Robert Mapplethorpe (Portrait of Paul Taylor) silver gelatine photograph, not dated or titled. Courtesy the artist and ACCA Archives

By Anna Schwartz

Paul Taylor invented the idea of a contemporary art culture in Australia. His engagement with individual artists became the ‘artworld’ of the early 1980’s, and the theories and connections that were drawn between them finally gave conservative critics something to sink their teeth into. Through his writing, editing, publishing, curating and his social energy he formed a circle which included artists as diverse in their practice as John Nixon and Vivienne Shark LeWitt, Jenny Watson and Maria Kozic, Peter Tyndall and Philip Brophy, Juan Davila, Linda Marrinon, Imants Tillers and Tony Clark among others. The list included nearly all the important practices of the time.

Paul articulated their ideas through ART&TEXT, his homegrown journal that built upon the articles and interviews he had been writing for Monash University’s Lot’s Wife as an art history student there in the 1970s. ART&TEXT gained a reputation around the world.  Having established his international credentials, Paul went to New York which became his new world. To walk the streets of SoHo with Paul in the day was to accompany a rock star.  

The title of his posthumous collected essays After Andy may be read two ways: Paul Taylor’s life succeeded Andy’s and continued the tradition established by Warhol of liaising with and matchmaking his contacts and reveling in the outcomes.  

publication, Impressario: Paul Taylor, The Melbourne Years, 1981-1984. Helen Hughes & Nicholas Croggon. courtesy The ACCA Archive

Paul was generous with his new-found connections and loved bringing together those he admired, adored and observed. I would arrive in New York and he would have an itinerary planned. ‘Leo at noon’ was one of his last meetings in the empty Castelli Gallery anteroom, with only a bowl of tulips.  Paul introduced me to those in his circle he hoped would become my role models as a gallerist.  

In 1992 Paul asked me to host a party in my gallery for his Australian friends. He was meticulous in its planning. Even the envelopes were subject to detailed criticism. I didn’t know it was to be his farewell. 

After Paul’s death, Jenepher Duncan arranged a memorial in the garden at ACCA. Works from Paul’s own collection were displayed on the walls (we were all arrested by the Mapplethorpe portrait) and several of his close artist friends and his brother Greg spoke, all thoughtfully and magnificently. His adored mother Pat was there and continued the rest of her life in the heart of the family of Paul's friends.

ACCA continues to be the cultural soul of Melbourne… the home of the experimental, the current, the “outrageous”. Paul had wanted to bequeath his collection to ACCA, had it been a collecting institution. This was not possible but his legacy lives in the culture of our time.

Paul Taylor: Memorial Tribute Exhibition
30 October – 8  November 1992
Artists: Howard Arkley, Joseph Beuys, Juan Davila, Keith Haring, Joseph Kosuth, Maria Kozic & Philip Brophy, Sherrie Levine, Simon Linke, Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Morris, Peter Nagy, Mike Parr, Robert Rauschenberg, David Salle, Vivienne Shark LeWitt, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol, Jenny Watson

In 1992 Anna Schwartz was the director of City Gallery in Flinders Lane, Melbourne. The following year she opened Anna Schwartz Gallery at 185 Flinders Lane. In 2008 the Gallery opened a second location in Sydney where it continues to diversify its programme.

Excerpts from an interview between Richard Perram (ACCA’s second Artistic Director, 1986-89) and Julia Powles (ACCA Archive Research Intern)

Conducted on 6 May 2013 at Il Solito Posto, Melbourne
Transcribed from audio to text in February 2014

Julia Powles: So Richard, you were saying you came on board…

Richard Perram: I came on board at ACCA in a rather strange way. I was working at the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council, running the overseas studios as well as the artists grants program. The painter Jan Senbergs, who was also on the Visual Arts Board, approached me to see if I’d be interested in the role at ACCA.

The position at ACCA had already been advertised, but I hadn’t applied. It turns out they had interviewed for the position but didn’t find anyone appropriate so Jan put my name forward as someone who could actually do it. They approached me to see if I was interested in running an art museum! I thought that yes, it could be interesting – I’d never ran an art museum before. So I came down and was interviewed and then offered the position. That’s how I came to ACCA.
…

RP: It certainly was an interesting experience because I think it’s fair to say that Melbourne at that time was very much a painting town, even though you had people like John Nixon who were working experimentally they were still painting. It was my belief that ACCA had been under the influence of a very small group of artists at that time and I sought to expand that number of artists and broaden the range of things that were actually done. To introduce installation art which really wasn’t that big a deal at that time in Melbourne. We did things like the Lyndal Jones installation which was very ambitious.  Naturally there were certain people who weren’t sure about this new direction for ACCA and I think that was the real reason why I fell out of favour in the end – it was seen as a territorial thing at the time, and over the years you look back and think …well, it taught me a terrible lot about people.
…

RP: So, I suppose the thing I tried to really do during my time at ACCA was introduce social elements into what we were actually doing. This is the reason why there were two exhibitions, two really contentious exhibitions, that I did. 

One was called Moral Censorship and the Visual Arts, which I asked Alison Carroll to curate. The board was so against it because it included a lot of pornography. We eventually got money from the Australia Council to do it, which meant that it then became difficult for the board to be critical of it, however when it really was looking like it was going belly up I rang Michael Kirby because he was a personal friend of the family and I said ‘Michael I’ve got a real problem here can you actually write an introduction to a catalogue’, so then it all went ahead. 

The other was the Imaging AIDS exhibition, which was really the first full-scale exhibition in Australia about HIV AIDS, although there had been a small show in Adelaide. It went over two venues, it was at Linden and it was also at ACCA. We had an open call out for participation and the exhibition developed in such a way that if people wanted to put a work in then they could put a work in. The focus wasn’t curatorial, it was all to do with the outcome, the publication and some of the debate around the exhibition. People like Gareth Samson turned up and said “I wasn’t going to put a work in but with all the shit that’s been happening over this exhibition, here have a work!’
It was all a storm in a teacup really. It was actually a very moving exhibition. Although I do remember there was a lot of misunderstanding at the time. For example I was interviewed for television at Linden and there was a series of portraits that Lachlan Warner had done of very handsome men in the background. The television interviewer said “Oh so what are these pictures?” and I said, “Well, these men have AIDs, they’re people that are living with AIDs”. And of course she said, “Oh they don’t look sick” and I said, “I think you just got the point of this exhibition”.

JP: The feedback I’ve had from people I know is that they remember making a point of going to see the Imaging AIDS show because they thought it was an important exhibition.

RP: Well it was an important show, but let’s just say some of the art in it wasn’t. It was about a community showing their support for something that at the time was incredibly demonized because it still wasn’t known what caused AIDS and it was seen as a gay disease. It’s important to note that at that time Australia was probably the most proactive country in the world for dealing with HIV/AIDs.

I remember going to America in the 1980’s and the difference between Australia and there was that because we had good heath we had more knowledge where as in America there was still people having unprotected sex. There wasn’t that clean strong line of proactive education that was taken in Australia with needle exchanges and things like that.
…

JP: Were there specific goals, things you really wanted to do?

RP: The first part of my tenure there was getting the extension of the existing gallery finished, the Loti Smorgon Gallery. It was being built when I arrived. The back of the building had been taken off and it was quite a small gallery where Young Contemporaries was actually was going on. The first show that opened in the renovation was Imants Tillers’ Paintings from Venice which was the work shown at the Venice Biennale.
…

RP: There was another show that was quite interesting called Evenings Without Andy Warhol. We invited young emerging artists (who had never exhibited before at ACCA) to be involved in a series of short exhibitions. We broke the gallery up into five spaces and each Wednesday night there was an opening of new work, so it was this massive change over every week.

JP: That has a nice link to the NEW series that ACCA holds annually now in which younger or new artists have the opportunity to develop a more major work. Although the format is different, ACCA is still a venue that can offer a real opportunity. It must be amazing when you go to ACCA now and see the different scale?

RP: Absolutely. It’s hard to believe now but the old ACCA, after the new extension, would have been the largest of all the contemporary art spaces in Melbourne. I was at the Australia Council at the time ACCA was established and supposedly the funding was only for three years and then it was going to be self-sufficient. But we knew that was never going to happen, we were going to be there for the long haul!

JP: Henry Gillespie told me that funding always been a challenge for ACCA.

RP: The funding from the Australia Council was secure and the funding from Arts Victoria was there. It might have been $100,000 or it might have been $50,000 – something like that. But it was doing the other things that were difficult, such as the E3: European Installation Art exhibition that ended up nearly cancelled as we just couldn’t physically raise the money.  And then Lyn (Williams), bless her socks, came in and we spent the whole day on the phone and by the end of the day we’d raised $75,000 for the show.

JP: That’s amazing!  Henry told me that when he first started establishing the Friends of ACCA he sent a hand written letter to about a thousand people after going through the 1983 edition of ‘Who’s Who’. I guess that’s a totally different proposition to fundraising today isn’t it?

RP: Well, I guess today on the internet you get a lot of people and a little bit of money to make a large amount of money. But when we did things like the E3 catalogue all we had were faxes so it came in bits of A4 paper and we then sticky taped it together… there was no computers to do this stuff.

I guess I recall that the program was a little bit all over the place. We did things like try to represent young artists who didn’t get a look in and make shows with those people like Peter Tyndal who were quite major and seemed to have slipped off the radar.

Peter’s show at ACCA was really fantastic, it was really just extraordinary. It had been initiated by Sue (Cramer). The ACCA Board, on appointing me, told me that if I wanted to drop the Peter Tyndall show I could. I said “No, absolutely not” and they had no choice but to go along with Sue and I. Once the exhibition was up they looked at the works and said, ‘He can paint!’ and I said, ‘Yes of course he can paint” but that’s not what it’s actually about!

Peter’s catalogue was a nightmare to produce because all the paintings were exactly the same, with the same title, yet they all had different dimensions. It was very difficult to make sure that everything matched up. And we did a big poster, which had all the information on the back. And there was a book published on Peter, but it may have been published by Gertrude Street. It’s called Dagger Definitions: selected works – 1952 – 1987. It was around about the time that the Picasso went missing.

JP: The Weeping Woman?

RP: Yes, Peter had a work in a show that we borrowed from the Art Gallery of South Australia. It was a spot on the wall with two cords hanging down, and that was it. 

JP: A cheeky reference to the missing Picasso?

RP: Well…
…

JP: Do you remember any other stories?

RP: Jill Orr also came in to the gallery and we talked about the possibility of doing something. She was talking about wanting to do something that summarised her career and the difficulty of actually doing it. I suggested we do it as a series of photographs of her performances with some texts that explained it. And so that’s how that show actually happened. Things had been at an impasse for her and I think this show and the fantastic catalogue that was published really helped move things on.

Richard Perram was Director of ACCA from 1986-1989. He has been Director of the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery since 2004 and has held many other roles in the arts, including Executive Officer of Arts Queensland, Executive Officer of Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras, Program Officer at the Visual Art Board of the Australia Council and as the Special Events Coordinator for South Sydney Council. He has been a member of many arts boards including Res Artis, the Visual Arts Reference Group for Museums & Galleries NSW and the Arts NSW Youth Panel.   

 

Richard Perram at Loti Smorgon Gallery Opening, 1987. Courtesy ACCA Archive

HIV/AIDS is a disease of the human immune system that was first clinically observed in 1981. But it was not until 1983 that Robert Gallo (US) and Luc Montagnier (France) separately identified a retrovirus that later came to be called HIV.

The history of HIV/AIDS in Australia in comparison with the rest of the world is distinctive in that prevention strategies were developed by government in close cooperation with grass roots groups that were principally gay. As a result Australia recognised and responded to the AIDS pandemic relatively swiftly, developing in 1987 one of the most successful disease prevention and public health education programs in the world. As a result, despite the disease gaining an early hold in at-risk groups principally gay men and IV users, Australia achieved and has maintained a low rate of HIV infection.

In 1987/88 when Imaging AIDS was being developed there was considerable public debate about the issue of AIDS, most of it negative. As Director of ACCA (1986-1989) I strongly believed that it was important for the gallery to develop exhibitions that looked at how the visual arts could engage with important social issues and AIDS was one such issue.

Stewart MacFarlane, The Forest, 1987. Featured in Imaging AIDS, ACCA 1989. Courtesy the artist and ACCA Archive

Imaging AIDS consisted of an exhibition at two galleries, ACCA in South Yarra (18 January – 5 February) and Linden in St Kilda (28 January – 26 February) and a publication. The project was overseen by a curatorium whose members were Graeme Byrne, Terry Harding, Stephanie Holt, Robert Jacks, Chris McAuliffe, Richard Perram and Stieg Persson. Sponsorship was provided by The Health Promotion Unit of the Victorian Health Department, St Kilda City Council, The Howard Norman Trust, Chris Perks, Greg McIntyre, the Victorian AIDS Council and 70 Arden Street.

The project was seen by the curatorium as a way for the visual arts community to support and engage in an unprejudiced and compassionate discussion of this most serious threat to public health.

Inclusion in the exhibition operated in a very democratic way with letters of invitation sent out to many artists inviting them to submit work around the theme of HIV/AIDS and asking them to pass the invitation around to other interested artists. No artists who submitted work were excluded from the exhibition with the result that both established as well as community artists were included.  

Initially the Board of ACCA was very reluctant for the exhibition to go ahead, due perhaps to their perception of the controversial nature of the exhibition and its subject matter. However they eventually agreed that the exhibition and the publication could proceed.

Similarly debate about the exhibition waged in the visual arts community between those artists who were willing to participate and those that weren’t.

To some, it seemed that the artistic program of the gallery was under threat and that Imaging AIDS was only the tip of the iceberg. This debate about the artistic program would again resurface in 1988 when I scheduled the ACCA exhibition Moral Censorship and the Visual Arts in Australia (1989) curated by Alison Carroll, the last exhibition under my directorship.

¹ The National Gallery of Australia’s exhibition Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS curated by Ted Gott would not occur until 1994.

The exhibition Imaging AIDS was held at ACCA from 27 January – 26 February 1989.

Excerpt of conversation with Richard Perram

Richard Perram was Director of ACCA from 1986-1989. He has been Director of the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery since 2004 and has held many other roles in the arts, including Executive Officer of Arts Queensland, Executive Officer of Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras, Program Officer at the Visual Art Board of the Australia Council and as the Special Events Coordinator for South Sydney Council. He has been a member of many arts boards including Res Artis, the Visual Arts Reference Group for Museums & Galleries NSW and the Arts NSW Youth Panel. In 2014 he was awarded an OAM for services to the visual arts particularly the museums and gallery sector. 

<back to 1989

By Peter Cripps

Originating in 1988, the play Namelessness and its accompanying theatre installation (along with other works, including paintings, sculptural models, concrete poems and stage pictures) tended to cut across more traditional boundaries of art production. Namelessness was produced in a reconstructed, life-size model theatre located within the exhibition space of an actual museum.

Namelessness was realized with contributions from other artists including Ruth Gall-Bucher and Bob Lingard who assisted in the writing of the script, and David Hirst who wrote the original score for the production and was produced by myself. The work was performed at three venues by Jane Burton, Katarina Cobanovich and Bruce Hay.

As a play and exhibition, Namelessness was first exhibited at the University of Tasmania’s Centre for the Arts Gallery in September-November in 1988 where it was curated by Bob Jenyns. Later that same year it was presented at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (December 1988-January 1989) and then at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in mid 1989.

At ACCA, a life-size reconstruction of a theatre (based on the Gossard Bra and Girdal Theatre located in the Gossard Building on Franklin Street, Melbourne) was installed for a program of performances in the recently opened Loti Smorgon Gallery. ACCA’s three front galleries and hallway contained an exhibition of photographs of stage pictures, concrete poetry, sculptural models and props for the play. Namelessness stood at odds to contemporary perceptions of what a contemporary play or performance could be. It attracted an engaged audience of people who often stayed on drinking and discussing the play and related issues within contemporary art.

Namelessness (1988) was the fourth in a series of plays and performances that included By the Fire in the Light of Your Eyes (1976), Hidden Knowledge or the Bare Arse of Superman (1977) and City Life (1981). In their own way, each work was concerned with the sociological and artistic exploration of ideas to do with time, memory, history and its selective construction, and the role of the museum in relation to these matters.

Peter Cripps, By the Fire in the Light of Your Eyes 1976. Courtesy the artist and ACCA Archive

By the Fire in the Light of Your Eyes was performed in a private house in Franklin, Tasmania. Two female performers moved from room to room carrying out a private conversation. The audience followed as the performers discussed political and social issues in the context of their own personal lives.

Hidden Knowledge or the Bare Arse of Superman was performed at the Institute of Technology, Mt Nelson, Hobart in the performing arts theatre. In the center of the theatre was a series of props set up for the scenes. The performers again moved from set to set with the audience moving around the outside area following the events on stage.

City Life was curated by Robert Lindsay for the National Gallery of Victoria and was performed in the temporary exhibitions hall. City Life was accompanied by improvised jazz from Judy Jacques and Barry Veith and had a strong Dada/Surrealist orientation which revealed the psychologeography of Melbourne. On this occasion City Life and Namelessness were both performed in the same reconstructed, life size theatre.

Namelessness, the play and the exhibition, later appeared in the survey exhibition, Peter Cripps: Towards an Elegant Solution, which was held at ACCA in 2010. This exhibition brought together past and present works and contextualized Namelessness in relationship to my forty years of artistic practice. A selection of stage pictures and a documentary video of the play from 1988 were included, along with backdrops and props from the play City Life. As with the staging of the original performance at ACCA in 1988, there was a strong interest from a younger generation. Following my public lecture given on my installations and artist plays, discussion and conversations extended into the night.

Peter Cripps, City Life 1981 Courtesy the artist and ACCA Archive

The exhibition and performance Peter Cripps: Namelessness – A play and Installation was held at ACCA from 2 December 1988 – 22 January 1989.                     

Peter Cripps started exhibiting in a number of key commercial galleries during the late 1980’s. He had the first exhibition at Peter Bellas Gallery, Brisbane in 1987 and started exhibiting with City Gallery (later Anna Schwartz Gallery) in 1989. Recently the artist has re-strategised his practice and is working on a project-based way of working that is independent from the commercial gallery agenda of exhibitions.  

See Tension 15, 1988 p 12 – 1

by Lyndal Jones

Study for the Prediction Pieces, Performance Space, Sydney, 1989 photographer; Sandy Edwards

Prediction Piece 6 (version 1) was an installation comprising a 2 x 5 metre Besser Brick wall with 2 returns built inside the gallery to seal off the rear exit to the garden. This created a ‘courtyard’ unable to be entered by viewers. Instead, in the darkened room of the gallery they could look up to see a continuous multiple projection of phrases and images across the ceiling.

Central to all versions of this work, which included other installations and a large-scale performance for the theatre, is the phrase ‘the writing is on the wall’.

This phrase, with its ‘implication of a fate already sealed[1]’ is tied here to the image of someone blindfolded, standing against a wall before a firing squad, their future determined. PP6 was thus created as an extended image of revolution, of war.

The action of the work was to proceed to make this future more complex, more open. Thus, the writing appeared here, not on the wall but on the ceiling, as a series of projections. These images were thus ephemeral and also had random relationships to each other in order to suggest a range of possibilities, a range of futures. The soundscape comprised only the clicking over of the slides in the automated unseen projectors (there were 5) in the otherwise silent, darkened room.

I remember the delight of having this huge grey wall built in the gallery and of setting up the projections the day before the opening, only to find myself completely unmoved by them. This was an important moment for my future works as I threw out the phrases I had and rewrote them. The phrases substituted were intimate and vulnerable, so that the viewer became implicated as the lover being directly addressed. And they were placed in the projectors only an hour before the opening. My first viewing was with over 100 other people in the room, some of who lay on the floor to watch it. I remember being exquisitely embarrassed by having created such a relationship, but knew this approach made for a much more powerful work. These and other phrases, which had almost accidentally created the viewers as performers, then became central to the rest of the Prediction Pieces. Importantly this one work had allowed me to create a way to use language and sound to create audiences as performers which has informed my artworks ever since.

Lyndal Jones, Prediction Piece 6: Pipe Dreaming (Installation Version 1) 1988, installation view, ACCA. Courtesy the artist and ACCA Archive.

Lyndal Jones: Prediction Piece 6: Pipe Dreaming (Installation Version 1)  was held at ACCA from  21 October – 20 November 1988.

Lyndal Jones is an artist who uses performance (live and video) to focus on context, place and empowerment through long-term projects.  In 2001 she represented Australia at the Venice Biennale and in 2008 held a survey exhibition at ACCA. The Avoca Project: Art, Place and Climate Change, her current 10 year project, addresses climate change action. She is currently Professor of Contemporary Art in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University.

"Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse." From James Joyce's ‘Ulysses’, an account of one person in one place on one day, 16 June 1904, published 2 February 1922. 

Peter Tyndall : DAGGER DEFINITIONS : selected works -1952-1987-
: dates and diversions galore, before and after everything.

A four venues tour, no less:
ACCA, Melbourne, – 7 Aug – 13 Sept 1987-
Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, – 18 Sep – 11 Oct 1987 –
Power Gallery of Contemporary Art, Sydney, – 28 Oct – 5 Dec 1987 –
Museum of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, – 19 Dec 1987 – 22 Jan 1988 –

Fifty works were listed on the back of the DAGGER DEFINITIONS poster. Fifty times the same Title, some with a sub-Title.
No.50, for example :
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something …

MISSING PAINTING
(History of Art)

Shout outs to John Buckley, the first ACCA director – we went together to Sally Milner at Greenhouse Publications (Melb) who agreed to publish a DAGGER DEFINITIONS monograph. To Pam Hansford who wrote the text and Ian Robertson who designed the book and poster. To Richard Perram, by opening night the second ACCA director, and Daniel Thomas who launched the show. To Robert Rooney for his thoughtful review. To my partner Christine Stokes for her always wise advice. To the many who made it happen at each venue.

That was then, this is now. LONG LIVE ACCA!

text by Peter Tyndall

Peter Tyndall : DAGGER DEFINITIONS : selected works -1952-1987-
was held at ACCA from 7 August – 13 September 1987, and toured to Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane.

Polixeni Papapetrou, Portrait of Arthur Hibbert, Sculptor and Painter, 1986 (detail). Courtesy the artist and ACCA Archive

By Elizabeth Gertsakis

During the 1980s the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art grasped both ends of the decade’s stick with three significant photographic exhibitions: The Thousand Mile Stare curated by Joyce Agee – an Australian Bicentennial photography survey project, produced by the Victorian Centre of Photography; and two exhibitions of feminist artist/photographers, Anne Ferran’s Scenes on the Death of Nature and Sue Ford’s New Photographic Work.

The Thousand Mile Stare (11 March – 10 April, 1988) was a selection from the eclectic nature of photographic practices in Victoria across two decades (and earlier) incorporating traditional photographic genres as well as the more experimental, political, commercial and ideological/activist uses tied to the camera. The exhibition emerged from the nascent establishment of the Victorian Centre for Photography as well as from a collective attempt to embrace a great number (54 photographers and over 100 framed works) of individual practitioners who, as photographers, belonged to very different aesthetic and technical generations in terms of definitions of photographic practice and political allegiances to what public and private photography looked like and what it was meant to be and do.

Anne Ferran, Scenes on the death of nature I, 1986. Courtesy the artist, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne and Stills Gallery, Sydney

Geoff Strong’s essay in the accompanying exhibition catalogue ‘The Melbourne Movement – Fashion and Faction in the Seventies’ succinctly underwrites the emergence and clash of individuals, groups and institutions that had either influence, authority or ambition for using or making photography as a documentary or more self-consciously, artistic medium.  Beatrice Faust’s press review (The Age, 30 March, 1988) gave recognition to the acceptability of most works in the exhibition, and points out that the conspicuous omissions and underrepresentation were significantly those of ‘fine print’ work, community photography and photojournalism.

The other two important photographic exhibitions of that decade clearly embraced dedicated feminist, ‘self and others’ exploratory work by Sue Ford (1943–2009) and the psycho-theoretical interrogative use of the photographic medium as both aesthetic inheritance and criticism in the work of Anne Ferran. Ferran had established a specifically intellectual and literary relationship to photography with her earlier project Carnal Knowledge (1984). She advanced on historical referentiality of past times and patinas that evoked familiar female imagery, subjectivity and subjectification in the iconic ACCA exhibition Scenes on the Death of Nature, produced in 1986 and exhibited in Melbourne in 1987.  

Sue Ford’s project New Photographic Work (11 May – 11 June, 1989) continued her commitment to working collectively and skill sharing. During Australia's 1988 bi-centennial, Ford completed 3 significant projects; The Barunga Festival in Northern Territory, and images from her time teaching Tiwi women photography and film making on Bathurst Island. These photographic images, many of which were in the ACCA exhibition, were both documents and windows into the collective resistance by indigenous communities in the face of official political grandstanding during the Bicentenary. Ford was an activist and her legacy during this period is that of recorder and witness.

ACCA’s commitment in the 1980s to photographic practice was fixed in the medium and its optic essentialism – The Thousand Mile exhibition ‘stared’, Ferran reminded us of the blind ‘gaze’ and Ford ‘witnessed’ the inexcusable. All three exhibitions were remarkable pivots of photographic observation and processes; spinning impulses of and toward visual continuity, recognition of the photographic and the photographer as playing with engagement and disengagement with others, separate and yet shared spasmodic linkings to ideas and the epic acknowledgement of the malleability of photography to fantasy and imagination.

If anything these exhibitions set the foundation for continued theoretical struggle around the historical ‘gaze’ which became a much more academic if not orthodox prescription for photographic thinking in the 1990s when earlier debates continued to rage around observation and the observed, presence and absence, play and authority, technique and skill versus accident and ephemerality.

By Sue Cramer

Geometric Abstraction, installation view, ACCA, 1986. Courtesy ACCA Archive

Geometric Abstraction brought together artists from three generations of abstract painting current in the mid-1980s. It was the first time that some of that younger group of Melbourne artists who would later be associated with Store 5 gallery (1989 –1993) — Gary Wilson, Rose Nolan and Melinda Harper — were exhibited in a public art gallery alongside some of their teachers and mentors. A range of approaches were in evidence, from the hard edge and minimal works of Robert Hunter, Robert Jacks and Robert Owen, to the Op Art of Lesley Dumbrell, and the more conceptual approaches of Peter Cripps, Peter Tyndall and Robert MacPherson. MacPherson’s Where Are you Now Silvia Holmes? (1982-83) especially stands out in my memory. It subversively coupled a text sheet by MacPherson with a fantastic abstract painting by a little known artist, Silvia Holmes, which he had found in an op shop.

In my essay I described Nolan, Harper and Wilson (the latter founded and ran Store 5) as ‘the young constructivists’ and their works introduced a new material element. I enjoyed how Gary installed his painting — a large Suprematist circle painted onto a sheet of black plastic — by taping it casually to the wall across the two top corners. It had a powerful presence. Rose was similarly informal, hanging her emblematic painted hessian banners using nails or pins. In retrospect, I can see from my text that I had quite an idealistic view of the modernist avant-garde that was somewhat in keeping with the new romanticism of the times. Even now, I don’t really disagree with what I wrote then. My co-curator, artist, John Nixon designed the concept for the catalogue cover with his usual minimalist economy and flair, basing it on the generic covers of Penguin paperback novels. Their distinctive two bands of orange made a striking geometric composition in keeping with the exhibition’s theme.

Geometric Abstraction
11 September – 12 October 1986.
Exhibiting artists: Tim Burns, Peter Cripps, Leslie Dumbrell, Melinda Harper, Robert Hunter, Robert Jacks, Robert MacPherson, John Nixon, Rosemary Nolan, Robert Owen, Peter Tyndall, Gary Wilson

Sue Cramer was Curatorial Assistant at ACCA 1984-86. She subsequently became Director at the Institute of Modern Art, Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and is currently Curator at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne.

By Sue Cramer

How Much Beauty Can I Stand?, Contemporary Landscape Painting, installation view, ACCA, 1986. Work by Amanda Tillers. Courtesy ACCA Archive

Landscape seen through the eyes of culture was the central theme of this exhibition, which looked at a 1980s revival of interest in romantic painting, viewed through the sceptical lens of postmodernism. A reconnection with art history as valid subject matter for art was typical of the ethos of this period. The contemporary artists in How Much Beauty Can I Stand?, I argued as its curator, ‘are more likely to derive inspiration from other paintings of nature, or reproductions of those paintings, than from the experience of actually looking at the landscape’. The picturesque and sublime landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich and Eugene Von Guerard were of particular relevance to the exhibition’s theme and to works in the exhibition.

The show’s rhetorical title came from a sadly never-to-be-completed painting promised to me by the German artist Volker Tannert, who was resident at Victoria College, Prahran. (Tannert’s failure to finish the painting was a keen disappointment, part of the young curator’s steep learning curve.) As a title, How Much Beauty Can I Stand? summed-up the ambivalence of artists at once drawn to ‘the awesome beauty of the sublime’ whilst being irredeemably aware of it as an historical construction, the notions of a ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ vision being very much under question at the time.  ‘It is no longer easy to believe in the utopias of beauty or truth’ I observed.

How Much Beauty Can I Stand?, Contemporary Landscape Painting, installation view, ACCA, 1986. Work by Geoff Lowe. Courtesy ACCA Archive

Looking back I still think it was a clever idea for an exhibition, (I was devastated when certain critics thought otherwise) bringing together four contemporary Australian artists with two internationals – both of them ‘names’ on the international scene – who happened to be visitors to Melbourne. (British artist Thérèse Oulton had been recently resident at the Victorian College of the Arts.) At the entrance to ACCA I hung an 1897 landscape by Von Guerard borrowed from the State Library of Victoria Collection, not exactly the one I had wanted, but close enough. Its panoramic vista typified the kind of transplantation of European vision onto the Antipodes that the Australians in the exhibition were newly exploring with fresh and knowing eyes.

“How Much Beauty Can I Stand?” Contemporary Landscape Painting
19 March – 20 April 1986.
Exhibiting artists: Tony Clark, Geoff Lowe, Susan Norrie, Thérèse Oulton, Volker Tannert, Imants Tillers, Eugene Von Guerard

Sue Cramer was Curatorial Assistant at ACCA 1984-86. She subsequently became Director at the Institute of Modern Art, Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and is currently Curator at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Derrick Cross, 1983. Courtesy the artist

Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) was a highly influential American photographer known for his formalism and fine technical facility. Working mostly in black and white, Mapplethorpe’s subject matter included male and female nudes, still lives of flowers and celebrity portraits. His work was often overtly homoerotic and at times sparked controversy.

In June 1985 ACCA’s inaugural Director John Buckley went to New York to meet with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe. At that meeting, which took place in Mapplethorpe’s studio/apartment, Robert and John selected the 60 photographs that would form the first exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s works to be held in Australia. John Buckley recalls the moment of entering the large New York studio as “stepping, like Alice, into the world beyond the looking glass”. The apartment was stylishly minimal; polished perspex and wooden surfaces reflected the filtered city light and, John noted, from the number of cameras and the lighting it appeared that the studio was set up for an upcoming shoot.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Susan Sontag, 1984. Courtesy the artist

Selecting the works with an Australian audience in mind, and the desire to introduce the breadth of Mapplethorpe’s work, Buckley and Mapplethorpe chose a selection from the best-known series of works: male and female nudes, portraits, flower photographs and a selection from the ‘soon-to-be-notorious’ erotic imagery. It was the National Endowment for the Arts sponsorship of the 1989 Mapplethorpe touring survey exhibition, Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment featuring his X Portfolio works, that was to spark the ‘culture-wars’ of the 1990’s, a period of increased censorship for the arts which left the US divided over whether or not public funding should support contemporary art. In Melbourne, although John Buckley recalls that “nobody blinked” about the content of the Mapplethorpe exhibition, the ACCA archives reveal that there were a couple of letters of complaint, and that God was cited by one correspondent as not being at all happy with ACCA for presenting Mapplethorpe’s work.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Lake Memphremagog, 1979. Courtesy the artist

The exhibition Robert Mapplethorpe: Photographs 1976-1985 was however a resounding success, and received funding from both Hasselblad and Kodak. It also attracted rave reviews in the press, and high audience attendance. The Australian called it ‘easily the best show in town’ and The Melbourne Times reviewer, photographer Janina Green, described it as ‘too beautiful for its own good’. For Australian audiences familiar only with reproductions of Mapplethorpe’s work Robert Mapplethorpe: Photographs 1976-1985 provided an opportunity to encounter the nuance and subtlety of the work in the original.

The exhibition Robert Mapplethorpe: Photographs 1976-1985 was held at ACCA from 4 February – 16 March 1986.

Image Codes, installation view, ACCA, 1985. Courtesy ACCA Archive

By Julia Powles

Emerging out of the anarchic energy of late 70’s punk, the Melbourne fashion scene in the early 80’s was raw, inventive and disrespectful. This was a period of great fluidity with blurred boundaries between fashion, craft, art and music. People defined their own styles by combining clothes from various periods; op-shop dressing was de rigueur, androgyny was in, and guys wouldn’t leave home without their eyeliner. Many fashion designers had originally trained as artists, and artists often worked as designers. This period saw the emergence of Martin Grant, Nick Cave and The Boys Next Door (The Birthday Party, The Bad Seeds), and the arrival of New-Wave music. At times clothing looked more like art than anything else.

Revolt into Style (video still). Courtesy SBS

Out of this very street-based culture the Fashion Design Council of Australia (FDC) was formed, an organisation dedicated to promoting and supporting new and innovative Australian fashion. Established in 1983 with a grant from the Victorian Ministry for the Arts, the FDC was co-founded by designers Robert Pearce and Robert Buckingham. In a recent SBS documentary, Revolt into Style, Pearce recalls that the FDC was formed out of a frustration; “I was just so sick of tracksuits… and two-tone polyester suits”. In the same documentary Buckingham summed up the organisation’s impetus: “to show those smug old bastards what can happen!”

Revolt into Style (video still). Courtesy SBS

For ten years the FDC’s annual fashion parades, held at St Kilda venues such as the now lost Earl’s Court, Seaview Ballroom and The Venue, were the alternative fashion industry events of the year. Young designers vied to be included with well-known fashion radicals such as Jenny Bannister and Kate Durham. FDC also produced the ground-breaking FASHION 84 HEROIC FASHION. This catwalk parade melded fashion, painting, sculpture and music. Spectacle, pastiche and voyeurism, it enveloped audiences in an experience that was part ‘happening’ and part exhibition.

In 1984 I was a 16 year old undertaking my Year 10 work experience with Kate Durham. I helped fill orders for her extraordinary jewellery made from an amalgam of non-precious materials that included (if I remember correctly) Pal Meaty Bites. I also worked as a ‘dresser’ backstage on the FASHION 84 parade. It was an exotic, chaotic, brightly coloured, smoke haze world filled with beautiful naked women, make up artists and enormous teased hairdos. Every now and again someone ‘famous’ would wander through. As I zippered people into shimmering dresses with exaggerated shoulder pads and lace up ankle boots, I remember thinking that Malcolm McLaren’s video clip Buffalo Gals had nothing on this.

Christopher Makos, Altered Image 6/35 1989. Courtesy the artist

In this context, ACCA’s 1985 exhibition Image Codes, curated by Robert Pearce of the Fashion Design Council, was entirely apposite. It sought to capture the mutability of the time and featured works by Polly Borland, Jon Cattapan, Sarah Curtis, Peter Ellis, Ashley Evans, Flamingo Terry, Maria Kozic, Phillip le Masurier, John Matthews, Shane McGowan, Kathy McKinnon, Robert Pearce, Rosslynd Piggott, Randelli (Robert Randall and Frank Bendinelli), Vivienne Shark LeWitt, Bruce Slorach, Robyn Stacey, Tra Fashion Video, Peter Tully, Ania Walwicz and Jenny Watson, amongst others.

Pearce’s brief to the participating artists was that the exhibition should “be as volatile and diverse as possible… a comment about Fashion, Fashions, Fashionability and the Concept of Fashion”. The exhibition was opened by Monash University lecturer, Memory Holloway, followed by ‘guest’ speaker, UK artist Duggie Fields who appeared via video. Fields’ blend of pop painting and fashion had recently featured in various works with contemporary cult figures such as Roxy Music and Zandra Rhodes. For Image Codes in Melbourne he presented a ‘special Duggie Fields art-scratching video’. Other international artists in the exhibition included Katsu Yoshida who exhibited charcoal drawings of rap dancers and Christopher Makos who exhibited five photographs of Andy Warhol in drag. All in all Image Codes captured Melbourne’s frenzied creative zeitgeist and championed FDC’s desire to keep fashion front and centre.

Bookending years working as an artist, curator and teacher, Julia Powles is currently interning on ACCA’s online archive project as part of ACCA’s First 30 Years Program.

<< back to 1985

Visual Tension, invitation, 1985 (detail). Courtesy ACCA Archive

By Ashley Crawford

Visual Tension was intended to be provocative. For better or worse, it was.

It was 1985 and it was the height of the tsunami of interest in all things theoretical, especially all things French theoretical. The magazines, most especially Art & Text, On The Beach, Frogger and Local Consumption were awash with references to Barthes, Deleuze, Guattari and Baudrillard. Especially Baudrillard. Even the more journalistic and ‘popular’ culture mag Tension fell under the sway of the French revolution[1].

In the midst of this, apart from editing Tension, I was making ends meet by working at ACCA. One of the first projects I was involved with was the Three Room project by Howard Arkley, David Larwill and Juan Davila. It was, presumably, a deliberately provocative act by John Buckley. Larwill was staunchly anti-theoretical, Davila the extreme opposite, Arkley fell somewhere in between. This intimate frisson one experienced witnessing the artists working ‘together’ inspired an idea, a magazine of artists-only imagery eschewing the theoretical discourse, clearly a deliberately confrontational act. For better or worse, the provocation worked all too well.

I discussed this notion with Buckley who inspired with typical enthusiasm. Not only would we do the magazine, but we would exhibit the works at ACCA to launch it. My own art-world experience was limited to the Art Projects network (Nixon, Watson, Tyndall, Tillers, John Mathews et al), Clifton Hill Music Centre (Maria Kozic), and mutual friends of Paul Taylor’s (Art & Text) such as Vivienne Shark LeWitt. Tension had also covered artists from City Gallery in St. Kilda such as Stieg Persson, from Tolarno Galleries in South Yarra such as Howard Arkley and Linda Marrinon, and from Reconnaissance Galleries in Fitzroy such as Marianne Baillieu and Paul Boston. There were also folk I had met in Sydney such as John Lethbridge, John Young and Richard Dunn.  Chaos is a polite term for this exercise, my first in curating and dealt with, from memory, on a ridiculously short deadline and utterly no budget.

To this already disparate mix John Buckley immediately added folk I had yet to meet such as Peter Booth and Gareth Sansom. To say the selection was unruly would be an understatement, and yet all of the artists responded with enthusiasm (or almost all – from memory Juan Davila was invited and dismissed the notion, politely, immediately, but would respond to the project savagely shortly thereafter). And that was before an enthusiastic Peter Cripps, already included in the initial lineup and then the director of the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane, suggested an immediate follow up – the same show but with the inclusion of Queensland artists at the IMA such artists as Robert MacPherson and Scott Redford.

Beyond the selection and exhibition mayhem much of the pressure fell to Tension’s designer, Terence Hogan. Amongst other things these were the days of crude scanning and reproduction techniques. We asked the artists to supply page-ready works, original works if possible. Some came through, some did not, leading to chaos as attempts were made to photograph irregular sizes (causing a terrible argument with Art Projects’ artist Greg Ades who delivered large canvases which remained beneath our home’s staircase for months and were never utilised, sadly). The other issue remained as to who should feature on the issue’s cover. The elder statesman Booth or the young turks Persson or Marrinon? After much travail Hogan came up with his own design and image, an ‘appropriated’ medical image of a man bandaged, blinded in one eye. It summed up the argument the edition was intended to address; was it about the visual and/or was it about the theoretical. Hogan also opted to utilize a die-cut on the cover, a ‘hole’ through which to view the image, which looked simply amazing and but  destined to tear on every other issue.

Visual Tension turned out to be a galvanizing moment, albeit short-lived with nothing like the impact and significance of Paul Taylor’s POPISM at the NGV – more a brick launched into that gallery’s moat. Over that period, while many of the artists had embraced a theoretical standpoint, many others were indifferent or even antagonistic to the preponderance of the ‘word.’ This was our curious curatorial stance.

‘Mainstream’ media coverage was positive; ‘Centre aims for wider audience,’ proclaimed The Age on February 28, 1985, quoting myself stating that the “aim was to give the space back to the artists,” (and also noting that the magazine received no funding). Critical response was lukewarm to downright murderous. Robert Rooney, who was also included in the show, reviewed it for The Age[2] and allowed a balanced discussion, accurately pointing out the mixed results of the printed version. He particularly noted the disappointing Peter Booth work, which as he pointed out, ended up a muddy mélange. The more archly conservative Rod Carmichael slammed the show in The Sun, dismissing Jenny Watson’s work as ‘scribble’ and incorrectly identifying the magazine as subsidised.

On The Beach, Visual Tension review, 1985. Courtesy ACCA Archive and State Library of Victoria

But it was in the pages of On The Beach [3] that the knives were drawn. Denise Robinson, Paul Foss and Juan Davila decimated both the show and the concept. This was, perhaps, of little surprise. The trio were amongst those actively promoting French theoretical works – the thought of art without words was, for them, anathema. Clearly the notion of provoking debate had worked, for better or worse. However while Foss and Robinson at least saw some merit in the concept, Davila went apoplectic.

Admittedly a hunk of the problem was the decidedly naive text that accompanied the publication, a rather embarrassing moment for which I shall share the blame with John Buckley.

Robinson: “Access is a proposition which is also offered to the artists: ‘Give the word a rest’ and ‘give the space back to the artists’. The critical space referred to is not defined, the offer ignores the fact that several artists within the exhibition have maintained theoretical methodology as integral to their work… as a strategy to assert its mobility and a determination to prevent being isolated from the power relations which affect its production. It is all the more surprising that artists such as Richard Dunn and Peter Tyndall have acquiesced here. The promotion of the word-object dichotomy suggests a limitation of the possibilities of questioning what language is and how it is generated/produced….”

But it was Davila who wielded the sharpest machete, blasting not only the concept, but the artists involved. He described the short text as “evidence of an early wearing in nerves and brain, an appeal to intellectual feebleness matched by the passivity of the artists. They share an editorial policy and an exhibition space that they do not control or want to discuss.” Davila’s bitterness here was uncalled for – the curators, Buckley and myself, proposed the context of the show/magazine in simple terms to the artists. The concept was discussed, in studios, in the gallery, in bars, but not in the high end discourse Davila craved (admittedly some artists cringed at the result.)

“Most of the works in Visual Tension do not refer to other works, or a context of cultural operation or a dialogue with other discourses,” Davila wrote. “They are blind, as the icon chosen for the cover illustrates. They are dumbstruck, renouncing any analytical stand; as the publication says, ‘give the word a rest’. Will they be also deaf to what is written?” In his own way Davila gave credibility to the project. His complaining was the perfect argument to our own. It was not so much that these artists were unaware, as Davila contended, but that they agreed to an alternative approach for a split second.
    
But Davila was determined to throw the baby out with the bath water: “Some of the artists – Stieg Persson, John Matthews, Gareth Sansom, Peter Cripps, Linda Marrinon, Peter Booth, Vivienne Shark LeWitt, John Young, Geoff Lowe, Howard Arkley, John Lethbridge, Marianne Baillieau and Paul Boston – all seem to have painted the same picture for this exhibition, one that is assimilable and indistinguishable from the commonplace of the worldwide kitsch picture consecrated by the international magazines. They share the notion of an imaginary that is private, beyond the problem of production of signs and social representation. In this instance, they appear to be denying themselves any critical value and reducing their own practice to an ornamental one.”

One had to question Davila’s eyesight here. Suggesting that every artists’ image came down to having “painted the same picture” when one had the stringent graphics of Arkley cheek-by-jowl with the gestural approach of Booth, or the poetical graphics of LeWitt next to the expressionistic essence of Baillieau, suggests a degree of critical blindness. To be sure, I got his point; art had to be about discourse. But that was our point: It didn’t always have to be about social representation or language.

It will annoy Juan to know that I was delighted by his review. He had taken the bait whole-heartedly and drawn the line in a far more articulate way than I could ever have hoped. But also in fairness to our critics, Visual Tension was a deeply flawed project, naïve in the extreme and clumsy in both its stated approach and its overall execution. A number of the artists were unhappy about the result for various reasons.  But it certainly inspired conversation and debate. What more could one ask?

At the time of Visual Tension Ashley Crawford was publisher and editor-in-chief of Tension magazine (1983-90) and worked briefly at ACCA (1985-86). He is currently a freelance cultural critic based in Melbourne and is undertaking his PhD at the University of Melbourne.

[1] As Alan Cholodenko has identified, Baudrillard’s work in Australia appeared in Local Consumption (edited by Peter Botsman), On the Beach (published by the On The Beach Collective of Ross Gibson, Lindy Lee, Sam Mele, Mark Thirkell and Mark Titmarsh, who became its editors), Tension (edited by Ashley Crawford), Art & Text (edited by Paul Taylor), and Frogger (edited by Rex Butler and David Messer). In August 1982, Local Consumption 2/3 published Baudrillard’s “Oublier Foucault”; On the Beach, no. 1, Autumn 1983, published his “Hostage and Terror – The Impossible Exchange”; On the Beach, no. 2, Winter 1983, had an interview with Baudrillard entitled “Mannerism in an Unmannered World”; Tension 2, September/October 1983, published his “Is Pop an Art of Consumption?”; Art & Text 11 published “The Precession of Simulacra” in the Spring of 1983; On the Beach, no. 5, Winter 1984 published a second interview with Baudrillard, one conducted by Salvatore (Sam) Mele and Mark Titmarsh called “Game with Vestiges”; Tension 4, July/August 1984 had an interview that Sylvere Lotringer conducted with him called “Jean Baudrillard: Dropping Out of History”; and On the Beach, no. 6, Spring 1984, published Baudrillard’s “On Nihilism”. Tension #5 featured a grand essay on Baudrillard’s keynote speech at Futur*Fall on the cover of the magazine with a specifically chosen typographical approach to highlight Adrian Martin’s abrasive and challenging essay on the subject (designed by Terence Hogan).
[2] Robert Rooney, Bewilderment in Suburbia, The Weekend Australian, 23/3/1985[3] On The Beach, #7/8, Summer/Autumn, 1985

Keith Haring, Collingwood, 1984. Courtesy Polly Borland

A rising star in the international art world, American artist Keith Haring visited Australia in 1984 on the invitation of John Buckley, the inaugural director of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.

Already a celebrated artist of the 1980s’ New York art scene, Haring created a number of temporary works during his three-week stay, including a mural on the National Gallery of Victoria’s iconic water-wall and a wall work in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ foyer. He spent time with many local artists and designers, and created a number of responsive works including small graffiti pieces along the Yarra River and a body artwork for the Melbourne Fashion Festival. Haring also created paintings that were later exhibited at ACCA.

Of all the works made by Haring while in Australia, the only one intended to be permanently sited in a public space was the outdoor mural painted at the Collingwood Technical College in inner city Melbourne. He painted this mural in one day in front of an audience of students and local residents. Captured with typical bold and energetic colour and line, its pictorial content includes a giant worm with a computer monitor for a brain positioned above a cast of dancing figures. Recently conserved with the support of Arts Victoria, this work is the last remaining large-scale artwork and publicly accessible record of Haring’s time in Melbourne.

Haring’s busy Australian program was coordinated by Buckley who initiated each project and introduced Keith to local artists, writers, academics and curators. Buckley’s intent was to demonstrate ACCA’s ambition to introduce and connect exciting international art and artists to the city. Haring’s visit is warmly remembered by many who met him and saw him work here.

ACCA’s current artistic director, Juliana Engberg recalls: “I met Haring at a couple of functions, most notably a rooftop party at Paul Taylor’s home. It was a great night, humid, sweaty and full of fun. Haring was a charming and sincere guy, a gentle sort of man and unassuming. He told me about a range of art activities he had undertaken during his time here. He was particularly pleased about the major mural he had completed in Collingwood.”

Melbourne street artist turned jeweler, Marcos Davidson, remembers: “He was a driven individual, vivaciously connected with drawing and getting as many drawings up as possible…They were fantastic and inspirational works to see going up.”

In 2012, twenty-eight years after Keith Haring’s visit to Australia, ACCA, in partnership with the City of Yarra, published Caterpillars & Computers: Keith Haring in Australia, a printed publication that gathers together the many threads of Haring’s stay in Australia. It brings Haring’s time in Australia vividly to life through anecdotes and art historical observations, including a detailed overview of Haring’s activities in Melbourne by Ted Gott and Lisa Sullivan with particular reference to the outdoor mural in Collingwood; Jane Rankin-Reid’s positioning of Haring’s artistic practice within an international context, drawing on her own experience of living in New York’s East Village in the 1980s; Lachlan MacDowall’s discussion of Haring’s outdoor works within Melbourne’s own tradition of street art; and a range of reflections from Melbournians about their encounters with Haring during his Melbourne stay. The book also contains previously unpublished photos of Haring and his works.

The Melbourne Keith Haring Mural website was realized as a free online resource and contains interviews with the Keith Haring Foundation, John Buckley and various arts professionals living and working in and around the Collingwood area. These ‘vox pops’ make clear the influence and impact that Keith Haring’s visit had on Melbourne’s artistic community. The website also contains bibliographical information and an image and media archive of documents related to Haring’s time in Australia.

http://www.melbourneharingmural.com.au
<< back to 1984

ACCA's first location at the gardners cottage on Dallas Brooks Drive, The Domain. Courtesy ACCA Archive

The early 1980s was a significant and exciting time for the contemporary arts in Australia. Several years after the establishment of the Australia Council, a number of public organisations were set up to house, facilitate and present contemporary art for the first time. In 1982 the newly appointed Cain Government set about revitalising the arts in Victoria. One of its priorities was to establish a dedicated contemporary art space that would accommodate the increasingly ambitious and experimental nature of contemporary practice.

Through the determined advocacy of a small group of local art supporters, the Ministry for the Arts, under the leadership of Arts Minister, Race Mathews, appointed Jill Graham to the task of finding a suitable building. This group of supporters was soon formalised into the Centre for Contemporary Art Steering Committee, which included Betty Churcher (Chair), Bill Kelly (artist), Tom Quirk (businessman), Bill Lasica (lawyer) and artists, John Davis and Leslie Dumbrell, amongst others.

Formed to navigate the establishment of a contemporary art centre, the committee quickly began formulating an early vision statement for the CCA. Looking to the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford as a model, it was decided that the CCA would not be a collecting institution but rather a venue for the presentation and interpretation of contemporary art.

That same year it was recommended that a nineteenth century gardener’s cottage situated on Dallas Brooks Drive in the King’s Domain, opposite the Royal Botanic Gardens, be developed for use as the Centre for Contemporary Art. Bill Kelly, ex-Dean of the Victorian College of the Arts, recalls visiting the empty Dallas Brooks Drive building with fellow committee member, John Davis. While both recognised its potential, he recalls that “it felt a long way from the city”.

Development of the site became problematic when it was established that the land was reserved for public parks and gardens. While site negotiations continued the CCA Steering Committee proceeded to search for a director. In October 1982 Betty Churcher approached John Buckley, who had just returned from overseas, and his appointment as inaugural director was confirmed in April 1983.

Melbourne architect Daryl Jackson was also engaged to devise the redevelopment of the Dallas Brooks Drive site for the CCA. His three-stage plan included internal and external modification of the existing building to better link it with the gardens, and a significant addition to the existing building to provide more exhibitions space.

While the Steering Committed continued their work, the Market and Parkland Act was amended by the State Parliament and in June 1983 an excision on the Dallas Brooks Drive property was granted. Shortly afterwards, on the 15 November 1983, the Centre became incorporated under the new name, The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA). The vision became a reality.

Dallas Brooks Drive before renovations, 1983. Courtesy ACCA Archive

10 August, CCA Position Paper
September, letter from B Churcher to Minister for the Arts
1 October, Ministry for the Arts Memorandum
undated, CCA copy for Welcome Victoria article

Friends Fundraising Dinner, invitation, 1988. Courtesy ACCA Archive

27 August, Friends Fundraising Dinner invite
29 March, Friends of ACCA fundraising letter

Solo Concerts by Six Australian Composers, program, 1988. Courtesy ACCA Archive

PERFORMANCE: Solo Concerts by Six Australian Composers
Performers: Ernie Althoff, Ros Bandt, Warren Burt, Syd Clayton, Elwyn Dennis, Herbert Jercher, Rainer Linz
DATE: 4 -7 February 1988

Publication
Solo Concerts by Six Australian Composers program

PERFORMANCE: MIMA Video Performance
DATE: 23 – 27 November 1988

< back to 1988

Dallas Brooks Drive before renovations, 1983. Courtesy ACCA Archive

8 October 1982, Ministry for the Arts press release, New Contemporary Art Gallery for Melbourne
23 October 1982, The Weekend Australian, Avant Garde's emoh ruo

3 February 1983, The Herald Sun, Council snag on plan for art house
26 September 1983, Ministry for the Arts press release, Founding Director for new art centre announced
October 1983, Art News announcement
 

May 1989, Art Monthly, appointment of Grazia Gunn. Courtesy ACCA Archive

In the Press
January, The Age, The director of Contemporary Art resigns
January, Ashley Crawford, Richard Perram resignation
February, ACCA Newsletter
14 April, The Herald, New Director of ACCA notice
20 April, The Age, Appointment of Grazia Gunn
May, Art Monthly, Appointment of Grazia Gunn
Spring, ACCA newsletter
5 November, The Age, Arts group on the offensive

Chris Mann: The Birth of Peace, invitation 1989. Courtesy ACCA archive

PERFORMANCE: Chris Mann: The Birth of Peace
A verse ballet by Rene Descartes, music by Frederich Nietzche with Ludwig Wittgenstein, clarinet and Claude Levi-Strauss violin, with additional text from ‘Doktor Faust – A Dance poem’ by Heinrich Heine. Conducted by Willy the Goldfish.
DATE: Sunday 23 July 1989  

Loti Smorgon gallery opening

ACCA building extension, 1987. Courtesy ACCA Archive

Loti Smorgon Gallery Opening, 1987. Courtesy ACCA Archive

Loti Smorgon Gallery opening
Loti Smorgon Gallery opening invitation
undated, ACCA press release, Opening of Loti Smorgon Gallery and 1987 exhibition program
undated, Ministry for the Arts press release, Loti Smorgon Gallery
Photograph of Loti Smorgon Gallery exterior
Photograph of ACCA Director Richard Perram outside new Loti Smorgon Gallery

In the Press
26 April, Sunday Telegraph, Power artists take a bow
undated, The Age, Terry Smith, Yarra strikes back
3 February, The Age, Clever extension to charming building

Other Material
1987 Exhibition Program
ACCA autumn newsletter
ACCA winter newsletter
ACCA building extension

Loti Smorgon Gallery Opening, 1987. Courtesy ACCA Archive

Loti Smorgon Gallery Opening, 1987. Courtesy ACCA Archive