If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life 2011

Summary

The practice of Melbourne-based artist Glenn Walls encompasses sculpture, installation, drawing, photography and video. His work forms a wry commentary on consumerism, lifestyle, design and aesthetics, and often points to and unpicks the double meanings, paradoxes and blind spots embedded in both familiar objects and in language. ‘If You Are Not Too Long …’ is a work from the series ‘Superlost Again 2011: Theoretical Book Covers’, a series title that already alludes to disjunctures between real and imagined, between lived and conceptual. Created through a collage of reflective coloured Perspex on board, the artworks in the series are constellations of commentary and play: the ironic book titles reference human experience but are accompanied by abstract geometric patterns in primary colours that mimic theoretical distance and lend order to the messy human issues considered in the theoretical tomes. Walls reworks the covers of these forgotten texts to humanise the modernist project. ‘If You Are Not Too Long, I Will Wait Here for You all of My Life’ is taken from Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’. Gwendolen’s cryptic and paradoxical expression of love indicates its contingency: hers is not an unconditional love for Jack – it is heartfelt for now, but not if she has to wait too long. The book’s subtitle – ‘An introduction to a current issue of public loneliness policy’ – perhaps reflects this posture, commenting on our fickleness and on the contingency of our earnestness around issues of social importance. This work was acquired in 2011 for the Art and Heritage Collection through the West Space fundraiser.