A Report on Survey Exhibitions in Australian Public Museums in the 1970S
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HOLMES Jonathan Going Solo: a report on survey exhibitions in Australian public museums in the 1970s Abstract Solo survey exhibitions have been an important way in which the work of Australian artists has been critically reviewed and assessed. In the 1970s and early 1980s a flurry of survey exhibitions were mounted by the State Galleries, allowing the oeuvre of a large number of artists to be examined. Later in the 1980s and in the 1990s, the number of survey exhibitions being mounted by the State Galleries seemed to diminish quite dramatically as curatorial staff began to focus on other forms of exhibition. Jonathan Holmes, Jeff Malpas, Paul Zika, Maria Kunda and David Hansen have been investigating the part played by solo survey exhibitions in the history of Australian art since the mid-1970s. This paper will present the first findings of the research team – a survey of solo exhibitions in the 1970s - and will offer an early assessment of their significance in the broader context of contemporary Australian art and its critical discourse during that period. Biography Associate Professor Jonathan Holmes took up a teaching position at the Tasmanian School of Art in 1974, tutoring in Art History and Theory. He was appointed lecturer when the Tasmanian School of Art became a faculty of the University of Tasmania in 1981. His most recent exhibitions have been Figure It, a show that was developed, with Maria Kunda, to coincide with a National Portrait Gallery of Australia symposium on portraiture held in Hobart in 2001 and The Barcelona Studio: fragments of a brief history which is currently being shown in the Plimsoll Gallery. This latter exhibition came about as a result of an ARC Discovery grant awarded in 1998. The research project investigated the impact of the Australia Council studio residencies on the work and careers of Australian artists in the past twenty-five years and is the subject of three further exhibitions planned for 2004, 2005 and 2006. The research project was developed out of an earlier exhibition, Rediscovery, Australian Artists in Europe, 1980-1990 which was commissioned by the Australia Council for Expo 92 in Sevilla, Spain. Colleagues, Paul Zika and Edward Colless assisted with the development of this exhibition. Since 1980, one of his primary roles in the Tasmanian School of Art has been the development of the School’s postgraduate program which he currently co-ordinates. The School now has around fifty postgraduate candidates enrolled in research degrees. Going Solo: a report on survey exhibitions in Australian public museums in the 1970s1 In May, 1975, the National Gallery of Victoria [NGV] mounted the touring exhibition, Modern masters: Manet to Matisse, curated by William Lieberman, one of the senior curators at the Museum of Modern Art, New York [MOMA]. The exhibition was one of several international exhibitions emanating from New York over the preceding decade. The first was Waldo Rasmussen’s Two Decades of American Painting – one of the last exhibitions to be shown in the old National Gallery of Victoria buildings that had formed part of the Library and Museums complex bounded by Latrobe and Little Lonsdale Streets on Swanston Street. This exhibition brought a major collection of works from MOMA, ranging from paintings by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Barnet Newman and Mark Rothko, to Warhol and Lichtenstein.2 It had been over twenty years since an exhibition of this quality had been exhibited in Australia although, a little less that a year later, this would change with the opening of the NGV’s new buildings on St Kilda Road when a string of international exhibitions began to be mounted on a regular basis.3 In 1972, Surrealism toured to the Art Gallery of New South Wales [AGNSW], the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV] and the Art Gallery of South Australia under the auspices of the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Then, in 1973, another challenging exhibition from MOMA – this time of minimal and conceptual art, curated by Jennifer Licht - was shown at the NGV. Some recent American Art included works by Eva Hesse, Don Judd, Mel Bochner, Sol Lewitt, Robert Morris and Dan Flavin.4 Daniel Thomas described the exhibition as an ‘immaculate minimalist show’5 and it was clear that the NGV was establishing itself as a major exhibitor of contemporary art.6 Its intentions were heralded on 1 14th August, 1968 when Brian Finemore’s and John Stringer’s exhibition, The Field, was mounted as the inaugural temporary exhibition in the new building on St Kilda Road. The exhibition included the work of forty younger Australian artists (many of whom were only just out of Art School) and focused on Australian colour-field painting and other forms of contemporary abstraction. Despite the criticism that many of the artists were untried at the time, it is a tribute to the curators’ perspicacity that, thirty-five years later, well in excess of sixty per cent of the artists in The Field continue to exhibit or to pursue other forms of art practice. This commitment to contemporary art was consolidated in the following year, 1969, when Christo’s wool works were shown at the AGNSW and the NGV7 and in 1971, a major exhibition of the paintings of Morris Louis was mounted at the gallery.8 The NGV, along with the AGNSW, continued this promotion of contemporary art exhibitions in the 1970s with the inclusion of the John Kaldor Project No 3, Gilbert & George’s The Singing Sculpture [1973] – an engaging performance piece in which the two artists, in business suits and gold-painted faces and hands, moved on a narrow table in a tightly choreographed ‘dance’ to the sounds of the 1931 song ‘by Bud Flanagan, ‘Underneath the Arches’.9 This occurred in the same year as Jennifer Licht’s exhibition Some recent American art and along with a raft of other contemporary art exhibitions that were shown in major public institutions that year. They included: • The NGV show, Object & idea : new work by Australian artists, Armstrong, Coleing, Danko, Lendon, Parks, Tillers10 • The AGNSW exhibition, Recent Australian art, curated by Daniel Thomas and Frances McCarthy (Frances Lindsay)11 • The Sydney Opera House Biennale of Sydney [Foundation Co-ordinator, Franco Belgiorno- Nettis], Sydney: 197312 In the space of a little over five years, then, the major State Galleries had begun to consider and exhibit the works of an emerging generation of visual artists whose careers had generally begun from the mid-1960s and during the 1970s and were informed by recent trends in international art, including Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Environmental art, Feminism, Installation, and Performance. In the case of the AGNSW show, Recent Australian Art, for instance, the work of almost sixty artists was surveyed and the exhibition provided a neat counterpoint to the international concerns exhibited in the first Sydney Biennale at the Sydney Opera House. Bruce Adams noted, for instance, that although there was a considerable amount of post-painterly abstraction included in the AGNSW exhibition, a very substantial number of the sixty or so artists were more preoccupied with issues emerging in the wake of post-object art. He went on to make the telling observation that: [T]he Art Gallery of New South Wales gave recognition to a viable area of activity which, to date, had found public focus only in small, ‘radical’ galleries in Sydney and Melbourne. It is creditable that public art museums – too often monuments to established aspirations – are endeavouring to accommodate art that is still contentious and experimental.13 This engagement with contemporary Australian art in the public sphere was very much the result of the vision and persistence of a number of highly motivated curators in this period including Daniel Thomas, Frances Lindsay (neé McCarthy), Robert Lindsay and Bernice Murphy at the AGNSW, Brian Finemore (tragically murdered in 1975), John Stringer, Jennifer Phipps and Graeme Sturgeon at the NGV and Ian North at the Art Gallery of South Australia. Other curators committed to Australian art and its international context in the early 1970s included Tom McCullough and Elwyn Lynn. McCullough radicalised the Mildura Sculpture Triennial in 1973 with his emphasis on environmental art before going on to be the 1976 Sydney Biennale director. He would continue to create challenging engagements with contemporary sculpture through into the 1980s.14 Elwyn Lynn, who had been curator of the Power Collection of Fine Arts at Sydney University since 1969, developed an important collection of contemporary international art under the auspices of the Power 2 bequest and exhibitions of recent purchases were shown in 1972, 1974, 1975 and 1977 at the AGNSW and other venues. When Patrick McCaughey reviewed The Field exhibition for Art and Australia in December, 1968, he argued persuasively that one of its real achievements was to align Australian art with the modernist tradition and he went on to say: Each work becomes an experiment, an attempt to solve a particular pictorial or sculptural problem or to reveal a particularly pictorial or sculptural experience. This ‘problem-solving’ attitude has caused the widest dismay and the deepest misunderstanding in response to The Field. The shift from the referential qualities of a work to its conceptual properties comes particularly hard in Australia where the references to the figure and landscape have played so notable a part in the founding patterns of contemporary Australian art.15 This view has its roots in Greenbergian formalism which, to a significant extent, was to be discredited in the 1970s, but there is no question that McCaughey was wanting to confront the persisting problem that ‘good art’ in Australia – the canonical art, so to speak – was perceived to be in the figure-landscape tradition.