Peer Commentary

PEER COMMENTARY 97 98 A STATEMENT IN SUPPORt of “RepeaTable Shape” AND AN EVALUATION OF GEOFF Hogg’S PUBLIC ART. ANDREW REEVES - MONASH UNIVERSITY By way of information, I am neither an artist nor an art theorist. I am a historian, now at Monash University but having previously worked as a curator and director at a number of Australian museums. Like Geoff, I have been active in the Australian labour movement since the 1960s and that engagement has provided the vector between his professional work and mine. More specifically, my interest in the material culture of Australian labour, particularly the notable banners produced since the 1850s coincided with Geoff’s involvement in the 1970s and 1980s in the most recent phase of banner making and production, a phase that proved to be national but whose epicentre was undoubtedly Melbourne, most notably at the Trades Hall Banner Workshop, led for much of its existence by Geoff himself. In more recent times, I have provided an annual lecture on aspects of the history of public art in Melbourne for his post-graduate public art course. As a colleague rather than a collaborator, I can speak of a number of the aspects of Geoff’s work with confidence. These are: • Geoff as an “insurgent’ public artist • Banner maker • Trade union artist • Public historian • Teacher and mentor of public artists. Taken together, these reveal a considerable career and contribution over a sustained period of time, with the ramifications of Geoff’s innovations and initiatives reaching far beyond the confines of South Carlton, where two of the institutions most germane to his work are located – RMIT University and the Melbourne Trades Hall. “Insurgent” public artist Geoff’s political perspectives were shaped, like those of so many others, by the character of international politics and confrontation during the 1960s. Like university students around the world, Australian students proved vocal in their political mobilisation, one given a sharper edge here by the decision of the Menzies government not only to commit Australian military forces to the American-sponsored war in Vietnam but also to re-establish military conscription to support that effort. This was the crucible which shaped Geoff’s politics. The more politically-charged, anti-imperialist wing of the student protest movement, with at least one eye firmly fixed on the impact of China’s Cultural Revolution, attracted Geoff the most. 99 Student and workers’ demonstrations during these years proved, as so often previously, a major catalyst for public art. The anti-war and anti-imperialist slogans of demonstration placards were inevitably illustrated with images, photographs and suitably political designs. In Sydney, a long established artists studio in the Waterside Workers Sussex Street headquarters found a new lease of life and new audiences; in Melbourne no equivalent existed and temporary production facilities sprang up on a number of university campuses. It would be at such places that Geoff first created public art, initially disposable, agit-prop works, created for a specific event or occasion and redundant thereafter. What took Geoff beyond the temporary, the disposable? Similarly, why were murals the medium by which Geoff experimented with the opportunities and possibilities of public art? I have no answers to these questions, beyond an almost facile observation that this was, in fact, a trajectory followed by revolutionary artists of previous generations. The easy answer is to invoke the Mexican muralists, Rivera in particular, as both impetus and source of inspiration. Undoubtedly Rivera played a role but I cannot see the answer is as simple as that. Living in North Carlton in the early seventies, I had every opportunity to witness the early months of Geoff’s first mural (or at least the first that I am aware of) on the southern side wall of a two storied Victorian shop in Lygon Street. After Rivera, it adopted an anti-imperialist theme and the figurative work included Uncle Sam, resistance fighters and the like. South-facing, the mural bore the brunt of many Melbourne storms and has now been almost obliterated, so I cannot test my memory, but when re-imagining that mural it is not Rivera that springs to mind but a lesser known muralist of the first half of the twentieth century, the communist aristocrat Viscount Hastings, who carried his Communist Party of Great Britain membership card more proudly than his right to sit in the House of Lords. His most enduring mural, small in scale to accommodate its location within what is now the Marx Memorial Library in London, depicts the down trodden of the earth rising, with their tools of trade and their bare hands to unpick the foundations of capitalism and redeem the birthright of humanity. Their efforts are watched by a benign Engels and an owl-like Marx. But it is the naivety of the figuring that harks back to what is an essentially European vision, one to be found in medieval books of hours and psalters. Hastings effective use of these forms brings Geoff’s Lygon Street mural to mind: a similar architecture, a similar use of figures, ultimately a similar global revolutionary cosmology. Such high-profile walls dominating stretches of Melbourne’s inner thoroughfares are typically sites for advertisements. Geoff’s mural, reclaiming such a site as public space to carry a message of insurgency took the contemporary ambition of all demonstrators to occupy the streets of the city to new heights (literally). Murals that followed marked the evolution of Geoff’s own style. The most prominent break, perhaps, was the mural painted at RMIT’s historic inner-Melbourne campus – “RMIT is a workingmen’s college”. In this work, elements of which are still to be seen, the figurative impulse of his work occupies an even more prominent space but the most significant point of departure is his deployment of detailed, accurate images 100 of tools of trade and the implements of the crafts and skills taught at the original Working Men’s College, a personal preference used to even greater effect on the mural commissioned for the Museum Station on the Underground city loop. Precise detail of the artefacts of everyday living and working became Geoff’s signature. Banner maker The other characteristic of the RMIT mural that warrants mention is the similarity in structure and style to another significant work of public art that Geoff completed during those years – The Victorian Trades Hall Council banner. Union banners have a long history in the Australian labour movement and an even longer one in Europe and Britain, and Geoff’s migration to what had become an almost indigenous art form for Australian unionism marked a major realignment of his relationship with that movement and the beginning of a sustained project to both illuminate and revivify these artistic traditions. Early twentieth century Australian banners were among the largest ever created, but Geoff’s VTHC banner outdid even those. Marked by its strong figurative imagery, its tools of trade and found objects of the workplace, this banner locates Geoff at the very beginnings of the generation of banner makers and artists who through the late seventies until the early nineties made the most recent generation of union banners. Reinterpretation and innovation are the two words that spring to mind, as these banner makers used new fabrics and materials, new styles and new perspectives to create contemporary banners that honoured the traditions of earlier banners while marking out new opportunities. If the old banners had been storyboards, designed to be observed at walking pace close up during Eight Hour Day processions, these new banners were visual sound-bites, designed for a TV grab. Quite apart from his personal influence on design innovation, there are two aspects of Geoff’s involvement that warrant mention, as they both reflect the terms on which he practised his art and the assumptions that underpinned it. Firstly, unlike his peers in Sydney, Geoff worked within the structures of the established union movement, most particularly the painting tradesmen’s union, the Operative Painters and Decorators Union, rather than seeking to establish a separate Art Workers Union, with membership defined as much by an appreciation of art aesthetics as by the practice of painting. Secondly, within the Trades Hall, he established a banner workshop that attracted many of the most talented of this generation of radical artists and developed a program of commissions from unions which were then completed within the workshop itself. Although more transient, the VTHC banner workshop inevitably begs comparison with the Tapestry Workshop established shortly after in South Melbourne – both institutions took an old art form and reinterpreted it successfully to meet changed social circumstance. 101 Trade union artist The first of these actions – working within existing union structures – undoubtedly informed the second, as perhaps explains, in part at least, why Melbourne generally and the Trades Hall Banner Workshop in particular became the epicentre of this most recent generation of Australian union banners. Further, this close involvement with trade union officials – explaining the new banners and their flexibility, explaining, too, the continuities with past practices and traditions - mark an overlap between Geoff’s art practice and the Art and Working Life activities supported by both the ACTU and the Australia Council. If engagement with such programs meant that Geoff’s work became more mainstream, or more recognised, it also marked a significant growth in his influence as an artist. By the mid 1980s many of the elements that mark the last twenty years of his work were falling into place – RMIT, public art commissions, overseas contacts and cultural programs. But two examples may serve to give a flavour to his work and influence during that ambitious period.

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