Floating Goose Studios. SALA Festival. 10 Aug 2025
Austrian-Australian performance artist Cynthia Schwertsik’s newest work is her most confronting yet. Over three weeks in August, she is filling the gallery at Floating Goose Studios with unwanted household goods and other objects, smashing them to pieces with an axe and then painting the resulting fragments green.
Schwertsik’s Green Wash, developed in collaboration with Paul Gazzola (Open Space Contemporary Arts) and Vitalstatistix, is Floating Goose’s contribution to this year’s South Australian Living Artists (SALA) Festival.
The public is encouraged to donate unwanted items, which are received over a counter resembling a shop counter, and donors receive a receipt in the form of a certificate of donation. The conventional purchasing process is thus reversed. The certificate of donation is printed on green paper and carries an emblem — an axe and a paintbrush positioned across each other, ironically mimicking the Soviet hammer and sickle emblem. The performance-exhibition will evolve as more items are donated.
Cynthia Schwertsik, Green Wash, installation view, Floating Goose Studios Inc. 2025
photo: Chris Reid
Donors can watch their donated items being smashed. Schwertsik’s confrontational process of destruction suggests a release of anger — the catharsis of the consumer — and donors might experience a feeling of release vicariously.
Schwertsik conducts her performances wearing protective clothing and goggles, and viewers are obliged for health and safety reasons to watch the destruction through the gallery window. The effect is to create a bizarre shopfront on busy Morphett Street, Adelaide, in which consumer goods that might otherwise be on display are destroyed, to the bemusement of passersby.
Cynthia Schwertsik, Green Wash, installation view, Floating Goose Studios Inc. 2025
photo: Rosina Possingham
Smothering the resulting detritus in green paint is intended as a metaphor for greenwashing — the all-too-common business practice of claiming unproven or false environmental benefits of their products for marketing purposes. She describes this act of painting as “painting in the expanded field”, an ironic take on the trajectory of painting as an artform over recent decades, beyond late modernism and postmodernism. Thickly applied, the paint masks the trash and offers an unsettling kind of aesthetic appeal.
This exhibition builds on Schwertik’s previous project entitled Bestowed, which she describes as “a poetic art service of listening and recycling”, and which took place in March this year, also in collaboration with OSCA. For that project, people were asked to talk about gifts they had received but didn’t want, and how to get rid of them without offending anyone.
The items donated to Green Wash were likely on their way to landfill or to thrift stores but have been diverted for the purposes of art. In inviting people to discard unwanted items, Cynthia Schwertsik asks us to reconsider what we really need, to engage in a process of shedding, and to limit future consumption to a sustainable level.
The exhibition is accompanied by two videos depicting the smashing process. One shows teacup and teapot fragments flying apart under the axe and then reforming as the video is reversed. The other depicts the outline of the artist in a layered, stop-motion sequence of action, as if in a stylised, ritual dance. A former professional dancer, Schwertsik makes us aware of the expressive potential of the body.
This is relational art that engages the public. It is performance art as ant-consumerist protest. Passersby can participate if they choose, and donors are implicated in it and become aware of their perpetual, inevitable participation in and dependency on the production and consumption cycle.
Green Wash obliquely recalls Guy Debord’s Situationist theory and Karl Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism. In Debord’s theory, commodities rule workers and consumers instead of being ruled by them. The exhibition also questions the exploitation of the environment — the extraction of the resources needed for manufacturing, the process of manufacture and the accumulation of the resulting waste — and how this exploitation is often ignored or hidden from public view.
Green Wash is a lighthearted but very powerful statement about our obsession with material wealth and about the failure of government, business and society to encourage and adopt alternative values and to halt environmental damage. While appearing destructive, it just might encourage people to change their ways.
Chris Reid
When 1 to 24 Aug 2025 as part of SALA
Where: Floating Goose Studios Inc.
More info: https://osca.org.au/project/green-wash-working-title/
Cynthia Schwertsik, Green Wash,
installation view,
Floating Goose Studios Inc. 2025
photo: Rosina Possingham
