Australia’s Gallery World (Part II)

Art became a more serious enterprise in the late 1980s, when larger and larger amounts of money began to change hands. Newly established private galleries were sometimes exploratory excursions by the very well-heeled—or the strategy of a group of investors who expected returns. The art students flooding the art schools (now annexed to the universities) were encouraged to comport themselves like small businesses, and with the art schools under the wing of the universities, grim professionalism and naked careerism replaced the paint-spattered bohemian, the cheerful layabout, and the uncomplicated notion of supporting one’s less accessible work through “commercial art”—the prerogative of so many who studied from the 1930s to the 1960s. The machinations of the boardroom—“human resources” and financial planning—had replaced the exhilarating days when your art teacher could amble through the forest of creaking easels, throw some lacerating remarks laced with jokes around the assembled group, and retreat for an hour or two for a cigarette and coffee.

And the ambience of the 1970s would be unrecognisable today. It was a time when a serious collector might write a cheque for a fog sculpture. It was also the decade when the arts bureaucracies swung into action—here a grant, there a grant—which meant artists could create works that melted or evaporated and still afford to have a bottle of wine with dinner. There was also the bonus of snubbing the bourgeois spender with the bulging wallet: the idea of getting a rise out of the ordinary philistine was put hilariously by Howard Jacobson, who translated épater le bourgeoisie thus: “flabbergasting the tradesperson”.

This was the time art began to detach itself from the wall and the plinth, and to define itself by its apparent unsaleability. Suddenly there were happenings, installations and performance art, whose viability was magically sustained by extravagant government funding. Painting seemed to be on the ropes.

How did this come about? In 1962, the Sydney-based artists Colin Lanceley, Ross Crothall and Mike Brown locked themselves inside Melbourne’s Museum of Modern Art for the night, turned up the rock-and-roll music and did some unexpected things with chicken wire, house paint, floorboards and thrift shop offerings. There was no manifesto, no long-winded theorising, but plenty of high spirits. They called themselves the Annandale Imitation Realists, and in an informal and anarchic way their exhibition presaged the cooler and more calibrated offerings that would appear officially in America over the next few years as Pop Art.

Lanceley, Crothall and Brown constructed their art works from their immediate urban surroundings. The accumulated detritus reflected what it meant to live in an urban culture replete with manufactured objects that were briefly used and readily discarded. There were no messages about the evils of consumerism or the waste of resources, merely a sense that a kind of visual poetry could be wrested from the most unlikely materials. It was a short-lived adventure and ultimately the artists would go their separate ways. Lanceley—then and now—would find himself among the more collectable artists; Crothall disappeared from the local scene; Brown would rail against the “system” to the end. The actual works in the show pointed towards future decades where an artist’s skills in fashioning his raw materials would become an irrelevancy.

In the 1960s paint had been the art world’s most prominent medium. Nation’s art critic George R. Lansell drew the art world’s attention to “Sydney’s new men”—all painters—Gallery A. New Generation Sydney showcased among others: Martin Collocott, John Firth-Smith, Michael Johnson, Rollin Schlicht, Tony McGillick, Peter Powditch and Dick Watkins. But where, he wondered, were Gary Shead, David Aspden and Mike Brown? Several had held their first solo shows, and some had recently travelled abroad, which Lansell pointed out may have been a hindrance rather than a help. “An over-reliance on overseas achievements,” he called it, and remembered the days when a happier influence had made itself felt.

Some had been “graduates” of “The Rocks”, an informal art school—more talking than painting—with John Olsen as its headmaster and Robert Klippel as his aide, which operated in 1963 and 1964. It was not, Lansell remarked, a school in a conventional sense: “Rather, it was a matter of persuading the younger artists to take their art seriously and very determinedly, which they have done.” He lamented that the more hard-edged paintings in the show would add nothing to the history of Australian art, but the artists reading his review knew they had been spared the worst of Lansell’s critiques, which ran to “nasty, messy, clumsy bric-a-brac”, “fuzzy artistic flummeries”, “skilful pot-boiling”, and “asinine trifles”. 

Many of the painters who would consolidate their reputations in the 1970s and beyond had first come together for The Field exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1968. This show of ninety-eight works would reveal the depth of local painters’ interest in the canvas as a demonstration of independence from narrative, from the illusionistic devices of realism—even from titles as clues. In other words, the painting was an object with no reference beyond itself; a self-contained world. Geometric shapes with knife-edged pigment abounded, colours were bright, and three-dimensional concerns were abandoned, but kept popping up thanks to colour’s (and nature’s) way of teasing the retina. It was variously called Colour-Field, Hard-Edge, or Minimalism. Who was in it? There were Dale Hickey, Wendy Paramour (one of three women), Gunter Christmann, Robert Hunter, Nigel Lendon, Michael Johnson, Robert Rooney, James Doolin, Peter Booth, Robert Jacks, Syd Ball, Tony McGillick, John Peart and Paul Partos, to name a few.

Patrick McCaughey was its most enthusiastic champion and defender, but he was taken to task by another art critic—and sculptor—Donald Brook for elevating the critic’s experience of the object above the painting’s intention. Brook may have been equivocal about McCaughey’s enthusiasms, but was not entirely dismissive of the new pure colour painting, as his comments on Gunter Christmann’s show of eighteen works at Inhibodress Gallery in March 1972 reveal: “I don’t think that pure colour painting will be the salvation of the art, but I have to admit that paintings like this disturb my confidence and make my day.”

In 1967, Strines Gallery opened in Carlton, Melbourne. Its owner was Sweeney Reed, the son of Melbourne figurative artist Joy Hester, who had been adopted by art patrons and collectors John and Sunday Reed. After a visit to London in 1964–65 he returned to Melbourne and opened his gallery. He was a talented but troubled young man and while his directorship was not an extended one, he mounted some energetic and memorable exhibitions. Les Kossatz decked the gallery’s exterior with multi-coloured and multi-shaped flags so that it resembled, according to Lansell, “a kind of miniature Renaissance palazzo”. He thought that Kossatz’s Pop world of objects, military bits and pieces and domestic furniture had transformed the commonplace into something magical. There was a painting called The Digger’s Throne, with a bulky Victorian chair and a human arm holding a wilting cigarette draped over one of its arm-rests. No human figure occupied it, rather a collection of symbols: iron crosses, RSL letters and Union Jacks, which Sweeney Reed called the “power units of the community”.

Christo, the celebrated Bulgarian artist, performed two artistic feats in two Australian cities in one year—1969. The National Gallery of Victoria hosted an installation of wool bales, accompanied by drawings, collages and photographs of past endeavours, while Sydney saw a portion of its coastline wrapped and trussed. The sheer scale of the Sydney project engaged everyone who experienced it. Thirty-six years later, Christo’s 2005 project The Gates would similarly galvanise Manhattan and demonstrate that large-scale projects in concert with nature or urban structures would remain central to his art practice.

Lansell, who believed that the principal artistry involving wool bales was a “tarpaulin semi-trailer load going up the Hume Highway” admitted his “grievous myopic shortcoming” as an art critic and willingly doffed his “well-worn dunce’s cap”. Nonetheless, he acknowledged that for those who had witnessed it at first hand, the wrapping of Little Bay had been a “gargantuan-scaled sensory experience”. However, a spoof by another writer for Nation, Barry Sloane, lampooned Christo in a manner which would find no counterpart until 1997 when John McDonald published his spoof of Mike Parr called “The Parr Horizon”.

Sloane’s invented character, one hapless “Abigail Stretch-Clarke” wearing a “little Pucci number” trailed in bewilderment through Central Street Gallery, exclaiming at the $2000 price tag for Exhibit 18: Packed Roses, consisting of forty-five red plastic roses wrapped in plastic, and affixed with staples to the gallery wall. When Abigail came to Item 20, a khaki tent wrapped with knotted rope—“another steal at $2000—she couldn’t fit it into her Gucci handbag any more than she could the roses”.

But according to Sloane, it was in front of Exhibit 19—spotted between her second glass of white wine and her introduction to Harry M. Miller—that she experienced the sensation prescribed in the catalogue as “the artist toys with our sense of disbelief or temporary confusion, our inability to tell art from accident”. It was a huge tarpaulin with a price tag of $7000. Perhaps there was to be some unveiling? 

But having been twice embarrassed by angry glances from the art clique, especially at her comment to a drink waiter that the roses must have taken at least ten minutes to wrap, she dived into her catalogue for advice. “What is this thing doing here?” is a more likely question than “What is it?” said the catalogue. Abigail concurred out aloud—more frozen stares. She was apparently unhinged by the exhibition and could be seen years later in Woolworths spending up a storm on plastic flowers, under the impression that they were original Christos. She was rumoured to have offered an Albury farmer $20,000 for a plastic covered haystack, and even offered to buy the Sydney Town Hall, resplendent in hessian tarpaulin while repair work was being carried out. 

As the 1970s progressed, more and more art was created that defied the market place. In other words art got rebellious and political. This was an exhilarating development and it provided a catchment zone for some wayward talents, random cheerleaders, the disaffected, and those who wanted some fun. It was also an opportunity for a budding art bureaucracy to become taste-makers. It was certainly satisfying to those in the academic and bureaucratic art world who resented what they imagined as some invisible matrix of rich collectors, biddable critics, hot-house art dealers and sniffy connoisseurship which would all be bypassed by the new developments.

Inhibodress Gallery opened in Woolloomooloo in 1970. Peter Kennedy, Mike Parr and Tim Johnson planned to run it as a co-operative to showcase experimental art and they envisaged a group of twelve to fifteen artists who would share the rent—always a problematic proposition. The following year Peter Kennedy, then twenty-nine, wrote out an application to the then Council for the Arts for the support of an “environmental situation” at Inhibodress. This proposed the destruction of forty or fifty loudspeakers in a small room, prompted by exposing them to complicated sounds—a variety of electronic torture perhaps.

The 1970s would be a decade of astonishing bureaucratic generosity, and much of the conceptual art—the “environmental works”, the “installations” and the “happenings”—would be underpinned by the taxes of the man in the street who might never see an “earth-work” or hear a loudspeaker expire. There was some logic in all of this. The deflation of the mining balloon meant that many professionals who had collected paintings in the late 1960s were selling them to pay their stockbrokers, and the drought-induced rural recession meant less available money to put into the art market. Lansell remarked: 

A gap has thus opened up between galleries and artists. The makers are not just painting or sculpting the unsaleable in the hope that time and a gallery director’s salesmanship will parlay it into the avant-garde market. They are specialising in the unbuyable. The plight of the galleries encourages them. 

Critics such as Donald Brook, James Gleeson and Daniel Thomas responded warmly to events at Inhibodress, which alarmed some of the dealers who believed then (if not now) that critics’ views had an influence on the art market. Inhibodress, which opened at dusk on weekdays till 8.30 p.m. and all day Sunday, was, according to Lansell, an anti-gallery without a director and without paid staff. Daniel Thomas quipped: “There were no new exhibitions in Sydney this week and once when the same thing happened five years ago I reviewed a dinner party.” This was The Silver Dinner. The food was real and the company enjoyable, and it was intended as a work of art. That is to say, a “happening” which was, according to Thomas, “an art form common enough in Europe and America in the early sixties, though I don’t think they reached Australia till 1966”. “Nobody does ‘happenings’ any more,” he noted ruefully. The Silver Dinner was the idea of Brian Thomson, who was described by Thomas as “one of the bright young architecture drop-outs who did so much for underground culture”.

James Gleeson paid close attention to Inhibodress, noting that the works had been christened “Transart” by their creators Mike Parr and Peter Kennedy “to describe diverse forms of new art which have one factor in common—they are highly transportable and therefore accessible to an international audience”. The artists bypassed paint, stone and metal and embraced instead videotapes, photographs, slides, sound installations and printed information. Gleeson suggested that one idea recurred as a principal motif: a search for the methods of extending the normal range of sensibilities and sensitivities: 

There are extreme examples in a film showing Mike Parr holding his breath for an agonising length of time, and in another, in which he holds his finger in a candle flame until he reaches the ultimate limits of endurance. This is the way one might expect an existential character in a novel by Camus or Sartre to behave. They are sharpening or extending awareness, testing endurance and limitations and savouring the subsequent release from stress. 

This may have been one way of saying that Parr felt better when he took his finger out of the candle flame.

Kennedy was suspicious of the larrikin tradition that many Australian painters had for so long cultivated: 

Art in Australia is a sort of game. Artists take on roles and play them out … It’s time for a break from that self-conscious bohemianism of the past … We are trying to do the opposite of what good art has been doing in the past. If a work was good, it produced empathy. You forgot yourself in looking at it. With our art, we’re trying to move people towards self-identification. This kind of work doesn’t involve a value judgement. It’s the integrity of the artist’s commitment that counts. 

Inhibodress closed in August 1972. Parr and Kennedy were departing Australia to work in Europe and America. “If we were to remain here, we’d become regional, and our art is metropolitan, and so international, or it doesn’t exist at all,” said Parr. The surprise, journalist Sandra Hall noted, was not that it was closing, but that it had survived for two years. For a while the co-operative spirit had prevailed, but membership fell away. 

“Happenings” and “installations” did not necessarily displace other fixtures in the art-world firmament. Sidney Nolan mounted his expansive Paradise Gardens at the National Gallery of Victoria in April 1970. It was composed of 1320 small components. Lansell called it an astonishing tribute to horticulture produced with dazzling facility and lunatic vision, superb at close range but resembling wallpaper at a distance. It was accompanied by a lavish limited-edition book of poems with line illustrations, which would wound certain parties. Seven years later, when Sunday Reed presented twenty-five of Nolan’s original Ned Kelly series to the National Gallery of Australia, there was a flurry of press curiosity, but John Reed, ever reticent on Sunday’s behalf, demurred. “If you must say something about us, just say I’m a gardener.”

In 1971 Mike Brown mounted an ambitious show at Bruce Pollard’s Pinacotheca Gallery which had relocated from St Kilda Road to Richmond. He described it as an “environmental freakout in the name of Art”. Lansell, who had stepped like Alice through a “deceptive cubby-house door”, described it as a “Mephistophelean maelstrom, primarily visual but also aural” and struggled to describe it adequately to the reader. “Like life, it just seems to have happened, found under a gigantic cabbage-leaf.” There was a maze littered with domestic detritus, a mystery room festooned with ribbons and a Christian cross, a rickety fence from which dangled a saucepan holding small change, and drawers of Monopoly money and Melbourne football pin-ups. Finally, the disoriented visitor came upon the main feature in a cavernous blacked-out room: a 100-foot-long mural, sculpted, collaged and painted with figurative and abstract motifs. The sheer scale and energy of it dazzled and confounded its viewers.

Conceptual Art gained a solid footing in the 1970s, as did Performance Art, Installation and Environmental Art. Nonetheless, painting revived, especially in the work of Alan Oldfield, Ian Grant, Alun Leach-Jones, Bryan Westwood, William Delafield Cook, Dale Hickey and Keith Looby, to name a few. Looby, who was for a period the art critic for the National Times, sniffed: 

Because of the Mafia-type promotion of … the hard edge movements in the later sixties … and the absolutist’s protestant duty to deny all rights of life to any contrary ideas, ideals and forms, this type of painting was more immediately accepted by the establishment of architects, interior decorators and critics, and lent itself to coloured reproduction in art magazines, more than any other new art form in history. 

A more insistent variety of realist painting flashed around a number of galleries as if to demonstrate beyond all doubt that painting was still viable throughout the 1970s. This was called Photo-Realism. It had learnt some pragmatic lessons from American Pop Art, but being literal-minded, it made photographic veracity its ultimate touchstone. It was occasionally created by painting directly from a photo or by projecting the contents of a colour slide onto a canvas. An exhibition called Illusion and Reality, which demonstrated just how many realities could exist side by side, toured Australia in 1977. 

It is an article of faith amongst the true believers in Australia that our Labor governments have been more supportive of the exploratory arts than conservative regimes, who seemed to be more relaxed and comfortable funding traditional opera and ballet. This view became entrenched, with some justification, when Whitlam’s funding and support for international modern art became a national and international headline. When Blue Poles was acquired, it became the focus for the public’s suspicion of cavalier spending, and the lodestone for near-hysterical criticism.

The injection of government funds into the arts in the 1970s and their resulting efflorescence—which coincided with Whitlam’s short reign—is set in the aspic of nostalgia now, and the results of this patchy prescience and unbridled enthusiasm, although conspicuous and enduring, eluded precise documentation on the balance sheets of accountants.

As the following two decades ticked over, more and more of this money went not to artists, but to bureaucracies which grew like hydras, which suffered only occasional erosions in times of fiscal tight-fistedness. Whitlam’s time in office was never to be forgotten by a grateful art world, but the long-term facts are occasionally inconvenient to the art-world mindset. It was a Liberal Prime Minister, Harold Holt, who announced in November 1967 that the country would soon have an Australian Council for the Arts, to be chaired by Dr H.C. Coombs.

It seems the arts were a family concern. Holt’s father had been a pioneer and producer in the Australian film industry and a one-time manager for J.C. Williamson in London. Holt’s proposed body would replace the Arts Council of Australia which was established in 1943, with a view to encouraging all the arts. It was the next Liberal Prime Minister, John Gorton, who announced the first grant in December 1968, which was restricted to theatre arts. In 1969 Gorton established a film bank for big films, a fund for short films and a film school. Former state and federal MP Peter Coleman noted: “They became part of Gorton’s programme for the 1969 election—the first time in Australian history that a major arts initiative was also an election policy.” Surprisingly, while many railed against the comfortable conservatism of the Liberal government and their antipathy towards bohemians and layabouts, the artists were as busy as bees. So were the commercial galleries and the art dealers. 

As the official art world expanded during the 1970s, the uncomplicated days when a education officer or curator might rise to become the director of a state gallery would all but vanish. Examples? Gil Docking became the Director of the Newcastle Regional Art Gallery, and briefly the Deputy Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, James Mollison became Director of the National Gallery of Australia—then the National Gallery of Victoria. Daniel Thomas became Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, as did Ron Radford—who would, in 2004, become Director of the NGA. Pat Sabine became Director of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Bernice Murphy became Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, and Bernard Smith became Australia’s sturdiest art historian. Today, directors of galleries are just as likely to be appointed with an eye on their qualifications in the financial world, as one of the overwhelming tasks of a contemporary director is to generate money.

In 1981, the curtain of the art-world stage lifted on Bernice Murphy’s all-embracing Perspecta at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. This exhibition gave expression to a number of imperatives that would mature—and mutate—during the 1980s. She spread a generous net; sweeping into the exhibition’s ambit not only paintings and sculpture, but also many newer art expressions that she sensed might founder without institutional support. Alongside established faces, Murphy showcased individuals who had previously received little institutional or commercial attention. Many would become prominent—and remain so—in the following two decades: Dick Watkins, Howard Arkley, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Rosalie Gascoigne, Bill Henson, Ken Whisson, William Robinson and Juan Davila, to name a few. In more recent times Perspecta strayed from being a democratic showcase of contemporary developments in all their variety; incrementally reducing itself to narrow curatorial fixations with political and gender issues. By 2000 Perspecta had reduced itself to offerings by a mere handful of players and thence vanished from the art-world stage.

Exhibitions like POPISM, Recent Australian Painting: A Survey 1970–1983, Australian Art 1960–1986: Field to Figuration and Vox Pop all helped to underpin the colourful and anarchic trajectory that painting would sustain throughout the 1980s and confirm its revived status. They revealed that painting had not, as assumed, effaced itself during the 1970s in deference to the tide of conceptual works that washed through that decade. Artists like Richard Larter, Peter Powditch, Syd Ball, Robert Jacks, Lesley Dumbrell, William Delafield Cook, John Brack, Gareth Sansom and Peter Booth had never missed a beat.

In 1990, an issue of Tension magazine gave a dazzling overview of the 1980s art world. Its breezy beginning: “The ’70s was the decade that style forgot …” was more revealing than the writers intended. In the world of art, “style” has been either the essence that helped us look at a work and identify its maker, or the set of characteristics that allowed us to place the work within a chronological framework or “period”. What the writers meant was not the style of a maker, or even the style of a period. It was the style of the “mover and shaker”, the opportunist, the practitioner with an eye on the main chance—something the idealistic, homespun, group-therapy art of the 1970s apparently lacked the wit to possess. The 1990s and beyond would be replete with works where style trumped substance.

The story has been told often enough, but bears repeating here. When Marcel Duchamp walked into a plumbing supply outlet in Manhattan in 1917, he exited with a bathroom appliance whose function would never follow its form. The white porcelain urinal would instead, be submitted—along with a bottle rack and a bicycle wheel fixed to a kitchen stool—to an exhibition mounted by the American Society of Independent Artists. He had signed a proxy name to the works—R. Mutt. The society was brand new, this was its first exhibition, and Duchamp was head of its hanging committee. His position did not assist his proposal. The committee demurred and Duchamp resigned.

Duchamp called these works “ready-mades” and designated them as art objects. This was intended to provoke the avant-garde, expose their conservatism and simultaneously ask what constituted an art object. What started as a straightforward provocation and a rumination has come to define—and confine —much that has subsequently taken place in the art world; with the added distinction that now a “ready-made” is intended for a ready-made space by people with ready-made intentions. As the New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl observed: “ritually endorsing art’s mission to challenge conventional thinking—a conventional thought if ever there was one”.

Duchamp would in essence remain an enigma. “I never could stand the seriousness of life … but when the seriousness is tinted with humour it makes a nicer colour.” Once he had moved through and beyond his earlier Post-Impressionist phase, he seemed to have had a hand in everything: Surrealism, Kinetic Art, Op Art and Pop. Then surprisingly, he dismissed all latter-day movements from Abstract Expressionism to Pop as second winds. He once remarked that the twentieth century was one of the lowest points in the history of art, “even lower than the eighteenth century, when there was no great art, just frivolity. Twentieth-century art is just a mere light pastime.”

Yet in spite of Duchamp’s pessimistic assessments, his own offerings would provide the armature of many of the vessels that would sail or bob about on the spot for much of the seventies, then re-appear with their hulls scraped, their decks scrubbed and any miscreants keelhauled through the 1990s and into the 2000s.

Perhaps too much freedom, where culture is concerned, is as bad as too little. Russia’s novelists and poets produced unforgettable works—which incidentally, did the historians’ job for them—in the teeth of unrelenting repression, ridicule, a ticket to the gulag, or a bullet to the back of the head, while the West, with its mania for relativity, has generously opened the floodgates to a heaving tide of banal work: unoriginal, derivative, formulaic and copycat—not to mention the running commentary on it by windbags, axe-grinders and the jargon-infected. 

Today, the collecting of art and the displaying of it is regarded as an art in itself. It has become the prerogative of the investor, the show-off and the dedicated pursuer of that vaporous notion—“lifestyle”. But where the wealthy but inexperienced collector is hypnotised by a “name”, a more sincere buyer with a discriminating eye will hesitate. For the genuine connoisseur as opposed to the art investor, it will be more rewarding to have a collection of inspired works by relative newcomers, than a room full of mediocre excursions or dismal failures by the more celebrated.

There are some valuable lessons to be learnt if you happen to be at the front desk of a commercial gallery. The buyers tend to be modestly dressed and inconspicuous. The presence of designer labels is never a sign of the likelihood of a sale, rather an indication of a marathon of acute bargaining and an indecisive conclusion. The general rule is: the fancier the handbag the more reluctant the wallet, but occasionally, collectors with seriously large wallets like to flex them. Thomas Hoving, a former Director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, conducted a survey among some Manhattan art and antique dealers, asking among other things, how they responded to bargaining. Gerald Rosenberg suggested: “It’s a question of politeness—lots of that is missing these days.” Christian Jussel added: “I don’t particularly like it. Perhaps the increase in bargaining—for everything—has to do with the belligerence of the times, the arrogance of power. It’s the car-buying mentality translated into everything else.”

Owning an art gallery is an adventure. You can fossick around artists’ studios, keep an eye on graduates from art schools, help revive the careers of neglected mid-career artists, and by offering talented young painters an entry into the art world with a first solo show—then a second and third—you are contributing in a modest way to the cultural life of your city. It is especially rewarding for closet connoisseurs, a once-thriving species for whom the aesthetic was the ultimate quarry, but who would now be looked upon with blank incomprehension by a hungry twenty-first century which sees the art world as a business and little more.

Young artists and would-be art-world denizens have great expectations, fuelled by art bureaucracies dependent for their continued existence on sufficient numbers of students to guarantee their institutional funding. The results have been pernicious—even fraudulent. Sydney is awash with hard-working waiters and valley girls (“I was like amazed …”) who can boast a masters degree in arts but whose knowledge of art would fit on the head of a pin.

Artists themselves are fertile, hard-working and, in this writer’s experience, surprisingly well organised. There are always too many of them, and too few unfilled spaces in the gallery calendar. But if galleries are swinging doors for a procession of hopeful artists (some of whom wave a CV in preference to actual art works), those who want to work in an art gallery have a similar dilemma. Most of these hopefuls are over-qualified for a job which essentially requires a good eye, the ability to hang a show well, some typing, a dislike of muddles, and considerable reserves of patience and a knack for tactful dealings—with both artists and clients. None of these abilities have anything to do with the acquisition of a PhD.

Yet, developments in the twenty-first century are exhilarating. Most commercial galleries have websites and conduct both the selling of artworks and the promotion of their stables on these websites and through e-mails. Artist blogs and video clips of exhibition openings abound on YouTube. The art world would seem connected and interconnected in a way unimagined two decades ago, but what this means for quality, imagination and judgement remains to be assessed. 

Patricia Anderson owned and ran the Crawford Gallery in East Sydney from 1992 to 2000. The first part of this two-part series of articles on the Australian art gallery world since the 1930s appeared in the January-February issue.