...continued
Blair French
ACKNOWLEDGMENT'S
This text is based upon a paper presented at
Symposium 2000: An International Conference
on Post-Object Art in New Zealand, Centra Hotel,
Christchurch, 12 November 2000. Sections of
this paper dealing with the work of Jim Allen
were first published in the essay Jim Allen:
From Elam to the EAF, in Jennifer Hay and Felicity
Milburn (eds), Interventions: Post Object
and Performance Art in New Zealand in 1970 and
Beyond (Christchurch: Robert McDougall Art
Gallery and Annex, 2000).
Research towards this text and the conference
paper on which it is based was undertaken under
the auspices of an Australian Research Council
Large Grant to Professor Terry Smith at the
Power Institute, Foundation for Art and Visual
Culture, University of Sydney, to study the
history of conceptualism in Australia, New Zealand,
the USA, and Europe.
AUTHOR
Blair French studied Art History and English
at the University of Canterbury during the 1980s
and is a writer and curator presently based
in Sydney. He is editor of Photo Files: An
Australian Photography Reader (Sydney: Power
Publications and Australian Centre for Photography,
1999) and has written extensively on contemporary
Australian and New Zealand art. Having previously
worked in public galleries and contemporary
art spaces in Australia, New Zealand and the
United Kingdom he is presently writing a book
for Piper Press, Sydney on the work of twelve
contemporary Australian photo-artists as well
as a doctoral thesis at the University of Sydney
entitled Picture This: The Photographic Image
as Contemporary Art.
[1]
NOTE TO EDITORS NEED TO REFERENCE TITLE OF CURNOWS
PUBLISHED TEXT HERE AND PAGE NUMBERS OF ITS
PRINTING IN THIS PUBLICATION.
[2]
Interview with Robert Leonard, Pander
6/7 (1999) 38.
[4] See for example: Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson
(eds), Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology
(Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press,
1999); Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art (London:
Phaidon, 1998); Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer
(eds), Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965-1975
(exh. cat.) (Los Angeles and Cambridge, Mass.:
Museum of Contemporary Art and The MIT Press,
1995); Philomena Mariani (ed.), Global Conceptualism:
Points of Origin 1950s1980s (exh. Cat) (New
York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999); and Anne
Rorimer, New Art in the 60s and 70s: Redefining
Reality (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001).
[5]
See for example: Arthur C. Danto, After
the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale
of History (The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the
Fine Arts 1995, The National Gallery of Art,
Washington D.C., Bollingen Series xv.44)
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997),
and Appoaching the End of Art, in The State
of the Art (New York: Prentice Hall, 1987)
202-18; Hans Belting, The End of the History
of Art?, Christopher Wood (trans.) (Chicago
and London: Chicago University Press, 1987);
Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde,
Michael Shaw (trans.), Jochen Schulte-Sasse
(fwd.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984); and Hal Foster, The Return
of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of
the Century (Cambridge Mass. and London:
October, The MIT Press, 1996).
[6]
Even in terms as simple as having raised the
stakes or expectations of a critical art practice
and having encouraged a sense of tacticality
(which I would like to think of in terms of
socially interventionist strategy) within New
Zealand art, both of which were insightful observations
made from the floor by Rob Garrett during Symposium
2000.
[7]
NOTE TO EDITORSNEED TO REFERENCE TITLE OF BARTONS
REVISED PUBLISHED TEXT WHETHER THIS IS IN THIS
JOURNAL OR IN ACTION REPLAY PUBLICATION.
[8]
Which of course by no means implies a displacement
of the central subjectthe specific practices
of specific artistswithout which these broader
issues could barely be raised, let alone be
seen to gain any real purchase upon the conditions
of lived experience.
[9]
I had in mind here particularly a three phase
model of the development of key investigative
drives within conceptual art being developed
by Professor Terry Smith at the University of
Sydney.
[10]
See Terry Smith, Peripheries in Motion: Conceptualism
and Conceptual Art in Australia and New Zealand,
in Mariani (ed.), Global Conceptualism,
89.
[11]
In addition to Christina Bartons essay in
this publication see for example: Tony Godfrey,
Looking at Others: Artists Using Photography,
in Conceptual Art, 301-42; Charles
Green, Avoiding art, desperately seeking photography:
Revising the history of photography by post-object
art, in Ewen McDonald with Judy Annear (eds),
What is this thing called photography?
(Sydney: Pluto Press in association with the
Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Trans/forming
Cultures Research Group, University of Technology,
Sydney, 2000) 17-35; John Roberts (ed.), The
Impossible Document: Photography and Conceptual
Art in Britain 1966-1976 (London: Camerawork,
1997); Anne Rorimer, Photography: Restructuring
the Pictorial, in New Art in the 60s and
70s, 113-53; and Jeff Wall, Marks
of Indifference: Aspects of Photography in,
or as, Conceptual Art, in Goldstein and Rorimer
(eds), Reconsidering the Object of Art,
247-67.
[12]
Blair French, Jim Allen: From Elam to the EAF,
in Jennifer Hay and Felicity Milburn (eds),
Interventions: Post Object and Performance
Art in New Zealand in 1970 and Beyond (exh.
cat.) (Christchurch: Robert McDougall Art Gallery
& Annex, 2000) 35-46.
[13]
In Smiths terms the first moves of conceptualism
involved the production of conceptual objects
that threw perception into doubt. See Smith,
Peripheries in Motion, 88.
[15]
And theres clearly an easy metonymy we could
enact between the terms post object and photography
here.
[16]
Here I am drawing upon and to a degree supplementing
what Terry Smith has identified as the core
minimal-conceptual nexus sitting as the basis
of the development of contemporary practice
in Australia. See Terry Smith, Generation
X: The Impacts of the 1980s, in Rex Butler
(ed.), What is Appropriation? An Anthology
of Critical Writings on Australian Art in
the 80s and 90s (Sydney and Brisbane:
Power Publications and Institute of Modern
Art, 1996) 249-259.
[17]
Jeff Wall, Introduction: Partially Reflective
Mirror Writing, in Dan Graham, Two-Way
Mirror Power: Selected Writings by Dan Graham
on His Art, Alexander Alberro (ed.) (Cambridge
Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 1999) xii.
[19]
Wystan Curnow, Project Programme 1975, Nos 1-6,
ACAG Quarterly 62-63 (1976) 23.
[20]
Jim Allen, transcript of gallery discussion,
in O-AR: Jim AllenRecent Work (Auckland:
1975) n.p.
[21]
Felicity Milburn, Road to Nowhere, in Peter
Robinson: Point of Infinite Destiny (exh.
cat.) (Christchurch: Robert McDougall Art Annex,
1999) n.p.
[23]
See French, Jim Allen: From Elam to the EAF,
38-9.
[24]
See Christina Barton, Post-Object Art in New
Zealand 19691979: Experiments in Art and Life,
unpublished MA thesis (University of Auckland,
1987) 169.
[25]
See French, Jim Allen: From Elam to the EAF,
40.
[26]
Jim Allen and Wystan Curnow (eds), New
Art: Some recent New Zealand sculpture and
post-object art (Auckland: Heinemann Educational,
1976).
[27]
See for example Wystan Curnow, Peter Roche and
Linda Buis: Liaison, Art Network 2 (1980),
23-4.
[28]
Peter Roche, for example, wrote a number of
unpublished essays on his own performance works
around 1979 and 1980 which can be found in the
Open Drawer post-object art files at the Elam
School of Fine Art Library at University of
Auckland.
[29]
See French, Jim Allen: From Elam to the EAF,
36.
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