PRICING
Season Pass: $200/$130*
Single ticket: $35/$20*
Ticket includes complimentary cocktail on arrival created by The Melbourne Gin Company
*Concession cards must be shown to obtain concession price
Lecture by David Chesworth; Respondent: Kelly Fliedner
The Clifton Hill Community Music Centre (CHCMC) was a lively place from 1976 to 1984, where artists from two distinct generations created, performed, debated and occasionally shirt-fronted each other. In the dilapidated rooms of the ex-organ factory—where generations earlier, Melbourne Town Hall’s grand organ was assembled—an emerging postmodernism rubbed up against counterculture aesthetics.
CHCMC was one of the first places in Australia where the boundaries of performance, music-making, filmmaking and installation-making were dissolved. Musicians made films, visual artists made music, critics and theorists performed. Initially encouraged by Ron Nagorcka and Warren Burt, performers producing work in vastly different ways included Tsk Tsk Tsk, Adrian Martin, Maria Kozic, Jayne Stevenson, Essendon Airport, Peter Tyndall, John Nixon, Ros Bandt, Ernie Althoff and Chris Mann, among others.
Events were free and artists received no payment. It was significant that the performers and audience were deemed to be on an equal footing, where anyone could (and was encouraged to) be a performer, often utilising cheap technologies (cassettes, toy instruments and super-8 film) and readymade materials of any variety rather than traditional instruments.
Coordinated by David Chesworth from 1978-82 with distinctive posters designed by Philip Brophy, the artist-run space, chimed with punk and post-punk’s attitude of ‘just do it’. Paul Taylor, who founded the art journal Art & Text, was a frequent visitor, even performing at one event. Later, Taylor’s breakthrough Popism exhibition at National Gallery of Victoria also featured many CHCMC artists.
David Chesworth is an artist and composer. For five years (1978-82) he was coordinator of the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre and early in his career he was co-founder of post-punk band Essendon Airport. He is known for his experimental and minimalist music, and has worked with electronics, contemporary ensembles, film, theatre and experimental opera. Together with Sonia Leber he creates films and installations that are speculative and archaeological, responding to architectural, social and technological settings. Their works are collected by institutions nationally and internationally, and was recently shown at the 56th Biennale of Venice: All the World’s Futures in 2015. A mid-career survey of six of their video works Architecture Makes Us was exhibited at Centre for Contemporary Photography in 2018, touring to UNSW Galleries and Griffith University Art Museum in early 2019.
Kelly Fliedner is a Perth-based writer and curator who writes fiction and art criticism, and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Western Australia where she is writing on contemporary art practices from South Asia.
Please note, all lectures open at 5:30pm for a 6pm start.
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ABOUT THE SERIES:
What are the landmark exhibitions that have shaped Australian art? From 2019 to 2020, ACCA’s Lecture Series, Defining Moments: Australian Exhibition Histories 1968–1999, will take a deeper look at the moments that have shaped Australian art since 1968. In this two-year series, sixteen guest lecturers will analyse the game changers in Australian art, addressing key contemporary art exhibitions staged over the last three decades of the twentieth century and reflecting on the ways these exhibitions shaped art history and contemporary Australian culture more broadly.
Ambitious, contested, polemical, genre-defining and genre-defying, contemporary art exhibitions have shaped and transformed the cultural landscape, along with our understanding of the very nature of what constitutes as art. This program traces the legacies of artists and curators, addresses the critical reception of select significant projects, and reflects on a wide range of exhibitions and formats; from artist run initiatives to institutions, as well as interventions in public space and remote communities.
Presented by Abercrombie & Kent with Research Partner, Centre of Visual Art (CoVA) at The University of Melbourne, the two-year series brings together a diversity of voices with hour-long lectures and conversations involving exhibiting artists, curators, art critics and historians, with the first set of lectures scheduled from April to November 2019.
