NOTHING PERSONAL (2000)

One of Kennedy's Superstar Shadow wall-text paintings, NOTHING PERSONAL plays with the statements relationship to power, subtly addressing the layered meanings of this phrase in both art and politics.

The work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at Khyber Arts Centre (Halifax, NS, 2000) for Westward Ho: A Guided Tour; in French (REIN DE PERSONNEL) at Faux Mouvement (Metz, France, 2003) for the travelling group exhibition, The Ironic Turn; at The Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto Canada (Toronto, 2007) to celebrate Kennedy's publication Superstar Shadow (1984-2005).

"This work was part of a citywide, multi-artist, multi-venue project entitled Westward Ho: A Guided Tour. I was assigned a space in the Khyber ballroom gallery along with the artists Lucy Chan, Kim Dawn and Carl Zimmerman. I decided to use a Superstar Shadow text piece primarily because I hadn't used it in a long time and I thought it still had legs. So from floor to ceiling across two walls I painted the letters "Nothing Personal"—in gloss white and after turning the corner on the third wall I continued with the letters ONAL in bright green. The white on white treatment on the first two walls presented an empty looking surface upon which Lucy Chan placed her large cut-out figures. The third wall's highly decorative neo-classical Corinthian columns received the green letter shadows. The work is intended to explain itself, with itself, as sort of an apology for why it had taken up so much of the gallery space—it was nothing personal. It also questions how the personal is used in art and I toyed with this meaning in the work's announcement that displayed my handwritten pencil rendition of the two words. By highlighting a trace of the artist's "hand" or "touch" as a means of conveying or revealing inner feelings, I was pointing towards a direct path of the truth, as it were. 

I found that apart from its art references the term Nothing Personal has dark, ironic reverberations. I was reminded of this by something I was reading at the time in a review by George Walden. In it he (TLS, Interpreting the Russian Revolution, 24 March 2000) recalled a letter that Stalin had sent to a comrade. It states, "Before having him shot after a show trial, Stalin told his friend Nikolai Bukharin that should it come to execution, 'it would be nothing against you personally'.  The natural response was to laugh."  Later Walden noted that "...Nazis too sometimes said that, personally speaking, they had nothing against the Jews." In concluding Walden states that "'Nothing personal' could double as the twentieth century's motto, and it's bitterest joke."

- Garry Neill Kennedy, Superstar Shadow (1984-2005), pg. 44.