The 1970s: Curators Framing the Avant-Garde in Writing and Rewriting Art History

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Notes

1. See First Annual Report January–December 1973 (Sydney: Australian Council for the Arts, 1974).

2. Edward Gough Whitlam, The Whitlam Government 1972–1975 (Ringwood, Vic: Viking, 1985).

3. See Terry Smith, ‘A Problematic Practice’ in Australian Painting: 1788–1990, ed. Bernard Smith and Terry Smith (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994), 452–94.

4. Ian Burn, ‘Art is What We Do, Culture is What We Do to Other Artists’ in Dialogue: Writings in Art History, ed. Ian Burn (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991), 131–39.

5. Donald Brook, ‘Theory and Criticism’, Art and Australia 5, no. 1 (1967): 392.

6. Donald Brook, Flight from the Object: The John Power Lecture in Contemporary Art Delivered at the University of Sydney on Wednesday 10 September 1969 (Sydney: Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney, 1970), 11.

7. Donald Brook, ‘From the Margin’, in Too Close for Comfort? Criticism and Practice in the Seventies’, Agenda Special Supplement (August 1988), 9.

8. Linda Nochlin, Women, Art and Power and Other Essays (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989), 13.

9. Joanna Coleman is now better known as Joanna Mendelssohn.

10. Janine Burke and Helen Hughes, eds., Kiffy Rubbo: Curating the 1970s (Melbourne: Scribe, 2016).

11. Judith Papachristou, ed., Women Together: A History in Documents of the Women's Movement in the United States (New York: Knopf, 1976), 23.

12. ‘Women's Art Registry, Victoria’, Art Almanac (September 1975), 27.

13. Virginia Spate, ‘Whatever Happened to the Art of the Seventies?’ Art and Text 14, (1983): 75–9. In contrast, Spate refers to postmodern devices of quotation, pastiche, irony and neo-expressionism as promoting a passivity in spectatorship.

14. Marcel Duchamp: The Mary Sisler Collection, New York, toured throughout Australia and New Zealand in 1967 and 1968, going to Auckland Art Gallery, National Gallery of Victoria, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Queensland Art Gallery, Art Gallery of South Australia and the Art Gallery of Western Australia. Minutes of the Conference of Interstate Directors held in Melbourne, 21–25 October 1968, Art Gallery of South Australia Research Library.

15. Jennifer Phipps, ‘Off the Wall / In the Air: A Seventies Selection’ in Off the Wall/In the Air: A Seventies Selection, ed. Anne Marsh, Jennifer Phipps and Charles Green (Melbourne: Monash University Gallery in association with the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 1991), 37.

16. Ibid.

17. Keith Broadfoot, ‘Banishing the Thing: Abstraction and Australian Sculpture’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 12 (2012): 117. This was theorised by Rosalind Krauss in the late 1970s as ‘sculpture in an expanded field’: October 8 (1979): 30–44.

18. Anne Sanders, ‘The Mildura Model’; Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 12 (2012): 127; 137–38.

19. Charles Green, ‘Avoiding Art, Desperately Seeking Photography: Revising the History of Photography by Post-Object Art’, in What is This Thing called Photography? 1975–1985, ed. Ewen MacDonald and Judy Annear (Sydney: Pluto Press, 2000), 17; Anne Marsh, ‘Desire and Discontent: Performance Art in the 1970s’, in Off the Wall / In the Air, 21–29.

20. Janine Burke, Field of Vision: A Decade of Change: Women's Art in the Seventies (Melbourne: Viking, 1990); Catriona Moore, ed., Dissonance: Feminism and the Arts (St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1994).

21. Charles Green, ‘Living in the Seventies’, in Off the Wall / In the Air, 6; Phipps, ‘Off the Wall / In the Air’, 35.

22. Ian Burn, ‘The 1960s: Crisis and Aftermath’, in Dialogue: Writings in Art History, ed. Burn, 101–119.

23. Brian Medlin, ‘Cultural Imperialism’, Broadsheet 4, no. 3 (1974); reprinted in Broadsheet 40, no. 4 (2011): 265.

24. Maureen Gilchrist, ‘Local Artists Call for Better Deal’, Age, 22 August 1975.

25. Arthur C. Danto, ‘Bourdieu on Art: Field and Individual’, in Bourdieu: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Shusterman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 216.

26. Daniel Thomas, ‘Being a Curator’, Art Monthly Australia, no. 123 (September 1999): 4; Robert Storr, ‘Show and Tell’, in What Makes a Great Exhibition?, ed. Paula Marincola (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative and Pew Centre for Arts and Heritage, 2006), 14.

27 Thomas, ‘Being a Curator’, 4.

28. Bruce Althshuler, The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the Twentieth Century (New York: Abrams, 1994), 236; Paul O'Neill, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Cultures (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2012), 10–27.

29. Donald Brook, Flight from the Object, 3.

30. Irit Rogoff, Smuggling: An Embodied Criticality, zenopraxis.net (2006), www.eipcp.net/dlfiles/rogoff-smuggling (accessed 30 August 2017).

31. These notes were penned just prior to Nick Waterlow's untimely death in November 2009; screened in Juliet Darling's film A Curator's Last Will and Testament, Sydney, April 2012; and cited in Thinking Contemporary Curating, ed. Terry Smith (New York: Independent Curators International, 2012), 21–22.

32. Brian Finemore, ‘New Art’, Object and Idea: New Work by Australian Artists (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1973), 3.

33. Finemore, ‘New Art’, 3.

34. Finemore, ‘New Art’, 3.

35. John Stringer, ‘New Museum?’ Object and Idea: New Work by Australian Artists, 8.

36. Ian Milliss, ‘New Artist?’ Object and Idea, 8.

37. Daniel Thomas, ‘Object and Idea’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 September 1973. On the Melbourne critics, see: Patrick McCaughey, ‘If you Call it Art, Let it Be So Judged’, The Age, 12 September 1973; Michael Shannon, ‘Alienation in a Tunnel of Love’, The Australian, 22 September 1973, ‘Object and Idea’ exhibition file, National Gallery of Victoria.

38. Frances McCarthy is better known by her married name of Lindsay.

39. Frances McCarthy, Daniel Thomas, ‘Introduction’, Recent Australian Art (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1973), 5.

40. Daniel Thomas interviewed by Ian North, 25 September 2012, as a part of this research project.

41. ‘Art by a Nose’, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 October 1973.

42. Daniel Thomas in conversation with Steven Miller, 12 July 2004. Interview Transcript (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales Research Library and Archive).

43. Margaret Plant, ‘Quattrocento Melbourne: Aspects of Finish 1973–77’, in Anything Goes: Art in Australia 1970–1980, ed. Paul Taylor (South Yarra, VIC: Art and Text, 1984), 75.

44. Chris Milne, ‘SA Arts Post to Sydney Sculptor’, Advertiser, 16 August 1973.

45. In an interview with Joanna Mendelssohn and Catherine Speck on 21 April 2011, Ian North indicated he had arranged for John Stringer to be a spotter for AGSA purchases from New York. He also recalled that John Baily, the AGSA director, was ‘tolerant of me and allowed me to do what I liked’.

46. AGSA Annual Report, 1973/74 cited by Ian North in ‘The Link Exhibitions: A Rough Reminiscence of Faint Scandal’, Artlink 20, no. 3 (2000): 31.

47. Daniel Thomas, ‘Sheridan's Shadows’, Sydney Morning Herald, 17 October 1974; Stephanie Britton, ‘Exciting Experiment’, Adelaide News, 5 December 1974.

48. Ivor Francis, ‘Stones Bring on those Questions’, Advertiser, 9 April 1975; David Dolan, ‘Enjoyment with Stone’, Sunday Mail, 13 April 1975.

49. Smith (ed.), Art and Language, np.

50. Margaret Dodd: Ceramics (Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 1977), np. The exhibition took place between 16 July and 14 August 1977.

51. In 2013, more than 35 years after the Trustees had rejected the proposal, Ian Milliss was able to join with Lucas Ihlein to create The Yeoman’s Project as a Contemporary Project for the Art Gallery of New South Wales: https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/ian-milliss-lucas-ihlein/.

52. ‘Proposed Project Shows’, Minutes of the Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney: Edmund and Joanna Capon Research Library, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1974).

53. ‘Project No. 1 Ti Parks’, Minutes of the Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, November 1974.

54. Grace Cossington Smith had been the subject of a national touring exhibition in 1973, also curated by Daniel Thomas.

55. Lenore Nicklin, ‘Grace Crowley Looks Back on a Lifetime of Art’, Sydney Morning Herald, 10 May 1975.

56. Terry Smith, ‘Art Criticism in Australia: The mid-70s Moment’ Agenda Special Supplement (August 1988): 12.

57. The elected Steering Committee were: Robin Angwin, Virginia Coventry, John Davis, Domenico de Clario, Lesley Dumbrell, Bill Gregory, John Hopkins, Les Kossatz, Victor Majzner, Charles Merewether, Clive Murray White, Ken Scarlett and Terry Smith: ‘Report on Artists’ Protest’, Art Almanac (September 1975): 29–30; Janine Burke, ‘Survey Spotlights the New Faces in Art’, The National Times, 14 October 1978, p. 50.

58. Survey Shows, exhibition file, National Gallery of Victoria Library.

59. Ronald Millar, ‘The Safe Side’, The Australian, 27 February 1978; Memory Holloway, ‘John Davis's Unique Australian Sculpture’, The Melbourne Times 12, no. 13 (5 April 1978).

60. Robert Lindsay, Survey 2: Rosalie Gascoigne (Melbourne: NGV, 1978). The exhibition took place between 29 April and 4 June 1978; Mary Eagle, ‘Assemblage Transforms Shopping Souvenirs’, Age, 3 May 1978: Rosalie Gascoigne Survey Exhibition file, NGV Library; Rod Carmichael, ‘Don't Scrap the “Junkies”’, The Sun, 10 May 1978.

61. Brian Blackwell, ‘Shock Scenes as Pigeons Hacked to Death: Horror Art Movie Seen by Kids’, Melbourne Truth, 2 June 1979; John Rygiel, ‘Art Fortunes at Mercy of Vandalism’, Truth, Melbourne, 30 June 1979.

62. Janine Burke has recalled that agreement on this issue was not achieved by the Melbourne group: Janine Burke, Field of Vision. A Decade of Change: Women's Art in the Seventies (South Yarra, VIC: Viking, 1990), 13.

63. Elvis Richardson, The Countess Report, http://thecountessreport.com.au/index.html (accessed 6 May 2017). The report found a slightly higher figure for commercial galleries, with 40 per cent of exhibitors being women.

64. Maura Reilly,’ Taking the Measure of Sexism: Facts, Figures and Fixes’, Art News, May 2015, www.artnews.com/2015/05/26/taking-the-measure-of-facts-figures-and-fixes/ (accessed 4 May 2017).