Tom Nicholson: Public Meeting Exhibition Kit

After action for another library is an early artwork by Nicholson. In 1999, when Nicholson was at university, he joined a volunteer group called Students for East Timor. Their mission was to work together to help the East Timorese, who were experiencing violence and repression as a result of their vote for independence from Indonesia. Nicholson was motivated by the empathy he felt for the experiences of the East Timorese and wanted to do something practical to help them. During the conflict, many libraries and private book collections had been burned to ashes. In response, Nicholson and the group organised for donations of books from Australian bookstores, libraries, and individuals to be sent to Dili. A huge variety of books were donated and now form part of the National University Library of East Timor.

This event generated the artist’s idea for After action for another library. Nicholson created this artwork by photographing the title pages of over three thousand of the books, as a visual record of the action. Printed large scale, the viewer can see a selection of title pages paired together like a series of open books. Nicholson often appropriates the work of other writers and artists to incorporate within his own. In this particular artwork he has chosen to use texts which evoke particular ideas about society and how people relate to one another. The selection begins with a title page of Ernest Hemingway’s novel For whom the bell tolls, featuring John Donne’s poem No Man is an Island. In his art practice Nicholson frequently uses written language in place of images. One idea the artist is interested in is ekphrasis, which is an ancient Greek term that describes how language can be used to conjure images in the mind of the reader. By presenting these books this way, with the actual stories hidden, the artist allows the viewer to imagine the characters, stories and experiences for themselves.

Discussion questions

• Why do you think the artist has chosen to make this artwork using books?
• Discuss the first line, ‘No man is an island’. What could this mean?
• How does Donne’s poem enrich the meaning of Nicholson’s artwork, made about sending books to East Timor?

Nicholson’s ideas are often triggered by chance encounters, events and conversations, which begin the artist’s long lines of inquiry. His artworks are richly layered and connected by different parts, materially and conceptually, bringing events from the past into present day, to pose new questions and to propose actions for the future. Evening shadows 2011–12/2019 is an iterative artwork that was first presented at the Art Gallery of South Australia in 2012. It evolved from an encounter Nicholson had with an Australian landscape painting, Evening shadows, backwater of the Murray, South Australia 1880, by H.J. Johnstone – the first work acquired by the Art Gallery of South Australia and the most copied painting in Australia. The colonial painting depicts an Aboriginal woman crossing a river at twilight to a camp on the other side and could be read as an allegory for the diminishing presence of Indigenous peoples in Australia.

When Nicholson first encountered this artwork, he reimagined the subject matter in relation to the historic event known as the Cummeragunja Walk Off of 1939, in which 200 Yorta Yorta men and women crossed the Murray River from New South Wales into Victoria in protest against their treatment at the Aboriginal reserve. Nicholson’s installation contains 21 copied paintings collected from a call out to residents in Adelaide who had one in their belongings, the original H.J. Johnstone painting, a drawing by the artist, and series of videos, one of which is filmed by Uncle Wayne Atkinson recording the 1988 ‘Walk On’, a gathering commemorating 100 years since the establishment of Cummeragunja. Marking the event is a stack of 10,000 posters, to be displayed by people, as a call to a future action. The artwork draws attention to this important event, which may not be widely known, and imagines new meanings for the painting to reflect anti-colonial resistance and sovereignty of the Yorta Yorta men and women in 1989.

Discussion questions

• How are the different parts of this installation connected?
• Are the copied Evening Shadows paintings all the same? What differences can you notice?
• Why do you think Nicholson has created an artwork about historical events? What is his intention?

Nicholson is interested in challenging how histories are told and inherited, particularly in his hometown of Melbourne. The artist undertakes acts of drawing, listening and walking as a means to understand others’ perspectives. Nicholson’s most recent artistic concerns surround the static nature of public monuments, and their vertical, authoritative presence in our landscape. By interrogating the histories recognised in monuments, the artist presents speculative artworks that seek to present alternative narratives and possibilities.

Over the past decade, Nicholson has been working on an artwork that is not yet fully realised. Towards a monument to Batman’s Treaty 2013-19 is an installation that includes a large mound of 3520 bricks and a series of plaques written by the artist that refer to a strange part of Australia’s history – that Melbourne’s first European chimney was built by convict William Buckley for coloniser John Batman. The texts on the plaques are the artist’s reflections on the contradictory meanings of Batman’s Treaty, that Batman claimed he signed with Wurundjeri people in 1835 to acquire land for a settlement which became the city of Melbourne.  A second element to this artwork involves a public call out to over 3520 people to pick up and carry a brick from ACCA through an area of Melbourne to Batman Park next to the Yarra River. This participatory artwork relies on the involvement of citizens and a collective action to reimagine the future of Melbourne together against a complex and contested backdrop of Treaty in Australia. Carrying a heavy brick in hand might evoke thoughts about place and Australia’s heavy colonial and Indigenous histories. The bricks will form a mound at Batman Park – a collapsed monument – to propose a new public artwork that recognises the voices of others not always present in these histories.

Discussion questions

• How does a monument assert authority?
• What is the significance of the brick in this artwork?
• How do you imagine this artwork fully realised?