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. The first was the exhibition of contemporary banners co-organised by Geoff with the Museum of Victoria in about 1988-89. (I was involved from the Museum end so can give an insider’s impression.) The most obvious exhibition for a museum to undertake would be of historic banners, particularly because museum staff were also leaders at that time in identification and preservation. But Geoff effortlessly moved beyond that preoccupation, arguing that they formed a springboard for the opportunity to present banners through new eyes – a new way of seeing these venerable items if you like. The Museum agreed, and the resulting exhibition introduced new banners, and equally importantly their new designs, imagery and media to a substantial audience. Quite apart from the debate on form and aesthetics that this exhibition stimulated, I clearly recall that among the most interested visitors were members of the Museum’s own design staff. They saw the potential of the format, the styles and opportunities offered by these new banners, and the lessons that they took from that exhibition resonated through museum exhibition design practice for years to come.
The second example is his work with the Australian Council of Trade Unions, particularly around Art and Working Life issues. Here, again, Geoff’s role was that of trail-blazer, constantly challenging old stereotypes of labour art and iconography, repeatedly offering new ways of both seeing and doing. If the creation of trade union banners represented political engagement at arms length, then the Art and Working Life activities proved more directly political on Geoff’s part. Art and Working Life was a political intervention within the trade union movement during years of change and transformation. Its programs stood with the economic change advocated by Australia Reconstructs, the bi-lateral exchanges between the ACTU and the Federal Labor Government and the concurrent campaigns on social reform as the hallmarks of the Australian union movement in the late twentieth century. Once again, it was no coincidence that Melbourne proved to be the epicentre of such work, and within the constellation of arts administrators and practitioners who contributed to this artistic surge, Geoff was prominent. The strategic partnership with the CFMEU and a number of its leading officials reflects Geoff’s role: while not passive in terms of the theory of art and
102 working life (insofar as one can claim that such a thing existed). Geoff concentrated much more heavily on theoretical application, of realising Art and Working Life objectives in practical form. Banners, murals, broadsheets and posters all resulted from his involvement, whether directly or indirectly.
As with so many other intellectual practices dependent on ideas and opportunity for their drive and influence, trade union cultural engagement can be interpreted, over time, as cyclical in impact. It rises in effect, it languishes.
The terms of engagement and the opportunities change. In such circumstances, threads of continuity are all important. It is here that Geoff’s innate importance lies. I am not referring simply to continuity represented by the presence of one or more people. I am instead referring to the continuity that stems from people not only remaining committed over the long term to a vision or aspiration but while remaining engaged, constantly refining their practice, injecting new ideas.
Public historian
I cannot tell at this remove whether Geoff’s earlier encounters with museums had any effect, but it is undeniable that Geoff’s long-term involvement with the Workers Heritage Centre (WHC) at Barcaldine in Central Queensland stemmed directly from his commitments as a trade union artist.
I worked on this project as well (although not as extensively as Geoff) and watched with fascination as Geoff embarked on a sustained program of education. The WHC in its early days was a malleable operation, susceptible to the ideas and innovations suggested by the small team of advisors, amongst whom Geoff was the most prominent (and persuasive). The task was no small one – how could we create a publicly-attractive, sustainable model for the WHC in a small, outback community hundreds of kilometres from a metropolitan centre of any size with strictly limited skills and resources immediately at hand? Hardly surprisingly, Geoff’s answer was art, more art and even more art! The exploitation of art, in its public forms, has long been an Achilles’ heel of Australian museums and heritage centres – generally neglected and ignored, with few examples of successful partnerships. Geoff built art into the bones of the WHC, convincing the project leaders that public art provided an appealing, accessible, engaging and participatory way to attract and retain visitors. In this he was helped by the environmental and climatic realities of Barcaldine. While there was an undoubted need to provide comfortable, sheltered spaces for exhibitions as well as for visitor comfort – and even these generally had a theatrical or artistic dimension, the WHC is also a venue given over to open-air activities and interpretation. Here Geoff threatened to re-write the rule book of museum design. Barcaldine’s WHC has survived against the odds. This, I believe, is in no small way due to the inspiration of Geoff’s work which created a small, arts-inspired oasis, deliberately applying the principles of public art and communication to create an attraction that has overcome its limitations of budget, scale and distance. Geoff successfully inverted long-understood truths. Art, especially public art, has been understood by so many as a form of decorative exegesis, refined details to be attached to the built or
103 shaped form. At the WHC, public art became a foundational tool, itself serving to shape the land and the Centre and, beyond that, delivering an experience that could attract sufficient visitors to a remote location.
I headed this section public historian and have spent the past five hundred words praising Geoff’s artistic acumen. I do not see this as a contradiction.
His art enlivened, unlocked one might say, important elements of the WHC story that would otherwise have remained inaccessible or unapproached. I see Geoff as an instinctive historian, aware of the influence and importance of past practices and received histories, but always needing to refract them through the prism of his own artistic practice. I might also add that Geoff creates his own works with an acute sense of not only their historical obligation but of the history, and significance, to come.
Teacher and mentor of public artists
In acknowledging this critical element of Geoff’s work, one must place him squarely within the distinctive tradition of artist as teacher. Obviously, this is not a tradition confined to radical artists, but there are those among Geoff’s intellectual predecessors, Noel Counihan being a Victorian example, who have made their mark as a teacher of art as well as a leading practitioner.
Why is this important in Geoff’s case and what have been the consequences of his commitment to this aspect of his work? I suggest three reasons.
The first is the location of his teaching – RMIT University, formerly the Working Men’s College. Other than the National Gallery School (now within the VCA), no other educational institution in Victoria has played such as influential role in both the teaching and proselytising of art. Similarly, no other institution has undertaken such work over such an extended period of time. But longevity is not the real point here. In contrast to the Gallery School, I would argue, the WMC/RMIT has been more open to alternative forms of art, to public art if you like. The synergies between formal art training and commercial art are one case in point but more relevant to Geoff, perhaps, is the influence of one of his predecessors as a teacher of art at RMIT. I refer to the eminent artist and muralist Napier Waller, who headed the art school during the 1930s. The continuity between Waller’s public murals (State Library, Newspaper House in Collins Street, the T&G Building to name some local examples) and Geoff’s Melbourne murals of the 1970s and 1980s, points to a shared perspective on the accessibility of art, but even more striking is the centrality of student engagement to their practice. Geoff’s public art works and installations are invariably collective efforts, most notably the fruits of his international art projects in China and Turkey. Students occupy strategic roles in conceptualising and realising each project – a logical extension of Geoff’s political position as an insurgent artist forty years ago.
104 What is striking, though, is the symmetry with Waller, who eighty years ago somehow convinced the proprietors of the Florentino’s restaurant in Bourke Street to allow him, working with his WMC students, to decorate the walls of the prestigious upper dining room with a series of themed murals; a smaller, more focussed example of the sequencing of murals he so successfully adopted in the Myer Mural Hall, further down Bourke Street.
Both in terms of art practice and of student engagement, Waller and Hogg both revivified public art teaching at WMC/RMIT while breaking new ground in terms of its focus and delivery.
This issue of revivification is an important one. Tradition and continuity in art are all very well, but if they are to avoid becoming fossilised constraints on art innovation and imagination the supply of practitioners needs to be sustained. The deterioration – or perhaps the mannered, over-formalisation - of figurative sculpture in Australia in recent decades testifies to this. Initially in the VTHC Banner orkshop,W but really at RMIT, Geoff has fostered a new school of public artists whose own influence will be seen to grow in coming decades. That he has not only committed to training the artists but has also played a strategic role in ensuring the growth of a market for public art within the public domain testifies to an acute understanding of the laws of supply and demand on the part of a socialist artist!
And that is really the third point. Public art has an illustrious but uneven history in Australia. It is plentiful, there are many fine examples. But in temporal terms they tend to be bunched within a few, intense decades, illustrative of the ways in which art is yoked, in part, to economic cycles.
Over more than forty years Geoff’s commitment to public art, in a variety of guises, has spanned changing economic fortunes and fickle political fashion.
He would, I think, reject the term ‘Renaissance Man’, although there is evidence enough that it is a period of Western history that he draws on. The point of the allusion is to draw attention to the multiplicity of tasks that he has performed in the service of public art – never in isolation, often simultaneously. Insurgent guerrilla artist, muralist and banner maker, teacher and mentor, even business manager, – these are all facets of a committed and complicated artist.
105 106