Recent, Current and Upcoming

Melbourne >< Brisbane: punk, art and after - Pestorius Sweeney House
Queensland Art 2009 - Pestorius Sweeney House
Ralph Balson - The Black Paintings, 1960-63 - Pestorius Sweeney House
David Pestorius - Reconsidering Recession Art and Other Strategies - Other Locations
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John Nixon, Portrait of Grant McLennan, Brisbane, 1981

Melbourne >< Brisbane: punk, art and after
23 February — 16 May 2010
Pestorius Sweeney House
39 Eblin Drive, Hamilton, Brisbane


An explosive interaction between art and punk music in the mid-1970s, which drove a charged decade of creative activity between Melbourne and Brisbane, will be explored in a major new exhibition opening at the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne in February 2010.

Melbourne >< Brisbane: punk, art and after will trace the extraordinary interaction of the alternative music and art scenes between Melbourne and Brisbane during the punk and post-punk years, 1975–85. The exhibition reveals the entwined artistic and musical histories of the two cities through music, film, ephemeral publications, photographs and paintings by artists including Howard Arkley, Tony Clark, Brett Colquhoun, Peter Cripps, John Nixon, Peter Tyndall and Jenny Watson, and bands such as The Saints, The Go-Betweens, Nick Cave, The Birthday Party, Ed Kuepper, and the Laughing Clowns.

Guest curator David Pestorius, a Brisbane-based arts activist, says Melbourne >< Brisbane explores the development of artists’ practice as a social and strategic experience.

“The exhibition highlights a period when the repressive political regime at the time in Queensland drove the Brisbane avant-guard to a muscially hungry Melbourne scene, with results that were often creatively explosive. And Melbourne artists happily took up the challenge to confront the prevailing Brisbane sensitivities.

“Crossing boundaries between art and music, gallery and gig, the exhibition reveals important strategies in the formation of a postmodern avant-garde, joining clusters of artists united by location, friendship, shared experience and interests.

“In Australia, punk music offered artists new strategies for collaboration (with artists forming as ‘bands’), new models for presentation (promoting and staging exhibitions as ‘gigs’), new channels of communication (the cassette, the record, the ‘zine). Above all, punk musicians established new definitions of independent practice. The do-it-yourself mentality that drove punk music was transferred to the art scene, propelling the independent art spaces and magazines that were the foundation of vanguard practices in the 1980s.

Director of the Potter Museum, Dr Chris McAuliffe, says Melbourne >< Brisbane is an opportunity to declare the historical significance of art and punk music in Australia in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

“The exhibition will connect audiences with contemporary art through issues and ideas strongly connected with everyday life and popular music.

“We retrace a time when Australian punk music led the genre (pre-Sex Pistols) and the creative vibe between Melbourne and Brisbane echoed the Paris/Moscow artistic frisson celebrated in the famous Beaubourg exhibition in Paris in 1979”, Dr McAuliffe said.

Melbourne >< Brisbane traverses painting, photography, installation, video, film, music and writing. It features rarely seen archival and documentary material, including extensive private archives of audio tapes documenting performances by artists' bands; Howard Arkley's personal photographs of his Melbourne 'Art tram' and Brisbane 'Muzak Mural' projects; Tony Clark's early DIY operas under the Anti-Music banner; and Brett Colquhoun's personal dialogue with the late Grant McLennan.

Melbourne >< Brisbane also looks at a number of artist-driven projects that have called attention to this history, not only through its critical re-telling, but also via collaborations which demonstrate that the associations forged during the historical period continue to resonate strongly into the present. Beginning with an important series of exhibitions organised by Peter Cripps at Brisbane's IMA in 1985-86, Melbourne >< Brisbane will also highlight more recent art/music projects involving Tony Clark, Robert Forster, and Ed Kuepper.

As part of the exhibition, American artist Dan Graham (the subject of a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2009) will present a public screening of his film, Rock My Religion, an exploration of threads linking non-conformist religion, counterculture and punk rock.

The exhibition will be officially opened by Robert Forster on 10 March.



Jenny Watson, Cover for The Go-Betweens' Send Me A Lullaby album (1982)

Queensland Art 2009
5 December–20 February, 2010
Pestorius Sweeney House
39 Eblin Drive, Hamilton, Brisbane


Fifty years ago, at the behest of the Queensland Art Gallery, Vida Lahey wrote Art in Queensland 1859–1959 (The Jacaranda Press, 1959). As much an activist for art as an artist, Lahey produced a history that was both groundbreaking and inclusive. She began by acknowledging the art of the Indigenous people, and then identified the London-born but Sydney-based painter Conrad Martens as our first non-Indigenous artist. Martens, born and living elsewhere, nonetheless, made an important contribution to art in Queensland. Lahey then proceeded to outline three categories of Queensland artists: firstly, those who have “made their names in the larger art centres and have produced practically none of their work in this State”; secondly, those who have “kept in touch through their work being exhibited here"; and, finally, those who have “produced all their work in Queensland”.

In advance, Vida Lahey contested an approach that would soon dominate the writing of art history in Australia. At the same time as Lahey's book was published in Brisbane, Bernard Smith in Melbourne launched his Antipodean Manifesto. Three years later he published his own history, Australian Painting 1788–1962, and together in these documents Smith enshrined a generation of mostly Melbourne men. In Smith’s masculinist account, Australian art was made by Australians in Australia. In taking this view he turned a blind eye to the work of our expatriate artists, immigrant artists and women artists. This unhappy bias, which excludes much that could assist us in understanding the experience of our artists in the twentieth century, continues today. Not just in the official histories, but also in the nationalism of our survey exhibitions, a construct that still preoccupies many of our State galleries. In a twist, Melbourne parochialism regularly mislabels local surveys as 'National'.

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Art in Queensland 1859–1959, QUEENSLAND ART 2009 takes up Lahey's text and attempts to rethink art in Queensland since 1959. Of course, artists have always lived, studied and worked in Queensland. But equally, they have always left Queensland and worked elsewhere and, as a kind of counter force, they have always come to Queensland to live and to work. QUEENSLAND ART 2009 is structured using these frames, a way of looking at ourselves handed down to us by Lahey, and thus this exhibition is divided into three parts: Art in Queensland, Art from Queensland, and Art of Queensland.

Finally, despite the inclusion of work by a large number of artists, QUEENSLAND ART 2009 makes no claim to being comprehensive. It is clearly subjective, even personal, in its approach and is therefore, contra Lahey, exclusive. But then, as we know, Brisbane-centrism can generate numerous stories of art in Queensland, and exclusivity is in the nature of every exhibition, even those whose view is wide. And while QUEENSLAND ART 2009 is indebted to Lahey, it also wants to acknowledge the Malcolm Enright and Nancy Underhill curated exhibition Queensland works. (UQ Art Museum, 1985), its predecessor in the memorialisation of Art in Queensland 1859–1959. Unlike that undertaking, however, QUEENSLAND ART 2009 is not so much concerned to update Lahey, but to recover the polemic found there. It is what we might think of as Lahey's way of thinking ourselves.

Opens 3pm Saturday 5 December with a reading by Sam Watson; Catherine Chevalier on Dave Hullfish Bailey's CityCat Project; Luke Roberts' Transformer and Nazissus introduced by Michele Helmrich; OtherFilm present Brisbane Punk Super 8 (J. Hurst, John Nixon, Gary Warner); Mark Titmarsh presents Super 8 Uber Queensland; a screening of Burchill/McCamley's Bathgirls '84; Everett True, The Deadnotes, Blank Realm, Muura; Electrical Storm performance by Ed Kuepper; and more.



Ralph Balson - The Black Paintings, 1960-63
12 September - 31 October, 2009
Pestorius Sweeney House
39 Eblin Drive, Hamilton, Brisbane


Ralph Balson was 70 years old and living in Europe when he commenced the works Daniel Thomas would later call the Black Paintings. Perhaps the least understood Balson series, they were painted between 1960 and 1963, and can appear at odds with his work up to that time. As opposed to his better-known, slowly built up and brightly coloured compositions, Balson’s Black Paintings are poured, trailed and dripped with liquid pigments; they embrace chance effects, but they also reveal highly idiosyncratic brushwork, all within a limited colour range.

In restricting himself to black and white, Balson was pursuing a particular tradition in abstract painting, one closely associated in America with the work of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, and in Europe with the work of Hans Hartung and Pierre Soulages, the latter two part of French Painting Today, which had toured Australia in 1953. Balson pioneered this ‘existential’ palette in Australia although he was soon joined by, for example, Tony Tuckson, Peter Upward and later Robert MacPherson. Of course, unknown to Balson, Stacha Halpern had also been pursuing a monochromatic black and white painting in Paris in the late 1950s.

It is hard to understand why Balson’s Black Paintings should be so little known. Certainly they are an identifiable sub-group of the artist’s so-called Matter Paintings, a phase of the artist’s late career that has tended to be regarded as a “bi-way” in his art. This was, for instance, initially the view of Daniel Thomas in his seminal introduction to, and overview of Balson’s work, published in Art & Australia in 1965, and, more or less, it is still the institutional view of Balson today. It is a disposition, however, which not only turns a shoulder to the works pioneering status within the extended field of painting in Australia, but it ignores even Thomas’s substantially revised opinion of the Black Paintings. As long ago as 1969 he declared them to be “the grandest, most museum-worthy, most aristocratic pictures ever made in Australia” and the 40th anniversary of this noble and remarkable correction has provided the spark for this exhibition.

The Sydney artist A.D.S. Donaldson has contributed exhibition design to the show, which focuses on two moments: the Black Paintings initial revelation at the Galerie Raymond Creuze in Paris in late 1960, and the reappearance of the brush in Balson’s painting in 1963, not long before the artist’s death.

This exhibition is being held in co-operation with the Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne.




David Pestorius
Reconsidering Recession Art and Other Strategies
Monday 24 August, 2009
The Bureau of Ideas, Perth


In May 1985 the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane presented Recession Art & Other Strategies. Curated by Peter Cripps, this important exhibition surveyed works made under the pressure of little money and an insignificant market, as well as a range of unconventional methods of display and presentation. If the exceptional prosperity of the last decade caused an art boom, it also produced a space of art defined by institutional orthodoxy. Now that the 'good times' are over, it is perhaps timely that we return to Cripps' exhibition and look there for some clues to the way ahead.

http://www.thebureauofideas.com/





Dave Hullfish Bailey
City Cat Project
2009


Los Angeles artist Dave Hullfish Bailey will return to Brisbane soon to continue work on his CityCat Project with Aboriginal leader, playwright and activist Sam Watson.

Bailey has said “if there's a one-liner about what my [site-based projects] attempt, it has to do with replacing an iconographic vision of place with an inhabited, on-the-ground geography". The artist’s CityCat Project enables us to think this ambition, and the complex space of art it proposes: an unfolding ecology of relations between producers and audiences, histories and locations, aesthetic decisions and political effects.

Commenced in 2003 with a brief to develop a public project for The University of Queensland Art Museum, Bailey's response led him to invite Watson to site, choreograph and theatricalise unannounced interruptions to the routine routing of Brisbane’s popular CityCat ferries, which since the late 1990s have played a key role in the redevelopment of the Brisbane River as a civic and touristic amenity. Watson's elaboration of Bailey's proposal not only involved the momentary translation of passing 'scenery' into lived 'place', but constituted a silent yet powerful assertion of Aboriginal culture and history, land-rights and self-determination. So much so, that at a public forum on 3 December 2006, Watson declared the event to be a Dreaming story that local Aboriginal people would tell, re-tell and, hopefully, re-stage into the future. This remarkable development, which is believed to be unprecedented in the history of contemporary art in Australia, further underscores the elasticity of traditional Aboriginal culture and the preparedness of elders to evolve it in dialogue with western aesthetic sensibilities.

While the river performance is at its core, the CityCat Project has activated and continues to activate multiple forms, contexts, producers and audiences, and includes drawings, photographic works, field recordings, exhibitions, architectural interventions, public discussions, printed works and publications. It is this multiplicity of sites and radically collaborative yet authorially fractured process, which substantially functions outside the branded space of art and in dialogue with traditional Aboriginal culture, that marks the CityCat Project as emblematic of advanced art today: an art that reorganises its own relationship to its audience and to its authors.

On Saturday 9 May between 10am–4pm Watson will further elaborate the river performance for the first time since declaring it a Dreaming story. Proceedings will involve CityCat ferries travelling upstream between:—

(a) the West End stop and the The University of Queensland terminal; and

(b) stops at Hawthorne and New Farm Park (10am–12noon only).

In addition, an exhibition by Bailey will open at the Pestorius Sweeney House (Cnr Crescent Road/Eblin Drive, Hamilton; CityCat stop: Bretts Wharf). The exhibition, which will continue until 11 July, will comprise drawings and photo-based works, including a multi-part photo piece first shown as part of the artist's critically acclaimed installation at the Lyon Biennial in 2007.

On Sunday 10 May between 3–5pm Bailey and Watson will reflect upon the procedures and implications of the CityCat Project in a joint presentation in Auditorium 1, State Library of Queensland, Cultural Centre, Stanley Place, South Bank, Brisbane.

Since 2006 Dave Hullfish Bailey has undertaken major projects for the Secession (Vienna), Centre d'Art Santa Monica (Barcelona), and CASCO Office for Art, Design and Theory (Utrecht). In 2007 a selection of Bailey's projects, including his CityCat Project, was presented at the Lyon Biennial, while in 2009 CASCO and the Sternberg Press (Berlin) will publish the artist’s book What’s Left, with contextual essays by Jan Tumlir, Lars Bang Larson and Emily Pethick.

The City Cat Project has been realised with the generous assistance and support of Brisbane City Council, TransdevTSL Brisbane Ferries, The University of Queensland Art Museum, State Library of Queensland, Queensland University of Technology, The Printing Office, Multimedia Art Asia Pacific, and Donovan Hill.



Dave Hullfish Bailey + David Pestorius
"Dada in the Post-Colonial Field"
Friday 17 April, 2009
Spaces of Art Conference
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney


This paper will reflect upon the procedures and implications of Bailey’s CityCat Project with particular emphasis on its critical 'updating' of Dadaist tendencies: its proliferation and confusion of spaces, information and agency (including institutional frameworks and the branded spaces of art), and its radically collaborative yet authorially fragmented process, which assumes its participants may not share common knowledges, aesthetic languages, nor political aims. It will also consider what may be the project’s most significant, and most surprising, outcome: its important status for local Aboriginal people and Watson’s public declaration that it will be re-told and re-enacted into the future, much like the ancient Dreaming stories that it alludes to.

Spaces of Art is presented by Artspace Visual Arts Centre in association with the Art Gallery of NSW and Art Association of Australia and New Zealand, and supported by the Australia Council for the Arts.