to make an art car. 

Redford remains a dedicated follower of fashion, surfing the zeitgeist. In the early days, he scoured international art magazines for trends, working on his next move; now he’s on the internet. He practices high-concept art, but he was never alone—it’s a po-mo idiom. The older John Armleder and the younger Anselm Reyle, for instance, are kindred spirits. As was the late Julian Dashper, a fellow provincial, a New Zealander. Playing Paper Rock Scissors with the canon, hacking the art-history algorithm, high-concept artists produce their art apparently effortlessly. They are stylists with art history at their fingertips. Redford says: ‘I know so much art history that I only need to disturb it a bit to create meaning. It isn’t hard to do. Art is easy.’