The and the Museum: Contested Histories and Expanded Narratives in Australian Art and Museology 1975-2002

Katherine Louise Gregory

Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

October 2004

School of , Cinema, Classics and Archaeology The University of

© Katherine Louise Gregory

Abstract

This thesis explores the rich and provocative fields of interaction between Australian and museums from 1975 to 2002. Artists have investigated and engaged with museums of art, social history and natural science during this period. Despite the museum being a major source of exploration for artists, the subject has rarely been examined in the literature. This thesis redresses this gap. It identifies and examines four prevailing approaches of Australian to museums in this period: oppositional critique, figurative representation, intervention and collaboration.

The study asserts that a general progression from oppositional critique in the seventies through to collaboration in the late nineties can be charted. It explores the work of three artists who have epitomised these approaches to the museum. Peter Cripps developed an oppositional critique of the museum and was intimately involved with the in Melbourne during the mid-seventies. Fiona Hall figuratively represented the museum. Her approach documented and catalogued museum tropes of a bygone era. Narelle Jubelin’s work intervened with Australian museums. Her work has curatorial capacities and has had real effect within Australian museums. These differing artistic approaches to the museum have the effect of contesting history and expanding narrative within museums.

Curators collaborated with artists and used artistic methods to create exhibits in Australian museums during the 1990s. Artistic approaches are a major methodology of museums seeking to contest traditional modes of history and expand narrative in their exhibits. Contemporary art has played a vital, curatorial, role in the Hyde Park Barracks, Museum of , Melbourne Museum and Ian Potter Centre: NGV , amongst other museums. While in earlier years artists were well known for their resistive approach to the art museum, this thesis shows that artists have increasingly participated in new forms of representation within art, social history, and natural history museums. I argue that the role of contemporary art within ‘new’ museums is emblematic of new approaches to history, space, narrative and design within the museum.

This is to certify that

(i) the thesis comprises only my original work towards the PhD, (ii) due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used, (iii) the thesis is less than 100,000 words in length, exclusive of tables, maps, bibliographies, appendices and footnotes.

Acknowledgements This thesis has benefited from the assistance of numerous people. I thank my principal supervisor, Dr Christopher Marshall, whose guidance, insight and continual support for the project, has enabled me to bring this thesis to fruition. I am thankful for the contribution of my associate supervisor Dr Charles Green in the latter stages of this thesis. Associate Professor Jeanette Hoorn helped in the early exploration of the topic. The University of Melbourne provided me with a Melbourne Research Scholarship to undertake my research. The School of Art History, Cinema, Classics and Archaeology, Faculty of Arts and Ian Potter Cultural Trust supported me with grants that contributed to interstate and overseas research and allowed me to attend conferences. I was fortunate to attend a Visiting Scholars Program on National Museums, National Histories at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University in 1999, which provided me with a forum in which I could test my ideas amongst friends and colleagues.

I wish to thank the main subjects of this thesis, the artists Peter Cripps, Fiona Hall and Narelle Jubelin, who generously responded to my requests and questions during interviews and throughout our correspondences. Thanks are also due to the artists Anne Ferran, Janet Laurence and Julie Gough and to the and museum staff John Barrett-Lennard at the Lawrence Wilson , Ann Stephen at the Powerhouse Museum, Peter Emmett formerly of the Hyde Park Barracks and Museum of Sydney, Lynn Collins at the Historic Houses Trust of , Roonie Fookes and Eve Almond at the Melbourne Museum, and Frances Lindsay and Jennifer Phipps the National Gallery of , all of whom I interviewed.

The School of Art History, Cinema, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Melbourne gave me teaching opportunities during my candidature. Thanks also to Dr Clarissa Ball and Dr Ian McLean who offered me teaching in Perth, at the School of Fine Arts and Architecture at the University of Western Australia, in the latter stages of my candidature.

I am grateful for the support and encouragement of my friends and family throughout the production of this thesis. I thank my parents, Ross and Jenny Gregory, who have had faith in me, read drafts with rigour and care, and provided me with the resources that allowed me to finish this thesis.

Table of Contents – Volume One

Introduction 1

Prologue. From Real Threat to Symbolic 18

Chapter One. The Ideal Archive: the artist’s museum in the work of Peter Cripps 1975-1996 26 Introduction 26 From Artists’ Artists to an artist’s museum: the curatorial context of Cripps’s archival art practice 1974-1977 28 a. Artists’ Artists and the art museum politics of the mid-seventies 28 b. The Caravan and self-curatorial activities 46 Cripps’s curatorial practice and critique of history in the 1980s 64 Symbolic critique of the museum 1989-1991 73 An archaeology of the museum 1992-1993 80 Conclusion 89

Chapter Two. The Figurative Museum: museum tropes in Fiona Hall’s work 1981- 2002 92 Introduction 92 Keeping it messy: museum disorder in The Antipodean Suite (1981) 94 Wonder and the Hybrid Object in Hall’s work 102 Museum as shrine: Give a Dog a Bone (1996) 112 Museum projects 1996-1998 117 Displaying the curious 1998-2002 124 Conclusion 135

Chapter Three. Museum Interventions: Narelle Jubelin as artist, and essayist 1986-1995 138 Introduction 138 A feminist intervention: looking and language 140 Entering the museum: institutional and bureaucratic passage in the Powerhouse Museum 150 Convergence: art installation as museum exhibit 166

Narrative and Revisionist History in Dead Slow (1992) and Soft Shoulder (1994) 174 Maintaining critical passage in the Museum of Sydney 1995 183 Conclusion 194

Chapter Four. Curator as Artist, Artist as Curator: speculative approaches to interpretation and commemoration in Australian museology 1989-1998 196 Introduction 196 Curator as artist: Peter Emmett’s museology in the Hyde Park Barracks 1989-91 197 a. Theatrics 201 b. Fragments 205 c. 208 d. Parallels 210 e. Criticisms 215 Artist as curator: artists’ interpretations of the Barracks’ archive 1995 217 Art, experience and commemoration: Edge of the Trees (1995) the Museum of Sydney 227 Creative licence in site-specific art in Elizabeth Bay (1997) and the Grainger Museum (1998) 235 Conclusion 247

Chapter Five. The Artist as an Instrument of the New Museum 1999-2002 249 Introduction 249 Reconfiguring wonder: art in the new Melbourne Museum 1999 250 Reconfiguring the : art intervention in the new ‘permeable’ Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia 2002 275 Conclusion 299

Conclusion 301

Bibliography 310 Appendix 328 1

Introduction

Blurred genres, interdisciplinary collaboration and greater public participation than ever before characterise museums of the early twenty-first century. New methods are increasingly sought through which to expand and contest old museum practices. History, narrative, space and design have come under scrutiny in museums wishing to reconfigure past approaches to representation. Within this spectrum of change, artistic approaches to interpretation and design have played a vital role: artists collaborate with curators to develop new forms of exhibit in museums of art, social history and natural science.

Despite this, the role of the artist in the new museum has rarely been explored. Little is known about the changing role of contemporary art in museums and the changing relationship of artists to museums. Yet, because artistic approaches are increasingly used in new museums, it is essential to understand the specific nature of art’s engagement with the museum. If artistic approaches continue to define new forms of practice in museums, we must gain an understanding of the history and scope of art’s investigation of museums so that museums can draw on the full range of possibilities that art offers and adequately accommodate art’s various tactics.

This thesis aims to examine the prevailing approaches of Australian contemporary art to museums between 1975 and 2002. During this period, Australian art explicitly addressed museums, and Australian museum practice underwent significant change. By tracing the way that art has investigated the museum in this period, this thesis aims to shed light on the increasing use of artistic methods in new Australian museums. As this thesis will show, artists have addressed museums extensively and influenced exhibition design and curatorial approaches through their various interrogations and speculations. The museum has also influenced contemporary art, as will become apparent.

How has contemporary art come to signify ‘newness’ within new museums? What is contemporary art’s role and effect within new museums? What does this suggest about art’s shifting and continuous relationship to museums? These questions provide the impetus for my examination of Australian art’s approach to museums and its 2 intersection with museum practice that gave rise to creative, sometimes fraught, collaborations. I anticipate that this thesis will not only contribute to a greater depth of understanding about Australian art practice since 1975, but also to a long overdue evaluation of the role of contemporary art within museums and how this work relates to broader shifts in the field of Australian museology.

The prevailing approaches of artists to museums since 1975 have received little focussed examination, especially not within the Australian context. Notwithstanding this, the relationship of artists to museums and exhibition practice is a vast field, touched on in a rich and varied range of sources, even if there is a paucity of literature that focuses adequately on the topic. I will outline the most relevant publications that directly tackle the topic, point to the limitations of existing analysis and situate this thesis within the broader field of analysis, before outlining the research approach taken in this thesis.

Three major publications that addressed the way artists have explored museums and archives during the twentieth century were produced between 1998 and 2001, indicating the currency of this topic. In 1998 and 1999, catalogues for two wide- ranging survey exhibitions on European and North American art’s exploration of the topic were produced. The first, curated by the Haus der Kunst in Munich, that later travelled to the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York and the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, was Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing and Archiving in Art.1 This exhibition included the work of approximately fifty-seven twentieth century artists, mainly European, who had addressed concepts of collecting, storing and archiving. The second, which opened at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York in 1999, was called The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect.2 This exhibition covered the work of fifty-nine artists, mainly American – some of whom were exhibited in Deep Storage – and was a comprehensive survey of art’s various depictions of museums. This exhibition showed that a strong figurative tradition of art representing the museum since the late nineteenth century and particularly in post-World War Two America exists.

1 Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art. Ingrid Schaffer and Matthias Winzen, eds. exh. cat. P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. New York, Prestel, 1998. 2 The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect. exh. cat. The Museum of Modern Art. New York, 1999. 3

In 2001, James Putnam, a curator in the Contemporary Arts and Culture Program at the British Museum, published another survey-style book documenting mainly European and North American art practices to explore museums and museology during the twentieth century. Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium constructed an encyclopaedic overview of a range of artistic approaches to the museum.3 Putnam dealt more comprehensively with the practice of art interventions in museums during the nineties than Deep Storage and The Museum as Muse. However, as surveys none of these publications delved into individual practice, nor provided an analytical account of the relationship of this art practice to museology. None considered the role and effect of such art in new museums. They also overlooked the appropriation of this practice by museums.

Deep Storage and The Museum as Muse did little to construct an overarching argument or narrative in relation to the differing approaches of artists to the museum or archive. Each exhibition catalogue presents an anthology of art practices. Deep Storage was organised alphabetically by artist name and themes such as collecting, archiving and storing. A number of essays were commissioned for the catalogue. The Museum as Muse had one essay by the curator of the exhibition, Kynaston McShine, senior curator in the Department of and at MOMA, in which McShine plotted a chronological account of the changing ways that art has investigated museums. Each catalogue provides a wide-ranging overview of European and North American practices and an international and historical context for the subject of this thesis. Neither The Museum as Muse nor Deep Storage considered the museological context for art addressing museums and archives, a prime interest within this thesis. Each exhibition viewed art’s representation of museums and archives in iconographical terms. This approach failed to recognise the interaction between artists and museums.

Putnam’s book went further than either exhibition in identifying themes in the way artists have approached museums. His book was organised around the broad themes of the way artists have adopted museum tropes such as collections, display vitrines

3 James Putnam, Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium (London: Thames and Hudson, 2001). 4 and archives; the way artists have created miniature or fictional museums; artists’ public questioning of the ideology of museums; photographic representations of museums; artists as quasi-curators in museums; and finally the use of art interventions in museums. Many of these themes are highly relevant for this thesis. However, while providing an overview of important themes to emerge within this field of practice, Putnam did not conduct an analytical interpretation of these themes. The book instead offers a rather superficial quasi-encyclopaedic pictorial overview of a diverse range of practices.

Notwithstanding these limitations, Art and Artifact and The Museum as Muse are the only comprehensive publications to show that artists have explored not only museums of art, but also museums of social history, natural science and ethnography. Many of the works in The Museum as Muse represented the Museum of Modern Art itself – iconic of the white cube of art museum – with which, the exhibition showed, artists have wrestled for decades. Putnam observed that artists have been especially interested in old-style museums rather than new. He argued that artists are attracted to the display aesthetic of institutions that appear to have escaped modernisation.4 I observe a similar interest in Australian practices.

In his exhibition catalogue essay, McShine identified two major approaches by artists to the museum in the early-to-mid twentieth century. First, the Russian constructivists after the Revolution of 1917 such as El Lissitzky, who wanted to integrate art with life and in McShine’s words, “harbored the utopian dream of a museum administered by artists.”5 Second, the Parisian avant-garde, such as Marcel Duchamp, for whom the museum represented an antiquated and aristocratic institution, prompting him to “poke fun at the museum, puncturing its pomposity.”6 The ways Lissitzky and Duchamp addressed museums have been dealt with more rigorously elsewhere.7 These two approaches by artists – the desire to control the museum and institutional

4 Ibid. p. 8. 5 Kynaston McShine, "Introduction," The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect, exh. cat. Museum of Modern Art. New York, 1999. p. 11. 6 Ibid. p. 11. 7 Benjamin Buchloh, "From Factura to Factography," October: The First Decade, 1976-1986 ed. Joan Copjec (London: The MIT Press, 1987). pp. 77-113.; Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations (, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001).; Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installation at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1998). 5 critique and subversion – set a paradigm that continues to define contemporary approaches by Australian artists, as this thesis will show.

Deep Storage, The Museum as Muse and Art and Artifact all addressed the well- established tradition of artists as collectors. Each included American artist Joseph Cornell’s nostalgic assemblage boxes of the 1930s-1950s, constructed out of ephemera scrupulously collected by the artist; Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaer’s Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles) in 1968; and American artist Claes Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum, a ‘museum’ the artist created containing a vast collection of objects made by the artist, between 1965-77.

Both McShine and Putnam touched on art that has explored the notion of the Wunderkammer (sixteenth-seventeenth century curiosity cabinets), a source of fascination for contemporary artists in Australia as well. Likewise, Susan Stewart argued in an essay for Deep Storage that the ‘embers’ of collecting strategies, such as the Wunderkammer, could be perceived in post-war American art.8 Another book, by Patrick Mauriès and published in 2002, traced the importance of the concept of the Wunderkammer for artists during the twentieth century. He argued that artists have adopted the property of strangeness intrinsic to the Wunderkammer.9

McShine made two important statements about the way artists have explored museums in The Museum as Muse. He observed that artists and museums are mutually dependent and that artists in the nineties were less adversarial towards the museum than they were in the seventies. McShine concluded that despite this, artists and museums in the 1990s “watch each other vigilantly.”10 I reach a different conclusion to McShine. I argue that on the whole, convergence characterises the relationship between artists and museums in Australian practice of the late nineties and that the boundaries between the two are more nuanced and less defined than

8 Susan Stewart, "Wunderkammer: An After as Before," Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art, eds. Ingrid Schaffer and Matthias Winzen, exh. cat. P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. New York, Prestel, 1998. pp. 291-295. 9 Patrick Mauriès, "Resurgences: the Spirit of Curiosity," Cabinets of Curiosity (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002). pp. 210-253. 10 Kynaston McShine, "Introduction," The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect, exh. cat. Museum of Modern Art. New York, 1999. p. 23. 6

McShine’s exhibition suggests. This distinction has several implications. First, it suggests that Australian museums and artists have a similar approach to the revision of Australian history. Second, it implies that artistic approaches to interpretation and museum representation have been validated within Australian museums.

The Museum as Muse only briefly touched on the conceptual-minimal work of artists during the sixties and seventies, which challenged the boundaries of the museum and the museum’s role in the . Aside from the museum ‘wrappings’ of Christo, in particular documentation of The Museum of Modern Art Wrapped (Front): Project for New York (1971) when the artist literally wrapped the museum, packaging it as a metaphoric commodity, instead of the museum containing and commodifying art, the challenges of , earthworks, installation and performance were largely outside of the exhibition’s scope. Art and Artifact gave more attention to these practices, though they were not the main focus of the book.

Several publications have however, dealt extensively with the manner in which ‘post- object’ art complicated and challenged the art museum. Feminist Lucy Lippard and neo-Marxist art historian Benjamin Buchloh have discussed the challenges of such art to the museum.11 In the Australian context, the writing of Ian Burn (art historian, critic and artist - a founding member of Art & Language) provided a cogent Marxist-inspired analysis of the art museum and the possible effects of conceptual art critique within it. Burn was of course extensively involved in the critique of the art market and museum as a conceptual artist, and his early writings in particular read as manifestos of Art & Language. His writings are important primary documents for this thesis, and help to explain the seventies conceptual critique of the museum in the Australian context.12

11 Lucy Lippard, ed., Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (London: Studio Vista, 1973); Lucy Lippard, "Escape Attempts," Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965 - 1975, eds. Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer, exh. cat. Museum of Contemporary Art, LA. Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1996. pp. 16-40.; Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, "Conceptual Art 1962 - 1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions," October 55.Winter (1991): pp. 105-143. 12 Ian Burn, "The Art Market: Affluence and Degradation," Artforum XIII (1975): pp. 34-37; Ian Burn, "The 1960s: Crisis and Aftermath," Dialogue: Writings in Art History (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991). pp. 101-119.; Ian Burn, "The art museum, more or less," Dialogue: Writings in Art History (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991). pp. 167-176. 7

During the 1970s and early 1980s several publications addressed contemporary art’s challenge to the art museum from a museum perspective. The earliest was an edition of the UNESCO journal Museum in 1972.13 This issue was devoted to the theme ‘problems of the museum of contemporary art in the West.’ It delved into the attitudes of contemporary artists towards museums of contemporary art, with the objective of suggesting ways in which the museum should change in order to better accommodate the needs of the contemporary artist. The journal addressed conceptual, performance, earthworks and and the way these practices highlighted the limitations of the art museum in its orthodox form. The journal suggested that the museum was at a turning point, under massive change due to a necessity to ‘democratise’ – a theme that is of continued relevance and that is a central rhetorical tool of Australian museums of the early twenty-first century, as this thesis will discuss.14

The contributing authors were contemporary art curators, museologists and museum curators. Harald Szeemann, who curated the Kassel exhibition of contemporary art in 1972, wrote an essay in the journal in which he argued that installation art of the late sixties attempted to transform the museum into a studio.15 Szeemann’s exhibition catalogue for documenta 5 included a section on “Museums by Artists.”16 Art works addressed in the documenta 5 catalogue included Oldenburg’s Maus Museum and Broodhaer’s Musée d’Art Moderne. In the journal Museum, Szeemann observed that artists wanted to destabilise the edifice and authority of the museum. Recreating the museum as a ‘studio’ was one way in which they could do this. Installation art, in his view, was inherently concerned with ‘invading’ the space of the museum and appropriating its hallowed halls for the artist’s own purposes. An ambition of the ‘new’ museum of contemporary art, the journal argued, was to develop greater accessibility and permeability both for artists and the wider public.

13 "Problems of the museum of contemporary art in the West," Museum XXIV.1 (1972). 14 The notion of museum in crisis has been espoused since Brian O’Doherty’s edited 1972 volume of Art in America entitled “Museums in Crisis”. This issue contained seminal American Marxist and Feminist critiques of the art museum and included discussion of contemporary art in the late 1960s and early 1970s and its critique of the museum. Brian O'Doherty, ed., Museums in Crisis (New York: George Braziller, 1972). 15 Harald Szeemann, "Exchange of views of a group of experts," Museum XXIV (1972): p. 8. 16 Ingrid Schaffner, "documenta V," Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing and Archiving in Art, eds. Ingrid Schaffner and Matthias Winzen, exh. cat. P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. New York, Prestel, 1998. p. 124. 8

Museums of contemporary art, the authors claimed, should represent the interests of the artists, and allow artists to participate on a greater scale than ever before.

To this end, the notion of the artist-organiser was discussed.17 Szeemann stated,

An extreme solution to the problem would of course be to let the artists wield the sceptre in the museum…Everyone is agreed that it is a mistake to swap professions, but it might be worthwhile trying the experiment.18

These comments were prescient. This thesis demonstrates that artists in Australia, and globally, have been given such an opportunity “to wield the sceptre”, though perhaps not in the way the authors originally envisaged. Artists acting as curators and curators using artistic methods in museums are two major themes of this thesis. In some cases it seems that professions have been swapped – throwing caution to the wind, and resulting in some of the most innovative, creative and highly criticised museum collaborations in Australia, as shall be demonstrated in the case study of the Museum of Sydney.

Another important statement made in this edition of Museum was that “the new museum should offer the widest range of possible experience.”19 The authors recognised that contemporary art could play a role in this. Dance, theatre and architecture were also suggested as avenues through which to expand museum experience. A pivotal finding of this thesis has indeed been that Australian artists have played a central role in expanding narrative and experience within museums of all types, but especially social history, through the nineties. This thesis argues that artists have extended imaginative experience within museums, and thus played a vital curatorial role.

The 1979 publication The Museum in Motion? a survey of exhibition practices of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands, offered another pertinent examination of the relationship between contemporary artists and the art museum since the late

17 Harald Szeemann, "Exchange of views of a group of experts," Museum XXIV (1972): p. 16. 18 Ibid. p. 20. 19 Ibid. p. 29. 9 sixties. This publication identified a “gap between the museum and the artist.”20 It reiterated the notion that museums should accommodate contemporary artists more and involve them in museum practice. The phrase ‘museum in motion’ signalled the museum changing form and becoming an open, inclusive and participatory institution. Recently this concept has been revived. In November 2004, a conference titled The Museum in Motion? in the Netherlands is planned, that will pick up on the trajectory plotted by this 1979 publication.21

In 1983, a Canadian publication Museums by Artists again addressed the way that artists negotiated the art museum during the seventies in North American and European art practice. Like the 1972 edition of Museum and The Museum in Motion? in 1979, it claimed that museums needed to become more responsive to the needs of contemporary artists.22 The publication also claimed that museums needed to be ‘broken apart’ by artists’ incursions, and transformed from a hermetic to permeable institution. Deep Storage and Museum as Muse did not assess the relevance of this analysis for art and museum practice in the 1980s and 1990s. Art and Artifact touched on this idea. Putnam concluded that the boundaries between artists and museums are becoming “interwoven.”23 Putnam observed that museums have become more permeable to artists who are more frequently involved with curatorial processes. He argued that museums are more flexible and adaptable to new practices than ever before. A goal of this thesis is to explore how, and to what extent, the museum has become more ‘permeable’ to artists in Australia since 1975.

In addition to Putnam’s survey of art interventions within museums, a small body of literature, written largely by curators of contemporary art, tackles art that addressed museum display and ideology within art and social history museums. Art curator Lisa G. Corrin’s essay for American artist Fred Wilson’s exhibition Mining the Museum at

20 Carol Blotkamp, et al., eds., Museum in Motion? (Eindhoven: Government Publishing Office, 1979). 21 Museum in Motion? is organised by the Jan Van Eyck Academie Maastricht, Department of Architecture & Urban Planning Ghent University and Museum Het Domein Sittard. It is planned for 12-13 November 2004. 22 AA Bronson and Peggy Gale, eds., Museums by Artists (Toronto: Art Metropole, 1983). 23 James Putnam, Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium (London: Thames and Hudson, 2001). p. 189. 10 the Maryland Historical Society in 1994 analysed art ‘interventions’ in museums.24 An essay in 1995 by art curator Carl Heideken discussed the notion of the artist as curator through exhibits at his museum, the City Museum of Stockholm.25 Curator Rebecca Duclos addressed a series of exhibitions at the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne in a 1996 essay. Duclos believed The Artist and the Museum series (discussed in chapter five) offered a unique opportunity for curators to revise orthodox practice within the museum.

Each of these essays claimed that art interventions could revise museum practice. They did little however, to investigate the nature and extent of this revision or the interaction between the museum and artist in this process. None of this literature dealt adequately with art interventions in natural history museums, more common since the mid-nineties. A goal of this thesis is to examine the emergence of art interventions in Australian museums. What occurs when art interventions are institutionalised within museums? Is the interventional nature of these art works compromised through the museum’s appropriation and curatorial promotion?

A common theme in the literature has been to refer to artists as outsiders and the museum as a hermetic and impenetrable institution. Julie H. Reiss analysed the transition of installation art from outside the museum to inside the museum. In From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art, Reiss argued that installation art began as a radical form of practice on the avant-garde fringes of the art community in the late fifties - mid sixties. By the eighties installations were specifically made for the mainstream museum context.26 Reiss argued that this signified the museum’s institutionalisation of avant-garde art.

Reiss’s study is pertinent to this thesis. Not only does my thesis deal largely with installation art, and therefore extends Reiss’s identification of the spaces of installation art, by showing that installation art is increasingly used within museums

24 Lisa G. Corrin, "Mining the Museum: Artists Look at Museums, Museums Look at Themselves," Mining the Museum: an installation by Fred Wilson, ed. Lisa G. Corrin, exh. cat. Maryland Historical Society. Baltimore, The New Press and The Contemporary, c1994. 25 Carl Heideken, "The artist as curator in a city museum," Museum International 46.3 (1995): 17-21. 26 Julie Reiss, From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2000). 11 of social history and natural history for specific purposes, it also explores the shifting attitudes amongst artists towards their status as ‘outsiders’ or ‘insiders’ of the museum. Some artists have traded on the notion of being ‘outsiders’ to the museum in a way that helps secure their avant-garde status. Others have pioneered highly collaborative forms of practice within museums, as ‘insiders’, only to cease working on the ‘inside’ for fear of becoming institutionalised. For these artists, returning to the margins of the museum enables a more critical, questioning engagement with museums due to greater artistic freedom. Australian art and museum practice of the nineties suggests that the notion of museum outsiders and insiders is redundant. Artists are employed in a curatorial capacity, and museums, in seeking to democratise and become ‘permeable’ and receptive to outside influences, are no longer hermetic authoritarian institutions. The boundaries between artists and museums are highly nuanced rather than clear-cut in contemporary Australian practice.

In Australian literature, the most extensive analysis of the way Australian artists have examined museums was in an edition of the journal Artlink that explored the theme “Mining the Archive” in March 1999.27 Guest edited by contemporary art curator Zara Stanhope, the journal mainly consisted of essays by curators. The journal discussed the way artists in Australia and New Zealand negotiated museum collections in the late 1990s. It signalled the relevance of this theme in contemporary Australian art, and the trend in Australian museums to art ‘interventions’.

Books and edited anthologies on Australian contemporary art have generally not examined the way in which artists have addressed museums. The theme has been touched on in some publications however and it is an undercurrent in analysis of art since the seventies. Charles Green’s Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970-1994 discussed the emergence of artist-run spaces in the seventies that were an alternative venue to the art museum for exhibiting art as well as conceptual art’s critique of the art museum. However, Green did not detail the particular ways in which artists during the eighties and nineties engaged with museological themes and iconography. Rex Butler’s edited anthology of critical writings on Australian art in the eighties and nineties What is Appropriation? did not cover the way artists have

27 "Mining the Archive," Artlink 19.1 (1999). 12 addressed, negotiated or indeed appropriated museums.28 Yet, one of the arguments of this thesis is that artists have appropriated museological formats as a means through which to critique the museum. The edited volume of essays What is Installation? contained one essay, by Carolyn Barnes, which analysed the museum projects of Peter Cripps, an artist whose work is examined in this thesis.29 Terry Smith’s Transformations in Australian Art volume two touches on the way that artists addressed museums, especially in the seventies.30 His writing on, and involvement with, the mid-seventies critique of the art museum is an important point of reference for this thesis.

Sue Cramer investigated the way artists have addressed museums in a Bachelor of Arts Honours dissertation at the University of Melbourne.31 The dissertation was titled “The Archive and the Museum in the work of Peter Cripps, Imants Tillers and Peter Tyndall” and it provides a touchstone for my own exploration of the work of Peter Cripps. The dissertation was limited in scope and considered only the challenges of the conceptual based nature of Cripps, Tillers and Tyndall’s art to the art museum.

Similarly, Ann Stephen wrote an essay that tackled Narelle Jubelin’s museum-based projects, another artist examined in this thesis.32 Stephen’s essay shows the curatorial and interpretative role that Jubelin’s work has played in museums. However, Stephen’s essay does not place these works within a broader field of art and museum practice.

What emerges from a review of the literature is that there has been little proper examination of the methods artists have adopted in negotiating museums, especially within Australia. Furthermore, the museological context in which such practice operates has been overlooked. This merits a detailed investigation because the

28 Rex Butler, ed., What is Appropriation? An Anthology of Critical Writings on Australian Art in the '80s and '90s (Brisbane: IMA & Power Publications, 1996). 29 Carolyn Barnes, "Specific Objects (the second time around): Two installations by Peter Cripps," What is Installation? An anthology of writings on Australian installation art eds. Adam Geczy and Benjamin Genocchio (Sydney: Power Publications, 2001). pp. 107-115. 30 Terry Smith, Transformations in Australian Art: The Twentieth Century - Modernism and Aboriginality, vol. 2 (Sydney: Craftsman House, 2002). 31 Sue Cramer, "The Archive and the Museum in the work of Peter Cripps, Imants Tillers and Peter Tyndall," B.A. Hons Dissertation, The University of Melbourne, 1991. 32 Ann Stephen, "Losers, Weepers: Narelle Jubelin's Museum Work," Past Present: The National Women's Art Anthology eds. Jo Holder and Joan Kerr (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1999). pp. 103-109. 13 museum has been of such major interest to Australian contemporary art since 1975. Such investigation is even more urgent owing to the fact that art increasingly plays an emblematic role within new museums of the late 1990s and early 2000s in Australia. This thesis aims to explore how the Australian context is different to the European and North American practices charted by Deep Storage, Museum as Muse and Art and Artifact.

This thesis identifies four prevailing approaches of Australian contemporary art to museums between 1975 and 2002. These four approaches are: oppositional critique, figurative representation, intervention and collaboration. This thesis argues that these four approaches represent a loose chronology. However, many of the practices investigated in this thesis also overlap and occur simultaneously, somewhat complicating the veracity of such a chronology. Nevertheless, this thesis charts a general progression from oppositional critique in the 1970s to collaboration in the mid-late 1990s and early 2000s.

Each of the chapters deals with one of these four approaches. For the first three of the four approaches, I investigate three artists whose work most clearly articulates that approach. Peter Cripps’s work since 1975 epitomises an oppositional critique of the museum. Fiona Hall’s work since the early eighties figuratively represents museum tropes. Narelle Jubelin’s work intervenes with museums from the late eighties to mid nineties. Each of these artists is well known and their work has been extensively reviewed. Yet surprisingly, there is a deficiency of literature properly analysing their respective engagements with the museum, and in particular, that situates their practice within a museological field. No attempt has thus far been made to consider their art practices together in order to chart a genealogy of art that has negotiated the museum. The final two chapters examine the fourth approach – collaboration – through artist- museum collaborations in new Australian museums since the early 1990s.

In 1996, an essay by Terry Smith “Generation X: The Impacts of the 1980s,” identified four key themes of Australian art practice: the minimal-conceptual nexus, the imagery of identity and alterity, the commodification and spectacularisation of art, 14 and the appearance of the other, which, he argued, prised open interpretation.33 Smith did not set out to explore the approaches of artists to museums. However, his four key themes shed light on the four prevailing approaches of artists to museums that this thesis explores.

The minimal-conceptual nexus that Smith identified corresponds with the oppositional critique of the museum that I identify in Peter Cripps’s work. Oppositional critique was a product of the minimal-conceptual nexus that Smith discussed. Indeed, he used Cripps as an example of this style of art, claiming that his work “seems an archaeology of the entire tendency.”34 The imagery of identity and alterity, according to Smith, directs attention towards personal identity formation, notions of hybridity and the marginal in relation to cultural canons. Much of the work examined by this thesis focuses on personal, subjective and marginalised histories in order to complicate the modernist canon and expand interpretation within museums. This is a chief contribution that art has made to recent curatorial practice in museums.

The third theme of art that Smith identified, commodification and spectacularisation in art, connects with my analysis of art’s figurative representation of museum tropes. Smith argued that art in the eighties explored concepts of commodification and the spectacle, following the influence of French theorist Jean Baudrillard.35 Fiona Hall’s work is intimately concerned with representing museum commodities – specimens and artefacts – and the spectacle of the museum. Hall’s late work figuratively depicts museum tropes and mimics the experience of viewing real specimens in the museum. While her work certainly employed strategies of quotation and appropriation, it did so in a different way to artists that came to epitomise these methods, such as Imants Tillers and John Young. Nevertheless, it is related to a broader interest in notions of commodification and spectacularisation.

33 Terry Smith, "Generation X: The Impacts of the 1980s," What is Appropriation? An Anthology of Writings on Australian Art in the '80s and '90s ed. Rex Butler (Brisbane: IMA & Power Publications, 1996). pp. 249-259. 34 Ibid. p. 252. 35 The influence of Baudrillard in Australian art and criticism during the early eighties has been traced elsewhere. See Charles Green, Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970 - 1994 (Melbourne: Craftsman House, 1995). pp. 70-71; Rex Butler, ed., What is Appropriation? An Anthology of Critical Writings on Australian Art in the '80s and '90s (Brisbane: IMA & Power Publications, 1996); Rex Butler, "The '80s in Retrospect," An Uncertain Smile: Australian Art in the '90s (Woolloomooloo, N.S.W.: Artspace , 1996). pp. 13-36. 15

The fourth theme that Smith discussed, the appearance of the other, referred to the significance of cultural difference and exchange in contemporary art. Smith argued that this opens up interpretative possibilities. My analysis of art intervention and collaborative approaches to the museum describes the significance of outsider - ‘other’ forms of representation within the museum - because of the way in which these methods contest history and expand narrative within the museum thus opening up interpretative possibilities. This thesis shows that a contemporary indigenous response to the museum has been sought in some new museums precisely to expand interpretation within the museum. Smith’s essay therefore, while not addressing the subject of this thesis directly, provides a parallel set of themes for Australian art of this period against which the four themes of this thesis can be better understood.

My methodology in analysing the work of Peter Cripps, Fiona Hall and Narelle Jubelin has involved reconstructing the artists’ works from visual documentation of the works, reviews, exhibition notes and catalogues, and interviews and correspondence that I have conducted with each artist. Frequently, I have sought to create a different picture of their work to that communicated by dominant critiques, by situating it within a museological context. I have only addressed works that deal explicitly with museum themes and that are related to the aims of this thesis, and have not sought to account for the entire career of each artist. For instance, I have deliberately not focussed on Narelle Jubelin’s work post-1995, because her work moved away from direct intervention in museums, when she became acutely aware of the problems with becoming what she described as a “career museum artist”36 such as Janet Laurence whose work is examined in chapter five. I consider the artist’s view that intervention loses its interventional qualities once it becomes part of the institution’s aesthetic and critical vocabulary.

For the fourth approach – collaboration – my method changes. Rather than analysing the work of a single artist who has collaborated extensively with museums, I analyse museum institutions that have facilitated emblematic artist-curator collaborations. The last two chapters focus on different museum contexts – including social history

36 Narelle Jubelin, Interview with the author, 4 December 2000, Madrid. 16 museums, natural history museums and art museums, in which artistic methods have played a vital curatorial role. The Hyde Park Barracks, Museum of Sydney, Melbourne Museum and Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia are analysed in these chapters. I draw from exhibition reviews, interviews and correspondence that I conducted with artists, curators and other museum staff in these institutions, internal museum documentation and commission briefs in order to build a picture of the different effects of contemporary art within these museums and the role of artistic approaches in curatorial methods.

Chapter one therefore investigates the work of Peter Cripps who conducts an oppositional critique of museums. The chapter plots a transition in Cripps work of oppositional critique from outside the museum during the seventies to oppositional critique from within the museum during the eighties and nineties. I argue that Cripps’s work continues what McShine identified in relation to Russian constructivist El Lissitzky who “harbored the utopian dream of a museum administered by artists.”37 Cripps’s self-archival and self-curatorial methods and construction of a private artist- museum attest to this.

Chapter two examines the work of Fiona Hall, whose figurative representation of museum tropes has characterised her visual language since the early 1980s. The chapter charts a constellation of museum tropes in Hall’s practice, including the sculptural-rendering of exotic specimen-like objects, taxonomic collections, storage drawers, display vitrines and the Wunderkammer. Hall’s figurative representation during the eighties is part of a broader so called return to figuration in the eighties and interest in, what Terry Smith identified as, the concepts of commodification and spectacularisation.38 Hall’s work has never been discussed in these terms.

In Chapter three, I investigate the museum interventions of Narelle Jubelin. Jubelin has conducted seminal and sophisticated interventions in Australian museums since the late eighties. Her work has also been highly collaborative in working with

37 Kynaston McShine, "Introduction," The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect, exh. cat. Museum of Modern Art. New York, 1999. p. 11. 38 Terry Smith, "Generation X: The Impacts of the 1980s," What is Appropriation? An Anthology of Writings on Australian Art in the '80s and '90s ed. Rex Butler (Brisbane: IMA & Power Publications, 1996). pp. 49-259. 17 museum curators to create installations and exhibits. Several of her pieces function both as art installations and museum exhibits – she is adept at blurring the boundaries between the two and indeed illustrates the degree to which convergence characterises the relationship between artists and museums particularly in Sydney in the early-mid nineties.

Chapter four addresses the fourth prevailing approach between artists and museums – collaboration. Jubelin’s work was seminal in charting a path of experimental collaborative practice between artists and curators, despite her overall artistic approach in maintaining an interventionist capacity. Chapter four aims to investigate the nature of artist-curator collaboration and convergence, with particular attention to the museological context for such practice. It identifies the practices within social history museums in the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales of the early-mid nineties – with particular focus on the Hyde Park Barracks and Museum of Sydney – as the most experimental forum for collaboration and convergence within this country, and indeed perhaps internationally.

Chapter five asks to what extent this collaborative practice between artists and curators has influenced – or, infiltrated – the traditional bastions of the museum establishment, the state museum and art gallery. In Victoria, the Melbourne Museum and Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, are the ‘new’ incarnations of the museum establishment. Each occupies a new museum building and adopts new principles of display and experience. Within these new museums, this chapter finds that art interventions play an emblematic role. In each, there is one specially commissioned intervention that occupies a high profile location and which, I suggest, may be used as an instrument of the new museum, to signify the museum’s revision of old models of museology and its new contemporary relevance.

In concluding this thesis, I draw the four approaches of artists to museums together – oppositional critique, figurative representation, intervention and collaboration – and consider the contribution that I have made to addressing the questions posed at the outset. I identify the broader implications of my research and suggest further avenues for inquiry. 18

Prologue. From Real Threat to Symbolic

Before starting this inquiry, I wish to sketch out the broad shift of real threat to symbolic in artistic treatments of the museum by focussing on a paradigmatic pair of exhibitions. This brief discussion aims to frame the principal set of issues within the thesis proper and set the scene for a recurring protagonist in this thesis: the National Gallery of Victoria.

In 1975, artist Domenico de Clario was invited to create an installation for the exhibition Artists’ Artists at the National Gallery of Victoria. The particular artistic and museological politics of this exhibition are examined in chapter one. Suffice to say that de Clario’s installation was at the centre of debates about the gallery’s representation of contemporary art and escalated changes in the gallery’s policy towards contemporary art.

De Clario’s installation Elemental Landscapes was grouped into five installation pieces and situated on the floor in the middle of the Australian Gallery (see Figures I and II).1 His installation was designed to correspond directly with iconic colonial and Australian landscape by Louis Buvelot, Eugene von Guerard, David Davies, John Longstaff and E. Philips Fox.

His June 1975 sketches for the installation, prior to its installation in August 1975, indicates the artist’s intentions for the piece.2 The five groupings were planned around the themes of fire, earth, air, ether and water. De Clario grouped discarded objects from urban consumer culture, which signified for the artist a “landscape of the unnatural world.”3 The sketch for the section ‘fire’ included a radiator bar heater turned on, kerosene tin, bedside table lamp, ash, and an electric heater. The heaters

1Catherine Haywood analysed de Clario’s Elemental Landscapes and its institutional context in a Post Graduate Diploma Thesis. Catherine Haywood, "Installations by Domenico de Clario. A comparative analysis of their context and criticisms; contrasted with the artist's perception of his art practice. A discussion of the curatorial issues that are raised," Post Graduate Diploma Dissertation, The University of Melbourne, 1993. 2 Domenico de Clario’s sketches for Elemental Landscapes, 1975, de Clario Artist File, National Gallery of Victoria Library. 3 Domenico de Clario, "Artist's statement," The Seventh Arit (Elemental Landscapes: 1975-1993) domenico de clario, exh. cat. National Gallery of Victoria. Melbourne, 1993. 19 and lamps were to correlate with Longstaff’s famous painting of a bushfire, Gippsland, Sunday night, February 20th, 1898 (1898). Other things in the installation included a fan; television (on which, his sketch reveals, he planned to play the iconic Australian TV series of the 1970s Skippy); a tape recorder playing a soundscape of Australian birds; a record turntable and a radio; pot plants; and bottles, glasses and dishes of water, which were to correspond with paintings of the sea.

These objects – detritus of everyday life – comprised a contemporary landscape, indicating a radical departure from nostalgic picturesque and romantic conventions of Australian landscape painting. Instead, de Clario’s pieces hoped to distil the essence of the elemental forces of the land, by presenting objects that he believed intrinsically embodied these elements from contemporary everyday life. To this end, he later stated,

I wanted to focus on ‘things’ as the repositories of an inner energy, expressed through these elemental groupings, as much as the Colonial paintings had depicted the inner elemental energy of a bushfire or of the ocean.4

De Clario began installing Elemental Landscapes in early August. However, when his plans to install a radiator bar heater turned on and highly flammable kerosene tin right next to valuable and irreplaceable works of art became evident, the gallery was concerned by the very real threat to the artworks. In the six months de Clario spent planning the installation, the organisers of the exhibition, Graeme Sturgeon and Peter Cripps, had not raised any concerns about the artist’s plans for the piece.5 However, de Clario “experienced unexpected aggression from the attendants about the nature of the pieces” once installing.6 When the curators of Australian art, Brian Finemore and Jennifer Phipps, became aware of de Clario’s piece they expressed concern for the safety of the artworks.7

4 Ibid. 5 Letter from Domenico de Clario to the Editor of the Age dated 12 August 1975 that was never published. de Clario Artist File, National Gallery of Victoria Library. 6 Ibid. 7 Jennifer Phipps, Curator of Australian Art (Late Modernism) National Gallery of Victoria, Interview with the author, 5 February 2004, Melbourne. 20

Finemore and Phipps discussed their concerns with de Clario and the organisers of Artists’ Artists, Sturgeon and Cripps. Phipps proposed that at the very least barricades be constructed around the installation where there was a bar heater to prevent it from being knocked over and causing a fire.8 De Clario objected to barricades because he wanted to retain the effect of ‘openness’ in the piece, which barricades would disrupt.9 He agreed, however, to display the heaters switched off and to display an empty kerosene tin to ensure that there was no fire risk. Interestingly, Longstaff first displayed his bushfire painting Gippsland, Sunday night, February 20th, 1898 (1898) in his studio, lit by kerosene lamps at the foot of it.10

Before the final installation was complete however, the director, Gordon Thomson, instructed that two sections of de Clario’s installation be removed. However, the artist was not advised.11 These sections were the closest to the historical works of art in the gallery. De Clario had installed the objects to set up specific relationships and juxtapositions with the historical paintings. Removing these sections altered the entire meaning of the piece and undermined the intrinsically contextual nature of the work. De Clario described the gallery’s removal of the two sections of the installation as having “vitally and totally altered the entire dynamics of the installation.”12 He therefore felt he had no option but to entirely disassemble the installation, because in its partial form, “it now stands on totally different grounds, ones that I have not considered; it has now new, unknown and unintentional dynamics, ones that I cannot at this stage assume responsibility for.”13

Following the installation’s removal, Thomson wrote to de Clario in order to explain the gallery’s reasons for removing the sections of the work. The reason given however was entirely unrelated to any possible real threat to the historical works of art. Thomson stated, “This change is necessitated by the unfortunate relationship they set

8 Letter from Domenico de Clario to the Age, 12 August 1975. de Clario Artist File, National Gallery of Victoria Library. 9 Ibid. 10 This was noted on the label accompanying the painting when displayed at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia in 2002. 11 Terry Smith touches on the significance of the removal of de Clario’s piece in Terry Smith, " in Australia: The Mid-1970s Moment," Agenda 1.2 (1988): pp. 12-13. 12 Letter from Domenico de Clario to the Age, 12 August 1975. de Clario Artist File, National Gallery of Victoria Library. 13 Ibid. 21 up with the historical works of art around them which I think it is unfair to ask the public to accept.”14 What was at stake therefore was not the installation’s real threat to the existing works of art, but their symbolic threat. The removal of de Clario’s piece mobilised contemporary artists to protest over the gallery policy on contemporary art, which will be investigated in chapter one, and caused de Clario to boycott the gallery (see Figures III and IV).

De Clario later commented that he believed the installation unintentionally appeared “arrogant and irreverent” when in fact it was “a serious attempt to examine how a self-perception of Australia had changed.”15 In 1975 however, the gallery evidently could not accommodate de Clario’s desire to establish a relationship between historical works and his own, nor de Clario’s proposed landscape of urban detritus. In a later letter to James Mollison, director of the National Gallery of Victoria in 1990, Stephen Mori, director of Mori Gallery, de Clario’s agent, argued that de Clario’s installation appeared to have “questioned the current art historical discourses.”16 Such questioning was deemed an unacceptable threat and insult to the Colonial and Heidelberg School landscape paintings. This exposed the hegemony of landscape painting within the canon of Australian art history. It also illustrated the gallery’s failure to understand de Clario’s style of work, with its influence of Arte Povera which was radical within the context of the gallery in 1975, and deemed offensive.

However, by 1990, James Mollison had begun negotiating with de Clario to recreate Elemental Landscapes within the gallery. In the fifteen intervening years the gallery had undergone a marked shift. It now offered the gallery collection to de Clario so he could recreate his installation in the large Murdoch Court. By 1990, de Clario’s approach to art was accepted ─ and seen to be extremely valuable ─ to the gallery.

14 Letter from Gordon Thomson to Domenico de Clario, 7 August 1975. de Clario Artist File, National Gallery of Victoria Library. 15 "Interview with Domenico de Clario conducted by John McPhee and Jennifer Phipps on 25 and 26 October 1993," The Seventh Arit (Elemental Landscapes: 1975-1993) domenico de clario, exh. cat. National Gallery of Victoria. Melbourne, 1993. 16 Stephen Mori, Director Mori Gallery, Letter to James Mollison, Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, 15 November 1990. de Clario Artist File, Internal Artist Files, National Gallery of Victoria. 22

After several delays, De Clario’s exhibition The Seventh Arit (Elemental Landscapes: 1975-1993) opened in December 1993 (see Figures V and VI). The installation was quite different to its earlier form. De Clario used objects from the gallery collection grouped around seven elements, instead of five: earth, water, fire, air, sound, light and thought. Each element corresponded with a colour – the spectrum of red through to violet. Red, for example, symbolised earth, orange – water, and yellow – fire. Six of the elements were located at points of a circle around the edge of the gallery, the seventh element, thought, was located in the centre. Each element comprised a group of objects from the gallery collection that de Clario had selected and arranged.

In the ‘fire’ section, for example, de Clario displayed Longstaff’s painting of a bushfire, Gippsland, Sunday night, February 20th, 1898 (1898) which he had originally intended to use in 1975, and to which the gallery had objected. The painting was hung on the wall, with objects from the collection clustered in front of it. A carved wooden table on which dozens of candlesticks were placed was directly in front of the painting. A large and elaborate candelabrum was adjacent to the painting and a drawing room suite of carved mahogany and fabric-cushioned chairs were placed haphazardly in front of the candelabrum. A lamp on the chair cast shadows of the objects onto the walls of the gallery. In other sections of the installation, de Clario gathered grandfather clocks, gilt edged mirrors and a range of that were unconventionally displayed directly on the floor. This time the installation included a bar heater, switched on, though de Clario agreed to display it facing away from and not near any objects from the collection, in a location approved by the conservation department.17 In addition, de Clario displayed cups and saucers from the collection filled with water. The conservation department also approved individual objects that could be filled with water.18

In the centre of the installation, de Clario displayed a chandelier. Underneath the chandelier was a pile of dust. De Clario had requested that the conservation department put aside all the dust collected from cleaning work done on objects in the

17 John McPhee, Co-cordinating Curator, Australian Art, Internal Memo to Tom Dixon, Head of Conservation, RE: Domenico de Clario’s installation, 11 November 1993. de Clario Artist File, Internal Artist Files, National Gallery of Victoria. 18 Ibid. 23 collection and vacuuming of storage areas for months before his exhibition. This dust – the centrepiece of de Clario’s installation – was comprised mainly of human skin and hair particles. This abject bodily matter is normally considered dirt and a pollutant, not something worthy of display itself. It is certainly normally banished from the museum, not consecrated as an ‘artefact’ of the museum. De Clario used it to signify the notion that everything eventually turns to dust, and that dust is the principle building block of all things – the most elemental of elements. Indeed this was made explicit in the central installation by the inclusion of an elaborately carved wooden cradle – symbolising birth, and an Egyptian mummy’s case – symbolising death. The mummy’s case was displayed within its packaging, as if in storage, with a sheet of transparent acrylic over the case to protect it.19

Rope barricades were erected around each group of objects to prevent the public from touching the exhibits. De Clario reportedly wanted the barricades in place.20 However, while the gallery would have preferred to display the candlesticks, cups and saucers in a glass case, de Clario did not wish to display them in this manner. The gallery therefore came up with a solution of waxing the objects to a glass sheet to be placed on the surface of the furniture, rather than declining de Clario’s wish.21 The gallery facilitated the artist’s unconventional display of the collection.

Notwithstanding this, there were problems throughout the duration of the exhibition involving the public touching the objects. People reportedly handled the candlesticks in the fire section of the installation and removed one of the drawers of a miniature chest.22 Following this incident, the artist rearranged the table on which the objects were positioned, moving it further away from the rope barricade, to discourage people from touching the exhibits.23 The number of gallery attendants was also increased to guard the display.

19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Terence Lane, Senior Curator of Decorative Arts, Internal Memo to the Acting Security Controller, 10 December 1993. de Clario Artist File, Internal Artist Files, National Gallery of Victoria. 23 Steven G. Ward, Operations Manager, Internal Memo to Terence Lane, Senior Curator of Decorative Arts, 21 December 1993. de Clario Artist File, Internal Artist Files, National Gallery of Victoria. 24

Despite these problems, the exhibition was praised within the gallery, with curatorial staff describing it as “fascinating” and “beautiful.”24 Indeed, in a letter from John McPhee, the co-ordinating curator of Australian art, to de Clario, thanking him for his efforts in preparing the installation, McPhee noted that,

The most amusing comment was from two women who were overheard to say, ‘I wish they would tidy up and turn on the lights.’! For that I think it has all been worth it!25

This signifies an immense shift in thinking within the gallery. In 1975, the director Gordon Thomson, had been concerned about the unusual juxtaposition of the installation with the landscape paintings, so much so that he claimed it was “unfair to ask the public to accept.”26 Nearly twenty years on, a degree of public confusion or confrontation was welcomed by the gallery.

For his part, de Clario described the experience of working within the gallery as “exhilarating, challenging, confusing and humbling.” He stated that the “ramifications, in terms of my works, will manifest in interesting ways over many years.” He noted that he had received “nothing but unqualified support and enthusiasm by all the individuals I’ve collaborated with.”27

These two exhibitions, one in 1975, the other in 1993, illustrate a paradigmatic shift in the gallery. The first installation had posed real threat to artworks in the collection, was modified by the artist, and then censored by the gallery director because of its symbolic threat to the artworks that was deemed offensive. For the subsequent reincarnation of this installation, nearly twenty years later, the gallery gave de Clario free reign and complete artistic licence, to the degree that the original real threat, a bar heater switched on, was accommodated within the installation. In addition, the gallery embraced the symbolically ‘threatening’ quality to the installation, with its

24 John McPhee, Internal Memo to Tom Dixon, RE: Domenico de Clario’s installation, 11 November 1993. de Clario Artist File, Internal Artist Files, National Gallery of Victoria. 25 John McPhee, Letter to Domenico de Clario, 23 December, 1993. de Clario Artist File, Internal Artist Files, National Gallery of Victoria. 26 Letter from Domenico de Clario to the Age, 12 August 1975. de Clario Artist File, National Gallery of Victoria Library. 27 Letter from Domenico de Clario to James Mollison, Director of the NGV, 8 December 1993. de Clario Artist File, Internal Artist Files, National Gallery of Victoria. 25 unconventional display of museum objects and challenges to public expectation. What was previously seen as an abhorrent aesthetic incursion, described in the media of the time as an exhibition of “rubbish”, was accorded an entirely different status within the gallery in 1993.28

These examples embody the transition from artist as an avant-garde outsider to the artist’s avant-garde status being embraced and promoted by the gallery, on the ‘inside.’ The following thesis will map out the changing contours that have defined the relationship between artists and museums in the period since 1975. How have artists negotiated and depicted museums? What has been the museum’s response to art’s various representations and incursions? What occurred in the intervening years between each de Clario exhibition to explain such a shift in thinking? How can this transition be accounted for? Why did the contours of the museological and artistic landscape in Australia alter so radically?

28 "'Rubbish' exhibition closure enrages artists." The Australian 19 August 1975 . 26

Chapter One. The Ideal Archive: the artist’s museum in the work of Peter Cripps 1975-1996

Introduction

Peter Cripps (b. 1948) has investigated the museum since the mid-seventies. He has negotiated curatorial issues related to the display of contemporary art, models of museums and art galleries that express different ideologies of representation, and the concept of the archive as a system. His work conducts an oppositional critique of the museum.

Analysis of Cripps’s work generally has not interrogated the artist’s oppositional critique of the museum or his early work. Sociologist Robert Lingard has written catalogue essays and collaborated on articles with Cripps since the late eighties.1 His writing on Cripps provides a valuable explanation of the artist’s intentions but fails to analyse the methods the artist adopts in his oppositional critique of the museum. Similarly, curator John Barrett-Lennard has worked closely with Cripps on exhibitions in the early nineties. He has produced catalogue essays for Cripps’s exhibitions and contributed an article on the artist’s work, discussing its site-specific aspects, but not his approach to the museum, or his early work.2

Carolyn Barnes has investigated Cripps’s work for a Master’s thesis that argued the artist was part of a wave of avant-garde artists breaking the established rules of art.3 In a later article she argued that Cripps’s work conducts an avant-garde critique of the

1 Namelessness: a play and installation by Peter Cripps. exh. cat. Centre for , The University of Tasmania. Melbourne, 1988.; Bob Lingard, "From Here On," Peter Cripps: From Here On, exh. cat. City Gallery. Melbourne, 1989. pp. 2-6.; Peter Cripps and Bob Lingard, "Flattening Australian Art History?," E3, exh. cat. Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Melbourne, 1988. n.pag. 2 John Barrett-Lennard, "Peter Cripps: Questions of Meanings," Art and Australia 30.3 (1993): pp. 346- 354; John Barrett-Lennard, "Peter Cripps: Projects for Two Museums," Peter Cripps: Projects for Two Museums, exh. cat. University of South Australia Art Museum and Museum of Economic Botany. Adelaide, 1993. pp. 8-21. 3 Carolyn Barnes, "Art - a rule to be broken: an examination of the development of an Australian avant- garde in the context of Australian earth, installation and site-specific art, c 1968-73," MA dissertation, University of Melbourne, 1992. 27 museum.4 However, she did not analyse what identified his critique as specifically avant-garde. Sue Cramer discussed the artist’s treatment of the archive and museum in a dissertation.5 Cramer identified the relationship between Cripps’s work and his peers Imants Tillers and Peter Tyndall.

Cripps’s oppositional critique of the museum has not been explored. His early work has rarely been investigated, yet it holds the key to understanding the artist’s developing oppositional critique of museums. There has been little critical investigation of Cripps’s practice that gives attention to a museological context of his work, despite the artist’s clear involvement with art museum politics. This chapter is concerned with excavating the museological context of Cripps’s practice and uncovering the relationship between this context and the artist’s oppositional critique.

By examining Cripps’s work and its museological context it will be possible to gain a more complete picture of avant-garde attitudes towards museum representation amongst artists of his generation. In tracing how Cripps has addressed museums, this chapter will also contribute to the analysis of Australian art since the mid-seventies. This chapter principally considers Cripps’s art practice but it also addresses his curatorial practice, which I argue has informed his art and its approach to the museum in prescient ways.

Why did Cripps’s work become so fixated on the motif and concept of the archive? How does his practice demonstrate an avant-garde response, shared by his peers, to a particular moment in museum history in this country? This chapter assesses the central claims in Cripps’s teleology, especially in relation to his creation of a private artist’s museum that although in some respects claims to distance itself from modernist notions of the heroic artist, actually continued to operate within this idiom. What effect, if any, does Cripps’s critique have on museums?

4 Carolyn Barnes, "Specific Objects (the second time around): Two installations by Peter Cripps," What is Installation? An anthology of writings on Australian installation art eds. Adam Geczy and Benjamin Genocchio (Sydney: Power Publications, 2001). pp. 107-115. 5 Sue Cramer, "The Archive and the Museum in the work of Peter Cripps, Imants Tillers and Peter Tyndall," B.A. Hons Dissertation, The University of Melbourne, 1991. 28

From Artists’ Artists to an artist’s museum: the curatorial context of Cripps’s archival art practice 1974-1977

This section aims to identify the influence that the exhibition Artists’ Artists held at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1975 had on Cripps’s approach to art practice. Cripps worked as an assistant exhibitions officer at the NGV from 1973 to 1975 and was involved in organising Artists’ Artists with Graeme Sturgeon, the exhibitions officer. This section establishes that this exhibition, and the related art politics of the mid-seventies, informed and helped to crystallise Cripps’s response towards the art museum. After Artists’ Artists Cripps’s art expressed opposition to the state art gallery. His work developed self-curatorial and self-archival strategies that allowed him, for a time, to maintain independence from the gallery. This independence was pivotal to his construction of his work as avant-garde. But it also isolated his art practice from an institutional museum context, which meant that his critique of museums had no effect or consequences for the museum.

During the early seventies, Cripps’s approach to the museum was heavily influenced by counter-cultural ideals – a heady mix of Marxist philosophy and leftist politics. With such views it is not surprising that he became critical of the state gallery’s collection and exhibition policies towards contemporary Australian art. Cripps and his peers claimed that the gallery failed to represent their interests, by not collecting and exhibiting their work. His work represents an idealistic, leftist commentary on particular aspects of museum practice and philosophy. a. Artists’ Artists and the art museum politics of the mid-seventies Graeme Sturgeon, exhibitions officer at the NGV and Cripps, his assistant, curated Artists’ Artists, an exhibition which opened in May 1975.6 Cripps left the gallery in April 1975, just prior to the exhibition opening. Cripps was closely involved with the

6 Artists’ Artists has not been discussed in any accounts of Australian art and museum practice of the seventies. However, the removal of de Clario’s work from the exhibition and the related art politics of the mid-seventies have been touched on in Terry Smith, "Art Criticism in Australia: The Mid-1970s Moment," Agenda 1.2 (1988): pp. 12-13 and Charles Green, Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970 - 1994 (Melbourne: Craftsman House, 1995). pp. 31-32. Catherine Haywood outlined aspects of this in a dissertation, Catherine Haywood, "Installations by Domenico de Clario. A comparative analysis of their context and criticisms; contrasted with the artist's perception of his art practice. A discussion of the curatorial issues that are raised," Post Graduate Diploma Dissertation, The University of Melbourne, 1993. 29 planning of Artists’ Artists, that consisted of a series of exhibits on show from May- November 1975, one of which was Domenico de Clario’s Elemental Landscapes.7 Cripps also exhibited his own artworks in the drawing and sculpture sections of the exhibition in June-July and October-November 1975 respectively.

Artists’ Artists exhibited a range of practices including painting, drawing and sculpture as well as post-object, installation and video. Older and more established figurative-expressionist painters including John Perceval, Barbara Brash and Fred Williams were included as well as Cripps and his peers Peter Tyndall, and Domenico de Clario who worked with post-object, conceptual and installation art. These young progressive contemporary artists were outnumbered in the exhibition, which favoured the older expressionist (male) painters.

It should be noted that out of approximately eighty-three artists who exhibited in Artists’ Artists, six were women. This disparity undoubtedly reflected the culture of the time, and in particular the hegemonic thinking that there were no great women artists. Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” originally published in the journal Art News, had tackled this thinking head on.8 Nochin argued that due to “stultifying, oppressive and discouraging”9 cultural and institutional frameworks, women artists have had far less opportunity to develop ‘great’ artistic talent. As well as this, there has been less institutional recognition for women artists in general. Museums have been complicit in promoting and maintaining this sexist hegemony. Artists’ Artists reflects this hegemony and shows the curators’ lack of interference with this hegemony. The sexist status quo remained

7 Jennifer Phipps recalled Cripps’s involvement with the planning of Artists’ Artists in an interview with the author, 5 February 2004, Melbourne. Domenico de Clario mentioned planning his installations with Cripps and Sturgeon in documentation of his installation held in the NGV Library. As an artist who exhibited within Artists’ Artists Cripps was involved with installing his own work in the gallery. Cripps’s role as assistant exhibitions officer in the lead up to the opening of Artists’ Artists has not been documented. In press coverage of the exhibition, Sturgeon was given full responsibility as curator of the exhibition. In subsequent discussion of the exhibition by art historians, of which there has been very little, Cripps is never mentioned. This is because any assessment of this exhibition has considered it principally in relation to the removal of Domenico de Clario’s work by the gallery, rather than the institutional setting from which the exhibition emerged. I am locating and identifying Cripps’s role in this exhibition because it relates directly to the manner in which this artist has addressed museological issues in his art practice. It also, of course, creates a fuller account of the institutional setting for the exhibition itself, the reasons for its development and its situation within the contemporary art community in Melbourne. 8 Linda Nochlin, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?," Women, Art and Power and Other Essays (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988, essay 1971). 9 Ibid. p. 150. 30 in Artists’ Artists, despite being an exhibition ostensibly aimed at increasing contemporary artists’ access to the gallery, and apparently tackling the issue of under- representation of contemporary art within the gallery. It certainly gave little attention to the plight of female Victorian artists.

Sturgeon and Cripps’s unusual curatorial methodology explains the disparate range of practices in the exhibition. They invited artists to select who they would like to see exhibited within the gallery, hence the title Artists’ Artists. The exhibition privileged the perspective of the community of living artists, who became active participants by contributing to who would exhibit in the show. This methodology was outlined in the pamphlet produced for Artists’ Artists. It was an important framework within which the art was to be viewed by the public. It attempted to adopt a democratic ethos in curating the exhibition.

It is likely that Sturgeon and Cripps adopted this methodology in response to a general sense of dissatisfaction with the gallery amongst the Victorian contemporary art community. It seems that many local contemporary artists believed that the NGV had not adequately supported their interests during the late sixties and early seventies.10 Artists’ Artists aimed to rectify this. As will become clear, Sturgeon and Cripps’s methodology was distinctly utopian in its quasi-Marxist vision of a gallery for the community of living artists. Their methodology reflected emerging revisionist methods within museum practice globally that advocated greater public participation in museums. Artists’ Artists was a novel attempt to correct what they perceived to be the state gallery’s inadequate support for local contemporary art.

Jennifer Phipps, the NGV’s associate curator of Australian art at the time, claimed that Brian Finemore, then curator of Australian art, thought the way Sturgeon and Cripps had selected the artists was a potential catastrophe, “destined to lead to major unrest and explosive unhappiness as peers discovered they were not selected by their peers.”11 Certainly, Sturgeon and Cripps’s method was the antithesis of conventional curatorial practice. In conventional curatorial practice, a curator selects the artists for

10 There is evidence for this in a wide range of sources, which I will be exploring over the course of this section. 11 Jennifer Phipps, email correspondence with the author, 22 March 2004. 31 exhibition based on their knowledge, taste, the collection and exhibition policies of the museum, funding parameters and practicability. In this case, artists from the community selected who they would like to see exhibited within the gallery. Theoretically, the hegemony of the curator within the museum would be challenged.

Maureen Gilchrist, critic for the Age reviewed Artists’ Artists in May 1975. Gilchrist noted in her review that the exhibition “was not carried out properly.” She referred to staffing problems within the gallery, but did not elaborate.12 The staffing problems that Gilchrist touched on seem to have principally been the tension between the exhibition officers (Sturgeon and Cripps), who did not normally curate exhibitions, and curators of Australian art (Brian Finemore and Jennifer Phipps). This may have been caused by the fact that exhibition officers at this time were usually responsible for the practical installation of exhibitions, rather than curating exhibitions. In 1975 it was unusual for exhibition officers to be responsible for curating an exhibition. Jennifer Phipps claimed in an interview with the author that Sturgeon and Cripps did not consult her, or Brian Finemore, on the development of the exhibition. They entirely bypassed any consultation with the curators in the development of Artists’ Artists.13

There are three possible reasons for this. Firstly, Sturgeon and Cripps were able to curate the exhibition relatively independently because the exhibitions department was given funds for this initiative as part of the statewide visual art festival of 1975, run by Arts Victoria. Sturgeon and Cripps did not have to collaborate with the curators because they had control over the funds within the exhibition department, and were therefore able to develop the exhibition themselves. Secondly, Sturgeon and Cripps may have been aware that Finemore disapproved of their methodology. This knowledge would not have encouraged their collaboration with the curators. Thirdly, Sturgeon and Cripps were associated with younger progressive artists who were influenced by counter-cultural ideals and an anti-establishment ethos. Their methodology for this exhibition suggests that Artists’ Artists was an effort to make the gallery more relevant and responsive to the needs of contemporary artists.

12 Maureen Gilchrist. "Look-in for local artists." Age 8 May 1975 sec. Art. 13 Jennifer Phipps, Interview with the author, 5 February 2004, Melbourne. 32

By curating Artists’ Artists Sturgeon and Cripps transgressed the normal parameters of their role as exhibition officers within the gallery. Nonetheless, within the NGV exhibition officers had once had an influential role in directing the curatorial content of exhibitions. In fact, artists had been employed as exhibition officers in the past. They also had a curatorial role just as Cripps had 1973. The semi-figurative and symbolic artist Leonard French, for example, was responsible for the Survey exhibitions of contemporary Australian art between 1957 and 1961. Art Historian Christopher Heathcote has discussed French’s role as the exhibitions officer at the NGV, which included organising the temporary exhibitions, advising on acquisitions of contemporary art and intermittently act as a guide lecturer.14 French’s role however was more expansive than this and is outlined in the Appendix (see Appendix). After French, John Stringer, originally a printmaker though not known now for his art as French is, oversaw the Survey exhibitions between 1962 and 1966.

By 1973, when the gallery employed Cripps, he had completed a diploma in sculpture from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, worked as a model maker for the stage designer Kris Frederikson and in 1973 had participated in the Mildura Scultpurescape, curated by Tom McCullough, that exhibited post-object, performance, conceptual, installation and earthworks art practices.15 Cripps’s work at the gallery, as an assistant exhibitions officer to Graeme Sturgeon (who was not an artist) would have been similar to French’s, however the Survey exhibitions were no longer operating and he therefore did not have as much of a curatorial role until the opportunity to help organise Artists’ Artists with Sturgeon.

Artists’ Artists was an expanded variation on the survey style exhibition that French and Stringer had been responsible for between 1957 and 1966. These survey shows may have been discontinued owing to the focus on opening the new gallery designed by Roy Grounds on St Kilda Road in 1968, and a packed exhibition schedule that included several international touring exhibitions in the early seventies, factors which

14 Christopher Heathcote, A quiet revolution: The rise of Australian art 1946-1968 (Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 1995). p. 55. 15 Cripps’s activities prior to 1981 were briefly mentioned in the biographical notes for the exhibition Theatre of Memory: An environmental work by Peter Cripps. exh. cat. Shepparton . Shepparton, Vic., 1981. 33 exhausted both exhibition space and funding.16 A change of directorship during this period, from Eric Westbrook to Gordon Thomson, may also have resulted in the Survey shows being discontinued because Westbrook had initiated them.

Like the survey shows, Artists’ Artists presented a wide-ranging survey of contemporary Australian art. Gilchrist commented in her review, “at long last, a considerable number of local artists have been given a look in and a say at the gallery as artists instead of merely as Sunday spectators like the rest of us.”17 This suggests that local contemporary art had not been exhibited by the NGV in recent years. What types of contemporary art had been exhibited at the NGV in the lead-up to Artists’ Artists?

In the early seventies there were several exhibitions of contemporary art practices, including conceptual art, installation art and craft. Craft was booming in the early to mid-seventies, and the NGV’s Craft and Fibre exhibition in 1973 capitalised on this boom. Brian Finemore curated Object and Idea also in 1973, which included the work of six Australian experimental contemporary artists including Aleks Danko, Nigel Lendon, Ti Parks and Imants Tillers. While art historian Christopher Heathcote has described Finemore’s collecting and exhibition practices as “safe, not perceptive”18 Finemore’s exhibition Object and Idea signified the gallery’s commitment to the most progressive of contemporary art practices and could hardly be seen as a safe selection. This exhibition, for example, led Bruce Adams to write in the journal Hemisphere in May 1974, “an interesting aspect of contemporary art in Australia over the past year or so has been the more active role of the state galleries in presenting temporary exhibitions of the most recent and still experimental art forms.”19 This comment shows the perception within the wider art community that state galleries such as the NGV were becoming instrumental in supporting and exhibiting progressive contemporary art. Art historian, artist and curator Charles Green went so far as to argue that in the seventies the most progressive art was often shown in state gallery

16 Major exhibitions that toured Australia and came to the NGV during this period included Some Recent American Art curated by Jennifer Licht from the Museum of Modern Art in 1974 and Modern Masters curated by William Liebermann also from the Museum of Modern Art in 1975. 17 Maureen Gilchrist. "Look-in for local artists." Age 8 May 1975 sec. Art. 18 Christopher Heathcote, A quiet revolution: The rise of Australian art 1946-1968 (Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 1995). p. 199. 19 Bruce Adams, "Impossible Art?," Hemisphere May (1974): p. 18. 34 survey shows.20 Ian Burn et al. similarly argued of this period, “the rapidly changing characteristics of avant-gardist art perfectly suited the new entrepreneurial role being assumed by the major art galleries in Australia.”21

In 1974, Phipps was preparing an exhibition of post-object contemporary art practices for the NGV. Performance Documents Film and Video included performance and conceptual artists such as Tim Burns, Aleks Danko, Mike Parr, Robert Rooney, Ian Burn, and Terry Smith. Again this selection favoured the most progressive contemporary art forms.

Despite the NGV’s emergence as a new forum for contemporary art, younger progressive artists were apparently disillusioned with the gallery in the early seventies. As the prologue discussed, artists were mobilised to protest after Gordon Thomson removed de Clario’s installation from Artists’ Artists in August 1975 because it was deemed offensive. A press report on the removal of de Clario’s installation noted “artists have been dissatisfied for several years at the gallery’s lack of policy on modern art.”22 A letter that de Clario wrote to the press about the lead-up to his installation’s removal (never published and now available on file in the NGV library) he paraphrased artist Tim Burns, who “felt that the whole issue was symptomatic of the failure of the gallery to cope with the contemporary scene while being keeper of the treasures of the past.”23 Clearly there was a growing belief amongst local progressive contemporary artists that the gallery did not adequately represent their needs. What led to this perception?

This disillusioned sentiment partly stemmed from the 1968 exhibition of contemporary Australian art, The Field. The Field had been a catalyst for debate about the gallery’s representation of contemporary art. Curated by Brian Finemore and John Stringer, The Field included works by contemporary Australian painters and sculptors working within the idiom of Hard Edge and Colour Field art. The director, Eric

20 Charles Green, Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970 - 1994 (Melbourne: Craftsman House, 1995). p. 29. 21 Ian Burn, et al., The Necessity of Australian Art: an essay about interpretation (Sydney: Power Publications, Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney, 1988). p. 107. 22 "'Rubbish' exhibition closure enrages artists." The Australian 19 August 1975 23 Letter from Domenico de Clario to the Editor of the Age in August 1975, never published, de Clario Artist File, National Gallery of Victoria Library. 35

Westbrook, used the exhibition to signal the gallery’s commitment to contemporary Australian art, and the gallery as modern.24 Although Stringer later asserted that with The Field he had tried to overcome “the time gap which usually hitherto alienated the institution from the avant-garde,”25 The Field nonetheless did not succeed in closing this gap. It instead uncovered a split within current practice and instigated debate about the nature of contemporary art.

While critic for the Age Patrick McCaughey praised The Field for embracing an international art style, a younger generation of artists criticised it for emphasising what they saw as an outmoded and unsustainable Greenbergian aesthetics.26 American art critic Clement Greenberg’s assessment of art based on the aesthetic merits of colour and form seemed increasingly irrelevant to many younger contemporary artists who produced work that critiqued the exclusivity of colour and form.27 These younger artists, together with the then University of Sydney based critic Donald Brook, questioned the logic of a hermetic art object and its surrounding institution, the museum.28 Even work within The Field undermined Greenbergian logic. Ian Burn’s Two Glass/ (1967-68) suggested an entirely different concept of art, which placed the viewer at the centre and the process of viewing itself as the subject

24 Further discussion of Westbrook’s policy on modern art and his belief that the NGV should represent contemporary art as much as historical, can be found in Christopher Heathcote, A quiet revolution: The rise of Australian art 1946-1968 (Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 1995). pp. 46-48. 25 John Stringer, "Why-The Field," The Field Now, exh. cat. Heide Park and Art Gallery. Melbourne, 1984. p. 16. 26 Gary Catalono, "The Ancestry of 'Anything Goes': Australian Art Since 1968," Meanjin 35.4 (1976): p. 394. 27 In May 1968, Clement Greenberg presented the Power Lecture in contemporary art at the Power Institute in the Fine Arts at the University of Sydney. His lecture, entitled, “Avant-garde attitudes: new art in the sixties” undertook a formalist analysis of avant-garde art. This lecture was heavily criticised by the local contemporary art community, for whom formalist concerns were secondary to intellectual and philosophical. Clement Greenberg, "Avant-garde attitudes: New art in the Sixties," The Power Lectures 1968-73: Concerning Contemporary Art ed. Bernard Smith (: Clarendon Press, 1975). pp. 5-15. Terry Smith has discussed the critique of formalist Art History in Terry Smith, Transformations in Australian Art: The Twentieth Century - Modernism and Aboriginality, vol. 2 (Sydney: Craftsman House, 2002). 28 Donald Brook was an early advocate in Australia of ‘post-object’ art practices, and staunch critic of Greenberg’s formalism. Brook was the first to use the term ‘post-object’ in Australia in reference to conceptual, performance, installation and earthworks art practice. Brook delivered the Power Lecture in 1969, the year following Greenberg’s Power Lecture, entitled “Flight from the object.” Brook discussed the flight from the object, “into the embrace of critical subjectivism” by which he meant, the work of art can be perceived in different ways according to the individual subject and therefore cannot be judged on any notion of inherent formal quality. He also discussed the flight from the object in terms of an approach to process and systems based art, which was integrated with life rather than segregated. Donald Brook, "Flight from the object," Concerning Contemporary Art: The Power Lectures 1968-1973 ed. Bernard Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). pp. 16-34. For an account of the emergence of conteptual art see, Terry Smith, "Conceptual Art in Transit," Transformations in Australian Art: The Twentieth Century - Modernism and Aboriginality, vol. 2 (Sydney: Craftsman House, 2002). pp. 122-143. 36 of art. Instead of placing the gallery at the cutting edge, The Field made the gallery seem out of step with the most progressive contemporary art debates.29

Despite Brian Finemore and Jennifer Phipps’ exhibitions in the early to mid-seventies that attempted to support the most recent developments in contemporary local art, the younger progressive contemporary art community still felt alienated by the gallery. The gallery had not resumed the Survey exhibitions that ran from 1957-1966 and this may be part of the reason. Another factor was that several large touring American exhibitions of contemporary art were exhibited at the gallery. Some Recent American Art curated by Jennifer Licht from the Museum of Modern Art in 1974 and Modern Masters curated by William Liebermann also from the Museum of Modern Art in 1975 were shown at the gallery. These exhibitions signalled to many local contemporary artists the pervasiveness of American cultural imperialism and that the gallery had embraced ‘international’ modernist style at the expense of local artistic interests.

Terry Smith has argued that the mid-seventies were a “moment of anti-Modernism” with artists reacting against the institutionalisation of “capital M-Modernism.”30 Institutions such as the National Gallery of Victoria seemed to embrace international modernism to such an extent, that the institution had little relevance for local contemporary artists. Or worse, as Smith described in “The Provincialism Problem”, when local artists finally achieved an international modernism style, as the work in The Field did, “it seemed, almost instantly, an empty victory, a hollow art, a vapid after-image” of the ‘original’ that was produced elsewhere (in the ‘centre’ of the artworld, New York) and earlier.31 Smith described the work of artists who critiqued

29 For more analysis of The Field see, Rex Butler, "Abstraction- The Anamorphic Monochrome," A Secret History of Australian Art (Sydney: Craftsman House, 2002). pp. 55-64.; Fieldwork: Australian art 1968-2002. exh. cat. National Gallery of Victoria. Melbourne, 2002.; The Field Now. exh. cat. Heide Park and Art Gallery. Melbourne, 1984.; Patrick McCaughey, "The Significance of The Field," Art & Australia 6.3 (1968): pp. 335, 342.; for information on Burn’s Two Glass/Mirror Piece (1967-68) especially see, Terry Smith, "Conceptual Art in Transit," Transformations in Australian Art: The Twentieth Century - Modernism and Aboriginality, vol. 2 (Sydney: Craftsman House, 2002). pp. 122-124. 30 Smith discusses the reaction against ‘capital M-Modernism’ in Terry Smith, Transformations in Australian Art: The Twentieth Century - Modernism and Aboriginality, vol. 2 (Sydney: Craftsman House, 2002). pp. 18-20. His 1974 essay, “The Provincialism Problem” was written in response to this situation, Terry Smith, "The Provincialism Problem," Artforum 13.1 (1974): pp. 46-54. 31 Terry Smith, Transformations in Australian Art: The Twentieth Century - Modernism and Aboriginality, vol. 2 (Sydney: Craftsman House, 2002). p. 18. 37 this situation – via conceptual, feminist and political practices – as modernism’s “supplements.”32

The local progressive contemporary art community in Melbourne resented the hegemony that the National Gallery of Victoria had come to embody and critiqued the activities of the gallery. In part, this dissatisfaction with the establishment shows the influence of counter-cultural politics on a younger generation of artists. The state art gallery exemplified the cultural establishment. Globally, young contemporary artists were critiquing the museum establishment, to which they believed they could not gain access. They perceived that the museum safeguarded the interests of a few, promoted elitism and bourgeois cultural values. It was out of step with the times, and an instrument of cultural control. The counter-cultural movement wanted access to the establishment if only to wreak havoc on the conservative values that it had come to embody.33

But this was played out in confusing and complex ways in 1975 in Melbourne. On the one hand the NGV was criticised by young progressive artists because it represented the cultural establishment, despite the fact that the gallery had been an increasingly supportive venue for progressive contemporary art. And on the other, an older generation of more conservative artists capitalised on the younger generation’s criticisms, widening their criticism’s scope to include a critique of the gallery’s lessening support of abstract expressionistic and figurative contemporary art. For a brief moment, young progressive and older conservative contemporary artists were united in their criticism of the NGV, although for entirely different reasons.

Sturgeon and Cripps’s Artists’ Artists brought together the interests of both groups of contemporary artists by enabling the art community to select the artists they would like to see in the gallery. In Artists’ Artists contemporary artists had some influence and power over determining the content of the exhibition. They therefore had greater

32 Ibid. p. 19. 33 Art & Language were particularly vocal in critiquing what they saw as the elitist ideology of the establishment. This is documented in Ian Burn, et al., The Necessity of Australian Art: an essay about interpretation (Sydney: Power Publications, Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney, 1988). pp. 104-126. 38 access to the processes of the cultural establishment than ever before. This gave agency to the art community, rather than the gallery.

Artists’ Artists reflected leftist political beliefs and especially the ideologies of Marxism and Maoism that were influential amongst Cripps’s contemporary art peers. Artists’ Artists democratically represented the perspective of a collective of artists, rather than a single authoritative curator. This was influenced by Maoism which claimed to privilege the collective over the individual, though the cult of Mao as an individual showed the hypocrisy of Maoist dogma. Nonetheless, the concept of the collective was popular from the late 1960s to mid 1970s amongst the left, and it influenced cultural practice in Australia, such as the formation of artist collectives in the late 1960s and early 1970s or experiments in collective direction of exhibitions. For example, Inhibodress was an artist collective formed by Mike Parr, Peter Kennedy and Tim Johnson in 1970 in Sydney. Collectives were formed elsewhere; the Progressive in Adelaide in 1974, the Community Art Workers in Melbourne in 1975 and Praxis in Perth in the early seventies. Charles Green described how in the alternative art gallery Pinacotheca in Melbourne, the director Bruce Pollard “experimented with collective direction, insisting that artists spend some time behind the gallery’s front desk.”34Sturgeon and Cripps’s methodology for Artists’ Artists embodied a utopian interest in the idea of the collective and challenged the museum’s exclusive authority to make judgements about art.

Artists’ Artists was also part of an international revision of museum practice. Sturgeon and Cripps’s views strongly corresponded with an emerging field of literature and museum theory that questioned the locus of authority within the museum, particularly from a Marxist and feminist perspective. Such critique worked on the assumption that, as Terry Smith argued in “The Provincialism Problem” in 1974, “there are no ideologically neutral cultural acts.”35

34 Charles Green, Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970 - 1994 (Melbourne: Craftsman House, 1995). p. 33. 35 Terry Smith, "The Provincialism Problem," Artforum 13.1 (1974): pp. 46-54. 39

In 1975, Artforum published an article by art critic and historian Annette Michelson, “The Museum in the era of Late Capitalism.”36 Her article, in the context of an analysis of French in the 1950s and 60s, the role of André Malraux as Minister of Culture, and the development of the Georges Pompidou National Centre for Art and Culture at Beaubourg, discussed the distrust students felt for institutions that reached its apogee in May 1968. Michelson described the tension between the student left’s aspiration to decentralised institutional authority that would represent living culture more satisfactorily and the creation of this massive cultural centre, the Pompidou, that represented another, if newer and highly sophisticated, example of centralised institutional authority. Michelson’s article reflects the Marxist critical appraisals of the museum and state cultural institutions emerging post-1968. Her article is especially relevant to Sturgeon and Cripps’s response to the National Gallery of Victoria, also in 1975, which typified the desire by the student left to destabilise the centralised authority of the art museum that she had identified. Sturgeon and Cripps’s Artists’ Artists was fundamentally concerned with increasing artists’ direct access to the gallery.

Other writers in the 1970s began to recognise the museum’s physical structure and layout, exhibition procedures and display methodologies, as specifically ideological, conveying specific cultural meanings. For example, Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach’s article “The Museum Of Modern Art As Late Capitalist Ritual: An Iconographic Analysis”, published in the journal Marxist Perspectives in 1978.37 While Sturgeon and Cripps’s critique of the gallery was not as well formulated as this, it was motivated by a belief that the gallery represented particular ideologies about art. The fact that Artists’ Artists was installed throughout the ‘public’ spaces of the gallery, such as the foyer of the building, and in free space within the permanent collection galleries rather than in a specific gallery, attests not only to the practicality of there being no designated gallery of contemporary Australian art within the gallery (which to Sturgeon and Cripps in itself represented a lack of commitment to contemporary Australian art) but also to Sturgeon and Cripps’s awareness of the artworks’ intervention into a particular, ideologically driven, narrative of art that was

36 Annette Michelson, "The Museum in the Era of Late Capitalism," Artforum XIII.8 (1975): pp. 62-67. 37 Carol Duncan and Allan Wallach, "The Museum of Modern Art As Late Capitalist Ritual: An Iconographic Analysis," Marxist Perspectives Winter (1978): pp. 28-51. 40 epitomised by the physical arrangement of art in the gallery. By placing exhibits of artworks in public spaces of the gallery, such as in the ground floor foyer where Cripps’s sculpture entry was exhibited, or in the ‘empty’ centre of the Australian art gallery as was de Clario’s installation, Sturgeon and Cripps drew attention to particular gaps in the gallery’s survey of art that were conveyed through physical and spatial means as much as conceptual and curatorial.

In the seventies, debates concerning the critique of museum practice were played out in the pages of the prestigious journals Art in America and Museum. The July-August 1971 edition of Art in America was a special issue on the museum.38 This was later published as an anthology of essays called Museums in Crisis in 1972 edited by Brian O’Doherty.39 These essays conducted feminist and Marxist critiques of the museum. Some essays in this volume clearly reflected the notion that the museum represented only ‘dead’ art, and had so far not satisfactorily established a framework for exhibiting contemporary art.40 Contemporary artists in Australia, including Cripps and his peers, almost certainly would have paid heed to these perspectives on the museum, given the high status that the journal had within the contemporary art community globally.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in Europe, Museum published a range of essays investigating the problems of exhibiting and collecting contemporary art, discussed in the introduction to this thesis. It presented an analysis of the proceedings of a UNESCO conference in 1969 and 1970 that had examined the relationship between avant-garde art and the museum and concluded that,

One of the main problems of museums today is to succeed in avoiding the influence of an authoritative museum culture, determined solely by one man. The need to replace the one-man system by a team is obvious everywhere…In order to break with eighteenth and nineteenth-century structures, even the team system should also be replaced by a participation of the public.41

38 Art in America 59.4 (1971). 39 Brian O'Doherty, ed., Museums in Crisis (New York: George Braziller, 1972). 40 Hugh Kenner, "Epilogue: The Dead-Letter Office," Museums in Crisis ed. Brian O'Doherty (New York: George Braziller, 1972). pp. 161-174. 41 Harald Szeemann, "Exchange of views of a group of experts," Museum XXIV (1972): p. 7. 41

Sturgeon and Cripps expressed this view in their methodology by privileging the artistic community’s perspective – the participation of the public – in Artists’ Artists three years later. While I cannot be sure that they would have read this edition of Museum, their methodology reflects the emerging ethos of revisionism taking place within museums. Sturgeon and Cripps’s exhibition Artists’ Artists should rightly been seen as part of this emerging spirit of revisionism, in which the authority and primacy of the museum was challenged by outside influences and greater public participation and access.

Although the sentiment of revision and participatory models of exhibition development were played out in Artists’ Artists, several incidents during the exhibition again seemed to highlight the gallery’s inadequate response to progressive contemporary art. In May 1975, just as Artists’ Artists opened, the gallery banned the scheduled Art & Language event curated by Jennifer Phipps. The gallery relocated the Art & Language event to the National Gallery , next to the NGV, in response to a demand from the visiting American curator William Liebermann from the Museum of Modern Art in New York who was in Melbourne for the opening of his exhibition, Modern Masters held at the NGV in May 1975.42 Liebermann objected to Art & Language’s direct interrogation of the Museum of Modern Art’s cultural imperialism. He threatened legal action and to cancel Modern Masters if the Art & Language event was not moved from the gallery.43 The Art & Language debate about American cultural imperialism via telexed statements, or “blurts, fragments of discourse” from New York, where Ian Burn and Mel Ramsden were, to Melbourne where Terry Smith received the telexes and led discussion with the audience, offended the visiting American curator. 44

Charles Green recalled the cancelling of Art & Language’s exhibit within the NGV, “these were memorable events, provoking debates about cultural imperialism in Art &

42 Charles Green, Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970 - 1994 (Melbourne: Craftsman House, 1995). p. 31. 43 Ian Burn, et al., The Necessity of Australian Art: an essay about interpretation (Sydney: Power Publications, Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney, 1988). pp. 118-119. 44 Art & Language exhibition statement, May 29-June 8 1975, National Gallery of Victoria Exhibition Files 1975, National Gallery of Victoria Library. 42

Language’s simultaneous forums.”45 Clearly, the progressive contemporary art community felt that the NGV was kowtowing to the conservative influence of the Museum of Modern Art. This is because the gallery wanted to position itself in line with the international standards set by MOMA, as the ‘centre’ of the .46 But there would have been very serious legal and financial repercussions had the gallery not relocated the Art & Language event. In some respects, moving it next door to the Art School was a good solution because it was still close to Modern Masters and could conduct its criticism of American cultural imperialism with perhaps even greater relevance owing to the publicity accompanying the event’s removal from the gallery under such circumstances.47

Then when the director of the NGV, Gordon Thomson, removed Domenico de Clario’s installation from Artists’ Artists in August 1975, even before the public had viewed it, artists were mobilised to protest about the gallery’s policy on contemporary art. The protest represented the culmination and crystallisation of avant-garde attitudes opposing the gallery’s depiction of local contemporary art that had been building since The Field in 1968, counter-cultural politics, as well as a direct response to the removal of the Art & Language event in May and de Clario’s piece in August 1975. The gallery was seen to be preventing contemporary artists from having access to the gallery. Terry Smith wrote that the removal of de Clario’s piece seemed to exemplify “the gallery’s long standing attitude of contempt towards local artists.”48

The protest demonstration by the art community in response to this incident was organised by the Ewing and George Paton Galleries at the University of Melbourne. A first meeting held in the Ewing and George Paton Galleries attended by 60 people occurred on 18 August 1975, and a second – much larger protest – attended by some

45 Charles Green, Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970 - 1994 (Melbourne: Craftsman House, 1995). p. 31. 46 This was when debates about the ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ of the art world were hotly contested within the Australian art community. This is outside of the scope of this thesis and is very well documented in Terry Smith, "The Provincialism Problem," Artforum 13.1 (1974): pp. 46-54; Ian Burn, et al., The Necessity of Australian Art: an essay about interpretation (Sydney: Power Publications, Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney, 1988). 47 Burn et al. describe the reception of Art & Language event by the Melbourne art community. It was not received well. The public, they reported, thought Art & Language were variously, “opaque”, “elitist”, “chauvinist”, “politically compromised” and “destructive”. See Ian Burn, et al., The Necessity of Australian Art: an essay about interpretation (Sydney: Power Publications, Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney, 1988). p. 119. 48 Terry Smith, "Art Criticism in Australia: The Mid-1970s Moment," Agenda 1.2 (1988): p. 12. 43

200 people, on 21 August 1975, was held at the NGV and chaired by Terry Smith (see Figures III and IV).49 During the first meeting there were six resolutions agreed on that were presented to the NGV. The first resolution condemned Thomson’s removal of de Clario’s installation and the Art & Language event, and stated that was “the culmination of a long history of prejudice against experimental art.” The second demanded that the gallery give equal respect to contemporary art as it did to historical art. The third demanded a public inquiry into the Department of Australian art (Sturgeon and Phipps) and Exhibitions (Sturgeon, Cripps had left the gallery in April). The fourth demanded the “right to contribute to policy making at all levels within the Gallery.” The fifth demanded a “continuous, responsive program representing Australian art” and the sixth demanded that the gallery be re-structured “to make it responsive to the needs and interests of artists and public in an expansively democratic way.”50

Maureen Gilchrist noted in a newspaper article covering the demonstration held in the Australian art galleries at the NGV that before the protest demonstration NGV staff “stripped the walls of the Australian gallery of most of its paintings in case of violence.”51 These cautionary steps reveal the NGV’s fear that the demonstration might actually pose a real threat to the artworks. There was no violence however. The Director of the Victorian Ministry for the Arts, then Eric Westbrook, and a gallery Trustee Brian Stonier, attended the demonstration to listen to the concerns of the protesters.52

The demonstration and its implications for the NGV have only briefly been touched on by art historians of the period. Terry Smith mentioned it in a 1988 article discussing Australian art and art criticism in the mid-seventies in the journal Agenda.53 Smith explained that the demonstration was essentially a demand by local

49 This is documented in relation to Gordon Thomson’s removal of de Clario’s work Elemental Landscapes in August 1975 in the notes on the events surrounding this incident on the de Clario Artist File, National Gallery of Victoria Library. 50 Poster advertising the artists’ protest at the National Gallery of Victoria held on 21 August 1974. de Clario Artist File, National Gallery of Victoria Library. 51 Maureen Gilchrist. "Local Artists call for better deal." Age 22 August 1975. 52 See notes on the events surrounding the removal of de Clario’s Elemental Landscapes in 1975 in de Clario Artist File, National Gallery of Victoria Library. 53 Terry Smith, "Art Criticism in Australia: The Mid-1970s Moment," Agenda 1.2 (1988): pp. 12-13. 44 contemporary artists for recognition from the gallery. Charles Green made passing mention to it in a section of Peripheral Vision on public galleries and the representation and exclusion of new art in the seventies.54 Neither Smith nor Green traced the implications of the demonstration for the institutional structure of the NGV. Green argued, “it was doubtful whether any substantial relationship between the Gallery and contemporary artists developed as a consequence.”55

The extent to which the gallery responded to the demands of the protesters is questionable. In late 1975 an Artists Steering Committee was established by the NGV to address the concerns of contemporary artists and specifically, the appointment of a curator of contemporary art, the establishment of a specific gallery for contemporary Australian art, the exhibition programme and acquisitions policy.56 The director, Gordon Thomson, left the gallery in late 1975 to be replaced by Eric Rowlison. Rowlison met with the Artists Steering Committee in March 1976.57 In May, the Age reported that a pressing priority of Rowlison’s was to “open lines of communication between artists and the gallery’s administration.”58

However, aside from the Director’s good intentioned rhetoric, there were few immediate and concrete changes within the gallery in response to the protesters’ demands. Indeed, the older more conservative faction of contemporary artists appropriated the demands made by the younger progressive art community during the demonstration. Lenton Parr, the artist appointed to the Trustees ostensibly to better represent the interests of contemporary artists in 1975, was an artist whose sympathies lay with abstractionists and expressionists.59 He was also Director of the Victorian

54 Charles Green, Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970 - 1994 (Melbourne: Craftsman House, 1995). pp. 31-32. 55 Ibid. p. 32. 56 Notes on the events surrounding the removal of de Clario’s Elemental Landscapes in 1975 in de Clario Artist File, National Gallery of Victoria Library. 57 Notes on the events surrounding the removal of de Clario’s Elemental Landscapes in 1975 in de Clario Artist File refer to a letter written by Rowlison on 12 March 1976, which recorded his discussion with the Artists Steering Committee, National Gallery of Victoria Library. 58 Maureen Gilchrist. "Art." Age 29 May 1976. 59 Parr’s name appears in the 1975-1976 NGV Annual Report as a Trustee of the gallery. I have not been able to ascertain the exact month he was appointed. Jennifer Phipps and Frances Lindsay recounted in interviews with the author that Lenton Parr was appointed to the Trustees to represent the interests of local contemporary artists in 1975. Frances Lindsay, Deputy Director, National Gallery of Victoria, Interview with the author, 4 Feb 2004, Melbourne; Jennifer Phipps, Interview with the author, 5 February 2004, Melbourne. 45

College of the Arts at the time. He did not represent the interests of experimental artists and was a conservative appointment by the Ministry.60

One concrete change, which responded to the demands of the protest, was the appointment of a dedicated curator of contemporary art and removal of the responsibility for the collection and exhibition of Australian contemporary art from both the exhibitions and Australian art department. In 1977, Robert Lindsay was appointed associate curator of contemporary art.61 Lindsay recommenced the Survey shows of contemporary Australian art, resulting in increased representation of contemporary artists, both progressive and conservative. But a dedicated space for contemporary art was delayed. Charles Green noted that by 1978 the gallery had,

A low-ceilinged anteroom adjacent to the permanent collection, this space was at best described as marginal; the institution, especially after 1977, implied that contemporary art – obstructed by pillars and compressing hanging – was by nature best confined to a cramped ivory tower.62

Despite the lack of adequate exhibition space for contemporary art, there is evidence that the NGV was attempting to develop the relationship between contemporary artists and the gallery. On 26 November 1977, the Trustees of the NGV staged a “Gallery Artists’ Day”, and invited artists, craftsmen, dealers, art teachers and critics to meet the Trustees and NGV staff in the Great Hall. The invitation to the event stated that the motivations for the invitation were the very important and “strong links between the gallery and the artistic community.”63 The implication of this statement was that the NGV wanted to maintain and develop these links.

60 Parr was by no means the first artist to be appointed to the Trustees. Artists Bill Longstaff and Max Meldrum, amongst others, had been Trustees of the NGV in the past. In 1966, an Act of Parliament had been passed that stated that there should be one person on the council of Trustees holding a senior academic office in the visual arts in a university in Victoria. This is not necessarily an artist however, although since Parr’s appointment local contemporary artists have continued to represent artists on the Trust - contemporary artist Sally Smart is currently a Trustee at the NGV. National Gallery of Victoria Act 1966, Section 6 (1) (a). 61 Patrick McCaughey mentions Robert Lindsay’s appointment in his memoir. Patrick McCaughey, The bright shapes and the true names: a memoir (Melbourne: Text Publishing, c2003). p. 219. 62 Charles Green, Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970 - 1994 (Melbourne: Craftsman House, 1995). p. 31. 63 Invitation to the Gallery Artists’ Day, 26 November 1977, Great Hall, NGV. 46

It is within this institutional setting that Cripps’s work as an artist began to expressly engage with aspects of museum representation and in particular develop an oppositional critique over contemporary artists’ limited access to the gallery. His attitudes towards museums evolved in relation to his experiences at the gallery as an exhibition officer. But also, the gallery was where Cripps’s emerging attitudes towards museums were tested. As will become clear, Cripps’s work evolved diametrically to the exhibition Artists’ Artists because of the way his work opposed the survey model of exhibition. Cripps’s involvement with Artists’ Artists when he was assistant exhibitions officer, then as an artist exhibiting within the show would have given him not only gallery experience, but also a highly politicised perspective on the state gallery and its representation of contemporary artists, both of which, I argue, were to inform his art practice and its oppositional critique of the gallery.

His work after 1975 reveals a desire to control and determine the context in which his work was represented. This is especially evident in the development of his personal archive The Caravan, which I argue, constitutes and can be defined as, a private museum. The Caravan should certainly be seen as a reaction to, and perhaps more specifically in Cripps’s view, a solution to, the contemporary museological setting of the mid-seventies in Melbourne in which Cripps had been intimately involved. b. The Caravan and self-curatorial activities Cripps began The Caravan in 1974, while working at the NGV (see Figure 1.1). The Caravan is literally an army field kitchen caravan that Cripps gutted and refitted to house his personal archive of material relating to his art practice. It is his personal archive and is subject to the artist’s personal curatorial choices in constructing an archive of his work. As such, it is rather an esoteric and eccentric project. It has functioned as an ongoing repository for the artist’s work, and a source of material for the artist on which he has drawn for exhibitions. It has never been completed and although it assumed less importance in Cripps’s work during the 1990s, it is an ongoing, ever-changing and accumulating project.64

64 Robert Lingard commented in a catalogue essay for an exhibition of Cripps’s work in 1989 that The Caravan was drawing to a close, and was less important to the artist’s current projects. Bob Lingard, "From Here On," Peter Cripps: From Here On, exh. cat. City Gallery. Melbourne, 1989. p. 3. However, 47

Cripps attempts to position The Caravan outside of and independent from the museum, commercial gallery, and even art history. This indicates that he has viewed the institutional framework of art with scepticism. With The Caravan he constructs another form of receptacle, the private artist museum-archive. Thus, Cripps becomes an archivist, curator and artist all in one.

References to The Caravan are few and far between because it has never been exhibited. In 1981, passing mention was made to it in a catalogue for an exhibition Cripps held at the Shepparton Arts Centre.65 In 1985, Cripps himself discussed it in his catalogue essay for the exhibition Recession Art and other strategies that he curated at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane, when he was director of the gallery. He noted that it speculated on the nature of the museum.66 In 1988, Lingard discussed The Caravan in an essay in a catalogue accompanying Cripps’s play Namelessness. Lingard revealed then that it “works as a personal museum.”67 In 1989, artist and friend of Cripps’s, Peter Tyndall discussed it more fully in a talk for the Art Museums of Australia Conference held at the National Gallery of Victoria. Tyndall described it as a “special subject museum” and that Cripps developed it with the intention that it “would always remain together as a large, internally coherent work.”68 Barrett-Lennard in an article for Art and Australia in 1993 described The Caravan as “both a study and a personal archive or museum.”69

Aside from these references to The Caravan, which do not analyse it as a work or provide further details as to its internal logic and structure it, like most of Cripps’s work, has received very little attention from critics and art historians. As a consequence and owing principally to the fact that it has not been exhibited, The Caravan is a difficult piece to reconstruct in detail. I have gleaned what I can from the

Cripps verified in an interview with the author that The Caravan was an ongoing project of continuing relevance for his practice. Peter Cripps, Interview with the author, 25 October 2001, Melbourne. 65 Theatre of Memory: An environmental work by Peter Cripps. exh. cat. Shepparton Arts Centre. Shepparton, Vic., 1981. 66 Recession Art and Other Strategies. exh. cat. Institute of Modern Art. Brisbane, 1985. p. 3. 67 Namelessness: a play and installation by Peter Cripps. exh. cat. Centre for the Arts, The University of Tasmania. Melbourne, 1988. p. 4. 68 Peter Tyndall. "Today for Tomorrow: Contemporary Art in Art Museums." Art Museums of Australia Conference. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. n.p., 1989. Provided to the author by Peter Cripps. 69 John Barrett-Lennard, "Peter Cripps: Questions of Meanings," Art and Australia 30.3 (1993): p. 350. 48 sources that do make reference to it, an interview that I conducted with Cripps and a photograph which Cripps gave to me. I have been unable to consider the specific ways in which Cripps put together his archive, because I have never seen The Caravan. The flimsy evidence available on the work makes it altogether possible that it is in fact, a fictional construction of Cripps’s. The quasi-fictional quality to The Caravan contributes to mythology around it and more generally mythologizes the concept of personal artist-archives.

While The Caravan is difficult to reconstruct, and I am not able to describe exactly what has been kept inside it and how, Cripps’s discussion of it in his notes for his play City Life, performed in 1981 at the NGV, reveals the overall theme for his collection within The Caravan and some clues as to how it relates to his overall practice. Cripps explained that The Caravan was a “repository for scientific romantic ideas about knowledge” such as those of turn of the century philosophers Lewis Carroll, Phillip Brandon, Edwin A. Abbott and H.C. Hinton. Cripps was interested in their “concepts of time/space continuums and high space.” He noted “part of the fascination is the analogies and models they sought to set up, as teaching aids, to demonstrate their ideas.” Lewis Carroll, for example, designed puzzles to train people in systematic reasoning. He used diagrams to assist with logical deduction. Edwin A. Abbott wrote Flatland: a romance of many dimensions (1884), a social satire on Victorian England and introduction to the geometry of higher dimensions and in particular the concept of a fourth dimension. Flatland explored a two-dimensional universe inhabited by flat beings interacting with phenomena from a higher plane. It used geometry as an analogy for Victorian England and is illustrated with geometrical diagrams representing the spaces of life in ‘flatland.’ The Caravan therefore included , slides, objects and physical models, which Cripps wrote, “as analogies seek to unlock such abstract concepts as the fourth dimension.”70 Further, his notes for City Life reveal that he conceptualised The Caravan as a collecting apparatus. The Caravan would ‘collect’ the documentation and associated material of his exhibitions or performances such as City Life.

70 Peter Cripps, "Notes for "City Life"," City Life, exh. cat. National Gallery of Victoria. Melbourne, 1981. n.pag. 49

In 1989, Peter Tyndall revealed that The Caravan had been “fitted out with various compartments containing Cripps’s models and notes concerning the History of Time and Space research and speculation.” He also revealed that Cripps intended this “special subject museum” to be displayed,

to different purposes at different locations – from the “Caravan show” with its ‘caravan audience’ to a State Gallery Museum where its contents could be spread out on the gallery walls. But, it would always remain together as a large, internally coherent work available to research.71

However, Cripps has never exhibited The Caravan in this manner. His exhibition From Here On in 1989 used material from The Caravan, but did not exhibit its contents as a coherent whole.72 Tyndall’s remark that Cripps had envisaged that The Caravan might feasibly be exhibited within a state gallery suggests that Cripps did not necessarily design the project as one that would bypass the gallery establishment completely. But Tyndall reveals that Cripps conceptualised The Caravan as a separate and complete entity with ‘internal coherence’, which the gallery would not be at liberty to manipulate through isolated displays of individual elements within The Caravan.

The Caravan can be understood as Cripps’s curatorial and artistic response to the museological setting of Artists’ Artists because it explicitly dealt with issues of museum representation. It developed in diametrical opposition to Artists’ Artists because it represented the artists’ work in depth over a period of time, rather than by example, as survey exhibition’s like Artists’ Artists did. It was the antithesis of a survey exhibition, because it emphasised a depth of collection, and therefore in Cripps’s mind, avoided some of the problems of survey exhibitions. The principal problem Cripps associates with survey exhibitions, as we shall see later, is the chance that his work is misrepresented.

71 Peter Tyndall. "Today for Tomorrow: Contemporary Art in Art Museums." Art Museums of Australia Conference. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. n.p., 1989. 72 Bob Lingard, "From Here On," Peter Cripps: From Here On, exh. cat. City Gallery. Melbourne, 1989. 2-6. 50

Cripps commented in a 1989 interview, that he felt “constraints which resulted from the fact that I also worked at the National Gallery of Victoria as an exhibitions’ officer.”73 With The Caravan, presumably in contrast to his work as an exhibition officer at the NGV, he felt he had a “condition of freedom” that enabled his work “almost to become pure research.”74 This freedom from any institutional framework gave the artist an independence, which he viewed as ideal. The Caravan was a utopian project, through which he could maintain control over his own artistic output and be as experimental as he wished, without suffering the censorship that de Clario later experienced in Artists’ Artists.

Cripps’s reference to his work becoming pure research raises the probability that The Caravan operated as a kind of studio and workshop as well as archive-museum. It was where he developed his ideas. It was pure because it was unexhibited and therefore independent from the art system. His reference to the research process in art making shows that he had adopted a strategy common to conceptual art of the early seventies. Through The Caravan Cripps explored a systems-oriented art, rather than object- based. He emphasised a temporal and accumulative research process in creating an archive, rather than an end product.

References to archival process was a common strategy of conceptual artists like Cripps because they challenged the conventional conception of art as a hermetic and finite object that was commodified by the art market. Conceptual artists, largely influenced by Marxism, wanted to resist such commodification of their art purely to draw attention to the centrality of the art market in determining the value of art. Conceptual art traded on intellectual value rather than material.75 Thus, the archive and detailed documentation of a research process became a potent metaphor for an intellectual process, and an ideas-based art. The Caravan represents one example of this, but it is perhaps more successful than most; it succeeds in bypassing the art system, because it has never been exhibited, where most conceptual art did not and was eventually commodified by the market and museum. The Caravan however continues to operate outside of the art system.

73 Ibid. p. 4. 74 Ibid. p. 4. 75 Ian Burn, "The Art Market: Affluence and Degradation," Artforum XIII (1975): pp. 34-37. 51

The Caravan indicates Cripps’s desire to maintain curatorial control over his work. It illustrates a concern with how his work is represented in the public archive because Cripps took complete responsibility for the representation of his work in The Caravan. Cripps’s control over the material in The Caravan results in an extremely hermetic quality to the work.76 The physical form of the army caravan even reinforces its demarcation from the world of open interpretation. It is literally hermetic, encased in an ex-army caravan that is protected by armour. But for Cripps this represents the only way his work will be kept together as a whole and shown in depth, rather than exhibited in a gallery over which he has no control whatsoever.

In a talk at the 1989 Art Museums of Australia conference Peter Tyndall discussed his belief, shared by his peers, that “it should not be the institutionalised orthodoxy that their (artists’) work be broken up and scattered to the four winds.”77 Tyndall criticised the state art museum model, as “the model of Noah’s ark’s “a couple of everything”, which was never meant as more than a temporary desperation measure.”78 He explained that his, and his peers’, opposition to the survey ethos within art museums, such as the National Gallery of Victoria, stemmed from their experience of misrepresentations of their work in this context. Tyndall remarked, “if our work was already constantly being distorted and misrepresented even while we were on the scene attempting to “keep an eye on it” then what hope could we hold out for its future presentation.”79 The art museum, for Tyndall and Cripps, could not be trusted to represent their work adequately. Their belief that museums should attempt to collect the work of contemporary artists in depth in order to avoid misrepresentation of an artist’s oeuvre is obviously highly unrealistic because museums clearly can’t acquire an artist’s entire oeuvre. Not only would this be financially unfeasible, it is also undesirable because museums’ collecting priorities are necessarily spread across a range of collection areas. To put all emphasis on the work of single artists would deny

76 One writer has referenced the hermetic quality to Cripps’s work. Sue Cramer observed in a catalogue essay, “Cripps remains intensely individualistic, and his project as an artist has, over the years remained hermetic, complex, speculative and largely unseen.” Peter Cripps: Paintings and Objects. exh. cat. Institute of Modern Art. Brisbane, 1989. 77 Peter Tyndall. "Today for Tomorrow: Contemporary Art in Art Museums." Art Museums of Australia Conference. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. n.p., 1989. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid. 52 the representation of others. Cripps and Tyndall therefore made their own preparations that would enable a full representation of their work. Tyndall and another peer of Cripps’s, John Nixon, each created archives of their work and Cripps created The Caravan.

Their approach to self-representation, and scepticism for museum-representation, had international parallels. An especially interesting parallel to Cripps is American artist Donald Judd. Judd had very specific ideas about the display of art because his work was primarily concerned with space. Therefore, the space of the gallery and arrangement of his sculptures within the gallery was paramount to the meaning of his work. It was for this reason that Judd first sought to create his own display contexts for his work and the work of his peers, such as Dan Flavin, Ad Reinhardt and . In 1968, Judd renovated a building in Soho, New York, in which he lived, worked and displayed he and his peers’ work.

In late 1973, Judd bought the land and buildings of a former army barracks in Marfa, Texas in the Chihuahuan Desert. Throughout the seventies, he worked on the buildings, redeveloping them for the express purpose of housing he and his peers’ work. He stated that “the main purpose of the place in Marfa is the serious and permanent installation of art.”80 Elsewhere he remarked his aim was “to preserve my work and that of others and to preserve this work in spaces I consider appropriate.”81 By the late 1970s, Judd had begun negotiating with the founders of the Dia Art Foundation to develop and eventually maintain his buildings and their permanent installations at Marfa as a museum. In 1987, the Dia withdrew from the project, and the Chinati Foundation assumed management, with Judd as a member of the trust.82 The Chinati Foundation exists as Judd intended: a permanent installation of his work and that of his peers in specifically renovated spaces.

Throughout his work, Judd opposed museums and especially survey style shows because he felt they misrepresented and poorly installed art.83 The Chinati Foundation

80 Donald Judd. , ed. exh. cat. Tate. London, 2004. p. 257. 81 Ibid. p. 258. 82 Ibid. p. 264. 83 Ibid. p. 266. 53 was his solution to the inadequacies of the museum system. Judd bypassed the museum altogether and had absolute control over the spatial context for the display of his work. Judd’s buildings and installations at Marfa are a unique example of an artist- museum. This has close parallels with Cripps’s desire to control the exhibition of his work. Despite the close parallels, the differences between the two are also very striking. Judd, being American and well funded, could create a huge complex, whereas Cripps remains utterly marginal and unfunded.

Tyndall and Cripps repeatedly put forward the model of the Grainger Museum, at the University of Melbourne as an alternative to the state gallery model of museum (see Figures 1.2, 4.35, 4.39, 4.40). This museum was essentially an artist-museum, having been conceptualised and developed by the pianist and composer Percy Grainger for the express purpose of housing and displaying his collection. Tyndall explained that the Grainger “should be taken very seriously as a model of a better way of representing and recognising the life-work of an artist.”84 This model of museum is inherently flawed, because it is a monument to an individual collector and thus in museological terms a huge white elephant – burdensome, difficult to maintain, and attracting a very small audience.

Nevertheless, Cripps spelt out the benefits of Grainger’s model of museum, the autobiographical artist museum, in his 1992 essay, “The Art Zoo and Other Museum Models” that was published in the Adelaide based contemporary art journal Broadsheet.85 This document is a quasi artist-treatise statement by Cripps in which he outlines his attitudes towards the state art gallery model of museum. It reveals his ideology, his biases and the ideals that underpin his approach to art practice and its relationship with the museum. It is thus a very important primary document for this thesis.

Like Tyndall in the 1989 conference, Cripps criticised the state gallery as an ‘art zoo’ in which two of everything is exhibited. He favoured instead a depth approach to art collecting, so that one artist could be represented in depth rather than by example.

84 Peter Tyndall. "Today for Tomorrow: Contemporary Art in Art Museums." Art Museums of Australia Conference. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. n.p., 1989. 85 Peter Cripps, "The Art Zoo and Other Museum Models," Broadsheet 20.3 (1991): pp. 8-11. 54

This is the antithesis of the curatorial approach adopted in Artists’ Artists and most survey exhibitions of contemporary art held at the NGV through the late sixties to mid-seventies.

Cripps and his peers selected the Grainger Museum as an appropriate model of an in- depth artist-museum, and an alternative to the state gallery survey ethos. However, there are several important distinctions between the Grainger and state gallery that are not addressed by Cripps and his peers that make their comparison, especially in terms of ‘this is better than that’, difficult. The Grainger is an autobiographical museum, and it is a museum of an artist’s life; it is not an art gallery. Percy Grainger was not exclusively a visual artist, indeed he was a pianist, composer and musician who made experimental instruments out of everyday materials, and designed textiles and clothing. All of his various activities are represented in the museum. It is a holistic, autobiographical account of his work and life. It is therefore representative of an entirely different ethos to the state gallery. Cripps and his peers seem to want their own work to be memorialised in such depth. They criticise the state gallery for not doing this, and take responsibility for their work by adopting a self-determinist approach in works. The Caravan was clearly modelled on the Grainger Museum.

Cripps commented on his and his peers’ interest in the Grainger,

we were interested in a museum so particular in nature and concept that it seemed to reveal other museums’ failures in relation to cultural practice by living artists. It was clear that within this museum there was a conceptual model for a different, more satisfactory relationship with official culture.86

And,

His desire for his life and work to be seen in a more in-depth way in a context established by himself, without the usual institutional or curatorial consideration, provided an interesting position for us to consider. By establishing this museum he has guaranteed permanent display of the

86 Ibid. p. 10. 55

things he considered important. In fact much of the present display was set up by Grainger.87

Cripps might as well be speaking about his private archive-museum The Caravan. These excerpts reveal that Cripps and his close peers saw the Grainger as an ideal museum model, because it represented to them a more complete and full account of Grainger’s pursuits than they believed any survey museum could. They saw the Grainger Museum as an alternative, subsidiary and complementary museum to ‘official’ museums. They considered the Grainger therefore to be ‘unofficial.’ This was presumably because of its autobiographical nature, which did not conform to public accounts of Grainger. The difference between official and unofficial that Cripps identifies, therefore seems to be the difference between public and private.

Certainly, Grainger’s museum was a very private account of his life and work because Grainger considered his private life integral to his public life. Grainger is now renown for his desire to include documentation of his sexual life in the museum.88 A sadomasochist and flagellant, Grainger had documented his sex life through posed photographs, letters and diaries and wanted these to be displayed in his museum alongside his sexual fetish gear, especially whips. He felt this aspect of his life dominated even his musical career, and was evident in his creative pursuits. An even more eccentric desire was to have his and his wife’s skeletons displayed in the museum after their deaths, a request which was never carried out. Early architectural plans of the museum show two small rooms adjoining the entrance hall of the museum that architectural historian George Tibbits speculated were for the eventual display of their skeletons.89 Though Grainger may not have known it, this desire to display his own body after death had a precedent in the form of philosopher and jurist

87 Ibid. p. 10. 88 In a letter to his wife, Grainger asked her if he might include a “lust-branch” (pornographic section) to his museum. Therese Radic, "Whipping Up a Storm," Talking Grainger: Perspectives on the Life, Music and Legacy of Percy Grainger eds. Kate Darian-Smith and Alessandro Servadei (Melbourne: The Australian Centre and the Grainger Museum, The University of Melbourne, 1998). pp. 15-24. Cripps also quoted this in his 1991 article, Peter Cripps, "The Art Zoo and Other Museum Models," Broadsheet 20.3 (1991): p. 10. 89 George Tibbits, "Building the Grainger Museum," Talking Grainger: Perspectives on the Life, Music and Legacy of Percy Grainger eds. Kate Darian Smith and Alessandro Servadei (Melbourne: The Australian Centre and the Grainger Museum, University of Melbourne, 1998). p. 49. 56

Jeremy Bentham’s auto-icon at University College in London.90 Bentham played an influential role in the establishment of University College. When Bentham died in 1832, his will stated that his body be preserved and displayed in Bentham’s own clothes at University College. His preserved skeleton, stuffed and dressed, with a wax head (his real head is kept safely in storage), is displayed in a glass cabinet at University College.

The University of Melbourne chided the intensely private nature of the Grainger Museum for years. Jokes were made on campus about its design being like a toilet block.91 Naomi Cass, who was the University of Melbourne’s Cultural Development Officer, believes this humour concealed the very real embarrassment felt by staff at the University about the museum’s private nature, which was seen as an embarrassing public display of oneself.92

Cripps and his peers’ idealisation of the Grainger museum was perhaps misguided. Cripps’s belief that “much of the present display was set up by Grainger” was incorrect. By 1991, when Cripps was writing, very little of the original contents remained intact from Grainger’s time. In 1999, Naomi Cass commented in a talk for Museums Australia, “I suspect many would be thrown to learn that every aspect of the current texture of the museum postdates Grainger’s direct involvement.”93 George Tibbits has argued that the curators Dr Kay Dreyfus and Rosemary Florrimell were responsible for much of the Grainger’s displays.94 However, one aspect of the museum’s displays for which Grainger was responsible were the so-called ‘display legends.’ These displays were collages of ephemera made by Grainger, including personal photographs, cut-outs from magazines, souvenirs from travel and postcards, arranged and hung on the museum’s walls. These autobiographical compilations

90 For more information on Jeremy Bentham’s auto-icon see http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham- Project/info/marmoy.htm Website last accessed 27 September 2004. 91 George Tibbits, "Building the Grainger Museum," Talking Grainger: Perspectives on the Life, Music and Legacy of Percy Grainger eds. Kate Darian Smith and Alessandro Servadei (Melbourne: The Australian Centre and the Grainger Museum, University of Melbourne, 1998). p. 62. 92 Naomi Cass, "Making a Museum of Oneself: The Grainger Museum," Meanjin.2 (2000): p. 148. 93 Naomi Cass. Museums Australia Seminar. Melbourne. n.p., 1999. 94 George Tibbits, "Building the Grainger Museum," Talking Grainger: Perspectives on the Life, Music and Legacy of Percy Grainger eds. Kate Darian Smith and Alessandro Servadei (Melbourne: The Australian Centre and the Grainger Museum, University of Melbourne, 1998). p. 61. 57 recount various events in Grainger’s and his peers’ lives. The term ‘legends’ connotes a myth like status to the tales.95

George Tibbits concluded that Grainger considered the museum one of his greatest failures. It was incomplete when he died in 1961.96 The museum was so compromised throughout its development so that it does not reflect Grainger’s plans. The architectural design of the museum underwent a convoluted development. This was partly a result of the difficulties associated with Grainger living overseas while the museum was designed, and intermittent communication between Grainger and the architect.97 During Grainger’s last visit to Australia in 1955, Tibbits argues he was bitterly disappointed with the museum because he “could not regain his vision for the organisation of the collection within the building.”98

Cripps and his peers’ based their admiration for the museum on the apparently false perception that Grainger had control over the museum and its representation of his work and life. The reality was rather different. The museum grew in a relatively haphazard manner. Despite this, Grainger’s basic desire to create the museum, which meant that he archived his work and life for the museum, was perhaps the most important aspect for Cripps and his peers. Cripps noted with relish how Grainger asked his friends to send him letters on tracing paper so that they could be duplicated for his archive.99 Cripps was fascinated by Grainger’s archival impulse because he saw such personal history creation as a genuine alternative to public museum institutions, where misrepresentation of the artist was likely. This model of museum, although highly flawed and untenable because of the unfeasibility of actually collecting, storing and maintaining an artist’s entire oeuvre and archive, was idealised by Cripps and his peers. The root of their attraction to the museum may lie in the appeal of an ‘unofficial’, subjective museum as opposed to an official and objective

95 Some information about the display legends is available on the Grainger Museum website, www.lib.unimelb.edu.au/collections/grainger/percy/pg_legends.html Last accessed 17 March 2004. 96 George Tibbits, "Building the Grainger Museum," Talking Grainger: Perspectives on the Life, Music and Legacy of Percy Grainger eds. Kate Darian Smith and Alessandro Servadei (Melbourne: The Australian Centre and the Grainger Museum, University of Melbourne, 1998). pp. 45-70. 97 The architect of the Grainger Museum was John Gawler of Gawler & Drummond. 98 George Tibbits, "Building the Grainger Museum," Talking Grainger: Perspectives on the Life, Music and Legacy of Percy Grainger eds. Kate Darian Smith and Alessandro Servadei (Melbourne: The Australian Centre and the Grainger Museum, University of Melbourne, 1998). p. 60. 99 Peter Cripps, "The Art Zoo and Other Museum Models," Broadsheet 20.3 (1991): p. 10. 58 museum. They had a utopian notion of the Grainger Museum however, which was far from its reality.

In creating his own private archive, Cripps was able to curate his work following his own methodologies and subject only to his own rules. A private archive of his work would surmount the curatorial problems he had identified within the structure of the NGV, principally the privileging of the curatorial voice, over the voice of the artist. The Caravan represented the artist’s voice completely. It was the ideal venue, the only venue, which could absolutely achieve this. It therefore also illustrates the artist’s autocratic tendencies and his desire to control the representation of his work. But most importantly it indicates that the artist took personal responsibility for the curating of his work and that he sought a personal solution to what he saw as curatorial problems in the way the gallery had curated contemporary art.

This self-determinist approach was evident in 1976, one year after Cripps left the NGV as an exhibition officer, when he had his first solo show at Ewing and George Paton Gallery at the University of Melbourne. Like The Caravan this exhibition demonstrated his self-determinist approach.

Entering du Prel’s Projection (see Figures 1.3 and 1.4) touched upon esoteric philosophies about space and time. Carl du Prel, a German mystic philosopher proposed a theory about life after death in 1885. Cripps’s reference to du Prel has tangential bearing on the installation’s exploration of archiving because of the way archives live on and preserve the past.

On Entering du Prel’s Projection consisted of a series of six trestle tables on which newspaper cuttings, library call slip cards and mechanical objects Cripps made by welding together found objects such as tins, boxes, coins and pipes, were placed. The installation appeared like a workshop or desk in a constant state of flux. It looked temporary. Indeed it was temporary because it existed as an installation only for the period of exhibition, in this way it was like many post-object practices that emphasised impermanence. The installation was documented in photographs and I have located two reviews of the exhibition.

59

The impermanent effect of the installation demonstrated du Prel’s philosophy about the impermanence and transience of life. The mechanical constructions were actually basic steam engines that Cripps used to physically model the transformation of water into steam. Next to each object was a photograph of a newspaper article reported on the day Cripps made the object. Accompanying the article was a library call slip card from Cripps’s visits to the library at the time he made the objects. The newspaper articles and call-slips are artefacts from Cripps’s everyday life that illustrated a more holistic perspective of the objects that he made. Graeme Sturgeon, who reviewed the exhibition, explained that this “serves to place it in an historical context by noting important political, social and scientific events.”100 But it also expressed the idea of the artist as archivist, preserving items such as newspaper articles and library call slips from everyday life and cataloguing them in relation to the production of his art. Archival process was invoked as a transformative process that attempts to make the impermanent permanent.

Indeed Cripps had been making the mechanical objects since 1962, and his display indicates an attempt to catalogue the objects to gain a sense of personal history in relation to world events and philosophical ideas. Margaret Plant observed in her review of the exhibition that the installation addressed the subject of time and longevity.101 The installation therefore played with ideas of longevity and impermanence in relation to the archival.

Sturgeon noted that Cripps “regards each of these machines as the now obsolete shell of a past activity.”102 When it was exhibited in Sydney, in 1977 at Watters Gallery, Cripps titled the exhibition Shells of Past Activities and emphasised the archival nature of the exhibition by draping fine white gauze over the trestle tables, as if the installations were in storage. Plant thought that the gauze invoked a morgue-like effect.103 It is unclear whether or not the title came from Sturgeon’s review of Entering du Prel’s Projection, which he titled “Shells of a past activity”, or whether Cripps had

100 Graeme Sturgeon. "Shells of a past activity." Age 16 December 1975 sec. Art. 101 Margaret Plant, "Quattroccentro Melbourne: Aspects of Finish 1973-1977," Studies in Australian Art ed. Margaret Plant (Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 1978). p. 108. 102 Graeme Sturgeon. "Shells of a past activity." Age 16 December 1975 sec. Art. 103 Margaret Plant, "Quattroccentro Melbourne: Aspects of Finish 1973-1977," Studies in Australian Art ed. Margaret Plant (Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 1978). p. 108. 60 originally discussed it with Sturgeon. If Cripps adopted Sturgeon’s review title it represents a rather interesting case of the artist appropriating the criticism of his work and ‘archiving’ critical discussion of the work into his practice.

Entering du Prel’s Projection represented an effort to self-curate his work into an exhibition. Together with The Caravan it shows the artist establishing a framework for his practice that operated outside of the state gallery and was in some respects independent from and non-reliant on the gallery. Cripps seems to have rejected the state gallery by developing his own separate archival-curatorial practice.

In Cripps’s writing, he revealed that he applied a self-determinist approach to his art because of the NGV’s failure to support his work. He argued that conceptual artists of the 1970s were forced to work in isolation from the gallery because it did not acquire or exhibit conceptual art. We have seen in the discussion of Artists’ Artists that this was a false perception, more influenced by counter-cultural ideology. Cripps saw his apparent isolation from the gallery, as we have seen in the discussion of The Caravan, as a condition of freedom. In Cripps’s view this isolation from the museum enabled “a liberated period of research and experimentation.”104 Cripps documented his research and experimentation in The Caravan and he presented his unexhibited ‘research’ in the context of Entering du Prel’s Projection/Shells of Past Activities. However, I believe he applied a self-determinist approach not purely because of the gallery’s failure to support him (he had after all exhibited at the gallery in Artists’ Artists, and the gallery had bought works of a conceptual nature in the 1970s, though conceptual art was not the primary collecting focus at that time) but also to signify his work as avant-garde and anti-establishmentarian.105

What is crucial is that Cripps chose not to make works for the museum. Both The Caravan and Entering du Prel’s Projection/Shells of Past Activities were not made with the intention that they be exhibited by a museum. These were self-deterministic,

104 Peter Cripps, "The Art Zoo and Other Museum Models," Broadsheet 20.3 (1991): p. 8. 105 Just one example of the Gallery acquiring conceptual art in the 1970s is when Jennifer Phipps acquired Ti Parks’s Polynesian 100 (1975) for the NGV in 1975. Phipps had curated Parks’s work in 1975, an exhibition with which Cripps assisted as an exhibitions officer. Gallerist Bruce Pollard offered the NGV Polynesian 100 for a reasonable price, with agreement of the artist, and so Phipps acquired it for the NGV out of her curator’s allowance. Email correspondence with Jennifer Phipps, 24 February 2004. 61 self-curated structures that existed (temporarily in the case of Entering du Prel’s Projection/Shells of Past Activities) independently of the museum. While Entering du Prel’s Projection/Shells of Past Activities were exhibited in alternative gallery spaces (the Ewing and George Paton Gallery in Melbourne and Watters Gallery in Sydney) and they were therefore dependent on the galleries for exhibition, the actual methodology employed by Cripps, which curated the objects he had produced since 1962, illustrated his curatorial control over the manner in which they were displayed.

From the mid-seventies to early eighties Cripps produced a bulletin called the Blunt Report (see Figures 1.5-1.7). He created it with the express purpose of bypassing traditional exhibition methods. Cripps wrote that the Blunt Report was conceived as an alternative ‘exhibition’ space for his work and that of his peers. Cripps wrote in 1985, “the printed exhibition space or bulletin/broadsheet…extended and expanded the activities of some artists.” And, “the printed bulletin is an exhibition space that operates from fluctuating financial resources.” 106 There is a genealogy of artist bulletins and mail art in the 1960s and 1970s, such as the Art and Project bulletins created in Amsterdam that Cripps received in the late 1960s, so it was not a unique practice.107 Conceptual art could be distributed through photocopies because it was based on idea rather than form. The Blunt Report incorporated the conceptual art of his peers with contributions to the bulletin from Imants Tillers, Peter Tyndall, John Young, Bronwyn Clark-Coolee and Robert MacPherson. Cripps later wrote of the bulletin that it,

allowed these artists a greater degree of autonomy. By taking up a position independent of the existing art institutions and authorities these artists were able to determine the content of their own artistic biographies and introduce event information.108

Here Cripps adopts Art & Language rhetoric, which claims artists should bypass the bourgeois art market and function ‘autonomously.’ He clearly believed it was possible to remain independent from art institutions. And to a large extent, with the Blunt

106 Recession Art and Other Strategies. exh. cat. Institute of Modern Art. Brisbane, 1985. pp. 5-6. 107 Art and Project bulletins were initiated in Amsterdam by Adriaan van Tavesteijn and Geert van Beijeren, and the first edition was mailed on September 16, 1968. Cripps refers to this in Ibid. p. 10. 108 Ibid. p. 5. 62

Report, he achieved this independence. Editions of this bulletin are very hard to find in institutions. I have located photocopies of sections of Blunt Report one, three and six in the NGV library.109 Cripps included editions of the bulletin in an exhibition he curated at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane in 1986.110 Other than this, the bulletins indeed bypassed the art market, and went to a very select audience consisting of Cripps’s peers. To this end, the Blunt Report succeeded as an alternative forum for distributing art. But it remained very much on the outside of public culture as a very private, club-like, and exclusive or closed production. They were therefore only introducing the content of their own artistic biographies and event information to a select, sympathetic few. This turns the notion of a more democratic art practice on its head, given that very few people had access to the bulletin.

Edition one of the Blunt Report was printed in 1975. It presented work by Cripps, Tillers, Tyndall, Clark-Coolee and MacPherson. I have included photocopies of excerpts from this edition in the thesis illustrations, which attest to the in-joke nature of the bulletin (see Figures 1.5-1.7). The images are difficult to decipher and connote Dadaist nonsense. Edition three was called Anthony 3 and was printed in 1979. It presented an image of a ‘projectile’ construction made by Cripps that related to The Caravan. Bulletin number six was a double issue and was printed in 1981. This edition included photographs of Cripps’s play City Life performed in 1981 at the NGV. Edition four of the Blunt Report was distributed in April 1983. It seems to have featured the work of Peter Tyndall.111 I have not been able to find any information on editions two or five, and believe that it is entirely likely that they were never produced. The non-sequential numbering of the Blunt Report may have been intentional.

Cripps named the Blunt Report after Anthony Blunt, the English Art Historian who was a Poussin expert and Director of the Courtould Institute of Art from 1947-1974. Blunt epitomised the highest traditions of art history as a discipline, with all the

109 Editions of the Blunt Report are in the Artist’s file on Peter Cripps in the NGV Library. 110 Recession Art and Other Strategies. exh. cat. Institute of Modern Art. Brisbane, 1985. 111 Pamela Hansford reproduced the front cover of the Blunt Report 4 in her monograph on Peter Tyndall published by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art with funding from the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council. Pamela Hansford, Peter Tyndall: Dagger Definitions (Richmond, Vic.: Greenhouse Publications, 1987). p. 41. 63 connotations of anglo-elitism that this contains, particularly as regarded by an Australian, marginalised artist like Cripps. Cripps’s reference to Blunt invokes the establishment of art history. Is the Blunt Report meant to raise questions about art history? Does Cripps want to construct an alternative history in documenting and reproducing his and his peers’ work that was otherwise often overlooked in the public archive and by art historians at the time? This is likely given his comment that the bulletin would document and “determine the content of their own artistic biographies” and do this independently from the “authorities”. Cripps was writing his own art history through the Blunt Report. However, given the lack of detail in the bulletins, and the inaccessibility of the bulletins, it was not a readily available or full art historical account. It was a highly biased and subjective history.

In 1979, Blunt was revealed to have spied for the Russians during WWII. Cripps capitalised on this, relishing the duplicity that this implied for his later editions of the Blunt Report. We are not to believe, necessarily, Cripps’s accounts represented in the bulletin. With the revelations of Blunt’s activities during the war, art history itself was conveniently fictionalised and turned into a hoax for Cripps.112

This chapter has shown so far how Cripps’s work in the 1970s was intimately concerned with the role of museums and archives in conveying and constructing history. His personal archival and curatorial activities in The Caravan and Entering du Prel’s Projection/Shells of Past Activities and the ‘exhibition’ space of the Blunt Report attest to the control that he wished to exercise over his work’s representation and his awareness of the process of archiving as one that is integral to the construction of history, depending on the systems of order through which they are created. This, I have argued, formed during his experience as an exhibition officer at the National Gallery of Victoria in the early 1970s. His work developed in opposition to the state art gallery, owing to the fact that his work was Marxist and Maoist inspired and that it is likely that he identified with counter-cultural politics that was set in opposition to the establishment. He proposed, as did many of his peers, an alternative structure to

112 Peter Tyndall and John Nixon created similar bulletins in the late seventies and early eighties, and they had similar ambitions to Cripps. Tyndall’s Hand Space was distributed in 1981. Hand Space, Cripps claims, was critical of and an alternative to mainstream exhibition spaces. This is because it privileged the more intimate viewing space of the bulletin, which is held by the hands and read at close range. Nixon’s Pneumatic Drill was also distributed during 1981. 64 the gallery, in the form of a private artist-archive. But the limitation with this is that his personal archive has never been exhibited and therefore is not open to interpretation. But it served his purposes in constructing his work as avant-garde and ‘other’ to the establishment. This was furthered in his involvement with exhibitions held in ‘alternative’ venues.

The next section examines Cripps’s work as a curator for contemporary art galleries where he continued to demonstrate his interest in self-representation and self-curating. But instead of operating on the margins of the art gallery, he worked from within the gallery system, albeit an apparently ‘alternative’ one. How did this affect his maintenance of his art practice in the margins and ‘other’ to the establishment, which helped to secure an avant-garde, eccentric status? The following section seeks to understand why he resorted to self-representation and how this is related to his ongoing critique of the art gallery establishment.

Cripps’s curatorial practice and critique of history in the 1980s

In the mid 1970s, Cripps actively produced the context for his work’s display (in Entering du Prel’s Projection/Shells of Past Activities and The Blunt Report) and archiving and collection (in The Caravan). This was designed as a criticism of the established museum framework, in particular the state gallery, and as we have seen, it reflected his leftist ideology and adopted conceptual art principles that highlighted a systems and process based approach to art rather than a hermetic finite art object. But as we have also seen, there were some ambiguities with this. An example was Cripps’s work The Caravan, which although systems based in its exploration of archival practice, was actually a highly hermetic work because it is unexhibited, and illustrated the artist’s desire to self-curate and self-archive his work. This, I argued, was a response to his experiences working at the National Gallery of Victoria as an exhibitions officer, and in particular the museological context surrounding Artists’ Artists in the mid-seventies.

In 1983, he curated Masterpieces: Out of the Seventies held at the Monash University Gallery. The exhibition included the work of Cripps, Tyndall, Nixon, Tillers and Sam Schoenbaum. This exhibition was a conscious attempt to curate his work and that of 65 his peers, which Cripps felt had been neglected by the state art gallery. Again, this indicates the artist’s self-determinist approach. Cripps took responsibility for representing his work and that of his peers because of the belief that their work was being purposely left out of the public record. However, at the time reviewer for the Age Robert Rooney chastised Cripps’s belief that their work had been neglected by art history and the museum. Rooney wrote,

As for Cripp’s (sic) view that he and his friends are the sadly neglected children of an “all too hastily forgotten” decade, we need not weep too long for these poor individuals. A quick look at their biographies will reveal that when it comes to curatorial support, they have not done too badly.113

Rooney may have observed, for example, that Cripps had exhibited at the NGV in 1981 in a survey exhibition of contemporary Australian art that Robert Lindsay curated called Relics and Rituals.114

Notwithstanding this, Cripps’s belief that their work had been neglected attests to his ongoing construction of his work and that of his peers as the underrepresented avant- garde of the seventies. Seeing their work as outside of the museum institution and indeed art historical representation was central to their notion of the avant-garde. Operating on the margins had intellectual and subversive kudos.

Cripps curated the exhibition to expose the way that he and his peers worked with the notion of ‘parts’ in creating art. Cripps presented his work Shells of Past Activities, which he dated from 1963-1974, John Nixon’s Archive 1968-1981, Imants Tillers’ Still Life No. 2 1973, Peter Tyndall’s Untitled works 1974 and Sam Schoenbaum’s One Year’s Work 1974. Each dealt with an accumulative, consciously-added-to form of art practice. These were works that were either conceived from the start as a project involving several defined parts (Tillers, Tyndall, Schoenbaum) or were later grouped together by the artist as a work (Cripps and Nixon). Cripps identified his works and that of his peers’ archival and systems based methodology in this exhibition. He

113 Robert Rooney. "Curator looks back on the seventies." Age 26-27 March 1983 sec. Art. 114 Cripps performed and exhibited his play City Life at the NGV in 1981. City Life. exh. cat. National Gallery of Victoria. Melbourne, 1981.; Survey 15: Relics and Rituals. exh. cat. National Gallery of Victoria. Melbourne, 1981. 66 discussed the way their work used ‘systems’ methods to reflect on the art system. He noted that the works “demonstrate the artists’ ability to stand back and look at their work in relationship to its context – the art system and the artists’ own history.”115 We have seen how Cripps’s works The Caravan and Entering du Prel’s Projection/Shells of Past Activities did this.

The works Cripps included in the exhibition were examples of artists ‘curating’ their own work. Cripps explained, “an artist considers his own history as malleable- available to him at all times for reprocessing or manipulation” (Cripps’s emphasis).116 This suggests that the artists treated their body of work in quasi-curatorial terms. Rooney for instance commented in relation to Nixon’s Archive “when it comes to looking after number one, John Nixon is a curator par excellence.”117 Evidently, Cripps and his peers claimed to be experimenting with the nature of art historical representation and what it means to construct individual history outside of the art system’s construction of art history. Cripps’s role in curating ensured that the works are seen in this context. By curating this exhibition, he controls the context within which his own work is considered. Rooney noted as much when he observed in his review,

The role of the exhibition curator who, by selecting those works which he or she regards of representative of a certain period of an artist’s career, is just as capable of manipulating the “facts” to suit the needs of an exhibition or point of view, as any ambitious artist.118

Rooney suggests that Cripps modelled the decade of the seventies to suit his own needs. Cripps’s needs were largely to view the art of his and his peers as outside of the art system. This assisted his construction of their work as the avant-garde of the seventies.

The hermetic nature of this type of self-determinist practice is glaringly obvious when one considers the exhibition spaces the artists exhibited within during the late

115 Masterpieces: Out of the Seventies. exh. cat. Monash University Gallery. Melbourne, 1983. 116 Ibid. 117 Robert Rooney. "Curator looks back on the seventies." Age 26-27 March 1983 sec. Art. 118 Ibid. 67 seventies and early eighties. For example, John Nixon opened Q-Space in 1980 in a disused and derelict wool store in Brisbane and Q-Space Annex in Nixon’s apartment.119 Exhibitions within these venues were held for one day only and viewers were notified by an invitation. These invitations were sent to their peers and colleagues. As with the Blunt Report, the audience was a select and closed group. Cripps has argued that such spaces were “in response to the inadequacies of the existing gallery structure.”120 He felt that with their alternative exhibition system,

there are few of the constraints of commercial galleries…the invitation method also allowed the artist to determine who the audience to any exhibition might be. The work was to be displayed at any place and at any time appropriate.121

So not only were the artists determining the context in which their work was viewed, but the audience which viewed their work as well.

In 1985, Cripps became director and curator of the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) in Brisbane (following John Nixon’s tenure as director of the IMA between 1980-1984). Known as an ‘alternative’ contemporary art venue because it was not a commercial gallery and not a state art gallery, the IMA, which receives public funding from the Queensland Government and the Australia Council, exhibited what those in the contemporary art community perceived to be the most progressive of contemporary art practices. But the IMA’s status as an alternative venue rapidly became established. The IMA opened in 1975. By the mid eighties it was an established ‘alternative’ art venue. How then did Cripps treat his tenure at the IMA? Do we see the same sort of self-determinist desire that operated in his art practice? How did he maintain his avant-garde ‘outsider’ status and oppositional critique while being director of a major ‘alternative’ art venue? Was this necessarily a priority for Cripps? Or did being the director of an alternative art venue further assert his outsider avant-garde status?

119 These venues were dealt with more fully in Cripps’s exhibition Q Space and Q Space Annex 1980 + 1981. exh. cat. Institute of Modern Art. Brisbane, 1986. 120 Recession Art and Other Strategies. exh. cat. Institute of Modern Art. Brisbane, 1985. p. 5. 121 Ibid. p. 5 68

During his tenure at the IMA Cripps curated one exhibition that included his own work.122 Recession Art and Other Strategies, held in May and June 1985 included his work and Peter Tyndall’s and John Nixon’s as well as Robert MacPherson’s and Gunther Christmann’s. Cripps was in an ideal position to promote his work and that of his peers within a context that he determined. The exhibition detailed much of the work this chapter has addressed already, which Cripps labelled ‘recession’ art, meaning that it was made during a period where there was limited commercial support for their work. It was necessarily made out of inexpensive materials, found objects and was conceptual in nature rather than object based. Cripps emphasised in his catalogue essay the failure of the museum establishment to support ephemeral art practices as fully as he believed they should. He quite rightly claimed that alternative galleries, such as the IMA, emerged in order to support such practices. We can view this exhibition as a continuation of Cripps’s criticism of the state art gallery’s representation of contemporary art and a desire to curate and archive his work and that of his peers. Certainly the exhibition promoted the artists as avant-garde outsiders to the museum establishment. The exhibition had the effect of historicizing their work and its alternative status. It claimed their work was the avant-garde of the seventies.

In Cripps’s art practice during the 1980s he experimented with alternative frameworks for viewing art. We have seen how the Blunt Report achieved this, and how certain exhibitions that he curated emphasised his peers’ interest in operating outside of the established art system, but simultaneously admitted them to the canon of avant-garde alternative practice. His curatorial work ensured that his work and that of his peers gained exposure in a context he deemed appropriate.

Cripps’s curatorial practice exposed his self-determinist ideology and awareness of the process of art historical production through exhibitions. His exhibitions depicted himself and his peers in the role of the artist as other to the museum establishment. But did Cripps have real reason to believe that he and his peers had been marginalized through the 1980s by the museum?

122 See Cripps’s essay about his tenureship as director of the IMA in Brisbane in Bob Lingard and Sue Cramer, eds., Institute of Modern Art: A Documentary History 1975-1989 (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 1989) pp. 79-82. 69

In 1988, he published an essay with sociologist Robert Lingard in which he argued that sculpture, post-object practice and indeed any non-painting art had been marginalized by the collecting policies of art museums in Australia for decades. They provided little evidence for their argument.123 In the essay, Cripps and Lingard argued that Australian art history is a flat history because of the emphasis placed on painting.124 Flat history refers not only to the two-dimensional flat plane of painting but to a flat rather than full account of history. They cited the work of Marxist historian Raymond Williams who influenced the emergence of revisionist social history because of the way he identified the selectivity of history.

The Cripps-Lingard essay is significant because it is one of the first in Australia to critically appraise the collection and exhibition practices of Australian art galleries.125 They noted that post-object practice, because of its ephemeral nature is sometimes difficult to collect, store, conserve and exhibit. They argued that this was partly why such work was less frequently collected than painting. But they also detected a bias within the museum establishment that, they argued, favoured painting over three- dimensional work. Because the judgement of the museum is crucial to art history, the support of the museum for these non-painting practices was necessary. They noted that by including such work in museums, the artist’s original intention to bypass the art museum was subverted. Despite this, they argued that the museum had a responsibility to collect such work in order to give a fuller account of Australian art history that is not skewed to favour ‘flat’ art.126

123 Peter Cripps and Bob Lingard, "Flattening Australian Art History?," E3, exh. cat. Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Melbourne, 1988. n.pag. 124 Although the authors provided little evidence for their argument that post-object practices were largely ignored by art history in the late seventies and early eighties, the so-called return to painting had resulted in a shift in focus from conceptual practices to painting. In 1988, Donald Brook wrote in the contemporary art journal Agenda that his 1969 Power Lecture “The Flight from the Object” “to the best of my knowledge has never subsequently been referred to by anybody in the entire Australian literature of art theory.” Donald Brook, "Too Close for Comfort? Criticism and Practice in the Seventies," Agenda 1.2 (1988): p. 8. 125 Cripps and Lingard were certainly influenced by the writing of Ian Burn through the 1980s. Especially an essay that was first published in 1985, Ian Burn, "Is art history any use to artists?," Dialogue: Writings in Art History (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991). pp. 1-14., and Ian Burn, "The 1960s: Crisis and Aftermath," Dialogue: Writings in Art History (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991). pp. 101-119. First published in 1981. 126 Peter Cripps and Bob Lingard, "Flattening Australian Art History?," E3, exh. cat. Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Melbourne, 1988. n.pag. 70

To this end, conceptual artist Fritz Rahmann’s notion of namelessness was seen by the authors to be useful. Rahmann argued in favour of keeping post-object practices ‘nameless’ because namelessness in his view escaped easy definition and therefore was not easily incorporated into the existing art system. He believed this enabled the object to gain autonomy from the art system. But Cripps and Lingard noted that this had the disadvantage of such work being left out of the system. Nevertheless, the authors saw ‘namelessness’ as a creative position for artists. They didn’t want it to be left out of museum accounts of art history. They argued that ‘nameless’ non-painting should be incorporated into the museum, establishing new parameters and definitions of art.

Cripps produced a work that addressed ‘nameless’ practice. He used the concept of namelessness – work that evades easy categorisation – to launch a critique of the gallery’s processes of categorisation. His critique contested linearity and attempted to ‘break’ apart the museum’s tight categories via challenging practices that require an expansion and redefinition of museum categories. In 1988, Cripps performed his play, for want of a better definition, called Namelessness (see Figures 1.8, 1.9). This play evades easy categorisation within the museum and art history although it was created especially for the museum.127

According to Cripps, this play was the last in a series of plays that had elaborated on ideas archived in The Caravan. His play City Life in 1981, explored the concept of a theatre of memory, and was inspired by Frances Yates’s Art of Memory, which Cripps read in 1974.128City Life had been performed at the National Gallery of Victoria, exposing the fallacy that his work was totally marginalized by the state art gallery. The play was included in the exhibition Relics and Rituals at the NGV in 1981, a survey show prepared by curator Robert Lindsay. Photographs of City Life were produced in his Blunt Report number six, distributed in 1981, indicating again

127 Cripps originally performed the play at the Centre for the Arts in Hobart, followed by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. 128 Frances Yates, Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).; Cripps noted the importance of this book for him in Namelessness: a play and installation by Peter Cripps. exh. cat. Centre for the Arts, The University of Tasmania. Melbourne, 1988. p. 15. 71

Cripps’s desire to archive his work.129 The Blunt Report archived and catalogued the performance through photographs. It ‘curated’ the performance in the context of the ‘exhibition space’ of the bulletin. Being ideas based – as a theatre of memory – it could successfully be ‘performed’ through the pages of the bulletin, just as it had been performed in the real space of the gallery.

Namelessness was widely reviewed because it was performed in Hobart and Sydney, and subsequent exhibitions of the props and sets of the play were exhibited at the IMA in Brisbane and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne in 1989. Despite this, it remains exceedingly difficult to reconstruct, because it was a performance, was not filmed, and photographs and props provide only fragmentary documentation of the performance.

The play was performed in a replica of a small Melbourne art deco theatre that was in the former Gossard bra and girdle factory in Franklin Street, Melbourne, that Cripps made for City Life. His reconstruction of a Melbourne theatre lost to urban gentrification and redevelopment showed Cripps’s desire to ‘recover’ and remember aspects of history. Yet paradoxically, as we shall see, the play both sought to recover historical forms of cultural practice that he idealised as ancillary and alternative to the establishment, and to address the difficulty associated with such a recovery. Namelessness explored the difficulty of creating history from past lived cultural practice. It demonstrated the way we receive the past through fragmented forms and remnants that attempt to speak about the lived event. It exclusively dealt with marginalized cultural practice, such as that within the minor, nearly forgotten theatre of the Melbourne bra and girdle factory. He did not wish to categorise and name these practices as a way of including them in history, but instead wished to retain their ‘namelessness’ and the difficulty they pose to history. Namelessness is similarly difficult to recover and categorise because it is theatre, performance art and sculpture.

129 A catalogue exists for City Life and is available in the Artist holdings of the State Library of Victoria. The performance was discussed in a review in the Shepparton News on 3 August 1981 because the play was originally held at the Shepparton Art Gallery. This review is on Peter Cripps’s artist file in the NGV Library. 72

Namelessness was divided into seven acts and eighteen scenes. Reviewers described each scene as a kind of tableau vivant.130 Each scene consisted of the actors moving into positions on the stage with objects and props in arrangements that formed a static image. The principal prop was a fragmentary plywood model of the Grainger museum that the actors disassembled and reassembled within the stage of the theatre. Cripps used the Grainger Museum as the centrepiece of the play.

Dialogue included a recital of sections of the artist Fritz Rahmann’s essay Difference to Realspace.131 In this essay, Rahmann discussed nameless art that he saw as disruptive to the museum’s classificatory function because museums traditionally sought to name things to establish their place in the museum’s scheme.

In the final act, documentary photographs of Duchamp and Picabia’s ballet Relâche (1924) and Robert Morris’s Site (1965) were re-staged. Neither conformed to categories of art production at the time. That Cripps re-staged the documentary photographs of each event highlighted the problem with representing and understanding performance through static images. Cripps’s re-staging of the photographs did nothing to help us understand their original performance. Instead, Cripps’s performance addressed the difficulty associated with the historical interpretation of performance. The play questioned the nature of categorisation conventions within museums and art history through examples of practices that have challenged conventions. Namelessness therefore addressed concerns that Cripps had outlined in his 1988 essay about the flattening of Australian art history and the role of art museums in this account of a ‘flat’ history of Australian art.

Cripps’s work through the eighties showed his desire to self-deterministically create the conditions through which his work was viewed by curating it himself. He also

130 Colless commented, “…models are exhibited in the stage set rather than performed, titling the style of direction toward the tableau vivant.” Edward Colless, "Namelessness," Art and Text 31 (1989): p. 65. Barbour remarked, “…the ‘play’, it soon appears, is really a succession of tableaux (and sometimes scenes are purely auditory) – in which the models are taken apart and reassembled, formal poses are adopted, monologues declaimed, and other works of art represented.” John Barbour, "Perpetual Motion," Agenda 2.4 (1989): p. 15. 131 This essay was published by the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien for Büro Berlin’s ‘Emotape’ project. Namelessness: a play and installation by Peter Cripps. exh. cat. Centre for the Arts, The University of Tasmania. Melbourne, 1988. Cripps and Lingard make reference to Rahmann’s essay being forthcoming in Art and Text but the author has not located this essay in Art and Text. 73 engaged with questions about the selectivity of art history and the art museum through his exhibitions and essays. His exhibitions claimed that art history and the art museum had selectively ignored his and his peers’ work in favour of painting. He therefore sought to address this perceived gap in history. His exhibitions presented a biased and selective account too. Because he had acknowledged the selectivity of history in his curatorial methodology, his autobiographical curatorial work was free to demonstrate his subjective account of his and his peers’ work. This illustrates his idealisation of subjective self-representation rather than what he saw as the fallacy of objective museum-representation.

He represented himself and his peers as the avant-garde of the seventies because of their desire to operate independently from the established art system. Cripps’s work was to a large extent successful in maintaining independence from this system. The Caravan was never exhibited in total and the Blunt Report was only distributed to a select and closed group, and is now difficult to find in the public archive. Namelessness similarly proves difficult to reconstruct and classify. But, not wanting to be forgotten, his curatorial work made public his essentially private pursuits. This seemed to undermine any potential they had to be independent from the art gallery.

Cripps’s work took a different direction at this point. It no longer attempted to be independent from the art museum, because Cripps wanted admittance to its history- making narrative. His work largely adopted a symbolic oppositional critique of the art gallery from within the art museum. It is no longer genuinely avant-garde, although he continues to symbolically conduct an avant-garde critique of aspects of the museum. The real effect his critique has on the museum is minimal.

Symbolic critique of the museum 1989-1991

This section examines the way Cripps’s work symbolically critiqued aspects of museology from the late 1980s through to the 1990s. As we have seen, Cripps originally developed his critique of the state art gallery because of his concern with the way in which he and his peers’ work was represented by the gallery. This originated in oppositional counter-cultural politics of the mid-seventies. His critique was more than symbolic because it sought to operate independently from the gallery 74 and resist categorisation. He self-deterministically curated his and his peers’ work, while critiquing the selectivity of history.

However, his real critique and opposition to the museum was increasingly unsustainable from within the gallery to which he wanted to be admitted as the avant- garde of the seventies. This is because his real critique relied on independence from the gallery and establishing alternative frameworks for his practice. Once his work relied on the art gallery for exhibition and collection, it was no longer independent and could continue its oppositional critique of the gallery only in symbolic terms. Given this compromise, Cripps’s critique of the art gallery seems to be increasingly futile. Perhaps because of this futility, he widens his critique of the art gallery to include museums of natural science. But his critique is no less futile. It is purely symbolic and provides no real challenge to museum processes. In turn, his critique becomes stylised and codified, trading on the symbolism of avant-garde critique of the museum alone.

From Here On (1989) exhibited at City Gallery (now Anna Schwartz Gallery) symbolically critiqued two models of museum display: the modernist white cube and natural history museum (see Figures 1.10, 1.11). The installation consisted of six flat- topped glass display cabinets, modernist in style because of their very simple design, evenly placed in two rows through the length of the gallery. Geometric forms made out of plywood were interspersed amongst the cases and fixed to the walls of the gallery. Glass photographic lantern slides, such as those used for projection by magic lanterns, were attached to the walls in groups of five and placed on the top of the glass display cases.

Using the concept of frames – the frames of the display cases, frames of the lantern slides, and hollow frames of the geometric forms, the installation exposed the space of the gallery itself. Most of the geometric frames placed through the gallery were hollow, allowing a view of the gallery space beyond. Because of this, and further reasons which will be outlined, the space of the gallery and specifically the process of viewing within the gallery became the subject of the installation.

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Because the display cases were empty, they were used against their traditional function. Instead, the cases themselves became objects of display, leaving the viewer to contemplate the process of display itself. Single lantern slides placed on top of the cases cast a shadow in the interior of the cases. Any images in the slides themselves could only be viewed through the shadow, and even then the images were very vaguely defined by the limited amount of light passing through the slide. The lantern slides were therefore also disinvested of their normal function. Because the groups of five lantern slides were fixed to the walls of the gallery the viewer was prevented from seeing the images on the slides. This provoked the viewer to contemplate the slide itself and its function as a display technology, rather than the images it contained.

Many of the slides were actually blank. Some of them were images of drawings of microscopic pollen, seeds and pods that according to the catalogue for the exhibition had been stored in The Caravan. The catalogue also explained that Cripps had produced the slides since 1968.132 He therefore presented an archive of slides. Cripps’s arrangement and exhibition of the slides was again self-curatorial. However, the way he drew attention only to their display function and not to the images they contained presented them as an archive rather than the individual components of the archive. The fact that they were grouped perhaps suggests some categorisation of the slides – but the viewer was not privy to this because the images were not clearly visible.

The arrangement of geometric objects on the walls of the gallery drew the viewer’s attention to the space of the walls. Some objects were placed high on the wall near the ceiling – a place not normally viewed in galleries. By arranging the objects in this way, Cripps questioned the conventions of display in the gallery. His arrangement of objects is non-conventional because it incorporated the space of the gallery. The gallery space is usually invisible and merely a neutral platform for viewing art. But Cripps made the space of the gallery the subject of his installation and critiqued the notion of the gallery space being neutral.

132 Bob Lingard, "From Here On," Peter Cripps: From Here On, exh. cat. City Gallery. Melbourne, 1989. pp. 2-6. 76

From Here On highlighted the white cube characteristics of the space of the gallery that had been discussed by Brian O’Doherty in Artforum in 1976. There were several ways in which it did this. As mentioned, the placement of geometric forms in obscure locations around the gallery walls drew the viewer’s attention to the space of the stark white walls – a space normally invisible. The arrangement of slides and display cases raised the concept of classification and categorisation and the importance of such methods of ordering and analysis to the museum and archive. This invoked the importance of these processes to the white cube.

The use of slides and display cases highlighted the centrality of looking within museum discourses. Looking and the visual realm have consistently been privileged over other senses in museums, which have sought to classify objects (art or natural science objects) based on their visual differences and properties. The subject of the installation was therefore the process of looking; visuality, and classification based on differences perceived visually. The modernist art gallery and the natural science museum were brought together as a subject of Cripps’s analysis.133

O’Doherty analysed the way that art practice had turned to context as content, making the modernist art gallery its subject and more importantly, object. Context, O’Doherty argued, had replaced the hermetic art object and become art. His analysis of the modernist art gallery showed how it embodies particular modernist ideologies, although it appears neutral and invisible. Neutrality and invisibility were crucial to the modernist art gallery’s control over the perception and interpretation of art. It connoted a space that was beyond time and place, a universal mode of architecture and interior design that was a vessel of an unbiased, hierarchical lineage of art. The art displayed in such an environment showed, “that the work already belongs to

133 Barnes argued that the slides and cases in From Here On represent nineteenth century natural history museology, while the smooth geometric forms represent art museology. Carolyn Barnes, "Specific Objects (the second time around): Two installations by Peter Cripps," What is Installation? An anthology of writings on Australian installation art eds. Adam Geczy and Benjamin Genocchio (Sydney: Power Publications, 2001). p. 112. John Barrett-Lennard also observed that the display cases were “reminiscent of the nineteenth-century museum.” John Barrett-Lennard, "Peter Cripps: Questions of Meanings," Art and Australia 30.3 (1993): p. 353. 77 posterity.”134 Posterity signifies importance and significance. Art in the white cube therefore asserts its place within the annals of history.

O’Doherty’s analysis addressed the place of the viewer within the white cube space. The spectator, he argued, is made to feel like an intruder is this rarefied space. This is because, O’Doherty thought, vision was privileged over any spatial relationship. We can look in this space, but our bodies are an unwelcome intruder. This is why children in the space of the white cube seem such intruders, because they are ‘everywhere’ with their bodies and physical interaction with the world. Their bodily presence is not easily accommodated within this hallowed space of visual contemplation. The way to behave within the white cube, O’Doherty argued, is to be “there without being there.”135 This results in a division between what O’Doherty referred to as the Eye and the Spectator. The Eye is privileged, where the Spectator is accommodated. But in order to be a successful spectator, you must have an ‘eye’ for art, which “discriminates…resolves…takes in, balances, weighs, discerns, perceives.”136

Cripps’s installation made the concomitant Eye and Spectator the subject of From Here On. But the installation frustrated their usual role. The slides stuck to the wall made it impossible to view the images they hold. The display cases had ‘nothing’ in them. He instead wanted the viewer to consider the spatial and physical characteristics of his installation. His large geometric forms implicated a spatial interaction with the viewer, who leant down to peer through their frames and moved around them in order to ‘look’ in the display cases. They interfered with the viewer’s usual movement through the space of the white cube. The objects on the walls of the gallery directed the Eye to places not normally viewed, and alerted the viewer to the space around them and the spatial dialogue between them, rather than the objects in themselves.

The symbolic critique of From Here On drew attention to the white cube gallery’s fiction of neutrality. It incorporated the space of the gallery as an integral component of the installation itself. Vision and the process of looking were exposed as the

134 Brian O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (San Francisco: The Lapis Press, 1986). p. 64. 135 Ibid. p. 15. 136 Ibid. p. 42. 78 principal instrument of discernment and categorisation in the art gallery, while his geometric sculptural objects provoked the viewer to interact with an alternative spatial narrative.

Cripps conducted a related critique in his 1991 installation Another History for H.B. and R.L. (see Figures 1.12, 1.13). He installed forty-odd rectangular and square flat panels faced with masonite or polished aluminium at angles protruding from the walls and ceiling of the gallery to form a curved space. The panels created an arced interior in the gallery that extended above the viewer. The shiny aluminium surfaces reflected the room, installation and viewer. The dull masonite surfaces absorbed reflectivity. These contrasting surfaces and textures created the effect of movement. One reviewer described the effect of the installation as “like looking into the eye of a vortex, the particles within (masonite and mirrored planes) temporarily suspended. One stop in a strobing flash.”137

This formal effect of suspended dynamism demonstrated Cripps’s desire to reformulate conventions of sculpture. But it also depicted his desire to reformulate conventions of exhibition within the art gallery. The planes faced with aluminium reflected the backing of the masonite boards. Not only did these reflections appear to be floating in space but they also directed the viewer’s attention to the conventions by which the objects were made and hung. The installation appeared like a Victorian double hang gone wrong. In the Victorian era paintings were hung on top of one another, sometimes filling most of the wall of the gallery. This convention went out of fashion in the 1940s and 50s, when art began to be hung much more sparsely, especially large modern paintings, which demanded a wall of their own.

The installation was based on the Bauhaus designer Herbert Bayer’s exhibition design Diagram of extended vision in exhibition presentation and Diagram of Field of Vision from 1930. Bayer in turn had been inspired by the exhibition designs of Soviet constructivist artist El Lissitzky, which Lissitzky made for the Soviet Pavilions from the International Exhibitions of the 1920s and 1930s. Lissitzky’s Demonstration Rooms (1926) were intimate sized rooms that displayed non-representational Soviet

137 Anthony Denham, "Dimension and Communication," Broadsheet 20.3 (1991): p. 21. 79 art. Lissitzky displayed the art so that the viewer had intimate access to the works. Lissitzky employed optical illusions on the surfaces of the walls that changed according to the viewer’s location in the room. Lissitzky designed the rooms because,

Traditionally the viewer was lulled into passivity by the paintings on the walls. Our construction/design shall make the man active…as a result of human bodily motion, a perceptual dynamic is achieved…The viewer is physically engaged in an interaction with the object on display.138

Lissitzky’s comment illustrates his belief that conventional viewing was a passive experience and that this apparently passive experience was less satisfactory than an active viewing experience. Lissitzky believed that active viewing could be achieved through certain spatially and visually confronting display methods. Cripps more or less adopted Lissitzky’s view from the 1920s and 1930s. Lissitzky’s view was possibly the received orthodoxy of conceptual and installation practices, such as Cripps’s. Cripps’s adoption of Lissitzky’s view that certain display methods encouraged passive viewing and others, active, was perhaps misguided. Alternatively, it may reflect the endurance of Lissitzky’s avant-garde critique of museum display methods, or the endurance of the white cube model of gallery.

Herbert Bayer’s exhibition designs built on Lissitzky’s conception of exhibiting art by attempting to involve the viewer in a more active and dynamic way. Bayer believed that exhibitions were a form of advertising and could manipulate the viewer in particular ways. Exhibitions were therefore powerful tools through which to educate and shape perception within a community.139 His exhibition designs depicted a male viewer in the centre of a room with panels angled to surround him. Bayer represented the viewer’s head as a giant eye that had to look above and below in order to see each panel. The exhibition literally surrounded the viewer. Bayer’s design was never actually built. It was a hypothetical model.

138 Benjamin Buchloh, "From Factura to Factography," October: The First Decade, 1976-1986 ed. Joan Copjec (London: The MIT Press, 1987). pp. 86-87. 139 Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installation at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1998).; Christopher Phillips, "The Judgement Seat of Photography," October: The First Decade, 1976-1986 ed. Joan Copjec (London: The MIT Press, 1982). pp. 27-63. 80

Cripps’s installation demonstrated an alternative to the style in which contemporary art is conventionally exhibited within the white cube gallery. He appropriated the design for his installation – which consists of blank and reflective panels, not artworks. This appropriation did not actually re-conceptualise methods of displaying art in a gallery – it symbolically critiqued current conventions of display within art galleries, and was related to his earlier critique with Lingard about the dominance of ‘flat’ painting, as opposed to spatial and three dimensional forms of practice in the state art galleries.

Both From Here On and Another History conducted critique from within the commercial art gallery. Given the installations’ references to museology and disciplines of display and cataloguing within the art gallery, their critique would have more symbolic effect if displayed within the state art gallery. Within a commercial gallery, the installations’ critique had less relevance. Like most installation art, these installations are made for an art museum space. These installations had a limited life within the commercial art gallery because they are displayed temporarily and not held by the gallery within a collection. In this case, City Gallery operated more like an alternative public art gallery because Cripps mounted installations that were unlikely to be sold, unless bought by an art museum.

An archaeology of the museum 1992-1993

Cripps’s temporary exhibitions within public museums in the early 1990s potentially had more symbolic effect because they were exhibited within the environment most related to the installations’ critique. Cripps’s exhibition Markets of Meanings/Meanings of Markets (1992) at the Deakin University Gallery posed questions about the University’s existing art collection (see Figures 1.14, 1.15). The installation was developed for a proposed permanent sculpture within the grounds of the University’s Geelong campus. It was developed specifically for the site of the University. The installation shows Cripps’s emerging interest in excavating museological sites and studying their ‘remains’. This interest enabled Cripps to develop a more specific symbolic critique than previous installations that had conducted a generic critique of methods of display within art galleries.

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While the proposed sculpture was never realised, the resulting temporary installation in the Deakin University Gallery presented maquettes of his proposed sculpture and items from the University art collection that were related to his sculpture. The maquette was a plywood hollow cylindrical sculpture with sections of the cylinder cut away to reveal the interior of the plywood cylinder. Written in the interior were lists of botanical specimen names in Latin and illustrations of botanical species that Cripps had reproduced from late eighteenth and early nineteenth century botanical compendiums. Cripps displayed this maquette with plaster cast Hellenistic and Roman belonging to the Deakin University art collection positioned against false walls within the gallery space. Written on the false walls were lists of botanical species in Latin.

The exhibition drew together elements of Western art and Western science, through the plaster casts and Latin botanical names. Each represented a model of classification that was integral to colonialism and was applied throughout the colonies as frameworks through which learning was to be conducted. Museums of art and science were instrumental as conduits of such learning. The structure of the maquette as an outer casing or shell symbolised the conceptual and linguistic framework of Latin botanical classification systems. The plaster casts of Hellenistic and Roman statues are literally physical shells of an original and also conceptual shells that embody principles of Western art and culture. Museums of art and science are similarly invoked by Cripps as ‘universal’ Western shells that were instruments of British and European empires.

The plaster cast statues held within the Deakin art collection symbolise the transmission of Western culture and values to the Antipodes. The casts originated from a collection of one hundred plaster casts acquired by Redmond Barry, head of the Trustees of the Public Library in Melbourne between 1859 and 1862. The library’s art collection was to become the National Gallery of Victoria. The casts formed the core of the art collection. Barry collected the casts because he believed that classical 82 sculpture and glyptic arts were central to the subsequent development and progression of Western art.140 They would be pivotal teaching aids to students of art.

Art Historian Ann Galbally regarded this collection of plaster casts as representative of “mid Victorian beliefs in the importance of the classical example for all intellectual and creative endeavour.”141 Galbally discussed how Barry believed classical casts and portrait busts were integral to learning. The casts helped to develop his public library art collection as a “functioning cornerstone in the building of a civilised British society at the far end of the earth.”142 According to Galbally, Barry believed in the mid-Victorian ideal of progress. In order to progress, Galbally observed “individuals and nations must know and use history.”143 The plaster casts were therefore believed to be central for the progress of Australian society and culture.

Barry believed that through casts something of the original would be communicated. The casts instructed the viewer on the perfection of the classical age, and gave students of art something by which to measure their own work. The plaster casts were imbued with truth and beauty and were the pinnacle of artistic achievement and something for which to strive.

Because Australia was thought to be a ‘clean’ slate in which to cultivate an ideal society (Melbourne especially was conceptualised in these terms because it was free from convicts; for Sydney this was more problematic), the principles of the classical age were employed as a guiding framework. As Australia, it was thought, had no ancient cultural heritage of its own, it would benefit from the foundations of Western civilisation in creating a civilised new world. Classicism would educate the public. It might also purify and elevate the minds of those living in the colony, so far from the British homeland. There was a danger in living so far from the centre of culture that the true and higher values of civilisation would somehow become debased through distance. Museums performed an extra important role in shoring up civilised minds

140 Leonard Cox, The National Gallery of Victoria 1861-1968 (Melbourne: The National Gallery of Victoria, 1968). p. 10. 141 Ann Galbally, "The Lost Museum: Redmond Barry and Melbourne's 'Musée des Copies'," Australian Journal of Art VII.Museums and Other Matters (1988): p. 28. 142 Ibid. p. 29. 143 Ibid. p. 30. 83 because they were centres of learning through which citizens could maintain contact with the Old world. Art historian Ivan Karp and artist Fred Wilson discussed the role of plaster casts in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. They noted that they were “put in place by the founders to elevate the taste of the working class of .”144

By the nineteen thirties in Melbourne, plaster casts were going out of fashion as bastions of the civilised world and educators of the mind. The plaster cast collection at the National Gallery of Victoria had suffered numerous breakages and was largely resigned to storage.145 While they had once been central to the National Art School’s teaching program, they no longer assumed such importance. The NGV deaccessioned many of the casts, farming them out to the City of Geelong and the Working Men’s College (now Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) and other colleges in far- flung municipalities of the state of Victoria.146 There they resided, rarely seeing the light of day. The Deakin University art collection, in Geelong, was but one beneficiary of the NGV’s original collection of casts, once so central to the philosophy of the state gallery.

Cripps’s exhibition invoked the plaster casts as part of a lost and fragmented collection that epitomised mid-Victorian ideals. The hollow maquettes symbolised this lost ideal. The hollow cylindrical forms are like shells that correlate with the plaster casts that are shells of a former empire and culture, but are shed like snake skins and are out of place and out of time. They have been devalued and cast adrift, shells of their former meaning.

Within this context, Latin botanical classification names evoked related connotations. Latin is no longer spoken and has little relevance in the contemporary world except in science where it continues to describe the botanical world. This is left over from a former age. Like the plaster casts, the botanical illustrations and classification systems represented the pinnacle of the civilised world. Striving for enlightenment, the pursuit

144 Ivan Karp and Fred Wilson, "Constructing the spectacle of culture in museums," Thinking about Exhibitions eds. Ressa Greenberg, et al. (New York: Routledge, 1996). p. 259. 145 Ann Galbally, "The Lost Museum: Redmond Barry and Melbourne's 'Musée des Copies'," Australian Journal of Art VII.Museums and Other Matters (1988): pp. 28-50. 146 Ibid. p. 48. 84 of truth and knowledge led to discoveries of new worlds, new habitats and species which required understanding and incorporation into existing pedagogical frameworks. The title of Cripps’s exhibition, Markets of Meanings/Meanings of Markets addresses their fluctuating cultural and scientific value within the market of knowledge.

In this exhibition, Cripps emphasised the ideological and historical roots of the art gallery and natural science museum. Cripps’s work had shifted from conducting an anti-establishment critique of the museum to work that explored the historical memory of the museum. This had greater effect because of the way that it revealed and questioned specific histories related to the Deakin University art collection. This enriched the viewer’s perception of the art collection and specifically the plaster casts within the collection.

Projects for Two Museums (1993) similarly conducted an archaeology type excavation of a specific museum site and drew attention to historical principles through which the museum was created (see Figures 1.16-1.19). Cripps was invited by the University of South Australia Art Museum to develop an exhibition. Cripps suggested developing installations for two sites in Adelaide – the University of South Australia Art Museum and the Museum of Economic Botany located in the Adelaide Botanic Gardens.

Erica Green, the Director of the Art Museum negotiated the use of the Museum of Economic Botany with the Director of the Botanic Gardens, Dr Brian Morley and Thekla Reichstein the Curator of the Museum of Economic Botany. Cripps had known about this museum since he was a child and had expressed interest in creating an installation within the museum.147 Morley and Reichstein agreed to Cripps’s request, although the museum had never been involved with a project of this nature. In an interview with the author, the curator of Projects for Two Museums John Barrett-Lennard, noted that he thought Reichstein was hesitant to agree to the project; but that once she had she was helpful although she “didn’t see it as essential for the

147 John Barrett-Lennard curator of Projects for Two Museums stated this in an interview with the author, 6 October 2001, Melbourne. 85 museum.”148 Erica Green thought that Morley and Reichstein “responded with an enlightened interest, to what must have seemed an irregular, though innovative proposal for institutional collaboration.”149

The Museum of Economic Botany is today a rare specimen of nineteenth century natural science museology that is largely intact. The museum, now heritage listed, has had few changes to its architecture and interior displays.150 It opened in 1881 to house and display collections of seeds, pods and fruit (from banksias to vanilla pods for example) and samples of plants that have economic value (for example, tea and spices). It was modelled on the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens’ Museum of Economic Botany. It is one rectangular exhibition hall with a small office attached to one side of the hall. It has a high wooden ceiling decorated with Victorian stencilled patterns. The museum still uses the original display cabinets – tall upright cases around the edges of the hall and flat-topped cases in the centre of the hall. On top of each upright case are plaster cast busts of natural scientists and collectors. The exterior of the building is neo-classical Greek in design.

Cripps’s installation in the interior investigated this museum as a site imbued with historical memory and ideology. He installed miniature plywood geometric forms, mirrors, lists of words, and large sculptural objects in the museum. He placed mirrors on top of some of the upright display cases angled so that they reflected the displays in the central flat-topped cases. Mirrors were also positioned underneath the central cases on the floor, angled to reflect the underside of the central cases to which Cripps had attached miniature geometric shapes made out of plywood and arranged in clusters. He also attached lists of words to the underside of the cases which were reflected in other mirrors. The lists included the names of influential natural scientists depicted by the plaster cast busts in the museum, as well as words which drew attention to the methods and the raison d’etre of the museum such as knowledge, power, classifying and framing. These reflected lists were sometimes partial

148 Ibid. 149 Erica Green, "Foreword," Projects for Two Museums, exh. cat. University of South Australia Art Museum and Museum of Economic Botany. Adelaide, 1993. p. 5. 150 The Museum is listed on the Register of the National Estate, 1980; Register of State Heritage Items, 1982; classified by the National Trust; and on the Register of City of Adelaide Heritage Items, 1985. Refer to the Museum website, last accessed 29 March 2004: http://www.environment.sa.gov.au/botanicgardens/adelaide.html#Museum_of_Economic_Botany 86 reflections and sometimes reflected in reverse, provoking one reviewer to speculate that the reflections were a metaphor “for a fractured sense of reality”151 within museums. The large sculptures, also plywood, were enlargements of seed and pod structures that were hollow and again with a side cut away to expose the interior of the form. In the interior of the form, Cripps had stencilled similar lists of words. These large structures were placed on the floor and high on the walls of the museum.

The installation was parallel to the formal structure within the museum. Barrett- Lennard commented in an interview with the author that he and Cripps had “not wanted to risk trampling on the continuing life of the museum.”152 By this he meant that they did not want to interfere with the visitor’s experience of the museum itself and that the installation would be an added layer in the museum that visitors would find if they looked closely. One reviewer verified this by observing that the majority of visitors to the museum during Cripps’s installation were tourists and “were largely oblivious to Cripps’s interventions.”153 But then he contradicted himself by noting, “he (Cripps) unleashes a pattern of interference that serves to irritate the visitor negotiating rows of antique display cases.”154 Another reviewer thought, “the lines seemed to be deliberately blurred as to exactly what was the artist’s ‘work’.”155 This suggests that the installation was well integrated into the existing displays of the museum.

For the museum, the implications of Cripps’s installation were fairly limited. It brought a new audience to the museum – the contemporary art audience – that may not have usually visited the museum. Thus the installation provided a greater exposure of the museum within the community. Aside from this though, Cripps’s installation conducted temporary, symbolic critique that was apparently oppositional, and had no real impact, which, according to Barrett-Lennard, is what Cripps wanted.

151 Louise Dauth, "Texts in Space," Art Monthly Australia 65 (1993): p. 27. 152 John Barrett-Lennard, Interview with the author, 6 October 2001, Melbourne. 153 David Broker, "Peter Cripps," Art and Text.47 (1994): p. 83. 154 Ibid. 155 Louise Dauth, "Texts in Space," Art Monthly Australia 65 (1993): p. 27. 87

Cripps’s installation pointed to the systems of classification, observation and spatial regulation in museums such as this. Cripps applied a Foucaultian-type analysis of the museum by excavating this museum as an institution of spatial and knowledge-based regulatory power. Michel Foucault’s work on institutional disciplinarity was translated from the French during the seventies. Foucault examined the origins of the prison, school, factory, medical clinic, and asylum amongst other institutions. His work was often concerned with how individuals and the broader collective have been manipulated and controlled through disciplinary forces. In several studies, Foucault paid special attention to the influence of architectural spaces of institutions on individual bodies (and thus the collective) occupying and moving through the space. Foucault showed how Jeremy Bentham’s mid-nineteenth century design of the Panopticon Prison, for example, enabled surveillance and regulated the behaviour of imprisoned individuals.156 Surveillance and systems of observation within various architectural spaces were a prime component of Foucault’s exploration. Foucault’s analysis is highly relevant to Cripps’s installations. His work conducts a Foucaultian- style exploration of the museum.

This makes sense considering Cripps’s original critique of the art museum as an institution of exclusion and regulation. Indeed, it is clear after surveying Cripps’s work since the mid seventies that the artist’s entire oeuvre has been primarily concerned with the museum as an institution and space of regulatory power. The artist’s work has largely sought to escape and reposition his own work in relation to the museum’s regulatory systems.

This is most clear in his installation within the Museum of Economic Botany. It literally drew attention to the underside of the cases through mirrors whose reflections loosely symbolised the underlying, embedded ideologies and systems of the museum. Cripps guided the viewer by providing lists of words – that were distinctly Foucaultian – such as power, classifying, framing. The museum’s embedded historical ideologies were thus revealed by Cripps to have a presence in the existing present-day museum. However, these ideologies were never specified and clarified beyond

156 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin Books, 1977). pp. 170-228. 88 generic, derivative lists of words. For those familiar with Foucault’s analysis – which has had a widespread influence throughout contemporary theory – Cripps’s installation at the time reiterated a highly current but now well-worn critique.

Two years after Cripps’s installation, in 1995, Tony Bennett published The Birth of the Museum: history, theory and politics in which a Foucaultian perspective on the museum was central.157 Douglas Crimp before him had undertaken a Foucaultian- informed analysis of the modernist museum. Crimp’s essays during the eighties, published together in 1993 in On the Museum’s Ruins, explored the museum as an institution of confinement and the discourse of modernist art history itself as a regulatory system.158 Eileen Hooper Greenhill’s Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, published in 1992 similarly prioritised the approach of Foucault.159 In each of these critiques, the museum is positioned as an institution of regulatory power. Cripps’s approach within the Museum of Economic Botany was related to this spectrum of critique, which viewed the modernist museum as an archaeological site, ripe for an analysis of past systems of knowledge, which can be detected and rendered transparent.

Cripps’s installation traded on the museum as a site of historical memory, which it fetishized through multiple reflections that turned the museum into Cripps’s object and artefact. Carolyn Barnes has argued that the installation alerted viewers to the space of the museum in a way that exposes it as something actively constructed rather than neutral, believing that in this Cripps asks “that we examine our submission and subscription to the transcendent logic they (objects and spatial forms) impose on our daily lives.”160 But surely this much is self-evident. Cripps does not expose anything specific about the spatial logic and display methodologies of the museum. His installation did not result in visitors seeing the museum in a new way, though it applied an archaeological-like visual and spatial excavation of hidden spaces within it.

157 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: history, theory, politics (London: Routledge, 1995). 158 Douglas Crimp, On the Museum's Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1993). 159 Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1992). 160 Carolyn Barnes, "Relational Space," Peter Cripps: Projects for Two Museums, exh. cat. University of South Australia Art Museum and Museum of Economic Botany. Adelaide, 1993. p. 46. 89

Cripps used clusters of large plywood geometric forms throughout the gallery space of the University of South Australia Art Museum for the other part of Projects for Two Museums. The arrangement of the objects physically engaged viewers because they needed to move around and through the objects to make sense of Cripps’s sculptural composition. The objects themselves were hollow cylinders, hexagons and oblique cones. Because the installation covered a large area, it was not possible for the viewer to perceive a complete view of the objects from any one position, viewers therefore moved around the installation to gain a three-dimensional perception of it. The compositional possibilities depended on the viewer’s physical involvement in moving from place to place.

This installation highlighted the space of the gallery and the process of viewing art in a white cube style gallery by employing sculptural objects and a spatial interaction between the viewer and objects. It reiterated Cripps’s symbolic critique of methods of display within the art gallery in his installations From Here On and Another History for H.B. and B.L. In particular, this work emphasised Cripps’s desire to create an active, spatially involved viewing experience within the museum environment.

Conclusion

This chapter has investigated the way in which Cripps’s early practice engaged with the concept of the archive. It also examined how the artist addressed curatorial issues relating to the display of contemporary art and historical models of museums and art galleries. Cripps’s work claimed to uncover the different ideologies of representation inherent within museums. Having been intimately involved with the art museum politics of the mid-seventies through his work at the National Gallery of Victoria, his work developed in opposition to the state art gallery. Counter-cultural politics, resistance to the establishment and a quasi-Marxist critique of the museum influenced both his early curatorial experience at the NGV and his art practice throughout the seventies.

His art practice addressed the concept of the archive in order to challenge conventional notions of a hermetic art object and create an alternative system of self- representation that was not reliant on the art gallery. His private artist’s museum and 90 archive, The Caravan, evolved in diametrical opposition to the survey model of exhibiting contemporary art common in the mid-seventies at the NGV. It emphasised depth of collection. Cripps self-archived and self-curated his work in several projects through the seventies because he wanted control over how his work was represented.

Cripps’s awareness of the processes of art museology led to his critique of the processes of art history and his analysis of the underlying ideologies of the museum exhibition as a medium. His curatorial activities of the eighties constructed he and his peers’ work as the seventies’ avant-garde, which was underrepresented in the mainstream gallery context. However, this underrepresentation was central to their identification as the avant-garde of the seventies, and as outsiders to the establishment. Cripps then self-deterministically sought to gain greater representation in the art gallery and in art history by curating exhibitions that determined the context in which his and his peers’ work was considered. This problematised his concept of himself as an outsider to the art museum establishment.

Realising that his critique from outside of the art museum had little effect on the art museum, Cripps’s works in the late 1980s and 1990s sought to engage with the art museum from within. But he continued to work within the stylistic and conceptual idiom of avant-garde oppositional critique. This was codified as a style within contemporary art and posed no real challenge to the art museum. Hence his critique of the museum was purely symbolic and rhetorical. Nevertheless, site-specific works, which conducted a Foucaultian-like archaeology of the modernist museum, shed light on remnants of the systems of knowledge within these museums.

Cripps’s engagement with the art museum shifted from opposition during the seventies to symbolic critique of the museum. His critique aimed to reveal display conventions within museums. His argument that the museum privileged what he termed ‘flat’ history – paintings and a one-dimensional view of the past–is repeatedly addressed in his installations. His installations instead privilege spatial engagement with the space of the museum in attempt to create a more active viewing relationship.

Cripps encapsulates a key paradox of symbolic critique of the museum. Such critique is essentially founded on modernist avant-garde notions of opposition. The avant- 91 garde has been thoroughly institutionalised by the art museum, and its critique is reduced to symbolism. Cripps’s work does not overcome this problem.

However, this analysis of Cripps’s work has also revealed the artist’s close investigation of subjectivity in museums and history, his keenness to expose the hegemony and limitations of objectivity in museums, and his interest in broadening the linear categorisation of art and artists by art museums. In this regard, his work is related to critiques of the 1970s which questioned the adequacy of the museum’s representation of ‘living’ contemporary art. These critiques viewed the museum as a keeper of ‘dead’ things, ill-equipped to accommodate living culture. 92

Chapter Two. The Figurative Museum: museum tropes in Fiona Hall’s work 1981-2002

Introduction

Fiona Hall (b.1953) represents tropes of the museum. Collections, taxonomies, display vitrines and items of curiosity feature throughout her work. Her works invoke the experience of wonder. Wonder is a hook for viewers. Via wonder, the artist explores the museum’s systems of classification and disorder within the ordered environment of museum collections. Notions of hybridity, cross-fertilisation and analogous connections dominate her work. In this, Hall’s work revives elements of the Wunderkammer and correlates with a renewed interest in wonder in museum practice during the 1990s.

This chapter explores Hall’s figurative representation of museum tropes, the artist’s use of wonder as a visual strategy, and her connection with contemporary museum practice. Her work presents a very different model of artistic engagement with the museum to Peter Cripps’s oppositional critique. However, there are also similarities between the two artists’ approaches to the museum. Each artist resists classification and narrow categorisation within the museum. Cripps proposed the idea of ‘namelessness’ as a resistive strategy that he hoped would accommodate more complexity within the museum’s categorisation process. Hall’s work broadens meaning by creating imaginative connections between diverse things, thus expanding the museum’s categories. Each approach relates to theoretical critiques of the museum. Cripps’s work during the 1990s adopted a Foucaultian-like excavation of the regulatory techniques of museum sites. Hall undertakes an Adornoesque critique of the modernist museum as a mausoleum, where objects are decontextualised, divorced from living culture and have an “afterlife” within the museum.1 Cripps pointed to what he believed was the inadequacy of the museum’s representation of ‘living’

1 The notion of museum objects having an afterlife in the museum was discussed by Adorno in his analysis of Proust’s philosophical stance towards museums. Theodor W. Adorno, "Valéry Proust Museum," trans. Samuel M. Weber, Prisms (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1967). pp. 173-185. 93 contemporary art. Hall is especially concerned with the afterlife of objects in the museum.

Despite one reviewer describing Hall’s work as “a Wunderkammer of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century”2, the artist’s representation of museum tropes, and in particular collections of curiosities, has never been analysed properly. Although Hall’s work is widely known, extensively collected by art museums within Australia, and highly coveted, it has received minimal critical analysis.3 The major books and anthologies on contemporary Australian art produced during the 1990s have neglected Hall’s work. Neither Charles Green’s Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970-19944 nor Joan Kerr and Jo Holder’s edited volume Past Present: The National Women’s Art Anthology5 cover Hall’s work. An essay by Deborah Hart in 1998 in Art & Australia6 considered a number of Hall’s works and analysed the artist’s interest in taxonomy and botanical classification systems. Some reviews of her exhibitions have contributed detailed and insightful discussion of her work as a whole, notably Jonathon Holmes’s 1994 profile of Hall for Art Contemporary Art Tasmania7 and Timothy Morrell’s article in Art & Australia in 1987.8

Hall’s work is related to a broader shift in art practice of the 1980s that utilised appropriation and tended to work within figurative, rather than abstract, traditions of practice.9 Her work has never been considered within these terms, yet Hall clearly

2 Stephanie Radok, "Trade: Fiona Hall," Artlink 21.4 (2001): p. 48. 3 In 1999 and 2000 she was nominated amongst Australia’s fifty most collectable artists in Australian Art Collector. Her work is represented extensively in public art collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Museum of Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Victoria, Queensland Art Gallery, Art Gallery of South Australia, Bendigo Art Gallery and La Trobe Regional Art Gallery. 4 Charles Green, Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970 - 1994 (Melbourne: Craftsman House, 1995). 5 Jo Holder and Joan Kerr, eds., Past Present: The National Women's Art Anthology (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1999). 6 Deborah Hart, "Fiona Hall's garden: Fertile Interactions," Art and Australia 36.2 (1998): pp. 202-211. 7 Jonathan Holmes, "Profile," Art Contemporary Art Tasmania 5 (1994): pp. 14,18,19. 8 Timothy Morrell, "Picturing the apocalypse- the art of Fiona Hall," Art & Australia 25.2 (1987): pp. 235- 239. 9 This revival in figuration during the eighties has been examined by Terry Smith and Charles Green. Terry Smith, "Postmodern Plurality: 1980-90," Australian Painting 1788-1990 eds. Bernard Smith and Terry Smith (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1991). pp. 518-556.; Green also discusses the ‘survival’ of abstraction, Charles Green, Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970 - 1994 (Melbourne: Craftsman House, 1995). pp. 40-58. 94 appropriates tropes of the museum. The way she has addressed museums has been neglected. This chapter therefore aims to redress these gaps in the literature by investigating Hall’s exploration of museums and its intersection with contemporary museum issues in the 1990s.

Keeping it messy: museum disorder in The Antipodean Suite (1981)

Museums are wonderful places for artists, filled with interesting things to look at, but also as an artist, if you are troubled by something, this is very interesting territory.10

This section investigates how Hall’s early work depicted museums and in particular her emerging Adornoesque critique of the modernist museum as a mausoleum. I examine photographs from The Antipodean Suite (1981) and draw on an interview I conducted with Hall.11

Hall’s early work drew inspiration from time that she spent “cruising” museums during the seventies while she lived in the United Kingdom and United States.12 Hall was a frequent visitor to Sir John Soane’s Museum and the Hunterian Museum of Anatomy and Medicine, belonging to the Royal College of Surgeons, both museums located in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in Holborn, London and the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian in New York. These museums provided the artist with a rich source of objects and displays that have surfaced throughout her visual vocabulary.13

These museums in particular fascinated Hall because each was an extraordinary example of modernist collecting and classification practices. Each of these museums is also evocative of death, an association on which Hall’s work dwells. Soane’s Museum, unique because it is a near intact example of a mid-nineteenth century

10 Fiona Hall, Interview with the author, 12 March 2000, Adelaide. 11 Ibid. 12 After majoring in painting at the National Art School in Sydney in 1975, Hall travelled to London to work as an assistant to the photographer Fay Godwin. In the late seventies she moved to the United States to undertake a Masters at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, which was known as an experimental photography art school. Ibid. 13 Ibid. 95 museum, is tomb-like.14 It is preserved as Soane wished, and is mausoleum-like, containing his prize collectable, an Egyptian sarcophagus in the crypt.15 Donald Preziosi observed Soane’s predilection for sepulchural imagery within the museum in the 2001 Slade Lectures. Preziosi argued that Soane used funereal imagery to orchestrate a symbolic transition from death to the afterlife within his museum through the layout and arrangement of his collection, which, Preziosi claims, Soane was obliged to do as a Master Freemason devoted to community eduction. In a fascinating lecture, Prezioisi uncovered what he believes to be Freemason ideology embedded in Soane’s Museum.16 Hall admired Soane’s Museum because of its particularly nineteenth century and highly individualistic display and collections. Packed to the brim with architectural and sculptural fragments, plaster casts, Piranesi watercolours amongst many other things, all lining the walls and ceilings of the house, Soane’s museum is part mausoleum and a labyrinth of unfolding spaces. Soane’s museum is a chaotic system of ordered objects, a visual feast and an overflowing treasure house.

The Hunterian Museum of Anatomy and Medicine, belonging to the Royal College of Surgeons in London invokes the image of a morgue: amongst its collections and clinical medical displays are pickled body parts in formaldehyde. Hall was inspired by the collections of alabaster-bleached specimens. Its element of the grotesque – ancient pickled body parts and foetuses – horrified and fascinated the artist. The museum was bombed during World War Two and renovated post-War. Hall loved the austere modernist post-War display vitrines that had light switches that the visitor pressed to illuminate sections of the display.17 Hall’s work in the late nineties, as we shall see later in this chapter, appropriates the alabaster-bleached specimens, the modernist austerity of the display vitrines and the clinical aesthetic of this museum.

14 In 1995, Sir John Soane’s Museum was restored to almost exactly how Soane left it when he died. The British Government was obliged to undertake this restoration because in 1833 an Act of Parliament established that Soane’s Museum would be left to the public when Soane died providing that it was left “as nearly as possible in the state in which he shall leave it.” Sir John Soane’s Museum: A Short Description, brochure produced by Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. 15 For a detailed analysis of Soane’s collection and museum see Susan Feinberg Millenson, Sir John Soane's Museum (Ann Arbor: UMI Press, 1987). See also John Elsner, "A Collector's Model of Desire: The House and Museum of Sir John Soane," The Cultures of Collecting ed. Roger Cardinal (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994). pp. 155-176. 16 Donald Preziosi, "The Astrolabe of the Enlightenment," Brain of the Earth's Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 17 Fiona Hall, Interview with the author, 12 March 2000, Adelaide. 96

The Museum of the American Indian, part of the Smithsonian Institute, interested the artist because of what she saw as its decontextualised ethnographic collections and its association with colonialism. For Hall, museums such as this “represent a proprietorial relationship with the world”18 that she finds disturbing and out of step with the present postcolonial world. This museum displayed thousands of things that were presented in an old-fashioned ethnographic museum manner – objects cluttered up together in dusty nineteenth century display cabinets. The artist was fascinated and disturbed by the collections of ethnographic objects from Native American communities. The objects were barely explained to the viewer, or if they were, only in a dry and sparse manner. They were presented as curiosities: out of context and misread in the museum, which both appalled and appealed to Hall. Although decontextualised, the museum objects gained a new context and meaning within the museum via strange juxtapositions.

The extent to which this interests Hall was made clear to me during an interview with the artist when she recounted a later visit to this museum. She went back to visit the museum in 1994, just after it had opened in Customs House in New York after major renovations, and was disappointed by the way it had updated its displays19 Instead of enthralling dusty old cabinets cluttered with objects barely explained to the viewer, the artist found a clear and articulate revision of this former museum model. Hall noted that the museum had far fewer objects on display. She also explained that many objects were displayed “as if they were artworks,” isolated, aestheticised and fetishized under luminous spotlights.20 With this method of display there was little chance for cluttered and peculiar juxtapositions of objects. The opening exhibition All Roads are Good: Native Voices on Life and Culture (that opened in 1994 and closed in 2000) represented Native Americans’ perspectives and interpretations of objects within the museum collection that they had selected. Objects were largely

18 Ibid. 19 The National Museum of the American Indian in New York Customs House opened in August 1994. 20 Fiona Hall, Interview with the author, 12 March 2000, Adelaide. 97 demystified, symbolically reclaimed and repositioned within their cultural context in the exhibition. 21

Hall was sceptical about this revision because she thought the museum risked “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”22 Hall wanted the museum to retain aspects of the previous displays. The strange juxtapositions of objects that inspired her curiosity were lacking in the new museum. Such juxtapositions led Hall to a subjective and imaginative engagement with objects. Old displays also provided information about the history of the institution itself, a history that may be highly problematic, but which nevertheless Hall felt should not be forgotten or sanitised. For Hall, the museum itself – with its changing methods of display – is like an artwork or an artefact, in need of preservation and contemplation.

Nevertheless, Hall’s position is difficult to justify and it is necessary to critique her endorsement of old displays. Old style ethnographic displays, especially within a museum such as the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, signified imperial and cultural control over the American Indian peoples. Such displays would typically represent American Indian cultures in narrow and inaccurate ways, or worse, as a dying culture, one less civilised than Western European culture. Museums must revise such displays in order to correct inaccurate perceptions of American Indian cultures today and assist with reconstructing knowledge of indigenous cultural heritage. Hall’s nostalgia for the curious juxtapositions in old-style displays does not merit the entire preservation of such displays.

However, other contemporary artists share Hall’s sentiment. American artist Mark Dion for example, expressed a similar sentiment to Hall. Dion developed a catalogue of checklists by which he assesses museums – as an artefact worthy of study. The checklist includes information such as how many extinct animals are represented in the museum collection; if any eminent biologists worked at the museum and how they left their stamp on it; when and how the museums were organised; what systems of

21 All Roads are Good: Native Voices on Life and Culture. exh. cat. The National Museum of the American Indian. New York, The Smithsonian Institute Press, 1994. p. 15. 22 Fiona Hall, Interview with the author, 12 March 2000, Adelaide. 98 classification and display the museums use and what ‘master narratives’ the museums communicate.23 Dion noted,

There is a sense of urgency in my pursuit, since at any moment a perfectly remarkable dusty old collection and arrangement might be turned into a banal scientific video arcade passing off hackneyed facts as miraculous discoveries.24

Dion shares Hall’s fascination for museums that convey a past worldview and leave some old displays intact, and scepticism for some new museum methods. Like Hall, he does not want to see museums ‘cleaned-up’ too much. Firstly, this is because old displays were “perfectly remarkable” and secondly, because new displays are sometimes no substitute for old. To these artists old museums are artefacts in themselves serving as reminders. They appeal to these artists because they illustrate past colonial encounters and the complex and conflicting gap between the present and past. Each artist seems to have nostalgia for the aesthetics of old museums, which for them offer endless imaginative possibilities.25 However, the maintenance of such displays by museums, in particular old ethnographic displays, is unjustifiable because their racist undertones. Hall’s nostalgia for old-style museums is, in some respects, utterly flawed.

In the early eighties, as an artist-in-residence at the Tasmanian School of Art, Hall began The Antipodean Suite (1981) in response to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart and Queen Victoria Museum in Launceston. These museums were mausoleum-like. The artist encountered jumbled collections of stuffed animals, stagnant displays and faded dioramas. She visited the storerooms, and staff allegedly showed her areas of the collections that she found deeply troubling: boxes of Aboriginal remains collected in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.26 Extinct animals, notably the Tasmanian Tiger, fragmented into skeletal remains, were kept

23 The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect. exh. cat. The Museum of Modern Art. New York, 1999. p. 98. 24 Ibid. p. 98. 25 Fiona Hall, Interview with the author, 12 March 2000, Adelaide. 26 Historian Tom Griffiths described the “hunting culture” within Australia in the 1800s and early 1900s. Griffiths argues that collecting was a form of ‘hunting’, and that the language of collecting expeditions in Australia deliberately invoked metaphors of hunting, sometimes in pursuit of “blackfellows.” Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996). pp. 18-21. Griffiths does discuss the collection of Aboriginal skulls and bones in Victoria, by digging up gravesites. Ibid. pp. 28-54. 99 within the museum stores. These museums, the artist felt, were invested with the tragedy of colonialism: the dispossession and massacre of Aboriginal people, convictism, and the destruction of the environment and extinction of numerous species as a direct result of the impact of British settlement. The artist felt that these museums conveyed what she described as the “darkness and drama” of Tasmania itself.27

This experience viewing the storage areas of these Tasmanian museums led to The Antipodean Suite (1981) which adopted an Adornoesque critique of museum collecting, classification, and storage. Museum collecting practices, Hall recognised, have been intimately connected to the extinction of native species. Historian Tom Griffiths observed this in his 1996 study of collection practices in Australia Hunters and Collectors, “Classification meant collection, and collection meant killing.”28 Natural history collections are literally filled with dead things that are subject to elaborate preservation techniques, but are in a state of disintegration.

In the late sixties Theodor W. Adorno explored the notion of the museum as a mausoleum in his essay “Valéry Proust Museum”.29 The concept of the disintegration of museum objects was integral to Adorno’s critique. For Adorno, objects in museums are subject to a fragmentation of meaning. Adorno articulated one of the most persistent and established critiques of the museum. Antoine Quatremére de Quincy argued in 1787 in relation to the revolutionary museum (such as the ) that museums rob art of their life by displacing them from their original context.30 Adorno discussed the notion that museum objects “are in the process of dying” because they no longer have a “vital relationship” with the observer.31 He argued that museums

27 Fiona Hall, Interview with the author, 12 March 2000, Adelaide. 28 Ibid. p. 19. 29 Theodor W. Adorno, "Valéry Proust Museum," trans. Samuel M. Weber, Prisms (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1967). pp. 173-185. 30 For discussion of Antoine Quatremére de Quincy’s position see Daniel J. Sherman, "Quatremere/Benjamin/Marx: Art Museums, Aura, and Commodity Fetishism," Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles ed. Irit Rogoff (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1994). pp. 123- 143.; Jean-Louis Déotte, "Rome, the Archetypal Museum, and the Louvre, the Negation of Division," Art in Museums (New Research in Museum Studies: An International Series) ed. Susan Pearce (London: 1995). pp. 215-232. 31 Theodor W. Adorno, "Valéry Proust Museum," trans. Samuel M. Weber, Prisms (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1967). p. 175. 100

“testify to the neutralisation of culture.”32 Adorno’s analysis of the attitudes of Valéry and Proust towards the museum explored how artifacts both disintegrate within the museum and gain a second life. In The Antipodean Suite Hall explores the museum as a mausoleum, filled with the spoils of colonial collecting decontextualised from their original context and habitat. She also however points to the idea of objects gaining an afterlife in collections via curious juxtapositions and reification.

Birds from The Antipodean Suite (1981) is a gelatin silver photograph of a storage drawer containing the bird and egg collections of the Queen Victoria Museum in Launceston (see Figure 2.1). Hall arranged the items in the drawer specifically for the photograph. She placed a number of stuffed birds with specimen tags and feathers over cardboard specimen boxes containing speckled bird eggs resting on cotton wool. The photograph has a shallow depth of field and depicts the scene at a close range. The image highlights the contrasting textures, shapes and sizes of the objects depicted. The objects seem to spill over the edge of the image and create the impression that the specimens are a small fraction of the whole collection. The image represents the museum as a storehouse of dead things, overwhelmed by an inherent struggle between order and disorder, preservation and disintegration.

In an interview with David Broker in 1983 about the image Hall remarked,

The impact of opening a drawer in a museum storeroom and finding it filled with rows and rows of dead catalogued birds - seeing them lying there like that had a great visual impact. The whole notion of collecting and cataloguing part of the world and keeping it stored in a museum situation is a fascinating concept.33

Hall found the encounter with so many objects ordered in the carefully monitored environment of museum storage intriguing. This encounter raised questions about museum classification and irregularities in the classifications of ordered museum storerooms.

32 Ibid. p. 175. 33 David Broker. "Fiona Hall interviewed by David Broker." The South Australian Photographic Newsletter 30 June 1983 101

Birds is a visual mess of feathers and birds jumbled up together, juxtaposed against the relative order of the specimen boxes containing bird eggs. The birds have an unruly quality that seems reluctant to conform to principles of order within storage. The image depicts the inherent irregularity, disorder and chaos of collections. On first glance it is difficult to pick out the individual stuffed birds from the layers of feathers over the catalogued eggs. When looking closely the viewer realises that not all the images of birds are complete. In the centre of the image is a bird’s head without a body. It is a puzzling image, given that the surrounding birds seem to be complete. Is this just an anomaly in the stuffed bird collection she photographed? Or is it a carefully contrived photographic illusion to demonstrate the fragmentation and disintegration of museum objects.

In another image, Bower Bird from The Antipodean Suite (1981) Hall depicted how systems of order are applied to collections (see Figure 2.2). The image depicts an arrangement of objects in the artist’s studio as a bowerbird nest. The bowerbird is a bird known for stealing blue things to create its nest. It is also an Australian colloquial term used to describe someone who collects trivia and curiosities. A photograph of a real bowerbird nest is in the centre of the image, surrounded by Hall’s installation of grasses and straw and blue ephemera and trivia. Objects such as plastic hair rollers, an airline baggage ticket and an airmail stamp are arranged in a grid in the foreground of the image.

The central photograph of the real bowerbird nest is positioned close to the lens of the camera, pinned to a horizontal stick with plastic blue clothes pegs. We initially perceive the image of the bowerbird nest to be set into the middle ground of the picture around which Hall’s nest is constructed. This is because Hall aligned the perspective in the photograph to match her constructed bowerbird nest set. However, the clothes pegs reveal that in fact the photograph is much closer to the lens of the camera. The viewer oscillates between looking at the foreground photo of the bowerbird nest and the background of Hall’s set construction. This trick of visual perception creates a sense of curiosity and close visual engagement.

Like Birds, Bower Bird is characterised by an overwhelming sense of mess and disorder despite addressing the notion of classification and order. Each image 102 highlights the disorder of collections. Bower Bird is a chaotic image that the viewer needs to look at closely and carefully to see the objects of trivia. The trivia collection combines surprising juxtapositions that prompt the viewer to wonder about the logic of their collection. Set within an artist’s studio, the image depicts the studio as a personal museum where strange collections of objects gather and are muses for the artist. The image raises the notion of objects gaining new meaning via juxtapositions with other things in a collection.

Both images depict collecting as a form of plunder. Bowerbirds are notorious for ‘stealing’ blue things to decorate their nests. Birds indicates a dual fascination for on the one hand, close contact with the objects in the storage area of the Queen Victoria Museum in Launceston, and on the other, discomfort about the sheer scale of the collection of dead things.

Each image expresses a fascination for the disorderly within museum classification and for the troubling history of museum collecting. They indicate the artist’s interest in objects that refuse easy categorisation and complicate the museum’s order. In this, her early work is related to Cripps’s invocation of the concept of ‘namelessness’ that aimed to evade the museum’s systems of categorisation. Each artist expressed the view that museum classification somehow limits the interpretation of things. They each work towards prising open closed categories in order to open-up speculative interpretation. For Hall, objects gain an afterlife in museums via juxtapositions that fail to conform to prescribed museum interpretation.

The unruly quality to museum objects and their capacity to invoke subjective speculation is of primary interest to Hall. Hall exploits what might be termed the disorder of museums and gaps in museum logic. The Antipodean Suite laid the groundwork for her exploration of wonder and hybridity in museum collections.

Wonder and the Hybrid Object in Hall’s work

This section explores how Hall’s work engages with the concept of wonder in the museum and reflects the notion of the Wunderkammer via collections of hybrid objects. The inversion of categories; contrasts of scale; juxtaposition of disparate 103 things; visual analogy; skilfully crafted artificialia; and hybridity are all relevant to the Wunderkammer and are used by Hall in works that create wonder and curiosity. The following section will discuss these key principles of the Wunderkammer and show how they are present in Hall’s figurative representation of collections of hybrid specimens. It will also assess how Hall’s concept of wonder has intersected with the museum’s reassessment of the role of wonder in the 1990s.

Kunstkammern and Wunderkammern (German for art chambers and curiosity chambers) originated in the sixteenth century in Northern Europe and continued for about 200 years. They were chambers (small rooms and cabinets) holding the collections of wealthy families and individuals who were often connected to royalty. The objects collected within these chambers were either objects of artificialia – artificial, man-made objects that were finely crafted; or items of naturalia – natural objects made by God.

Wunderkammern celebrated the diversity of things in the world. In sixteenth century Europe the borders of the world were rapidly expanding due to sea exploration in previously uncharted waters, and the development of microscopes, telescopes and lenses that allowed things not visible to the naked eye to be seen and more finely crafted objects to be made.34 The Wunderkammern were conceived of as places in which to study and contemplate God’s universe. They formed a space where the outside material world merged with the internal cognitive world and the wonders of God’s world could be marvelled (see Figure 2.7).

Art historian Paula Findlen has argued that Wunderkammern demonstrated an encyclopaedic vision of the material world that “delighted in discontinuity”35 in an era before the widespread acceptance of the Linnaean concept of classification. This delight in discontinuity was manifest in objects that were considered unusual, rare, exotic or bizarre. Objects that confused the categories of artificial and natural or were of indefinite origin, and might be man-made or natural, were considered curiosities.

34 Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, eds., The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) p. 2. 35 Paula Findlen, "The Museum: Its Classical Etymology and Renaissance Genealogy," Journal of the History of Collections 1.1 (1989): p. 63. 104

Objects that problematised identification were highly prized and sought after. Some objects entering Europe in the sixteenth century through trade routes posed problems of identification. Coral especially delighted collectors, because they were unsure whether it was man-made or natural. It confused the animate world with inanimate – the living with the dead – and sat in the middle of the spectrum between art and nature (see Figures 2.8, 2.9).

Hall’s sculptures Paradisus Terrestris (1989-90) and Paradisus Terrestris Entitled (1996) explore the notion of curiosity in highly crafted objects of artificialia (see Figures 2.3-2.6). In reviews of Hall’s exhibition Garden of Earthly Delights: the work of Fiona Hall that toured Australian state galleries between 1992 and 1994, Paradisus Terrestris was widely discussed.36 Brenda Marshall described the series in her review as a “gleaming sculptural feat.”37 Stephanie Bunbury noted the works were “luxurious, scintillating” and “as self-consciously heroic as any enormous abstract.”38 Jenny Zimmer noted the works were “clever, classy and profoundly intriguing.”39

Despite the accolades, the works received little critical investigation apart from description and marvel. I would speculate that this is because of the crafted nature of the works, Hall’s use of humour, and the accessibility of the ideas. These factors may have resulted in Hall’s work being overlooked as subjects for critical investigation. That reviewers frequently responded to the works by marvelling over them should not be dismissed. Paradisus Terrestris and Paradisus Terrestris Entitled use marvel – a key principle of the Wunderkammer – as a hook for viewers. The works explore taxonomy and botanical collections within an Australian context.

Paradisus Terrestris consists of twenty-three sculptures crafted out of aluminium sardine tins and Paradisus Terrestris Entitled consists of fifteen sculptures. Each sculpture is a bas-relief rendering of plants and trees sculpted in aluminium sprouting out of the top of sardine tins. Paradisus Terrestris depicted plants exotic to Australia

36 This exhibition, curated by Kate Davidson at the National Gallery of Australia, was when Hall’s work became widely known and was reviewed extensively. Kate Davidson, "In the Vicinity of Eden," Garden of Earthly Delights: The work of Fiona Hall, exh. cat. Australian National Gallery. Canberra, 1992. 37 Brenda Marshall, "Adventures in a Cultural Wonderland: Fiona Hall's Exhibition of Photographic Painting," The Independent Monthly.May (1994): p. 78. 38 Stephanie Bunbury. "From sardine tin to tiara." Sydney Morning Herald 24 June 1994. 39 Jenny Zimmer. "The vague divisions of craft and art." Age 5 April 1994. 105 and Paradisus Terrestris Entitled represented indigenous plants. The lids of the sardine tins are rolled down to reveal sections of the male and female body in erotic poses. The rolled down lids create the effect of voyeuristically peering through a peephole at, as one reviewer wrote, “slivers of the infinite sexual alphabet.”40 Some are rolled down only partially and it is tempting to roll them down further to expose more of the scene. Each plant shape corresponds analogously with the shape of the body inside the tins.

The first impression when viewing these sculptures is astonishment. These beautiful and delicate silvery sculptures are in fact made of ordinary sardine tins. Sardine tins are usually rubbish, but Hall has used them to create intricate sculptures. Because they are small sculptures, the viewer needs to look closely in order to see what is depicted inside. Upon peering closely, erotic scenes are suddenly recognisable. This creates surprise and humour because of the contrast between the silvery sculptures of plants, and the erotic scenes held like precious boxed specimens within the sardine tins.

Surprising contrasts between disparate things were a central organising devise within Wunderkammern. Curiosities within Wunderkammern and Kunstkammern were arranged according to the principles of analogy and contrast. Art Historian and cultural theorist Barbara Stafford has argued that analogy was central to the logic of arrangement within curiosity cabinets, because “resemblance was central to the baroque delight in paradox.”41 Stafford argued that Jesuits encouraged learning through playful connections between disparate objects and this way of learning had a significant impact on Wunderkammern.42 Stafford believes that Wunderkammern embraced intermediary relations between things. However, these intermediary relations rely on being neither the same nor totally unalike, so that “startling dualities are always on the verge of coalescence, but never finally cohere.”43

40 Linda Marie Walker, "Fiona Hall Paradisus Terrestris," 1990 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, exh. cat. Art Gallery of South Australia. Adelaide, 1990. p. 44. 41 Barbara Maria Stafford, Visual analogy: consciousness as the art of connecting (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1999). p. 121. 42 Ibid. p. 121. 43 Ibid. p. 152. 106

Each sculpture in Paradisus Terrestris (1989-90) and Paradisus Terrestris Entitled (1996) relies on visual analogies between the reproductive organs of plants and humans. Prickly pear: (Opunita) from Paradisus Terrestris (1989-90) draws an analogy between the spiked and lumpy form of the prickly pear with an aroused female nipple being licked. daffodil: (Narcissus) shows an analogy between an erect penis being stroked and the daffodil flower caressed and framed by finger-like leaves. grapefruit (Citrus paradisi) depicts a view of breasts cupped by hands with the fruit of a grapefruit tree cupped by leaves. These visual analogies enrich perception. Through analogy the viewer can perceive with greater clarity the lumpy texture of the prickly pear; the smooth and lengthened surface of the daffodil flower.

The analogy between plant and human reproductive organs invokes the doctrine of signatures, a popular belief system resurrected during the sixteenth century from Pliny the Elder, the Roman savant and author of Historia Naturalis, an encyclopaedic work on science.44 The doctrine of signatures proposed that if the external appearance of plant, mineral or animal resembled the appearance of symptoms of a disease, it would be therapeutic in curing the disease.

Some plants still bear traces of this popular doctrine in their common names. For example, the liverwort plant was thought to resemble a diseased liver, and therefore could be used to cure this ailment.45 Nomenclature based on analogous appearance was deemed unsuitable in Linnean taxonomy, which adopted two Latin names for specimens. Each sculpture in Paradisus Terrestris (1989-90) is titled with the Latin botanical and colloquial names of the plant depicted. In Paradisus Terrestris Entitled (1996), Aboriginal names for each plant are also listed with the botanical and English colloquial names of the plants. These layers of names illustrate the differing cultural systems of naming.

The title of the series, Paradisus Terrestris, invokes the earthly paradise of the Garden of Eden - the original site of naming. Naming makes the unfamiliar, familiar and

44 By the seventeenth century, the doctrine of signatures was rejected as an outmoded and unsubstantiated theory. 45 Elisabeth B MacDougall, "A Paradise of Plants: Exotica, Rarities, and Botanical Fantasies," The Age of the Marvellous, ed. Joy Kenseth, Hanover, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 1991. p. 147. 107 implies ownership and custodianship.46 Naming was crucial to the British colonial enterprise in Australia, as writer Paul Carter has shown.47 Hall’s sculptures address the naming of already named specimens and the erasure of indigenous names and identity by colonialism.

Hall derived the title of the series from a seventeenth century book, John Parkinson’s Paradisi in sole paradisus terristris (1629), which documented and classified collections of newly discovered plants. Parkinson’s book referenced the Garden of Eden before the Fall. An image of the Garden of Eden was depicted with newly discovered plants in regions far from Europe on the front cover of the book. Far away exotic places were represented as a nostalgic site of desire where Eden might be recovered. Hall’s sculptures connote the garden as a site of desire, by depicting scenes of plant and human reproductive organs. They also suggest that the collection of exotic plants by European explorers was in part a desire to recover a concept of earthly paradise. The sculptures show how plants from the new world were highly desired as exotic objects that challenged and expanded classification systems.

The combination of plants, human bodies and sardine tins in Paradisus Terrestris and Paradisus Terrestris Entitled created hybrid objects. Hybridity in horticulture is used to refer to the cross-pollination of species. The term has been used in cultural and linguistic theory to refer to hybrid languages and hybrid cultural identities. Cultural theorist Homi Bhabha used hybridity to stress transfigurative power.48 Bhabha argued that hybridity is powerful because it subverts set boundaries and classes. Hybrid forms were extremely important within Wunderkammern because of the way they subverted set boundaries and proposed new forms of classification.49 Hall’s hybrid sculptures similarly create surprising juxtapositions that subvert set boundaries of classification. Their hybridity, that escapes clear categorisation and proposes a fluid identity, inspires wonder.

46 See Paul Carter’s exploration of naming in colonial Australia, which in particular identifies the role of naming in constructing space and place. Paul Carter, Living in a New Country: History, Travelling and Language (London: Faber and Faber, 1992). 47 Ibid. 48 Homi Bhabha, The location of culture (New York: Routledge, 1994). 49 Paula Findlen, "The Museum: Its Classical Etymology and Renaissance Genealogy," Journal of the History of Collections 1.1 (1989): p. 63. 108

According to Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, authors of Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150-1750, “wonder and wonders hovered at the edges of scientific inquiry.” Wonders in fact “defined those edges” and were a passion that “registered the line between the known and unknown.”50 Hall’s hybrid sculptures redrew the imaginative line between the known and unknown, just as specimens collected from the new world did.

Another feature of Wunderkammern was a love of contrasts and inversions of scale. In Wunderkammern inversions of scale were achieved through artificial objects that were constructed out of wood depicting large-scale scenes in miniature dimensions. This was facilitated by the development of precision wood turning instruments and lenses.51 Joy Kenseth observed that it was common for collectors to aspire to a combination of very small and very large objects in their Wunderkammern.52 Hall’s sculptures explore inversions of scale. The human body is miniaturised, to fit within the sardine tin. The plants too are miniaturised, to correlate with the scale of the bodies. This transformation of scale invokes wonder.

Paradisus Terrestris and Paradisus Terrestris Entitled place wonder at the forefront of the experience of viewing things in museums. The works thus point to a pre- Enlightenment model of learning through curiosities. Daston and Park argued that wonder played a diminishing role in the public museums of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They claim scientists and intellectuals discredited wonder during the Enlightenment because it was not based on reason and rationality.53 They show that this process was a complex and uneven development because while many wonders were disproved, or explained, others persisted well into the eighteenth century. Notwithstanding this, wonder became associated with the vulgar, popular, superstitious and religious during the mid-eighteenth century. These clashed with Enlightenment principles that emphasised human powers of reason, secular society

50 Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature (New York: Zone Books, 1998). p. 13. 51 Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, eds., The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). 52 Joy Kenseth, "A World of Wonders in One Closet Shut," The Age of the Marvelous, ed. Joy Kenseth, exh. cat. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Hanover, 1991. p. 89. 53 Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature (New York: Zone Books, 1998). pp. 329-363. 109 and scientific explanation. Daston and Park claim that wonders were “domesticated” through the eighteenth century.54 They claim “critics of the wondrous believed that the imagination could also manufacture false marvels.”55 The imagination was therefore seen to be the binary opposite of reason. The imagination was praised for its use in creative pursuits in the eighteenth century, but was discredited for serious scientific pursuits.56 Wonder was tamed and treated with scepticism during the Enlightenment.57

Public museums developed during the Enlightenment, and accordingly prioritised the faculty of reason over sheer imagination and wonder. Hall’s invocation of principles of wonder and the marvellous is significant because it suggests a different ordering principle from modernist museums. Hall’s exploration of wonder parallels shifts in museum practice through the nineties, which suggest a reappraisal of the imaginative, wondrous and curious.

Art Historian Stephen Bann has argued that contemporary museum displays indicate a recuperation of the curious, claiming “we are now experiencing a kind of historical ricorso to curiosity.”58 Bann argued that recent trends in museums have revoked the instructive chronological hang and didactic scientific display in favour of displays that insert surprising interjections to such displays and invoke curiosity. These interjections to modernist display conventions are addendums and amendments that reposition wonder in museums. Bann sees this as, “the long-term effect of the weakening of the paradigm of historicism, which has for at least two centuries dominated the classification and display of the visual arts in the West.”59

Hall’s works recuperate wonder as an alternative to the didacticism of modernist museum rational. Her work parallels an emerging prioritisation of wonder in contemporary museums during the nineties, and as Patrick Mauriès showed, continues

54 Ibid. p. 336. 55 Ibid. p. 341. 56 Ibid. p. 341. 57 Ibid. pp. 329-363. 58 Stephen Bann, "The Return to Curiosity: Shifting Paradigms in Contemporary Museum Display," Art and its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millennium ed. Andrew McClellan (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003). p. 118. 59 Ibid. p. 120. 110 a tradition of artists’ exploration of curiosity culture that can be charted through art during the twentieth century.60

An installation by Canadian artist Rosamond Purcell demonstrates the rehabilitation of the concept of wonder in museums of natural science during the nineties. Purcell was commissioned by Pere Alberch, the director of the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid, to recreate a Royal Renaissance cabinet of curiosities from the collections of King Carlos III for the rotunda of the museum in 1995.61 Alberch was familiar with Purcell’s photographs of the displays and collections of natural history museums.62 He wanted her to create an imaginative reinterpretation of the collections that would emphasise the experience of wonder and reconfigure the dusty old didactic displays of the rotunda, which he thought were anachronistic.63

Alberch commissioned the project in part to develop “the relationship of art to science.”64 Alberch observed that Spanish culture valued art museums more than science museums. The public attended the art museums of Madrid in large numbers but not so the museum.65 By inviting an artist to develop a display from objects in the collection, Alberch hoped to attract the public interested in contemporary art. He also valued the imaginative approach of artists to collections.66

Purcell’s commission aimed to reinvest an aesthetic and imaginative experience within the science museum. She designed El Real gabinete (The Royal cabinet or chamber) as a miniature museum inside the museum (see Figures 2.10, 2.11).67 Purcell created symbolic and metaphoric associations in her arrangement. She furnished the

60 Patrick Mauriès, "Resurgences: the Spirit of Curiosity," Cabinets of Curiosity (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002). pp. 210-253. 61 Rosamond W. Purcell, "The Game of the Name," Art Bulletin LXXVII.2 (1995): p. 180. 62 Purcell is well known for her photographs of objects found in museums. She has collaborated with science writer Stephen Jay Gould to illustrate his text exploring the discipline of natural history. Rosamond Wolff Purcell and Stephen Jay Gould, Illuminations: A Bestiary (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1986). Purcell commonly depicts extreme close-ups of objects so that they appear to be something else. For instance, Purcell reveals lunar-like landscapes in miniature specimens. 63 Pere Alberch, "The identity crisis of natural history museums at the end of the twentieth century," Towards the Museum of the Future: New European Perspectives ed. Lauro Zavala (London: Routledge, 1994). p. 197. 64 Ibid. p. 197. 65 However, Alberch commented that blockbuster exhibitions that the Museum has put on have worked to change this. More people are visiting the Museum since its restructure in 1989. Ibid. p. 194. 66 Ibid. p. 195. 67 Rosamond W. Purcell, "The Game of the Name," Art Bulletin LXXVII.2 (1995): p. 180. 111 rotunda with glass cabinets and collector’s chests containing some extremely small items such as insect specimens, and with large fauna specimens, such as an elephant skeleton, walrus heads and tusks from great animals (once thought to be from unicorns) around the edge of the circular room. The objects were arranged in groups: rarities, books and documents; exploration and scientific instruments; minerals; strange animals, specimens and artefacts; horns and tusks; table of elements and the Royal Cabinet consisting of a portrait of King Carlos III above drawers of shells, eggs, ammonites and butterflies.68 As Wunderkammern such as Olaus Worm’s in Copenhagen did, Purcell displayed large turtle shells, crocodiles and other sea creatures high up on the walls of the room.69 In Wunderkammern this inverted known principles, because sea creatures came from ‘down’ in the ocean, yet they were displayed up high towards the ‘heavens’.

A large glass cabinet occupies the centre of El Real gabinete. It contains an exhibit of Adam and Eve – male and female human skeletons – in the Garden of Eden. A fake ficus tree represents the Tree of Life with a taxidermal serpent positioned slithering down from the tree. Various wonders of the natural world such as coral, birds of paradise and fossils, all of which were highly sought after for Renaissance curiosity cabinets because of the way these items challenged conceptual systems, occupy the vitrine.70 As well, probably in reference to Albrecht Dürer’s print of Adam and Eve (1504), Purcell placed a rabbit, rat and duck at the feet of Adam and Eve, with a parrot on Adam’s skeletal shoulder. The artist commented that she drew on the left hand panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1500-1510) when creating her Garden of Eden by including a hedgehog, bird of paradise, the pangolin and salamander. These creatures were thought to be mythological and wondrous.71 Purcell sites the Garden of Eden as the “first literary model for taxonomic procedure.”72

68 Ibid. p. 181. 69 Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature (New York: Zone Books, 1998). p. 271. 70 Paula Findlen, "The Museum: Its Classical Etymology and Renaissance Genealogy," Journal of the History of Collections 1.1 (1989): 59-78. 71 Rosamond W. Purcell, "The Game of the Name," Art Bulletin LXXVII.2 (1995): p. 181. 72 Ibid. p. 181. 112

Purcell’s commission illustrates one way in which wonder has been rehabilitated in contemporary museums. It indicates the museum’s desire to use imaginative and artistic forms of representation that pose an alternative to the modernist displays that now seem anachronistic, as Pere Alberch commented.73 Artistic recreations of old- style museum displays have gained currency.

Museum as shrine: Give a Dog a Bone (1996)

In an installation in 1996, Give a Dog a Bone, Hall again invoked an Adornoesque critique of the museum with an exploration of the processes of loss, preservation and the reification of objects within museums. Hall developed the work for the international exhibition Containers ‘96: Art across Oceans held in ninety-six shipping containers on Copenhagen’s piers. Hall filled a shipping container with different sized cardboard packaging boxes, with one side of the box open to view. Each box contained soap of domestic objects, such as telephone receivers and bottles, natural specimens, and bones. A large format photograph of her father, an elderly man, cloaked in a knitted blanket made from Coca Cola cans occupied the centre of one wall of boxes (see Figure 2.12).

Timothy Morrell’s essay on the piece, when it was exhibited in the 1996 Asia Pacific Triennial, argued that the installation was shrine-like because it mourns and remembers consumer culture. Morrell described the installation as “a poignant shrine for civilised humans in the late twentieth century.”74 However, Morrell did not examine the association with shrines further.

Hall created this shrine-like structure out of impermanent materials. The idea of transience, via cardboard packaging designed to transport commodities, shipping containers and soap that washes away, contrasts with notions of permanence. In Asian cultures, those on the move wishing to make offerings to deceased loved ones and gods, create makeshift shrines. Asian shrines occupy unlikely places and are portable

73 Pere Alberch, "The identity crisis of natural history museums at the end of the twentieth century," Towards the Museum of the Future: New European Perspectives ed. Lauro Zavala (London: Routledge, 1994). p. 197. 74 Timothy Morrell, "Fiona Hall," Asia Pacific Triennial, exh. cat. Queensland Art Gallery. Brisbane, 1996. p. 114. 113 and demountable. Hall’s shrine is not easily portable or demountable, but uses impermanent, transient materials. Creating artefact-like-objects out of soap sets up a tension between permanence and impermanence. Soap is a symbolic agent of forgetting and renewal. Hall commented in an interview with the author that the objects were carved out of soap because this is a “material of cleansing, and forgetting.” She went on to comment, “our culture is hell-bent on cleansing the past, many of us don’t know how to handle the past, whether indigenous or whatever.”75 This comment reiterates her interest in the problematic history of the museum and desire to remember these past practices rather than continuously sanitise and renew.

The soap objects are protected by their cardboard containers, and yet made of soluble material. Cardboard boxes also signify impermanence and fragility. For example, the homeless use them as temporary shelters. Indeed, Hall’s arrangements of containers that symbolise preservation and protection, and the collection of carefully sculpted artefacts, evoke permanence and conservation.

Hall’s shrine addresses late twentieth century consumerist culture. Cardboard boxes are used for packaging consumable goods delivered around the globe; the packaging is rarely re-used. The items that Hall sculpted are everyday ones; everyday consumables and domestic items such as mop heads, laundry detergent containers and milk bottles. By sculpting their likeness out of soap, Hall rarefies the items and turns them into archaeological-like-finds.

The central photograph of Hall’s father wrapped in a cloak is like the image of a deity, surrounded by offerings. The elderly man seems both fragile and precious. Cloaked in a blanket made from knitted Coca Cola cans, which as Morrell pointed out, “offers neither protection nor comfort,”76 the image seems to suggest the cold comfort of consumerist culture.

By knitting out of Coca Cola cans, Hall transforms an object that symbolises consumption and mass-production into the handmade and one-off. Knitting is

75 Fiona Hall, Interview with the author, 13 March 2000, Adelaide. 76 Timothy Morrell, "Fiona Hall," Asia Pacific Triennial, exh. cat. Queensland Art Gallery. Brisbane, 1996. p. 114. 114 traditionally the domain of women, who clothed their families and communities. In this instance, Hall clothes her father, but offers little comfort. Her knitting creates something tangible and solid out of waste. She subverts the culture of consumerism through the act of knitting Coca Cola cans into a glittering and magical cloak.

The old English children’s nursery rhyme “give a dog a bone…this old man came rolling home,” from which Hall derived her title, combined with her photograph of an old man, transforms the space into a kind of hobo’s dwelling: a home for the displaced and disenfranchised. Although life is transient, this installation proposes that it is worth preserving and honouring. Hall commented in an interview with the author that her father represented an elder of Australians with anglo-celtic heritage. She believes older people are increasingly marginalized within Australian society.77 The containers perhaps hold the habitat of this elder that Hall represents as fragile and impermanent, threatened with extinction.

Give a Dog a Bone addresses the negative implications that global consumer culture has for society and the environment. It proposes that global consumerism is not only detrimental for the natural environment but also creates an increasingly fragile sense of cultural authenticity. The insatiable desire for consumable goods results in the old continually being cast out and forgotten. Hall’s installation gathers together everyday consumable items, along with an elderly man, and creates a shrine for them. It reinstates their value and authenticity – as relics of our culture.

The notion of the shrine as a place containing memorabilia of a particular person is invoked by the installation. As a shrine, this installation observes a loss of culture and concomitantly the loss of nature, in the face of consumerism. It is a place of remembrance and evocative of a graveyard.

A number of writers have explored the museum as a shrine, mausoleum or memorial. In 1975, Kenneth Hudson discussed the boxed-in method of display in museums. He claimed the glass-panelled cases were like coffins. He cited a photograph of an interior of the Western Australian Museum in the early 1900s, commenting that the

77 Fiona Hall, Interview with the author, 12 March 2000, Adelaide. 115 room was a filing system, filled with dead things.78 The emphasis on filed dead things creates the impression of a shrine, or Hudson might even think, a morgue. As shrines to the past, to dead things, museum visitors come to remember the past.

Carol Mavor explored the concept of collecting as a way of coping with loss.79 Mavor claimed that we collect things in order to remember the past and to ward off future death. Collecting is fundamentally related to the desire to preserve our loved ones and ourselves.80 This is part of a broader literature on collection studies, particularly the work of Susan Pearce.81 Mavor noted, “Objects keep death away by helping us to remember.”82 This is apt for Hall’s installation, which prepares for the death of the elderly by enshrining the old man in a tomb filled with domestic relics. Indeed enshrining collected items made from soap – which cleanses and metaphorically atones – invokes the notion of collecting and keeping things preserved and cared for in museums or personal collections.

In 1984, Donald Horne discussed museums as sites of pilgrimage.83 To him the modern sightseer and museum visitor was a modern day ‘pilgrim’, journeying to view relics. Horne explored the concept of the museum as a shrine filled with relics of considerable worth and aura. The fact that Hall included bones carved of soap in her installation further creates this idea of the installation as a shrine, where visitors can view bones of the saints that, in sacred pilgrimages to cathedrals and churches and other sites of religious significance, are amongst the most important of relics. Hall’s objects in this regard are metaphorically invested with the supernatural power of religious relics and connote the aura of objects deemed to be spiritually significant. Hall’s installation is stocked with soap replicas of the relics of consumer culture, that we pay homage to and in which we invest considerable power.

78 Kenneth Hudson, A Social History of Museums: What the Visitors Thought (London: Macmillan Press, 1975). p. 127. 79 Carol Mavor, "Collecting Loss," Cultural Studies 11.1 (1997): pp. 111-137. 80 Ibid. p. 121. 81 Susan Pearce, Collecting in contemporary practice (London: Sage Publications, c1998).; Susan Pearce, Museums, objects and collections: a cultural study (Leicester, England: Leicester University Press, 1992).; Susan Pearce, Museums and the appropriation of culture (London: Athlone Press, 1994). 82 Carol Mavor, "Collecting Loss," Cultural Studies 11.1 (1997): p. 121. 83 Donald Horne, The Great Museum (Sydney: Pluto Press, 1984). p. 9. 116

Horne claimed that art museums “still maintain the holiness of paintings as authentic ‘relics’, and their own sanctity as cathedrals.”84 Museums, as temples and shrines containing authentic relics, are invoked by Hall’s installation. Except, in Hall’s museum-shrine, the artefacts are inauthentic, they are not the actual relics, but replicas made from soap. This suggests that Hall views contemporary consumer culture as inauthentic and transient, based on desire, and globally trafficked so that specific local cultural objects are lost to globally marketed consumables. It also alludes to the fact that we pay homage to consumable items, which are produced in the millions, and that there is no such thing as a one-off, specially made mass-produced consumable.

The replicas of objects made from soap also suggest that museum objects are like ghosts of their former selves, subject to the transformative processes of disintegration, preservation and reification. Their golden yellow colour invokes the idea that an alchemical change occurs to museum objects once catalogued and displayed within the museum. Objects take on a new life and become “museumified.” In this regard, Hall’s work embodies Adorno’s observation that museums transformed objects “into the hieroglyphics of history and brought them a new content while the old one shrivelled up.”85

Eilean Hooper-Greenhill invoked the concept of the museum as a temple in 1992. For Hooper-Greenhill, the museum as a temple is exemplified by the British Museum.86 She identified this as an outmoded model of museum. The shift away from collections research to education imperatives in museums since the late 1980s testifies to the shift away from the museum as a temple. The temple-museum that holds precious relics is increasingly deemed old-fashioned and irrelevant.87 Museums place less emphasis on their collections, Hooper-Greenhill claimed, and more emphasis on education and experience within museums. Hooper-Greenhill suggests that the practice of visiting museums to worship precious objects, and even the museum as a site for contemplation and meditation, is a thing of the past. Hall’s installation made of flimsy cardboard and impermanent soap suggests that the museum as a shrine is a precious

84 Ibid. p. 16. 85 Theodor W. Adorno, "Valéry Proust Museum," trans. Samuel M. Weber, Prisms (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1967). p. 185. 86 Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1992). p. 1. 87 Ibid. p. 2. 117 and rare thing itself, increasingly subject to revision and perhaps in need of collecting and preservation itself.

Museum projects 1996-1998

Hall was commissioned for two museum-based projects in 1996 and 1998 that acknowledged the artist’s exploration of museums and positioned the artist as a legitimate interpreter of museum collections. In 1996, Trevor Smith, curator for the Canberra Contemporary Art Space, invited Hall to produce a work for the exhibition Archives and the Everyday.88 Smith developed the exhibition in response to the work of a number of contemporary artists addressing the concepts of archives and memory. He commissioned eight artists to produce an artwork in response to one of nine archiving institutions in Canberra.89 The artists had access to the archival collections of these institutions. Smith’s curatorial goal was to facilitate the artists’ interpretation of everyday things in national archives. Artists were required to, “work with archived materials that do not constitute the traditional centre of institutional holdings, such as ephemera or single objects.”90 This desire to re-evaluate the marginal illustrates the revisionist curatorial approach of the exhibition.

Hall decided to research objects given as gifts to the nation.91 Hall based Incontinent (1996) on a table bequeathed to the nation by Queen Victoria held in the Parliament House Art Collection (see Figures 2.13-2.15).92 The table was significant because the

88 Towards the end of the project, Smith was appointed Curator, Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. Neil Roberts, an artist, managed the project once Smith left Canberra for Western Australia. Trevor Smith, Former Curator, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Interview with the author, 20 Jan 2000, Perth. 89The institutions involved with the project were the Australian Archives; the War Memorial; CSIRO Entomology; the National Film and Sound Archive; the National Gallery of Australia; the National Library of Australia; the National Portrait Gallery; Old Parliament House; and the Parliament Art Collection. The exhibition included works by; Anne Brennan, Barbara Camphell, John Citizen/Gordon Bennett, Martyn Jolly, Robert MacPherson, Susan Norrie and David Watt. The exhibition was made possible by development funding from the Australia Foundation, the Australia Council and artsACT. 90 See Director Jane Barney’s foreword, Archives and the Everyday. exh. cat. Canberra Contemporary Art Space. Canberra, 1996. 91 Fiona Hall, Interview with the author, 12 March 2000, Adelaide. 92 Incontinent is also informed by Hall’s former involvement with a commission to photograph the building of the new Parliament House building in Canberra between 1984-86. Hall used a large format camera (8 x 20 inch) to document the building. Louise Dauth, Director of the Parliament House Art Collection, observed that Hall’s images “present a set of finely detailed images with a feel that is reminiscent of an archaeological dig.” Louise Dauth, "Documenting the Building of a Parliament: Fiona Hall," Canberra Projects: Fiona Hall, exh. cat. Canberra School of Art. Canberra, 1997. n.pag. The 118

Queen signed the documents for the Australian colonies to federate in 1901 upon it. The Queen sent the table, the pen and inkstand as mementos of her signing these federation papers. This attests to the symbolism invested in artefacts to embody meaning and commemorate events.

Incontinent is Hall’s version of Queen Victoria’s table. In place of the wooden three- drawer table with leather top and guilt metal mouldings, Hall used a 1950s laminex and chrome kitchen table. The legs of the table taper into mahogany attachments, echoing the wood of Queen Victoria’s table. Thirteen inkwell-like holes perforate the tabletop and connect to an elaborate PVC pipe drainage system under the table. Each pipe is decorated with fine perforations of Victorian lace designs. The perforations serve a dual purpose: they are symbolic of the lacy undergarments worn by women in the Victorian era, and they make the pipes redundant, leaky. The pipes open out into the room, leading nowhere identifiable and spilling invisible substances. Hall commented in an interview with the author,

PVC piping is a visual metaphor for everything that plumbing represents, it hints at waste material and cleansing and doing away with, also what you don’t see – the behind the scenes conduits for something to happen.93

A water tank float, perforated with holes in the shape of Australia, rests on the tabletop and threatens to roll off the table. Because it is perforated, it cannot function as a regulator of water level. Hall uses the water float to symbolise a globe. The reach of Empire might be calculated from this desk and represented on the globe. However, because it is disconnected from the pressure supply and perforated, it is redundant and incapable of performing. The water float symbolises a lack of functionality in the monarchy, and might represent the slow and fraught process of gaining federation in 1901 or the limited relevance of the monarchy today. The plunger that sits on the tabletop symbolises the Royal stamp or seal.

Parliament House photographs depict men working above subterranean passages, ladders reaching from below, much like her early appropriation of Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights in her Genesis series from 1984. Networks of scaffolding offer an emerging shape for the building; stark shadows cast on the exterior of the building create a feel of Egyptian tombs and ancient ruins. 93 Fiona Hall, Interview with the author, 12 March 2000, Adelaide. 119

Precariously balanced in the network of PVC pipes is a Gordon’s Dry Gin bottle with a message inside it, but concealed from view. A message in a bottle represents a call for help, or a love letter, awaiting discovery, communicating a message from the past. Tantalisingly close, yet unreadable, Hall’s message symbolises untold and unofficial history, the forgotten folded into unseen passageways. Hall has not revealed if there is actually a message written on the paper held in the Gin bottle. This adds to the sense of an untold, secret history. The Gin bottle itself refers to Queen Victoria’s well- publicised penchant for Gin as well as the popularity of gin as drink throughout the Empire.

Incontinent invokes a loss of control. It conflates the body with country through the word incontinent. The work therefore conflates private realms – the body – with public state power and administration. Hall uses this bodily metaphor to symbolise the Empire’s loss of control over Australia. The ‘plumbing’ represents the administrative ties between Australia and Britain that remain, but do not function.

Incontinent represents colonial power in decay: the pipes are an antiquated system, but remain as edifices of a former power. The metaphor of plumbing allows Hall to address systems, in this case, of power, as fluid and in flux. In Incontinent, the system has dried up and lost functionality. This work relies on symbolism and allegorical meaning. It is an allegory for the Queen’s loss of hold over the Empire; for the leaky and inefficient systems by which bureaucratic procedures work; for Australia’s colonial heritage and present-day status as part of a monarchy.

Incontinent is an allegory for the demise of Empire. Hall’s interpretation adds a potent layer of meaning to the object. Within the Parliament House Art Collection, the object simply stood as an artefact of the nationally significant event of the Queen signing the Federation papers.94 Hall’s interpretation of the object is creative and imaginative. She explores Australia’s ongoing official connection to Britain, but sees it as a largely non-functional, symbolic connection. The bureaucratic and administrative ties

94 The table for instance rates a mention in The Australian Encyclopaedia, Volume IV, of 1958 under the entry on “Federation”; “On the 9th the Queen gave her assent to the Bill in duplicate at the delegates’ request, and gave one of the copies, as well as the pen, inkstand and table she had used, to be preserved in the Federal Parliament buildings.” p. 32. 120 between Australia and Britain are leftover from colonial times and, the work suggests, outmoded in the post-colonial world.

In 1996, the same year Hall was invited to create a work for Archives and the Everyday, David Hansen curator of art at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery commissioned Hall to create a work based on an aspect of the collection. The commission was not completed and exhibited until 1998. Hansen commissioned seven artists to produce works that explored the museum. Hansen wanted artists to “address or reflect some aspect of the museum’s identity…its geographical, social and political environment, its philosophy and professional ethic, its history and collections and its buildings and grounds.”95

The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery is a quintessential nineteenth century colonial museum and art gallery. Hansen wanted the artists to draw on the range of collections represented in the museum and encourage cross-disciplinary work between the museum and art collections. His motivation for the commissions seems to have been to encourage a creative revision of the museum. Hansen wanted to enliven museum interpretation, and use artists to prise apart the illusion of objectivity in the museum.96

Hansen’s objective, which echoes that of the new museology, was to devise a critique of objectivity within the museum.97 Rather than the museum developing exhibits that exposed the fallacy of museum objectivity, Hansen commissioned contemporary artists to create works that questioned and revised aspects of the museum. The implications of this are two-fold. First, it suggests that contemporary art is a permissible medium for such critique, and second that art’s imaginative and subjective methods might serve to complicate the notion of objectivity in the museum.

Hall’s work Drift Net (1998-99) was based on several items within the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery collection (see Figures 2.17-2.20). To the best of my

95 David Hansen, "TMAG Commissions exhibition notes," TMAG Commissions, exh. cat. Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Hobart, 1999. n.pag. 96 Ibid. 97 See Peter Vergo, ed., The New Museology (London: Reaktion Books, 1989). 121 knowledge, this work has not been reviewed or written about. Yet it represents a significant transition in Hall’s visual language and approach to museology. Hall’s works after Drift Net are similar in format, utilising museum display vitrines, and collections of sculpted objects arranged in a museum-like manner inside the vitrine.

For Drift Net, Hall drew on a book documenting plants collected on Cook’s voyage near Hobart; an “Album of Sea Weed” collected in 1840 by Dr Joseph Hooker on an Antarctic expedition; the collection of bird eggs and nests; and a collection of “Knots and Splices, Bends and Hitches” compiled in the 1960s. Her installation was exhibited alongside these sources. The exhibit of “Knots and Splices, Bends and Hitches” was displayed in a glass cabinet adjacent to Hall’s installation. The album of seaweed and a book, documenting specimens found on Cook’s voyage, were displayed in another glass case alongside the installation.

Hall’s installation was similarly displayed in a glass cabinet. Two glass vitrines, one on top of the other, held a series of objects made by Hall and objects from the museum collection. Drift Net is a museum-like display. The glass cabinets protect the objects, but they also fetishize them, making objects seem precious, historical and rarefied within the space of the museum. By using glass cabinets that invoke a nineteenth century style of museum display Hall sets the work in time. She also engenders a particular kind of looking by the viewer. The display vitrine encourages the viewer to look closely, in order to be educated about the items the vitrine contains. Hall uses the display case to prompt the viewer to look at her installation as if it was a museum display, rather than contemporary artwork. Hall’s work however subverts the viewer’s examining gaze with an arrangement of objects that are metaphorical and suggestive rather than instructive. Her display therefore runs counter to conventional museological imperatives, although it adopts the external conventions of a museum display. Drift Net presents a parallel story that is suggestive of the experiences surrounding her museum sources’ providence, rather than objective and educative facts about the museum objects.

Drift Net contains a coral-like structure Hall made from white glass beads with a conglomerate of tentacles ending in mother of pearl buttons in the top vitrine. This object has a number of ‘roots’ made of brown beads that stretch below into the bottom 122 vitrine. This object appears to float between the two cases like seaweed or coral. The top vitrine also contains a water tank float perforated with holes; a brown sink plug; an object made out of a plunger head, with long tentacles made with silver glass beads; a brown gum nut made out of glass beads; an empty Gordon’s Dry Gin bottle engraved with lettering; and a small bird’s nest and bird eggs from the museum’s collection. PVC piping perforated with holes stretches and winds its way through the lower vitrine. Hall attached a small compass at the end of the PVC pipe.

Hall engraved the Gordon’s Dry Gin bottle with hand-written lists of native tree, plant and bird names down each side of the bottle. Hall also engraved the words “Providence and Assistant” and “Adventure and Resolution.” This refers to the specific source Hall used from the museum archive for Drift Net: pages from Plants of Captain Cook’s Third Voyage HMS Resolution and HMS Discovery that contain specimens collected from Adventure Bay, near Hobart, in 1777. The Gin bottle invokes hard-drinking sailors as well as being a symbol for the Empire. The bottle suggests the collecting activities of this exploration as well as the notion of sea- adventure and hardship.

The interplay between Hall’s installation and the museum sources was pivotal to interpreting each. Hall enriched the interpretation of the museum collections. Hall’s work evokes the colonial sea exploration and the collecting of objects on such expeditions. Hall commented that she wanted the installation to “work poetically between different areas of the collection which had the common theme of drifting, migration and crossing waters.”98 The museum collections in the adjacent display vitrines represent an objective rendering of sea-exploration, and are the end result and the evidence of collecting expeditions. Hall’s reinterpretation suggests a more subjective interpretation of how such objects came to be in the collection. Hall’s installation pries open the dry, objectivity of the museum and inserts a creative, allegorical interpretation of the process through which such collections were created. The installation added a rich layer of interpretation to the existing museum collections.

98 Fiona Hall, Interview with the author, 12 March 2000, Adelaide. 123

Drift Net is figurative and foregrounds a narrative interpretation of objects. The installation appears to tell a story. It does so through metaphoric connotations and imaginative connections. Drift Net therefore draws attention to the role of imagination in museums. The installation engages the viewer’s imagination through metaphor and symbolism. This influences the way the viewer interprets the museum collection, by encouraging a more lateral, symbolic and imaginative interpretation.

The term Drift Net implies a net catchment that indiscriminately collects everything in its path. The installation likens this to the collecting practices of the museum. The term drift evokes slow movement and is used to describe the scope of intention or meaning, as in the phrase ‘if you catch my drift.’

The installation works slowly on viewers, as they look at each object within the vitrine and piece together a story about sea travel and exploration. The glass vitrine is highly reflective and creates a watery effect. Drift Net seems literally cast adrift in water.

By displaying Drift Net next to the sources that the installation draws on, similarities and differences between each become apparent. Drift Net is symbolic, narrative- driven and imaginative. The collection of different types of sailing knots is educative and dry, but in combination with the pages of sea-specimens collected on Cook’s voyages, and Drift Net, it is transformed into something more. Metaphorical interpretations that are suggestive rather than instructive are encouraged. Drift Net presents a parallel narrative that plays off the source material and suggests experiences surrounding the sources. The installation extends the museum display by encouraging viewers to imagine the associative contexts to objects in museums.

Hall was unhappy with the way in which the installation was installed at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. She didn’t go to Hobart to install it herself, and believed that the museum did not arrange the items in the vitrine as she intended. Hall withdrew her work from the commissions because of this. Clearly, the artist and 124 museum disagreed over the terms of the contract as well as over how the installation was arranged by the museum.99

Hall reworked Drift Net without the objects from the museum collections upon which the installation was based. The top vitrine is sparser and less cluttered with objects in Hall’s reworking. The installation still invokes the idea of sea travel, exploration and collecting expeditions although it is not displayed within the specific context of the museum. The use of the display vitrine also connotes museum collections and displays. However, the installation is less potent and effective simply because it is not displayed within the context of the museum collection.

Both Incontinent and Drift Net show the emerging legitimacy of artists’ imaginative and lateral interpretations of museum collections. They highlight the currency of artistic approaches to interpretation. In each case, Hall was commissioned by curators of contemporary art already familiar with Hall’s interest in museums. Hall’s approach to each commission reveals her desire to thicken and broaden the interpretation of museum collections. In Drift Net, the artist drew from several disparate collections, creating imaginative links between them. Her interpretation encouraged a narrative about sea-exploration and colonial adventure. This suggests that the museum valued imaginative and artistic approaches to interpretation. These commissions provided the museums with an opportunity to revise dry and stagnant exhibits and collections.

Displaying the curious 1998-2002

Following Drift Net (1998) Hall began a series of museum-like exhibits of collections in display vitrines. Cash Crop (1998) displayed a series of botanical specimens carved from soap in a museum vitrine (see Figures 2.22-2.24). Timothy Morrell reviewed this installation and Julie Ewington wrote a catalogue essay.100 Morrell and Ewington provided detailed visual analysis and discussion of conceptual content of this work. Neither explored the way the work addresses commodity fetishism within museums,

99 Ibid. 100Timothy Morrell, "Fiona Hall: Cash Crop," Art Monthly Australia 115.Nov (1998): 4-5; Julie Ewington, "Cash Crop Fiona Hall," Cash Crop Fiona Hall, exh. cat. Institute of Modern Art. Brisbane, 1998. n.pag. 125 though Morrell commented, “the work is a display, very much in the manner of the 19th century museum.”101

Hall made this work during a residency at the Mt Coot-tha Botanical Gardens in Brisbane. It explores the idea of the cash crop – crops of plants grown for economic gain, not subsistence. Morrell noted that for this work Hall drew on her regular visits to the Museum of Economic Botany in the Adelaide Botanic Gardens (which she lives close to)102, where Peter Cripps made the installation Projects for Two Museums in 1993. Morrell claimed, “Fiona Hall’s affection for its style and contents has led to her most recent body of work.”103

Hall arranged eighty sculptures of fruit, seeds and nuts made from pastel coloured soap on a series of glass shelves within a vitrine. She arranged the objects by size, from smallest on the top shelves, to largest on the bottom. On the glass walls of the vitrine are a series of names that correspond with each specimen, like a labelled museum display. The labels consist of a phrase from the lexicon of international financial terminology, the Latin botanic name, and colloquial name for the specimen. For instance; asset management, gingko biloba, ginko; rescue package, cocos nucifera, coconut; sharemarket float, nelumbo nucifera, lotus. On the base of the vitrine Hall placed banknotes from a variety of Asian countries, each painted with white gouache images of that nation’s indigenous leaves and grasses. Hall included an old Australian two-dollar note, with an image of a gum leaf painted over the image of wheat depicted on the note. This is a potent reminder of the ghost of native species that have been wiped out by introduced species, such as wheat, for economic gain.

Because Hall painted these images in white gouache, they are ghost-like, and evocative of an after-image. The leaves that she depicts are from native species cleared to make way for cash crops. Hall conflates currency with the value placed on native species. Like these Asian currencies, they are worth little in global economic terms and in terms of profitability. In addition, banknotes as a form of currency are

101 Timothy Morrell, "Fiona Hall: Cash Crop," Art Monthly Australia 115.Nov (1998): p. 4. 102 Ibid. p. 4. 103 Ibid. p. 4. 126 increasingly jeopardised as cash transactions decrease. Hall noted in an interview with the author, that money in the form of notes is,

such a modern phenomena but now it is disappearing, and it is happening everywhere, we are getting rid of notes and coins. I am interested in things becoming historical, or disappearing, and in conserving cultural and natural things.104

The display of such objects in the vitrine imbues the objects with a sense of value and preciousness. Each item appears intrinsically special and unique, separated from the mass economy of cash crops. At the same time, the vitrine fetishizes the objects. This is an effect of their separation from the context of the real world into the space of display. Hall therefore addresses the commodity fetishism of museums, and shows how museums are another type of economy, that have exchanged and created hierarchies of value out of plants and objects. Indeed the use of currency notes invokes the value of museum items. These currency notes are even more valued because they are no longer in use and therefore more highly valued because they are rare.

The vitrine is pivotal to the effect of fetishization. The vitrine engenders a particular type of looking. It enables close looking, without contact. The display vitrine is associated with the museum and the shop. These two contexts have their origin in the Crystal Palace, the purpose-built structure that housed the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace astounded London crowds. Built entirely of glass, steel and wood, the building housed an enormous display of manufactured objects from around the world.

Not only did the Great Exhibition reflect the early Victorians’ blossoming love affair with consumerism, where objects produced could increasingly be bought and owned by the wealthy, it embodied a fascination with and desire for the exotic that cut across

104 Fiona Hall, Interview with the author, 12 March 2000, Adelaide. 127 lines of class.105 All manner of wondrous materials and technologies were showcased. And all glistened in the Crystal Palace.

Visitors to the Crystal Palace were dazzled by the sheer number of objects and also by the natural light infused through the glass walls and ceilings. Objects seemed magical in this glassy context. Such was the power of the Crystal Palace that it influenced the development of aesthetic principles of display governing the modern museum and the shopping arcade.

The glass vitrine, ubiquitous in museum and shop displays, protects and transforms objects within. An object’s preciousness seems heightened because it is untouchable, and the reflections of light and shadow cast within the case provoke an imaginative engagement with an object. The display ‘space’ of the glass case therefore is a major methodology by which museums engage their audiences and shops inspire consumerist desire.

In Cash Crop, the names – black lettering on transparent sticky tape – placed on the outside of the vitrine engender a pedagogic quality to looking. These names teach the viewer certain paradigms through which to view the objects within the vitrine. The viewer moves along each shelf reciting in the mind’s eye each lexicon as a frame of reference. The connection that Hall makes between lexicons subverts this process of earnest instruction. This is because the associations are often witty plays on words. For instance; an ‘emerging market’ is equated with the mushroom; ‘insider trading’ with the caper; ‘market volatility’ with chilli, ‘gift tax’ with myrrh and ‘runaway inflation’ with the tulip, referring to the Dutch tulip boom of the sixteenth century. These witty combinations subvert the coherency of taxonomy and coax the viewer to reflect on the way we receive information in museums.

Morrell noted in his review,

105 Anthony Bird, Paxton's Palace (London: Cassell, 1976).; Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle 1851 - 1914 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990). 128

The illusion of scientific propriety dissolves fairly quickly on examining this display. the specimens out of soap, in pretty, soapy, often marbled colours (almost never the true colours of the specimen) is wilfully odd, and the arrangement of the plant material bears no relationship to any system of classification practised by botanists today.106

He suggests that although the work addresses taxonomy and classification of specimens, the use of soap, naming of specimens, and way in which the items are arranged subverts conventional botanical taxonomy.

Hall continued to explore the way that museums represent and fetishize objects in Fieldwork, White History (both 1998-99) and Comparative Anatomy and Moonlighting (both 1999). Individually these works adopt a taxonomic presentation of artefacts in museums and address the fetishization of artefacts that are isolated and removed from their original context by the museum. They were however, displayed together in Hall’s entry for the Clemenger Contemporary Art Award in 1999, an art award administered by the National Gallery of Victoria. Together, the exhibits created the impression of a mini-museum, consisting of two vitrines filled with strange specimens and a tabulated graphic presentation of specimens of plastic Tupperware, amongst other items, on concertina-style unravelled Pianola rolls.

Fieldwork illustrates the fetishization of exotic objects when displayed in a tableau format in museum vitrines (Figures 2.25, 2.26). The objects in Fieldwork were created out of brown glass beads and mother-of pearl buttons. They are extremely beautiful and invoke exotic specimens in a museum. The title Fieldwork suggests that the objects are anthropological collections of artefacts or botanical collections of natural specimens. However, they are displayed in such a way that isolates them from a contextual interpretation of the objects’ anthropological use and significance. They are reduced to aesthetic appreciation only.

The objects look like enlarged artificial seeds and pods – collected during a fieldwork expedition – but are altered in ways that make them inherently strange and unfamiliar. For instance, one pyramid shaped structure has a brown sink plug stitched into its

106 Timothy Morrell, "Fiona Hall: Cash Crop," Art Monthly Australia 115.Nov (1998): p. 4. 129 side. Hall has fashioned these exotic objects out of familiar things – sink plugs, beads, and buttons – but uses these items to create unfamiliar forms. Fieldwork raises the display of exotic specimens collected from far-away places and consumed by European audiences.

In Fieldwork, Hall strips the objects of all meaning aside from their exoticism. Hall remarked in an interview with the author,

Fieldwork is about objects in museum generally, and the experience of looking at objects, but you don’t know what they are, can’t understand them as they are out of our experience. In museums we don’t experience things in their original context, we only know them from museums.107

Hall’s remark reflects Quatremère de Quincy’s observation of the early museum that museums isolate and remove objects from their original contexts. Writing in the late 1700s and early 1800s, Quatremère de Quincy, an architectural historian, critiqued museums because he saw them as “responsible for the death of ‘living’ art.”108 Museums contrive to bring diverse objects together in one place so as to enable comparison, analogy, classification and chronology. But in doing so the museum displaces objects from their original context and strips them of their original use and meaning. This also reiterates Adorno’s critique of the museum’s neutralising and disintegrating effect on objects. Hall’s Fieldwork replicates the experience of viewing objects that are foreign to us and come from an entirely different context to that of our own culture. It invokes the experience of encountering fragments of the world brought together in the museum, and the problem of deciphering the meaning of foreign objects and fragmented worlds.

Charles Saumarez Smith claimed that in the second half of the twentieth century,

One of the most insistent problems that museums face is precisely the idea that artefacts can be, and should be, divorced from their original context

107 Fiona Hall, Interview with the author, 12 March 2000, Adelaide. 108 Jean-Louis Déotte, "Rome, the Archetypal Museum, and the Louvre, the Negation of Division," Art in Museums (New Research in Museum Studies: An International Series) ed. Susan Pearce (London: 1995). p. 215. 130

of ownership and use, and redisplayed in a different context of meaning, which is regarded as having a superior authority.109

Saumarez Smith argued that the context of the museum is far from neutral, and that although artefacts are removed from their original context in museums, they are no less subject to transition, use and meaning. Artefacts in museums, Saumarez Smith believes, are not static and in a vacuum-sealed environment that preserves objects. Saumarez Smith published this particular argument in 1989 in Peter Vergo’s edited book The New Museology. His argument, like others advocating for the new museology, attempted to dispel the myth of museum neutrality and objectivity. He showed that an artefact’s history and institutional passage in a museum often reveals its changing status and prescribed meaning. Artefacts have complex histories that reflect historical attitudes and values. Saumarez Smith, like Adorno, argued that in some cases an artefact’s meaning is actually lost over time within museums, rather than preserved. He argued, that this loss is “the exact reverse of the trajectory artefacts are supposed to follow on entering a museum, where there history is intended to be conserved, not lost.”110

Hall’s Fieldwork refers to this loss of meaning. The loss of an artefact’s meaning occurs with the changing prerogatives and priorities of the museum. Artefacts are used in different ways, to highlight different histories, in different museological contexts. Depending on the way they are framed, different meanings of the artefact are highlighted. Hall’s work reflects on the stripping back of meaning that occurs with a taxonomic presentation of artefacts “laid out in a consistent, unitary and linear way.”111 Hall’s installation asks the viewer to apply a classificatory gaze to the artefacts – we compare, contrast, see similarities and differences between the ‘family’ of objects. The installation reflects on the transition of artefacts with complex histories to artefacts viewed within limited classificatory frameworks.

109 Charles Saumarez Smith, "Museums, Artefacts, and Meanings," The New Museology ed. Peter Vergo (London: Reaktion Books, 1989). p. 9. 110 Ibid. p. 14. 111 Ibid. p. 19. 131

Nélia Dias has examined the classificatory frameworks in which artefacts were viewed in ethnographic museums since the nineteenth century.112 Hall’s mode of presenting objects in a tableau format in Fieldwork reflects a mode of presentation that is typical within ethnographic museums as analysed by Dias. Dias claimed that the tableau was a convention of what she called “the typological arrangement” of displays in ethnographic museums.113 Tableaux, like a kind of list, consisted of an arranged series of objects that were visibly analogous to each other. Tabular displays are usually ‘read’ from left to right. The items stood as examples of a broader culture, as specimens that illustrate the species. Dias argued that this tabular display is always based on the exterior appearance of the artefacts – their visible characteristics. This reliance on the visible characteristics of artefacts in tabular display results in what Dias referred to as panoplies. Panoplies are visual presentations that “allowed the spectator’s eye to follow a particular itinerary, moving from left to right.”114 According to Dias, the panoptical space of the tableau display is both timeless and abstract – it is stripped of geographical and historical placement – the objects are examples of a taxonomic order removed from spatial and temporal specificity.

Hall’s work White History adopts a similar strategy to Fieldwork. It consists of a number of artefact-like objects arranged in a tableau format in a glass display vitrine. The tableau presentation allows the objects to be ‘read’ from left to right as a panoply. White History displays a series of objects made out of white glass beads, plumbing paraphernalia and PVC piping (see Figures 2.27, 2.28). On first inspection, the objects seem as equally strange as those in Fieldwork. Gradually however, the shapes become familiar, and the viewer realises that they are human bones – a femur, a rib bone and a vertebrae, amongst a sort of drainage system. The placement of PVC pipes, a water float, plunger head and sink plug evoke the sense of water running between and through the passages of the pipes, surrounding the bones. The objects are specimen- like and roughly analogous to each other so that they seem to represent a particular class of objects. As with Hall’s earlier use of PVC piping in Incontinent (1997), the pipes in White History are perforated with holes so that they seem skeletal and in a

112 Nélia Dias, "Looking at objects: memory, knowledge in nineteenth century ethnographic displays," Traveller's Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement eds. George Robertson and et.al. (New York: Routledge, 1994). pp. 164-176. 113 Ibid. p. 165. 114 Ibid. p. 169. 132 state of leaky decay. Again, this is a metaphor for an archaic and disintegrating structure. White History again invokes the museum as a shrine or mausoleum filled with dead, decomposing things, divorced from living culture. As well as this, White History has the effect of historicizing modern day plastics: it makes these items seem precious and antique. In this work, the vitrine sets these objects in time.

The use of beads has significant connotations. The early colonists used beads to barter with indigenous populations throughout the empire. They were traded and exchanged for indigenous material culture, and such collections of bartered goods found there way into museums. Bearing this in mind, the beads illustrate that ‘white history’ is absolutely reliant on an invisible, but ever-present and considerably blacker underside. Hall constructs her ‘artefacts’ from beads, literally demonstrating the way museum artefacts were procured through the colonial encounter.

For each of these works Hall emphasised the aesthetics of her crafted objects to such a degree that they seemed fetishized. This addressed one effect of museums – the fetishization of exotic objects. White History explores the whitewashing of history and the past, and reflects on the way museums constructed the myth of neutral, non-bias accounts of the past.

When the works were first displayed in the Clemenger Contemporary Art Awards of 1999, Hall displayed two other works, Comparative Anatomy (1999) and Moonlighting (1999) behind. In this setting, the tabular museological arrangements were highlighted through the taxonomic presentation in each work.

For Comparative Anatomy and Moonlighting Hall painted gouache images of Tupperware and human bones on Pianola rolls (see Figure 2.29). The white gouache emphasized the white of the beaded sculptures and perforated PVC pipe in White History. Consequently, some of the effects of White History cross over into the interpretation of Comparative Anatomy and Moonlighting. The items painted in white gouache appear to be artefacts displayed along a shelf. The concertina folds of the Pianola rolls add to an illusion of three-dimensionality. The Pianola roll, once a symbol of modern technology and the commodification of music, is now exotic and 133 antiquated. Tupperware is a symbol of 1950s domesticity. It seems equally exotic and antiquated in Hall’s representation, as if they are strange artefacts of another culture.

Hall’s Dead in the Water (1999) also employed a display vitrine filled with glass- beaded and PVC pipe sculptures (see Figures 2.30-2.32). However, the tableau setting and tabular classification of the artefacts is not so apparent in this work, though the display still relates to what Dias refers to as a “typological arrangement.”115

These beaded sculptures in Dead in the Water are more sophisticated than earlier works. They are complex hybrid forms. The vitrine is divided in two. On the upper level are a series of PVC pipe structures drilled with small holes. Adjoining the pipes underneath are beaded sculptures that occupy the lower larger cabinet. The forms are jellyfish-like and look organic. The overall effect of a watery world is heightened by the shadows cast by the translucent beaded forms.

Hall was inspired to make the objects by collections of glass-blown representations of deep-sea specimens made in the early 1900s that she saw in the Museum of Natural History in New York. Hall explained in an interview with the author that she wanted to convey some of the breathless delicacy of these objects.116 Glass-blown specimens were developed because the real specimens were too fragile to bring up from the deep sea and store intact.117 Consequently, museums had glass-blown representations made to a larger scale from drawings.

As well as addressing the way museums have sought to represent jellyfish and deep- sea creatures through glass-blown replicas, Dead in the Water addresses environmental degradation and specifically the phenomenon known as coral bleaching. Coral bleaching is dead coral that is bleached of colour as the coral dies. It is occurring with more frequency in reef habitats globally as a result of pollution. Hall’s white coral and jellyfish like forms clearly represent death, and this is reinforced through the title, a phrase that refers to something that cannot be

115 Ibid. p. 165. 116 Fiona Hall, Interview with the author, 12 March 2000, Adelaide. 117 For more information on glass-blown models of marine invertebrates and plants in museums, see Richard Evans Schultes and William A. Davies, The Glass Flowers at Harvard (Cambridge, Mass.: Botanical Museum of Harvard University, 1992). 134 successful, and is useless, or futile. Dead in the Water therefore has bleak connotations. This work is about the destruction of the oceans that according to Hall is “just as devastating as the destruction of other parts of the natural world.”118 But it also refers to dead objects collected and displayed in museums. Moreover, Dead in the Water may suggest the futility and irrelevance of old style museum displays. Dead in the Water implicates the museum in the conservation and preservation of the natural world. While museums aim to conserve and preserve, their collections consist of dead things, in a state of decay.

Dead in the Water contains surreal and hybrid forms that seem half mechanical and half organic. Like earlier works such as Paradisus Terrestris and Paradisus Terrestris Entitled, the sculptures demonstrate the cross-fertilisation of classes. Hall explored cross-fertilised forms further in a work in 2002. Cell Culture (2002) was exhibited in the exhibition conVerge: Where Art and Science Meet at the Art Gallery of South Australia.119 This work builds upon Hall’s previous vitrine works. A number of animal and plant like forms occupy a three-level glass vitrine (see Figure 2.33). In this installation, the vitrine is an older style wooden framed three-level display case. The vitrines Hall used for Cash Crop and Dead in the Water were modernist in style and made from aluminium frames. Drift Net, Fieldwork and White History used display vitrines that looked like old-style cabinets with wooden frames, but were evidently made for Hall’s installation.

Cell Culture contains a collection of forms made from clear glass beaded shapes attached to white Tupperware. Hall collected Tupperware from Trash and Treasure meets over the years. She commented, “I like white Tupperware with its modernist associations, it’s beautiful. My mother never went to Tupperware parties so I didn’t know anything about Tupperware. I think – wow, what is this for?”120 These growths appear to be the experimental product of cross-fertilisation, somewhere been natural and artificial, each a sub-species of its own. Many of them are extremely humorous

118 Fiona Hall, Interview with the author, 12 March 2000, Adelaide. 119 For a review of this exhibition see Peter Ward. "Then and now, class tells." Weekend Australian 23 March 2002 sec. Review: p. 21. 120 Fiona Hall, Interview with the author, 12 March 2000, Adelaide. 135 forms. Again, Hall addresses issues of collection, taxonomy and museological display.

Hall broaches the issue of genetic modification in Cell Culture. The work grapples with ontological difference between things and whether or not such unity of being can be maintained in a time when DNA can be altered. Cell Culture depicts a new order, not of discovered things, but things created through cellular alteration. In museums, different things have rubbed shoulders for centuries – this is one of the principle pleasures of museums – however, in Cell Culture, these different things have reproduced and created new hybrid forms. In a review of the work, Peter Ward commented, “In a museum vitrine she has assembled a droll selection of intricate little Frankensteins, exquisitely crafted from glass beads and Tupperware pots. It is a bizarre bestiary.”121

This work extends Hall’s exploration of hybridity and the principles of the Wunderkammern. Instead of drawing attention to the similarity between things that are fundamentally different, Cell Culture actually makes unified things out of essentially different structures. The work meditates on the nature of existence, but more specifically on the nature of ontological difference. The work suggests that such contemplation of the difference and similarity between things is at the heart of the experience of wonder within museums.

Conclusion

Hall’s depiction and exploration of tropes of museology has intersected with debates in museum studies literature and with new forms of museum practice since the late eighties. Her work has emphasised wonder, subjective narrative, and a reappraisal of dry modernist objectivity and the apparent neutrality of museums that is typified by the tableau displays of artefacts in glass cabinets that she explored in her work in the late nineties. Her work thus had similar objectives to the new museology that had exposed the fallacy of museum neutrality, and to new museum practices that have recuperated wonder and the role of the imagination in museum displays. On

121 Peter Ward. "Then and now, class tells." Weekend Australian 23 March 2002 sec. Review: p. 21. 136 occasions, she was commissioned by Australian museums seeking to create imaginative and artistic explorations of museum collections and objects, indicating the relevance of artistic interpretations to current museum practice.

Despite this clear commonality her work has with revisionist forms of museum practice, Hall has indicated scepticism about the revision of old museums. This scepticism stems from her love of old museum displays that reveal past attitudes towards interpreting and visualising the world. Hall’s comments about old-style museums however are fuzzily nostalgic in a way that her art works are not. Hall’s work ‘documents’ elements of a former era of museology, as artefacts in themselves in need of preservation. Her work recaptures aspects of ‘old museology’ and classifies museological formats and experiences. In so doing, Hall’s work draws attention to dying museum formats that are increasingly discarded by new museums. This implies that Hall’s role is that of a cataloguer or archivist, storing fragments of the museum within her work’s description of museological formats. This relates to her broader interest in the preservation of ‘dying’ cultures and environments – the destruction of natural habitats, the ‘outmoded’ shrine-museum, Australia’s arguably withering relationship to the English monarchy, and increasingly archaic banknotes and Tupperware. Hall is therefore both artist and ‘museographer’.

Hall’s work represents a significant shift away from Cripps’s oppositional critique of the museum. Instead of symbolically critiquing museology Hall uses museological formats to replicate the wonder associated with viewing objects and artefacts. It thus avoids the problem of an artist’s institutional critique being codified as a style of contemporary art, resulting in rhetorical and symbolic critique of the museum only. Hall’s work does not seek to have any effect on museum practice, as Cripps’s practice did. Notwithstanding these differences in artistic approaches, commonalities between Cripps’s and Hall’s treatment of the museum emerge. Each sought to broaden the scope of museum categorisation, contest aspects of museum history, expand museum narratives, and highlight the imaginative, subjective role of the viewer. Each addressed the idea that living culture ceases once collected within a museum. They also both explore the modernist museum as a historical artefact.

137

Is it possible for an artist to have real effect in the museum? How might art both address museology and intervene with actual museum processes? The following chapter investigates the work of Narelle Jubelin that intervenes with particular museums. Jubelin’s work suggests a further shift away from the notion of artist as an avant-garde opposition to the museum and artist as ‘museographer’, charting and cataloguing museum tropes of a bygone era. From opposition and symbolic critique, to the figurative representation of tropes of museology, Jubelin’s work proposes another type of artistic engagement with museums that is involved, interventionist and collaborative with contemporary museums. 138

Chapter Three. Museum Interventions: Narelle Jubelin as artist, curator and essayist 1986-1995

Introduction

This thesis has explored how Peter Cripps has conducted oppositional critique of the museum and Fiona Hall figuratively represented museum tropes. Narelle Jubelin (b. 1960) intervenes with Australian museums. Her work establishes a series of counterpoints to the museum. Her approach is critical, reflexive and essay-like in its unravelling of the canons of history. This chapter examines the trajectory of Jubelin’s work and her interventions with archives, which this chapter argues, have astutely interacted with the key museological questions of the time. Jubelin’s practice has also responded to key questions facing contemporary Australian artists about the revision of the museum in a sophisticated manner.

No previous examination of Narelle Jubelin’s practice has accounted for the body of her work. The literature on her practice consists of exhibition reviews of singular works and catalogue entries. An exception is Ann Stephen’s essay “Losers, Weepers: Narelle Jubelin’s museum work”, which examined two Australian museum installations by Jubelin.1 However, Stephen’s essay in no way attempts to place these installations within the context of the artist’s broader career, nor does it account for the artist’s relationship with current museological practice, both factors that are elaborated on in this chapter.

In 1990, the journal Art and Australia invited Jubelin to select a pre-twentieth century work held in an Australian museum collection to discuss in the column “Artist’s Choice.”2 Jubelin’s selection and discussion is a productive entry point into this

1 Ann Stephen, "Losers, Weepers: Narelle Jubelin's Museum Work," Past Present: The National Women's Art Anthology eds. Jo Holder and Joan Kerr (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1999). pp. 103-109. 2 This Art and Australia column originated in December 1967 (Vol 5 No 3) when John Olsen wrote about the painting Road to Berry (1947) by Lloyd Rees. While this essay seemed to be a one off, the editorial commentary for this edition noted, “We are frequently asked what is the policy of the magazine. In the sense that the question is posed, it has no policy – except to encourage an intelligent interest in painting, sculpture, pottery, architecture and other allied subjects and to try to bring the notice of a wide public the art of the present, particularly Australian art, without losing awareness of the art of the past and its importance as an influence on the work of today.” Such a column would seem to address this 139 analysis of her oeuvre. She selected a photograph from the National Gallery of Australia taken in 1868 and attributed to Helen Lambert and Viscountess Frances Jocelyn. The image depicts a staged scene of Mrs Macleay, Miss Tiny, Miss Nelly Deas Thompson and Viscount Newry in fancy dress thought to be on the day of a fancy dress ball in honour of Prince Albert’s 1868 visit to Australia.3 Taken at Elizabeth Bay House in Sydney, the protagonists pose on a stage, with Elizabeth Bay visible as a backdrop. The women are dressed in exotic costume, while Viscount Newry wears a dark cloak with a hood. The masculine figure approaches the unaware group of women in a vaguely ominous manner. It is tempting to read the image as one that enacts a peculiarly nineteenth century European fascination with the east. However, the image is puzzling because it does not fit easily within an orientalist reading. While the image reveals a romantic taste for the exotic, it does not surrender its meaning in any clear way.4 As contemporary viewers, we do not readily have access to the set of cultural codes with which the photograph engages. Jubelin’s selection of this photograph illustrates the artist’s attempt to unpick cultural codes and symbols and fascination with the loss of cultural codes over time.

The museum, for Jubelin, may represent a storehouse of things, all of which suffer various stages of loss and fragmentation of meaning. At the time, she stated that the photograph, “further whets my appetite for the archival underworld of the museum.”5 Not only does Jubelin’s discussion in this artist’s choice column, reveal her sense of intrigue for the archival (that in itself is founded in a duality: a romantic desire for what has been hidden and may be discovered afresh and a desire to make meaning out of the partial and unrecognisable), but also it reveals her acute awareness of context as

very issue. However, the idea of an artist selecting a work to write about does not appear again until March 1979 (Vol 16 No 3) when Jeffrey Smart wrote about Brian Dunlop’s painting Room (1977-78). Artist’s Choice No. 3, titled as a column for the first time, appears one year later in March 1980 (Vol 17) when Lloyd Rees selected Roland Wakelin’s Down to the hills to Berry’s Bay (1916). From this point on the column has continued, sporadically, but with regularity through the 1990s and into 2002. The reasons behind such a column indicate a degree of interest that was beginning to form in art criticism through this period about the artist’s perspective on material culture and the degree of reflection by artists on art historical contexts for their own artistic production. Evidently, by the time of Jubelin’s column in 1991, the journal was limiting the artist’s choice by some factors, because the journal invited Jubelin to select a pre-twentieth century work in an Australian museum collection. The changing characteristics that the column has taken over the last thirty years would merit further research. 3 In Jubelin’s discussion, she unpicks the particular meaning that the work gains by understanding whom these figures were in Sydney society. Narelle Jubelin, "Artist's Choice No. 37: Atributed to Helen Lambert and Viscountess Frances Jocelyn," Art and Australia 27.3 (1990): p. 420. 4 Jubelin wrote at the time, “This image captures the constructed romanticism of an exotic vision: sensuous artifice of pose, tone, distance, substance and light.” Ibid. p. 420. 5 Ibid. 140 an interpretative tool. This is evident through her discussion of a number of interpretative contexts for the photograph. She actively questions whether she should discuss the photograph as an accessioned object in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, or, as an image cast in the exhibition Shades of Light, or, she asks “its progenitive site?” This questioning highlights a range of interpretative contexts and serves to open up meaning around the photograph. It is through such a consideration of interpretative contexts that Jubelin intervenes with the process of interpretation of the meaning of the object. The artist proposes that the photograph’s meaning is not its iconography alone, for indeed we cannot be clear about the set of cultural codes operating in the image, but also in the photograph’s subsequent cultural circulation. This questioning methodology has been central to Jubelin’s artistic strategy. It illustrates the careful consideration that the artist gives to her art practice as a cultural intervention.

A feminist intervention: looking and language

As a young artist in the late seventies and early eighties, studying at the Alexander Mackie College of Art Education and the City Art Institute in Sydney, Jubelin was part of the first feminist art history classes in Australian art eduction institutions. Feminism has had a formative effect on this artist’s methodology. It contributed to a critical and revisionist approach to art practice. In her early exhibitions, Jubelin’s practice dealt largely with reinterpreting aspects of modernism from a feminist perspective.

However crucial feminism may be to her art practice, it does not entirely explain her early methodology. Geoffrey Batchen commented in relation to Ian Burn’s practice, “Picture-making is in every case assumed to be an intelligent and potentially sophisticated activity, a skill invested with practical and historical knowledges.”6 Jubelin inherited this understanding of art from Burn. She, along with many artists of her generation, was indebted to the philosophy with which Burn approached and

6 Geoffrey Batchen, "Introduction: Pictography: The art history of Ian Burn." Dialogue: Writings in art history. Ian Burn. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991. p. xiii. 141 developed a critical art practice.7 The precise character of Burn’s influence in Jubelin’s practice requires examination and will be assessed in this chapter.

Burn’s approach unveiled looking and language as realms of critical inquiry for art, and it is the particular analysis and interpretation of systems of looking and language that Jubelin begins to build in her early art practice that assists her approach to the museological. Awareness therefore of art as a systematic and potentially sophisticated medium of critical engagement, coupled with the politicised agenda of revisionist feminism, gave rise to Jubelin’s early methodology.

Ian Burn was instrumental in the international Art & Language group during the mid 1960s to early 1970s.8 As discussed in relation to Peter Cripps’s practice, conceptual art, such as that exemplified by Art & Language, questioned the value placed on art as a product, and sought to replace the art product with the systemic process. The development of an idea for art was therefore foregrounded by the Art & Language group as art. The logical consequence of this was that an artist could produce art through a series of instructions, or any other device that destabilised the notion of an artwork as product. It was enough to simply state the artwork’s intention, rather than produce an artwork per se; of course, the art system subsequently reinvested the documents of this work with the aura of a conventional object-based artwork. This aside, an important way in which artists’ foregrounded process over product was by adopting the trope of the index. The Art & Language group proposed that an indexical documentation of the idea could represent art. The repercussions of this strategy have

7 Burn was clearly an important figure for Jubelin. In an interview with the author, Jubelin commented, “…when he (Burn) wrote that essay for the (Venice) Biennial, dealing with my work, both Tracey (Moffatt) and I were amazed that he spoke out so strongly in relation to our work. Because, for most of my formation, Ian was out of the country when I was studying, he was someone that had come back in and that I’d read. He published a rabid review of the Australian National Gallery when it opened in the National Times. I remember reading it when I was at art school, thinking – I’m never going to that museum because his argument was so good. And then I went and I actually disagreed with him. As a younger artist, his critical attention is something that keeps you on your toes. He was very important for me. Recently, I was talking to another artist in Sydney and she was saying to me, comments that he’d made to her over years were enough to keep her going. In times where she felt the work she was doing was completely irrelevant and she was being attacked by other factions…Ian knew exactly what he was doing, he was generous and understood practice so completely that he would just say the right thing at the right time.” Narelle Jubelin, Interview with the author, 4 Dec 2000, Madrid. 8 For an incisive analysis of Art & Language see Charles Green, "Conceptual Bureaucracy: Ian Burn, Mel Ramsden, and Art and Language," The Third Hand: collaboration in art from conceptualism to postmodernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). pp. 25-56. 142 been pervasive for subsequent art practice and have influenced Narelle Jubelin, whose work has used the metaphor of the catalogue or index in various forms.9

A related issue to the privileging of the idea over the art-object was to make the viewer aware of the context in which they view art. Burn’s practice and art writing sought to reinvigorate the relationship between the viewer and art. Burn, like other conceptual artists in the sixties and seventies, examined the possibility of a different relationship with art. Burn invested the viewer with an awareness of their viewer- status. Looking was politicised by Burn, revealed active rather than passive, and in itself this recognised and emphasised the possibility of a dialogue between the viewer and art. Batchen commented, for Burn “if pictures and viewers are to engage in effective dialogue, looking itself must be transformed into a measured and palpably self-conscious activity.”10 It is this in particular that Jubelin, aided by feminism, wrestles with in her early practice: looking, and the potentially sophisticated and radical intervention that looking might enable.

Jubelin’s choice of medium – petit point embroidery – reflects this awareness of a politics of looking and a feminist methodology. It was a vehicle through which the artist would explore an indexical language. Jubelin explained in an interview with the author that, after majoring in painting at art school, she took up petit-point embroidery during her teaching placement. The reason for this was that petit point, unlike painting, was a medium she could work with on the train travelling to school, and did not require access to a studio. At the end of Jubelin’s teaching placement year, she had made approximately twenty small-scale petit point embroideries that she had based on maps and which she intended to expand into large formalist paintings. Jubelin commented,

9 Art historians and critics have not examined the indexical nature of Narelle Jubelin’s practice. 10 Geoffrey Batchen, "Introduction: Pictography: The art history of Ian Burn." Dialogue: Writings in art history. Ian Burn. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991. p xiii. Batchen goes on to write; “ The look of the viewer thus becomes the art’s most important element, and the theatre of viewing its greatest intellectual provocation” Ibid. p xv. Note that Charles Green points out that Burn interrogates this act of viewing throughout his practice, by foregrounding the act of looking itself, as with his mirror pieces of the late 1960s. Charles Green, "Conceptual Bureaucracy: Ian Burn, Mel Ramsden, and Art and Language," The Third Hand: collaboration in art from conceptualism to postmodernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). pp. 25-56. 143

The response that I received from people at the college (was that) they wanted me to exhibit them straight away, and for me it was like why would I do that? The lecturers that I had were saying, you should show this at Macquarie Galleries – and for me Macquarie Galleries had absolutely nothing to do with where my head was, but also what these men were saying was ‘these would be fantastic if they were much bigger!’ So, I started thinking about the politics of scale… I understood immediately that what I was doing was something that these men couldn’t do because they paint, and yet they were making renditions of their paintings, with the Victorian Tapestry Workshop… So I thought, hang on let’s think about this, let’s think about the scale, let’s think about what it means to translate something into sewing. And it took me ten years to work through the arguments that I needed to work through, in order to decide, when Stephen Mori approached me to work with him in Sydney, it made perfect sense. There was a peer group there, but also the context enabled me to sew, without having to deal absolutely in a very literal way with that ‘craft pit’ scenario. I was very lucky and it was because I came via painting.11

Only in the context of the reception of these early petit point embroideries, did Jubelin became aware of their potential, if carefully developed, to disrupt. This disruption is multifaceted and brings to the fore the politicised nature of looking to which Burn had attended.

The use of embroidery in a ‘high art’ context was subversive on a number of fronts. It challenged convention where there was an assumption that the small embroideries were unfinished, or at least representative only of a process. Equally, when considered as an end in themselves, there was the immediate classification of them as something relevant to a gallery (and by extension, to a particular audience) such as Macquarie Galleries. Macquarie Galleries was a venerable commercial gallery that had exhibited painters dealing with abstraction since the 1940s. However, the cutting edge artist in the contemporary art world of the early 1980s would not have identified with Macquarie Galleries. Indeed, Macquarie Galleries, for a young feminist artist, would have been associated with a particularly masculine modernist scene.

In contrast, her small, domestic-scale petit point embroideries provide a particular intervention with art practice. As Jubelin states, however, it is only in the context of Mori Gallery and the peer group of artists represented by Stephen Mori, that this

11 Narelle Jubelin, Interview with the author, 4 Dec 2000, Madrid. 144 intervention is fully realised. Mori Gallery supported many feminist artists and contemporary art that was otherwise politicised. Here, the contemporary art audience could appreciate the political nature of Jubelin’s choice of medium. Had her work been relegated to craft practice, in the context of the Victorian Tapestry Workshop, much of its interventionist nature arguably would have been lost. In this regard, the success of Jubelin’s petit point relies on its exhibition as critical contemporary art.

The choice of petit point embroidery also strategically tapped into a debate about craft versus art in Australian art circles at the time.12 Feminist art history demonstrated how craft was inevitably associated with the feminine, domestic, and therefore dilettante, where art was masculine, public and professionalised. The art historian Rozsika Parker who published The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine in 1984 sought to show how needlework has functioned as an “instrument of subservience” and to illustrate how women have resisted and subverted patriarchal culture through their needlework.13

However, Jubelin did not necessarily seek to reinstate the value of needlework within the context of a genuine, serious art practice. The use of petit point embroidery, she realised, was strategic because it proved to be a hook, while playing on a politicised trajectory. Audiences, she realised, love to see ‘workmanship’ and look at finely crafted objects. The scale and nature of needlework entices viewers to look closely, carefully, and sympathetically. This allows Jubelin to then counter this treatment of the work with politicised subject matter that does not comply with the expectation of the domestic and decorative. Jubelin’s use of the language of petit point embroidery was therefore timely, in that it intersected with the feminist re-evaluation of craft practice occurring locally and internationally, strategic, because it engaged with a

12 For example see, Julie Ewington, "What's in a Name? The Art Craft Debate Again," Craft Australia Autumn.1 (1986): pp. 108-109, 122; John McDonald. "Art." Sydney Morning Herald 10 December 1988 McDonald claims that Jubelin’s exhibition at Mori Gallery in 1988 offers “the latest word in the art and craft debate.”; Anne Brennan, "Redrawing the Margins: Looking for Meaning in the Crafts," Broadsheet 18.3/4 (1989): pp. 10-11 Brennan argues for craft’s reinterpretation “in terms of its origin and social function.”; David Bromfield, "Artifice and Earth: Terra Incognita and the Art/Craft Debate," Craftwest 1.April (1989): pp. 2-4. 13 This phrase “instrument of subservience” is used fittingly by Bronwyn Hanna to describe embroidery in a review of Jubelin’s work. Bronwyn Hanna, "The Subversive Stitch: Two Recent Exhibitions by Narelle Jubelin," Transition.May (1987): p. 30. 145 politics of looking in art, and art historically aware, because it built on conceptual art’s indexical metaphors in ways that will be examined later in this chapter.

Jubelin recounted Ian Burn’s response to her work Trade Delivers People exhibited at the Venice in 1991,

Ian explained to me that he understood the seduction of the materials…the whole reason I use petit point is to slow people down. However vacuous it is, there is a value that people give to the labour of stitching. It’s such a corny hook, but it continues to work for me. So he said that when he was looking - a very sophisticated, critical gaze towards the work – he said there was one piece… and he felt like the work had slapped him on the face because he was caught in the moment where he applied the colonising gaze… and he said for him it was incredibly interesting because there was a moment where there was a capturing, identification, and then later the chastisement.14

Burn’s viewing response articulates the complexity of relationship between viewer and artwork that Jubelin establishes with petit point embroidery. The specific subject matter of Trade Delivers People is analysed later in this chapter. However, this relationship between audience and artwork characterises much of Jubelin’s practice, regardless of the specificities of subject matter, and is fundamental to the interventional nature of her practice.

In Jubelin’s first exhibition, held at Mori Gallery in 1986 entitled Hi(s)Story: A Small Reminder, this viewing experience of capture, identification and chastisement, while not yet as sharp as in her 1991 work Trade Delivers People, was emerging as a strategy.15 She contrasted renditions of the masculine, public, built environment of Sydney, with the technique of small-scale, domestic needlework (see Figure 3.1). While this contrast clearly articulated a critical engagement with feminist revisions of history, because it translated the edifices of public culture into needlework (instead of enlarging, as suggested by her lecturers at art school, she reduced), it also explored

14 Narelle Jubelin, Interview with the author, 4 Dec 2000, Madrid. 15 This exhibition will not be analysed extensively in this chapter. See Bronwyn Hanna’s detailed and incisive analysis from 1987, Bronwyn Hanna, "The Subversive Stitch: Two Recent Exhibitions by Narelle Jubelin," Transition.May (1987): pp. 26-30; and Joan Kerr, "Remaking Hi(s)story: Narelle Jubelin's Recent Work," Artlink 8.3 (1988): pp. 29-30. 146 the possibility of seduction offered by needlework, in order to instil a close and careful looking.

Each rendition depicted nineteenth century public monuments, buildings and designed structures around Sydney. Jubelin depicted vistas of the south head lighthouse, statues of Captain Cook, the gates at the entrance of the botanical gardens and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. These familiar landmarks are local but at once generic examples of nineteenth century public structures. Charles Green observed, “(a)s one of the most important methods of cultural control, colonising cultures always circulated their own libraries of canonical texts.”16 These built structures are equally representative of a colonising culture’s iconography that inscribes the colonised landscape with a set of cultural codes that serve to reinforce a particular status and identity. They are representative of British patriarchal culture. Jubelin identifies and disentangles each icon from their context of a normalizing, invisible power structure, and reduces them to a domestic narrative of the miniature, thereby rendering them impotent.17

Jubelin wrote at the time,

Hi(s)Story tells of patriarchal colonisation - each sequence of accidents and unforeseen events echoing the tales of his forefather told, weaving the elaborate fabric of culture. The first concern was to tidy up the settlement and create some semblance of law and order. Elegant buildings, well kept gardens and a smart new look transformed squalid little Sydney into a pleasant progressive town with an exciting future… The form is familiar and insidious. Parklands eulogise warfare, gracing their monuments as tacit bastions of male power. The founding days are over but the select restoration of its relics conserves the consistency of the pattern.18

16 Charles Green, "Narelle Jubelin: Colonial Culture and Canonical Texts," Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970 - 1994 (Melbourne: Craftsman House, 1995). p. 134. 17 See Bronwyn Hanna’s fascinating discussion of Jubelin’s disruption of the phallic language of public monuments in an essay commissioned by Jubelin in 1987. Hanna convincingly argues that Jubelin deconstructs the phallocentric discourse of public architecture and design. In addition, Hanna suggests, that with Jubelin’s analysis of the binary oppositions of craft/art, monument (phallic)/shelter (feminine), and artifice/nature the value of maintaining such hegemonic order disintegrates. Bronwyn Hanna, "The Subversive Stitch: Two Recent Exhibitions by Narelle Jubelin," Transition.May (1987): pp. 26-30. 18 Narelle Jubelin, "A Reading of (His)story," Young Contemporaries, exh. cat. The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Melbourne, 1987. n.pag. 147

Jubelin intervenes in this process of restoration by interrupting our society’s unquestioning eulogies with her critical gaze. From her first solo exhibition, looking is recognised by Jubelin to be a potentially politicised act.

In another exhibition of the same year, Remembrance of Things Past Lay Bare the Plans for Destiny, Jubelin enacts a similar feminist strategy, recording the public spaces of Sydney that were planned and established in the nineteenth century along with the seeds of nationhood.19 Again, Jubelin recorded the Art Gallery of New South Wales, this time in embroidered panoramic form set in the gardens of the Domain, thus echoing the nineteenth century visual tradition of city panoramas that laid out the geographical features and economic centres of a town. The title of this exhibition points to the acts of remembrance in public institutions like art galleries, society’s cultural storehouses. Jubelin suggests that through public remembrance, which prioritises certain aspects of the past over others, we usher in our future hopes, “lay bare the plans for destiny.”

Jubelin’s depiction of public memorials in miniature format attempts to question their public role. Joan Kerr has argued in relation to Jubelin’s early practice that this process of inversion (from monumental to miniature) is explicitly inscribed with the politics of gender and power. Kerr wrote,

It is the male gaze which is ultimately being subverted and all that goes with it: the ‘masterpiece’, art’s institutional values and hierarchies, the male construction of history. Her artworks make the monuments and views of men into ‘exquisitely precious little things’, charming but ultimately futile exercises of phallocentric power.20

As well as this feminist action however, Jubelin invokes associated characteristics of the miniature: the hand-held and personal, the domestic and the souvenir, for strategic means.

19 For a more detailed discussion of the issues arising from this exhibition see, Bronwyn Hanna, "The Subversive Stitch: Two Recent Exhibitions by Narelle Jubelin," Transition.May (1987): pp. 26-30; and Joan Kerr, "Remaking Hi(s)story: Narelle Jubelin's Recent Work," Artlink 8.3 (1988): pp. 29-30. 20 Joan Kerr, "Remaking Hi(s)story: Narelle Jubelin's Recent Work," Artlink 8.3 (1988): p. 30. 148

Susan Stewart’s 1993 publication On Longing offers a pertinent analysis of the cultural meanings and distinct identity of the miniature and the souvenir, in relation to the gigantic and collection. According to Stewart, the souvenir is a metonymic token of an experience.21 In this regard, Jubelin’s miniatures allude to souvenirs, but of course are not actually souvenirs of these public monuments, because they are representations of sites rather than tokens of a direct experience. Examples of souvenirs are postcards bought on the spot depicting the monument visited, tea towels bought in commemoration of the experience of visiting a place, or snow domes with miniaturised scenes of places, able to be pocketed and transported. A souvenir evokes an individual’s memory of an experience and stands in metonymically for this experience. Stewart argued that because the souvenir is a token or sample of something, it will embody nostalgia and desire, caused by the impossibility of returning to that original experience. Individually, the petit points in Jubelin’s early exhibitions inspire a false feeling of longing in the viewer that is strategically provoked by their small-scale crafted-kitsch quality and associated private and domestic connotations. However, when taken as part of the group of small-scale works their identity alters, towards something collective and less personal.

Stewart analysed the characteristics of collections in contrast to the souvenir. She argued that the collection works by example, and is metaphoric rather than metonymic. In each of Jubelin’s early exhibitions, she presented groups of small-scale works (up to twenty in Hi(s)Story), with each work offering an example of a type of nineteenth century public monument. According to Stewart,

The souvenir still bears a trace of use value in its instrumentality, but the collection represents the total aestheticisation of use value. The collection is a form of art as play, a form involving the reframing of objects within a world of attention and manipulation of context…its function is not the restoration of context of origin but rather the creation of a new context.22

By creating a new context, removed from the origins of constituent parts of a collection, Stewart suggests that individual parts gain new meaning. The

21 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (London: Duke University Press, 1993). 22 Ibid. pp. 151-152. 149 interpretation of things changes when they are placed within a collection because juxtaposition and collective meaning over-rides other possible interpretations. In Jubelin’s early exhibitions, she begins to play with the language and function of collections. She extracts petit-point embroidery and public monuments, from their contexts of origin (the realm of the strictly feminine and domestic/the physical public site) and, via the series, establishes a new context that allows an alternative interpretation of their cultural meaning and value. In this, Jubelin’s work indicates a different approach to Hall’s. Hall addressed the decontextualisation of museum objects and the loss of ‘original’ meaning. Jubelin explores the accumulation of new meaning depending on the context of display.

This introduces another element that Jubelin began to explore in collections: the notion of the index. The index is a dominant trope in Jubelin’s early exhibitions. These exhibitions were indexical because of the serial representation of a ‘category’ – nineteenth century public buildings and artifices that form an iconographic archive. This clearly aligns Jubelin with the practices of conceptual art, in which the index has served as an important cornerstone since the late sixties. Typically, conceptual artists employed the metaphor of the index to strip away associations with the hand-made art object and emphasise process and idea over form and content. Consequently, such art practice frequently adopted tropes of record keeping and of catalogues.23 The photocopy and photograph have been pivotal to the development of this imagery because they are not hand-made, and imply the serial rather than one-off.

Like the index in conceptual art, Jubelin’s embroideries evoke an awareness of production and time, but they do so through a self-consciously handcrafted medium. Unlike much conceptual art that adopted the index, they are discursive. Where indexical metaphors adopted by artists through the late 1960s and 1970s were serial and sequential, Jubelin’s index is somehow wider and less ordered. This is principally because she utilizes juxtaposition and arrangement, in a way that runs counter to the logic of the index. She establishes a discussion between composite parts and the

23 For example, Edward Ruscha’s seminal picture books Twenty-six Gasoline Stations (1962) and Sunset Strip (1966), which developed photographic indexes, and On Kawara’s One Million Years –Past (1970-71) that were typed and photocopied books consisting of dates in sequence. 150 whole. Her arrangements of petit points ‘read’ like an essay or discussion, raising a series of arguments for consideration.

Entering the museum: institutional and bureaucratic passage in the Powerhouse Museum

I understand that I’m not museum trained that I’m not an art historian, I’m an interloper, I come in, I understand it’s very tentative and I grapple with things, and I also rely very heavily on the people that I’m working with.

Narelle Jubelin, Interview with the author, 4 December 2000, Madrid.

The discursive methodology emerging in Jubelin’s early exhibitions via the format of collections, gained a more radical and interventionist dimension with the piece Legacies of Travel and Trade (1989-90) that actually incorporates the collections of the Powerhouse Museum. With this work, Jubelin’s approach found root in an actual collection and bureaucracy, and this enabled a tangible intervention with museology to develop in her practice.

In 1989, the Department of Australian Decorative Arts and Design Post 1945 and the Department of Industrial and Domestic Life at the Powerhouse Museum commissioned Narelle Jubelin for a mixed-media installation that was a permanent acquisition for the museum. For the commission Jubelin worked most closely with Ann Stephen, curator in the Department of Industrial and Domestic Life and Claire Roberts, curator of Asian decorative art, the areas most relevant to Jubelin’s focus in the installation. The curators’ motivation for the commission was to enhance the contemporary holdings of innovative textile work and stimulate local practice.24 Beyond this, however, it is clear in the commission proposals prepared by the curators that the commission offered two other vital motivating possibilities,

This work will provide a unique way of exploring the history of collecting.

24 Judtih O’Callaghan, Senior Curator Australian Decorative Arts and Design Post 1945, “Addendum to Commission/Acquisition Proposal: ‘Legacies’ by Narelle Jubelin, Sydney 1990”, n.d., Powerhouse Museum Internal Document. 151

The work will provide a new and creative reassessment of part of the Museum’s collection.25

The commission was the first of its kind in Australia, and one of the first internationally, to propose a re-evaluation of collecting and a re-conceptualisation of the practices of museums via contemporary art. This indicates an astute awareness, on behalf of the curators, of the growing interest in museological issues by contemporary artists and the possibilities this practice might have for museums. Ann Stephen, in particular, instigated this commission - a curator who had been involved with the Art & Language group, with the Women’s Art Movement and Melbourne based feminist LIP magazine and Ian Burn especially. In 1988, the previous year to Jubelin’s commission, Stephen had co-edited a publication with Ian Burn, Nigel Lendon and Charles Merewether called The Necessity of Australian Art: an essay about interpretation.26

While artists had examined museological issues in their practices for decades, and this had particular currency in art practice during the 1970s, it was more unusual for a museum to open up their collections to the artist’s gaze. Indeed, Legacies of Travel and Trade was at the forefront of an internationally emerging curatorial practice to do so.

For example, one year after Jubelin’s commission in 1990, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, began a series of exhibitions entitled Connections, in which contemporary artists were invited to select works from the collection and display them with their own. However, this has quite a different emphasis to Narelle Jubelin’s commission. In Connections the interest was primarily the artist’s perspective on historical art. It did

25 Kimberley Webber, Ann Stephen et.al. “Submission to Trust: to commission a mixed media work by Narelle Jubelin”, n.d., Powerhouse Museum Internal Document. 26 Ian Burn, et al., The Necessity of Australian Art: an essay about interpretation (Sydney: Power Publications, Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney, 1988). Stephen is currently writing a PhD thesis on the practices of Ian Burn. 152 not propose the more radical redefinition of history and collecting that Jubelin’s commission entailed.27

Important precedents existed of museums inviting artists to respond to their collections. In 1969, the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design invited Andy Warhol to select and display objects from the collection. This exhibition has been analysed by Lisa Graziose Corrin, who discusses it as the pioneering exhibition for 1990s curatorial practice that has invited the artist into the museum. Corrin treats Warhol’s project at the museum as a logical extension of his art practice, which “regrettably…was marginalised until recently within discussion of Warhol’s oeuvre.”28

Against a backdrop of decreasing visitor numbers, especially in the student demographic, the exhibition, Raid the Icebox 1 with Andy Warhol, originated from an idea, when Dominique de Menil, the director of the Institute for the Arts at Rice University and her husband John visited the museum.29 John de Menil wondered what would happen,

if some important contemporary artist were to choose an exhibition from our reserve? If the only organising principle would be whether or not he liked whatever he saw? Would the result be different from having a storage show chosen by a curator?…If he were famous enough, would it not oblige the curious to look?30

Andy Warhol selected whole groups of objects in storage for his exhibition, without necessarily discarding the storage paraphernalia. He exhibited a large collection of eighteenth and nineteenth century women’s and children’s shoes and umbrellas in shelving systems. A selection of wooden Windsor chairs were stacked, lined up and

27 Trevor Fairbrother, "Sleuthing Storage: The "Connections" Series at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston," Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art, eds. Ingrid Schaffer and Matthias Winzen, exh. cat. P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. New York, Prestel, 1998. pp. 209-212. 28 Lisa G. Corrin, "The Legacy of Daniel Robbin's Raid the Icebox 1," Rhode Island School of Design Museum Notes.June (1996): p. 58. Michael Lobel examined Warhol’s practice of collecting and accumulating as an artistic strategy and the way that this exhibition related to this strategy. Michael Lobel, "Warhol's Closet," Art Journal 55.Winter (1996): p. 42. Deborah Bright analysed Warhol’s exhibition as an articulation of “his finely tuned proletarian consciousness.” Deborah Bright, "Shopping the Leftovers: Warhol's collecting strategies in Raid the Icebox I," Art History 24.2 April (2001): p. 278. 29 Daniel Robbins, "Confessions of a Museum Director," Raid the Icebox 1 with Andy Warhol, exh. cat. Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design. Rhode Island, 1969. pp. 12-13. 30 Ibid. p. 14. 153 suspended from the ceiling. This display of the serial and multiple was consistent with Warhol’s representations of consumer goods and the media in American popular culture. Another section of the exhibition showed marble pillars clustered into a corner with an Eastern statue and marble sculptures of figureheads. Here Warhol confounded both notions of aesthetic, stylistic and period division, and even the act of display: the Eastern statue faced the wall rather than the viewer, as if in storage.

In a review for Art and Artists in 1970, Gregory Battcock wrote that,

the traditional purpose and content of a museum exhibition has been deliberately abused…we are brought into direct confrontation with the nature and the dynamics of the itself.31

Battcock recognised that this exhibition was no mere display of Warhol’s taste. Indeed he stated that, “the larger implications of this attitude toward museum exhibitions are enormous and the show could well prove a prophetic as well as a major artistic event.”32

The next major precedent for Jubelin’s commission at the Powerhouse Museum was in 1985 when the British Museum’s Museum of Mankind invited the artist Eduardo Paolozzi to curate an exhibition from the ethnological collections. This exhibition, Lost Magic Kingdoms and Six Paper Moons from Natuatl, not only described the deep influence that ethnographic museums have had on Paolozzi’s practice, but also highlighted the alteration of an object’s meaning once placed in a museum. Paolozzi selected hundreds of objects for display, many of which the museum had not displayed before. Paolozzi interrogated the way museums assign meaning to objects, via collections, by creating hoax displays and inventing fictional labels. Authenticity (the original use and context for objects), Paolozzi demonstrated, is inevitably lost in the museum’s translation into collections.33 This exhibition was both an artistic event,

31 Gregory Battcock, "Museums' anti-shows," Art and Artists Jan (1970): p. 56. 32 Ibid. p. 56. 33 Echoing the original criticism of the revolutionary museum (such as the Louvre) by Antoine Quatremére de Quincy who argued in 1787 that museums rob art of their life by displacing it from its original context. For discussions of Quatremére’s position see, Daniel J. Sherman, "Quatremere/Benjamin/Marx: Art Museums, Aura, and Commodity Fetishism," Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles ed. Irit Rogoff (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1994). pp. 123- 143.; and Jean-Louis Déotte, "Rome, the Archetypal Museum, and the Louvre, the Negation of Division," 154 and museological reassessment, that responded to the emerging revision of museums in the mid 1980s.

Jubelin’s commission for the Powerhouse Museum delved into the history of the formation of collections in the museum; the way museums interpret objects and shape perceptions of culture, and into current museological imperatives displayed by the museum and by museums more broadly. The Powerhouse Museum commissioned Jubelin one year after its redevelopment from the former Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences and one year after Australia’s bicentennial celebrations. Jubelin’s installation, Legacies of Travel and Trade, contested each. The artist explicitly formulated the work as a counterpoint to what she described as “the big machinery the more blockbuster type exhibitions” which the Powerhouse favoured in its first year opening.34 She also wanted to counter the white, masculine myths of Australian nationality that the official bicentennial celebrations had reiterated. Politicised by dissenting groups within the community, notably indigenous and non-indigenous people marking and mourning ‘invasion’ day, the bicentennial year saw official culture contested and celebrated by differing groups in the community.

Jubelin identified a disjunction between the museum’s location next to Chinatown and its lack of representation of the Chinese Australian experience. She identified several collections to examine in her installation. One, of objects collected in China in the early twentieth century by an Australian woman, Mrs Christian Rowe Thornett. Another, a collection of Chinese cash coins that were used in the Queensland gold fields during several gold rushes. The Chinese Australian Wong Ping Sing originally owned the coin collection that was displayed in the 1888 Centennial International Exhibition. A key imperative in Jubelin’s focus on these particular collections was the aim to recover some quality of their original and individual context, or at the very least illustrate the disjunction and gap between their origin and subsequent identity within museological collections.

Art in Museums (New Research in Museum Studies: An International Series) ed. Susan Pearce (London: 1995). pp. 215-232. 34 Narelle Jubelin, Interview with the author, 4 Dec 2000, Madrid. 155

As well as these collections, Jubelin worked from a series of photographs taken in China by the German Australian photographer Hedda Morrison who ran a studio in Peking in the 1930s. Although these photographs were not part of the Powerhouse collection, Jubelin’s research led to the discovery that Hedda Morrison was alive and living in Canberra. Jubelin and Claire Roberts visited Morrison to discuss her photographic practice. Jubelin found this meeting particularly confronting, because for the first time in her art practice she could actually meet one of the key protagonists in her work. For Jubelin, this raised ethical issues associated with her use of Morrison’s imagery, and whether or not she should seek approval for the context in which she was using them. Jubelin remarked in an interview with the author, “this is the first time I actually have to go and speak to someone (whose work she was working on) and I had to think (through) the whole issue of the ethics of the appropriation.”35

The ethics of her appropriation were somewhat resolved for Jubelin during the course of her meeting with Morrison. The two discovered shared viewpoints, and Morrison demonstrated her certainty that Jubelin understood the intentions behind her photographic practice, when she shouted from the lounge room to her husband in the kitchen, “A comrade! We have a comrade!”36 Morrison’s photographs were included in a publication on Orientalism just after Jubelin began to work on her piece for the Powerhouse Museum. Jubelin disagreed with and specifically wanted to contest their interpretation within a framework of Orientalism. For Jubelin, Morrison had not participated in a reductive representation of Asia according to the taste of the West. Instead, Morrison had systematically set out to record cultural specificities of the places through which she had lived and travelled. Jubelin recognised that Morrison was attempting to put together a photographic archive and employ a sophisticated visual language in her representations of culture in transition. Certainly it seemed that Morrison herself disputed the understanding of her work as something that purely sought out the exotic in Asia for her own Western tastes and desires.

35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 156

Legacies of Travel and Trade uses a flat-topped nineteenth century display cabinet to display four petit point silk embroidered renditions of photographs by Morrison in combination with Chinese cash coins and dress accessories collected by Mrs Christian Rowe Thornett. Jubelin arranged the objects on a background of yellow silk. The cash coins sit in grid format across the upper section of the cabinet. Her petit-point renditions, framed in faux ivory and wood frames, are on top of this ‘bed’ of coins. In the lower section of the cabinet, Jubelin arranged four matching embroidered dress accessories – a spectacle case, fan case, and two purses – adjacent to four ivory cigarette holders of differing length, ordered from longest to shortest. The cabinet itself sits on a low pedestal against a red wall, demarcated from the main exhibition space (see Figures 3.2-3.8).

The installation is visually stunning, with careful points of visual analogy made by Jubelin between the petit point of her renditions, the grid format of the layout of coins and embroidered dress accessories, and the faux ivory frames with the ivory cigarette holders. The flat-topped display cabinet accentuates the aerial perspective used in two of Morrison’s images. This sophisticated visual layout is fundamental to the installation’s success. Indeed, through this layout, Jubelin demonstrates the importance of careful display design as a way of accentuating the associations with and meanings of objects. She allows these objects to ‘speak’ through spatial and visual means.

This installation takes the language of an archetypal museum display –the glass cabinet and object-based display - and subtly sets in motion a creative extension of this format of display. Apart from a didactic panel describing it as the work of an artist displayed adjacent to the installation, its appearance is that of a museum display rather than art installation. On closer inspection however, this installation deals with the objects on display in a much less didactic and more fluid way. The relationship Jubelin establishes between the objects and her renditions through their arrangement prompts a particularly fluid and imaginative set of interpretations. In this regard, Jubelin’s commission is comparable to Rosamond Purcell’s El Real gabinete commissioned by the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid in 1995 (six years after Jubelin’s commission), discussed in chapter two of this thesis. Purcell’s recreation of a curiosity cabinet set out to create artistic and imaginative 157 juxtapositions between museum objects that highlighted wonder and curiosity rather than dry didactic interpretation. However, Jubelin’s installation is much sharper and more theoretically aware than Purcell’s. Jubelin’s commission explores travel, collecting and souveniring, trade and exchange in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These themes unfold gradually within the context of a visual story created through example, artistic juxtaposition and arrangement.

In particular, Legacies of Travel and Trade tells a story about the movements of individuals and communities via the of objects and collections. Her renditions of Morrison’s photographs point to Morrison’s travel through China and South-East Asia in the 1930s, and to the photograph as a snapshot or souvenir of an event, place or experience. However, Morrison’s careful composition and selection of subject matter are altogether more serious a pursuit than the now ubiquitous tourist taking snapshots. One sepia-toned rendition of a photograph by Morrison titled Looking for a passenger depicts a bird’s eye view of a street scene with two people carrying rickshaws diagonally across the picture plane. Another depicts an interior view of two men playing chess, titled A quiet game of chess in a rich man’s home. These photographs are anthropological, rather than individualistic mementos of a place. In addition to this, Morrison’s images reveal the influence of Japanese and Chinese art. The non-perspectival space of Chinese composition and the use of aerial perspective had influenced modernist European photographic practice since the turn of the century, with the increase of European travel to Asia. This is a further legacy of exchange that Jubelin makes the viewer aware of in the installation.

Once the viewer interprets the petit-point renditions of Morrison’s photographs against the grid of Chinese cash coins, the purses and cigarette holders, further associations with travel, trade, collecting and souveniring come into play. The cash coins used in the Palmer River gold field region in Queensland quite literally denote a monetary system of exchange used by Chinese communities, but more figuratively draw attention to the migration of Chinese to Australia in the nineteenth century, to the establishment of Chinese communities and their cultural and economic segregation from Australian society at the time.

158

The items collected in the nineteenth century by Australian woman Mrs Christian Rowe Thornett are more nebulous in origin. Thornett may have bought them for use in her own wardrobe; they could be souvenirs; or she may have bought them as examples of Chinese dress design and textile production, envisaging them as part of a broader scheme of collection. Each has subtle but distinct sets of meaning. Certainly, Jubelin’s use of these objects casts questions about the travel of this Australian woman to China at this time, a time when travel was largely (almost exclusively) a masculine pursuit.

Jubelin’s approach strategically set out to thicken the debate around orientalism at this time in the late eighties, via a specific analysis of particular collections in the Powerhouse, in combination with her renditions of Morrison’s photographs. She made clear the importance of the physical layout of the installation in achieving this in an interview with the author. In discussing her criticism of the framing of Morrison’s work within a particular publication on orientalism, she commented,

I was conscious of …the way the objects are laid down in the case…and a layering that happens in terms of a deepening or a more complex way of looking at the situation…So its like trying to build a case, in one small surface area – at this point I was talking very much about the notion of writing, the notion of writing an essay. For me it’s like writing an essay, but in three dimensions. So it’s taking up critical discourse that’s being chewed over at that point in time, but attempting to thicken it.37

Pamela Zeplin observed this essay-like quality to Jubelin’s practice in an interview with Timothy Morrell in 1988, curator of an exhibition of the work of Narelle Jubelin and Paul Saint at the College Gallery in the South Australian School of Art. She titled the interview, “Language, not just pictures…” but she does not discuss this aspect to Jubelin’s work in the interview.38

Legacies of Travel and Trade explores a number of types of ‘transaction’: the transactions of collecting and cash exchange, and a transaction between East and West. Further, the mediation Jubelin makes of Morrison’s photographs through her

37 Ibid. 38 Pamela Zeplin, "Language, not just pictures..." Broadsheet.Summer (1988): p. 9. 159 petit points is transactional. Jubelin translates Morrison’s photographs into another format, and in this process alters their meaning and reception. The installation also instigated a complex and fraught transaction between the artist and the museum.

Jubelin proposed to produce a work that “worked across traditional museum collecting areas and explored the concept of ‘transactional history’, that is, the particular circumstances that have brought objects into the museum context.”39 In a submission to the Board of Trustees for the commissioning of Jubelin, the curators cited transactional history as a motivating principle for the commission. Transactional history had been theorised by Brian Durrans in 1988 as a method for enlarging visitors’ perceptions of particular objects and collections.40 In 1989, this represented an innovative approach to museology, and was at the forefront of theoretical thinking and new modes of practice within museums.

It was perhaps too innovative for the Powerhouse Museum at this particular moment, although it was not the concept of transactional history that was criticised directly by elements within the museum, but the implications of transactional history. The transactional and cross-disciplinary nature of Legacies of Travel and Trade meant that Jubelin worked across disciplines and collection areas in a highly collaborative fashion. This proved to be a challenge for elements within the institution because it made Jubelin’s involvement with the institution more difficult to classify. For Jubelin however, this oblique passage through the museum enabled a potentially more radical engagement with the collections and museum displays because she was not limited to one particular area.

The director of the Powerhouse, Terrence Measham, had to submit the papers proposing Jubelin’s commission twice to the Board of Trustees, before the commission was accepted. The resubmission papers went into considerable detail justifying the philosophy behind the commission and Jubelin’s approach to the installation and pedigree as an artist. In a letter prompted by the lengthy approval

39 Claire Roberts, "Legacies of Travel and Trade," Decorative Arts and Design from the Powerhouse Museum, exh. cat. Powerhouse Museum. Haymarket, Sydney, Powerhouse Publishing, 1991. p. 178. 40 Brian Durrans, "The future of the other: changing cultures on display in ethnographic museums," The Museum time-machine: putting cultures on display ed. Robert Lumley (London: Routledge, 1988). pp. 144-169. 160 process for the installation, Jo Holder, the Director of Jubelin’s representative gallery, Mori Gallery remarked,

We understand that the submission occasioned certain debate amidst Trustees…Legacies is an unusual undertaking for an Australian museum. To my knowledge no commission has ever involved so much intellectual and curatorial activity and exchange between an artist and exceptionally well trained and experienced museum curators…I think it is ironic that a project examining museum collecting and presentation practices should preempt (sic) such philosophical questioning on museum acquisition and collection presentation policy. I wonder does this make the project successful after all!41

Legacies of Travel and Trade uncovered and escalated a split within the Board of Trustees. The debate amongst Trustees centred on two issues. The first was to do with disagreement about Jubelin’s selected subject: the collections relating to Asian- Australian relations, and how this related to discussions about the museum’s policy – because, at the time of Jubelin’s commission the museum was considering deaccessioning objects from the Asian collections. I will discuss this in greater detail shortly. Unfortunately, there is little available documentary evidence that details the precise dimensions and protagonists of this debate. When I interviewed Ann Stephen, the curator who commissioned Jubelin, she noted that the whole incident was so distressing for Jubelin, because of the debate within the institution that her work caused, that Stephen felt sure Jubelin would never want to work within a museum again.42 Jubelin herself also commented to the author the extent to which the work caused debate within the Trustees.43 The second issue raised by the commission concerned the definition of Jubelin’s practice as craft or art.

Jubelin’s methodological approach to the collections was interventional in nature, because her consideration of current museological issues within the Powerhouse caused institutional disturbance. The installation addressed the limited representation of China and Chinese cultural relations with Australia in the Powerhouse collection. Jubelin demonstrated that a wholly European vision of ‘China’ existed in the

41 Letter from Jo Holder, Director of Mori Gallery, to John Sexton of John Sexton Productions, dated 12 October 1990, copy on file in Powerhouse Museum. 42 Ann Stephen, Interview with the author by telephone, 26 October 2000. 43 Narelle Jubelin, Interview with the author, 4 Dec 2000, Madrid. 161 collections of the Powerhouse, formed by European taste and perspective. The cash coins form the visual and structural base to the installation, whereby this real experience and history of Chinese communities in Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries vies against a quixotic image of China displayed in the majority of collections in the Powerhouse relating to China. Jubelin commented in an interview with the author that she selected the cash coins in part because they were from “a region that was renowned, in contemporary history, for the brutality of the massacres against the Chinese community. So that was laid as the base ground, almost as the given, then you build a contemporary critique on top.”44

As discussed, Jubelin’s focus on the Asian collections in the Powerhouse was partially in response to the disjunction between the museum’s new location in Haymarket, adjacent to Chinatown, and the lack of representation of the Chinese-Australian experience in the museum. Jubelin’s perception hit the mark. Unbeknownst to Jubelin, her interest in reassessing the way the museum represented China intersected directly with an ongoing debate within the Museum’s Board of Trustees. Members of the Trustees had been arguing for the deaccessioning of the museum’s Asian collections, because of their perceived irrelevance to Australia.45 Jubelin’s installation escalated this debate. A direct outcome of Legacies of Travel and Trade was the shoring up of collections relating to Asia-Australian relations, and the donation and accessioning of Morrison’s photographs. Morrison’s husband gave the Powerhouse an extensive collection of Morrison’s photographs after she has died, as a consequence of Jubelin’s

44 Ibid. 45 According to Ann Stephen in a telephone interview with the author, 26 October 2000. Stephen observed in an article, “In retrospect it is clear that we... approached Jubelin at a moment of hiatus in official culture: between the rhetoric of 1988 nationalism and prior to the major policy shift to Asia.” Ann Stephen, "Losers, Weepers: Narelle Jubelin's Museum Work," Past Present: The National Women's Art Anthology eds. Jo Holder and Joan Kerr (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1999). p. 104. This implies that the shift in policy towards Asia that came with the Keating Labour government influenced the collecting policies of the Powerhouse Museum. Narelle Jubelin commented in an interview with me, “…Claire (Roberts) was actually trying to secure an exhibition of Hedda’s work in the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (Powerhouse Museum), and she was unable to do so…when Hedda died, she donated a great deal of her photographs to the Powerhouse Museum, through Claire, and later Claire was able to work up an exhibition…part of the consequence, part of the moment of the particular commission, there was actually a split that became evident during the commission process that, there were actually people within the Board of Trustees that wanted to deaccession the Asian material, because they didn’t think it was relevant within that particular collection. So the commission ended up being very difficult because it fell right into the middle of a debate that was happening with the people that were making collecting choices at that particular point in the museum. So on the one hand, Claire was unable to get the exhibition up and running, but later, through changes of people involved, or through a change in thinking, she ended up re-exhibiting this again (Jubelin’s installation) in the context of the Hedda Morrison show.” Narelle Jubelin, Interview with the author, 4 Dec 2000, Madrid. 162 and Robert’s interest in her work. Subsequently, the Powerhouse has staged an important exhibition about Morrison’s work.46 However, this was only after a significant shift in policy and thinking.

The second factor, which caused institutional disturbance within the Powerhouse, centred on the classification of Jubelin’s installation itself that had implications for the context of its display and reception with the museum. Jubelin worked across museum departments, partly within the Department of Australian Contemporary Decorative Arts, and partially with the Department of Industrial and Domestic Life and Department of Asian Art. Elements within the institution had great difficulty with the classification of the installation. Was it craft or art? Was it museum display or art installation? In their resubmission to the Trust, the curators addressed the question of whether or not Jubelin is a fine artist or a designer/maker.47 The curators argued that Jubelin’s pieces “are more than purely “decorative” or purely “functional”; they carry meaning.”48

That this was a point of discussion shows that the museum felt the interventional and challenging nature of Jubelin’s choice of medium of petit point embroidery as a medium for art practice at this time. Stephen stated in an interview with the author that the director, Terrence Measham, objected to the commission, because he “didn’t appreciate or respond to what Narelle was doing.” Stephen explained that paradoxically this was because he was from a traditional art museum background, and Jubelin’s practice did not comply with his conception of art.49 However, Stephen believes that ultimately this confusion enabled the installation to slip through between disciplines of social history and decorative arts and between definitions of craft and art, as it did not conform to the commonly understood and classic characteristics of art.50 This, Stephen suggested, enabled the installation to be more radical,

46 In her view: the photographs of Hedda Morrison in China and Sarawak in 1933-67. exh. cat. Powerhouse Museum. Sydney, 1993. 47Judtih O’Callaghan and Jennifer Sanders “Resubmission to Trust Commission/Acquisition Proposal: ‘Legacies’ by Narelle Jubelin, Sydney 1990” for Board of Trustees Meeting No. 419: 18 October 1990. Powerhouse Museum Internal Document. 48 Ibid. 49 Ann Stephen, Interview with the author, 9 July 2001, Sydney. 50 Ibid. 163 interpretative and interventional.51 Though it was radical and interventional within the context of the museum, this was not necessarily evident to those outside of the inner circle – those involved with Jubelin’s commission. To museum visitors, the interventional nature of the work was not evident.

The problem of its definition as either contemporary craft, art installation or museum display had implications for the display context of the piece. Jubelin and Stephen had initially conceived the installation as a permanent display in the museum located independently from, but adjacent to, a permanent exhibition in the museum dealing with the history of migration to Australia.52 In this context, the installation functions between the categories of art installation and museum display quite comfortably. Jubelin was so concerned with the context of her installation’s display that she specified in the agreement for the commission a special condition that, the artist,

be consulted, within her lifetime, if and when this work is subsequently considered for exhibition outside its initial terms of display, (and that) should the artist decide that such a display alters the initial frame of reference of the Powerhouse commission, she reserves the right to veto such display.53

Jubelin’s awareness of the installation’s potential power had been heightened. Although not explicitly site-specific, the work relies on display context to fully comprehend particular interpretations.

A short time after the work’s installation Terence Measham requested that Legacies of Travel and Trade be moved to what he understood as a more meaningful context for the work to be seen: the contemporary craft gallery, and the exhibition A Free Hand. For him, the work was a contemporary craft piece. Stephen argued that in this display, “its susceptibility to context plunged it into incomprehension... (the) installation loses its reason when cast as an object of contemporary ‘style.’”54

51 Ibid. 52 Ann Stephen, "Losers, Weepers: Narelle Jubelin's Museum Work," Past Present: The National Women's Art Anthology eds. Jo Holder and Joan Kerr (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1999). p. 105. 53 Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences Agreement for the Commission of A Mixed-Media Installation, 1 November 1990. Powerhouse Museum. 54 Ann Stephen, "Losers, Weepers: Narelle Jubelin's Museum Work," Past Present: The National Women's Art Anthology eds. Jo Holder and Joan Kerr (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1999). p. 105. 164

In May 1991, Jubelin expressed great concern about the display of Legacies of Travel and Trade in this context. In an interview with the author, Jubelin discussed the problems with the interpretation of her work within the context of contemporary craft. She commented,

I was very happy to do the commission as long as it wasn’t put into what I used to call the “craft pit” - this area that was used for contemporary craft practice. And they (the museum) agreed. And we actually set up a situation where I was working for a very specific location in the museum. The work was specifically outside of that particular collection area (contemporary craft), and there was this space that we were working to that was between the social history area and the decorative arts…so we’d actually set up an agreement that whenever the work was installed or changed its location, they would contact me to talk about it. At that point in time, I was trying to make an argument for working specifically within the contexts of a collection, and they are very hard arguments to stick to. Something like three days after the installation was done, they had to contact me saying that the director wanted it moved into the craft pit because for him, it was a more appropriate context for the work to be seen.55

An internal memorandum about the location of the work documented Jubelin’s concern. The senior curator in the Department of Australian Decorative Arts and Design Post 1945, Judith O’Callaghan, requested in this memo that the installation be removed from this display because Jubelin “is extremely unhappy about the work being situated within this context” and because “the location of ‘Legacies’ in ‘A Free Hand’ was to be a temporary measure. It was understood that the work would return to the location originally selected by the artist, curators and design staff.” Furthermore, O’Callaghan argued that, “the present location of ‘Legacies’ is also problematic from a curatorial point of view as it interrupts the storyline of ‘A Free Hand’ and does not sit happily in that context.”56 The work was removed from this context and was subsequently displayed in an exhibition on Hedda Morrison in 1993.

Jubelin however was aware that her work, which on the surface, is “a particularly classic looking highly aesthetic object, is actually a very subversive object within a

55 Narelle Jubelin, Interview with the author, 4 Dec 2000, Madrid. 56 Judith O’Callaghan, Memorandum to Jennifer Sanders, “Location of Narelle Jubelin work”, 1 May 1991. Powerhouse Museum Internal Document. 165 particular collection, within a particular point of time.” However, the curators Jubelin worked with were “astutely aware if not more aware than me, of the negotiations that you have to make within a collection, and particularly when you understand that what you are dealing with is an internal politic.”57

On a more pragmatic level, the logistics of actually exhibiting the objects in the way that Jubelin wanted raised certain dilemmas between the artist and the museum. Jubelin recounted that the very physical substance of the objects she was using determined how she could display them. Jubelin consulted the museum conservators about placing certain objects on particular fabrics and whether or not this would damage the objects. She commented in an interview with the author that “everything that is in the case is dealt with in its material terms, like what happens with this metal when the metal is attached to the back and it is placed on the silk that we decided to put as the base beneath the coins without damaging either the coin or the frame of the piece that I introduced.”

Similarly, Jubelin found herself involved in an institutional discussion about the labelling for the installation. She commented during the interview,

In terms of accrediting the work, everything was noted. The label that we made, instead of using the label from the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (the Powerhouse Museum) we actually made a label…once you get involved with the museological field, the plot thickens, always, because you have to deal with conservators, you have to deal …with the language that can be used… the point size of text is very specific. I was always saying, in the Powerhouse everything to me looks like baby- writing, all the point sizes are very large, and there is always a very important discussion about legibility, and the way in which any person can enter a display. So in terms of ethics, you are swimming through a whole lot of stuff.

In 1989, the Powerhouse Museum was undergoing transition. Curatorially, it was beginning to embrace more experimental exhibition practices, such as the commissioning of Jubelin. These practices advocated for and encouraged greater access to and interpretation of its collections. However, the opening of the museum in

57 Narelle Jubelin, Interview with the author, 4 Dec 2000, Madrid. 166 the bicentennial year as a newly revised and modern institution reflected the rhetoric of national identity and inherently conservative modes of exhibition display. Legacies of Travel and Trade broached sensitive issues within the Powerhouse, creating institutional debate and confusion because of the way it contested myths of national identity. To many within the museum, it was not easily classifiable, justifiably because the work did not conform to the museum’s existing structure. This is largely because the curators gave Jubelin free agency to formulate her response to the collections and construct a work that actively intervened with museological processes. Further, it crossed borders between art installation and museum display, it could be, and is, either, depending on the context of its display. Ultimately, Jubelin remarked in the interview, as an artist she was given licence to work temporarily “self-consciously and self-critically from the inside” and this position was driven by the curators Jubelin worked closely with. Jubelin remarked, that the curators “knew exactly what I can potentially do. I can do stuff that they might take longer to do or they do it in a different way, because they have to negotiate the hierarchy of the museum in a different way.”

After her experience with the Powerhouse, Jubelin may not have wanted to continue her role as an artist revising the museum. She recognised that while it was a unique opportunity to intervene directly with public collections and therefore enact an inherently politicised and reflexive discussion within an institution, there were clear limitations to the position as well. She commented during an interview with the author, “If you were working in an institution over time, they get to you. You have to comply, you have to work in a particular way.” She suggests that interventions by artists eventually become codified as a contemporary style, and ineffective. Hence Jubelin’s experience at the Powerhouse arguably provoked a shift in her practice away from the institutional and towards the marginal.

Convergence: art installation as museum exhibit

Following Jubelin’s commission for the Powerhouse, the layout of her installations had a distinctively museological appearance. She similarly continued to investigate the provenance of objects and combine petit point embroidery with actual objects, however outside of the framework of an institutional collection. 167

Trade Delivers People (1990) had heightened her profile and exposure as an artist representing Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1990.58 She made this work at the same time as her involvement with the Powerhouse for Legacies of Travel and Trade. The two installations are therefore closely related.59

Although not dealing with an institutional collection, Jubelin examined a different type of institution in Trade Delivers People: the Venice Biennale and international survey exhibitions. Jubelin specifically explored the connections between international survey exhibitions and an emerging debate over the interpretation of so- called primitive artefacts within global art markets and art museums that was in response to two exhibitions, Magicians de la Terre at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (1989) and Primitivism in 20th Century Art. Affinity of the Tribal and Modern Objects at MOMA in New York (1984). These exhibitions generated considerable attention and discussion regarding the museological treatment of so-called ‘primitive’ artefacts.60 Jubelin was not alone in addressing the issues raised by the exhibition, especially the display and museological reception for primitive artefacts. However, she may well have been the first to deal with the exhibition in the context of art practice.

The installation consisted of twelve pieces, a combination of Jubelin’s petit point embroideries, framed in early twentieth century tramp art frames and metal frames,

58 Trade Delivers People is perhaps Jubelin’s most well known work, because it was exhibited at the Venice Biennale. It has been written about more frequently than any of her other installations. For detailed discussion of Trade Delivers People refer to, Charles Green, "Narelle Jubelin: Colonial Culture and Canonical Texts," Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970 - 1994 (Melbourne: Craftsman House, 1995). pp. 134-138; Diane Losche, "Subtle Tension in the work of Narelle Jubelin," Art and Australia 29.4 (1992): p. 463.; Bronwyn Hanna, "Marco Polo's Shadow," Contemporary Arts and Crafts.2 (1990): p. 21; Jennifer Stevenson, "Art Trade," Vogue Australia May 1990: 143-146; Jan Avgikos, "Other relations: the dangers of tourism," Artscribe.Sept-Oct (1990): pp. 68-71. 59 Jubelin commented, “The invitation to do Legacies of Travel and Trade came at the same time as I was working on Trade Delivers People. And in fact I delayed doing that because the invitation came to make the work for Venice. And so it was a very strong relationship (between the two works).” Narelle Jubelin, Interview with author, 4 Dec 2000, Madrid. 60 For discussion about these exhibitions, especially Magiciens de la terre see Benjamin Buchloh, "The Whole Earth Show," Art in America 77.5 (1989): pp. 150-159, 211, 213.; Eleanor Heartney, "The Whole Earth Show Part 11," Art in America 77.July (1989): pp. 90-97. In her catalogue essay on Trade Delivers People Vivien Johnson commented, “That exhibition (Primitivism in 20th Century Art), whose images and concepts continue to circulate widely in catalogue form, relied on banal formalism to present its imperialistic version of universal human affinity.” Vivien Johnson, "People Deliver Art," Narelle Jubelin: Trade Delivers People, exh. cat. Aperto La Biennale di Venezia. Venice, The Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council, 1990. n.pag. 168 and objects that the artist had purchased. A list of works that accompanies the installation provides details of each item, including a description of the object, where and when Jubelin produced or purchased the item and the measurements of each item. Jubelin arranged the group with a distinctly museological approach, hung along a wall with particular objects clustered together, forming contextual groups for their interpretation. Each piece in the installation gathers meaning from its surrounding context; each is ‘read’ against another object (see Figures 3.10-3.13).

The ‘first’ item in Trade Delivers People is a petit point self-portrait. It shows Jubelin’s profile in dark cotton, turned toward the rest of the installation. This implicates Jubelin, as a contemporary artist, within global art markets. Her ‘product’ and ‘profile’ as an artist is in a system of circulation and exchange just as ethnographic objects are. Not only this but, as Vivien Johnson suggested in her catalogue essay for the installation, Jubelin’s “silhouette belies the diffusion of the artist’s sensibility into the work – for the colonialist psyche whose fetishes are de- constructed here is her own.”61 Jubelin commented,

There was a very conscious citing of myself within the whole system of trade, imperialism, trafficking of images, objects, etc. I was cited as part of the reference that I was developing, but knowing at the same time that within the context of that particular exhibition everyone was identified by their nation. There would be ambiguity as to whether I was black or white.62

In the context of her installation, which examined in particular the trafficking of ethnographic objects around notions of the exotic, the ambiguity surrounding the artists’ racial origin was strategic.

Adjacent to the self-portrait is an African mask that Jubelin identified as originating from the Puma region. This mask, decorated with British coins, connotes imperial trade and collecting practices and the value now placed on such objects as primitive artefacts in global art markets.63 Jubelin incorporated another two African masks in Trade Delivers People interspersed between renditions of objects in institutional

61 Ibid. 62Narelle Jubelin, Interview with the author, 4 Dec 2000, Madrid. 63 The artist purchased these masks from primitive art dealers in New York and Sydney. 169 collections. The careful placement of each mask, next to petit points with corresponding forms and evocative symbolic associations, ensures that the viewer interprets them in a very particular way, in context. By doing this, Jubelin referred to a major problem faced by art museums in their displays of ethnographic objects as purely aesthetic items, without information about their social and cultural use.64

This was a key criticism of the exhibition held at MOMA in 1984 Primitivism in 20th Century Art. This exhibition drew simplistic formal correlations between so-called “primitive” objects and modern art, reducing the interpretation of the objects to purely aesthetic terms. Rather than providing information on the masks’ authentic cultural context – as was argued for in the debate surrounding Primitivism - Jubelin draws attention to their reception and circulation in global art markets, and the imperial history of such a trade. Although Jubelin refused to treat them in purely aesthetic and formal terms, the formal and aesthetic qualities of each item in Trade Delivers People is crucially important to Jubelin’s methodology.65 She juxtaposed and orchestrated visual correspondences between the items on display that in turn facilitated particular interpretations and associations.

For example, an antique Venetian glass necklace constructed of Venetian glass trading beads, African silver and amber beads and a bone pendant, references trading practices between Venice and Africa. But in relation to the petit point rendition of Australian modernist printmaker Margaret Preston’s 1946 print Boomerang and Flower it takes on a deeper set of associations.66 Preston depicted a stylised image of a

64 Art historians and museologists have debated this issue. James Clifford’s critique of the exhibition Primitivism pointed out the shifting value systems around the objects in the exhibition, from curiosities, to ethnographic specimens and now art creations. Clifford argued that the exhibition reveals modernism’s “taste for appropriating or redeeming otherness, for constituting non-Western arts in its own image, for discovering universal, ahistorical “human” capacities.” (p. 193) Clifford showed how the exhibition excludes difference within the categories of “tribal” and “modern”. Indeed those cast within the category of “tribal” are done so in vague, ahistorical and purely aesthetic terms. James Clifford, "Histories of the Tribal and the Modern," The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). pp. 189-215. 65 Vivien Johnson observed the same in her catalogue essay on Trade Delivers People when she wrote, “Narelle Jubelin is not above using simple formal relationships to lure the viewer’s eye further along the sequence of objects, but the mode of her incorporation of tribal artefacts sets an agenda whose parameters lie well outside a narrowly aesthetic approach. They are reduced, not to their aesthetic properties, but to the status of anonymous signifiers of the “Primitive Art” trade as symptom and accompaniment of colonialism.” Vivien Johnson, "People Deliver Art," Narelle Jubelin: Trade Delivers People, exh. cat. Aperto La Biennale di Venezia. Venice, The Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council, 1990. n.pag. 66 Jubelin purchased the necklace in Venice in 1990. 170 boomerang enveloping a native flower. Jubelin’s petit point rendition is framed in a metal frame decorated with Australian coins, all but one with an image of the kangaroo visible. One however shows the image of King George, looking across from the position of the far right corner. Formally, Preston’s image is a reverse echo of the Venetian necklace, which forms an arc opposite to the boomerang. The pattern of the native flower petals in Preston’s image corresponds with the size and repetition of glass trading beads in the Venetian necklace.

However, the two items reflect a more complex interrelationship, aside from this compositional and aesthetic relationship. Preston advocated for the appropriation of Aboriginal designs and forms in Australian art, as well as the depiction of the country’s native flora and fauna. She argued that in order to form a distinct national style of art, artists should draw upon our distinct indigenous forms. Preston’s position may reveal, as Ian McLean argues more broadly in relation to Australian visual art, “the scar of antipodality – of having an identity founded in negativity rather than positivity – in migration rather than indigeneity” which would lead Preston to search for and appropriate indigeneity.67 However, this disregards the cultural context of Aboriginal design motifs, and their cultural use. The Venetian necklace composed of trading beads and African amber and silver beads and a bone pendant similarly extracts these items from their original context. The necklace translates these items into high fashion. Johnson points out that the trading beads were once worthless “used to ‘appease the natives’”, and now have returned “like the repressed to hang on the necks of European society women – or the walls of Venetian art galleries, to suggest the process by which objects circulate through trade cycles accruing value.”68 This correlates with the new value Preston saw in Aboriginal motifs and artefacts, and the search for ‘authenticity’ in fashion.

Trade Delivers People astutely examined the context of international art exhibitions, the ironies of the Venice Biennale itself, and slippages between the contextual interpretations of ethnographic objects and her own petit point renditions. Jubelin’s

67 Ian McLean, White Aborigines: Identity Politics in Australian Art (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1998). p. 7. 68 Vivien Johnson, "People Deliver Art," Narelle Jubelin: Trade Delivers People, exh. cat. Aperto La Biennale di Venezia. Venice, The Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council, 1990. n.pag. 171 methodology relied on a museological layout of juxtaposition and arrangement, which the visual and formal associations between items then subverted by incisive commentary about conquest and colonisation. This was however, a didactic installation, and has a raw and unsophisticated quality because of this.69 It is not as supple and imaginative and does not allow the objects to ‘speak’, or the viewer to ‘read’, in the way that Legacies of Travel and Trade does.

Jubelin made subsequent versions of Trade Delivers People. Trade Delivers People II (1990-93) combined some of the original version of the installation, new petit point renditions and items from the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) collection. This installation originated from an invitation made by James Mollison, the then director of the NGV. The NGV owned several items from the original Trade Delivers People. Mollison wanted Jubelin to build up the installation, using objects from the collection and new petit point renditions, because the gallery was unable to purchase the complete original installation of Trade Delivers People as the private collectors who owned the other components did not want to sell their items. Jubelin however expressed hesitation in working within another institution.70 However, she agreed to it because of her respect for James Mollison. In her view Mollison is “a person that every time he’s reinstalled a collection of Australian art he’s rewritten Australian art history.”71 This interest in Mollison’s interpretation of Australian art convinced Jubelin to develop the work around the NGV collection.

Jubelin’s institutional passage was relatively smooth for the development of Trade Delivers People II. She confessed in a letter to the NGV that during her two mornings selecting objects from the collection for the installation she felt like a “bull in a china

69 Charles Green has observed this didactic quality to the installation. However, he interpreted its didacticism in a different way. He discussed the qualities of resonance and wonder, which he argued that the installation invokes because of Jubelin’s attention to detail and the sense of preciousness. Green wrote that Jubelin “framed these sensations for the viewer through the apparatus of didactic museological arrangements and carefully chosen references to local traditions that valued these elements of beauty, intricacy and preciousness.” Charles Green, "Narelle Jubelin: Colonial Culture and Canonical Texts," Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970 - 1994 (Melbourne: Craftsman House, 1995). p. 147. 70 In an interview with the author Jubelin remarked, “When I was invited to do the work, and he (James Mollison) said– quite specifically – you can work with material that we have in the collection. I thought – oh god, here we go.” Narelle Jubelin, Interview with the author, 4 Dec 2000, Madrid. 71 Ibid. 172 shop.”72 The objects Jubelin selected were four predynastic Egyptian pots c 3330- 3000 BC that were excavated by Sir William Flinders Petrie in 1889, grandson of Matthew Flinders (an early navigator of the Australian coast, famous for circumnavigating Australia in HMS Investigator from 1801 to 1803), and were given to the NGV by the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1899. She selected these for formal and compositional reasons; they were similar in shape to the masks that she had used in the first version. Jubelin also noted that the NGV had never displayed them. She wanted to bring them out of storage. Moreover, the pots implied notions of travel and trade. They were used in pre-dynastic graves and signified trade with the underworld and eternity – they functioned as emblems of bartering for a smooth passage to the afterlife. Jubelin was also interested in their discovery by archaeologists, and subsequent travel to the collection of the NGV, via colonial routes.

Much of the debate that occurred over her selection of these objects within the institution centred on the practicalities of their installation and conservation requirements. The curator for the Antiquities collections, Margaret Legge, preferred to display the pots in a case, because there would be less chance of damage to the objects while displayed.73 But Jubelin argued that she must display them as they were in storage, supported by a wire at their base, for the success of her installation. Because Jubelin had the full support of the director, she gained permission to display them like this, as if they were in storage. However Jubelin commented,

When you are working in terms of museums – you enter to a degree but you’re always like a feral object within there, because you have respect to a certain degree but not a commitment that comes through education, your education was formed elsewhere.74

Jubelin’s use of the pre-dynastic Egyptian pots as part of the piece has caused difficulties in the cataloguing of the work. Jennifer Phipps, who assisted Jubelin in selecting the objects and coordinated her involvement with the gallery, explained that the pots are still not listed as part of the piece on the collection catalogue, though they

72 Narelle Jubelin, Letter to John McPhee, Co-ordinating Curator of Australian Art, n.d., Jubelin Artist File, Internal Artist Files, National Gallery of Victoria. 73 Narelle Jubelin, Interview with the author, 4 Dec 2000, Madrid. 74 Ibid. 173 should be.75 This underlines the fact that an artist’s use of objects from the collection in an installation is still uncommon, and the institution has not yet developed appropriate cataloguing systems for such installations.

In Trade Delivers People II Jubelin created petit point renditions of a bookplate from Richard Haese’s Rebels and Precursors, published in 1981, and a contents page from The Art Bulletin of Victoria 1967-68, another self portrait and a rendition of a Tiwi hand hemmed mission cloth. The installation included the rendition of a tortoise shell engraved with a partially complete map of Australia that had been the final item in the first version of Trade Delivers People. Jubelin remarked that the reason why she had selected this was because it was the first image that the viewer saw in James Mollison’s final rehang of the Australian collections at the National Gallery of Australia.76 This provided a significant link back to the context of the NGV, under James Mollison’s direction.

Trade Delivers People II explores the margins of culture: things forgotten (the Egyptian vases in the NGV collection), marginalised (Tiwi hand-hemmed mission cloth rendition), archived (the rendition of the 1960s Art Bulletin of Victoria), and cites important examples of revisionist art history (Mollison’s re-hang of Australian collections, Richard Haese’s publication), which she herself is attempting (evidenced in the self portrait). Charles Green points out in his analysis of Jubelin’s work generally, but specifically of Trade Delivers People that the artist deconstructs the canon, and recasts the marginal. For Green, Jubelin destabilises the canon through her own research into what lies just outside of the canon.77 However, it is not only through her analysis of the marginal that Jubelin destabilises the canon. As has been illustrated in this chapter, Jubelin’s installations use the format of a museological display (but not the format in which some curators of the museum would prefer to display the objects – Margaret Legge would have preferred to see the items from the Antiquities collections displayed in a glass case, not as they were in storage), spatial arrangement and visual juxtaposition. These methods are more accurately how Jubelin develops an

75 Jennifer Phipps, Email correspondence with the author, 21 May 2004. 76 Narelle Jubelin, Interview with the author, 4 Dec 2000, Madrid. 77 Charles Green, "Narelle Jubelin: Colonial Culture and Canonical Texts," Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970 - 1994 (Melbourne: Craftsman House, 1995). pp. 134-138. 174 unorthodox interpretation of objects. It is through their ‘dialogue’ between and across one another that Jubelin builds an alterative interpretation.

Mieke Bal has argued that the new museology has relevance to the art museum precisely because of its capacity to review and contest the canons of art history and because art exhibitions are indeed a type of discourse that requires analysis.78 Exhibitions, Bal argues, can be analysed using the tools of literary theory. Exhibitions produce narrative; make use of metaphor, metonym, synecdoche, rhetoric and allegory. Bal suggests that the new museology should bring these tools to its analysis of the art museum as it constructs art history through spatial and narrative means. According to Bal, it is through an exhibition’s design and spatial layout that the museum asserts a particular narrative about history. Jubelin is implicitly aware of this. Her installations demonstrate a convergence between art installation and exhibition design, not only spatially or compositionally, but where the viewer reads both art installation and exhibition design, as narrative. Jubelin arguably brings the new museology to the context of contemporary art installation, by analysing and exploiting the narrative produced through exhibition design within her art installation.

Narrative and Revisionist History in Dead Slow (1992) and Soft Shoulder (1994)

Jessica Bradley observed in 1997,

Working slowly and cumulatively, Jubelin links objects as narratives while making specific reference to the historical, cultural and geographic heritage of the places for which her projects are created. Her attention to methods of display and her implicit critique of the arbitrariness of exhibiting conventions constituted a timely awareness of the contexts within which the concerns of her work are interpreted.79

This is a fitting introduction to the use of narrative, space and history in Jubelin’s practice. Jubelin’s involvement in the Venice Biennale of 1990 led to international

78 Mieke Bal, "The Discourse of the Museum," Thinking about Exhibitions eds. Ressa Greenberg, et al. (London: Routlegde, 1996). pp. 201-218. Bruce W. Ferguson has also argued that art exhibitions are a discourse. Bruce W. Ferguson, "Exhibition Rhetorics: Material Speech and utter sense," Thinking about Exhibitions eds. Ressa Greenberg, et al. (London: Routledge, 1996). pp. 179-180. 79 a la vez Narelle Jubelin at the same time. exh. cat. Art Gallery of Ontario. Ontario, 1996. 175 opportunities. In 1991, Jubelin had the Australia Council Studio in Tokyo. During this period, over the hot Tokyo summer, she worked on several projects. Andrew Nairne, then the Director of the Centre for Contemporary Arts in , had invited her to produce an exhibition. She was also working towards a residency in Chicago at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, planned for 1994. The eventual works, Dead Slow (1992), made for Glasgow, and Soft Shoulder (1994), made for Chicago, are closely related.

Jubelin wrote to James Mollison from the Australia Council Studio in Tokyo in July 1991. 80 Jubelin had discovered that two high-back Rennie Mackintosh chairs were in a Scandinavian embassy in Tokyo. Intrigued by this, Jubelin began to piece together connections between three topics of research: Glasgow and Charles Rennie Mackintosh; Frank Lloyd Wright and Chicago; and their connections with Japanese design. The Rennie Mackintosh chairs provided an entry point for Jubelin’s research. She discovered that Rennie Mackintosh had first encountered Japanese building design at the Chicago World Fair in 1893. This interest in the influence of world fairs on design and architecture and the internationalism of modernism underpins Dead Slow.

Jubelin visited Glasgow to further develop her ideas for Dead Slow. Andrew Nairne employed a young artist, Mathew Coley, to show Jubelin around Glasgow. Jubelin explored Rennie Mackintosh’s work in Glasgow, and the Paisley fabric and textile industry, which had distributed fabric around the world and created enormous wealth for Glasgow in the nineteenth century. Jubelin always visits the local museums when creating a site-specific work. She noted,

I’d go to museums to see how the culture is represented by the institutions that are there, (this is) a very easy way in. And very consciously taking up an investigation that is founded in the notion of tourism… I was using the museum as the way in, beginning to look at the politics of display and representation in order to enter. 81

80 Narelle Jubelin, Letter to James Mollison, Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, n.d., received by the National Gallery of Victoria on 19 July 1991, Jubelin Artist File, Internal Artist Files, National Gallery of Victoria.Elsewhere she reported that her work was immeasurably slow, and that she had to resign herself to this slow process, which is in part why Jubelin used the title Dead Slow. 81 Narelle Jubelin, Interview with the author, 4 Dec 2000, Madrid. 176

Coley suggested that Jubelin visit the People’s Palace museum. This museum became a major source for Jubelin’s work Dead Slow. Jubelin remarked that this museum was,

really low grade in terms of museological hierarchy. A very popular museum. It’s basically one of those museums where anything the community thinks is of value, they give to the museum. The museum is, in its traditional sense, a keeping place. But the curatorial work that had been done on top of that was out of date, by the time I was there, which was ‘91. And so they were articulating the communists of Glasgow, or the trade union group. So there was a social history interpretation over a very scattered ramshackled collection. A very low-grade popularist, very very interesting collection.82

Dead Slow, the work Jubelin developed for the Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Arts, addressed concepts of museological display, imperialism, and the internationalism and geographic reach of modernist design. The spatial layout and design of the installation is central to the narrative that Jubelin develops. Set against a harled (roughcast with small gravel) wall, in reference to the roughcast walls of Mackintosh’s Hill House made for the Blackie family, the installation arranged and juxtaposed framed petit point renditions of May Day photographs in Glasgow and Wollongong; silver point annotations of Blackie & Sons published titles; c. 1900 Australian wood-chipped chairs; nine editions of Thérèse de Dillmont Encyclopedia of Needlework, seven nineteenth century Northern Indian hand-cut wooden printing blocks; petit-point renditions of woven cloth, one a Paisley shawl c. 1870 and another a Bathurst Island mission hemmed linen from 1974; and a petit point self portrait. The scale of the wall dwarfs each item, and requires the viewer to look closely, carefully and slowly in order to decipher the objects’ identity. Even then, one reviewer wrote, the viewer needs to consult the catalogue in order to find out the true nature of each object (see Figures 3.14- 3.17).83

The initial sense of illegibility, hastened by the small scale and on first glance obscure connections between each object, make comprehension dead slow. However, this is

82 Ibid. The People’s Palace was refurbished in 1998. 83 In a review of the exhibition, Paul Usherwood commented, “Since individual items were frequently tiny, intricate or faintly drawn, it was necessary to spend time peering at each one in turn and since none of them were labelled, it was necessary to spend further time consulting the catalogue.” Paul Usherwood, "Narelle Jubelin," Art Monthly Australia May-Jun (1992): p. 19. 177

Jubelin’s strategy to encourage and deepen an active interpretation in the viewer. In a distinct move away from the didacticism of Trade Delivers People, Dead Slow is so subtle as to instigate a degree of incomprehension in the viewer.84 The seduction of the technique of petit-point embroidery, the romanticism of old editions of books, and aesthetics of the textile patterns to which Jubelin refers, indeed the quality of each item as an inherently valuable artefact of culture, instils curiosity and wonder in the viewer. And it is curiosity and wonder, which drives the viewer on to keep looking, and keep unravelling the narrative, as they move from object to object.

In a sense, Jubelin requires the viewer to apply a type of disinterested gaze to the work. Involvement with the intricacy, delicateness and sheer object-ness of the items drives this disinterested gaze. One views the work, allowing associations and connections to simply rise up, out of an involvement with their materiality and subjective interpretation, rather then seeking to understand any didactic message or lesson within the work – because the work will simply not allow easy or quick understanding: it is dead slow. It functions imaginatively and through discursion. Through this process however, a narrative unravels.85

Reviewers commented that the work showed “rare sensitively to the country in which she is exhibiting…(creating) an exhibition of relevance and power”86 and that the work was “an immaculate and satisfying thing in itself, but also a small triumph of artistic archaeology.”87 The sense that Dead Slow was firstly, relevant to the community of Glasgow, and secondly, an innovative artistic interpretation of specific material culture, indicates the respect and high esteem Jubelin holds for her audience. Rather than exercising intellectual obscurity for the sake of clever connections, the artist draws upon the model of the museum as a keeping place, with community relevance, as she knows that seemingly ramshackled collections of objects are not necessarily without meaning. Her museum-like arrangement of objects is at once

84 Paul Usherwood also remarked in his review that “’Dead Slow’…seemed in no hurry to tell anybody anything; in fact it seemed intent on slowing down the process by which the viewer came to any kind of understanding.” Ibid. p.19. 85 Reviewer Andrew Renton commented in Flash Art, “The installation may be read from either side to another, or from the middle outwards. A history will emerge, but only one determined by the viewer, or participant, who comes to the work.” Andrew Renton, "Narelle Jubelin, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow.," Flash Art XXV.166 (1992): p. 102. 86 Murdo Macdonald. "Maximum from the minimal." The Scotsman 5 May 1992 sec. Arts. 87 W. Gordon Smith. "Visual Arts." Spectrum 10 May 1992 sec. Scotland on Sunday. 178 familiar to her Scottish audience, and foreign. She drew upon community iconography, which she understood to be part of the fabric of the Glaswegian identity, however, she translates this iconography into something of relevance to her, an Australian. Jubelin trusts that her audience will recognise the iconography, acknowledge the points of incomprehension in the installation, and continue looking and reading the installation in order to make sense of this narrative.

For example, Jubelin includes petit point renditions of photographs of May Day celebrations in Glasgow and Wollongong in the year 1937.88 Because the textile industry and the export of coal were particularly prominent in Glasgow, the trade union movement in Glasgow was especially strong. May Day was designated an international labour day by the International Socialist congress of 1889. It became an occasion for important political demonstrations and radical left-wing politics.89 Jubelin points to the connection between May Day celebrations in Glasgow, and in Wollongong. Like Glasgow, coal, clothing, and textile industries drove Wollongong. The trade unions were also extremely important to the community of Wollongong. Jubelin’s audience would have an implicit understanding and familiarity with trade union iconography because of its historical importance to the culture and community of Glasgow, a predominately working-class city. However, they may know nothing of Wollongong. Jubelin’s juxtaposition of similar events taking place in each city illustrates the internationalism of trade unions as a focal point for communities. The association of trade unions with dissent and radicalism is especially apt in the context of Jubelin’s installation, which practices dissent over the interpretation of apparently marginal, and value-less, material culture.90

Dead Slow also includes two wood-chipped high-backed hall chairs, c. 1900, from Sydney. On first glance, the design of the chairs is synonymous with the famous

88 The photograph of the Glasgow May Day photograph is from the People’s Palace. 89 Trade unions were also noted for their sympathy towards the suffragette movement. The particular photograph that Jubelin selected to render in petit point from the People’s Palace, depicted a banner for the United Socialist Movement, painted by artist and suffragette Jane Parkes. Ann Stephen, "Narelle Jubelin: Dead Slow," Narelle Jubelin: Dead Slow, exh. cat. Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow; Biennale of Sydney. 1992. n.pag. 90 Renton observed this as well, he commented, “Jubelin’s display is a devastating, physical, and exquisite accumulation of evidence regarding colonial marginalisation. The work does not seek to uncover hidden agendas, but rather observes cultural blind spots.” Andrew Renton, "Narelle Jubelin, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow.," Flash Art XXV.166 (1992): p. 102. 179 design of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s high-backed hall chairs. The logical interpretation is that these chairs are variant replicas of Mackintosh’s design, however, these chairs are relegated to the margins of design history, as fakes and of little worth because they are made by amateur wood-chippers. In fact, Jubelin makes the viewer aware, with two quotes in the catalogue, that firstly, wood-chipping in Australia was particularly popular with women around the turn of the century, and secondly, that Mackintosh was not alone in developing high-backed chairs, and similar designs were produced before Mackintosh’s now famous design.91 Jubelin challenges the mythology of Mackintosh, by revealing two chairs, showing classic arts and crafts movement design motifs, that are possibly made by Australian women amateurs, before Mackintosh’s famous chair.

Another component of Dead Slow presents nine editions of Thérèse de Dillmont’s Encyclopedia of Needlework on individual shelves coming out of the wall.92 This presentation in itself seems incongruous and humorous. Jubelin gravely offers to the viewer the little books on needlecraft that have been historically trivialised. The presentation of such an offering deepens the sense of gravitas. Closed and untouchable in this museological context, each occupying an especially crafted individual ledge, the books speak volumes. Receptacles of an undisclosed knowledge within the installation, Jubelin emphasises the seriousness of needlecraft and such a publication, in this method of presentation. The books also point to the internationalism of needlecraft and in particular, the global popularity and publication of Thérèse de Dillmont’s book. Jubelin’s narrative relating to different forms of labour and work argues an alternative concept of history. Reviewer Andrew Renton commented, that Dead Slow seems to suggest that culture,

and cultural attribution, is not static, but moves at a pace that is unobservable and, therefore, subversive…If Jubelin’s project attempts to find a way back to a mythical centre, or ‘home’, as we might wish to call

91 “There are hundreds of chippers today, and will soon be thousands. It finds its votaries chiefly amongst the ladies, although the sterner sex have been bitten by the craze.” The Australian Ironmonger Melbourne, July, 1889 Ann Stephen, "Narelle Jubelin: Dead Slow," Narelle Jubelin: Dead Slow, exh. cat. Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow; Biennale of Sydney. 1992. n.pag. 92 The provenance of each edition, detailed in the catalogue, contributes to the meaning of Dead Slow. In neat circularity, one edition is, “on loan from Diana Wood Conroy, and another inherited from her mother, Marion Carmont Wood from her maternal grandmother, Jessie Inglis Wylie Mackie, of Glasgow.” Ibid. 180

it, it is also certain that there can never be a fixed position from which to read the juxtapositions she has tentatively suggested. This appears to be no less than an ethics of displacement.93

History and culture, Jubelin argues, shift with interpretation. Moreover, as interpretations are infinitely subjective and infinite in scope, the representation of culture needs to engage with this multiplicity.94 Jubelin’s display is one possibility for such a representation.

Paul Usherwood was the only reviewer of Dead Slow to obliquely recognise this quality to the installation, and he did so when he observed the stark relation that Jubelin’s exhibition had to an exhibition next door put on by the McLellan Galleries entitled “Home of the Brave.” He noted,

Happy coincidence gave ‘Dead Slow’, Narelle Jubelin’s museum-like little parade of pictures and artefacts, its particular edge. Almost next door on Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street was an example of exactly the kind of exhibition which Jubelin seemed to be challenging. This was ‘Home of the Brave’ at the McLellan Galleries, a crowd-pulling, multi-million pound lament for everything that the White Man has done to the American Indian over the years…Jubelin’s installation is similar to ‘Home of the Brave’ in that it, too, was concerned with the relationship between those who have been written into history and those whose fate it is to be consigned to the margins. But there it parted company. In the first place, the effect of the presentation was entirely different. ‘Home of the Brave’ was one of those didactic time-tunnel-type exhibitions complete with cordless earphones, film shows, music and darkened rooms which are now increasingly fashionable in municipal galleries and museums. As such, its purpose was to direct the viewer speedily and efficiently to a satisfactory- seeming understanding…For a joyous moment (in Dead Slow) it seemed possible to resist the pat teleology of ‘Home of the Brave’s, brand of historical explanation.95

Closely related to Dead Slow, Soft Shoulder (1994-95) a work developed for Jubelin’s residency at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, explores history

93 Andrew Renton, "Narelle Jubelin, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow," Flash Art XXV.166 (1992): p. 102. 94 Jubelin commented, “ When I talk about research – it’s a consultative research…I make assumption about how they’re (her installations) are going to be read and of course they’re read in copious amounts of ways, different ways. But the more consultation you do the more that informs how you form your argument.” Narelle Jubelin, Interview with the author, 4 Dec 2000, Madrid. 95 Paul Usherwood, "Narelle Jubelin," Art Monthly Australia May-Jun (1992): p. 19. 181 and material culture in discursive and subjective terms.96 The format is similar, combining Jubelin’s own petit points and pencil transcriptions relating to specific cultural documents, and objects.97 Jubelin arranged items along a purpose-built grey cement shelf, running along both sides of a secondary gallery wall, at shoulder height. This implicit reference to the body of the viewer, as they move along, shoulder to the shelf, acknowledges the role of the viewer as interpreter and participant. This enables a far more intimate association with the viewer than in Dead Slow, which retained an important element of distance between the viewer and itself as a critique of museological display.

Indeed, Soft Shoulder explores specifically feminine intimacy on a number of fronts, couched within an aesthetic and cultural frame of reference of apparently masculine modernism. Included are pieces of a 1960s tea set of fine bone china, beautifully laid out on this incongruent hard and grey concrete shelf.98 Tea drinking is unavoidably associated with the domestic, interior and feminine.99 It is inherently bourgeois, a leisurely pursuit that can be practised, and indeed cultivated, to an art form by those with time. As well as these associations, a tea set conjures up conversation. This is a fitting analogy to the installation itself; the viewer is indeed entering a conversation with the artist and objects (see Figures 3.18-3.20).100

96 The original catalogue for Soft Shoulder in its first places of exhibition, The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago in 1994 and the Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, New York University in 1995, is in itself an extremely innovative catalogue publication. As well as a catalogue essay, it included a section that was “arranged by categories related to this installation, is offered as one guide to the reading of its associations and meanings.” Arranged under group headings, each with a series of sub- headings containing quotes and snippets of information, the main headings were wonderfully wide- ranging and included: Australia; Authenticity; Chicago Architecture; Cities; Concrete; Copper; Decorative Arts; Hearth; Shoulder; Women; Writing. Narelle Jubelin: Soft Shoulder. exh. cat. The Renaissance Society, The University of Chicago. Chicago, 1994. 97 Charles Green has argued that the objects in Jubelin’s installations refer to the original exhibitor of found objects, Marcel Duchamp. While this is an inevitable, and important, association, and certainly Green takes care to point out that “Jubelin converted Duchamp’s methods to the more heterogenous intellectual and feminist climate of the 1990s”, the conditions under which Jubelin employs her read- made objects are entirely different from Duchamp’s, so much so that, I would argue Jubelin’s objects need to be defined separately to Duchamp’s. Charles Green, "Narelle Jubelin: Colonial Culture and Canonical Texts," Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970 - 1994 (Melbourne: Craftsman House, 1995). p. 137. 98 The tea set was designed by Susie Cooper for Wedgwood. 99 As opposed to coffee drinking; this occurs in the public arena in cafes and therefore assumes qualities that are more masculine. 100 Indeed the artist is intimate with us when she reveals in the catalogue that the tea-set was received as a gift on December 24, 1989. Narelle Jubelin: Soft Shoulder. exh. cat. The Renaissance Society, The University of Chicago. Chicago, 1994. 182

Two pairs of tan, unworn, machine knitted, seamless stockings from 1930 also evoke intimate associations. Lying exposed on the shelf, the viewer can peer closely at the items of hosiery from another era. The stockings implicate the feminine, as an item for examination in the installation. Jubelin’s painstaking pencil onto gessoed Craftwood transcription of a set of letters from Anaïs Nin to David Pepperell, a Melbourne record shop owner and writer, stands in for the absent female body implicated by the stockings. The artist has arranged each intimate letter along the shelf, at eye view. However, two factors make reading these letters difficult. The first is the feint, almost illegible, pencil that Jubelin transcribed the letters in and the second is the elaborate display of cross writing employed by Anaïs Nin in her letter writing. The viewer gleans only a partial, obscured sense of the writing style and personal voice of Anaïs Nin. It is as if Jubelin wishes to partially shield this intimate correspondence from public view.

Juxtaposed against these letters are the equally faint and difficult to interpret petit point renditions of material relating to Marion Mahony Griffin. They are illegible without consulting the catalogue. Married to Walter Burley Griffin, and an architect in her own right who worked with Frank Lloyd Wright, Mahony Griffin wrote a four- volume manuscript, conceived as a professional epitaph in 1947, after her husband died. Each of the petit points relate to this manuscript, which Jubelin researched two versions of held in the Art Institute of Chicago and the Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, New York University. One rendition shows a detail of drawing for a building in 1910, and “Marion’s method of stippling over Walter’s signature on her presentation drawing. In this case, unlike others, she had also obscured her own mark.”101

This sense of an obscured view of something hidden, be it the possible authorship of Marion Mahoney Griffin to designs attributed to her husband, or the intimate voice of Anaïs Nin in her letters, is parallelled euphemistically in the sign stating ‘PLUMBING.’ The bold brown coloured wooden lettering, which Jubelin bought in Chicago in 1993, is a humorous analogy to her historical and museological narrative. ‘Plumbing’ is euphemistic for reproductive and digestive anatomy. It refers to what is

101 Ibid. 183 unseen, and essential, but cannot be directly talked about in public or at least in polite conversation. The private narratives of her subjects, Jubelin seems to propose, are equally the underlying essential structure to public culture. This is very like Hall’s use of PVC piping to suggest plumbing and the hidden passages and private histories of society.

Each time Soft Shoulder is displayed Jubelin has incorporated one object from the collection of the museum. For example, when displayed at Curtin University Gallery in Perth in 2002, Jubelin installed the work at the gallery, and selected a wooden toy from the collection. The small, brightly painted wooden car that has three wooden figures seated within, sits on the concrete shelf on the corner. The reasons why Jubelin selected this particular item are unspecified. The object does not even appear on the list of items in Soft Shoulder, displayed on a didactic panel adjacent to the installation. The air of mystery surrounding this child’s toy extends to the Curtin University Collection. The object is without accession or provenance information and none of the curators or collection managers knows how it came into the collection. The ambiguous identity of the object clearly appealed to Jubelin. Slipping between these institutional gaps, the toy finds a place within Soft Shoulder. It communicates another unspoken narrative of intimacy and female identity: motherhood.

Maintaining critical passage in the Museum of Sydney 1995

Where Soft Shoulder explored metaphorically the notion of a continuing sentence, in relation to both conversation and the interpretation of historical archives and objects, and emphasised the personal within the public, the intimate within the archive, it did so from the artist’s position of interloper. Curator Juliana Engberg likened Jubelin’s Soft Shoulder to the detective genre.102 This analogy implies a scene where the viewer plays sleuth, and the artist, interloper. As an interloper, Jubelin transgressed boundaries, by selecting marginalised material culture, in order to intervene with the grand narrative of modernism. However, within the context of museology her intervention was arguably impotent, because it was outside of an institutional

102 Juliana Engberg, "Rubbing Shoulders: Free association is the delight of good friends," Narelle Jubelin: Soft Shoulder, exh. cat. The Renaissance Society, The University of Chicago. Chicago, 1994. p. 23. 184 collection, and reached a select contemporary art audience. It did not actually challenge systems of classification of material culture within a museum. Jubelin had the opportunity to work within an institutional structure again, this time with further reach than Legacies of Travel and Trade, as she was employed to develop a museum display.

In 1994, Peter Emmett, senior curator of the (at the time unopened) new Museum of Sydney (MOS), part of the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, invited Jubelin to curate a major display for the museum. Emmett wanted Jubelin to select and arrange an array of material for a set of drawers in the museum, the Collector’s Chests. The conflict experienced with Legacies of Travel and Trade at the Powerhouse Museum in 1989 meant that Jubelin was reluctant to enter into another museum in quite the same way. However, the creation of the MOS proposed a different context, and her role within the museum had entirely different specifications. Emmett invited Jubelin into the MOS, more as a associate curator rather than artist, to produce a ‘permanent’ museum display.103

Jubelin worked with the MOS for one year to develop the displays inside the chests. This differentiation, and the fact that the museum was a new institution without the hierarchy and bureaucracy of a museum like the Powerhouse, encouraged Jubelin to accept Emmett’s proposal. In addition to these reasons, Jubelin saw the potential to work collaboratively with Emmett and others such as filmmaker and writer Ross Gibson and writer and sound artist Paul Carter, both of whom came from outside the museum profession and were instrumental in designing the exhibitions and methodological approach of the MOS. Ross Gibson curated the Bond Stores display in MOS, which employed the use of fiction and filmed characters projected onto invisible screens, ‘speaking’ from the past.

The approach that Emmett, Gibson and Carter took to historical interpretation was revisionist and potentially radical. It was potentially radical, because it challenged previous conventions in historical interpretation and museum practice, and especially,

103 The Museum of Sydney has been open since 1995, and the Collector’s Chests have been permanently displayed since then. 185 did not rely on objective evidence in creating historical interpretations. The objective is always furnished with the subjective and fictional in this museum. Within this context, Jubelin was attracted to the potential for collaboration, and a shared approach, that had existed much less within the Powerhouse. MOS had an interdisciplinary and innovative approach. The Museum was one of the most revisionist and radical experiments in museology in this country, and even globally. It represented the culmination of a unique experiment and collaboration between Australian artists, writers, historians, archaeologists and filmmakers, that to this day has not quite been repeated. It emerged from a unique context- post-bicentennial Australia, under the Keating Labour Government – a time when Australian history assumed immense importance in the public national rhetoric, and revisionist, creative endeavours were facilitated and enabled with Government funding. In his public language, Keating arguably used monumental rhetoric to tell a grand narrative of pluralism. The Museum of Sydney is a museological embodiment of this shift towards plurality on a government level (even if it was largely rhetorical).

From Emmett’s perspective, the need to engage people from a variety of disciplines was imperative to encourage a new approach to the interpretation of history. In 1995, the influence of postcolonial interpretation methods meant that the disciplines were no longer discrete entities; cross-disciplinary research was perhaps more productive. This spilt over into museology. The new museology, Peter Vergo claimed, encouraged new interpretative methods spurred by cross-disciplinary collaboration.104 For Emmett, the involvement of historians, filmmakers, artists, archaeologists would potentially enable a more satisfying interpretation of history. At all costs, he wanted to avoid pure chronological display.105 He stated in an interview with the author, that artists “are allowed to get away with poetics.”106 The poetical was clearly important for Emmett in the interpretation of the past at the MOS, and in his earlier role as a curator at the Hyde Park Barracks, which is explored in chapter four. Indeed, he wanted to use poetic licence - the transgression of established rules for effect - in interpreting the past.

104 Peter Vergo, ed., The New Museology (London: Reaktion Books, 1989). 105 Peter Emmett, Interview with the author, 11 July 2001, Sydney. 106 Ibid. 186

Jubelin’s role was to select material from historical archives and a limited archaeological collection to furnish the drawers of the chests (75 drawers in total), and provide an interpretation of a specific period of Sydney’s history – 1788-1845. Emmett wanted to use collector’s chests as a way of exploring the legacy of collecting as a strategy of the colonialist enterprise that was felt not only at the edges of empire and science, but in the minds of individuals. He wanted a contemporary equivalent to the Dixson and Strathallan chests, that were amateur collectors’ cabinets made out of local Sydney timber, and filled with the remnants of shell, insect, flora and fauna collections, arranged into intricate geometric patterns (see Figure 3.24). Non-scientific methods of display ruled these chests, because an amateur created them governed more by an individual and subjective sense of aesthetic arrangement, than principles of classification and taxonomy. Emmett appropriately believed that an artist might best achieve a contemporary take on these chests. Artists are likely to apply a different approach to material culture, than an historian, archaeologist or scientist, and Emmett felt this would lead to a productive new interpretation.

Embedded in this concept was an understanding, although not explicitly vocalised by Emmett or Jubelin, that the Collector’s Chests would be an inherently self-reflexive medium for the museum to cast its eye over the practice of collecting. Self-reflexivity is fundamental to the displays and methodologies of the MOS. Peter Emmett commented,

The Museum of Sydney looks beyond the museum of objects. It museums the museum. It’s not a museum as collector’s chest, a cabinet of curiosities, but a Pandora’s Box. To look into the Pandora’s Box is to unleash the demons of the past…to renegotiate and contest the naming and classification of things; their meanings as tokens/symbols of power, rights, values.107

This revisionist approach to historical interpretation was synchronous with Jubelin’s art practice. Jubelin’s Collector’s Chests would be an ironic re-presentation of the nature of collecting and the colonialist world view, rather than an authentic restaging of an actual collector’s chest: it would problematize collecting.

107 Emmett is quoted by Christopher Marshall, "Back in the Basilica: the new museology and the problem of national identity in the Museum of Sydney," Art Monthly Australia June.100 (1997): pp. 7-8. 187

However, the methods used for this revision differ between the artist’s approach and the museum’s, and need to be analysed carefully, to ascertain what is gained by this reconceptualisation of history and the museum, and what is lost. Moreover, this sympathetic context for Jubelin’s involvement with the museum might have arguably resulted in a necessarily less interventionist project by the artist. The nature of Jubelin’s project would need to then contribute something beyond sheer revisionist intervention.

The Museum occupies the site of the First Government House. The Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales had a responsibility to protect and interpret the remains of the building. However, only the foundations remained of the First Government House. A central problem faced by Emmett was how to create a museum out of absence. A clear way to assist in resolving this issue was firstly, to broaden the scope of the museum, from specific site interpretation to more general representation of the early history of Sydney’s settlement, to 1845, the date of First Government House’s demolition. However, this was highly contentious. How to develop and interpret the site was subject to classic debates within the heritage movement, centring on the question of what constitutes authenticity. There was a political, conceptual and ethical divide over what to represent and how to interpret that history.108

Factions of the Trust were reluctant to support a broader historical interpretation of the early colonial history of Sydney favoured by Peter Emmett. Emmett, with the support of the director of the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, Peter Watts, broadened the scope of interpretation for the site, and maintained a focussed interpretation of the remains of First Government House. The MOS adopted absence as a metaphor through which to explore the past: what is missing in the official archive, how can we uncover it and what does this reveal about power relations and social interaction?109 The MOS does not have a collection; it is purely an interpretative

108 Peter Zellner, "Curating Cultural Difference: the Museum of Sydney," Museum International 49.Oct- Dec (1994): pp. 15-19. 109 Christopher Marshall commented, “The problem was a lack of material…the designers solved this problem by turning absence to an advantage.” Christopher Marshall, "Back in the Basilica: the new museology and the problem of national identity in the Museum of Sydney," Art Monthly Australia June.100 (1997): pp. 7-8. 188 museum, creating exhibitions and displays. The only material that it conserves is the foundation of the First Government House.110 That Emmett curated the museum around a lack of material and physical evidence, signalled a different approach to museology, given legitimacy through several important factors: the new museology, cross-disciplinary curatorial involvement and a political context that was receptive to revisionist history as evidenced by the Mabo decision in 1992.

Emmett’s approach to the MOS was to contest what he defined as the ‘master’ narrative of history. In practice, this meant a shift in emphasis from historical facts of official events, evidence-based history, to history that attempted to piece together everyday life, personal stories, multiple perspectives and an imaginative engagement with the past. It was a risky approach to take, because it employed fiction and narrative story telling as key methodologies. Historical interpretation at the MOS would be looser, more fanciful, than any other museum in Australia. The shortcomings and inaccuracy of the master narrative of history, as it did not account for everyday lives, validated this approach. As well as this, revisionist history was necessary in order to expose past racist and sexist belief systems.

Arguably, however, this approach failed to account for contemporary political, social, economic and environmental consequences of history.111 Criticism of the MOS was widespread because of this perceived depoliticisation, or failure to engage with current issues. Guy Hansen, curator at the National Museum of Australia argued that “overall, the Museum’s displays serve to depoliticise history.”112 Hansen based this on his belief that MOS favoured aesthetics, over content, and that in particular the MOS avoided analysing the issue of colonisation. This is a surprising interpretation, given the MOS focuses on the early period of colonisation. Hansen seems to feel that the MOS dealt with the issue of colonisation and reconciliation obliquely by focusing on fragments, quotation and illusion, rather than head on, and that this was therefore an

110 In the Museum Plan for the MOS written in September 1993 the report stated, “MOS must create its own interpretative frameworks, its own metaphors to replace the absent metaphors of a physical house or collection... ” Museum Plan (Sydney: Museum of Sydney, 1993). p. 19. 111 Catherine Rogers disagrees in her discussion of the Museum of Sydney. She argued, “the new museum refuses to consider a coherent past and refuses to allow an escape from the present. The visitor here cannot consider the past without first dealing with the density of the present.” Catherine Rogers, "Terra nullius and the Museum of Sydney," Olive Pink Society Bulletin 8.2 (1996): p. 19. 112 Guy Hansen, "Fear of the 'master narrative': reflections on site interpretation at the Museum of Sydney," Museum National.Nov (1996): pp. 18-19. 189 avoidance strategy. I will discuss the use of fragment, quotation and illusion in Peter Emmett’s curatorial approach in chapter four. Hansen argued, “the material remnants of the past are not being interpreted but rather used as props in a larger artwork.”113 For Hansen, the focus on aesthetics and poetics in the MOS, and on musing, detracted from what he perceived to be the primary responsibility of the museum: to educate the public.

However, artistic approaches were used in the museum to expand interpretive possibilities. Narelle Jubelin’s Collector’s Chests are a potent example of this in the context of the MOS. Despite Hansen’s view that artistic approaches lead to a reductive, depoliticised account of history, the chests are highly sophisticated and effective in their exploration of history. The chests instigate an imaginative engagement with the past, and allow for multiple interpretations.

Located on level two in the central stairwell; the visitor passes the chests when accessing other areas of the museum (see Figures 3.21-3.23). Because the chests are self-contained, closed as it were, the visitor must actively engage with the chest by opening the drawers in order to experience them. A review of the chests undertaken by the museum in July 1996 found that this self-contained quality has proved problematic because some visitors do not realise they can be opened. Museum guides encourage visitors to open the drawers.114 Because of the individual engagement required by the chests, visitors ‘read’ the chests in a number of ways, depending on the sequence in which they select drawers to view. The review of the chests, based on visitor and teacher evaluation forms and Guides’ anecdotal experiences, found that most visitors select drawers randomly, with no apparent system.115 The sequence of information the visitor receives changes and depends on the actions of the visitor. The layering of information in each visitor’s mind is therefore different, and may result in the visitor coming away from the chests with different interpretations of the same

113 Ibid. 114 The review also noted “Some visitors have complained that there is no way of finding out what is inside the drawers without opening them, rejecting the interactive and independent discovery experience.” Beth Hise and Chris Waugh, Review of the Collector's Chests (Sydney: Museum of Sydney, 1996). n.pag. 115 Ibid. 190 body of material. The chests are highly interactive, non-linear and encourage a subjective interpretation.

Opening the drawers requires physical engagement. Each drawer is weighted to close automatically and requires effort to open.116 The opening of the drawers and close examination of the small-scale contents of the drawers creates a sense of private discovery in the visitor.117 In historian Linda Young’s review of the Museum of Sydney, she noted that the experience of pulling open the drawers and peering inside was “magical, entrancing.”118 This sense of private discovery contrasts to the external appearance of the chests, which are made of polished aluminium, and appear stark and industrial.119 Designed by Jissuc Han, the bureaucratic and clinical aesthetic seals or separates the chests from the rest of the exhibition space. This implies the chests are distinct and somehow different from the rest of the museum.

Jubelin is not identified as the ‘curator’ of the chests however, and they are not differentiated as an art installation.120 Jubelin felt that the collaborative production of the chests meant that it was inappropriate to single her out as the ‘author’. Had Jubelin been identified, the way the chests are received and interpreted within the museum might have changed significantly. Viewers may have treated the chests differently had they been identified as an art installation. They may have had less authority within the context of the museum, or been marginalised as a contemporary art piece.121 They may

116 The review of the chests noted that one of the most common complaints visitors made about them was that the “drawers are too heavy to open and keep open, especially the bottom ones.” Ibid. 117 It may be that a common experience of childhood is activated by the drawers: a bodily and imaginative memory of delving into drawers as a child, having to reach up and pull open with all one’s might. 118 Linda Young, "Museum of Sydney," Australian Historical Studies 26.105 (1995): p. 667. 119 Reviewers have described the external appearance of the chests as “a somewhat sinister echo of a scientific laboratory.” Maryanne McCubbin, "Contemporary Culture and Curators," Insite Sept (1995): pp. 3-4. Ann Stephen commented, “the neutral aesthetic of these identical chests recall the hardware of steel cabinets and office equipment…they appear more like the clinical furniture of a morgue than a museum display…reminding us that we are looking at the remains.” Ann Stephen, "Losers, Weepers: Narelle Jubelin's Museum Work," Past Present: The National Women's Art Anthology eds. Jo Holder and Joan Kerr (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1999). p. 105. 120 Much to the concern of some within the art world. Jubelin recounted, “when the museum opened, a gallerist, Roslyn Oxley, came to me saying ‘where’s your piece?’ and I told her what I’d worked on and she said ‘ but your name’s not there’ and I said ‘no because it’s part of the museum as a whole’ and she was saying ‘oh no I think your name should be on it.’” Narelle Jubelin, Interview with the author, 4 Dec 2000, Madrid. 121 The review of the chests found that some visitors complained about there being no general information provided on the chests. Beth Hise and Chris Waugh, Review of the Collector's Chests (Sydney: Museum of Sydney, 1996). n.pag. 191 have played less of a curatorial role. The chests are an important exhibit within the museum and play a curatorial role. Jubelin’s approach to interpreting material culture therefore plays a significant role within the museum.

Each drawer displays a selection of material that came from a range of sources, including material on loan from the Australian Museum, and photocopies of archives. The artist combined newspaper cuttings, extracts of diaries, letters and journals, historical and contemporary objects, both artefacts and natural history specimens. In the main the objects are neither valuable, rare, antique or exotic, rather they are as Jubelin describes, “popular, often mass-produced and available items forming a new public archive.”122 Jubelin ostensibly selected the material according to principles of fragmentation and quotation. However, she was careful to avoid any reduction in the interpretation of the material, and in particular, reduction along purely aesthetic lines. She stated to the author,

We were working out how to deal with these objects that were museum objects borrowed from other institutions, in terms of conservation, and how to deal with them in a way that I was happy with in terms of building up an essay type content in each of the drawers, but also in a way that wasn’t overly aestheticised.123

Jubelin felt that the primary material revealed complex social, economic and political interactions. She was conscious of the potential problem of reducing the material’s complexity. Jubelin felt responsible for adequately representing and interpreting the primary material. She commented, “we were grappling with how to reintroduce this complexity.”124 Indeed, this uncovered a methodological split between Emmett’s and Jubelin’s approaches. According to Jubelin, Emmett originally wanted Jubelin to approach the drawers thematically. He suggested to Jubelin that each drawer could represent an emotion. Jubelin was opposed to this because she thought it would be reductive.125

122 Narelle Jubelin in a document outlining her research for the chests, Museum of Sydney archives, n.d., n.pag. 123 Narelle Jubelin, Interview with the author, 4 Dec 2000, Madrid. 124 Ibid. 125 Ibid. 192

The composition and layout of the drawers is fundamental to Jubelin’s attempt to explore the complexity of history. Via the juxtaposition of incongruous material, Jubelin hoped to arrive at a less reductive engagement with the past. Using a process that was the antithesis of classic museological methods, she compiled material and arranged it in ways that opened up highly interpretative, imaginative and subjective ways of understanding history. This methodology, although broadly synergistic with others working on the museum, exposed disjunctions between the collaborating disciplines. For instance, as an artist, Jubelin’s interpretation of material differed from an archaeologist’s interpretation of the same material – leading to disagreement, but also to valuable new conceptualisations of the material. Different criteria determined the way that the artist and the archaeologist approached the material. Jubelin described this process,

I tried to keep the material as buoyant as I could...just grouping material. Sometimes a title would come before the contents, sometimes the other way around. I was very deliberately, consciously putting material in juxtaposition with one another...it’s a risky methodology and it’s very idiosyncratic, because you have to be prepared to make juxtapositions that are absolutely ridiculous...When we were making the drawers up I remember the archaeologist saying to me, ‘Narelle, I could write a book on this drawer, I don’t know if you understand’, and of course I had no idea, but what I’d put in one drawer was the contents of one of the cottages that had been excavated in the Rocks. She said to me ‘you don’t understand how rarely this material is dealt with in terms of the user, the people’. So I’d say fine, tell me more, so we’d start to work out other compositions that would work in a similar way.126

Jubelin’s approach to the material as an artist and the collaboration between different disciplines was fundamental to the development of the chests’ narratives. She described, “flash points all the way along” because of her methodology as an artist being different to others’.127

Linda Young described the material inside the chests as a “strange conglomeration.”128 She was not convinced by the “abandonment of purposeful historical analysis of

126 Ibid. 127 Ibid. 128 Linda Young, "Museum of Sydney," Australian Historical Studies 26.105 (1995): p. 667. 193 historical material.”129 For this historian, the aesthetic juxtapositions created “an irresponsible rhetoric of emptiness.”130 So despite Jubelin’s intention to reintroduce complexity, for Young at least, this attempt had failed.

Young’s criticism suggests that indeed the chests fail if viewed as an authoritative museum exhibit. Visitors to the museum are not told to view the chests as anything else, so this may be a common response to them. Notwithstanding this, Jubelin’s specific juxtapositions open up meaning and a range of interpretive possibilities.

Jubelin arranged the drawers by layering text, image and object. Her arrangements were associative, random and imaginative (see Figures 3.25-3.27). The formal compositions of each layout are an integral part of the chests. For example in one drawer titled Lost Souls the artist juxtaposed the leather soles of children’s shoes excavated from the Rocks in Sydney with a passage from a journal from HMS Sirius which made a voyage to New South Wales and listed the names of drowned passengers, or lost souls. Jubelin circled in red the relevant part of the journal, which one visitor commented on,

the feeling that simply envelops you on opening those drawers with the challenging, intelligent caption: even the encircling of the relevant passages in red on the documents was simply… inspired131

Other drawers relied on more simple visual analogies. One shows the rust line of a bowl, split in two, continued as if leaking over, in an ink stain the page of a journal entry. Another drawer presented a diary entry recounting a Sydney storm that shattered the windows of the house, and overlaid the entry with glass shards and bits of mortar. While these are playful analogies, they have serious intent. They use artefacts, be they minor, such as glass shards or broken pottery, in combination with the text of historical documents, to engage the viewer with historical narratives. Christopher Marshall argued that these combinations, “eschew the grand statement on Australian identity in favour of an often highly subtle and fugitive dialogue of ideas

129 Ibid.p. 667. 130 Ibid.p. 667. 131 Beth Hise and Chris Waugh, Review of the Collector's Chests (Sydney: Museum of Sydney, 1996). n.pag. 194 on an endless and constantly shifting array of topics dealing with history and memory.”132

The specific relationship that Jubelin drew between artefacts and archives was unorthodox. However, this unorthodox method is not reductive, and is an important avenue through which imaginative and subjective interpretations of history are encouraged. Perhaps this is the reason that, the review of the chests found, the Collector’s Chests are amongst visitors’ favourite parts of the museum. 133

Conclusion

The chests presented Jubelin with an opportunity to be involved with the museum in a curatorial capacity. Her involvement was not interventional in the way that Legacies of Travel and Trade was, but moved beyond sheer artistic intervention and critique of museology to a more collaborative and innovative practice that employed an artistic methodology in the challenging interpretation of material culture. Within the context of the MOS, the specificity of her juxtapositions and their focussed visual and metaphoric analogies avoided banal generalisations and an over-emphasis on design in replace of specific substance, for which the MOS was criticised. The chests strategically used the aesthetics of visual correspondence and juxtaposition to facilitate the interpretation of specific content and an engagement with the past. In this, Jubelin maintained critical passage within the museum, without a reduction to pure aesthetics or coercion to communicate overly general themes in this complex moment of self-reflexive museology in the mid nineties.

The Collector’s Chests have been influential in Australian museum displays developed since the MOS opened in 1995. Collector’s chests have become highly popular motifs that combine interactivity with self-conscious and reflective museology. In a recently redeveloped gallery of the Western Australia Museum, the

132 Christopher Marshall, "Back in the Basilica: the new museology and the problem of national identity in the Museum of Sydney," Art Monthly Australia June.100 (1997): p. 10. 133 Beth Hise and Chris Waugh, Review of the Collector's Chests (Sydney: Museum of Sydney, 1996). n.pag. 195 children’s displays include aluminium collector’s chests. The discursive museology epitomised by the chests is evident in displays in new museums around the country.

In 1999, museologist Susan Pearce, argued that in order to have contemporary legitimacy museums must become reflexive and exploratory places where “existing collections speak in new voices” and that one way to achieve this might be “the reception of ironic or subversive comment from those who are not part of the institution.”134 But does this subversive, interventionist, comment from artists become coopted by the museum for revisionist purposes. Jubelin carefully avoided becoming a ‘career museum artist’ such as American artist Fred Wilson might be described, because she thought that artists “…have a use by date in terms of value for museum professionals ... otherwise you end up just having an artist come in and it’s more like a fashionable intervention, but it weakens - it breaks down.”135 For this reason, since 1995, Jubelin has worked on only one museum project, in 2001, when she returned to the Powerhouse Museum to make a companion piece for Legacies of Travel and Trade. 136

The following chapters will take these issues up in an investigation of collaborations between artists and museums that aim to contest history, expand narrative and thicken interpretative possibilities in Australian exhibition practice.

134 Susan Pearce, "A new way of looking at old things," Museum International 2.Apr-Jun (1999): pp. 12- 17. 135 Narelle Jubelin, Interview with the author, 4 Dec 2000, Madrid. 136 Jubelin’s companion installation, Legacies in Transit, explored a collection bequeathed to the museum by Herta Imhoff, a volunteer at the museum for many years, whose Jewish family had fled Europe during the war. 196

Chapter Four. Curator as Artist, Artist as Curator: speculative approaches to interpretation and commemoration in Australian museology 1989-1998

Introduction

The previous chapter critically analysed the practice of Narelle Jubelin, demonstrating how this artist’s oeuvre engaged radically with museological questions. Jubelin’s practice intersected with the interests of museum curators and this was recognised and developed through the commissions Legacies of Travel and Trade (1989) for the Powerhouse Museum and Collector’s Chests (1995) for the Museum of Sydney. This thesis has contended that these works are pivotal and paradigmatic examples that signal the widespread commencement of this type of artist-curator collaboration in Australia.1

Indeed Collector’s Chests augmented a new type of museum display. It blurred boundaries between art installation and museum installation and the roles of artist and curator. Following these installations by Jubelin, museums in the 1990s more frequently incorporated art into museology. Throughout the 1990s, artistic strategies played an increasingly significant role in Australian museology. This suggests a more collaborative and involved model of engagement between artists and museums, compared with Peter Cripps’s interaction with the museum during the 1970s and 80s.

This chapter considers the relationship between art, museology and social history within the Hyde Park Barracks, Elizabeth Bay House, and Museum of Sydney, all properties of the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, and the Grainger Museum in Melbourne in the period 1989-1998. It explores the concept of the curator as an artist, and the use of artistic strategies in these museums.

1 Though, as chapter one discussed, artists collaborated with curators to create museum exhibits in decades prior to this. Abstract artist Leonard French was employed at the National Gallery of Victoria to curate the Survey exhibitions of contemporary art between 1957-61. French employed highly creative means of exhibiting the work, and his displays sometimes bordered on installation art. See Appendix. 197

Do curators and artists have increasingly convergent attitudes towards museum exhibit design and the representation of social history in heritage museums? If convergence does characterise the relationship between artists and curators on the whole, when do divergent attitudes between artists and curators arise? Are moments of contention evident in these examples of art installation in heritage museums? If so, what characterises such contention?

Curator as artist: Peter Emmett’s museology in the Hyde Park Barracks 1989-91

The notion of the curator as an artist has received minimal attention in recent literature. Yet it seems to be an important development in curatorial strategies, especially within heritage, social history and commemorative museums throughout the 1990s. In 1977, Ian Finlay predicted the increasing importance of artistic, and specifically “theatrical,”2 approaches to exhibition design in museums. He noted that curators should have “an element of the creative artist,”3 but that a specialist field of exhibition design would become more important in museums because it could “penetrate to new dimensions in museum display.”4 Curators and specialists would need to maintain control of exhibition design however, Finlay thought, in order to police the standards of academic scholarship in museums, and especially, the factual content of exhibitions.5 Exhibition designers could easily resort to “fancies” as opposed to “facts, in so far as those are known.”6

By 1990, approaches to historical interpretation had changed significantly in museums. History was indeed seen largely as an interpretation rather than truth. Steven D. Lavine and Ivan Karp therefore claimed that museums “need experiments in exhibition design that try to present multiple perspectives or admit the highly contingent nature of the interpretation offered.”7 To this end, the incorporation of art

2 Ian Finlay, Priceless Heritage: The Future of Museums (London: Faber and Faber, 1977). p. 64. 3 Ibid. p. 62. 4 Ibid. p. 63. 5 Ibid. p. 64. 6 Ibid. p. 64. 7 Steven D. Lavine and Ivan Karp, "Introduction: Museums and Multiculturalism," The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display ed. Ivan Karp (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990). p. 7. 198 into museology offered new ways of seeing historical material, as chapter three showed in an analysis of Narelle Jubelin’s 1989 commission for the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.

The notion of the artist as curator in social history and heritage museums has become increasingly important. In 1995, Carl Heideken claimed, “The trend of introducing art into museology has become common practice.”8 He argued that the artist’s use of fiction was attractive to new museology because it facilitated imaginative and emotive responses to history. But an emphasis on fiction, he thought, could compromise the depiction of true, empirical evidence: “When the means of expression begin to look more like those of an art gallery, the borderline between fact and fiction could be seen to be blurred with the “truth” evaporating.”9 Heideken did not address the notion of curators as artists. Nor did he consider the possibility that curators using artistic strategies (i.e. fiction) could actually facilitate historical accuracy.

Discussion of curators as artists has been largely confined to the emerging role of the curator as an auteur. Nathalie Heinich and Michael Pollak argued that the curator was increasingly thought of as an auteur because of a focus on curators as authors, with their ‘work’ (exhibitions) therefore marked by particular individuality. Curator Germano Celant has similarly argued, “the exhibition installation becomes the new pretender to originality… in and of itself a form of modern work”10 Indeed, this chapter considers the ‘work’ of the curator Peter Emmett, as a type of artist, in the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales. I consider the specific nature of the artistic approaches to exhibition design and development that Emmett has employed. In particular, I discuss the curator’s use of artistic methods as a way of highlighting historical ‘truth’ via artistic exhibits that are both interpretive and commemorative.

Artistic strategies have formed a very important part of the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales’ (the Trust) approach to museology. Indeed, so much so, that its creative and innovative approach to museology and heritage has been influential

8 Carl Heideken, "The artist as curator in a city museum," Museum International 46.3 (1995): p. 17. 9 Ibid. p. 17. 10 Germano Celant, "A Visual Machine: Art installation and its modern archetypes," Thinking about Exhibitions eds. Reesa Greenberg, et al. (London: Routledge, 1996). pp. 371-386. 199 nationally and internationally.11 The Trust’s methods have also caused much debate, the nature of which will be assessed in this chapter. Peter Watts, the Trust’s Director since it began in 1981 has undoubtedly fostered creative approaches to heritage interpretation. However, Peter Emmett, as senior curator of some of the Trust’s most innovative properties, the Hyde Park Barracks between 1990-1991 and the Museum of Sydney between 1992-2000, instigated and developed the unique nature of these creative methods.

Peter Emmett’s role within the Trust has been as a kind of curator-artist. He has stage- managed the space and design of museum displays, as if they are art installations or theatrical productions. The artistic methods used by Emmett within the Hyde Park Barracks and Museum of Sydney, I believe, enhanced historical interpretation and indeed museum experience. Furthermore, Emmett’s work demonstrates how artistic approaches can be tailored to curatorial methods in museums, so that one extends and complements the other.

Emmett played a major role in the Trust’s redevelopment of the Hyde Park Barracks between 1990-91. He redeveloped the interior of the building, using artistic methods, to emphasise the original form of the Hyde Park Barracks that was designed by colonial architect Francis Greenway and built between 1817-1819.12 Prior to the

Trust’s redevelopment of the Barracks, the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (now the Powerhouse Museum) occupied the Barracks. The Museum had undertaken substantial redevelopment of the exterior of the Barracks, removing all outlying buildings and internal additions that detracted from Greenway’s building. However, the Museum had not sought to reinstate the original interior of the Barracks. False walls used for museum exhibitions and to conceal services such as air-conditioning largely filled the interior space of the Barracks, detracting from the original design,

11 The Trust has been influential in both practical and philosophical matters. For example, the Trust is viewed as a model of heritage management to emulate. Thomas E. Perrigo the Chief Executive Officer of The National Trust of Australia (Western Australia) stated during a seminar, “the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales …provided me with a benchmark to strive for.” Thomas E. Perrigo. "Management of Heritage Places- How wrong have we got it?" Curtin University Seminar. Perth. n.p., 2002. p. 8; Katherine F. Benzel, The room in context: design beyond boundaries (New York: McGraw- Hill, 1998). 12 The Barracks was used as convict quarters between 1819-1848, then to house female immigrants (mainly Irish), destitute and aged women, and orphans between 1848-1886, and finally for legal offices and courtrooms between 1887-1975. 200 and according to the Trust’s Hyde Park Barracks Museum Plan in 1990, creating “the dominant impression of…confusion.” (See Figures 4.1- 4.3)13

Emmett removed these confusing elements that detracted from Greenway’s interior. He emphasised the building as the principal artefact. Emmett’s approach was therefore shaped and determined by the New South Wales Ministry for the Arts Policy for the Development of Museums and Historic Sites in NSW (October 1989) which conceived that the building “should properly be regarded as a museum in itself, directly related to its historical uses, rather than as a venue for other museum exhibits.”14 Emmett wanted to create a spatial and sensory experience of the Barracks building. This would be achieved, the Museum Plan stated, partly through “simplifying and exposing surfaces”15 and also through “a more creative approach to adaptation of the historic place [to a museum.]”16

The so-called “ghost stair” illustrates the way Emmett sought to simplify and expose the building and is an example of the creative techniques he employed (see Figure 4.4). The play on presence and absence established by the ghost stair is one of the principal commonalities that Emmett’s methods has with contemporary art. The ghost stair is the location of the original stairwell in Greenway’s building that was probably removed in the 1860s. Instead of rebuilding the stairwell, Emmett recreated the void where the stairwell once was by removing sections of the floor on each level of the building. A steel rod traces the location of the staircase handrail through the void to illustrate the staircase that was once there. It is a simple yet evocative method that plays with both the presence and absence of the original stairwell.

Looking up the ghost stair void, the three different museological approaches Emmett adopted on each level of the Barracks can be discerned by observing the finish of the walls of the void. The ground floor walls of the stairwell void are painted white and the floorboards are polished, which according to the Museum Guide, signifies the

13 Hyde Park Barracks Museum Plan: Incorporating analysis and guidelines on conservation, interpretation and management (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1990). p. 32. 14 Ibid. p. 2. 15 Ibid. p. 35. 16 Ibid. p. 35. 201 contemporary adaptation of the ground floor for exhibition space.17 The paint on the walls of the next level has been stripped back to expose the various layers of the building’s use. This level of the Barracks explores the notion of layers of history within the building. The upper level walls and ceiling are reconstructed to look as they did during the convict era – simple lime-washed walls and bare wooden boards. The upper level is a theatrical reconstruction of the convict building. As well as establishing a play on the presence and absence of the original stair, the ghost stair encourages contemplation of the physical building itself and is a synopsis of the three museological and artistic approaches Emmett took within the Barracks: theatrical experience, fragments and pure aesthetics. These three approaches encapsulate the artistic methods used by Emmett in his redevelopment of the Barracks. a. Theatrics In an interview with the author, Emmett emphasized that he thought of the Barracks as a theatre set.18 This implies that entering the Barracks is a three dimensional sensory experience that aims to enact the past. The principle actor in this theatre set is undoubtedly the visitor. It is the visitor’s task to recreate and imagine the past taking shape as they move through the building. Emmett uses certain evocative means to assist the visitor in their imaginative quest. These ‘props’ are on the whole subtle and understated, and serve to enhance the physical building and physical experience of the place. Emmett’s theatrical approach is not a total reconstruction. Rather, sparse but symbolic things, such as the ghost stair, stand to trigger the viewer’s imaginative engagement with the Barracks.

Emmett employs most artistic licence on the upper level of the Barracks. Theatrical methods are crucial in Emmett’s invocation of the convict period of the building’s history. This level was restored to Greenway’s original plan. Emmett added certain theatrical and experiential exhibits to evoke the human presence of the convicts. In the museum plan in 1990, Emmett outlined his approach to the theatrical effects in this upper level. He planned to divide the two long rooms into ‘daytime experience’ and ‘night-time experience.’ This clearly reveals Emmett’s hope that the exhibits would

17 Hyde Park Barracks: Museum Guide (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1994). 18 Peter Emmett, Interview with the author, 11 July 2001, Sydney. 202 be experiential. In the final museum plan the rooms were renamed ‘characters’ and ‘sleep and dream.’

The room ‘characters’ is empty aside from cut-out silhouettes of convict men made of custom board and mixed media clustered around the windows. Emmett commissioned textile artist, Heather Dorrough, to make the life-size silhouettes based on the recorded details of the size and shape of the men. The silhouettes are similar to the early drawings of convicts by colonial artist Augustus Earle. Against the light from the windows, the silhouettes could almost be real. Some sit, others stand in profile or with their back to the visitor, appearing to gaze out the window. These ghostly presences are made even more real because they seem to speak (see Figure 4.5).

A soundscape of conversations between the men recounting tales of escape and their crimes and misdemeanours plays continuously, creating the impression that the visitor is intruding or overhearing the convict conversations. Entitled, Named in the Margin, the conversations were scripted by writer Paul Carter. Some of the information in the soundscape was sourced from official documents and records, diaries and letters. Some is fictional.19 The soundscape, together with the convict silhouettes, are experiential and sensory. The visitor almost feels as though they are stepping back into the past. This is an example of how fiction and artistic methods can create an immersive engagement with the past. The museum plan from 1990 stated that these displays intended to reinstate “the human presence and the conflicting convict experiences and states of mind in the dormitories.”20 It hoped to create a stronger imaginative invocation of the convicts themselves.

The room ‘sleep and dream’ is a reconstruction of the convict sleeping quarters, filled with rows of hammocks crammed tightly together (see Figure 4.6). The soundscape in this room, also part of Named in the Margin expresses the nightmares of the convicts. Here the fears and phobias of the convicts are invoked. The discomfort and

19 A transcript of the soundscape is reproduced in Hyde Park Barracks: Museum Guide (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1994). 20 Hyde Park Barracks Museum Plan: Incorporating analysis and guidelines on conservation, interpretation and management (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1990). p. 57. 203 claustrophobia of these sleeping quarters is palpable, and as in the room ‘characters’, theatrically invokes the human presence of the convicts.

Emmett used artistic and theatrical techniques in order to establish an experiential environment for the visitor. The visitor can move through the entire space, listen in on conversations, and hear the coughs of convicts and creaks of the hammocks in the sleeping quarters at night. As he did with the ghost stair, Emmett sets up a play between presence and absence. His methods are evocative rather than instructive, though I argue that his evocative methods are instructive. Indeed, the Director of the Trust, Peter Watts, thought that Emmett’s use of artistic and theatrical methods was the most instructive manner in which to explore the convict history of the Barracks.21 The displays elicit the visitor’s subjective engagement with the space, and require the visitor to imagine what the convict Barracks would have been like. For Emmett,“the hidden ingredient in the historic process is imagination.”22 And, “the museum, like history itself, demands the visitor’s imagination to fill the gaps.”23

There is a need to fill in the gaps because the social history of the Barracks, which Emmett attempts to prioritise, is incomplete. Indeed, as the title of Carter’s soundscape Named in the Margin suggests, the convicts were marginalized figures in history. There is little hard evidence about the lives of the convicts, for example, so fiction and artistic methods that speculate on their lives are a useful way of telling social history. Emmett used creative and theatrical methods bring to life the social history of the Barracks. This suggests that creative strategies are extremely useful for the museology of social history, because they do not rely on hard evidence alone.

The communication of social history – history from below as opposed to history from above – was important to Emmett. Revisionist historian E. P. Thompson influenced

21 Peter Watts commented that the “Of all the displays the Trust created when developing the Hyde Park Barracks as a museum in 1991, the empty room on the top floor remains, to me, the most instructive. Its sheer emptiness, combined with Heather Dorrough’s simple but moving sculpture, still sends a shiver up my spine every time I enter the room. It tells me more about the pain, the isolation and the loneliness of the convict than any didactic display ever could. Powerful architecture and good contemporary art can be powerful allies in communicating ideas and liberating the imagination.” Peter Watts, "Foreword," Secure the Shadow: Anne Brennan and Anne Ferran, exh. cat. Hyde Park Barracks. Sydney, Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1995. 22 Hyde Park Barracks Museum Plan: Incorporating analysis and guidelines on conservation, interpretation and management (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1990). p. 40. 23 Ibid. p. 40. 204

Emmett.24 Thompson famously sought to rescue the poor and oppressed from history. He wrote, “Only the successful (in the sense of those whose aspirations anticipated subsequent evolution) are remembered. The blind alleys, the lost causes, and the losers themselves are forgotten.”25 Closer to home, Australian art critic Robert Hughes (no doubt also influenced by Thompson), discussing convicts, claimed that, “on the feelings and experiences of these men and women, little was written. They were statistics, absences and finally embarrassments.”26 Emmett wanted to resurrect the forgotten and marginalized in history and commemorate the presence of convicts and working-class subjects of the Barracks.27 The Museum Plan quotes Hughes’ approach to the history of the convicts and seems to have influenced Emmett in his representation of convict history in the Barracks.

Emmett’s desire to tell the social history of the Barracks reflected what I refer to as post-Bicentennial revisionism in the years immediately following the Bicentennial year in 1988. Critics of the official Bicentennial celebrations claimed that it had focused on a white sanitised version of history that did not address social history, the brutality of the convict system, nor the perspective of indigenous Australians, for whom British colonisation signified invasion. Tony Fry for instance argued, “The Australian Bicentennial year was as much to do with the generation of forgetting as with the production of remembrance. 1988 was a year of reordering and sanitising history.”28

Emmett’s approach to history in the Barracks refused to commemorate the nation’s founding fathers. It sought to establish a theatrical and experiential framework for communicating the social history of the Barracks. Emmett felt this was a more truthful account of the past, even if it was not based on evidence alone. This was corroborated by Peter Watts when he commented in relation to Heather Dorrough’s

24 Peter Emmett, Interview with the author, 11 July 2001, Sydney. 25 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). p. 13. 26 Hughes, Robert, The fatal shore: a history of the transportation of convicts to Australia, 1787-1868, London: Collins, Harvill, 1987, quoted in Hyde Park Barracks Museum Plan: Incorporating analysis and guidelines on conservation, interpretation and management (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1990). p. 7. 27 Ibid. p. 7. 28 Tony Fry, "Museum, Object and Environment: a play of design," Australian Journal of Art VII (1988): pp. 16-27. 205 convict silhouettes and the empty room they occupy, “It tells me more about the pain, the isolation and the loneliness of the convict than any didactic display ever could.”29 b. Fragments The partial evidence that exists for social history is physically illustrated through an emphasis on fragments in the Barracks. Emmett used fragments to symbolise the fragmentary, incomplete nature of history. For example, the majority of the Barracks building is not restored to the convict era; it is stripped back to reveal fragmentary layers of the past. The importance of this approach to historical interpretation in the Barracks is demonstrated in the first room that the visitor enters in the museum. The “artefact room” is theatrically lit to illuminate sections of the walls of the room that show fragments of paint scrapings that illustrate the layers of the building’s use (see Figure 4.7). A section of the fireplace is stripped back to reveal the original bricks and mortar. The location of the original doorway is visible. The floor is raised to reveal the building foundations. The room is empty, aside from a central glass case containing various fragmentary artefacts from the building’s history, uncovered during the archaeological excavations of the building between 1979-1984. The artefacts in the cabinet relate to the three main stages of the Barracks’ history, as a convict barracks, an asylum for immigrant, destitute and aged women and law courts and government offices. The artefacts include fragments of objects such as ceramic pipes, glass bottles, and bits of textiles and cloth. The fragments of artefacts are displayed in a very simple and evocative manner. As Emmett’s theatrical effects did, fragments play on the notions of presence and absence because they are incomplete.

The emphasis Emmett placed on fragments contributed to the effect of the Barracks as, Emmett stated in an interview with the author, a “contrived ruin.”30 Emmett wanted to contrive a ruin-like impression of the Barracks. But why contrive a ruin? Ruins recall the past through suggestive means.31 As geographer and historian David Lowenthal argued, decay confirms and adorns notions of antiquity.32 The sense of

29 Peter Watts, "Foreword," Secure the Shadow: Anne Brennan and Anne Ferran, exh. cat. Hyde Park Barracks. Sydney, Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1995. 30 Peter Emmett, Interview with the author, 11 July 2001, Sydney. 31 See David Lowenthal’s discussion of the aesthetic of decay in heritage. David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). pp. 148-182. 32 Ibid. p. 152. 206 decay is one of the most evocative ways in which to experience the past. However, Emmett’s desire to invoke a ruin-like quality must be considered a radical redefinition of Australian ‘antiquity’. He placed Australian antiquity firmly in the convict experience, a past not usually admired or celebrated. Though, as Lowenthal points out, John Ruskin, famously “admired decrepitude.”33 The convict experience was nothing if not decrepit and miserable. In this regard, Emmett perhaps reiterates Ruskin’s aesthetics:

A Broken stone has necessarily more various forms in it than a whole one; a bent roof has more various curves in it than a straight one; every excrescence or cleft involves additional complexity of light and shade, and every stain of moss on eaves or wall adds to the delightfulness of colour.34

Emmett does not however reiterate Ruskin’s nostalgia. He uses elements of the aesthetics of the ruin for evocative means: principally, the fragment.

Fragments capture the imagination because the viewer is required to complete the picture. Not only this, they play with notions of presence and absence, and convey a sense of authenticity. Historian Raphael Samuel in his epic study of concepts of heritage, Theatres of Memory, identified the desire to see an imperfect ‘authentic’ past as an “aesthetes” approach to heritage. Aesthetes, Samuel thought, did not wish to see simulations “pretending to be the real thing” but rather the passage of time, in order to gauge a sense of the past.35 Aesthetes are interested in the aura of the real. In the original Greek sense of the word aesthetes were those who perceived. Samuel claimed that aesthetes essentially wish to perceive the passage of time. Ruins accentuate the authenticity of a place, through weathered, fragmentary and crumbling forms. Emmett wanted the Barracks to emulate this sense of authenticity and the imaginative engagement with the passage of time in the Barracks.

Emmett’s contrived ruin reflected debates about restoration in Sydney in the years leading up to the Bicentennial. In 1986, a debate occurred between historian and one

33 Ibid. p. 165. 34 Ruskin quoted in Ibid. p. 165. 35 Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory Volume 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, 1994). p. 266. 207 time president of the National Trust of Australia (New South Wales) Max Kelly and Historic Houses Trust curator James Broadbent in the pages of Vogue Living magazine that epitomises the conflicting views on heritage restoration or conservation. Kelly referred to it as the rot or restore debate.36 The debate may have been indicative of the difference in approach between the National Trust and Historic Houses Trust. Kelly claimed that heritage buildings should be restored to their former glory. Broadbent claimed that a heritage building should reflect the passage of time and its history by looking worn and old. In the lead up to the Bicentennial celebrations of 1988 (“years of tedious nationalism,” Broadbent wrote), the Trust curator lamented the number of restorations that he thought “faked” heritage.37 All these restorations, Broadbent argued, were inauthentic. Broadbent preferred to see the “imperfect”, but to some extent at least authentic, past: “the wrinkled, the dilapidated, the incomplete, the REAL. It is there you will find our heritage,” he wrote.38 Emmett’s redevelopment of the interior of the Barracks reflects precisely this view. He thought by stripping back the building and highlighting fragments, an ambience of the past would be created that would facilitate the visitor’s imaginative engagement with the past.

However, the fact that Emmett emphasised the Barracks as a contrived ruin, illustrates that Emmett was engaged with new approaches to heritage interpretation and the new museology, which emphasised the constructed nature of the past. He revealed his view that heritage was something constructed or contrived, in the sense that it is devised and planned, rather than simply found. In this regard, Emmett’s notion of the Barracks as a “contrived ruin” pre-empted cultural theorist and museologist Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett’s approach to heritage in 1998,

Heritage is not lost and found, stolen and reclaimed. Despite a discourse of conservation, preservation, restoration, reclamation, recovery, re- creation, recuperation, revitalisation and regeneration, heritage produces something new in the present that has recourse to the past.39

36 Max Kelly, "Restore or Rot?," Vogue Living Sept 1986: 168. 37 James Broadbent, "Past Imperfect," Vogue Living Aug 1986: 152. 38 Ibid. 39 Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums and Heritage (Berkeley: California University Press, 1998). p. 149. 208

Kirschenblatt-Gimblett encapsulated the view that authenticity, although sought after, is constructed and to some extent, false. Emmett illustrated the constructed nature of the past by using a variety of different museological approaches that show how the past is constructed: through layers, fragments and theatrical methods. c. Aesthetics Emmett’s use of theatrical methods and fragments served to establish a play between presence and absence. It also emphasised the physical aesthetics of the building. It highlighted the patina and texture of the walls, the paint colour, and the overall impression and experience of being in an old building. This focus on the ‘real’ thing itself was evident in the way Emmett displayed artefacts. He sought to “get rid of everything extraneous” in order to highlight the “real” thing by “taking away barriers for interpretation and methodologies that act as barriers.”40

Emmett therefore displayed artefacts in the Barracks in a highly aesthetic, sparse and simple manner. For example, the level two display of women’s clothing and bonnets that date from the mid nineteenth century and would have been worn by women who lived in the Barracks when it was a women’s asylum, are suspended by fishing wire so that they appear to be floating within the glass cases (see Figure 4.8). This places maximum attention on the objects themselves, and reflects Emmett’s idiom of displaying artefacts “with as little designer infill as possible.”41 The bonnets are suspended in a shape as if worn. This manner of display is theatrical, suggestive and evocative of the women who occupied the Barracks and once walked its passageways. The items are spotlit and cast shadows, which imply the ghosts of the Barracks’ women but also focus attention on the aesthetic quality of the items.

This display methodology avoids placing the artefacts within a set-like scene, which Emmett believed detracted from the artefacts themselves, and avoided simply laying the artefacts flat, which would restrict the full visibility of the items.42 Emmett’s method does however, have the effect of aestheticising the artefacts, which are fetishistically displayed in isolation.

40 Peter Emmett, Interview with the author, 11 July 2001, Sydney. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 209

Although highly aesthetic, his displays stress the use and function, rather than just form, of the artefacts. Emmett stressed that his method of displaying artefacts in the Barracks aimed to evoke their use, rather than the objects being decontextualised through aestheticisation.43 His display of women’s bonnets evokes the item’s use by displaying them as if worn. His focus on the materiality, texture, fabric and aesthetics of the artefacts, is always tempered with a demonstration of their function.

For example, the display of archaeological fragments found on the Barracks site presents a series of clay pipes, in conjunction with pictures of early Sydney colonists smoking such clay pipes (see Figure 4.9). This graphically illustrated their use. It is no coincidence that Emmett used nineteenth century pictures to illustrate the clay pipes’ former lives - in use, prior to their status as artefacts. Pictures, as the old adage goes, tell a thousand words. But they also help to animate the pipes. Similarly, the display of convict clothing on level three again suspended by fishing line and animated as if worn, is both evocative of their use – of the human presence – and highly aesthetic (see Figure 4.10).

Emmett’s desire to display artefacts in a simple and unadorned manner, and in particular his use of fishing line to suspend items, was influenced by his research on international museums for the Barracks’ redevelopment. He visited a provincial French museum, the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires (National Museum of Folk Art and Tradition) during his research and was struck by the museum’s “very simple representation and evocation of human presence” via the use of displays hung on fishing lines as if floating in space.44 This museum hung objects to suggest the human activity or use of object. Its displays were thematic and unadorned with props. And while the objects, according to Emmett, were a very important aspect of the museum, they were used as “triggers to something greater.”45 This something greater was their historical, human use and value. Emmett wanted to emulate this museum’s method of display in the Hyde Park Barracks.

43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 210

This museum was built in 1937 to house French cultural material in the former Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro – the foreign collections became the Musée de l’Homme. When Emmett visited in 1989, he would have viewed the so-called ‘Cultural’ gallery that opened in 1975 and was inspired by Claude Lévi-Strauss’s comment, “All human civilisation, however humble, can be presented under two major aspects: on the one hand it is in the universe; on the other it is itself a universe.”46 This quote seems to have influenced even the manner in which the items were displayed in the museum, and that subsequently influenced Emmett’s displays in the Barracks. Artefacts are both a complex thing in themselves, and indicative of a much wider range of social meanings. Emmett’s displays and the redevelopment of the Barracks building itself express this concept.

The simple, stripped-back and pared-down mode of display Emmett used in the Barracks was also a reaction against his earlier experience as senior curator of the Bicentennial Exhibition that toured Australia in 1988.47 The displays in this exhibition were cacophonous and visually complex by all accounts. Historians Peter Cochrane and David Goodman noted that the exhibition was a “barrage of voices and music, a cacophony of sounds.”48 The exhibition used props liberally. So much so that is seemed to take a “kaleidoscope approach” with its “collage-like use of pre-existing statements (films, objects, images)…”49 Emmett’s approach to curating the Barracks after this exhibition sought to simplify the way the message was conveyed and highlight the actual artefact. d. Parallels Emmett’s use of theatrical effects, fragments and simple, aesthetic displays has parallels. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. is perhaps one of the most evocative examples of an experience-based museum, and compares in some interesting ways with the Hyde Park Barracks Museum. The

46 According to the Harrap guide to Paris, pp. 1166-1168. Very little information about this museum exists in English. 47 Peter Emmett, Interview with the author, 11 July 2001, Sydney. The Bicentennial Exhibition was organised by the Australian Bicentennial Authority and took over five years to prepare at a cost of $37 million. Peter Cochrane and David Goodman, "The Great Australian Journey: Cultural Logic and Nationalism in the Postmodern Era," Australian Historical Studies 23.91 (1988): pp. 21-44. 48 Ibid. p. 21. 49 Ibid. p. 38. 211

Holocaust Museum opened in 1993, two years after Hyde Park Barracks.50 In the permanent exhibition The Holocaust is a reconstruction of concentration camp sleeping quarters. The visitor enters a wooden reconstruction of a sleeping quarters room to view the bare wooden bunks (see Figure 4.11). The sense of restricted space is extremely confronting and evocative, like the Barracks’ reconstruction of convict sleeping quarters. However, unlike the Barracks, the Holocaust Museum needed to construct the room entirely artificially. It is not the real thing, whereas the Barracks’ reconstruction highlights the fact that the visitor is actually standing in the very place that was used for convict sleeping quarters. Each serves to commemorate the past experience of convicts and Holocaust victims, and to create an experiential, emotive, interaction with the visitor.51 They seek to bring the past alive through theatrical reconstructions.

The display of concentration camp prisoner uniforms in the Holocaust Museum is similar to Emmett’s display in the Barracks. The uniforms are suspended with invisible line, and appear to float in space, invoking the human presence of the people who once wore these very uniforms as victims of the Holocaust (see Figure 4.12).

Such displays are strikingly close to the techniques used by art installations – Emmett knew this and this is why he commissioned Heather Dorrough to create the convict silhouettes and Paul Carter to write the script for the soundscape. Indeed, art curator and critic Ingrid Periz observed when she visited the Holocaust Museum that she almost mistook a display of the shoes of concentration camp victims with one half of the display missing (removed for conservation purposes, according to a small sign) for a contemporary art installation. This was an easy misunderstanding, she thought, because of the display’s “semiotic plenitude, (its) play on presence and absence

50 The Holocaust Museum in Washington was designed by James Ingo Freed, of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners. The Museum website notes, “To inform his design, he visited a number of Holocaust sites, including camps and ghettos, to examine structures and materials. The result is not a neutral shell. Instead, the architecture, by a collection of abstract forms — invented and drawn from memory — refers to the history the Museum addresses. Architectural allusions to the Holocaust are not specific. Visitors make their own interpretations. The subtle metaphors and symbolic reminiscences of history are vehicles for thought and introspection. In Freed's words, “There are no literal references to particular places or occurrences from the historic event. Instead, the architectural form is open-ended so the Museum becomes a resonator of memory.”” http://www.ushmm.org/museum/a_and_a/ Website accessed 8 June 2004. 51 For information on Holocaust Museum in Washington see Jeshajahu Weinberg and Rina Elieli, The Holocaust Museum in Washington (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1995). 212 coupled with referential ambiguity” that was highly artistic, and employs a method with which contemporary art audiences are accustomed.52

Sound plays a role in the Holocaust Museum as it does in the Barracks’ theatrical reconstruction. While the Barracks’ soundscape draws from historical documents, and employs fiction and poetic means, the Holocaust Museum uses oral history recordings in a soundscape. Voices from Auschwitz is a sound recording of survivors of Auschwitz recounting their stories. It plays in a specially constructed empty grey room with cold clinical seating for visitors to listen to the survivor’s individual memories of terror. The soundscape – as oral history – conveys the history of victims and is social history. Named in the Margin similarly attempts to bring to life the voices of those who experienced life in the Barracks, but it needs to use poetic and imaginary means in order to achieve this because oral history sources are unavailable.

The principle difference, apart from subject matter, between the Holocaust Museum’s experiential, commemorative displays and the Barracks’, is that the Barracks seeks to highlight the building as an artefact, the place where the convicts were actually imprisoned and lived. The Holocaust Museum, in contrast, is an artificial, highly designed space using theatrical reconstruction to tell the story of the Holocaust. The Barracks uses theatrical reconstruction to both interpret the site and bring the past alive. Each plays with notion of presence and absence. The Barracks displays are on the whole understated and sparse, employing inconspicuous design in order to highlight the building as an artefact, or the actual artefacts. The Holocaust Museum relies on highly designed spaces and displays in order to communicate something of the reality of the Holocaust and facilitate an emotional response in the viewer. The Barracks theatrical methods also elicit an emotive response.

The design of entire environments to simulate some aspects of a past event is of course employed by so-called living museums and was a major methodology used in Great Exhibitions, in particular in reconstructions of African villages.53 Such

52 Ingrid Periz, "A parable of missing shoes," Archives and the Everyday, exh. cat. Canberra Contemporary Art Space. Canberra, 1996. n.pag. 53 Annie Coombes, Reinventing Africa: museums, material culture, and popular imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Yale University Press, 1994). 213 simulations are also used today in conventional collection-based museums. They are not however, always as artistic as Emmett’s and the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s were. The Imperial War Museum in London designed an exhibit called The Trench, which simulates a trench in autumn 1916 on the front line during the battle of the Somme (see Figure 4.14). The exhibit opened in 1990.54 The museum visitor enters the darkened space and travels through the reconstructed trench, peering at different three-dimensional sets off the trench. The visitor hears bombs exploding nearby and in the distance, and ‘witnesses’ mannequins lying injured, having a cigarette, or radioing messages. The visitor moves through the twists and turns of the trench, watching the sets, and listening to the sound recordings of the mannequin-soldiers. It is an immersive experience, but not for a moment real. The visitor is absolutely aware of its artificiality and set-like feel. It is visibly plastic after all. And, the visitor watches, rather than feels. There is a separation between the visitor and the display despite, or perhaps because of, its elaborate reconstruction.

This elaborate reconstruction is nothing like what Emmett created, nor even what the Holocaust Museum sought to achieve. It is not in the least artistic, nor like contemporary art installations, although it is experiential. How is it dissimilar? The Trench fills in all the gaps, and delivers the visitor a complete view of the scene. It leaves nothing to the imagination. The visitor thus watches it, as a sort of three- dimensional television show, complete with the sense of smell. The visitor absorbs it, passively, although with the odd ‘oh’ and ‘ah.’ There is no play on presence and absence.

Compare The Trench to, for instance, British artists ’s work Hell (1999). The work consisted of nine display vitrines containing three-dimensional models of X-rated battle scenes created by the Chapman brothers (see Figure 4.15).55 While the pornographic and explicit portrayal of mutated soldier figurines would make it unsuitable for children and not for the faint hearted, the methods it employs are far more evocative than The Trench, principally because it requires the viewer to

54 Penny Ritchie Calder, Head of Exhibitions, Imperial War Museum London, Email correspondence with author, 7 June 2004. 55 The work was destroyed by fire on 26 May 2004 while in storage with other artworks in ’s collection in London. Saatchi commissioned the work from the Chapman Brothers for £500,000. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1-1124042,00.html Website accessed 4 June 2004. 214 imagine the scene. It employs artistic licence. There are some 5000 figurines in the work, which illustrates an excessive amount of bodies pushing and writhing together. The miniaturised diorama-like models, that are distinctly museological, are absolutely absorbing and fascinating meditations on the violence of war, though they do not employ sound, smell, nor do they recreate an entire simulated environment for the visitor to move through. These models raise the point that perhaps old-fashioned museum dioramas continue to be an effective communication and interpretation method. And, that an all out three-dimensional simulated environment is lacking in the important area of subjective, imaginative reconstruction.

Artistic approaches to museological display and heritage sites offer, as Periz observed, ambiguity and “semiotic plenitude.”56 They thus allow the visitor to create their own experience, interpretation or private meditation of the display. Emmett’s distinctive adoption of sparse art-installation like methods in the Barracks, relies on absence, and on the actual artefact, require, what writer Jan Dungey called an enquiring engagement. Dungey’s 1989 article, although brief at three pages, described an approach to heritage museology as ‘Where Arts, Imagination and Environment Meet.’57 Dungey argued that artistic approaches to display engage the enquiring mind, body and senses.58 By enquiring she meant the active imaginative response of a museum visitor. Dungey stated,

The arts can offer ways of approaching places and the means of articulating and communicating experience of place to others…If arts’ expressions can give cultural importance to these qualities and their application to places, if they can introduce new images, myths and celebrations of places into our cultural store, they will be of as great a practical value as the physical preservation of a particular historic building.59

Emmett’s approach to museology in the Barracks is artistic and theatrical. This approach allowed an imaginative engagement with the social history of the site –

56 Ingrid Periz, "A parable of missing shoes," Archives and the Everyday, exh. cat. Canberra Contemporary Art Space. Canberra, 1996. n.pag. 57 Jan Dungey, "Where Arts, Imagination and Environment Meet," Heritage Interpretation Vol 1: The Natural and Built Environment ed. David L. Uzzell (London: Belhaven Press, 1989). pp. 229-231. 58 Ibid. p. 230. 59 Ibid. p. 231. 215 history from below as opposed to above – that in fact facilitated the communication of historical truth in the Barracks. e. Criticisms Notwithstanding this, Emmett’s artistic approach in the Barracks potentially has some problems and has been the subject of criticism. The focus on the physical fabric of the building and emphasis on aesthetics is something for which he was criticised. Museologist Linda Young reviewed the Barracks after Emmett’s redevelopment. Young argued that Emmett’s artistic methods divert attention from the complex history of the Barracks. She claimed, “minimalist aesthetics almost blots out the complexity of the story.”60 Young argued that the Barracks depicts the violence of the convict past in abstract and stylistic terms, which “make the horrific approachable, though upon realising it, one’s stomach may churn at the artifice.”61 According to Young, stylistic – theatrical and aesthetic – elements of the Barracks trivialise the historical meaning of the museum, so much so that museum exhibits are “toy like.”62 Young comes from a heritage and museum perspective, and is a senior lecturer in the University of Canberra’s cultural heritage management programme, rather than art perspective, which may help to explain her criticism.

Young reiterated this criticism of the Barracks in her review of a later exhibition Wanderlust: Journeys through the Macleay Museum curated by Emmett in 1998 at the Museum of Sydney. Young claimed Emmett offered an “aestheticised selection [which] floated in an ether of metaphor.”63 She concluded that Emmett’s approach to exhibiting artefacts, “offered an interesting aesthetic experience but an unconvincing historical interpretation.”64 Young believes that the focus on the aesthetics of objects downplays the artefact’s significance and that this creative approach to historical interpretation results in a sort of fuzzy history, giving no clear sense of the truth of history.

60 Linda Young, "Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney," Australian Historical Studies 25.99 (1992): p. 327. 61 Ibid.p. 327. 62 Ibid.p. 327. 63 Linda Young, "Wanderlust: Journeys through the Macleay Museum," Museum National.Nov-Dec (1998): p. 30. 64 Ibid.p. 30. 216

This criticism reiterates the fear outlined at the start of this section that if curators do not carefully manage museum designers, the focus on design and aesthetics would dominate over attention to facts. However, ultimately this criticism is difficult to sustain because as I have shown, Emmett’s goal was not to communicate facts. He used visual and spatial as opposed to textual methods of communication in order to create an experience of the past.

Nevertheless the experience of the past created in the Barracks is arguably problematic as well. The use of theatrical reconstructions of the sleeping quarters, a sound installation and convict silhouettes created a total sensory and spatial engagement. But these theatrical techniques arguably do not do justice to the brutal reality of the convict experience. However, as Andrea Witcomb has argued in relation to Emmett’s approach to the Museum of Sydney, the Barracks does offer “interactivity” for museum visitors.65 This is because it requires the visitor to actively imagine the past and fill in the gaps.

The artistic methods employed by Emmett in the Barracks reflected a very idealistic attempt to match discourse with practice. It reflected a particular experimentalism and approach to historical interpretation, which can be understood as part of post- Bicentennial revisionism, and which has now unfortunately largely lost currency.66

65 Andrea Witcomb, Re-Imagining the Museum Beyond the Mausoleum (London: Routledge, 2003). pp. 128-164. 66 Post-Bicentennial revisionism has lost currency for a variety of reasons, which are outside of the scope of this thesis. Suffice to say that a more conservative political environment since the Howard Liberal party’s election to Government in 1996, has perhaps dampened the creative experimentalism in these museums, and as historian Graeme Davison contended, has led to a focus on monumental history in the national rhetoric as opposed to ‘small’ history that has thus filtered down to museums’ representations of history. Predictably, this has been felt most keenly in the National Museum of Australia. Evidence for this can be found in the politically circumscribed debates in the museum’s council. Revisionist and politically conservative members of the council, elected to council by the Howard Government and with strong ties to the Liberal party, have been reported to be at loggerheads over the museum’s exhibition guidelines, which state that museum exhibitions would challenge museum visitors to reflect on the nation’s history. Conservative members of the council contested the use of the word challenge, arguing that museum’s shouldn’t challenge their visitors. Furthermore, the conservative members claimed the museum was ignoring “the inspiring stories of the great pioneers and the pastoralists…in order to find room for suburban historical trivia like the Hills Hoist.” Richard Yallop. "Battle of the black armband a challenge for museum." Weekend Australian 4-5 January 2003: pp. 1, 2. The government’s criticism of the museum resulted in a review being conducted into the museum’s exhibitions and programs. The review was completed in July 2003, and is available on the NMA website. The review found that the NMA was short on “compelling narratives” and that aspects of the museum are incoherent narrative-wise. It argued that there were to few focal objects upon which to build strong narratives. This review seems to suggest a move away from the highly pluralist exhibits with which the NMA opened. 217

The following section will examine specific art installations in the Barracks in 1995 that further interpret the social history of the site. It will consider the similarities and differences in approach between the artists, in their quasi-curatorial role, and Emmett’s artistic approach to museology in the Barracks. This discussion therefore aims to ascertain the key differences between art installation and museum display in the Barracks.

Artist as curator: artists’ interpretations of the Barracks’ archive 1995

In 1995, curator of the Barracks, Lynn Collins, invited artists Anne Brennan and Anne Ferran to create work based on the Barrack’s archive of archaeological material. A curator of contemporary art previously, Collins had experience with a variety of art residency projects.67 Brennan and Ferran had each previously produced art that explored historical representation and contested the modernist canon of art history from a feminist perspective. Brennan had contested the binary distinction between art (masculine, heroic) and craft (feminine, dilettante). Ferran had explored classicist tropes in stylised photographic portraits of women.68 Each worked in revisionist terms from a feminist perspective. In their residency at the Barracks, the artists extended the themes of their individual practices through the reappraisal of the material collected in the Barracks’ archaeological archive.

Collins initially planned the artists’ residency to culminate in,

http://www.nma.gov.au/libraries/attachments/review/review_report_20030715/files/552/ReviewReport20 030715.pdf See p 68. Last accessed 16 July 2004. 67 Collins was Director of the Jam Factory Workshop in Adelaide. Lynn Collins, Interview with the author, 10 July 2001, Sydney. 68 Since her residency at the Barracks Ferran has gone on to base many of her works on other historic sites. Lost to Worlds (2001) explored the female factory convict sites in Tasmania, one located in South Hobart, another in Ross. Despite the convict history having been turned into ‘heritage’ and part of the cultural tourism circuit in Tasmania, the Hobart female factory site – the first in Australia, built at the same time as Port Arthur –was until 1975 (International Year of Women) unlisted as a heritage site. In contrast, Port Arthur, although it is arguably of no greater importance historically, was protected since 1949. See Graeme Davison, "A Brief History of the Australian Heritage Movement," A Heritage Handbook ed. Chris McConville (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991). p. 65 The contrast may be in part due to the aesthetics of the ruin – where the Port Arthur site had by 1949 assumed the characteristics of a romantic ruin, the Hobart Female Factory site had been reused for various businesses. Anne Ferran’s interest in this is also motivated by feminism, and the absence of memorialisation of the female convicts compared with the male convicts at Port Arthur. 218

little vignettes throughout the whole museum, embellishing facts, passages that were not overly apparent…the idea was to animate the space, create a theatre by which to interpret cold museum facts in another way.69

Collins’ comment seems surprising given that I have established that the Barracks was far from a cold, clinical or objective interpretation of the past. Nevertheless, Collins clearly felt that artists could bring a different kind of interpretation to Emmett’s.

During the course of the artists’ residency, the Greenway Gallery on level one became available and the project developed into a temporary exhibition in the Gallery instead of vignettes throughout the museum. Speculating on the merits of vignettes throughout the museum and the exhibition in a separate gallery, Collins remarked, “The artists’ vignettes appealed to me more than the exhibition because of the unexpected and intimate relationship they could offer museum visitors…as triggers for peoples’ imaginations.”70 Collins thought the artist’s involvement would invoke an imaginative response and be more intimate than the existing museum displays. This intimacy was perhaps lessened when the project developed into a separate exhibition because vignettes catered to the individual and would have been discovered while viewing other museum exhibits. Despite this, I will argue that Brennan in particular maintained a sense of intimacy with her work in the exhibition format.

Brennan and Ferran developed their exhibition Secure the Shadow around their research on the Barracks’ archaeological archive. According to Ferran, the artists were the first external researchers (non-museum personnel) to look at the archaeological archive and attempt to make sense of it.71 Peter Watts, Director of the Trust, verified this in his foreword for the exhibition catalogue.72 It seems significant that the first external researchers to examine the material were artists not historians or archaeologists. This illustrates the value Peter Watts placed on artistic interpretation.

69 Lynn Collins, Interview with the author, 10 July 2001, Sydney. 70 Ibid. 71 Anne Ferran, Interview with the author, 12 July 2001, Sydney. 72 Peter Watts, "Foreword," Secure the Shadow: Anne Brennan and Anne Ferran, exh. cat. Hyde Park Barracks. Sydney, Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1995. 219

Brennan and Ferran focussed on material relating to immigrant female occupation (1848-1886) and the period of the Government Asylum for Infirm and Destitute Women (1862–1886). Many of the female immigrants were brought out to solve the gender imbalance in the colony and the shortage of female servants once convict transportation ceased in 1848.73 Most of these women came either from Ireland or from the overcrowded workhouses of Britain. There is little evidence about the lives of the women occupants of the Barracks during the mid-nineteenth century. The little that exists is in the form of bureaucratic documents that detail names, ages, places of birth and dates of arrival in the colony. This information is essential but does not give us much sense of the lives that the women may have led. It is not enough to piece together a social history and personal interpretation.

The artists hoped that the Barrack’s archaeological archive would reveal more tangible traces of the lives of these women. Trawling through the archaeological archive Brennan and Ferran found objects relating to the lives of the women such as hair combs, cutlery, clothing remains, sewing items, paper, textiles and menstrual rags. This archaeological material provides a more tangible link with the women who occupied the Barracks in the nineteenth century than bureaucratic documents. Brennan and Ferran therefore researched this material in search for a more stable and concrete understanding of the lives of the women. The material presented tangible traces of the women- objects that had been handled by them, bodily objects, and some evidence of their daily movements through the building, such as the deposits of sewing items, pins especially, clustered under the floorboards around the windows and fireplaces where they sewed. But this was scant evidence providing an outline but nothing more.

Although Brennan and Ferran wanted to ‘pin down’ a more stable image of the women this proved difficult. Instead, reflected in the artists’ work was the idea of unstable identities that are inaccurate and imaginative. Rather than anything else, the artists pinned down their own subjective imagining of the women. The nineteenth

73 Deborah Oxley, Convict Maids: The forced migration of women to Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996).; Eric Richards, ed., Visible Women: Female Immigrants in Colonial Australia (Canberra: Division of Historical Studies and Centre for Immigration and Multicultural Studies, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University, 1995). 220 century advertisement for photography that advised to ‘secure the shadow ere the substance fade’ encapsulates the artists’ desire to grasp hold of material remnants that offered at least some tangible link with the women.

Brennan and Ferran returned to the body as the site of identity to garner a more stable sense of their subjects’ identity. The artists’ adopted stitching as a metaphor for writing and conversation. They conflated the activity of sewing with writing to establish a connection between the bodily actions of stitching, the conversations spoken while sewing and the act of writing. Brennan and Ferran note,

Sewing and writing, stitching and transcribing… they could all be said to belong to the one family. A single row of stitches, closely spaced, is a code for a precise sequence of movements of the arm and hand…. As for plain sewing, so for handwriting; the pen, like the needle makes a line which can be physically retraced, re-membered later…The women’s sewing could be seen to mirror their lost- or absent- writing, or even to echo their spoken words which went unrecorded.74

Brennan suggests these conflations through hand-made books (see Figures 4.16-4.20). The books were placed on tables for visitors to look through and in glass cabinets open at a particular page. By placing the books on a table, Brennan recreated the feel of a library, or a place of study. In a sense this is precisely what the exhibition embodied, because of the way it placed the visitor in the position of a researcher – piecing together information gleaned from displays of the collections themselves and the artists’ representations. Furthermore, by encouraging the visitor to sit down and read, Brennan replicated the slowed time associated with both reading and sewing and actively implicated the visitor’s body. The activity of reading in this exhibition became another form of tracing, like sewing, as well as a private space for contemplation and the imagination. In this exhibition, reading the past is an act of the imagination. Brennan created an interactive role for the visitor. She also established an intimate experience for the visitor, as reading is a personal, intimate activity.

74 Anne Brennan and Anne Ferran, "Secure the Shadow," Secure the Shadow: Anne Brennan and Anne Ferran, exh. cat. Hyde Park Barracks. Sydney, Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1995. p. 14. 221

Displayed in glass cabinets, the books took on the aura of an art object, or a rare book, both of which they are.75

The books themselves, stitched together by the artist, conflate stitching with writing. On one page Brennan used cross writing in the shape of an oval, which connotes a kind of letter stitching. The intersecting horizontal and vertical line grid consists of scant biographical details of the women. It invokes the cross-stitch grid, the pattern of a thumbprint and most literally the cross-written letters of the nineteenth century. Stitching, to Brennan, is an illiterate writing, a surrogate for writing. As well, the thumbprint like image stands in for the artist’s search for a stable sense of the women’s identity. In this schema, their identity consists of names, ages, birthplaces, crimes, illnesses, and numbers of children and their activity of sewing.76

Ferran’s photographic piece Secure the Shadow 1 (see Figures 4.22, 4.23) consists of a series of montages of bureaucratic documents about the women in the form of sewing patterns for nineteenth century women’s clothing – long skirts, bodices and bonnets. The images are like blueprints, literally patterns for identity that evoke the deferred physicality of the women who inhabited the Barracks. Scattered over these patterns are clusters of sewing pins.

In Soft Caps, Ferran photographed white bonnets, given shape and gesture by invisible wearers (see Figure 4.24). The bonnets appear to float in time and space. They are at once theatrical and ghostly. This was a similar approach to Emmett’s display of bonnets suspended with fishing line. Both artist and curator suggested the human presence, through absence. This indicates a methodological parallel between Ferran’s and Emmett’s approach. Each wanted to engage the viewer’s imagination, and stimulate the imagined presence of the women who lived in the Barracks.

75 Joan Kerr noted, “Brennan’s beautiful little books turn the unfeeling negatives of official records – “blind, abandoned by her husband, no children, destitute” for example – into positives.” Joan Kerr and Jo Holder, "Site-Specific Projects," Past Present: The National Women's Art Anthology eds. Jo Holder and Joan Kerr (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1999). p. 155. 76 Evelyn Juers noted in her catalogue essay, “We note the emphasis on stitching in Ferran’s photographs and Brennan’s books. Theirs is a conscious focus on activities of fusion: sewing, book- binding, and indeed, reading.” Evelyn Juers, "Under the House," Secure the Shadow: Anne Brennan and Anne Ferran, exh. cat. Hyde Park Barracks. Sydney, Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1995. p. 7. 222

In another display, Ferran and the curator of the Greenway Gallery, Gary Crockett, selected aspects of the archaeological collection to display in glass cabinets. Ferran selected the material that she liked the look of and put them in the cases. This material primarily consisted of dirt and rats’ nests found under the floorboards of the Barracks.77 Ferran commented in an interview with the author,

I just put in their accession numbers, no other information. I did this to suggest (that it is) part of a much bigger archive, (that the) numbering system is ordered, yet the material is chaotic, arranged by rats! …For artists these contradictions seem really productive78

Ferran noted that Gary Crocket appreciated her “minimal style of interpretation” of the rats’ nests (see Figure 4.25).79 Other curators within the Trust found it frustrating. Ferran thought that James Broadbent, another curator for the Trust, wanted her to make more of the material in her display. But Ferran felt this was precisely what the artists’ were grappling with – the lack of clues about the life of women in the Barracks.80

This act of displaying unarticulated dirt has a number of implications. In the first instance it is an interventional ‘curatorial’ decision within the context of the Barracks. While a large part of the archaeological material consists of dirt with fragments of objects and textiles tangled in it – it is rarely displayed in such a way. The role of the museum is to articulate meaning around things, to pull identifiable objects out of the dirt, clean them up a bit and generate interpretation around the object in exhibition displays. Ferran has inverted, perhaps contravened, these museological principles. As an artist, she seemed to be more interested in bringing the dirt itself into the museum. Clearly, the contrast between the cleanliness of the museum environment and the organic dirty matter of the rats’ nests appealed to the artist. Furthermore, she did not provide explanatory labelling. But this does not mean that she did not interpret the archaeological material. Collins argued that Ferran’s display of clumps of dirt and

77 The rats’ nests are attributed with saving much of the textile archaeological material – the rats collected textile material over the years and used it in building their nests. 78 Anne Ferran, Interview with the author, 12 July 2001, Sydney. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid. 223 textile fragments “are not presented as elements of an empirical exercise but as eloquent objects in their own right.”81

This seems remarkably close to Emmett’s desire to focus attention on the materiality and ‘eloquence’ of objects. Emmett however, did not go so far as the artists in displaying unarticulated dirt. His approach, like the artists, focused on the object itself, which as we saw, highlighted the aesthetics of the item.

Indeed, although Ferran wanted to display the ‘dirtiness’ of the archaeological collection with fragments of unidentified objects tangled together, she claims she did not anticipate the scraps becoming aesthetic objects in their own right and being fetishized within the museum cabinets (see Figure 4.21).82 The spotlights intensified the colours of the scraps, compared to their ‘discoloured’ dull tenor inside storage where the artist had selected them. The gleaming designer display cases and lights made the scraps assume an intensity that was not there previously. Ferran commented, “generally they became charged with a power they had completely lacked before.”83 The scraps’ humbleness was somehow enlarged and transformed into something more potent by the frame of the museum vitrine.

Evelyn Juers observed the aesthetic and symbolic treatment of these scraps in her catalogue essay,

Instead of treating strips of material as parts of a larger whole – a dress, an apron, underwear, winding sheet, curtain – the humble and anonymous fragment is dealt with the aesthetic respect usually accorded something larger and more significant. In this exhibition, peelings and siftings, remnants, are allowed to exchange their dusty and inferior objecthood for gendered subjectivity.84

Ferran’s display of archaeological material also served another purpose. On level two of the Barracks is a store and study room containing the Barracks’ archaeological

81 Lynn Collins, "Introduction," Secure the Shadow: Anne Brennan and Anne Ferran, exh. cat. Hyde Park Barracks. Sydney, Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1995. p. 3. 82 Anne Ferran, Interview with the author, 12 July 2001, Sydney. 83 Ibid. 84 Evelyn Juers, "Under the House," Secure the Shadow: Anne Brennan and Anne Ferran, exh. cat. Hyde Park Barracks. Sydney, Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1995. pp. 4-9. 224 collection, catalogued in cardboard boxes. This storeroom is visible to the public because a glass wall separates it from the archaeological displays. The Barracks’ archive is thus displayed and in storage. This aestheticised display of storage and archives was another parallel with contemporary art installations in the Barracks, because contemporary art installations have frequently drawn upon the metaphor of storage and archives.

Ingrid Schaffner described the appeal of archives to artists for the 1998 exhibition Deep Storage: Collecting Storing and Archiving in Art,

To visit the storeroom, where objects dwell cut off from critical aura, is to contemplate art in a state of temporal remission….the spectacle of an unopened container or closed file can be an arousing suggestion of unknown possibilities, with contents made desirable precisely through their inaccessibility.85

The Barracks’ display of archives in storage perhaps worked to arouse curiosity about what is kept within all the storage boxes, as well as visually reinstate the notion of the Barracks as a museum, and keeping place.

Ferran’s display of archaeological material from the archives counteracted the sealed view of the museum archive display, by revealing the archival contents: spilt open and on view. This contradicts Schaffner’s comment, and perhaps indicates that Ferran took more of a curatorial approach rather than artistic by displaying the archaeological material.

Ferran and Brennan’s exhibition had many parallels with Emmett’s redevelopment of the Barracks. Like Emmett, Brennan and Ferran engaged with the social history of the site, and used creative means to do so. Ferran and Brennan highlighted the presence of human subjects of the Barracks by suggesting their physical presence, and prompted the visitor to imagine the life of women in the Barracks. They privileged visitor interactivity with the exhibition through, for example, the activity of reading the artist

85 Ingrid Schaffner, "documenta V," Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing and Archiving in Art, eds. Ingrid Schaffner and Matthias Winzen, exh. cat. P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. New York, Prestel, 1998. p. 11. 225 books. They also established a play between presence and absence as Emmett had done.

Despite these similarities, there are still clear differences between the artists’ and Emmett’s approach. Emmett reconstructed an experiential environment for museum visitors, which hoped to place museum visitors, as much as it could, in the shoes of the former occupants of the Barracks. Spatial experience of the building was pivotal to Emmett’s method. Brennan and Ferran did not reconstruct any aspect of the Barracks as it would have been, and did not create a spatial experience for the visitor. These visiting artists did not have a responsibility to educate the public in the way that the Barracks staff did and this perhaps enabled greater focus on the notion of absence.

The development of the exhibition presented some difficulties that highlight the different working processes of artists and institutions. Ferran commented that with the shift to Greenway Gallery,

(we) had to be much more structured and forward planning…(there were) tensions because the curator needed info about the show, and the artists were not ready. I struggled to accommodate their need to know quite early what the show would have in it, while we were still working it out.86

Ferran goes on,

These tensions were not severe, but I was very aware of them… Physical protection of the work was an issue. Another problem – or feature of the experience- was signage…the artist wants to leave spaces for people to enter the work, spaces for individual interpretation.87

This suggests that the museum wanted to use text labels, where the artists wanted to display the archaeological material without labels because they did not want to create a prescriptive interpretation of the items. They wanted to preserve ambiguity and allow the visitor to create their own interpretation of the material.

86 Anne Ferran, Interview with the author, 12 July 2001, Sydney. 87 Ibid. 226

The artists’ approach to the archaeological material provoked public debate soon after Secure the Shadow opened. Ferran recalled, the controversy “seemed in part to do with the fact that the artists found that there was not much known about the material, that they were the first to look at it, aside from the archaeologist who catalogued it.” Not only this but artists had concluded, “there was little to find in the material.”88 While absence formed a productive point of engagement for the artists, for those interested in fact finding, this was a rather frustrating observation. Brennan went on ABC radio Arts Today to defend the show, and Joan Kerr’s opening speech for the show was printed for visitors to the exhibition – almost as a defence of the work. Kerr’s position as a prominent art historian and matriarch of feminist art history in Australia lent considerable support to the project. Kerr noted,

Secure the Shadow does not offer some re-creation of the barracks as it might have appeared when it was a refuge for women who had nowhere else to go. That is provided by the context of the building and its historic displays. Instead Brennan and Ferran have taken unembellished rubbish and fragments which are all that remain of these women’s lives and from them conjured up poignant and tragic ghosts.89

Ferran believes that the criticism came from those who thought that the artists were not a reliable interpretative source and that Ferran and Brennan had wilfully emphasised absence and lack for their own feminist goals.90

This debate was ultimately circumscribed by a politics of gender. What the artists had drawn attention to was the way that women who were poor or powerless are not figured/represented in public archives – and only traces of their lives are found in archaeological material. Secure the Shadow attempted to reinsert the women into this archive, or at least elevate the public consciousness about the histories of women in the Barracks. Joan Kerr and Jo Holder explain “advocates of cultural relativism aim to reveal the way history is selected, periodised, presented, marketed and consumed and the way that exclusions come into play.”91 Brennan and Ferran in this case were

88 Ibid. 89 Joan Kerr and Jo Holder, "Site-Specific Projects," Past Present: The National Women's Art Anthology eds. Jo Holder and Joan Kerr (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1999). p. 155. 90 Anne Ferran, Interview with the author, 12 July 2001, Sydney. 91 Joan Kerr and Jo Holder, "Site-Specific Projects," Past Present: The National Women's Art Anthology eds. Jo Holder and Joan Kerr (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1999). p. 154. 227 advocates of cultural relativism, vying for women’s place in public memory, alongside a collective memory about Australia’s convict heritage.

Although Secure the Shadow had parallels with Emmett’s creative approach to interpretation within the Barracks- that emphasised aesthetics rather than information, lateral connection rather than precise definition, plural and subjective perspectives- their approach challenged some within the Trust and the public. Just as Emmett’s artistic methods received criticism, so did the artist’s quasi-curatorial interpretation of the archaeological archive.

In light of the particular approach of Brennan and Ferran in Secure the Shadow, it is clear that artists play an interpretive role in social history museums. These artists did not set out to explicitly critique and contravene the museum. Their work was not interventional in the way Jubelin’s was, though it did cause some controversy. Brennan and Ferran’s approach to the Barracks extended Emmett’s interpretation.

Art, experience and commemoration: Edge of the Trees (1995) the Museum of Sydney

In the previous sections of this chapter I established that Ferran and Brennan’s quasi- curatorial role had parallels with Emmett’s artistic curatorial practice in the Hyde Park Barracks. Each used artistic methods of interpretation that encouraged an active and imaginative engagement with the visitor. Emmett, for example, did this through the room of reconstructed convict sleeping quarters; Brennan, through her handmade books that the visitor could sit and read. Each sought to commemorate the human occupants who once lived in the Barracks.

Emmett extended the commemorative function of art within the Museum of Sydney where he was senior curator. He commissioned two artists to create a spatial and experiential art installation that had the primary function of commemoration. This section examines this art installation at the Museum of Sydney and the role Emmett played in this commission. I suggest that as well as art playing an interpretive and quasi-curatorial role in museology at the Trust, it has played a commemorative role.

228

As touched on in chapter four’s analysis of Narelle Jubelin’s Collector’s Chests, the Museum of Sydney has generated widespread commentary and criticism. Linda Young reviewed the opening of the museum and claimed that Emmett, “pushes museum history in more fluid and mysterious directions than any other historical presentation in this country.”92 One writer claimed the Museum of Sydney was the most successful example of a museum that incorporates and is symbiotically related to the city.93 Another, museologist Andrea Witcomb, argued that the Museum of Sydney achieves “dialogic interactivity” via what she described as ‘unusual’ methods and that this represents, “the most promise for understanding interactivity in a museum context.”94 What Witcomb described as ‘unusual’ methods however, I call artistic, because the examples that Witcomb cited frequently involved contemporary artists or a creative approach to historical interpretation and design. Witcomb acknowledged in her analysis of the Museum of Sydney that “many of its exhibits are like art installations.”95 Witcomb thought that the unusual (artistic) methods successfully fostered an imaginative and interactive engagement with the viewer.

The first art installation the visitor encounters upon approaching the Museum of Sydney is spatially and dialogically (in that it establishes a dialogue with the visitor) interactive, to use Witcomb’s terminology. The installation is commemorative and serves to introduce the visitor to the museological approach Emmett adopted in the Museum. This reveals the significance art had to Emmett’s curatorial project. The Museum Plan in 1993 further verifies the importance of art to the Museum of Sydney, “Interpretation is based on empirical evidence but beyond it on the threads of connection and more so the gaps between evidence based on a creative and speculative approach.”96 This recalls Emmett’s play on presence and absence in the Barracks.

Why did Emmett prioritise artistic methods to such a degree? Part of the reason is that the site of the First Government House, on which the Museum of Sydney is located,

92 Linda Young, "Museum of Sydney," Australian Historical Studies 26.105 (1995): p. 666. 93 Katherine F. Benzel, The room in context: design beyond boundaries (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998). 94 Andrea Witcomb, Re-Imagining the Museum Beyond the Mausoleum (London: Routledge, 2003). p. 7. 95 Ibid. p. 163. 96 Museum Plan (Sydney: Museum of Sydney, 1993). p. 19. 229 and which the museum commemorates, was the focus of competing interpretations from the early 1980s.97 Emmett dealt with the competing and contradictory views of the site by embracing the multivalency of the site. Artistic methodologies were extremely useful because they often leave interpretation open and allow, what Ingrid Periz described as “semiotic plenitude.”98 This artistic approach risked a lack of clear didactic meaning. And indeed critics are divided as to whether the result is a lack of meaning99 or enhanced meaning and even “dialogic interactivity”, as Witcomb argued.100 Nevertheless, artistic methodologies are pivotal to the Museum of Sydney.

Emmett’s use of art installations achieves two things at the Museum of Sydney. The first, as chapter three described in relation to Narelle Jubelin’s Collector’s Chests, was polysemic interpretation and interactivity with the visitor. Jubelin’s role was curatorial. The second, that I will now discuss, was commemoration.

Fiona Foley and Janet Laurence’s Edge of the Trees (1995) is a sculptural installation in the forecourt of the Museum of Sydney (see Figure 4.27, 4.28). Visitors pass it on entering and exiting the museum. It introduces the museum and commemorates the encounter between the local Aboriginal Eora people and the first colonisers of the Sydney region – a major theme in the Museum of Sydney. Young noted that in the Edge of the Trees “to the annoyance of some First Fleet descendants and others, there is none of the conventional glory of colonial foundation in its picture.”101

97The Friends of the First Government House wanted to emphasise the story of the convict bricklayer who built the House (the House was built in 1788 and demolished in 1846, only the footings of the House remain today). The New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council wanted to find out whether the bricks used to build the house were made from shell middens that contained the bones of local Aboriginal Eora people. The 1788-1820 Association wanted a replica of Governor Phillip’s house built on the site, which would have destroyed the original footings of the first Government House. The minister for Public Works in 1981 proposed a conservatorium of music occupy the site. The National Trust recommended the site for the Inter-Continental Hotel. As bizarre as this latter recommendation may seem, such diverse views on the site reflect the extremely contradictory and differing values and interpretations of the site. Paul Carter, "Footings: Mythopoeic Foundations of Imperial Time," Quicksands: foundational histories in Australia & Aotearoa New Zealand eds. Klaus Neumann, et al. (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1999). p. 64. 98 Ingrid Periz, "A parable of missing shoes," Archives and the Everyday, exh. cat. Canberra Contemporary Art Space. Canberra, 1996. n.pag. 99 Guy Hansen, "Fear of the 'master narrative': reflections on site interpretation at the Museum of Sydney," Museum National.Nov (1996): pp. 18-19; Julie Marcus, "Erotics and the Museum of Sydney," A Dark Smudge Upon the Sand: Essays on Race, Guilt and the National Consciousness ed. Julie Marcus LNR Press, 1999). pp. 37-50.; Linda Young, "Museum of Sydney," Australian Historical Studies 26.105 (1995): pp. 666-667; Linda Young, "Wanderlust: Journeys through the Macleay Museum," Museum National.Nov-Dec (1998): pp. 29-30. 100 Andrea Witcomb, Re-Imagining the Museum Beyond the Mausoleum (London: Routledge, 2003). 101 Linda Young, "Museum of Sydney," Australian Historical Studies 26.105 (1995): p. 666. 230

The work consists of a series of pillars of different shape, height and material including wood, steel, glass, sandstone and zinc. The pillars are installed in a sandstone ground, differentiating the space of the Edge of the Trees from the granite plaza space in front of the museum – on the site of the First Government House. The visitor can wander amongst the pillars, surrounded by the forest-like form. Each pillar is unique. Some are circular, others rectangular, each has individual features. For example, some wooden pillars are etched with the names of local plant species in Latin and in Aboriginal languages. Another pillar has a series of small plates of zinc engraved with the signatures of crew and convicts of the First Fleet. Others have small glass containers inlaid in the wooden pillars filled with various substances including ash, feathers, hair, wax, shells, and fish and animal bones. A number of pillars have speakers installed in them playing sound recordings of the Aboriginal Eora names for flora and names for the regions of Sydney. The work is highly sensory. It comprises different shapes (elongated; round, rectangular), textures (wood; smooth steel and zinc; soft feathers), colours (brown to grey wood; rich ochre; pale yellow sandstone) and sounds (Aboriginal language). It is an enveloping and immersive structure. The work commemorates the local Eora Aboriginal people and the first colonisers in Sydney by combining iconography suggesting each. It specifically commemorates their interaction that was beset by conflict, misunderstanding and dispossession.

Through substances such as wax, the artists’ hoped to suggest honey, which they claim is a “mythological and healing substance”, while wax is a “binding material used in Aboriginal art practices.”102 The healing, binding quality of the work was a crucial aspect of the work’s memorial quality. Memorials not only commemorate the past, but also are contemplative focal points binding and healing present and future generations. Architect Andrew Nimmo commented,

It tells of how the longest continuous civilisation ever known so nearly came to a clumsy and ignorant end at the hands of colonisers/invaders. It recalls misguided eighteenth century notions of a criminal class that could simply be extracted from society. It replaces perhaps the very trees that

102 Dinah Dysart, ed., Edge of the Trees at the Museum of Sydney (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 2000) p. 51. 231

once grew on this site. The pillars evoke the ghosts/spirits of those who have marked and named this place, and who are now absent.103

The installation’s role is primarily commemorative, as Nimmo suggests. Unlike conventional memorials however, which commemorate the founding fathers of Australia, this memorial commemorates a complex and ongoing story. It does this through formal means as much as intellectual. Unlike statues for example, which are frozen depictions and something that we view, Edge of the Trees is a memorial that we enter and move through. It is a memorial that speaks. It is not quantifiable as a discrete entity or object. Instead, it occupies a space and is an entire ‘environment’ rather than object. It is experiential, rather than just viewable.

The installation is integral to the Museum building, plaza and curatorial content of the Museum of Sydney. This is undoubtedly due to the integration, convergence and collaboration between the curator, artists and architects in developing the work. Emmett can be understood again as contributing artist to the work. Indeed, the Trust’s publication that details and documents the process and final product of the work, names Emmett as the author of the original concept for the work. Andrew Nimmo believed Emmett played the role of ‘arts advocate’ for the work.104 This implies Emmett as the principle organiser, and the artists as those who realised the work in material form.

Foley, who is Aboriginal, provided much of the indigenous component of the work. In the concept brief, Emmett stressed the importance of an indigenous perspective.105 However, Laurence and Foley’s negotiation and collaboration, perhaps fittingly, was not smooth or harmonious. In the Trust’s publication documenting the process of the commission, these problems are not detailed. The work is presented as a unanimous collaboration between Laurence and Foley. In her introduction, Dinah Dysart noted however, “the evolution of the project was by no means straightforward.”106 And that

103 Andrew Nimmo, "Delivering art to the public realm 2: the role of the arts advocate," Architecture Bulletin.September (1995): p. 7. 104 Ibid. p. 8. 105 Peter Emmett, Edge of the Trees Concept Brief (Sydney: Museum of Sydney, 1993). n.pag. 106 Dinah Dysart, ed., Edge of the Trees at the Museum of Sydney (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 2000) p. 2. 232

“tensions between the two artists ensued.”107 For a Master of Arts thesis about Janet Laurence’s work, Sarah Curtis interviewed Laurence. The artist discussed some of the more problematic aspects of her collaboration with Foley.108 Disagreement between the artists was largely over their dispute about the amount each artist contributed to the collaboration. Laurence claimed Foley did not contribute sufficiently to merit being named as a co-collaborator.

The artists’ dispute over authorship matters is interesting given the acknowledgement Emmett receives in official documentation of the work as the author of the concept for the installation.109 The concept brief for the commission illustrates that Emmett had developed a very clear idea of what the installation was to achieve. He pointed out for example,

While not wanting to be prescriptive about the sculptural character of the installation to be developed by the artist, Edge of the Trees is a well developed concept integral to the strong curatorial/design thesis that dominates and integrates MOS interpretation.110

The concept brief spells out that while the artists would be acknowledged for the creative/artistic ownership of the work, the Museum of Sydney would preserve the ownership of the concept, and specifically the concept definition.111

The concept brief makes it clear that Emmett conceptualised a sculptural-installation that would provide a spatial and symbolic counterpoint to the architecture of the site. He wanted the work to provide an organic response to the geometric form of the architecture; an environmental response to the mathematical nature of the architecture; and an Aboriginal response to the fundamentally European formalist and classicist architecture.112 Emmett wanted to use the notion of the ‘edge of the trees’

107 Ibid. p. 2. 108 Sarah Curtis, "Janet Laurence: Feminine Singularity in Australian Cultural Formations," MA dissertation, The University of Melbourne, 1997. 109 Dinah Dysart, ed., Edge of the Trees at the Museum of Sydney (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 2000). 110 Peter Emmett, Edge of the Trees Concept Brief (Sydney: Museum of Sydney, 1993). 111 Ibid. p. 15. 112 Ibid. p. 8. 233 which quotes a text written by Rhys Jones, which referred to the edge of the trees as the border between Aboriginal and European encounter.113

Emmett wanted the commission to dramatise this point of contact and encounter between the early colonisers and the Aboriginal Eora people; illustrate the contested nature of this interaction; and be experiential rather than observable. Emmett wrote,

Above all, Edge of the Trees is not something to look at in architectural space, but something to enter/engage. It has depth. It is installation not object. It demands engagement through the physicality of place and sensory engagement/interaction. It has spatial/sensory dimension: in imagination, emotion, memory and interaction.114

This reflects Emmett’s previous use of ‘experiential’ displays in the Hyde Park Barracks, such as the recreation of the convict sleeping quarters. It also shows what a clear idea Emmett had of the installation prior to the artists’ commission.

His approach foregrounded experience and emotion rather than factual information. Through experience and emotion, Emmett hoped to provide an account of history not accessible through evidence alone. This approach to historical interpretation, of course, has its critics. Despite advocating for the way the Museum of Sydney achieves ‘dialogic interactivity’, Witcomb conceded that the museum’s artistic methods could be perceived as elitist, limiting the interpretation of history to an emotive and aesthetic experience. She wrote, “This is a museum for museum lovers and for those with an interest in contemporary media installations…its treatment of objects is highly aestheticised…it treats everyday objects as art.”115

Other writers have expressed similar criticism. Julie Marcus critiqued the museum partly because “it was all so good-looking.”116 She felt bamboozled by the museum’s

113 The quote was,“The ‘discoverers’ struggling through the surf were met on the beaches by other people looking at them from the edge of the trees. Thus the same landscape perceived by the newcomers as alien, hostile or having no coherent form, was to the indigenous people their home, a familiar place, the inspiration of dreams.” Ibid. p. 1. 114 Ibid. p. 8. 115 Andrea Witcomb, Re-Imagining the Museum Beyond the Mausoleum (London: Routledge, 2003). p. 163. 116 Julie Marcus, "Erotics and the Museum of Sydney," A Dark Smudge Upon the Sand: Essays on Race, Guilt and the National Consciousness ed. Julie Marcus LNR Press, 1999). p. 41. 234 prescriptive emotional experience. Marcus correctly deduced that the museum conveys multivalency and emotion in order to critique the Enlightenment model of museology. However, she argued that the aesthetics of the museum conveyed an absence of truth. The museum’s use of aesthetics, she believed, conceals a whole, coherent and true narrative of history.117 So much so that she argued the museum “presents a benign and slippery language which camouflages its facts in the process of presenting them.”118

Emmett implemented a “slippery language” through the use of artistic methods in order to contest a “master narrative” approach to historical interpretation. This does not mean his approach was historically untruthful. It was his intention to invoke ambiguous meaning, the multivalency of artefacts and historical events, and heterogeneous interpretation. He intended this principally because the Museum of Sydney is a contested site that holds many meanings to different groups and individuals.119 Emmett described it as a “site of contradictions”120 and as a Pandora’s box.121 But also because Emmett believed that history was to be found in the gaps between the evidence.

Emmett’s conceptualisation of the Edge of the Trees as an emotive and experiential way of commemorating the past has commonalities with the use of art in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. This museum opened in 1993, two years before the Museum of Sydney. It commissioned four art works to be permanently installed in the museum. One of these is a sculpture by Richard Serra entitled Gravity (see Figure 4.29). The work, a twelve-foot, square slab of steel, intersects with the corner of a staircase in the Museum’s ‘Hall of Witness.’ It has an imposing physical presence. It appears to have fallen from the sky and impaled the staircase. The museum claims the sculpture, “cuts the stairs asymmetrically, destabilizes the space, and forces a rift in the flow of visitors as they descend the stairs

117 Ibid. p. 42. 118 Ibid. p. 47. 119 Dinah Dysart, ed., Edge of the Trees at the Museum of Sydney (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 2000). 120 Ibid. p. 22. 121 Peter Emmett, Contested Ground - Contested Histories - Contested Futures Policy Statement (Sydney: Museum of Sydney, 1994). p. 7. Museum of Sydney Archives. 235

— a disquieting process of forced separation.”122 The forced separation achieved by the sculpture aims to recall the separation of victims of the Holocaust. The work communicates the gravity of the museum’s subject. It uses an experiential technique to do this – by momentarily physically separating those who descend the staircase. It contributes to the emotional landscape of the museum that mourns the event of the Holocaust.

Like Edge of the Trees, it is experiential, commemorative and signifies the overall museological approach of the museum. That is, to communicate the horror of the Holocaust through personal experiential techniques. These include, for example, the visitor being allocated an identification card of an individual during the Holocaust as they enter the museum, and being informed as to the fate of this person by the end of the museum visit – if they were taken to a concentration camp, if so, which one.

Art has played a significant role, as a commemorative and interpretive strategy, in new social history museums such as the Hyde Park Barracks, Museum of Sydney and Holocaust Memorial Museum. The art works examined in this chapter have over and above this, been tailored to the overall museological approach of the museum. But how has art been used in already established social history museums? Has it been possible to layer a competing or contradictory commemorative or interpretive art installation in already existing museum spaces? Far from being tailored to the overall museum experience, these installations might set up tensions, productive or negative, not encountered in the art projects in the Hyde Park Barracks and Museum of Sydney. The following section explores this possibility.

Creative licence in site-specific art in Elizabeth Bay House (1997) and the Grainger Museum (1998)

In 1997, a series of art installations in Elizabeth Bay House created tension within the museum environment of the historic house. The installations therefore had a very different effect to the art installations in the Barracks and Museum of Sydney, which extended experience within these museums. The Historic Houses Trust of New South

122 http://www.ushmm.org/museum/a_and_a/ Website accessed 8 June 2004. 236

Wales also manages Elizabeth Bay House, and oversaw its refurbishment into an ‘historic house.’ The house was restored to its earliest colonial history. Alexander Macleay, a British civil servant and collector who arrived in Sydney with his wife and six daughters in 1826, having been appointed Colonial Secretary of New South Wales, built the house. Completed in 1839, the house is an elegant, simple design, overlooking spectacular Elizabeth Bay in Sydney Harbour. Inside, it is much like any historic house, with rooms ‘restored’ to their original function and furniture laid out in such a way as to suggest the occupants’ use of the house. Elizabeth Bay House is less ‘fussy’ than many historic houses, and reflects the Trust’s museological approach of adopting simple but suggestive methods of presentation.

Within this context, curator Michael Goldberg mounted an extensive program of contemporary art within the house. Capitalizing on the trend of site-specific installation art in historic places, epitomized by Mary Jane Jacob’s Places with a Past in Charleston in 1991,123 Goldberg declared that with the exhibition he wanted to disrupt the conventions of museum presentation, “by the collision of disparate elements, a process which confounded visitors to the house.”124

Artists in the House! consisted of a series of six exhibitions held in the house over a period of six months. Each exhibition included the work of two or three artists installed in different rooms of the house. The art installations took over the house for the period of exhibition – colonizing the historic house for a brief time, and displacing the conventional experience within the house.

An example of the art installed for the exhibition is Anne Graham’s The Macleay Women, which occupied several rooms of the house (see Figures 4.30, 4.31).

123 Mary Jane Jacob, "Narelle Jubelin Foreign Affairs," Places with a Past: New Site Specific work in Charleston, exh. cat. Charleston Spoleto Festival. New York, Rizzoli International Publications, 1991. pp. 62-69. The trend for site-specific art installation in public, historic sites, perhaps began when Belgian curator Jan Hoet took contemporary works of art from the Museum of Modern Art in Ghent and installed them in private houses in Ghent. This exhibition was called Chambres d’Amis, and its popularity – based on the novelty of seeing contemporary art in private, domestic and usually historic spaces – translated into contemporary exhibition practice throughout Europe and North America, resulting also in site- specific contemporary art for a variety of places. This attests to the influence of Hoet, as a curator who has set trends in exhibition practice. For a discussion of this exhibition, and other site-specific art in Europe see Rutger Pontzen, Nice! Towards a new form of commitment in art (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2000). 124 Michael Goldberg, "As Memory Fades," Artists in the House!, exh. cat. Elizabeth Bay House. Sydney, Historic Houses Trust New South Wales, 1997. p. 5. 237

Graham’s installation invoked the presence of the six unmarried daughters of Alexander Macleay. Their story, Graham claims, is under-represented in the house, which favours the story of Alexander Macleay. This much is correct, in that the house includes Alexander Macleay’s study, which conveys Macleay’s administrative role within the colony and passion for collecting.125 Macleay’s wife and daughters had no room of their own in the house, and their pursuits are little documented. However, the house does provide information about the women where possible, in the form of placards.

Nevertheless, Graham researched the women and dramatized their presence in the house through her installation. She found that the women were noted for their red hair, which one diarist revealed, “The colours of their hair vary from sandy to the deep red tone of a vitrified brick the former Maman calls Auburn, the latter chestnut.”126 Red hair was a dominant symbol Graham used to represent the women.

For example, in the dining room, Graham placed red hair on the centre of the dining table with casts of pairs of white hands reaching out of the hair. In the cellar, long plaits of red hair ran out of a small barred window and along the length of the room. In a bedroom of the house, cleared of furniture, Graham laid six white pillows on the floor with bunches of red hair resting on top of the pillows.

Hair has long been used to evoke the presence of loved ones, or the dead. The first lock of a baby’s hair was – and often still is - ritualistically kept as a memento for connection to youth and to that baby. In the Victorian era women who mourned for their dead beloved wore jewellery that contained the hair of the deceased as a reminder both of their own mortality and as a souvenir of their beloved, thus maintaining a symbolic connection with the dead.127 Locks of hair exchanged by lovers and placed in lockets also act as a symbolic gesture of connection. Lou Taylor observed,

125 Macleay’s collection is now based at the University of Sydney in the Macleay Museum. 126 Chapman, Peter The Diaries and Letters of G.T. W. B. Boyes 1820-1832, (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985) pp. 255-256, quoted in Michael Goldberg, "As Memory Fades," Artists in the House!, exh. cat. Elizabeth Bay House. Sydney, Historic Houses Trust New South Wales, 1997. p. 9 127 See Michelle Elliot, "Hair, Abjection and Feminine Space: Confessions of a Female Fetishist," MA dissertation, The University of Sydney, 1995. 238

Hair is at once the most delicate and lasting of our materials and survives us like life. It is so light, so gentle, so escaping from the idea of death, that with a lock of hair belonging to a child or friend, we may almost look up to heaven and compare notes with angelic nature, may almost say: ‘I have a piece of thee here, not unworthy of thy being now.’128

Graham’s use of hair therefore symbolises the presence of the Macleay women in the house. Like Brennan and Ferran in Secure the Shadow at Hyde Park Barracks, Graham invoked the Macleay women through bodily metaphors. In each exhibition the female body was the site of identity – proving to be the most tangible link with these women who lived at the same time within the same region of Sydney, yet in vastly different social classes.

Graham’s use of hair however is transgressive. For example, hair on the dining table transgresses the use of the table for dining. It pollutes rituals of eating at the table. It is, to use anthropologist Mary Douglas’s terminology, matter out of place, and thus pollutes our rituals and sense of order.129

Graham’s use of hair in transgressive, polluting ways was part of the reason that her installation caused tension within the house. The other significant reason was simply that her installations completely redefined the space of the historic house. It precluded the visitor from experiencing the historic house. One visitor to the house was clearly frustrated by this and wrote in the visitors’ book, “Contemporary art belongs in contemporary museums, not historic houses.”130 The visitor had come to see an historic house display, not a contemporary art exhibition. For this visitor, the contemporary art did not complement or extend the historic house experience.

People visit historic houses for specific reasons. One reason is curiosity for the way people lived in the past. A distinctive feature of historic houses is the fact that they are reconstructions of private domestic environments that are accessible to the public. There is an element of sheer curiosity for how other people live and once lived and for

128 Ibid. 129 Mary Douglas, Purity and danger : an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo (London: Routledge, 1966). 130 Dinah Dysart, "In-house Intervention," Art & Australia 36.3 (1999): p. 350. 239 gaining a glimpse of the once private domestic settings. Another reason for visiting historic houses, museologist Mónica Risnicoff de Gorgas argued, is to gain the sense of being transported back in time to another era. Risnicoff de Gorgas analysis of the historic house museum emphasised the fundamental role of the imagination in invoking the past. She argued that a principal part of the experience of historic houses is the sense of ‘meeting the other.’ This is achieved through the ambience and atmosphere of the house, which facilitates an imaginative response in the viewer and enables the feeling of being transported back in time.131 Each room in a historic house is therefore carefully “stage-managed” to suggest the past.132 There is an art to this, she suggested, that should not be heavy-handed, or in her words, an “excessively structured discourse aimed at showing us the right way to see.”133 Because this would “rob the museum of its quality of being a space of freedom and inner quest.”134

Arguably, this is precisely what Goldberg does through the exhibition Artists in the House! He prevents the house “being a space of freedom and inner quest” by using art installations that completely change the house environment and the terms that visitors engage with the house. Tension is created that, depending on your view, is either negative or productive.

The curator saw this tension as productive because he rather naively wanted to “challenge assumptions about the museum experience, and to encourage a renegotiation of its authority.”135 Whose renegotiation of authority, one wonders, the visitors? This is naïve because historic house museum visitors do not generally visit house museums for an authoritative account of history, which they passively digest. On the contrary, they may go for a ‘theatrical’ experience of the site. House museums are arguably like theatre sets, which viewers can move through in order to conjure up images of how people lived in the past. Visiting an historic house is an active and imaginative experience and does not require a renegotiation of authority; given that

131 Mónica Risnicoff de Gorgas, "Reality as illusion, the historic houses that become museums," Museum International 53.2 (2001): p. 10. 132 Ibid. p. 11. 133 Ibid. p. 15. 134 Ibid. 135 Michael Goldberg, "As Memory Fades," Artists in the House!, exh. cat. Elizabeth Bay House. Sydney, Historic Houses Trust New South Wales, 1997. p. 5. 240 the visitor is the principle agent in his or her own experience of the historic house. It was naïve also because Goldberg simply exchanged one sense of authority for another – the house, with the artists’. Now the visitor was to accept the artists’ renegotiation as a substitute for the usual manner of presentation in the house.

The artists’ interpretations of the house nevertheless provided a productive tension for some visitors. A Trustee of the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, Dinah Dysart, approved of the house being “subjected to fresh interpretation.”136 Graham’s installation was also one way to remind visitors about the women who lived in the house. It reflected the view of historian Linda Young who argued that historic houses must respond to new historiography by telling history from a variety of perspectives, including feminist.137 It also reflected the view of Julia Clark who criticised historic houses for excluding “any consideration of social questions and conflicts from this hermetically sealed sanctuary.”138 These commentators reflect the view that above all historic houses should avoid a frozen static depiction of the past if they are to keep up with revisionist history. Their critique of the historic house is of the false sense of history, based on nostalgia and comfort, that historic houses tend to convey. Clark addresses the common response of visitors to historic houses –‘wouldn’t it have been lovely to live back then’– and argues that these houses need a dose of realism, and should depict the lives of the servants as well as masters. Young suggested historic houses adopt challenging displays. She advocated for visitors’ perceptions of the historic house to be disturbed, claiming that visitors “cope very adequately” with such disruptions to convention.139 To Clark and Young, the artists’ installations in the house might have been productive, at least in breaking up what they saw as a hermetic narrative in most historic houses.

For contemporary art viewers, visiting the house principally to view the art, the tension between the historic house convention and the art installations might have been considered productive because they would be visiting the house in order to see

136 Dinah Dysart, "Foreword," Artists in the House!, exh. cat. Elizabeth Bay House. Sydney, Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1997. p. 3. 137 Linda Young, "House Museums in Australia," Public History Review 3 (1994): pp. 167-187. 138 Julia Clark, "Make 'Em Laugh, Make 'Em Cry! Reinventing the House Museum," Museums Australia Journal.Out of the Box - A Special Issue on Women in Museums (1993): p. 37. 139 Linda Young, "House Museums in Australia," Public History Review 3 (1994): p. 182. 241 contemporary art, not the historic house. The exhibition would have fulfilled the taste for site-specific art in unusual locations identified by Joanne Lamoureux.140

However, the site-specific contemporary art in exhibitions such as Artists in the House! capitalises on the novelty of the space itself, only to then subvert or disturb this novelty, something that art curator James Lingwood thought was inherently disrespectful of the space.141 But also the contemporary art may not be any match for the creativity of the historic house museum space itself.

An exhibition at the Grainger Museum in 1998, Electric-eye dream suggests that it is possible for site-specific art to match the museum space, and create tension within the museum. The art installations in this exhibition enhanced the existing museum space and displays rather than detracting from the museum. The exhibition was held for the sixtieth anniversary of the Grainger Museum. The visual arts component was just part of an innovative programme of events that aimed to bring the museum and the music of Grainger into dialogue with the contemporary community of musicians and artists. The exhibition organizers believed that the museum had become rather static and unresponsive to contemporary conditions. Even within the University of Melbourne grounds, it is largely unknown and rarely visited by students or staff.142

Although the museum has a relatively low profile, it is nevertheless much loved by a small but devoted audience. Peter Cripps is just one person obsessed with the museum and its extraordinary collection of musical recordings, instruments, ethnographic objects collected by Grainger, textiles (especially Scandinavian) and Grainger’s own clothing designs, musical instrument designs and compositions. As chapter one discussed, Cripps’s art practice referenced the Grainger Museum as a model for a more satisfactory form of museum practice, largely because he thought (incorrectly) that it represented Grainger’s vision intact. Naomi Cass, one of the organizers of the exhibition, noted the difficulty with any revision or alteration of the museum given

140 Johanne Lamoureux, "The Museum Flat," Thinking about Exhibitions eds. Ressa Greenberg, et al. (London: Routledge, 1996). pp. 113-139. 141 James Lingwood, "Place," Space Invaders: Issues of Presentation, Context and Meaning in Contemporary Art, ed. Stephen Foster, Southampton, John Hansard Gallery, 1993. pp. 21-27. 142 Naomi Cass. Museums Australia Seminar. Melbourne. n.p., 1999.; Naomi Cass, "Parallax Error," Artlink 19.1 (1999): pp. 52-55. 242 this perception within the museum’s devoted audience.143 But, she strongly felt that revision was necessary. She explained why during a seminar,

If during this session you were to clasp the hand of the person you’re sitting next to, after a time you would lose the sense of where your hand stops and the other begins. To really experience the other hand you would need to be active. Collections are like this … they need to be wrestled with, stroked, moved, turned around, seen from different and even controversial points of view, just to keep fresh and present in the mind’s eye.144

Electric-Eye hoped to enable a fresh interpretation of the museum, something Cass thought Grainger would like having been a creative, inventive and unorthodox person. The aim was not to subvert the museum, as Goldberg had aimed at Elizabeth Bay House.

The visual arts component of the sixtieth anniversary celebrations consisted of Melbourne based artists, Carolyn Eskdale and Louise Weaver, creating installations in the museum. Cass commented, “It is significant that the Museum curator was not invited to rethink the exhibitions, but artists were given an opportunity to excavate…(the) spaces… the logic of an artist’s approach is most germane.” This suggests that Cass favoured art’s lateral and creative approach. The artists “were invited to explore… the material culture and architecture of the building. If they tackled the meaning of Grainger’s biography or archive, that would be a bonus.”145 This was a free ranging and hands-off curatorial approach that required a leap of faith for the museum because the outcome of the artists’ projects was unexpected. The artists indeed had creative licence to do as they wished in the museum.

Unlike the installations for Artists in the House!, Eskdale’s and especially Weaver’s installations were integrated with the museum displays themselves and did not infringe on the unique experience of the Grainger Museum too much. Though, they had a strong presence within the museum. Eskdale installed her work, untitled room 10.98, in the ‘London Room’ of the museum (see Figures 4.32-4.34). This room is the

143 Naomi Cass. Museums Australia Seminar. Melbourne. n.p., 1999. 144 Ibid. 145 Ibid. 243 first that the visitor sees upon entering the museum. It is located in one of the only ‘rooms’ (albeit a three walled room) of the museum and houses the Grainger family’s dining room furniture (see Figure 4.35). The entrance to the room is an archway creating an impression of the room as a stage, upon which some drama might unfold. The furniture is Edwardian and made from dark wood. It is set up as a dining room and is similar to the contrived dining rooms of many historic houses: the table is set with fake fruit and flowers, as if a family might be just about to sit down to dinner. It appears stagnant, dusty and frozen.

Eskdale’s installation occupied this whole room. It was a pervasive installation yet subtle. The artist inserted a series of translucent screens, made out of a tissue-like fabric, in the empty space of the room. These screens were like veils that partially enclosed and partially revealed the room. They were fixed and immobile. This immobility invoked a stifled and controlled atmosphere. It seemed to play upon the stifled atmosphere of the ‘London Room’ as a static display. Indeed, a work that Eskdale made in 1998 for the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art used similar veil like structures and prompted reviewer, Alison Main to note, “Eskdale’s veiled furniture evokes those novels of a country house dust-sheeted till the ‘season’ – recurrent familiarity awaiting use.”146

The screens of untitled room 10.98 filled the entire height of the room around the edges of the table and the space above the dining table. There is room for a family to sit at the table but they would be caught underneath this intoxicating veil. This invoked a sense of claustrophobia and restraint. It would be impossible to move freely around the room. The screens themselves were so neatly integrated with the room that despite their strong presence they did not dominate the room. Instead, because they were made to the precise measurements of the room and were translucent, they seemed naturally in place and actually seemed to enhance the museum space in a perverse, claustrophobic way.

146 Alison Main, "all this and heaven too: Adelaide biennial of Australian art 1998," Eyeline 36 (1998): p. 43. 244

Eskdale’s untitled room 10.98 suggests complex family relationships, characterised by intimacy as well as confinement. Eskdale’s installation evokes Grainger’s close relationship with his mother, Rose that is well documented by the museum. Their intimacy, it seems, was double edged. While productive for Grainger’s creativity, letters between mother and son indicate that they felt an overpowering anxiety when they were separate.

The installation is also suggestive of Grainger’s archive of sexual material held within the museum, but was for many years unknown because Grainger decreed that the material only be opened ten years after his death. Grainger was a sadomasochist, and as Naomi Cass points out, collected “a vast array of whips and protective apparatus and an extensive collection of documentary photographs depicting (bondage) sessions.”147 This material was downplayed within the museum because it was felt to be publicly unpalatable, even though Grainger felt it was central to understanding his music. Eskdale’s use of screens that obscure the view of the ‘London Room’ allude to an obstructed, censored view, while invoking the metaphors of control and power and submission and domination, intrinsic to the sadomasochist.

Louise Weaver created her installation in the so-called Ethnographic Gallery. Grainger’s collections of ethnographic objects are an important feature of the museum (see Figures 4.36-4.38). His collections influenced his textile and clothing designs. Weaver placed three large cedar and glass antique display cabinets along the centre of the ethnographic gallery’s corridor form. In each cabinet she combined objects from Grainger’s collections with objects of her own making closely replicating the language of ‘ethnographic’ forms, but with no labels identifying the artist’s objects from Grainger’s collected objects. The effect of this, Cass thought, induced “mild panic in viewers who are now faced with the increasingly over determined nature of museum exhibitions.”148 I disagree with this interpretation. The ambiguity about the authenticity and provenance of the objects enabled a curious, rather than information- hungry, engagement with all the objects.

147 Naomi Cass, "Making a Museum of Oneself: The Grainger Museum," Meanjin.2 (2000): p. 145. 148 Naomi Cass, "Parallax Error," Artlink 19.1 (1999): p. 53. 245

There are parallels between the Weaver’s collection and Grainger’s. Each was governed by subjective principles that were inherently idiosyncratic rather than taxonomic or scientific (see Figures 4.39, 4.40). Their principles were in fact, artistic. Weaver’s creation and arrangement of objects spoke to Grainger’s own artistic approach to collecting and museology. Weaver, as is Grainger, is ever-present in the collections. Male and female plaster cast torsos mark the boundaries of the ends of the sequence of cabinets, as if literalising the presence of the two collectors. Between them run the combinations and juxtapositions of carefully choreographed displays (see Figure 4.41).

Weaver’s objects, which included crocheted ‘skins’ for light bulbs, branches and rocks, are not recognisable.149 They are exotic in their strangeness. The act of crocheting over existing objects is a preserving and protective act. Weaver museumifies seemingly worthless objects and makes them special.150 This reflects on Grainger’s project of preservation embodied in his museum.

Combined with objects from Grainger’s collection, Weaver asks the viewer to create their own meaning from the displays and objects. What relationships can the viewer discern from these combinations of objects? Because there are no clear factual narratives, a subjective reading is encouraged.

The free-ranging curatorial approach enabled the artists to respond to the museum in an unrestricted manner. Cass commented in a talk for Museums Australia Seminar in 1999,

I believe the greatest task is in selecting the right visual or installation artist, because I believe you need to trust the artist and support rather than direct their work. You need to let go. Certainly there needs to be respect

149 Maxine Black writes in a review of another exhibition of Louise Weaver’s “These things are arranged in the gallery like objects in a museum, but you can only guess at their origins or ontological status.” See Maxine Black, "Louise Weaver I have a small yellow bird in my ear that sings," Like 5 (1997/98): p. 47. Charles Green makes an important observation about the effect of the crocheted objects combining two art-historical precedents, “Beuys’ anthroposophic sublime and ’s fetishization of surface…she adopts the psychological implications of the fetish, but also the ethic of feminized labor…” Charles Green, "Louise Weaver," Art Forum.Feb (1998): p. 102. 150 See Jason Smith’s analysis that Weaver “…offers an enriching and provocative challenge to our perception of what is ‘natural’ and casts a critical eye on the panic-stricken late 20th century impulse to preserve.” Jason Smith, "Weaver by name and by nature," RealTime 23.Feb-Mar (1998). 246

for the collection and audiences, however I have found artists to be extremely respectful and knowledgeable about material culture and buildings…You may have a particular outcome in mind. However, if you are really to achieve something unique with your collection it’s best to trust the artist to create something of lasting value.151

The artists indeed engaged with the museum in a sensitive manner, perhaps luckily for Cass. They did not disrupt the experience of the Grainger Museum but subtly explored elements of its display methodology and enhanced the experience of the museum.

This section has shown that giving artists creative licence to develop site-specific art installations for heritage museums has the effect of providing tension in the museum space and extending interpretation and experience for the museum. These differing results are worth more critical attention, given the fact that these exhibitions occur with frequency, but often without attention to the possible pitfalls or negative implications for the museum. On the other hand, it is a matter of the visitor’s perspective as to whether they find the installations disruptive or enlivening, and this largely comes down to the type of audience. For example, contemporary art audiences may not notice the disruption to the conventions of the museum so much as historic house visitors, or the devoted audience of the Grainger Museum. Those advocating for new approaches to museum interpretation similarly might see the tension created by these sorts of installations as productive, rather than negative. Another result of these installations, not represented in these examples, is the very real chance that certain installations will have very little impact, either negative or productive in the museum.

This was evident in an exhibition at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London during late 1999-early 2000. Hans Ulrich Obrist curated Retrace your steps: Remember Tomorrow and invited Gilbert and George, , Richard Hamilton, Rosemarie Trockel, Cerith Wyn Evans and Isaac Julien to create works for the space. The curator produced a small brochure for the event that included an essay. He explained that many of the installed works were so subtle that they were almost

151 Naomi Cass. Museums Australia Seminar. Melbourne. n.p., 1999. 247 undetectable, and noted, “There are no didactic panels or sound guides but visitors will be encountering unexpected works of art in unexpected places.”152 That is, if they even noticed them. Gilbert and George for example, spent an afternoon drinking tea from Soane’s cups in the Museum. The photograph of them doing so was framed and placed in the Library-Dining room. Cerith Wyn Evans attached small bells to a velvet covered rope barrier across a staircase, preventing the visitor from passing. The effect of these art projects in Soane’s museum was minimal. This is partly because they pale in comparison to the already extraordinary nature of the museum itself.

Conclusion

This chapter has identified the vital role artistic strategies played in Emmett’s curatorial practice at the Hyde Park Barracks and the Museum of Sydney, so much so that Emmett’s curatorial practice was quasi-artistic. Art installations in these museums expanded the curatorial thesis of the museum in ways that were interpretive and commemorative. Such art installations were semi-curatorial and experiential. This illustrated a convergence between the methodologies of artists and museums in creating museum exhibits. International parallels, for example in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, verify that this is a wider trend in museums, that responds to new approaches to historical interpretation and to the problem of representing history that is not necessarily based on hard evidence. Theatrical methods are sometimes necessary to convey truthful historical accounts. Notwithstanding this, there has been substantial criticism of this approach, in which critics have argued, aesthetics and emotive experience detracts from historical accuracy.

The tension that art can create, because of its focus on aesthetics and semiotic ambivalence rather than ‘historical accuracy,’ can be both negative and productive for the museum. The result is negative when the art project prevents the visitor’s engagement with the museum space itself and does not match the creativity of the

152 Hans Ulrich Obrist, "Retrace your steps," Retrace your steps: Remember Tomorrow, exh. cat. Sir John Soane's Museum. London, 1999. n.pag. 248 space itself. It is positive when it extends aspects of the museum experience, and provides a fresh interpretation.

This chapter suggests that artists and curators deal with exhibit design and the representation of social history in convergent ways. This reflects the influence of new historiographical ideas on social history, advocating for more creative ways of interpreting the past in order to expand our understanding of history. It also reflects the fact that the avant-garde notion of the artist as outsider to the museum does not apply to social history museums in the 1990s. The next chapter will investigate how quasi-curatorial art has been incorporated into museums of natural history and museums of art and will further seek to clarify the relevance of the model of the artist as an avant-garde outsider to these museums at the turn of the twenty-first century. 249

Chapter Five. The Artist as an Instrument of the New Museum 1999-2002

Introduction

The last chapter established that there was a clear move towards artistic methods in social history museums between the years 1989 and 1998. Curators had licence to behave in quasi-artistic terms. Artists produced work for museums that was interpretative and commemorative. The overall impact of this was an emphasis on experiential and aesthetic displays in social history museums. Such displays established a framework for communicating social history. This framework allowed polysemic interpretation and facilitated the visitor’s imaginative engagement with the museum. Notwithstanding this, there were criticisms of these artistic methods, which claimed that the emphasis on aesthetics and polysemic meaning resulted in an ill- defined history and was elitist.

Within this context, the notion of the artist as an avant-garde outsider had little relevance. Instead, convergence between curatorial and artistic practice exposed the mythology of the artist as an avant-garde outsider to the museum, and illustrated that social history museums required new forms of representation. Despite convergence, artists did approach interpretation differently from curators, and this sometimes caused tension within the museum. They were less reliant on fact, and more reliant on subjective interpretation. These very factors were seized on by social history museums as they offered an important avenue through which to explore marginalized history and figures on the fringes of respectability about which very little evidence exists. What emerged from this discussion was that curators of social history no longer embraced objectivity. Subjectivity played an increasingly significant role in social history museums, as did the experience of the viewer.

Social history museums established a new museological paradigm for artists, which was quite different from the ’s interaction with the art museum. How has art has been incorporated into the curatorial strategies of museums of science and art at the turn of the twenty-first century? Do we see the same sort of convergence as 250 there was in social history museums? Is this art quasi-curatorial in the ways exemplified in the previous chapter? What role does art play in the curatorial strategies of science and art museums? What wider implications does this art practice have for museology? I argue that contemporary art installations are emblematic exhibits within the new science and art museum, which are increasingly non-linear, multi-perspectival, accessible and self-reflexive.

Reconfiguring wonder: art in the new Melbourne Museum 1999

In this section I develop an argument that I made in relation to Fiona Hall’s exploration of museums of natural science. I proposed that Hall was fundamentally preoccupied with a return to wonder in her investigation of natural history museology. She replayed the experience of curiosity in museums through her art. She apparently had little interest in participating in the revision of museums, because, I speculated, she saw revisionism as contributing fundamentally to a diminishing experience of curiosity in museums. Furthermore, this may have signified that she had no wish to play into the hands of art curators seeking to trade on the artist as a critic of the museum. This discussion has resounding relevance for an emerging paradigm of art practice in science museums, as I will show by examining an art installation commissioned by the Melbourne Museum in 1999.

Janet Laurence was commissioned by the Melbourne Museum to create a semi- permanent display of items from the museum collection for its new building, which opened in October 2000. Laurence’s work shares a similar regard for museums as Hall’s. It expresses the wonder associated with looking at objects, especially in natural science museums. Like Hall, her work invokes the feeling of curiosity when encountering stuffed animals in museums, and implies the museum is a mausoleum. Wonder is tempered with a meditation on death in Laurence’s work. Laurence’s commission Stilled Lives, for the Melbourne Museum, contemplates death and creates the wonder associated with looking at natural history specimens in juxtaposition with other museum objects. In a previous work, Unfold (1997) Laurence photographed stuffed fauna, such as deer, displayed in large glass cabinets in the natural history 251 museum in Vienna.1 The images were printed on large transparent sheets of duraclear, which she hung from the ceiling in two rows so that the viewer could walk in between the sheets of film. This created the feeling of walking amongst the stuffed animals, and entering the glass cabinet in which they were displayed.2

Laurence’s commission for the Melbourne Museum expanded her work on natural history museums and gave her the opportunity to work directly with museum collections. For the museum, it provided a solution to the question of what would occupy the galleria walkway of the museum’s new building. The museum architects Denton Corker Marshall, suggested art projects for the public spaces of the museum, such as the galleria walkway.3 This firm was closely involved with the fit-out of the museum’s interior as well as the exterior design of the building.4 The firm designed the Museum of Sydney and was familiar with the art projects that Emmett employed in the public space of this museum, such as Edge of the Trees (1995), discussed in the previous chapter, by Janet Laurence and Fiona Foley, and Narelle Jubelin’s Collector’s Chests (1995). Jubelin’s Collector’s Chests were more closely comparable with Laurence’s commission for the Melbourne Museum. Each artist was required to fill a specific cabinet with objects, in Jubelin’s case the drawers of an aluminium chest, in Laurence’s a flat-topped glass display case. The works were both quasi- curatorial in this regard, as I argued with Jubelin’s role in the museum, but as we shall see, Laurence had less artistic licence than Jubelin, and was an instrument of the museum in ways that Jubelin was not.

Art and the terminology of art museums were utilised by the Melbourne Museum. In fact, the Acting General Manager of the museum, James Dexter, claimed in 1999 that

1 Susan Best, "Immersion and distraction: the environmental works of Janet Laurence," Art and Australia 38.1 (2000): pp. 85-91. 2 The work was exhibited in Janet Laurence’s Muses exhibition held at the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne 22 June – 6 August 2000. This exhibition resulted from Laurence’s commission for the Melbourne Museum. For the exhibition Laurence was able to use objects from Museum Victoria’s collection and create art installations in the Ian Potter Museum of Art combining natural history specimens and her own work. Muses: Janet Laurence artist in the museum. exh. cat. The Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne. Melbourne, 2000. 3 Eve Almond, Former Galleria Project Manager, Melbourne Museum, Interview with the author, 8 March 2001, Melbourne. This was verified by Ronnie Fookes, Galleria Project Manager, Melbourne Museum, Interview with the author, 9 March 2001, Melbourne. 4 The Sydney office of Denton Corker Marshall was involved with the interior design of the Melbourne Museum. The Melbourne office of Denton Corker Marshall designed the museum building. Eve Almond, Melbourne Museum, Interview with the author, 8 March 2001, Melbourne. 252 the museum “would provide elements of an art gallery in a new museum package.”5 The museum exhibition spaces are referred to as galleries, such as the ‘Science and Life Gallery’, the ‘Australia Gallery’, and the ‘Evolution Gallery.’ The museum regularly hosts touring exhibitions of art, such as The Italians: Three Centuries of Italian Art exhibition that toured to Melbourne from July to October 2002 and Hybrid Objects an exhibition of Australian design from December 2002 to February 2003.6 Above and beyond Laurence’s installation, the museum commissioned artist Judy Watson to design a zinc-etched wall for the Bunjilaka Gallery (displaying Aboriginal material culture) entitled Wurreka (1999).7 The museum also displayed works by artists Lin Onus and Fiona Foley semi-permanently in the museum grounds and interior public spaces.8 An installation of Aboriginal shields in the ground floor public space outside of the Bunjilaka Gallery entrance was inspired by an art installation by Sydney based contemporary artist Brook Andrew and poet Clinton Nain in the Djamu Gallery, a temporary exhibition space of the Australian Museum, near Customs House in Sydney (see Figures 5.1, 5.2).9

Andrew, with curator Sharni Jones, selected a series of Aboriginal shields for a display that he hoped would signify the resistance of Aboriginal people to colonisation.10 Andrew displayed the shields behind road barricades with a poem by Clinton Nain about Aboriginal resistance displayed above the shields. Ronnie Fookes, the Melbourne Museum galleria project manager, saw the exhibition in 1999, stated that it inspired the Melbourne Museum’s display of shields outside the Bunjilaka

5 Robin Usher. "The stuffed that dreams are made of." Age 2 August 1999: p. 9. 6 Admittedly, The Italians was exhibited at the Melbourne Museum almost by default because the Italian Government exhibition organisers had stipulated that the exhibition would go to Melbourne and the National Gallery of Victoria, the venue that would usually host such an exhibition, was closed due to renovations. A past and present schedule of the Melbourne Museum exhibition programme nevertheless reveals the clear commitment the museum has to showing art related exhibitions. http://melbourne.museum.vic.gov.au/exhibitions/index.asp Last accessed 16 June 2004. 7 Wurreka means 'to speak' in the Wamba Wamba Aboriginal language. Judy Watson designed and etched the zinc panels in consultation with the Victorian Aboriginal community. Her design included depictions of Victorian Aboriginal artefacts held in the museum collection. The concept for the 50 metre zinc-clad wall was also conceived by Melbourne Museum architects Denton Corker Marshall in consultation with the Museum’s Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Advisory Committee. 8 An exhibition of Lin Onus’s work, In Honour of Lin Onus, is on display from 2002-2007 adjacent to the Bunjilaka Gallery. Fiona Foley’s The Lie of the Land (1997) that was originally commissioned for the City of Melbourne is installed in the exterior space of the lower level. 9 The exhibition was entitled Menthen...Queue Here! and was exhibited between July 1999 and January 2000. Ronnie Fookes, Project Manager Public Spaces, Melbourne Museum, Interview with the author, 9 March 2001, Melbourne. 10 http://www.cloudband.com/frames.mhtml/magazine/articles/rev_daines_menthen_1299.html Last accessed 17 June 2004. 253

Gallery.11 The final display of shields in the Melbourne Museum bore little resemblance to Andrew’s installation. Nevertheless, like Andrew’s installation, the museum’s shields were suspended with transparent wire and in two rows facing out to the viewer. They were also exhibited at eye level off the ground. This testifies to the influence of contemporary art installation in the museum and to the significance of aspects of the art gallery to the Melbourne Museum.

But why incorporate elements of an art gallery in the museum? This section suggests that the aesthetic emphasis in the new museum and its use of contemporary art is indicative of the museum’s desire to reconfigure the way it relays the experience of wonder and to engage critically with the institution’s colonial past.

This section examines Janet Laurence’s commission in particular, because it reveals certain museological and aesthetic problems in the museum. It indicates the complexity of the transition from a collection to ideas-based museum (revealed through an anxiety surrounding the status of the object in museum exhibits), and the institutionalisation of art for critical purposes. The discussion sheds light on the role that art plays in the Melbourne Museum and the ‘new museum package’ to which Dexter referred.

The Melbourne Museum contracted Janet Laurence to select and arrange objects from the museum’s collections for a flat-topped showcase display located on the first floor galleria – referred to by the museum as the ‘Orientation Galleria’ because it is via the galleria that the visitor accesses the museum’s galleries (see Figures 5.3, 5.4). The museum envisaged Stilled Lives as a semi-permanent installation on show for three to five years.12 The location of the installation in the galleria is significant because of the contradictory dynamic established between the work itself and its location. The galleria is a transitory space. Museum visitors are not encouraged to stand for any length of time viewing Stilled Lives, which runs along two sections of the galleria. This effectively positions the installation as a decorative space-filler, marginal to the main event in the galleries. Yet as we shall see, museum staff also thought of the

11 Ronnie Fookes, Interview with the author, 9 March 2001, Melbourne. 12 Eve Almond, Interview with the author, 8 March 2001, Melbourne. 254 installation as a strategic exhibit for the whole museum. The installation itself calls out for close contemplation and careful looking, made difficult within the transitory space of the galleria. Stilled Lives is paradoxically both marginal and central to the new museum.

The galleria has historical references that reveal how the museum architects conceptualised the space and help to shed light on the reason for Stilled Lives being positioned in this location. Art historian and scholar of the origins of museums, Paula Findlen, argued that the term galleria signalled the museum’s transition from the private studio to a public space in the late sixteenth century. Janet Laurence’s display is invested with a tension between private viewing and public display. The museum galleria was a space of transition and display, in contrast to the hermetic studio that was a private place of study and contemplation. Findlen argued that the museum’s transition from studio to galleria had occurred by the seventeenth century.13 The Florentine Medici family’s Galleria degli Uffizi for example, originated as an enclosed walkway in which works of art, statuary and architectural fragments were placed to create an appropriate setting for the display of art, and linked the two palaces of the family. The contemplation of works of art in this transitory space was thought to elevate the mind by observing beauty and perfect form. Findlen argued that the Galleria degli Uffizi exemplified the emerging notion of the museum as a public gallery. Findlen argued that the galleria was,

Set in motion by the constantly changing selection of objects as well as visitors that continuously filled the space it created – public in conception, due to the expanded realm of sociability that the museum promised and to the open-ended nature of the contents that it revealed to the gaze.14

According to Findlen therefore, the galleria was a transitory, non-fixed environment, continually changing in character because of the ever-changing display of art.

Another historical trajectory of the galleria is worth considering because it further reinforces the public nature of the space: the nineteenth century Parisian arcade, an

13 Paula Findlen, "The Museum: Its Classical Etymology and Renaissance Genealogy," Journal of the History of Collections 1.1 (1989): p. 71. 14 Ibid. p. 71. 255 enclosed walkway of shops. The arcade emerged in Hausmann’s new Paris. His radical redevelopment of the urban spaces of Paris created great boulevards and demolished many of the cramped, medieval spaces of the city.15 The increased visibility that resulted from this change in the cityscape, the exposed vistas, intended for military and surveillance purposes, helped enable a culture of public spectacle.

Charles Baudelaire’s 1863 description of the flâneur who strolled the boulevards observing the street-life of modern Paris, was an urban parallel to the natural scientist – both were curious but detached from the world and dedicated to a life of observation. Walter Benjamin described the flâneur as a voyeur of street life, never participating, but gaining pleasure from a life of looking. Benjamin famously said that the flâneur “goes botanising on the asphalt.”16 The Parisian arcade and boulevard were stages upon which the culture of surveillance and classification through observation were played out. The arcade ushered in a new commodity culture that catered to the growing bourgeois market. This is an important historical antecedent for the Melbourne Museum’s galleria. Indeed, in an interview with the author, Eve Almond revealed that the museum architects, Denton Corker Marshall, thought of the public arteries such as the galleria as “highways and streets” partly because they direct and orientate the viewer but also because of the public exchanges that occur in the space.17

The museum galleria evokes the Parisian arcade, and also the boulevard, in several ways. It is a highly visible space that encourages the viewer’s surveillance of other museum areas because it has open vistas that enable the viewer to look down onto the museum’s ground floor. The space of the galleria is panoptical. It enables other regions of the museum to be seen, and provides a vantage point from which to view the museum interior and exterior. The reflective surfaces of the museum’s glass façade and glass windows overlooking the Gallery of Life elevate the sense of visibility inherent to the galleria. It is an entirely transitory space unless the visitor

15 David Harvey, Paris, capital of modernity (London: Routledge, 2003). 16 as cited in Raman Selden, ed., The Theory of Criticism From Plato to the Present (London: Longman, 1988) p. 448; Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire : a lyric poet in the era of high capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: NLB, 1973). 17 Eve Almond, Interview with the author, 8 March 2001, Melbourne. 256 stops at the café in the galleria. Even then, the café is al fresco in style, as if on a streetscape.

This street-like quality suggests the culture of looking that emerged in the late nineteenth century, and was embraced by Great Exhibitions. In these highly populist exhibitions, the ‘world’ was brought to the people, and was accessible simply by taking a stroll through the street like spaces of these exhibitions. The galleria invokes the arcade, boulevard and spectacle culture of the late nineteenth century.

The galleria therefore has two historical references: the galleria of the seventeenth century, which Findlen claimed marked the museum’s transition from a private to public space, and the shopping arcade as a galleria of the mid-late nineteenth century. This was a panoptical space of voyeurism, public spectacle and consumption.

The galleria’s sense of openness, transition and public visibility is a far cry from the cramped and dusty corridors of the old Victorian museum, which suggested private discovery and personal revelation, rather than panoptical public spectacle. The Melbourne Museum was originally a typical Victorian era museum (as the old National Museum of Victoria): it established a massive collection for research purposes, and aimed to educate the public.18 The new galleria is the antithesis of the dark corridors of Victorian museums where strange things were gathered in ever- growing collections. One reviewer of the Melbourne Museum, Andrew Brown-May noted this,

This new museum is nothing like that prototypical, perhaps nostalgic and ideal museum I carry around in my head: a limitless place, with rooms never before entered. This museum is in-your-face, an open book. Here there is nowhere to hide.19

Brown-May’s comments suggest a nostalgia for the sense of private discovery and the real possibility of getting lost in the old Victorian museum. As he points out, the new

18 As evidenced through the National Museum of Victoria collection publications. See Sir Baldwin Spencer, Guide to the Australian Ethnological Collection: exhibited in the National Museum of Victoria (Melbourne: Government Printer, 1922).; Frederick Chapman, Illustrated guide to the collection of fossils exhibited in the National Museum of Victoria (Melbourne: H. J. Green, Government Printer, 1929). 19 Andrew Brown-May, "The Surreal Thing," Meanjin 60.4 (2001): p. 94. 257

Melbourne Museum is transparent and entirely visible. The visitor in the new museum is shunted along with a guide in hand to clearly mapped out and visible galleries. There is little chance of diversion from the crowds or for entering some seemingly forgotten room.

The new Melbourne Museum stresses increased visibility and transparency. The façade of the building is glass and is therefore transparent and reflective. It reflects the Royal Victorian Exhibition Building opposite the museum, which opened in 1888 for the Melbourne International Exhibition (see Figure 5.6).20 This exhibitionary model of museology was in many ways the antithesis of the Victorian era model of museum, though each developed in the same period. The Royal Victorian Exhibition Building, was, as the name suggests, devoted to display and temporary exhibition. In contrast to the Exhibition Building, the National Museum of Victoria was devoted to collecting, research and education. These two types of museology developed in parallel. The Melbourne Museum clearly wishes to site as its antecedent the Royal Victorian Exhibition Building and the exhibitionary model of museology21, which was all about spectacle and visual stimulation, and distance itself from the old National Museum of Victoria, perceived to be problematic and outmoded, as we shall see later in this chapter.

Indeed, the museum architects, Denton Corker Marshall, based the design layout of the Melbourne Museum on the Victorian Exhibition Building next to the museum in the Carlton Gardens. An official museum document states that,

The layout of Melbourne Museum echoes the cruciform plan of the Royal Exhibition Building. It includes a 150m public circulation walk of equivalent length to the ground floor of the Royal Exhibition Building’s Great Hall.22

20 UNESCO listed the Royal Exhibition Building and Carlton Gardens, designed by Joseph Reed, on the World Heritage List in 2004. http://whc.unesco.org/pg.cfm?cid=277 Last accessed 16 July 2004. 21 The development of exhibitionary culture in the nineteenth century was explored in Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: history, theory, politics (London: Routledge, 1995). 22 Melbourne Museum: A Museum for the 21st Century, Museum Information Sheet, Museum Victoria, January 2001. This information sheet is available online. http://www.museum.vic.gov.au/infosheets/10347.pdf Last accessed 23 June 2004. 258

The reflection of the Exhibition Building in the glass façade of the Melbourne Museum also invokes it as an historical antecedent.

Unlike the old Victorian model of museum, the Melbourne Museum’s transparency offers the promise of institutional transparency. Visitors witness museum staff at work in their glass-walled offices. This symbolises the museum’s accessibility and accountability to the public. It also visually invokes the shimmering glass towers of the corporate world. This glass façade communicates the museum’s increasing corporatisation (the museum as a business), methodological transparency and need for accountability. At the same time it invokes the transparency of London’s Crystal Palace, designed by Joseph Paxton, where the first Great Exhibition of 1851 was held. This Great Exhibition was fundamentally an entertaining spectacle, rather than a serious educative place of study.23 The Melbourne Museum, the glass façade suggests, will entertain and dazzle. But it also continuously reminds the visitor through its architecture, interior spaces and indeed through Laurence’s commission Stilled Lives of its historical antecedents and that it is a revision of an old Victorian museum model.

The impression of the museum being an open place of entertainment and spectacle that fundamentally aims to do away with the apparently hermetic Victorian museum model is reinforced by exhibits which employ sound, light and interactive touch screens. Information flashes everywhere, particularly in the Australia Gallery and in the Mind and Body Gallery. The old object-based museum displays have been substantially reconfigured, and with them the experience of wonder.

Laurence’s commission Stilled Lives is a paradoxical exhibit within this context of new museum methodology. Her display accentuates the wonder of looking at object- based displays. Private reverie and an imaginative and subjective engagement with objects are encouraged by her display. It is therefore an unusual exhibit within the Melbourne Museum. This discussion will show that the installation embodies some

23 Anthony Bird, Paxton's Palace (London: Cassell, 1976).; Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle 1851 - 1914 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990). 259 anxiety about how to deal with old museum approaches, the transition from an object- based museum to ideas-based and specifically, the aura of the real.

Laurence’s commission Stilled Lives is an object-rich display that purports to critique collecting. The project brief specified that Laurence choose objects from across a range of collection areas.24 Laurence selected objects based on, she noted, her personal interests,25 including a fascination with alchemy and a love of the natural world (see Figures 5.5, 5.7- 5.17).

The objects include a series of old-fashioned glass bottles some containing pigment powders and some that once held chemicals. The bottles vary in size and shape and have old-fashioned labels identifying their contents. Glass laboratory equipment lies adjacent to the bottles. This suggests alchemy. Laurence included a variety of species of stuffed birds, each with old-fashioned museum tags, lying on transparent shelves, above, for instance, bird eggs carefully placed on cotton wool in cardboard storage boxes. Another section of the installation displays stuffed brown flying foxes lying next to brown wooden shoemakers’ moulds, establishing a striking visual analogy between the two things because of their similar size, colour and form. Little nineteenth century painted porcelain dolls and figurines, broken and fragmentary, are carefully laid in a row on a transparent shelf above a fragile animal skeleton and next to a cluster of museum labels. It is a poignant and beautiful combination that speaks of the fragility of life. Snowy white owls lie ‘sleeping’, historian Tom Griffiths observed that “one child next to me fervently hoped.”26 Cotton wool stuffing pops out of their eye sockets, provoking a meditation on death.

Aboriginal tools, including stone-sharpened implements and round stones for pounding and grinding are lined up by size and shape. Bird nests are placed in rows on a transparent shelf above little plastic dishes filled with native seeds and nuts, establishing a visual analogy between the empty nests and transparent containers. Echidnas are placed next to little wooden carved items, which look Pacific in origin.

24 Balcony Showcase Consultancy Brief, Brief to Contractor, Melbourne Museum, 1999, provided to the author by Ronnie Fookes. 25 Close Up: Janet Laurence, The Arts Show ABC TV, 2000. Transcript available online. http://www.abc.net.au/artshow/trans/s163364.htm Last accessed 17 June 2004. 26 Tom Griffiths, "The Gallery of Life," Meanjin 60.4 (2001): p. 86. 260

The carved and painted markings match the yellow and black of the echidna fur and spikes. Above them tiny fruit bats are lined up on a transparent shelf, their wings outstretched. Minerals and gems are displayed, some in a wooden box, divided into a grid with gems placed inside each compartment. An old envelope lies tantalisingly in the box with the word list written in running writing. It could be mistaken for ‘lust’. The ambiguity is serendipitous, because it raises the idea of museum objects not only being catalogued but also being highly valued and desired.

Laurence’s display shows a great sensitivity for the objects, which are displayed in creative juxtapositions, attentive to colour, texture and form. Although filled with objects, the display is not cluttered or distracting. This is largely achieved through the contrasts and comparisons created between each of the objects and the careful and strategic use of ‘empty’ space in the cases. The contrasts between things enable the objects to be viewed with clarity. Fibre optic spotlights heighten the colour and texture of the objects. The juxtaposition of objects creates a sense of wonder and encourages the viewer to think about notions of classification. Laurence has not classified her objects according to scientific principles. She stated in the text panel accompanying the exhibition, “the objects have been selected not on museum principles but by attraction, through reverence and empathy.”27 This attests to the artist’s sense of wonder, or perhaps something even more powerful than wonder – reverence – for the objects when she encountered them in storage (see Figure 5.18).

Laurence described her sense of awe and intrusion in having access to the museum’s collections in storage,

Being involved with the museum for this installation gave me access to the storage for the museum; to all of their material in storage. And that has been the most extraordinary and wonderful, very privileged opportunity…to be able to go into the collection here and just spend time selecting objects and to actually be able to touch them and be involved with them in a very intimate way is really the most extraordinary gift. It’s the thing I’d been imagining I’d love to do… I really want to express my own sense of wonder; to give them potency, a kind of new life, almost like bringing them to life.28

27 Janet Laurence, didactic panel to Stilled Lives in the Melbourne Museum. 28 Close Up: Janet Laurence, The Arts Show ABC TV, 2000. 261

This is a powerful statement about the aura of museum objects and indicates the artist’s sense of transgression in being allowed into the rarefied environment of museum storage and to actually touch museum objects. For Laurence, the objects have a kind of magical efficacy attached to them like votive objects. This is heightened by the fact that the artist does not normally have access to museum collections in storage, so to her it feels like trespassing.

Laurence envisaged that Stilled Lives would appear as if the museum collection was leaking out of storage and across the galleria.29 The artist’s statement accompanying the exhibit states, “These showcases offer a glimpse into the collection, creating a fissure or seam into which objects have seemingly escaped from their adjacent storage.”30 She was interested in the idea of the collections breaking out of the ‘confines’ of storage, noting that when she visited storage she imagined the objects coming to life at night when the museum was closed.31 The artist’s fantasy is communicated by the installation’s references to alchemical change, through laboratory equipment, chemicals and pigments (gold predominantly) implying the artist’s desire to bring these objects back to life. This indicates that Laurence shares a similar approach to Fiona Hall, by invoking an Adornoesque critique of the museum as a mausoleum.

The sense of reverence and wonder invoked when looking at these objects, combined with the installation’s meditation on death, demands contemplation. Laurence thought that the installation would act as a “breathing space” in the museum.32 The artist clarified what she meant by this by stating that she thought of the installation as a “slow space” that would counter the otherwise fast-paced (and, she implied, non- contemplative) nature of the rest of the museum.33 However, this is difficult given its location in the transitory space of the galleria that encourages movement rather than quiet contemplation.

29 Janet Laurence, Interview with the author, 21 July 2000, Melbourne. 30 Janet Laurence, Artist’s statement, Didactic panel accompanying Stilled Lives, Melbourne Museum. 31 Janet Laurence, Interview with the author, 21 July 2000, Melbourne. 32 Janet Laurence, Artist’s statement, Didactic panel accompanying Stilled Lives, Melbourne Museum. 33 Janet Laurence, Interview with the author, 21 July 2000, Melbourne. 262

Although Stilled Lives appears to deal with the weighty subject of death, the galleria does not encourage lengthy contemplation of this topic. The installation implies that museums ‘still’ or halt the life of things by extracting them from their context, be that natural or cultural. Laurence’s installation invokes the museum as a kind of mausoleum. The title Stilled Lives also plays on the phrase ‘still life.’ In late sixteenth and seventeenth century Netherlandish still life painting, skulls were often included, as were decaying fruit and flowers, serving as a reminder of mortality. These images were known as vanitas, because they depicted the brevity of life, transience of earthly pleasures and vanity of mortality and materialism.34 Stilled Lives can be interpreted as a contemporary vanitas. It reminds viewers of mortality and the materialism of colonial collecting culture.

The installation’s critique of colonial collecting is ambiguous. It hovers between criticism and nostalgia. The installation invokes colonial museology through the inclusion of old-fashioned museum tags and a photograph of the old Museum of Victoria (now Museum Victoria, of which the Melbourne Museum is one campus) when it was housed in the University of Melbourne (see Figure 5.19). The labels that are included in the showcase are original museum tags attached to selected specimens, usually only seen in storage to identify each object, its provenance and catalogue number. The labels that Laurence selected to remain attached to the objects are yellowed with handwritten catalogue and provenance details dating from the early twentieth century and some from the late-nineteenth century. Hence they seem like artefacts in themselves worthy of preservation along with the objects they denote. Laurence displayed butterflies in wooden pullout drawers within the cases, which are evocative of old-fashioned collector’s chests. The artist used these as props that are strategically evocative of past museum practice. In this regard, Stilled Lives expresses nostalgia for old-fashioned museums, which reviewer Andrew Brown-May invoked.

Yet Laurence’s exhibit is nothing like old museum displays. The manner in which Laurence selected the objects, based on subjectivity rather than objectivity, is far from

34 Oscar Mandel, The cheerfulness of Dutch art: a rescue operation (Doornspijk, Netherlands: Davaco, 1996). 263 the old museum’s veneer of objectivity. Laurence liked the look of her objects and displayed them for aesthetic and imaginative reasons rather than to demonstrate a scientific principle or incorporate them into any natural science epistemology.

The animal and bird specimens that Laurence selected are just skins or only partially stuffed and prepared for display. This lack of animation is unlike the museum of old, in which the art of the taxidermist was not just in stuffing skins but also in creating life-like renditions and arranging the objects for display.35 Laurence’s display of skins and stuffed birds and mammals, unprepared for display, is quite unlike the old museum. Her display makes it difficult to view and imagine the objects as living things. The animals and birds are revealed as nothing more than decomposing skin and bone. Laurence laid the specimens on beds of glass sheets, incomplete, unanimated with stuffing coming out of their eye sockets. Laurence displays the objects as she saw them in storage. This contravenes conventions of museum display that usually show animal and bird specimens in a recreated habitat, such as a diorama, or frozen into a pose that is designed to invoke the living animal. Tom Griffiths described the objects in this installation as “flamboyantly dead.”36

For Griffiths it was because of the palpable sense of death that the objects “dance with a beauty of texture and colour, and their deadness makes this beauty poignant and moving.”37 For others, such confrontation with death is distressing. For example, the obviously dead animals may provoke a young child to meditate on death without the conceptual framework to assimilate the concept of death.

As well as these subversions of old museum display principles, Laurence lined the edge of the showcases with words that consider the museum’s treatment of specimens. Words such as, negotiated, politicised, desired, mythologised, bewildered, remembered, retrieved, treasured, forgotten, claimed, juxtaposed and fetishized, raise less obvious processes at work in museums. The words refer to the multi-faceted passage and value of objects in museums. In Laurence’s terms they are not simply

35 Deborah Root, "Art and Taxidermy: The Warehouse of Treasures," Cannibal culture: art, appropriation, and the commodification of difference (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996). 36 Tom Griffiths, "The Gallery of Life," Meanjin 60.4 (2001): p. 86. 37 Ibid. p. 86. 264 collected, sorted, stored and displayed – they are, for example, also fetishized and mythologised. One reviewer noted that these words were “nailed like accusations”38 to criticise old museum models. However, the words are actually extremely subtle, as they consist of white lettering engraved on to transparent glass labels. They may not even be visible at first. If it is accusation, it is not especially damning.

Stilled Lives celebrates and fetishizes elements of nineteenth century museology, through the old museum tags for example which have considerable aura in the display. It also critiques nineteenth century museology through its meditation on the death of living things and its reappraisal of the museum’s reasons for collecting objects that are not represented as scientifically objective, but rather the product of the individual fetishes of collectors. In light of Laurence’s evident reverence for the objects, her apparent critique of the museum does not ring true. Rather, it seems to be a tokenistic critique that does not have the scope to develop a more specific and far- reaching interpretation of past museum practice.

Stilled Lives can be understood as a barometer, registering the museum’s reconfiguration of old museum practice, and in particular of wonder. It is an instrument through which the new museum communicates its institutional change. Eve Almond’s comment in an interview with the author that the museum thought of the installation as a “strategic piece of art for the whole building” provides evidence for this.39 The museum intended the commission to be strategic - or to be a strategy. But a strategy for what? I argue that it was a strategy to reflect on old museum practice and reconfigure wonder for the new museum.

The commission brief provides evidence for this. It also shows that the commission was closely controlled by the museum, which wanted the exhibit to do precise things. The brief described the installation as “an opportunity for close viewing of small- scaled exhibits.”40 It identified specific criteria for the exhibit. The installation, it stated, “should rely on a minimal amount of labels and other didactic interpretive devices so as to provide a change of pace after the more intense exhibitions in the

38 Julie Szego. "A museum for the age of democracy, Oprah and reality TV." Age 19 May 2000: p. 1 39 Eve Almond, Interview with the author, 8 March 2001, Melbourne. 40 Balcony Showcase Consultancy Brief, Brief to Contractor, Melbourne Museum, 1999. 265 galleries.” It would use objects from across a range of collection areas, “to highlight the diversity of material collected by the museum.” It was to “display focussed and revealing aspects of the Museum’s collection,” and “create a cohesive whole” but also “enable visitors to dip in and feel satisfied if they have only seen one section of the display.” The overall result, the brief stated, should be “based on a strong overall concept that is resolved in a sophisticated and visually rich manner.”41

These criteria show a radically different commissioning process to Jubelin’s Collector’s Chests in the Museum of Sydney, on which the commission in the Melbourne Museum was modelled. Jubelin was employed as a curator for a year to work on the cases. She was able to approach the cases entirely on her own terms and worked highly collaboratively with other museum staff. She disagreed with Emmett about arranging the material in the drawers thematically because she believed this would lead to a reductive representation of the material.

Laurence’s commission was prescribed by the museum. She had much less freedom than Jubelin. The commission brief shows that the installation was to be object-based, with minimal labels. This, the museum thought, would provide a change of pace from the intensity of the galleries. This suggests that the museum believed the majority of museum exhibits were information rich, saturated and intense. Laurence’s exhibit would be object rich, instead of information rich, and sparser or less didactic in order to enable individual contemplation. James Dexter, the acting general manager of the museum, explained this further when he stated that Stilled Lives would encourage subjective interpretation and therefore provide a counterpoint to the museum exhibits proper that were “prepared as a developing narrative which left little room for people to create their own meanings.”42

The museum therefore commissioned the installation with the intention that it would enable individual interpretation and contemplation and be less didactic than museum exhibits. This suggests that the museum admits individual interpretation is little accommodated in other museum exhibits. Yet, subjective interpretation is of some

41 Ibid. 42 Robin Usher. "The stuffed that dreams are made of." Age 2 August 1999: p. 9. 266 significance to the museum because it commissioned an artist to deliver such a display in the centralised location of the galleria, through which all museum visitors must move. Indeed, it was an artist who was given the task of creating a display capable of being interpreted in a variety of ways, capable, of open-endedness. Additionally, the museum charged an artist with the task of creating an object-based display.

This suggests several things about the new museum. It suggests that museum exhibits are didactic, prescriptive and intense. It might be fruitful to consider Stilled Lives within the context of other object-based displays in the museum in order to better illustrate their differences.

Most object-rich displays are in the Science and Life Gallery (Figures 5.20, 5.21). One display consists of a floor to ceiling glass case, filled with objects on transparent shelves. Birds, animated to appear life-like, are on the top shelf. Below, a range of fungi, fossils, coral, and starfish are arranged. On a lower shelf are fish juxtaposed with a wolf - a strange pairing. The transparent shelving allows objects to be compared with what is below or above. It enhances the visibility of the items. Maximum focus on the things themselves is achieved also through minimal labelling or set infill. Each item is displayed with an unobtrusive number that correlates to a list of labels, identifying what the objects are to the side of the case. The exhibit is quite different from Victorian and early twentieth century displays that were furnished with fake environments such as tree limbs on which to perch birds. The density of the display and rough categorisation with surprising comparisons (for example, between the fish and wolf) invoke the concept of the Wunderkammer. This exhibit is unlike Stilled Lives because it is visually cacophonous. Our eye flits from one thing to another, taking in the visual contrasts and leaps from the micro to macro. There is little room for contemplation of individual objects or subjective imaginings.

Another object-based display, which demonstrates another way the new museum exhibits objects, is in the ‘InfoZone’, a collection research centre. The InfoZone includes a series of aluminium filing drawers along one edge of the wall, which the visitor can access to find out more about the museum collection of natural history specimens (see Figures 5.22, 5.23). On the surface these cabinets are vaguely reminiscent of Narelle Jubelin’s Collector’s Chests in the Museum of Sydney. They 267 are unlike Jubelin’s exhibit however, because they do not create lateral connections between disparate things. The InfoZone chests are highly ordered, and aim to provide maximum information rather than creative interpretation. Each drawer contains objects presented in cardboard storage boxes with a label explaining what it is as well as larger didactic labels in the drawer explaining the species. This is literally an information-zone for independent research. On many of the species the original museum tags are left on the items, as in Laurence’s display. However, the emphasis in each display is quite different. The InfoZone cabinets emphasise information and independent research: Laurence’s display emphasises aesthetics and wonder.

The InfoZone cabinets highlight a perceived failing of Stilled Lives in the eyes of many museum visitors. According to Ronnie Fookes many visitors feel frustrated by not being able to identify what the objects are in Stilled Lives. Some parents resent not being able to answer their children’s questions about what the objects are.43 Such visitors seem not much interested in individual contemplation and subjective interpretation as they are in information and learning from a museum.

Herein lies the crux. The new museum is essentially a museum of ideas and information, not subjective wonder and extensive collections. In the 1980s, the new museology highlighted some problems with collection-based displays, and the Melbourne Museum seems to have adopted the new museology’s critique. Peter Vergo questioned the display of objects without information because, he argued, such displays would be inaccessible to visitors without a prior knowledge. Vergo wanted objects to be explained and made accessible to the viewer. Object-based displays without information, he argued, were elitist because they assumed the visitor had knowledge and that the object would speak for itself. Vergo argued against connoisseurship. He said museums should provide contextual information to allow the object to fully communicate with the visitor and for the viewer to more satisfactorily engage with the object.44 In Vergo’s view, objects without explanation are mute and unreadable.

43 Ronnie Fookes, Interview with the author, 9 March 2001, Melbourne. 44 Peter Vergo, "The Reticent Object," The New Museology ed. Peter Vergo (London: Reaktion Books, 1989). pp. 41-59. 268

Stephen Weil, a scholar with the Smithsonian Institute’s Center for Education and Museum Studies in Washington advanced a similar argument to Vergo. He claimed that an emphasis on museum objects, without an interpretative framework encouraged the notion that museums are an objective undistorted lens, free from bias. This, he said, would be a “wilful naïveté.”45 This reflects the belief that museums are shaped by ideology and biased.

These museological debates collide in Stilled Lives. Against the beliefs of Vergo and Weil, and unlike the rest of the museum, Stilled Lives displays objects free from information and explanation. It highlights the aesthetic dimension of objects and in this regard limits understanding of the objects. Paradoxically however, it does this in order to create open-endedness and expand subjective interpretation. Such open- endedness is tempered by the words that direct attention to museum processes, and purport to critique museum collecting.

This brings us to a more vague directive of the commission brief that stated the installation should ‘reveal’ aspects of the collection, but left unstated what it wanted ‘revealed.’ I discussed this with Eve Almond, who was the project manager of the installation, to clarify what the museum meant by this. Almond remarked that the museum wanted the display to prompt questions on the theme of “the things we keep.”46 The museum wanted the display to reveal and publicly question the different motivations for collecting.47 It seems therefore that the museum did not feel comfortable displaying collections without didactic interpretation unless it alerted the viewer to the museum’s desire to distance itself from old collecting practices.

The museum’s public questioning of collecting practice reflected the ideas of Graham Morris, director of Museum Victoria (from 1990-1998) and George MacDonald, chief executive officer of Museum Victoria and director of the Melbourne Museum (from 1998-2001). Neither wanted the museum to be object-based and both wanted to

45 Stephen Weil, "The Proper Business of the Museum: Ideas or Things?," Rethinking the Museum and Other Meditations ed. Stephen Weil (Washington: The Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990). p. 48. 46 Eve Almond, Interview with the author, 8 March 2001, Melbourne. 47 Ibid. 269 distance the museum from past collecting activities. Morris expressed this in an interview with Christopher Marshall,

It (the Melbourne Museum) will communicate the message that this is a different kind of museum, this museum is relevant. It’s not a stuffy, smelly space with shutters and glass cases which is like a shrine where I bless myself and have to speak in a hushed voice…We can talk about early Aboriginal life if we want to or the early pioneers. We can talk about forest use issues or pollution issues. We can talk about anything we want to.48

Morris was keen to position the museum at the forefront of contemporary debates, as a place of contestation, community involvement and accessibility. The emphasis he placed on ‘talking’ suggests a dialogue between the visitor and museum. Morris thought that interactivity, contestation (arising from different viewpoints) and tackling ‘difficult’ issues would distance the new museum from the apparently stagnant, didactic rather than interactive, model of museology that he thought the old museum epitomised.

Morris and MacDonald wanted the Melbourne Museum to be relevant to the twenty- first century and democratic. This concept of the museum, they suggested, would transform the static, irrelevant, undemocratic, temple-like and treasure-house model of museum that the old museum apparently represented.

In the Melbourne Museum therefore, past museum methodologies are self- consciously mocked. An example of this is a display created by Eve Almond on the ground floor that consists of an old-fashioned display cabinet displaying birds escaping and flying out of the museum’s confines. Journalist for the Age Julie Szego thought that Stilled Lives “mocks the museum of old.”49 Though, as I have discussed, there is also an element of reverence and nostalgia for the experience of contact with the real in the installation.

48 Christopher Marshall, "Dancing with the Dinosaurs: Graham Morris and the Museum of Victoria's agenda for change," Art Monthly Australia.108 (1998): p. 6. 49 Julie Szego. "A museum for the age of democracy, Oprah and reality TV." Age 19 May 2000: p. 1. 270

Historian Graham Davison saw Stilled Lives as an example of museums “historicizing themselves” because “they’ve become self-conscious about their own institutional past.”50 He nevertheless felt uncomfortable about this because, “Whatever guided people in making those collections (used in the exhibit) is now invisible and it troubles me because something significant is being lost.”51 In Davison’s view Stilled Lives does not adequately or fairly represent past museum practice. It essentialises the old museum, by fetishizing its look and treating it as an aesthetic object. This reflects Morris and MacDonald’s desired revision of collecting.

Indeed MacDonald, the former director of the Canadian Museum of Civilisation, was an influential and early advocate (since the mid 1980s) of the use of new technologies in museum exhibits, wanted to minimise the use of objects altogether. In his view, new technologies were the future for museums. Thus, the Melbourne Museum employed new technology in exhibits in order to enhance visitor interactivity and increase access to the museum, or so MacDonald believed. It used multimedia displays: film, video, sound and touch screens. It promised to advance its internet presence, by way of a ‘’, which at the time of opening was rather undeveloped.52 Over the years it has done this. Detailed information about exhibitions and collection areas of the museum is available on the museum website. Web-based projects have been initiated.53 For example, the exhibition Bugs Alive! on display at the Melbourne Museum in 2004, has a web page with educative games for children. 54

MacDonald believed that new technology would increase accessibility and democratise the museum. He was influenced by the theories of Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis, Canadian communication studies commentators (Innis published from the 1940s-1950s and McLuhan in the 1960s, with several works published posthumously in the 1980s). McLuhan built on Innis’s work, which theorised that electronic technology (specifically television) would enable information to be

50 Ibid. p. 8. 51 Ibid. p. 8. 52 Christopher Marshall, "Dancing with the Dinosaurs: Graham Morris and the Museum of Victoria's agenda for change," Art Monthly Australia.108 (1998): p. 6. 53 http://www.museum.vic.gov.au/collections/showcase.asp Last accessed 21 June 2004. 54 ‘Bug catcher’ is a game that asks players to click on the collection drawers and identify bugs. http://www.museum.vic.gov.au/bugs/catcher/index.aspx Last accessed 21 June 2004. 271 distributed democratically, but it would also create the rapid transference of power and cultural imperialism.55 MacDonald was influenced by their theorisation of the notion of the global village, created and enhanced through electronic media. He applied this concept to museums, arguing that museums aim to communicate within the context of a global village.56 MacDonald drew on the concept of the ‘museum without walls’, which implies a museum without collections but based on images of collections. He therefore invoked André Malraux’s concept of the musée imaginaire or museum without walls, which Malraux had explored during the sixties.57 MacDonald advanced the notion of a virtual museum in his writings.58

In an analysis of interactivity and electronic new media in museums, Andrea Witcomb observed that new media technology rearrange an old hierarchy privileging objects over mass-produced and reproducible media (such as photographs and electronic media).59 Information technology and electronic media therefore potentially displace the hegemony of the museum object. MacDonald hoped this would make the Melbourne Museum more relevant to contemporary audiences. Witcomb points out however, that in focusing exclusively on information technology,

The only social group they concern themselves with is that of the new information class. The continued existence of groups for whom the new mode of information is either irrelevant or simply not part of their cultural landscape is dismissed as of little consequence. 60

This comment suggests that electronic media are not necessarily as democratic and accessible as MacDonald hoped. The utopianism reflected by MacDonald’s view that new technology and the internet specifically would democratise information has been

55 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding media: the extensions of man (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964).; Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers, The global village: transformations in world life and media in the 21st century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).; Harold Innis, The bias of communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951). 56 George MacDonald and Stephen Alsford, Museum for the Global Village: The Canadian Museum of Civilization (Ottawa: The Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1989). 57 André Malraux, Museum without walls, trans. Stuart Gilbert and Francis Price (London: Secker and Warburg, 1967). 58 George MacDonald and Stephen Alsford. "Towards the Virtual Museum:crisis and change for millennium 3." American Association of State and Local History 54th Annual Meeting. Omaha. 1994. http://www.civilization.ca/academ/articles/macd-alsf1_1e.html Last accessed 21 June 2004. 59 Andrea Witcomb, Re-Imagining the Museum Beyond the Mausoleum (London: Routledge, 2003). p. 106. 60 Ibid. p. 115. 272 partly realised, but only for people with access to the internet, though this is an ever- increasing number.

MacDonald’s view correlated with new museology literature of the mid to late 1980s, such as the writing of Peter Vergo and Stephen Weil, advocating for ideas-rich instead of object-based exhibits. For Morris and MacDonald, museums that focused exclusively on museum objects and not information were problematic because they were elitist. This view was reflected through the promotional material at the time of opening, which discussed the museum as a “storehouse of ideas” and a “museum for the people.” As well as signifying a more democratic, interpretive institution, these catch phrases signalled a distinct move away from collections. Indeed Morris remarked on collections, “I’m not saying they’re worthless, but they are useless for exhibition purposes, albeit great for academic purposes.”61 This was in keeping with MacDonald’s observation when he was director of the Canadian Museum of Civilization,

Collections have suddenly become something of a burden to museums. Most museum directors now feel like directors of geriatric hospitals whose budgets are devastated by patients whose survival for another day depends on expensive, high-technology support systems.62

MacDonald wanted to move away from a collection-based museum to an information- based museum – that could be developed into a so-called virtual museum. But paradoxically, it appears that what MacDonald set out to do with the Melbourne Museum has been turned around by the chief executive officer of Museum Victoria since 2002, Dr J. Patrick Greene. The Melbourne Museum’s promotional material now states, “Come and see the real thing,” implying a reversal of MacDonald’s ideas because it emphasises both the museum object, and visiting the actual museum, not simply accessing information about the museum through the museum’s website.

61 Christopher Marshall, "Dancing with the Dinosaurs: Graham Morris and the Museum of Victoria's agenda for change," Art Monthly Australia.108 (1998): p. 6. 62 Quoted in Andrea Witcomb, Re-Imagining the Museum Beyond the Mausoleum (London: Routledge, 2003). p. 114. 273

The move away from collections-based museology under Morris and MacDonald was reflected also in changes to the museum structure. Christopher Marshall noted, that the museum is divided into programs that emphasise ideas rather than collection areas such as - the origins, development and diversity of Australian culture; indigenous rights and perspectives; the environment and its need for conservation; technology and its impact on everyday life; science and its contribution to society; and the human mind and body. The curator’s primary role in this context is to generate ideas for exhibitions, not manage and conserve the collections, for which there are collection managers and conservation staff. Marshall observed that the curators’,

primacy has been challenged on an immediate and fundamental level. The restructuring has significantly questioned the idea that their expertise should be based on long-term and often highly specialised research on the collection…Curatorial energies, including acquisitions, are instead to be focussed predominately on the preparation of exhibitions and other forms of public interface.63

Curators in the Melbourne Museum work collaboratively with a range of people in developing exhibits.64 This means that many perspectives are incorporated in the development of exhibits. Indeed, Stilled Lives, developed by an artist, is an example of this. This artist had a quasi-curatorial role because she worked with the collections, traditionally the domain of the curators. This suggests a broadening of perspectives within the museum. The notion of a singular museum perspective is increasingly under scrutiny because of multiple agendas present within any one exhibit.65

Stilled Lives was evidently a paradoxical exhibit within Morris and MacDonald’s museology because it is object-based. Laurence’s installation celebrates museum collections and the encounter with the actual object in museums without interpretative information, with which MacDonald disagreed. In addition however, Stilled Lives

63 Christopher Marshall, "Dancing with the Dinosaurs: Graham Morris and the Museum of Victoria's agenda for change," Art Monthly Australia.108 (1998): p. 6. 64 Ibid. p. 6. 65 The changing role of the curator in the Melbourne Museum was marked by controversy and caused a great deal of anxiety amongst museum staff. Journalist with the Age, Julie Szego reported, “Tough decisions were needed, but they have hurt an institution trying to find its feet…the sacking of the curator of numismatics, which includes coins and banknotes, led to a protest from the French-based International Council of Museums…one museum insider …(said) he thinks the institution has shed traditional values such as corporate knowledge, certainty of intellectual purpose and “old-style museum patience.”” Julie Szego. "A museum for the age of democracy, Oprah and reality TV." Age 19 May 2000: p. 8. 274 purports to critique the collecting practices of old. This fits more synchronously with MacDonald’s paradigm of new museology. However, Stilled Lives is a tokenistic – and purely symbolic – critique of collecting. Far more pervasive is the installation’s celebration of the wonder of looking at museum collections, of seeing the real thing.

Wonder, along with object-based displays, is often discredited in the Melbourne Museum. For example, in reviewing the museum Peter Timms remarked,

The very small number of stuffed birds and animals we can see, for instance, are not there to prompt our interest in or to satisfy our curiosity about Australian fauna. They have been coopted into didactic displays whose sole purpose is to convince us that stuffed birds and animals belong to the past and have no place in the modern museum.66

The Science and Life Gallery, which does display stuffed birds and animals in abundance, was not yet complete when Timms wrote this review. But his point that when these items are shown it is generally in a critical or sceptical way is relevant. Timms suggested that wonder and contemplation of real objects is a factor missing from experience within the Melbourne Museum.67 Another reviewer, Andrew Brown- May, similarly argued that museum visitors want to see real things and that the museum’s use of props and new media – simulacrum – prevents the visitor’s appetite for the real being satiated.68

Stilled Lives is an exception. Laurence thought the installation would have the effect of captivating viewers, because of, “the exquisite beauty and fascination of the objects.” The artist noted that this was a contrived effect when she added, “I’ve presented them in certain ways to create a kind of potency; liberating them in some respects.”69 The effect of realness – and wonder – in other words, is constructed, contrived and configured.

Stilled Lives shows that the museum used the artist as an instrument through which to create a display that was object-based and reflects on collecting. For some, this may

66 Peter Timms, "The Triumph of the Managers," Meanjin 60.4 (2001): pp. 12-13. 67 Ibid. 68 Andrew Brown-May, "The Surreal Thing," Meanjin 60.4 (2001): p. 97. 69 Close Up: Janet Laurence, The Arts Show ABC TV, 2000. 275 represent the institutionalisation of contemporary art by museums. Another way of interpreting this is the museum providing a specific role for the artist, and to some extent professionalising the artist’s role within the museum. It is a form of , comparable with the position of the court artist in sixteenth century Europe.70 The museum was reliant on the artist to deliver a specific type of visual representation that was ‘strategic’ for the museum.

Stilled Lives shows the museum reconfiguring the experience of wonder in museums. Personal reverie and contemplation are key components to the installation, and distinguish it from other museum exhibits. The artist plays a specific role therefore within the museum. Contemporary art fills a gap in the new museum, a gap left by the new museum’s ambivalence over object-rich contemplative displays which facilitated imaginative engagement but which the Melbourne Museum’s managers, Graham Morris and George MacDonald, considered problematic.

Reconfiguring the white cube: art intervention in the new ‘permeable’ Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia 2002

This section investigates the role of the artist in the new art museum. Is art an instrument of the new art museum, in the way that Laurence’s commission Stilled Lives was for the Melbourne Museum? If so, what is the role of the artist in curatorial strategies of the new art museum? What differences are there between the art museum’s use of contemporary art as a museological instrument and the science museum’s? The following discussion will examine a work by artist Julie Gough in the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia at Federation Square in Melbourne in 2002 in order to address these questions.

The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia (NGV.A) represents a model of art museology that reconfigures the notion of the white cube display. The gallery opened in October 2002, the first to open of two new campuses of the National Gallery of Victoria, the second being the NGV International (NGV.I) in the extensively redeveloped gallery

70 Martin Warnke, The court artist: on the ancestry of the modern artist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 276 on St Kilda Road that opened in late 2003. The NGV.A is devoted to displaying the gallery’s Australian art collection and exhibitions. The building, part of Federation Square in Melbourne opposite the city’s central railway station, was designed by architects Peter Davidson and Don Bates of Lab Architecture Studio + Bates Smart Melbourne, who designed the Federation Square complex. Federation Square houses the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and SBS (Special Broadcasting Service) as well as cafés, bars and shops. 71 The architects were also responsible for the interior fit-out of the NGV.A. The architects therefore, like Denton Corker Marshall in the Melbourne Museum, had an influential role in the gallery, even in curatorial decisions.

Frances Lindsay, the deputy director of the National Gallery of Victoria, and head of NGV.A involved the architects in creating an innovative and experimental hang in order to create continuity between the design of the building itself and the interior design elements. The interior spaces of the galleries continue the multiple planes and intersecting angles of the exterior building. This is no white cube. Galleries are asymmetrical in shape and are spliced with windows at oblique planes that cut a view into other galleries and outside. Ledges and niches – particularly in the shape of wedges to continue the interwoven wedge shapes of the exterior façade – are tucked in corners and walls to break apart uniform walls. Patrick McCaughey, in his review of the NGV.A observed that “no two (galleries) are alike” and that the complex interconnected shapes repeated throughout Federation Square suggested the “contradictions of the imagination.”72

Lindsay believed that involving the architects would result in a more experimental hang and in particular break apart the chronology of the hang. She hoped to suggest breakages in the linear narrative and contradictions within grand historical narratives. Involving the architects in the design elements of the hang was risky because of the fact that they were novices when it came to understanding curatorial imperatives. Lindsay believed that as novices, they could contribute a fresh approach to the interior

71 Much has been written on the design of Federation Square, its role as a new civic centre for Melbourne and its spatial and aesthetic relationship to the city centre. For example, see John Macarthur, et al., "Federation Square," Architecture Australia 92.2 (2003): pp. 46-66; Robert Bevan, "Inside the NGV: Creative Juxtapositions of Architecture and Art," Artichoke 02.02 (2002): pp. 46-55. 72 Patrick McCaughey, "Landmark or Lemon?," Meanjin 62.2 (2003): p. 175. 277 without being restricted by curatorial considerations. Nevertheless, the architects’ involvement in curatorial decisions carried potential problems and resulted in some dubious implications for the hang.

The result of the architects’ input can be both criticised and praised. McCaughey thought that the architects designed “the best new galleries in Australia”73 and that the nineteenth and twentieth century galleries are “stylish and spectacular.”74 While the galleries are impressive spaces and allow an enlivening spatial passage through galleries, bays and niches, the architects’ experimental presentation also had problematic consequences for the hang. In gallery five, the first room of the permanent hang which displays a range of nineteenth century art and explores themes of migration, dislocation and colonisation, Peter Davidson, the architect principally responsible for the interior design of the gallery spaces, painted the room in strong contrasting colours and asymmetrical forms. The wall displaying a quasi-Victorian double hang of nineteenth century portraits and still lifes was painted dark grey and white, with part of the ceiling also painted dark grey. The dark grey painted region is an asymmetrical shape with an oblique edge to the floor. This oblique line creates an uneasy effect in the gallery. The paintings appear to be hung on a slight angle – a disconcerting and unsatisfactory effect, especially for the portraits. While the paintwork ties in with the overall design motifs of wedges and oblique angles repeated in the floating ceiling, the windows and the exterior of the gallery, it detracts from the artwork and dominates the room (see Figure 5.24).75

This bold effect was however the intention of Davidson and Lindsay, because it was a way in which to break apart normal display conventions associated with the white cube. Indeed, Davidson’s design of the wall paint disrupted the notion of a neutral display environment. His paint design was clearly anything but neutral because it frequently clashed with the art exhibited. Director of Craft Victoria, Kevin Murray, observed this negation of neutrality in a conference paper addressing the interior display ethos of the NGV.A. Murray noted that at the NGV.A, “space is not a neutral

73 Ibid. p. 175. 74 Ibid. p. 175. 75 Peter Davidson of Lab Architecture in association with Donald Bates, Bates Smart, won the public spaces and temporary structures award in the 2003 Dulux Colour Awards for the paintwork in the gallery spaces. "Showing their colours." Age 7 May 2003 sec. Domain: p. 8. 278 container for art, it is rather the structure that gives it meaning.”76 An interview with Davidson revealed that the architect indeed planned to disrupt the notion of the gallery as an ‘invisible’ container. Floating wall and ceiling panels and paintwork would, he stated, “pick out colours within the picture to increase the spatial effect. This also provides a visual structure between the paintings.”77 Davidson hoped that this ‘visual structure’ would enhance the artwork on display. However, the highly designed display environment is so visible that it in most cases it competes with the artwork on display.

Throughout the gallery, wall paint intersects with the sight lines for viewing art. On the one hand this means that the viewer is constantly alerted to the design elements of the gallery itself – possibly creating a more active viewing experience – and on the other hand, it detracts from contemplation of the art itself and from the curatorial context – the content and explanation of works of art and their arrangement in the gallery through labels and other didactic wall panels. Instead, the design elements of the galleries draw attention to themselves and away from the work of art. Murray observed that this infringes upon the visitor’s contemplation of individual artworks. He argued,

This is not a space conducive to what Robert Hughes claims as the ritual of art devotion—the ‘long look’. Instead, it is a space for the restless contemporary eye, seeking constantly changing views and connections.78

The design aspects of the galleries are certainly dynamic and create suspense and tension. This is meant to be an active and involving space. The obverse of this is also true: it can be involving to the point of distraction.

The architect-designed display cases in gallery five are another example of distracting display design. The cases are held within five plinth-like white columns that are

76 Murray delivered his paper “The Plinth in the Age of Digital Reproduction” at the conference Locate and Classify: Curating the Crafts at Northumbria University 26-27 September 2003. It is available online at Craft Victoria’s website. Murray is the director of Craft Victoria. http://www.craftculture.org/archive/kmurray2.htm Last accessed 29 June 2004. 77 "Showing their colours." Age 7 May 2003 sec. Domain: p. 8. 78 Kevin Murray. "The Plinth in the Age of Digital Reproduction." Locate and Classify: Curating the Crafts. Northumbria University. 2003. http://www.craftculture.org/archive/kmurray2.htm Last accessed 29 June 2004. 279 connected at the base and together form a wedge shape.79 The vitrine is placed on an angle in the gallery. Early Australian gold and silver, as well as contemporary Aboriginal jewellery made from shell by artist Corrie Fullard and notebooks containing sketches by nineteenth century Aboriginal artist Tommy McRae were displayed in these cases for the first hang. The display cases and plinths dominate the eclectic and curio-like exhibit of disparate items. The cases do not recede into the background of the gallery or serve only to heighten the viewer’s perception of the objects. One reviewer, Geoffrey Edwards, a former curator of Australian art at the NGV, described the display cabinet in gallery five as “over-designed and architectonic.” Furthermore, Edwards stated, “the complicated styling of this hunk of display furniture is not picked up at any other point in the entire circuit of galleries.”80 Another problem with the design of the cases is the obscure placement of the labels on the side of the vitrine. The labels’ location is not readily apparent to the viewer. These design aspects rival the contemplation of objects, and communication of basic information about the objects.

The cases in gallery five were one of the few displays of three-dimensional works in the first hang of the permanent collection. Nineteenth century Australian gold and silver is displayed in a glass vitrine located in a passageway between gallery five and six – a marginal location. There are few sculptures displayed that allow viewing from all angles. Murray speculated why this may be so. He argued for instance, that three- dimensional objects are not displayed on simple plinths because,

The plinth’s invitation to view the object ‘in the round’ would create a kind of whirlpool in the visitation experience, disrupting the designed trajectories. It would be the awkward crease in the seamless ‘fly-through’ constructed for gallery visitors.81

79 The more successful and much larger display cases for Australian fashion and textiles in gallery twelve were designed by the Frankfurt based company, Glasbau hahn that has specialised in glass case manufacture since 1836, in collaboration with the Gallery’s exhibition design department, curators, conservators, and senior management staff and the architects. The cases were the outcome of extensive research, complex trans-continental negotiation and intelligent design. 80 Geoffrey Edwards, "The Ian Potter Centre: a curatorial perspective," Insite Jan-Feb (2004): p. 13. 81 Kevin Murray. "The Plinth in the Age of Digital Reproduction." Locate and Classify: Curating the Crafts. Northumbria University. 2003. http://www.craftculture.org/archive/kmurray2.htm Last accessed 29 June 2004. 280

Murray thought that simple plinths would disrupt the fragmented and shifting viewing experience constructed within the gallery because they focus attention on an individual object. Murray criticised the lack of craft, decorative arts and sculpture in the first hang – and rationalised that the reason for the exclusion of three-dimensional objects was precisely because they would have interfered with the design ethos of the building which was a principle focus when the gallery first opened. The first hang was indeed dominated by painting, with three-dimensional work only occasionally intruding in the flat pictorial display.82 Murray’s comment suggests that the design experience constructed by the architects prevented an engagement with art on its own terms.

At the NGV.A the art object is no longer accorded the regal treatment it may have experienced in the white cube model of art gallery. It is not isolated on a sparse bare white wall, or plinth, and exhibited as an icon worthy of worship, contemplation or connoisseurship. The architectural container continually interjects and intrudes in the display of art. This has numerous precedents in the history of art museum architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright’s sloping spiral ramp and sloped walls on which works of art were displayed in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York that opened in 1959 is an iconic example of the architectural space intercepting the notion of the art museum as a neutral and unobtrusive container for art.83 It presented a radical departure from the white cube international style of the 1939 Museum of Modern Art in New York.84 Wright’s design for the spiral passageway meant that viewers were constantly moving – descending or ascending the ramp (though descending from top to bottom was Wright’s intention) – were never on flat horizontal ground, and that the paintings were displayed on walls that sloped outwards, altering the perspective of the painting.85 Wright reportedly claimed that the aim of his work was “the destruction of the box in architecture.”86

82 Geoffrey Edwards also noted this lack of three-dimensional objects in his review of the gallery. Geoffrey Edwards, "The Ian Potter Centre: a curatorial perspective," Insite Jan-Feb (2004): p. 13. 83 John Coolidge, "When the Architect Has His Way: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Guggenheim," Patrons and Architects: Designing Art Museums in the Twentieth Century (Fort Worth, Texas: Amon Carter Museum, 1989). pp. 40-48. 84 See Carol Duncan and Allan Wallach’s 1978 analysis of the design and layout of the museum. Carol Duncan and Allan Wallach, "The Museum of Modern Art As Late Capitalist Ritual: An Iconographic Analysis," Marxist Perspectives Winter (1978): pp. 28-51. 85 John Coolidge pointed out that this sloping wall was intended as a solution to keeping visitors at a respectful distance from the paintings in this narrow spiral passageway. John Coolidge, "When the 281

The NGV.A interior architecture, like Wright’s design for the Guggenheim, again reconfigures and fragments the notion of a neutral white cube ‘box’ space for viewing art.87 The NGV.A galleries are laid out in a figure eight shape with breakages between the galleries that allow for crossover between galleries. The visitor’s route is not prescribed in the way that it is in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. However, it is not just the layout and design elements of the galleries (wedges, oblique angles, intersecting planes) that literally adjust the notion of the white cube. Lindsay’s curatorial approach also destabilises elements of the white cube model of display, and it is this curatorial approach that is of primary interest to this thesis and in particular, the role that art intervention plays in fragmenting the white cube.

In the NGV.A the artwork is treated as an historical document, rather than worshipped as an aesthetic icon. Explanatory labels accompany nearly every artwork, as well as didactic wall panels in every second gallery. Additionally, there are educative brochure trails, audio tours, and multimedia touch screen stations where the viewer can access a range of detailed information about the art works, including video interviews with contemporary artists. This is an impressive effort to provide the viewer with information and explanation. It reflects an inherently democratic approach to curating that tries to ensure accessibility. Ideas, themes and interpretations are readily apparent to the viewer.

The visitor is offered ways of viewing works of art, via a series of themes that are woven throughout the gallery’s essentially chronological hang. The broad themes of Melbourne story, the constructed world, the landscape and environment, and immigration recur and reinstate themselves throughout the gallery labels, audio tours, multimedia and trails. These themes frame the unfolding basic chronology of the

Architect Has His Way: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Guggenheim," Patrons and Architects: Designing Art Museums in the Twentieth Century (Fort Worth, Texas: Amon Carter Museum, 1989). p. 45. 86 Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, "A Temple of Spirit," The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1995). p. 56. 87 Peter Anderson noted in his review of the NGV.A, “Internally, NGV Australia is far from a neutral set of white boxes.” Peter Anderson, "Beyond the white cube: Melbourne's new galleries," Art and Australia 40.4 (2003): p. 566. Robert Bevan argued the opposite in his review. He thought that the gallery was full of “clever games, which succeed in creating a series of experiences on what are basically a series of conventional (if lovely) white boxes.” Robert Bevan, "Inside the NGV: Creative Juxtapositions of Architecture and Art," Artichoke 02.02 (2002): p. 51. 282 permanent hang, from early nineteenth century art in gallery five to contemporary art in gallery twenty, with the Indigenous collection treated separately on the ground floor. The balancing of a thematic and chronological hang is carried off more successfully than the thematic hang of the , which Lindsay cited as a role model for the gallery in an interview with critic Peter Timms.88 This is partly because the themes are less overtly proclaimed within the hang of NGV.A than at the Tate. This means that there is more room for speculation and interpretation of works outside of tightly prescribed themes that in the Tate seem arbitrary and limited.

Multiple interpretations are offered. Lindsay’s labels programme was highly innovative, because it combined the input not just of curators, but also of education and public programmes staff. Not only were the perspectives of those within the museum sought, but also the voices of writers, artists and schoolchildren. Education staff wrote explanatory labels for works of art that addressed curriculum areas. Excerpts from poems, songs, fiction, and primary material such as artist’s correspondences were sourced and matched with works of art on display. The education staff involved school children, who wrote their own comments about works of art that were then displayed in addition to existing labels for works of art and rotated on a regular basis, enabling many children from across Victoria to have their ‘voices’ heard in the gallery space.89

The overall impact of this is that a plethora of interpretations and range of discursive frameworks are offered to the viewer. Not only does the design experience therefore suggest permeability – a dialogue between inside and outside – the curatorial approach emphasised visitor access and permeability, with schoolchildren for example visibly participating in the interpretation of art. The NGV.A positions itself as a permeable new art museum, open to outside interjection.90

88 Peter Timms. "NGV Squared." Age 19 October 2002 sec. Supplements: p. 6. 89 The involvement of school children in writing labels for the artworks received press coverage. See "Words reach Melbourne gallery." Hamilton Spectator 14 November 2002: p. 8; Ebru Yaman. "Gallery- goers put words to pictures." Australian 2 December 2002: p. 16. 90 The ‘permeable’ aspects of the architecture within Federation Square were confirmed by the architects who referred to Ernst and Esher in the way the NGV.A “is designed to unfold and flow in a permeable way.” Robert Bevan, "Inside the NGV: Creative Juxtapositions of Architecture and Art," Artichoke 02.02 (2002): p. 50. 283

Throughout this new permeable art museum, Frances Lindsay sought “to break the tyranny of the lone curatorial voice.”91 Curators are not the sole ‘authors’ of the hang. As explained, the architects had a significant input to the design of the hang and the labels employed a range of voices. When curators did write labels, their initials are listed. A brochure is available at the reception that provides the names of the curators who wrote labels, for anyone interested. The curator is constructed as transparent, accountable and subjective, rather than hidden, independent and objective.

The curators also did not have autonomy over exhibition design and layout or the interpretation of their collection areas. The role of the architect in designing significant elements of the galleries meant that in some cases the curators’ carefully conceptualised curatorial choices were significantly altered by the architect’s vision for the space. This undoubtedly caused tension amongst the curators.

Peter Davidson, for example, was responsible for the experimental hang of Sidney Nolan’s Wimmera series in gallery nine. The series of paintings were hung asymmetrically, high and low, across two walls. In a review of the gallery for the Age, Gabriella Coslovich quoted senior curator of Australian art, Terence Lane who, Coslovich thought, was “lost for words when asked to comment on the unusual arrangement.”92 Lane stated, “we’ve never hung pictures like this before…they do catch your attention. One of the challenges is to get people to look at pictures and not to walk past, and certainly this method of hanging does that.”93

Lindsay wanted to capitalise upon the fact that Davidson, as an architect, could bring a fresh interpretation to the display and engage the viewer’s attention through innovative design. On the other hand however, the architect’s lack of curatorial knowledge in some sections of the hang resulted in, at best, a naïve arrangement of the collection and at worst, a botched curatorial opportunity, that disregarded historical specificity of the works and the expertise of the curators. In sections of the gallery the architect’s input created an over-emphasis on clever design. Reviewers of the gallery have observed this. Geoffrey Edwards noted in his review that,

91 Frances Lindsay, Interview with the author, 4 Feb 2004, Melbourne. 92 Gabriella Coslovich. "Art transplant." Age 25 October 2002: p. 6. 93 Ibid. 284

those annoying and gratuitous configurations of wall colour that create ‘witty’ and distracting connections with the line of a lower edge of frame moulding, or (worse still) with the horizon line in landscapes…these examples of an architect’s conceit will surely be painted out as soon as the architectural design team has left town.94

While I would not wish to argue against experimental design in art museums, it is clear that elements of the interior design at NGV.A work well in creating an active and engaging viewing context and others do not. I have singled out the more problematic aspects such as the wall paint and display vitrines in gallery five. Other aspects of the interior design, such as the figure eight shape of the floor plan, the multiple entry points to galleries and vistas created through galleries into other parts of Federation Square, are ingenious solutions to creating a non-linear, yet clearly navigatable, experience within the gallery. The overall impression within the gallery design is of permeability. There are clear links between the external and internal space of the gallery. The external is visible from inside the gallery spaces through ‘perforations’ that allow increased visibility and vice versa. A successful element to the hang is the creation of macrocosmic displays that emerge through carefully arranged vistas through the gallery. For example, when entering gallery five, the first chronologically speaking in the hang, the viewer can see landscapes on every visible wall in each gallery room through to gallery six. When the viewer reaches the last room of gallery six and turns to look back towards gallery five, portraits are visible on the reverse of each wall.

The innovative design visually signifies that this gallery is cutting edge. It parallels and complements the adventurous curatorial approach to the hang that Lindsay adopted. Emblematic of Lindsay’s experimental curatorial approach was the use of contemporary art ‘interventions.’ The interventions signified Lindsay’s desire to produce an innovative, critically engaged hang. The intervention programme only occurs within the NGV.A, not at the NGV.I. This illustrates that it was entirely Lindsay’s directive. It also shows that the NGV.A has a significantly different profile

94 Geoffrey Edwards, "The Ian Potter Centre: a curatorial perspective," Insite Jan-Feb (2004): p. 13. 285 from the NGV.I. It was to be the more cutting-edge of the two galleries and more engaged with local Australian practice.

Indeed, Lindsay commented in an interview with the author that she believed it was crucial for the gallery to critically engage with experimental contemporary practice within Australia – and this seems to be born out through her desire to involve the architects and contemporary artists in elements of the hang.95 Lindsay recounted the director of the Tate Gallery Nicholas Serota’s comment that he believed it was crucial for galleries to gain the respect of the contemporary art community.96

Lindsay saw contemporary art ‘interventions’ as a strategy through which the gallery could gain respect within the contemporary art and museological community. The interventions signalled the gallery’s commitment to contemporary art practice and to experimental, revisionist museology. The question is to what extent does art intervention become co-opted as an effect of ‘newness’ with the gallery? Are art interventions reduced to a critical-aesthetic effect, as was largely the case in Janet Laurence’s commission Stilled Lives for the Melbourne Museum? Is art intervention used by the gallery to simply signify contemporary relevance? Or, do the interventions have greater capacity to independently reconfigure museological approaches in the gallery?

Before discussing the use of art intervention at the NGV.A, it is worth considering how Lindsay came to prioritise the notion of interventions in galleries. Lindsay’s commitment to innovative museological practice was evident when she was director of the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne. Lindsay oversaw the development of this museum that opened in August 1998, and implemented an adventurous curatorial programme. Lindsay displayed the collection thematically, rather than chronologically, and set up confronting juxtapositions between historical and contemporary works of art that were designed to create commentary on particular issues. Lindsay did this because she believes that we understand the past via the

95 Frances Lindsay, Interview with the author, 4 Feb 2004, Melbourne. 96 Ibid. 286 contemporary world.97 She used contemporary art as a lens though which to view historical art. This reflected her belief in the inherently subjective and conditional process of interpreting the past. Lindsay’s work at the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne epitomised the new museology because it stressed that objectivity is not possible, and that art can be interpreted in a myriad of ways. The selection and display of art carries particular ideological and aesthetic considerations, which Lindsay was willing to make as transparent as possible. Most importantly, Lindsay wanted to make historical works of art accessible to contemporary viewers and relevant to the contemporary world.

Lindsay cited a particular exhibition at the Potter as being especially influential for her curatorial approach at the NGV.A. The exhibition was the product of a residency by American contemporary artist Fred Wilson in 1998.98 Wilson’s exhibition indicated for her, “really where museology needs to be.”99

Wilson’s ‘intervention’, in the manner of all of his work, was quasi-curatorial. He selected objects from the Potter’s collection and arranged them with objects that were not part of the collection, in order to challenge museological convention (convention not so much apparent in Lindsay’s Potter) and illuminate particular narratives and biases inherent to the collection. His artistic project is driven by the desire to make visible the previously invisible in museum collections and spaces. He particularly excavates issues of racism within museums.

Wilson’s installation, Viewing the Invisible, consisted of three elements (see Figures 5.27, 5.28). In a gallery he displayed nineteenth century Australian landscape painting, with works selected from collections around Victoria. Next to each painting, Wilson displayed a reproduction of the image as if under infrared analysis, revealing preparatory drawings for the paintings. Wilson sourced the hoax preparatory

97 Ibid. 98 Fred Wilson was the 1998 MacGeorge Fellow at the Ian Potter Museum of Art. Wilson spent three months at the Potter working towards the exhibition. He visited Melbourne previously in 1996, when he was keynote speaker for the 1996 Museums Australian conference Power and Empowerment. The Potter nominated him for the 1998 MacGeorge Fellowship because of the interest in Wilson’s work following the 1996 conference. Frances Lindsay, "Preface," Viewing the Invisible: an installation by Fred Wilson, exh. cat. The Ian Potter Museum of Art. Melbourne, University of Melbourne, 1998. pp. 4-5. 99 Frances Lindsay, Interview with the author, 4 Feb 2004, Melbourne. 287 drawings from the State Library of New South Wales’ nineteenth century drawings collection which depicted scenes of encounter and conflict between Aboriginal people and white pastoralists. The apparently serene, idyllic landscapes of the paintings belie battlefields and a grave contest for land. While these images are not the real infrared analysis of the paintings, the viewer is unaware of this. Upon entering the gallery, the viewer is presented with a display about infrared analysis and a painting within the collection that had been examined under infrared light. The unwitting viewer could indeed view the exhibition believing that these paintings had all undergone infrared analysis and uncovered such scenes of ambush and conflict. The Arcadia and pastoral scenes gain a sinister character. It may be only when the viewer confronts a cleaning trolley on a white pedestal in the centre of the room that they realise the nature of Wilson’s intervention. The trolley has black mannequin hands attached to it, and comments on the employment of black people in the service industry, as well as the invisible processes of the day to day running of the museum.

In addition to this, Wilson created a glass-walled room filled with ethnographic objects (such as masks, bowls, dolls, drums) and modern day domestic items (such as plates, and plastic cigarette lighters) on plinths or an ordinary trestle table. On the door of the room is a label ‘Greeting Gallery, open Mondays, by appointment only’. Monday is the day the museum is closed to the public. By including everyday domestic items, Wilson’s normalises what we perceive to be the exotic artefacts. Adjacent to this room is a false white door with the title ‘Secret/Sacred Gallery, Restricted Access.’ These exhibits clearly refer to the notion of the museum as an inaccessible treasure house and power broker.

A third element of Wilson’s installation was the display of plaster cast busts of the important Tasmanian Aboriginal leaders Woureddy and Truganini (for many years falsely believed to be the last Tasmanian Aboriginal). The busts are displayed in front of a semi-reflective window revealing a room in the old part of the museum building filled with white male portrait busts from the university campus, with scientific apparatus and medical instruments. A sound recording of muffled male voices emanates from the room. We can’t quite catch what they are saying, but the sense of authority and power is palpable. These, we are lead to believe, are the decision- making historical figures, with whose legacy the university lives, and whom to some 288 extent, continue to inform core values and privileges of university life. Within this context, Woureddy and Truganini are clearly outcasts, condemned to the figurative construction of the noble savage.

Wilson’s ‘intervention’ was one of the opening exhibitions of the Potter. Lindsay used it to reflect two things: the museum’s commitment to new museological principles and to revising the interpretation of historical art. It was not an entirely new project within the Potter, because the previous director, Merryn Gates, established a series of exhibitions of art interventions, which began in 1994. The Artist and the Museum series consisted of art projects that destabilised the viewer’s confidence in the art museum’s supposed objectivity and exposed the elitism of connoisseurship in museums of art. The series of exhibitions attracted attention amongst curators. Rebecca Duclos for example, commented in relation to The Artist and the Museum series,

Interventions such as these have obvious appeal. Not only do alternative approaches allow the abstract theoretical concepts of our discipline to be innovatively and conceptually realised, they introduce traditional practices of curatorship to a whole new world of possibilities.100

This comment indicates that contemporary art’s involvement with museological practice challenges museum professionals to conceptualise their roles in new ways. Artists can be an instrument for the art museum wishing to reflect on its own museological processes and a way of re-examining historical art.

Lindsay clearly felt this was an important museological undertaking. In 1998, Lindsay commented,

The museum must continuously address the ways in which it deals with history. It must subvert myths and stereotypes and work to foster diverse, democratic dialogue and understanding.101

100 Rebecca Duclos, "Australian Interventions: 'The Artist and the Museum' Series, Ian Potter Gallery, University of Melbourne," Exploring Science in Museums ed. Susan Pearce (London: The Althone Press, 1996). pp. 165-171. 101 Frances Lindsay, "Preface," Viewing the Invisible: an installation by Fred Wilson, exh. cat. The Ian Potter Museum of Art. Melbourne, University of Melbourne, 1998. p. 4. 289

She sought to achieve this through an intervention programme of contemporary art in the first hang of the NGV.A. Lindsay specifically wanted to “insert the missing voices back into the archive.”102 The voice of indigenous Australians, women and Chinese Australians were particularly important for Lindsay.

The most significant contemporary art ‘intervention’ in the first hang of the NGV.A was Julie Gough’s Chase (2002) in the gallery displaying art related to Australia’s Federation. This was the only intervention that was specifically commissioned by the gallery. The other interventions were contemporary works of art from the gallery’s collection displayed in juxtaposition with historical works in a way that created an alternative viewpoint.103 For example, in gallery five, which displays nineteenth century art and addresses migration and displacement, a work by Chinese Australian artist Xiao Xian Liu from his series My Other Lives (2001) was displayed (see Figure 5.25). The work appears to be two early stereographs of Victorian women side by side. Upon looking closer however, the viewer realises that while one seems to an authentic Victorian woman, in the other image, the face of an Asian man has been inserted. The label next to the work explains that this is in fact the face of the artist Xiao Xian Liu, who had his portrait taken in the same position as the stereographic portrait of the woman.

The image challenges expectations. Xiao Xian Liu made the series as a way of creating another version of Chinese Australian history.104 He hoped viewers would wonder about the history of the Chinese in Australia. So although gallery five deals with the concepts of migration, homesickness and settlement, it is only via this contemporary work that the history of Chinese migration to Australia is addressed. This is typical of most of the contemporary art interventions in the gallery. They work to expand the possible range of interpretations of art as historical documents rather than aesthetic icons.

102 Frances Lindsay, Interview with the author, 4 Feb 2004, Melbourne. 103 However, many of the contemporary artworks used as interventions in the first hang were acquired in the months preceding the opening of the gallery especially for this purpose. They were bought with the intention of being displayed as interventions within the first hang. 104 http://www.cacsa.org.au/publish/cats/2002/liu.html Last accessed 25 June 2004. 290

Fiona Hall’s Paradisus Terrestris Entitled (1996), discussed in chapter two, was similarly displayed as an intervention to the permanent hang in gallery five. The display of work included landscape paintings by Swiss-Australian painter Louis Buvelot such as Waterpool near Coleraine (sunset) (1869) and Between Tallarook and Yea (1880). Buvelot’s paintings, the gallery interpretation explains, at first glance appear to be romantic and idyllic rural scenes. However, in many of his paintings, the environmental impact of European settlement of the bush is depicted. The clearing of bush, introduction of cattle and passing of the authentic native environment are documented in Buvelot’s paintings. Hall’s work is curatorially strategic within this context. This series depicted indigenous plant species sculpted out of sardine tins, with erotic scenes of the body sculpted inside the sardine tins, with the lids partially rolled down. Each finely crafted object is titled by the indigenous plant name, Latin botanical name and colloquial name. It comments on the collection, classification and destruction of native plants in the colonial period. As well as intersecting thematically with the paintings by Buvelot, Hall’s sardine tins are displayed adjacent to a cabinet displaying nineteenth century Australian gold and silverware that often depicted native Australian flora and fauna as part of its design (see Figure 5.26). This establishes a visual correspondence between the filigree of Hall’s contemporary sardine tins that speak of dispossession and environmental degradation and the filigree of the decorative candelabras, vases and bowls which traded on the exotica of Australian flora and fauna as part of its charm.

Gough’s Chase is slightly different. Lindsay wanted to commission an artist to create an intervention in the gallery displaying art related to Federation.105 This gallery contained iconic Australian paintings such as Frederick McCubbin’s The pioneer (1904) and E. Phillips Fox’s The Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay 1770 (1902). Lindsay did not want to display such nationalistic works without a contemporary indigenous response.106 The director of the gallery, Gerard Vaughan, expressed a similar sentiment to Lindsay towards the intervention by stating, “We’re

105 However, the artist was not formally commissioned for the work, and the gallery therefore does not own the work. Gough explained in an interview with the author that she was invited to create an intervention in the gallery’s permanent hang. She accepted and the gallery paid her a stipend while she worked on the project and covered all costs in transporting the tea tree sticks from Tasmania and installing the work. Gough intends to give the work to the gallery, and she understands this to be the gallery’s expectation. Julie Gough, Interview with the author, 6 Feb 2004, Melbourne. 106 Frances Lindsay, Interview with the author, 4 Feb 2004, Melbourne. 291 not shrinking away in this gallery, from art that has strong political messages, that’s confronting, that shakes us up a bit, makes us think very, very hard.”107 Vaughan’s comment was strikingly close to MacDonald and Morris’s approach to the Melbourne Museum who wanted the museum to reflect contemporary debate and issues. The NGV.A similarly hoped to instigate debate about contemporary and historical issues – far from the pristine, quite vacuum of the white cube model of gallery, which Brian O’Doherty identified in Inside the White Cube.108

The gallery hoped that Gough’s intervention would spark debate and discussion. Gough was commissioned because of her previous work that explored degrading images of Aboriginal people and notions of collecting and souveniring. The senior curator of Indigenous art, Judith Ryan and Jennifer Phipps, suggested the artist would be appropriate also because of her work with found objects, given that the gallery wanted an artist to work with objects from the collection.109

Gough expressed interest in working with the furniture collections, after Phipps had shown her objects in the collection that depicted Aboriginal people and designs, and specifically a furniture suite by Matthias Prenzel.110 Gough wanted to create an installation using a dressing table by Prenzel, which had Aboriginal weapons carved into it as decoration. The item was stamped “European labour only” on the underside of the drawers to signify the quality and purity of the furniture item. Gough planned to display it turned over with the stamp visible. However, because the artist had limited time to select other items to display with the piece, the idea for this installation didn’t eventuate.111 Jennifer Phipps revealed that the director of the gallery, Gerard Vaughan, did not approve of Gough’s plan to use furniture displayed in this manner. According to Phipps, this was partly because he wanted to minimise the amount of sculpture and decorative arts in the first hang and partly because he couldn’t envisage Gough’s idea in the context of the Federation gallery.112

107 Gabriella Coslovich. "Art transplant." Age 25 October 2002: p. 6. 108 Brian O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (San Francisco: The Lapis Press, 1986). 109 Jennifer Phipps, Interview with the author, 5 Feb 2004, Melbourne. 110 Ibid. 111 Julie Gough, Interview with the author, 6 Feb 2004, Melbourne. 112 Jennifer Phipps, Interview with the author, 5 Feb 2004, Melbourne. 292

Gough recounted that Phipps suggested she work with E. Phillips Fox’s The Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay 1770 (1902) instead. Gough agreed to this, partly, she said, because she had limited time to look through the collection.113 Indeed, from the gallery’s perspective Gough’s invitation to respond to this work was appropriate, because Phillips Fox was originally commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria to paint the work to commemorate Federation. Now, one hundred years on, Gough was invited to create a contemporary indigenous response to the work.

The painting was shown to Gough while it was in conservation without its frame. She liked it without the frame and hoped to display it as such, unframed.114 Lindsay supported this idea. However, Gough noted in an interview with the author that the curators in the Australian art department, Geoffrey Smith and Terence Lane, expressed some concern, had argued displaying the painting unframed represented a conservation risk to the painting. Gough says she was mindful of this and also did not want to be disrespectful to Phillips Fox’s intentions for the work by displaying it unframed. However, she decided to display it unframed once the gallery concluded that it did not present a major conservation risk to the painting. Gough believed the unframed painting symbolised the continuing narrative of Cook’s landing, which she continues through her installation.

The Phillips Fox painting depicts Captain Cook landing at Botany Bay in New South Wales, ‘discovering’ and claiming Australia with a British flag. The English invoked the legal doctrine of Terra Nullius (meaning unoccupied land) in order to claim the land under English law. Cook is depicted walking ashore, while his sailors point behind Cook towards a group of Aboriginals with spears, who were disregarded as possible ‘owners’ of the land by the English. A British soldier kneels down aiming to fire his gun at the Aboriginals. Gough imagined what would have happened after this scene. She imagined a chase would have taken place. Her installation, Chase, consists of a group of densely hung Tasmanian tea tree sticks, symbolising a forest, or wood, hung directly in front and to the right of the Phillips Fox painting, where she imagined

113 Julie Gough, Interview with the author, 6 Feb 2004, Melbourne. 114 Ibid. 293 a chase to have occurred. She tied pieces of red fabric around particular tea tree sticks, in order to signify the flash of red coats through the trees or blood left behind on the trees. The Tasmanian tea tree sticks had been used by Gough in a previous work.115 She wanted to reuse the sticks for Chase, because they were suitably straight and thin, and a similar shape to Aboriginal spears. The use of Tasmanian tea tree was significant for Gough because she has Tasmanian Aboriginal heritage (see Figures 5.29 - 5.32).

On the other side of the ‘forest’, hung next to Phillips Fox’s painting is another work by Gough, titled Imperial Leather (1994), held within the gallery collection. According to Gough, Phipps and Ryan suggested including this work in the installation of Chase.116 Gough agreed, because of the way Imperial Leather worked with the shape and colour of the British flag in the Phillips Fox painting, and the strips of red material tied to the tea tree sticks.

Imperial Leather is a work about the same size as Phillips Fox’s painting. It depicts a red union jack, made from terry towelling fabric. The union jack is marked by individual wax mouldings the shape of a caricatured Aboriginal face. Each wax moulding is hung on a rope, which is tied in the shape of a noose, and invokes soap- on-a-rope. The work comments on the trade of Aboriginal figurines within Australia and Britain, which depicted degrading caricatures of Aboriginals. It shows how such imagery metaphorically hung Aboriginals by the noose because of the way it dehumanised and belittled Aboriginal character. The use of wax to invoke soap-on-a- rope invokes the way cleanliness has been associated with whiteness and purity, and blackness with impurity and degradation.117 The title, Imperial Leather, a soap manufacturer, refers to the way that soap advertising since the Victorian period utilised concepts of race in their imagery. These ideas were addressed by Anne McClintock in her book of the same name as Gough’s work Imperial Leather: Race,

115 The work was called Stand and it was created for the Ten days on the island festival in the Tasmanian midlands. 116 Julie Gough, Interview with the author, 6 Feb 2004, Melbourne. 117 Gough was inspired to make the work after reading about an Aboriginal woman who was inflicted with an obsessive-compulsive disorder that compelled her to constantly clean her house and scrub her hands. Ibid. 294

Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context, which was published in 1995, one year after Gough completed her work.118

The dialogue between the three elements of the installation – Phillips Fox’s The Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, Gough’s Imperial Leather and the dense thicket of tea tree sticks – creates a poignant commentary on the devastating experience of colonisation. The sheer physical presence of the tea tree sticks in this gallery of late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Australian painting is unexpected and challenging. There is no missing Gough’s intervention, which demands attention and understanding. The contrast between the organic matter of the sticks, which are rough in texture with small pieces of bark flaking off the sticks, and the clean stark museum, creates an uneasy juxtaposition. But striking analogies also emerge. The forest form and colour of the tea tree sticks parallel the grey wood of McCubbin’s triptych The pioneers, displayed opposite. Chase extends McCubbin’s wooded scene of despair. It literalises the landscape and through this dramatises the Australian bush – the scene of so many nationalistic myths, such as that depicted by McCubbin.

The tea tree sticks also obviously refer to spears. Each length of wood is about that of a spear, and they are slender enough for the analogy to be clear. The swarm of spears is perhaps a symbol of Aboriginal resistance to colonisation. The installation contests the doctrine of Terra Nullius by invoking the conflict over land and Aboriginal resistance to colonisation. Each stick is suspended by rope, in the manner of a noose, and creates a parallel with the soap-on-a-rope Aboriginal heads in Imperial Leather. This adds a horrific element to the work. Each stick symbolises death, and together the thicket forms a graveyard of ghosts. The parallel with Imperial Leather and the spears held by the Aboriginal figures in Phillips Fox’s painting, create a strong sense of continuity between the three elements of the installation. Gough stated in an interview with the author, that she wanted to express the idea of entanglement. She hoped to create the effect of each work having a scuffle in the swarm of spears/trees

118 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995). 295 and becoming entangled.119 She wanted the sticks to represent the imaginary wood, from which Cook never emerged, and that this unresolved history and entangled past of cultural conflict, continues to haunt Australian society. Chase, as a contemporary response to an historical artwork, brings the story of Cook’s colonisation up to date by viewing it as a continuing and ongoing struggle. Indeed, Gough believes the work represents the story of Aboriginal people successfully chasing and pursuing Cook.120

Gough’s original idea for the installation was to suspend the sticks so that it would be impossible to view Phillips Fox’s painting from the position of Imperial Leather, and vice versa. She intended to display each work on walls opposite each other with the group of tea tree sticks in between them. If this had been the case, she would have decompressed the tea tree sticks, spreading them out so that only glimpses of the other work on the other side of the sticks would be possible. However, exhibition designers within the gallery introduced a freestanding wall that was to cut diagonally across the gallery. This meant that Gough reconfigured the work. She planned to display one work on the angled wall with the other opposite, and the tea tree sticks in between. However, the architect Peter Davidson did not approve the diagonal wall, and the gallery was left open. Gough again reconfigured the work, but she was unable to return to her original plan. This is because it was discovered that the weight of the tea tree sticks could only be supported in certain sections of the room. In fact, the ceiling had to be modified in order to support the sticks.121 Lindsay described this as the only significant difficulty with the intervention.122

The method of suspension posed problems as well. Gough had wanted each rope to be pinned individually to the ceiling, but this proved impossible because it would not hold the weight of the stick. The gallery exhibition designer, Megan Atkins, who worked closely with Gough on the work, came up with the idea of suspending them from a specially made grid from material used for fencing on farms, which was bolted to the ceiling.123 Atkins designed the grid, keeping in mind that Gough wanted it to be

119 Julie Gough, Interview with the author, 6 Feb 2004, Melbourne. 120 Ibid. 121 Frances Lindsay, Interview with the author, 4 Feb 2004, Melbourne. 122 Ibid. 123 Jennifer Phipps, Interview with the author, 5 Feb 2004, Melbourne; Julie Gough, Interview with the author, 6 Feb 2004, Melbourne. 296 a grid pattern, but also an amorphous blob-like shape. The grid has no edge and therefore ties in with the display of the E. Phillips Fox painting unframed. Gough hoped that the amorphous arrangement of the sticks would help to create the effect of a swarm of trees and a floating mass that for the artist symbolises “Australia’s sub- conscious history and unresolved history that has not settled, so that we cannot settle as a nation.”124 In the label accompanying the installation, Gough made this explicit, by stating, “This work is a story of the unfinished business between white and black Australia.”125

The final configuration of the three elements therefore did not achieve the effect of the tea tree sticks obscuring the visibility of each work. From Imperial Leather, the viewer can partially view The Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay next to it, and vice versa. Notwithstanding this, the obstruction of the sticks is enough to force the viewer to move around the installation in order to see each component clearly. Gough decided to condense the tea tree sticks and lower them so that they appear to lightly brush the floor of the gallery. This, she hoped, would create more tension in the installation.126

The dense amorphous shape adds tension to the gallery, and casts an entirely different perspective on many of the works displayed there. The theme of Federation and nation building is problematised by the obvious division caused by the installation, which speaks of the divide between Aboriginal experience post colonisation and white Australian experience. Gough’s intervention in the gallery makes it impossible to uncritically celebrate Federation and national myths. It serves a crucial curatorial role by complicating the nationalistic historical narratives, which Lindsay felt could not be displayed unchallenged.

The installation is displayed with a detailed label explaining both The Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, Imperial Leather and Chase as a whole. Although Gough didn’t know about it when she made Chase, Phillips Fox’s painting was displayed with a quote from Cook’s diaries, which the artist had originally sought to

124 Julie Gough, Interview with the author, 6 Feb 2004, Melbourne. 125 Julie Gough, Artist’s Statement, in label accompanying installation of Chase at the NGV.A. 126 Julie Gough, Interview with the author, 6 Feb 2004, Melbourne. 297 dramatise in the painting. The quote describes Cook’s landing and confrontation with Aboriginals with spears. Cook wrote, “the darts were poisoned and made me cautious how I advanced into the woods.”127 This works perfectly with Chase that of course invokes the advance and ensuing struggle in the woods, from which, Gough contends, we have not yet emerged.

Chase plays a curatorial role because of the way it intervenes with historical works that canonise and celebrate nationalistic imagery. The interviews with the artist, curator and deputy director, all suggest that the intervention was highly collaborative. The curator suggested to the artist which art works from the collection to use and the exhibition designer developed the grid from which to suspend the tea tree sticks. Museum staff therefore had significant input to the nature of the installation. The artist’s role in developing the concept of a swarm of tea tree sticks symbolising a wood and also spears, created an environment that visually and spatially dramatised the notion of encounter between Aboriginals and British colonists. It provided a far more powerful and evocative method through which to represent this history, rather than a label accompanying the E. Phillips Fox painting. It extended the revisionist curatorial vision for the gallery and opened up the ways in which the gallery could communicate history and interpret historical art.

The intervention is an example of, in the words of McCaughey, “a good and troubling moment” in the first hang.128 In contrast, Peter Anderson saw Gough’s intervention as a “didactic moment.”129 Anderson thought it “stood awkwardly” in the context of historical art.130 It is precisely this awkwardness that troubles and intervenes. This is a productive tension. Productive, because it sets up questions and prompts reflection on the unsettling and troubled colonial past. Peter Timms feared that the use of contemporary art interventions would result in the historical works being “reduced to little more than fall guys for contemporary artists postmodern jibes and putdowns,

127 Excerpt from Cook’s diary, quoted in label accompanying E. Phillips Fox’s The Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, 1770 (1901). 128This is a description McCaughey applies to a display in the opening temporary exhibition Fieldwork contrasting the work of Bill Henson and Peter Booth and literally surrounded by Bea Maddock. Patrick McCaughey, "Landmark or Lemon?," Meanjin 62.2 (2003): p. 180. 129 Peter Anderson, "Beyond the white cube: Melbourne's new galleries," Art and Australia 40.4 (2003): p. 567. 130 Ibid. p. 567. 298 robbing them of their individuality and dignity.”131 Gough’s intervention is more successful than this because it extends Phillips Fox’s narrative in the painting rather than simply co-opting it for politicised revision.132

However, was Gough’s intervention co-opted by the gallery as part of an effect of ‘newness’ within the gallery? The work was an instrument through which the gallery could revise historical works and provide a contemporary indigenous perspective on national myths. It is thus an important signifier of new museological approaches – and a new permeable museum. Certainly the intervention was part of the effect of ‘newness’ in the gallery. As reviewer Geoffrey Edwards noted, the notion of contemporary interventions are the “height of museological chic.”133 Gough’s intervention had a cutting-edge quality simply because it is seen to be new and innovative museum practice. The notion of co-option, which suggests artistic compromise or a lessening of artistic freedom and licence, has some relevance in relation to Gough’s intervention. As discussed, curators and exhibition designers had significant input to the work – it was a highly collaborative creation – possibly to the extent that Gough’s artistic freedom was reduced. As noted, Gough’s original plan to display furniture by Matthias Prenzel upside down to expose the stamp “European Labour Only” – possibly a far more disruptive display to the gallery – did not eventuate. Gough recounted that this was because she ran out of time to develop the installation idea. Phipps claims this was at least in part because the director, Gerard Vaughan did not encourage it. It was also in part due to the curator’s suggestion to work with the E. Phillips Fox painting instead. The subsequent development of the intervention was a result of collaboration. This suggests that the gallery subtly co- opted the work, bringing it in line with the gallery’s desire to intervene with the particular historical narrative expressed in the idea of ‘Federation’ by providing a contemporary indigenous response.

131 Peter Timms. "NGV Squared." Age 19 October 2002 sec. Supplements: p. 6. 132 Gough’s installation Chase was displayed for approximately 18 months. In June 2004 it was removed. E Phillips Fox’s painting remained on display and a contemporary painting by Aboriginal artist Gordon Bennett was displayed, on loan from the University of Melbourne Art Collection. The painting, Big romantic painting (The Apotheosis of Captain Cook) (1993) addresses the narrative of Cook’s landing, the impact of colonisation on Aboriginal culture and dispossession of land. It creates a similar contemporary intervention to Gough’s but is less engaging and confronting physically and spatially. 133 Geoffrey Edwards, "The Ian Potter Centre: a curatorial perspective," Insite Jan-Feb (2004): p. 11. 299

Art intervention in the NGV.A was an important curatorial instrument that expanded the ways of interpreting historical art. Chase was a collaborative exercise between the gallery and artist, and did not challenge the gallery, which was supportive and facilitated the artist’s input. The intervention extended the gallery’s curatorial approach, which sought to contest and problematize readings of Australian historical art through contemporary interpretation. This notion of the museum as a place for contested history has great theoretical currency. In a paper at the Rebirth of the Museum? conference at the University of Melbourne in July 2004, Ross Gibson argued that contemporary museums should aim to settle nothing, but instead aim to be places of contestation, debate and experimentation.134 He proposed the notion of the museum as a cultural laboratory, “a contentious and dubious place, a place where scenarios are proposed and tested endlessly, rather than a place where truths are entrenched and defended conclusively.”135

Contemporary art intervention has provided an avenue through which contemporary museums have constructed themselves as cultural laboratories – places of experimentation. However, art intervention is also thoroughly institutionalised and absorbed into the methods of art galleries, so much so that it was part of the curatorial language of the NGV.A and considered a central interpretation method. This does not mean however that their potency, or potential to generate speculative interpretation, is lost. Art interventions in the NGV.A signified the ‘permeability’ of the gallery (mirrored by the stylistic permeability of the design), its openness to contemporary interjection and desire to reconfigure the hermetic white cube model of gallery.

Conclusion

In the Melbourne Museum and NGV.A contemporary art played a vital and emblematic role as an instrument of the new museum. Each signified new approaches to museology in both the science and art museum. In the Melbourne Museum, the artist was invited to create an exhibit that filled the gap created by the absence of

134 Ross Gibson. "The Museum as Cultural Laboratory." The Rebirth of the Museum? An International Symposium. The University of Melbourne. 2004. 135 Ibid. 300 contemplative object-based displays. This commission revealed the ambiguity towards object-based displays in the Melbourne Museum and the precarious place of wonder as part of this museum’s experience. The artist’s display, although nothing like displays of the Victorian natural history museum evoked a ricurso to elements of this collection-based museology, despite its rhetoric of critique.

In the art museum, the artist was used as a curatorial strategy to problematize iconic images, and to view historical works of art as historical documents that spark contemporary debate rather than revered and unquestioned aesthetic icons. This reflected the broader museological approach at the NGV.A that also sought to intervene with the communion with objects, just as the Melbourne Museum sought to problematize purely object-based displays. In the NGV.A, the architects designed the interior spaces so as to break up the neutral gallery space. Their design rivalled the art objects in some instances so as to intercept the contemplation of art as an aesthetic icon. Similarly the labels, multimedia and trails establish a thematic interpretive framework that encourages art to be viewed as an historical document and constantly provide accessible information. A plethora of interpretations and perspectives is offered to the viewer throughout the gallery. Contemporary art interventions are used to highlight the revisionist curatorial themes of the gallery.

In each instance, the status of the museum and art object was clearly at stake and in question. Stilled Lives and Chase can be interpreted as barometers measuring the widespread change from object-based to ideas-based museology. In each installation, nevertheless, the object (and their object-hood) was of crucial importance. The physical presence and texture of Gough’s Chase created a dynamic tension-filled space within the gallery. The poignant arrangement of museum specimens within Laurence’s Stilled Lives was absolutely reliant on the colour, texture and form of the objects. Through the physical presence of objects, rather than text, moving image or sound, the artists demonstrated the curatorial imperatives of the respective museums.

301

Conclusion

In this thesis, I have traced the prevailing approaches of contemporary Australian art to museums between 1975 and 2002 and, as a result of this, shed light on the increasing use of artistic methods in new Australian museums. Four prevailing approaches were identified. They provided the basic structure for this thesis – oppositional critique, figurative representation, intervention and collaboration. I hypothesised from the start that this would create a broad chronology of practices, believing that oppositional critique would largely be confined to practices of the seventies and that I would chart a progression through figurative representation in the eighties, intervention in the early to mid-nineties and finally collaboration in new museums of the mid-nineties on.

I flagged the likelihood that the veracity of such a chronology would be problematised by overlapping discourses, and indeed the study revealed, for example, that oppositional critique in the work of Peter Cripps continued well into the eighties and nineties. Notwithstanding that, his critique shifted from real to symbolic effect, all the while being located somewhat on the margins of the museum that has been the artist’s main point of reference for critique – the National Gallery of Victoria. I revealed that this was fundamental to the artist’s construction of himself as an avant-garde outsider to the museum and that this enabled his oppositional critique to function, even if in purely symbolic terms. I argued that his later work adopted a Foucaultian analysis of the spaces and histories of particular museums that privileged an exploration of the regulatory power of museums.

Hall’s figurative representation of museums tended not to critique, intervene or collaborate with museums. However, the study of her work yielded an unanticipated finding. Hall’s reassessment of the role of wonder in museums had parallels with a broader recuperation of wonder and curiosity culture in museology of the nineties. Her work also frequently intersected with the narratives of museum literature that have been preoccupied with defining and analysing the museum of old, prompting me to think of the artist as a sort of ‘museographer’ – charting the predominant tropes of 302 old museums through visual and sculptural means. Throughout her practice, Hall has invoked an Adornoesque critique of the museum as a mausoleum.

The boundaries between the four prevailing approaches are not clear-cut. In Narelle Jubelin’s work, for example, intervention often also involved a large degree of collaboration. This suggested to me that the notion of the artist as an outsider to the museum was by the mid-nineties largely irrelevant, and that convergence frequently characterised the approaches of artists and curators to museum interpretation and display. Jubelin’s work illustrated the effectiveness and centrality of the feminist intervention and critique of the museum.

In analysing collaborative practices within the Hyde Park Barracks, Museum of Sydney, Elizabeth Bay House and the Grainger Museum, I found that artistic methods were pivotal to new ways of interpreting, experiencing and commemorating social history. This was because artistic approaches provided imaginative solutions to representing the often-intangible nature of social history. As well as this though, artistic approaches broadened the spatial, visual and conceptual range of experiences within museums. I highlighted the implications of artistic methods employed by Peter Emmett at the Barracks and Museum of Sydney, arguing that imaginative and theatrical methods used in these museums resulted in greater emphasis on the viewer’s subjective experience and interpretation.

Artistic methods in these museums therefore enabled an emphasis on polysemic interpretation and subjective experience. Notwithstanding this, the experience was carefully constructed so as to produce particular effects. Within this spectrum of practice, artists had quasi-curatorial roles. They were closely involved in the interpretation and representation of archival material and collections. Likewise, Emmett’s use of artistic methods meant that he was an artist-curator. I established that the use of art in these museums was fundamentally related to an emerging language of revisionism within the museum. The critical capacity of art thus played a distinctively revisionist role. This sometimes produced a rhetoric of critique within the museum, particularly in the case of Elizabeth Bay House, and resulted in poorly integrated installations and unconvincing revisions. The discussion also suggested that many visitors found site-specific art projects that interfered with the usual narrative of the 303 historic house disruptive. I questioned the relevance of this disruption, and showed that, while in Elizabeth Bay House it limited the visitor’s experience of the house, in the Grainger Museum art installations extended experience within the museum.

The final stage of this study aimed to ascertain what role contemporary artists played in new museums – the Melbourne Museum and the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia. I established that Laurence’s Stilled Lives in the Melbourne Museum and Gough’s Chase in the NGV.A were integral to the effect of newness within each museum. Each installation was an instrument of the museum, which tried to distance itself from old models of museology. They both publicly demonstrate new effects within the museum. These effects include: revisionism and a shift from object-based to ideas- based museology, which in the Melbourne Museum are made manifest by discomfort about the museum’s past collecting strategies, and in NGV.A are made manifest by the breaking apart of the hermetic white cube model.

Both the Melbourne Museum and the NGV.A reflected the idea of greater permeability and public access. However, the devil was in the detail. What emerged through a detailed investigation of each of the commissions was that art projects were manipulated by each museum to produce certain effects. There was a great degree of collaboration, but these museums were not as permeable and open to ‘intervention’ as first appeared. Art projects are instead very much part of the rhetoric of newness and permeability within each museum. Notwithstanding this, they do signify the influence and importance of contemporary art within museum representation and the interpretation of history at the turn of the twenty-first century in Australian practice.

I suggested at the outset that considering the museological context in which this genealogy of practice operates might yield a more nuanced understanding of these art practices. Investigating the museological context for such art practices has shown that this work constitutes far more than a figurative tradition. In each case the links between the artist’s personal experience within museums, the institutional reception of their work and broader shifts in the analysis of museums in museological literature, were instrumental in the formulation of the practice. Artists have been closely engaged with and indeed integral to museum practice in Australia since 1975. Not only has the study of museums been a major trope of art in Australia between 1975 304 and 2002, I have shown that art has also increasingly influenced and impacted upon museum practice in this period. This art has participated in new methodological approaches in museums that aim to enlarge the process of communication from fixed transmission to more lateral transmission that includes reflection on the very process of transmission itself. This creates a speculative, contentious and experimental form of museum practice. More than anything, it reflects the collapse of the master narrative in museums since 1975 and the role that contemporary art has played in creating fissures and interstices that have opened up interpretative and creative pathways in museums. This thesis has argued that above all else, artists have resisted a closure of meaning in museums, and provide an avenue, through which museums can contest and expand history.

Comparing the reception of Domenico de Clario’s Elemental Landscapes (1975) installation at the National Gallery of Victoria with Julie Gough’s Chase (2002) at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, starkly encapsulates the museological and artistic shift that has occurred in these intervening years. De Clario’s work, detritus from everyday life and ‘rubbish’, epitomised artistic transgression in the gallery. His installation sought to intercept the viewing of Australian landscape painting and propose a new form of landscape art. The director of the gallery found this offensive and effectively censored the work. Nearly thirty years later, the same institution invited Gough to create an intervention with an historical work of art, specifically to intercept with the viewing of Phillips Fox’s The Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, 1770 (1901). Gough, an indigenous woman, collaborated with curators to create a contemporary indigenous response to the work that portrayed the heroism of Cook’s landing. Chase severely problematised the apparent heroism of Cook’s landing, and used a transgressive visual language to do so, such as the use of organic sticks which disrupted the pure, clean and artificial environment of the gallery and the display of Phillips Fox’s painting unframed.

De Clario’s work was oppositional, transgressive, and part of a genealogy of Western male avant-gardism. In 1975, the gallery director thought that the vexed relationship it set up with historical works of art was unacceptable. Gough, an indigenous woman, trained in Western contemporary art theory and practice, worked collaboratively and consultatively with the gallery in order to break apart traditional viewing experiences 305 within the gallery. This reveals firstly, the political and cultural change that has occurred – an indigenous woman now has absolute access to the gallery in the way that even a Western male contemporary artist, though avant-garde, did not have nearly thirty years ago. Secondly, it reveals the transition in museological practice – the gallery in 2002 entirely orchestrated the intervention, whereas in 1975 the gallery censored the intervention. Thirdly, it reveals the transition from oppositional art practice to a collaborative and consultative interaction between the artist and museum. Finally, it illustrates the political and museological currency of the use of transgressive art in 2002. This evocative comparison paints the museum as a more permeable and receptive institution. The museum may well be more adept at representing living culture while being keepers of treasures of the past. However, this thesis has shown that art interventions in new museums such as the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia and the Melbourne Museum, while central to the critical language of these museums, are carefully controlled and produced by the museum.

A number of fertile areas for further research have been raised by this inquiry. A detailed discussion of the link between art practices and the use of new technologies in new museums has been beyond the scope of this thesis. If, as I have argued, art is an integral component of new methodologies in museums that expand experience, interpretation and communication, it seems likely that there may be strong parallels between the use of new technologies, which have related ambitions, and the use of contemporary art. The NGV.A’s use of multimedia touch screens integrated into the fabric of the museum, create the impression of permeability, perhaps in a similar way to Gough’s Chase. They provide another layering of interpretation, and are literally interactive, responding to the visitor’s touch and opening new fields of discursive practice that merit research. Another avenue for further inquiry would be an investigation of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) located at Federation Square in Melbourne, next to the NGV.A. This museum, which opened in 2002 under the direction of Ross Gibson, is a fascinating example of artists producing the museum. New media artworks in this museum create the museum, rather than being exhibited and collected by the museum. Is this a new trend? Such a tendency requires examination and it may be a further development of the transition from oppositional to collaborative practice that this thesis has identified and explored. 306

Primary Sources

Interviews and correspondence

Eve Almond, Former Galleria Project Manager, Melbourne Museum, Interview with the author, 8 March 2001, Melbourne.

John Barrett-Lennard, Curator, Interview with the author, 6 October 2001, Melbourne.

Penny Ritchie Calder, Head of Exhibitions, Imperial War Museum London, Email correspondence with author, 7 June 2004.

Lynn Collins, Former Curator, Hyde Park Barracks, Interview with the author, 10 July 2001, Sydney.

Peter Cripps, Artist, Interview with the author, 25 October 2001, Melbourne.

Peter Emmett, Former Senior Curator, Hyde Park Barracks and Museum of Sydney, Interview with the author, 11 July 2001, Sydney.

Anne Ferran, Artist, Interview with the author, 12 July 2001, Sydney.

Ronnie Fookes, Galleria Project Manager, Melbourne Museum, Interview with the author, 9 March 2001, Melbourne.

Julie Gough, Artist, Interview with the author, 6 Feb 2004, Melbourne.

Fiona Hall, Artist, Interview with the author, 12 and 13 March 2000, Adelaide.

Narelle Jubelin, Artist, Interview with the author, 4 Dec 2000, Madrid.

Janet Laurence, Artist, Interview with the author, 21 July 2000, Melbourne.

Frances Lindsay, Deputy Director, National Gallery of Victoria, Interview with the author, 4 Feb 2004, Melbourne.

Jennifer Phipps, Curator, National Gallery of Victoria, Interview with the author, 5 February 2004, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

Jennifer Phipps, Email correspondence with the author, 24 February 2004.

Jennifer Phipps, Email correspondence with the author, 22 March 2004.

Jennifer Phipps, Email correspondence with the author, 21 May 2004.

Trevor Smith, Former Curator, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Interview with the author, 20 Jan 2000, Perth.

Ann Stephen, Curator, Powerhouse Museum, Interview with the author by telephone, 26 October 2000.

307

Ann Stephen, Interview with the author, 9 July 2001, Sydney.

Primary Material from the National Gallery of Victoria

National Gallery of Victoria Act 1966, Section 6 (1) (a).

Invitation to the Gallery Artists’ Day, 26 November 1977, Great Hall, NGV, National Gallery of Victoria Library.

Domenico de Clario’s sketches for Elemental Landscapes, 1975, de Clario Artist File, National Gallery of Victoria Library.

Letter from Domenico de Clario to the Editor of the Age dated 12 August 1975, never published, de Clario Artist File, National Gallery of Victoria Library.

Letter from Gordon Thomson to Domenico de Clario, 7 August 1975, de Clario Artist File, National Gallery of Victoria Library.

Stephen Mori, Director Mori Gallery, Letter to James Mollison, Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, 15 November 1990. de Clario Artist File, Internal Artist Files, National Gallery of Victoria.

John McPhee, Co-cordinating Curator, Australian Art, Internal Memo to Tom Dixon, Head of Conservation, “RE: Domenico de Clario’s installation”, 11 November 1993. de Clario Artist File, Internal Artist Files, National Gallery of Victoria.

Terence Lane, Senior Curator of Decorative Arts, Internal Memo to the Acting Security Controller, 10 December 1993. de Clario Artist File, Internal Artist Files, National Gallery of Victoria.

Steven G. Ward, Operations Manager, Internal Memo to Terence Lane, 21 December 1993. de Clario Artist File, Internal Artist Files, National Gallery of Victoria.

John McPhee, Letter to Domenico de Clario, 23 December, 1993. de Clario Artist File, Internal Artist Files, National Gallery of Victoria.

Letter from Domenico de Clario to James Mollison, Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, 8 December 1993, de Clario Artist File. Internal Artist Files, National Gallery of Victoria.

Art & Language exhibition statement, May 29-June 8 1975, National Gallery of Victoria Exhibition Files 1975, National Gallery of Victoria Library.

Poster advertising the artists’ protest at the National Gallery of Victoria held on 21 August 1974. de Clario Artist File, National Gallery of Victoria Library.

Narelle Jubelin, Letter to John McPhee, Co-ordinating Curator of Australian Art, n.d., Jubelin Artist File, Internal Artist Files, National Gallery of Victoria.

Narelle Jubelin, Letter to James Mollison, Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, n.d., received by the National Gallery of Victoria on 19 July 1991, Jubelin Artist File, Internal Artist Files, National Gallery of Victoria. 308

Primary Material from the Powerhouse Museum

Kimberley Webber, Ann Stephen et.al. “Submission to Trust: to commission a mixed media work by Narelle Jubelin”, n.d., Powerhouse Museum Internal Document.

Judith O’Callaghan, Senior Curator Australian Decorative Arts and Design Post 1945, “Addendum to Commission/Acquisition Proposal: ‘Legacies’ by Narelle Jubelin, Sydney 1990”, n.d., Powerhouse Museum Internal Document.

Judith O’Callaghan and Jennifer Sanders “Resubmission to Trust Commission/Acquisition Proposal: ‘Legacies’ by Narelle Jubelin, Sydney 1990” for Board of Trustees Meeting No. 419: 18 October 1990. Powerhouse Museum Internal Document.

Judith O’Callaghan and Ann Stephen, et.al. “Resubmission for Approval of Commission” for Board of Trustees Meeting No. 419: 18 October 1990. Powerhouse Museum Internal Document.

Judith O’Callaghan, Memorandum to Jennifer Sanders, “Location of Narelle Jubelin work”, 1 May 1991. Powerhouse Museum Internal Document.

Letter from Jo Holder, Director of Mori Gallery, to John Sexton of John Sexton Productions, dated 12 October 1990, copy on file in Powerhouse Museum.

Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences Agreement for the Commission of A Mixed-Media Installation Between Narelle Jubelin and the Powerhouse Museum, 1 November 1990. Powerhouse Museum Internal Document.

Primary Material from the Museum of Sydney

Narelle Jubelin, document outlining her research for the chests, n.d., Museum of Sydney Archive.

Emmett, Peter. Contested Ground - Contested Histories - Contested Futures Policy Statement. Sydney: Museum of Sydney, 1994.

---. Edge of the Trees Concept Brief. Sydney: Museum of Sydney, 1993.

Hise, Beth, and Chris Waugh. Review of the Collector's Chests. Sydney: Museum of Sydney, 1996.

Museum Plan. Sydney: Museum of Sydney, 1993.

Primary Material from the Hyde Park Barracks

Hyde Park Barracks Museum Plan: Incorporating analysis and guidelines on conservation, interpretation and management. Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1990.

Hyde Park Barracks: Museum Guide. Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1994.

309

Primary Material from Melbourne Museum

“Balcony Showcase Consultancy Brief, Brief to Contractor”, n.d., Melbourne Museum, 1999.

310

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Appendix

There is a tradition of artists working as exhibition officers at the National Gallery of Victoria. Both Leonard French, an exhibition officer between April 1957 and January 1961, and John Stringer, an exhibition officer between 1962 and 1968, had a curatorial role. French’s exhibitions in particular were displayed in an artistic and experimental manner, which in today’s terms might be understood as installation art.

French was an abstract artist when he was appointed by Director Eric Westbrook to initiate and oversee the Survey exhibitions, which as the title suggests, surveyed recent trends in contemporary Australian art.1 Westbrook initiated the survey exhibitions because he wanted to improve the gallery’s representation of contemporary Australian art. The survey exhibitions were one aspect of a multi- faceted attempt on Westbrook’s behalf to recreate the gallery as a contemporary and relevant institution2 Together French and Westbrook devised the exhibitions of contemporary Australian art, described by a journalist at the time to be of an “ultra- contemporary” nature3

In 1962, Westbrook received criticism for the “ultra-contemporary” nature of the exhibitions being staged at the gallery. Conservative factions of the contemporary art community such as William Dargie, a traditional portrait painter and once head of the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, publicly claimed that Westbrook favoured abstract contemporary painters. The ensuing debate, played out in the press, called for an inquiry into the gallery’s collecting policy of contemporary Australian art.4

1 Sasha Grishen briefly mentions that French was an exhibitions officer at the NGV in his monograph on French. He does not go into any detail about the experience for French, or the types of exhibitions that French was involved in coordinating. Sasha Grishen, Leonard French (Roseville N.S.W.: Craftsman House, 1995). p. 24. 2 For a discussion of the defining ideas of Westbrook’s directorship see Christopher Heathcote, A quiet revolution: The rise of Australian art 1946-1968 (Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 1995). pp. 46-48. 3 Christopher Heathcote notes that John Yule, journalist for the Observer, commented on the “ultra- contemporary” nature of the Survey exhibitions. See Ibid. p. 55. 4 This debate even reached the London press, much to the embarrassment of the Gallery Trust. The controversy was reported in the London Times on 14 June 1962. Dargie and his supporters called for an artist to be appointed to the Trustees to represent their views. They wanted to stake a place in the gallery for contemporary realist painting that was rapidly loosing favour to abstract painting. However, the debate subsided, and did not effect any institutional change. This incident is dealt with much more fully in Sarah Scott’s forthcoming PhD thesis, School of Art History, Cinema, Classics and Archaeology, 329

Art historian Christopher Heathcote has discussed Leonard French’s role in curating these “ultra-contemporary” exhibitions. In an interview with Heathcote French observed that his unofficial role in the gallery was to “animate the place.”5 As stated in chapter one, officially he was employed to organise temporary exhibitions, advise on acquisitions of contemporary art and intermittently act as a guide lecturer. However, his brief stretched much farther than this, and it seems that he had a degree of artistic licence in the way he chose to arrange the temporary exhibitions. French stated to Heathcote that he mainly found himself called upon to act as a cross between a general ideas man and gallery ‘scrounger’; tinkering with a display here, repainting a wall there, juggling pictures about a bay, and producing whatever materials were required to install the exhibition at hand.6

Heathcote briefly mentioned an exhibition installed by French that animated the exhibition spaces in unusual and artistic ways. In 1958, he installed Iri Maruki and Toshito Akamatsu’s Hiroshima Panels, scrolls depicting the story of Hiroshima after the atom bomb was dropped. This exhibition was mounted by the Japanese government and toured Australian galleries, but French displayed the work in a totally different manner than the other galleries. Heathcote described how French installed the piece,

He blackened the walls and placed a fresh green leaf on a sheet of rice paper at either end of the panels. Builders’ rubble and broken bricks were heaped along the base. As a final touch, the drawings, leaves and rubble were spotlit in the darkened gallery. Not surprisingly, the space became very hushed as visitors adopted a reverential manner.7

French’s 1958 installation of the exhibition illustrated the artist’s unusual objectives towards exhibiting art. The exhibition would have animated the gallery and demonstrated Westbrook’s ambition that the gallery be at the forefront of contemporary practice. There is very little documentation of this exhibition in the

The University of Melbourne. See also, Leonard Cox, The National Gallery of Victoria 1861-1968 (Melbourne: The National Gallery of Victoria, 1968). pp. 304-11. 5 Christopher Heathcote, A quiet revolution: The rise of Australian art 1946-1968 (Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 1995). p. 55. 6 Ibid. p. 55. 7 Ibid. p. 57. 330

National Gallery of Victoria Library. An exhibition catalogue was produced for the exhibition, however it is missing from the gallery library.

When French left the Gallery in 1961, John Stringer, a printmaker, though now better known for his work as a curator, replaced him. Stringer continued to work with Westbrook and the curator of Australian art, Brian Finemore, on the Survey series between 1962 and 1966.8 Stringer went on curate The Field with Brian Finemore in 1968.

8 Leonard Cox, The National Gallery of Victoria 1861-1968 (Melbourne: The National Gallery of Victoria, 1968).; Christopher Heathcote, A quiet revolution: The rise of Australian art 1946-1968 (Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 1995).

Minerva Access is the Institutional Repository of The University of Melbourne

Author/s: Gregory, Katherine Louise

Title: The artist and the museum: contested histories and expanded narratives in Australian art and museology 1975-2002

Date: 2004-10

Citation: Gregory, K. L. (2004). The artist and the museum: contested histories and expanded narratives in Australian art and museology 1975-2002. PhD thesis, School of Art History, Cinema, Classics and Archaeology, The University of Melbourne.

Publication Status: Unpublished

Persistent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/38728

File Description: The artist and the museum: contested histories and expanded narratives in Australian art and museology 1975-2002

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