re collection: 25 years of the Griffith University Art Collection 1996

re collection

The Griiiith Univ· er6ity Art Collection -

25 Jear6

Brisbane City Gallery 5 August - 16 September 1996

GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY

1971-1996

2__5

boreword Griffith is recognised as an innovative and dynamic University, reflected in its spirited Collection of Australian

contemporary art. Griffith ARTWORKS, the Queensland Conservatorium of Music, and the Queensland College of Art, in

themselves institutions with remarkable histories, all contribute to the unique position in the arts Griffith occupies today.

Griffith ARTWORKS manages the University Art Collection and has achieved a national profile for its outstanding program which has included workshops, residencies, consultancies, exhibitions, performance, and public art projects, as well as

breaking new ground in policy development. The lively and diverse exhibitions produced by Griffith /\RTWORl<S, both for

on-campus, local, and regional audiences. address issues of relevance to our professional and everyday lives.

A rigorous Art Collection Policy derived from the University's own Mission Statement encompasses the importance of

bringing together relevant disciplines through multi- and inter-disciplinary approaches to optimise utilisation of all

resources within the University. The criteria of 'innovation', 'academic rigor', and 'intellectual freedom' are key aspects of the Art Collection Policy.

The support for younger artists, especially those from Queensland, is manifested in the Collection and in this exhibition

which celebrates GriffiLh University's 25th Anniversary. Griffith does not only focus upon local and national art interests.

At the time of this exhibition Griffith ARTWORKS will be hosting an artist-in-residence from Hong Kong, who will work with the super-computer in the Science and Technology Faculty, to bring to fruition work for the Queensland Art Gallery's Asia Pacific Triennial. We look forward to many future shared international ventures.

Recently the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee organised a review of museums and collections within universities,

and identified the importance of these holdings and the need to resource their on-going good management as an important part of Australia's Distributed National Collections. Griffith would welcome the opportunity to expand

participation and enjoyment of our Collection through greater access for the general and art communities.

On behalf of the University I welcome you to the exhibition re collection which serves as an introduction

to our Art Collection, and which, l believe, conveys our great interest in the young, in the development of our students, and in the role the challenging ideas of contemporary artists play within the universities of the future.

ProbeMor Roy Webb

Vice-Chancellor

2

.,

pre�ace Griffith ARTWORKS manages the Griffith University Art Collection of more than 1500 works assembled over the last quarter of a century. A living museum of corridor areas and selected public art spaces throughout the campuses

accommodate curated exhibitions related to the respective faculties, schools, or offices of Griffith University. This

remarkable program which encompasses hanging areas comparable in linear meterage with the largest of Australia's art

institutions, serves to enhance the cultural life of the University for students, visitors, and staff. Tiuough their

interrogatory and reflective roles, the exhibitions can also provoke, amuse, or irritate viewers. Afterall, the Collection is

about contemporary life and art: cutting-edge practice loaded with ideas, theoretically-based. often daring in concept and realisation, always innovative, challenging, and fo rever young. re collection reveals only a glimpse of the Griffith University Art Collection holdings through a selection of eighty-six

works. The lack of painting representation may surprise, but this reflects the focus of the Collection ,,hich in many ways

has mapped alternative art histories [such as conceptual, intermedia, filmic, and performative histories}. This exhibition is a testimony to the expansion and explosion of the visual arts field over the past three decades.

ln 'Beth Jackson's essay, she makes the point that the Collection has been acquired fo r a University which in itself is a

collective, and draws to our attention aspects of the Collection brief such as: ''to reintegrate art and community. and to

generate critical debate upon the artform and upon issues in wider Australian society". As well, "to reflect the broad and

complex meanings which the word culture has come to signify since 1971 ". Undoubtedly this exhibition addresses those aspirations.

One of the most famous poster images in Australian art (p.9) was produced by Michael Callaghan in 1979 at The

Queensland Film and Drama Centre (later Griffith Artworks). The client was Steel City Pich1res. Wollongong. Whilst dealing

with radical issues 'Redback further revolutionised poster-making in Australia by either satirising or rejecting the traditional imagery of the Left.

Wllat Now Mr Mao? produced for the Griffith University Representative Council in 1979. and included

in this exhibition, features the irreverence and wit for which Redback became renowned. Griffith University can claim an important stake in the beginnings of what became Australia's pre-eminent poster producer.

We believe re collection reflects the dynamism, the special spirit of Griffith University·s environment. as an intellectually exciting place fo r learning, for growth as human beings working at the forefront of new technologies. We hope you will enjoy and engage with the exhibition, with the performances, and the film and video art screenings scheduled during re collection which encapsulate the special qualities of the Griffith University Art Collection. in its 25th year.

Barbara Tucke,-man Acting Director Gribuith ARIWORKS

3

re collection The Gribbith Univer6ity Art Collection - 25 Jear6 This exhibition explores the notions which surround the words collection. collectivity, collecting, and recollecting in the life of a university. Not an individual's art collection, nor even a public art collection in the same sense as a national or state

collection, this collection was founded, like Griffith University itself, on an interdisciplinary model. lts brief, to reintegrate art

and communicy, to generate critical debate upon the artform and upon issues in wider Australian society, and to reflect the

broad and complex meanings which the word culture has come to signify since 1971. During these past three decades (argi.1ably the most experimental in Australian art history), the visual arts has expanded from a discipline dominated by

painting and sculpture into a multimedia, interdisciplinary practice encompassing photography, sound, visual poetry,

performance, installation, new technologies, video, drawing, and printmaking. The exhibition re collection is a demonstration of the extent to which this University has supported such a creative explosion and engaged in dialogue and debate.

re collection is a collective space - a gathering of works of art from many fields and eras of practice, acquired for a

University which is itself a collective. Works of art have been acquired for their relationship to other fields of learning (the

humanities, the sciences, Asian studies, environmental science, education, architecture, information technology, and so

on) by a panel of members from these various fields. Many "retrospective" art exhibitions follow either an individual's

career (foregrounding notions of self, identity, and oeuvre), or an art history (foregrounding notions of art and history such as impressionism, cubism, or surrealism). ln contrast, re collection foregrounds multiplicity and difference, the

f

gathering of many threads and stories from the methodology of interdisciplinarity, from the ultimate collaborative ef ort

between art and life.

The guiding metaphor for this essay and method for this exhibition is memory. 1 wish to explore memory as a vehicle for the negotiation of identity; as a tool which insists on the viability of narrative; as a catalyst for the generation of

meaning in the wake of deconstruction; and as an act (collective and individual, institutional and anti-institutional) of

desire where objects continue to resonate with significance in collective social spaces for many reasons. re collection:

tracing histories from stories (official and unofficial, formal and anecdotal), seeing histories emerging from practice, from

dialogue and debate, from the art objects themselves, through my eyes.

Like memory itself, the Griffith University Art Collection is founded on ideas, thereby privileging the conditions of

ephemerality and community. The artworks themselves are materialisations of life and philosophy, traces and

intersections of wider, complex discourses. The broad areas re-membered in this body of works, which formulate the

collection's identity in the gallery space and which guide this essay are: the posters; printmaking; eonceptual/intermedia work; photography; Aboriginal artmaking; video and new technologies. Aspects of memory and remembering are salient

for each of these areas and offer seductive strategies for engaging with the multiple times and spaces of past, present,

and future.

4

po6ter6 Q.

If the unemployed are dole bludgers,

what the fuck are the idle rich? asks the fluorescent pink monkey sipping

Ronrico from a straw. Postered up around the University's Nathan campus late one night, this image caused an uproar the following day and all copies were removed by offended staff and students. This was the first poster printed by

Michael Callaghan under the collective name of Redback Posters at the Queensland Film and Drama Centre (QFDC),

Griffith University in 1979. The QFDC, was set up to provide an arts function in a University which did not formally

teach the practical arts, and rode on the wave of the community arts movement which had flourished and strengthened

during the Whitlam era and with the support of the Australia Council. Dr Margriet Bonnin was appointed as co-ordinator of the Centre in 1978, later becoming the Director of Griffith ARTWORKS. The QFDC (which later became Griffith

ARTWORKS) was modelled on the University of Sydney's Tin Sheds where Michael Callaghan had been part of the

Earthworks Poster Collective. The screenprinting facility which he developed at Griffith University in Brisbane became a focal point for student, academic, and artistic activism, at a time when Queensland's government under Premier Joh

Bjelke-Petersen was an impediment to free expression. Callaghan later moved to Wollongong, and together with

artist/activist Gregor Cullen established the company Redback Graphix, Australia's leading postermaking workshop.

Wliat now Mr Mao? (1979) displays Callaghan's characteristic use of fluorescent colours, photostencils, and witty text. Jn

one broad sweep he attacks icons of the right and the left (Coca-Cola and Chairman Mao) while validating youth,

popular culture, and collective student spaces. Lyn Finch and Cherie Bradshaw, students at Griffith University who were

taught screenprinting by Callaghan and collaborated with him during his residency, went on to form the collective Mantis Prints. They contributed a strong feminist dimension to the political agenda of the day. Lyn finch's Wh y we oppose

votes for men (1980) and Cherie Bradshaw's Prostitution is the rental of the body. Marriage is the sale! (1980) have

become (in)famous icons of this period.

Where many of the posters held in the Griffith University Art Collection were produced at the QFDC/ Griffith ARTWORKS workshop, re collection presents a national selection of the postermaking movement. Additional to those collectives and individuals already mentioned, also represented are collectives such as Lucifoil and lnkahoots, and individuals such as

James Swan (Pitchas), Marie McMahon, Toni Robertson, Robyn McDonald, Chips Mackinolty, Jeff Gibson, and

importantly Martin Sharp whose early posters and designs in his Oz magazine helped to import the "counter culture" from Britain. The posters map issues, events, and Feelings of the day and lead us into a social and historical

remembering.

Postermaking was a powerful social movement which occurred throughout Europe and America and universities, both there

and here, were the focal point for this and other forms of radical political activity. It was within such a climate that

Griffith University was founded - a consciously alternative model for education and research with a holistic, social vision of

democratic reform. The founding Schools, Humanities, Modern Asian Studies, Administration, Science, and Australian

Environmental Studies, sought to reshape Australian identity politically, socially, and ethically. For Professor John Willett,

Griffith University's founding Vice-Chancellor, art played a central role in social and political reform, in creatively re­

interpreting the past, critically engaging with the present, and imagining futures.

5

Postermaking was radical not only for its content but also for its claim to be an art practice. lt attacked notions of '"high art" and cultural elitism as viciously as it attacked politicians and fascist ideologies. lt validated popular culture and

deliberately sought to be kitsch, graffiti-like, or just plain "bad". Posters pivot centrally on the tension between the verbal

and the visual. The sophisticated juxtaposition of image and text pre-dated, and indeed helped to pave the way for, the almost compulsory occurrence of this concern in every medium of contemporary visual art practice. lnf ormed by the

deconstructive strategies of semiotics and structuralism, posters appealed to an increasing public capacity for critical visuality. They made visible the circulation of signs in mass media, popular culture, and everyday life.

Postennaking centrally relies upon collaboration and collectivity. This presents a fundamental challenge to the heroic

individual artist of modernism with the signature trace, the authentication of originality, and the unique art object. Many postcnnakers remain unknown, many are trained professional artists, many are not. The artistic practice and processes of

postermaking are a collaboration between artists, and often also a collaboration between these artists and commissioning organisations such as unions, co-operatives, and community groups.

Postermaking has moved away from the ··grass-roots", hand-made screenprints of the seventies and early eighties and is

now mostly produced cmrimercially through offset processes. This is partially due to the prohibitive costs involved in

hand-printing processes, but also it is due to the increasing valorisation of the artist as a creative thinker and collaborator

rather than as someone with particular technical skills and a unique, individual vision.

The major force of poster production now is through a client's commission, rather than through collective action. This

change can be seen as part of a larger social restructuring of collaborative activity, evidenced within universities through courses becoming more and more vocationally oriented, the re-introduction of student fees, the move from student

unionism to student representative councils, and the centralisation of discourses of expertise and specialisation. Ten years

of student press (cl 985) shows the front pages of GUUS's (Griffith University Union of Students) paper '"Griffitti". The title

of the paper has been changed in recent years to "Gravity'" - a change which also signifies the trend away from an

anarchistic attitude to a more professional posture.

The intensified commodification and consumerisation of everyday life and the ubiquitous in Filtration of the mass media has made counter-cultural or subcultural trends easily and immediately able to be recuperated or co-opted by

mainstream discourses and even, to some extent, manufactured or manipulated by them. Where Brisbane·s early

postermaking movement could easily be associated with punk music, certain "red'" bookstores, student activism, and

youth counter-culture, today's postermaking relies more on professional bodies (Amnesty lntemational, Conservation

Councils, CAAMA - Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association, Aids Councils, and others) and aesthetically targeted

to mainstream media and trends.

6

BUC.l<'S

MEN R£­ GA\NEO THE SHIPS ,WMICH MAO BE'EN C\RCLIN(; OVE�MEAO UNDER RE.­ MOTE CON· iR\)\.. ...

CL\ NC. 'TIGMT SIST� -IT'S OE"A,H TO ORO �AVE

•As WILMA HAO NO JUMP­ ING BELT ANO TMERE w�s NO •IHE

TO MAKE

A LANDIN(;, HY I PILO, DROPPE D A L.INE:: -•

Cherie BRADSHAW (Mantis Prints) Cling tight sister ,1980

7

printmaking Postermaking was at the intersection of two larger art movements: the community arts movement; and the printmaking movement. Both movements sought to break down elitist notions of culture, and to create collaborative and collective practices and spaces. While many postermakers rejected traditional fine art practices (such as painting and sculpture),

many traditionally trained artists entered into printmaking in an egalitarian attempt to extend these practices and disseminate their work to wider publics at affordable prices.

The Queensland Film and Drama Centre with its interdisciplinaiy brief (developed chiefly through the efforts of Professor

C.F. Presley), its studios and residencies, and its outreach into many communities (not only students and the university community, but also the wider suburban communities of Logan, Woodridge, Kingston, lnala, Sunnybank, and Acacia Ridge) was a unique facility for community arts practice in Brisbane.

In 1977, through the assistance of artist Brian Seidel, an etching studio was established, and in 1978 Lawrence Daws was

employed as "host artist" to co-ordinate the Visiting Artists Etching Scheme. Arthur Boyd, Donald Laycock, Colin

Lanceley, and Stephen Killick were invited to the studio to produce etchings, printed by technician James Swan. This

folio of prints and other works produced at the etching studio formed some of the earliest acquisitions of the Art

Collection. The artist-in-residence program for which the QFDC and later Griffith Artworks became nationally renowned, initially centred upon the etching studio and again, works acquired From these residencies founded the Art Collection.

Lawrence Daws was a focal member and seminal influence in the collective which accessed the etching studio at Griffith University. The more informal, drawing-based methods of printmaking encouraged a vernacular vocabulary of imagery and style. There are many informal portraits of other artists and of the studio itself, marrying art and life, and

emphasising artistic process as much as product. The portrait of Brett Whiteley at Owl Creek ( 1978) depicts Whiteley

working directly from life and the intimate collegiality of artists.

Owl Creek was the name given by Daws to his residence in the Glass House Mountains where he has lived since 1973.

From about 1976, Daws produced images of the area focussing upon the mountains and opposing the organic curvilinear qualities of the landscape with geometric structures of architecture. The large etching View of r/re

Himalayas from the Gloss House Mountains ( 1978) exemplifies these concerns while also revealing Daws' interest in Eastern philosophy and spirituality. Lawrence Daws has produced three official portraits for the University and was awarded an honourary doctorate in 1992.

Many artists who entered into printmaking during this period were chiefly known as painters and their prints have been

seen as minor works which support the more significant and valuable paintings. However, this hierarchical conception renders invisible the ways in which the printmaking processes feed and inform the paintings and vice versa. lt also

disguises printmaking as a medium in its own right, and as a different methodology which builds its aesthetics upon

repetition, informality, process, and collaborative technical skills. The lithographs Under bridges ( 1989), collaboratively produced by Tim Maguire and master printer Neil Leveson at the Australian Print Workshop, are a superb example of

such an aesthetic: their meditative spirituality marrying process and product, icon and ephemerality.

8

Qo If the unemployed are dole bludgers, What the fuck are the idle rich?

Michael CAUAGHAN (Redback Posters) Q. Ifthe unemployed 11re dole bludgers. whar the .fuck are the idle rich? 1979

In 1984, the lithography studio was established with the assistance of artist-in-residence Kaye Green who continued to

hold annual workshops in lithography at the studio as part of Griffith Artworks' workshop program until it was devolved in I 993. Since then, the etching and lithography studios comprise the only community access facility in Brisbane supporting

professional printmaking practice. Remembering aspects of this history is, like printmaking, to collaborate, disseminate, become embedded in process, and explore the many states of one image and its lasting most salient impressions.

A work which l have inc:luded in the printmaking section of this exhibition, but which really falls across a number of areas, pre-dates Griffith University, its Art Collection and the QFDC, namely Systematically altered photograph (1967) by lan Bum. lan Burn has been one of Australia's most important artists since the mid-1960s. His involvement in the

development of the Conceptual Art movement and in the activities of the Art et Language Group (working first in London and then in New York between I 965 and 1977), his subsequent involvement in the union movement and the Australia

Council's Art and Working Life program, his passion for theory, and his significant contributions as a critical writer and art historian, placed him at the forefront of the massive changes which have occurred in art practices since the mid- l 960s.

Syste111a.tically altered photograph is an early example of conceptual art practice and can be seen as a launching point

for the explosion of interdisciplinary, collaborative, intennedia art practices of contemporary pluralism. As a print, it pre­

dates the burgeoning of tli'e printmaking and poster movements and radically anticipates their democratic: and collective

ideals. The work rejects traditional hand-crafting and radically breaks from the traditional art object. The first image (a

non-original, found image from a magazine) is photocopied once, and the second image is the same image after it has

been photocopied many times. Photocopying was a new technology at this time, and the exploration of this mediation of

mechanical reproduction was a random process-based approach to artmaking whic:h challenged traditional notions of

originality, authe11tidty, treativity, authorship, subject, and object. lt privileged the acts of reading and interpretation, the processes of artmaking, and the concept behind the work, the thought processes of the artist and the audience. 1-le writes: "There·s no sense of creating the image, only of recreating it in a new system". Burn draws attention to the

contextually-dependent nature of meaning, the circulation of signs in a broadened notion of culture, the relationship between art and language.

Another early work, Brett Whiteley's JO Rillington Place W II (still from a proposed 16mm film) ( 1964), foreshadows, in a similar way to Ian Burn, the emergence of the intermedia dialogue between fine art and popular culture. Where lan

Bum's conceptual investigation relies on semiotic analyses of sign systems and language, Brett Whiteley's work draws on

psychoanalysis, commingling private and public fantasy. The subject of the work is the mass-murderer John Reginald Christie. On his arrival in London in I 964, Whiteley lived within walking distance of the house in which Christie had

strangled, gassed, raped, and buried at least five women prostitutes. Whiteley produced a series of works about Christie

which in turn was part of his larger investigation of evil, mental disturbance, violence and the unconscious. This work establishes important historical and international references for the Griffith University Art Collection to the earlier

twentieth century avant-garde art movements of Surrealism and Dada, and the practices of Salvador Dali, Max Ernst,

Andre Breton, Man Ray, and others in photography, film, poetiy, and painting.

10

Tim MAGUIRE

Under bridges ll 1989

11

conceptual and intermedia. art practice6 1 am using the term conceptual here very broadly, to mean those works of art which create a self-reflexive, critical space

for their own media and methodology rather than referring only to Conceptual Art, the specific art movement. This is in

opposition to works which rely upon already established generic codes and conventions, and paradigms of communication.

Such a critical self-reflexivity is a key guiding principle in the University's Art Collection Policy, and essential to the

generation of debate and the engagement with and formulation of ideas in creative research and innovation.

The Art Collection, though always acquired through a committee including University and wider community

representatives, was initially given limited administrative and curatorial support. In 1983 it was given into the care of the

QFDC, and this body (later Griffith ARTWORKS) consolidated the original policy vision (chiefly through the assistance of

Associate Professor Colin Crisp) and the exhibition program in which works are displayed in public corridor and foyer

areas throughout the University marrying the works of art to the various themes of study and research. Also at this time, invaluable curatorial support and direction was brought to tl1e Collection by Sarah Follent (now editor of the art journal

Eyeline), through her active engagement with and interest in the theoretical parameters of visual arts practice.

The central interrogatory ,guality of self-reflexivity may be found in works from every section of this exhibition but is given its own space here as a principle axis in re collection. ln such a self-reflexive space memory gazes upon itself,

becoming aware of the techniques of its own production and the sets of practices which enable object relations. The

Collection Policy questions: "What is the relationship between a work of art and the world?". Art speaks, art comes into being, from a tangential direction to other discourses of representation. lt seeks open-endedness rather than closure; it

seeks the lines of fault and points of rupture in discourse rather than the solid ground of definition and rationale.

Conceptual and intermedia practices interrogate their own means of production and formulate an aesthetic through the

very act of deconstruction.

The title Purple and rust (1978) refers to the two material elements balanced in the sculpture by Paul Selwood. Without

recourse to metaphor or illusion, this strong example of minimal art creates a formal abstraction involving line, colour, form,

surface, light, space, and solid structure. Steel, most often experienced as a non-decorative, non-tactile, and functional

material is here seen as an organic, chemically corroding, "painterly" surface whose solidity dissolves elegantly into the floor, making it appear soft and fragile. From various angles the steel slats and rods appear to be plaited and interwoven, and

giving as much form to the surrounding space and light as to their own substance. Purple and rust rests on the cusp

between (modernist) sculpture and (postrnodernist) installation. Emerging in the intermcdia dialogue of contemporary art

over the last twenty-five years, particularly in the area of sculpture/installation, is an insisting environmental consciousness -

a materiality which relates media to methodology, artwork to audience, space and site to sensory perception.

Painting too has undergone a massive process of self-criticism. In Mammal-mammal (Untitled) ( 1979-80). Robert

MacPherson has included a paint brush as part of the work, emphasising the process and labour of artmaking. The hog

bristles found in the paint brush form part of the mammal-mammal cycle proposed by the title, as are the artist and the

12

Luke ROBERTS Ulltitled 1990 featuring Christ and Kallio 1989 from the photographic performance series /+/sJ. Performers: Luke Roberts and Joanna Meighan. Camera: Stephen Crowther.

13

viewer (both mammals), and of course the images. The seventy images, in their minimalist repetition, lie between

painting, drawing, installation, an ordered system, a Zen-like one-ness. and a spontaneous, comical eruption. MacPherson

is a leading figure in contemporary Australian art who has lived and worked in Brisbane during times when there was little or no local support for his artistic practice. He was awarded an honourary doctorate by the University in 1992.

Scott Redford's Map of the world ( 1987) subsumes a book in a decadent layer of black acrylic paint, rendering it

unreadable and unknown. The work is an almost literal interpretation of Roland Barthes famous essay ··The Death of the

Author" ( 1968). 1l seems to cry from beneath the black shroud tha l everything is at once embedded in textual meaning

and yet remaining at the level of sensuous surface. The more our lives are scripted and our worlds are mapped, the more

superficial and commodified they become.

The works of Janet Laurence and Judith Wright more fully explore the relationship of art and language, of visual and

verbal sign systems. ln Janet Laurence's Metals liquids a11d gases ( 1993) inks are spilt across metallic plates, imitating random and volatile chemical reactions, and contrasting with the screenprinted, scientific symbols of elements (from

chemistry·s periodic table). Art, like science, is a series of controlled experiments, b�sed 011 an amalgam of hypotheses,

intuition, factual knowledge, and experience. Art, like science. tampers with our environment - culture and nature are always in dialogue with each other.

When artists proclaim that art and life are inseparable, they are speaking of a dialogue. Both art and life are a

conversation with oneself, between self and other. a fashioning of the self, an unfolding story, inscribed and prescribed

with layers of meaning. ln Judith Wright's Image of absc11ce (1996) the dark form of a head is partnered with the titling

line of text floating on the vacant, randomly etched surface. as a mirror reflection of self and other, absence and presence, subject and object. The viewer mediates and marries the two images activating dialogue and desire.

Curiously this dialogue is also fundamental to the earlier work of Mike Parr, Geghe11a E Reghena (perspecti11e as sword a11d ccili11g), Geghe11a (self porrrait as a dream) ( 1983). The left hand image is a heavily worked, facial self portrait.

while the right hand side depicts a more free-hand, graffiti-like dream image of a disembodied arm or phallus - in

reference Lo the artist"s congenitally deformed arm and his sexuality. As well as inviting the viewer to marry the objectified and subjectilied images of his self. Parr has also enacted such a dialogue in his own practice as a

performance artist. His continual production of self-portraits for over a decade have deconstructed the borders between

art, life, and the self through a psychoanalytic framework. Parr has been a key figure in the rise of performance practice in the visual arts and the Griffith University Art Collection has sought to support performance art and other ephemeral

practices through the acquisition of works which are related to these practices or actually document them.

The U11ritled image from Stelarc's S11spe11sio11 folio (1991) documents one of his many performances which involved the placing of hooks in his skin in order to suspend his body in various positions and locations. Stelarc conducted over

twenty-five of these performances since 1976, but has had to cease them as his skin will no longer take the strain.

14

.,

I I

1 Rose FARRELL and George PARKlN The a1111w1cia1io11 from the series Repenra11re 1988

15

Performance art events, especially those involving violence and/or sado-masochism have caused more controversy and

debate than perhaps any other visual art practice. Stelarc objectifies his body in order to explore it as a tool, as a medium for artistic expression, as a site for radical intervention, as a social and biological performance of the self.

photography lf a core body of works in the Collection employ the reductivist aesthetics of minimalism and aim to deconstruct the discourses of representation, there is a complementary body of works in photography which explore and exploit the

seduction of representation and aim not only to deconstruct but to reconstruct the imaginative and imaginary self.

Photography's implicit valorisation, yet obvious manipulation of the real, generates some of the most sophisticated

political critique in artmaking. The decline of community arts movements and the anti-aesthetic activism of the seventies, post-Whitlam, post-Vietnam, on the one hand gave rise to an increasing conservatism (what has been termed as "a return

to painting"), but on the other hand gave rise to a deeper engagement with the politics of representation, with the theories of cultural and textual analysis. Hence it is not surprising that photography has been the major vehicle for feminist and postcolonial art practice.

ln Elizabeth Gertsakis" Beautiful sons and Beautiful daughters (1989) the medium of photography captures, reproduces, and juxtaposes three tropes of representation. On the left, the Hollywood portraits of Johnny Weismuller and Elizabeth

Taylor; in the centre, the family album photographs of the artist"s parents during World War 11 in Macedonia, Greece; and on the right, two portraits from the canons of Art History - a Titian Self portrait and Corot's Peasant girl. For Gertsakis,

pl1otography is caught somewhere between the public discourses of high art and popular culture, while also inhabiting

the private realm of family and domestic life. The economy of these visual signs generate cultural and gender stereotypes, structuring social ideals, and modes of desiring production.

Postmodern photographic practice creates a performative space where fantasy and reality collide and become confused, where subjective scenarios are enacted under the camera's objectifying gaze. Rose Farrell and George Parkin create

elaborate stage sets for the private re-enactment of certain visual icons. The annunciation ( 1988) is both real and fake, both a sacrilege and a homage, exemplifying how we carry within us the scripted dramas of our cultural pasts, re­

enacting and re-inventing them. So too with Luke Roberts and his re-inscription of Frida Kahlo into the patrilineage of

our Judea-Christian traditions.

Photography is a medium of appropriation, eclectically gathering imagery from multiple sources past and present. lt

generates an aesthetics of reproduction, critically engaging our mass mediated, filmic, and televisual sensibilities.

Photographic technologies have created a mass-produced self-voyeurism which hypnotically transfixes whole cultures

and communities before various versions of the silver screen. This regime of surveillance and visibility with its dominant

16

..,

Hiram TO

Casual victim 1991

17

American paradigms has rendered invisible countless other cultural practices. In the works of Eugenia Raskopoulos,

Hiram To, Chris Barry, and Christopher Koller, the artists are photographically reflecting on the experiences of cultural loss, cultural homogenisation, social violence, and displacement. In remembering these pasts they engage in the very acts of self-voyeurism which they seek to critique, re-colonising the self, re-presenting social, f amilial, public-private

visual knowledges.

The act of remembering is an act of re-imagining the self and the other; desirous decisions of incorporation and

exclusion; a curating, an editing, an orchestration of experience. The photographic works activate the subjective and

collective memory spaces of the viewing audience, underlining the act of remembrance which forms the basis for this exhibition re collection: The Griffith University Art Collection - 25 Years.

In the Untitled work by Tracey Moffatt from her series Pet thang ( 1992), the artist stages a self-portrait, a sado­

masochistic fantasy in an act of self-voyeurism. The sheep may be seen as a symbol of white colonisation, a central

icon in the Australian pastoral heritage and a symbolic end to the indigenous hunter-gatherer societies. Moffatt's bared,

female, and Aboriginal body may be seen as the feminised landscape, able to be raped and exploited through

colonisation. That Moffatt'is both torturer and victim, master and slave, demonstrates the degrees to which we become

our own colonisers and oppressors, internalising social l1ierarchies and systems of control. Her own agency and desire, seen as core to any feminist endeavour, is questioned - perhaps it is complicit with her own subjugation, or else expiating guilt and father-fear through staged fantasy?

aboriginal artmaking Where works by Aboriginal artists are included in the various areas of this exhibition, the works demand a collective enunciation. The rise of the Aboriginal art movement over the past twenty-five years has been one of the greatest

movements in the art history of this country. Their works explode the binary oppositions fundamental to categories of

Western interpretation: amateur/professional; fine art/kitsch; art object/artefact; abstraction/representation;

traditional/avant-garde. As such they have caused and contributed to the central debates which have arisen in the arts since the mid-sixties and which have generated the contemporary climate known as postmodernism. These are the debates which form the basis to the Griffitt, University Art Collection and thus Aboriginal artists have a central representation in the Collection.

Fiona Foley is one of the leading artists in the contemporary Aboriginal art movement. A member of the Batdjala people of Fraser Island and past artist-in-residence at Griffith Artworks, her work Booral mangrove (1995) conveys a profound

message of political, social, environmental, and spiritual importance. The bleached driftwood, ghost-like in appearance,

18

Destiny DEACON

Trarou·r

l

- Dancin

g

dollir

s

199 3 -9 5

19

.,

resembles bones of ancestors and couples the histories of Aboriginal persecution and environmental devastation. These

sticks seem to be both spirits of the trees which have been felled and bones of the Aboriginal ancestors who were their traditional owners, caretakers, keepers. The title of the exhibition in which this work featured was Land deal, lielvet

water, which not only refers to the historical removal of Aboriginal peoples from their traditional lands, but also to the

contemporary Mabo legislation which has tried to re-instate their original ownership (but which has caused so much

controversy and revived racist sentiment among white Australia). The Batdjala people of Fraser Island are currently putting forward a land claim on Fraser Island. Boom/ mangro11e is also a minimalist sculpture, which through its repetition, and its simplicity, creates a meditative, contemplative space for the viewer. The very minimal artistic

intervention allows the forms of nature to have equal privilege within the human-made artwork, dissolving the Western

division between nature and culture.

Desriny Deacon is a Koori feminist artist ancl photographer, as well as a teacher, performer, writer, video-maker, and

broadcaster. Iler low-tech enlarged polaroid shots reflect upon and attempt to redress stereotypes about Australian

Indigenous people. Her visual language is drawn from popular culture - comics, television, cinema, mass-circulation

magazines, newspapers, pulp-novels, advertising, kitsch souvenirs, memorabilia and domestic knick-knacks. Her savage humour reviles contemporary society for the cultural and economic impoverishment of Aboriginal peoples since white

settlement. Like Tracey Moffatt's work, these tea towels are macabre self portraits, where identity is objectified by the gaze

of consumerism and kitsch.

White artist Donna Confetti created the work Black deaths i11 custody (1995) as her expression of outrage and despair at the incarceration and death of Aboriginal people. The work is installed high on the wall, forcing the viewer to look

up at the Australian coal of arms. The towel scrolls down with the roll call of black deaths - the letters and m1mbers

before the date are the official codes used by the Muirhead Royal Commission to identify the individual deaths. The names have been omitted as a mark of respect for the mourning traditions of Aboriginal peoples to not speak the

name of the dead, and to reinforce the impersonal nature of the Western system describing and investigating their deaths. The use of embroidery references the long social and political history of commemorative craft (tapestries, quilts, tlags, clothing). Confetti accuses the authorities of literally washing their hands of responsibility for the

system that perpetrates these statistics.

In the construction and deconstruction of identity, be it national or personal, collective or individual, there is a demand

for dialogue, an insistence of difference. We position ourselves and are positioned by others strategically so that we fall within or without their embrace. We choose to remember or forget, to accord significance or to trivialise.

20

John GILLIES and The Sydney front Teclwo/Dumb/Show 1991

21

video and new technologie& The first studio established by the QFDC in 1975 was the video studio and the first artist-in-residence was the experimental video artist David Perry. His work Interior with views ( 1976) features the interior of the small demountable studio building

with its views onto the bushland of Toohey Forest which surrounds the Nathan campus and promotes an environmental consciousness at the University. Perry creates a Cezanne-esque painterly surface on the video monitor from the humble

surroundings of classical still life objects. When Griffith ARTWORKS was awarded a Collections Development Grant from the

Australia Council in 1994 to acquire works in video and electronic-based media, the Collection was able to revisit its origins and renew its original interest in film and video-making, acquiring this work.

David Perry was a friend and colleague of artist Albie Thoms who was one of Australia's first experimental film-makers

and who wrote the "Handmade Film Manifesto" (first published in San Francisco in 1967, then in Sydney in 1968). His

work Bluto (1967), like the works by lan Burn and Brett Whiteley discussed earlier, pre-dates the establisl1ment of the University and foreshadows the radical rise of intermedia visual art practices in tl1e coming decades. Created by

incising on opaque film stock and handcolouring the incisions, Bluto was inspired by Paul Klee's notion of "taking a

line f or a walk" and Jackson Pollock's abstract expressionism. It also has a "handmade" soundtrack, created by incising

in the soundtrack area of J:he film, twenty-eight frames ahead of the images in order to maintain synchronicity.

Other works included in the compilation on the gallery monitor further explore techniques of abstraction in sound and

image from documentary (Frank Osvatli's Homage to

10h11

Cage 1993) to animation (Jennifer Leggett's E 1994),

computer generated imagery (John Tonkin's Air and water I-Ill 1994) to mathematical algorithms (Mike Nicholls' and

Tim Kreger's Bifurcate 1994). re collection also includes two nights of film and video art screenings: "Permeable Bodies" which explores physicality, performance, and sexualities; and "·Land Marks'' which explores issues and imagery

surrounding the landscape in Aboriginal video and filmmaking. "Land Marks" includes Rachel Perkins' documentary of

her father Charles Perkins, the first Aboriginal to enter university, and his years of campaigning and activism for

lndigenous rights. Perhaps the recent re-occurrence of nationwide student and academic activism will lead to a renewed concern in universities for community politics and formations of democracy.

The rise of new technologies and their impact on the visual arts cannot be underestimated in the furthering of debates, the generation of new techniques and media, and the stimulation of artistic innovation and experimentation. The

technologies of reproduction continue to monopolise our contemporary aesthetic sensibilities, and to seduce us daily into ever-more virtual realms. Traditional social, political, and aesthetic boundaries have collapsed: abstraction and

representation have dissolved into hyperreality; private and public have dissolved into consumerism; fact and fiction have dissolved into info-tainment.

22

Dorian DOWSl: 0111Tiµi 1996

23

The final works to be discussed here and the most recent acquisitions f or the collection are the two works in CD ROM -

Felix Hude's Haiku Dada (1996) and Dorian Dowse's OmTipi (1996). Curiously, they mirror two of the founding schools of Griffith University - Modern Asian Studies and Australian Environmental Studies. They also restate the f ounding aims

of the QFDC - interdisciplinarity and community. lt seems that these two "ideals" are becoming more and more difficult

to realise and yet these works in CD ROM manifest them clearly and call for them insistently.

OmTipi is comprised of three layers of imagery randomly brought together through a mathematical algorithm. One layer

consists of scanned documentary photographs of "Orn Shalom", a tipi community in Northern New South Wales; a

second layer depicts close-range photographic images of organic bush surfaces (rock, leaves, lichen, bark, sand, etc.); the

third layer consists of computer-generated fractal patterns (from mathematical geometry). The CD is non-interactive and is meant to be a two-dimensional surface similar to a painting, yet with an ever-changing patina of colour and texture.

Dowse simulates the presence of nature, constant yet ever-changing and self-renewing, an organic aesthetic For high technology. ln contrast Haiku Dada is a highly interactive CD, with many complex layers of image, sound, text, and

animation. lt playfully and fantastically creates and explores another cultural realm through sophisticated appropriations from a multiplicity of sites and sources.

Returning again to memory, to collecting and recollecting, it is from a sea of absences that memory's bric-a-brac is cast

ashore, the flows of forgetting which direct schools of fishes along their life paths. My omissions in this brief and subjective account will be as important as my inclusions. The continuity, the history, and the communities are all

fictions which must be rewritten and reinscribed within ourselves. lf not, if we presume we already know these things, we are in danger of reproducing the many violences which have been experienced in their name (Continuity, History,

Community). The creative, collaborative, interdisciplinary spaces between life and art inhabit shifting ground, lines of

fault, lines of flight.

Beth jack6on Curator

24

li6 t ou work<S • Acquired with the assistance of the Federal Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

All measurements indicate image in cm, height before width.

Bronwyn BANCROFT

Cori11g for people wirh AIDS from the series Everybody's busi11ess 1992

offset lithographic poster 89.0 x 61.0 cm Gift of Thomas Vale Slattery and the Qld AIDS Archive Chris BARRY (Krystyna Marczak) Puppet from the series Lost in rra11slatio11 1992 type C photograph 152.0 x 127.0 cm Cherie BRADSHAW (Mantis Prints) Cling tight sisrer cl980 screenprinted poster 51.0 x 76.0 cm Cherie BRADSHAW (Redback Posters)

Prostit11rio11 is the rental of the body.

Marriage is the S{1/el 1980

screenprinted poster 88.3 x 76.0 cm

Peter BURGESS The seat of. .. I 995

painted basswood and graphite on paper one sheet, 23.5 x I 37.2 cm and two constructions, each 8.3 x 3.7 x 3.5 cm Jan BURN

Systematically altered photograph /A} 1968

offset lithograph on paper 56.0 x 71.0 cm Ian BURN

Systemarical/y altered phorograph (DJ 1968 offset lithograph on paper 56.0 x 71.0 cm

Michael CAlLAGHAN (Redback Graphix)

Bush radio 1985

screenprinted poster 74.4 x 100.4 cm Gift of CAAMA (Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association)

Michael CAlLAGHAN (Redback Graphix) Walik11 tjukurpo 1989 screenprinted poster 94.0 x 67.1 cm Michael CAlLAGHAN (Redback Posters) What now Mr Mao? 1979 screenprinted poster 75.9 x 51.3 cm Michael CAllAGHAN (Redback Posters)

Q. If tl,e 1111e111ployed are dole bl,ulgers, what

the f11ck are the idle ric/1? 1979

screenprinted poster 75.9 x 88.7 cm

Donna CONFETTl Black deaths i11 cusro{ly 1995 mixed media construction 210.0 x 37.0 x 40.5 cm (irreg) Lawrence DAWS Brett Whitclev at Owl Creek I 978 etching and aquatint on paper 50.0 x 50.0 cm Gift of the artist lawrence DAWS

View of the Himalayas from the Glasshouse Mou11tai11s 1978

etching and aquatint on paper diptych, each 100.5 x so cm Gift of the artist

Destiny DEACON Tearowel - Da11ci11g dollies 1993-95 laser transfer on linen 57.0 x 91.0 cm Destiny DEACON Teatowel - I sw, myself 1991-95 laser transfer on linen 57.0 x 90.0 cm Dorian DOWSE ·omTipi 1996 CD ROM Rose FARRELl and George !'ARKIN T " he a11111111ciatio11 from the series Repe11tance 1988 type C photograph 127.0 x 163.5 cm

Lynette FINCH

All those i11 fal'our of .slave labour raise yo11r righr lrn11d 1985 offset lithographic poster 75.4 x 46.4 cm Lynette FINCH

Why we oppose ,·ores for men 1979

screenprinted poster 64.4 x 79.5 cm Fiona FOLEY

Booral ma11gro1'e 1995 bleached and painted mangrove wood 114.0 cm x variable A. GEE (Lucifoil Poster Collective) Don't log rai,(foresr cl98! screenprinted poster 75.9 x 50.8 cm

Elizabeth GERTSAKIS "Beautiful daughters from the series A glamorous privare l1isTO')' 1989 cibachrome photograph triptych, each 51.0 x 40.5 cm Elizabeth GERTSAKlS "Beautiful sons from the series A g/amo1·011s private hisro')· 1989 cibachrome photograph triptych, each 51.0 x 40.5 cm Jeff GIBSON

dis ENGAGE 1986 screenprinted poster 90.0 x 60.0 cm

Jeff GlBSON

H,1111a11 1wture from the series Screwballs 1992 screenprinted poster 151.6 x 102.0 cm

Anne GRAHAM Pull 1994 horsehair. bamboo lice combs, rubber bands and pins 78.0 x 106.0 cm Felix HUDE

•Haiku Dada 1996

CD ROM

Teresa JORDAN (lnkahoots)

Respect from the series Special edition 1994 screenprinted poster 63.8 x 45.0 cm

25

lngo KLEINERT

Tim MAGUIRE

corrugated iron construction seven, each 55.0 x 95.0 x 18.0 cm (irreg)

lithograph on paper 43.7 x 43.5 cm

Christopher KOLLER

Tim MAGUIRE

U11tirled 1995

Ex Voto (Gracias Virge11cita para e/ sue110 11ue me co11t0 q11e yo 111111ca 11gradaceria a mi p11dre/ Tha11k you dearest Virgin for t"he dream which rold me I would 11e11er please my father 1990-1991 ty11e C photograph and tin plate construction 198.5 x 118.0 x 57.0 cm Richard LARTER U11ritled 1978 offset lithograph on paper 51.0 x 38.0 cm Janet LAURENCE

Metals liquids a11d gases from the series Periodic table 1993 screenprint and oil paint on metal five panels, each 45.0 x 30.0 cm

Jennifer LEGGETT ·£ 1994 shot on super 8, completed on video 9'00'' David Mc01ARM10 Yes 1992 offset lithographic poster 67, I x 44.4 cm Gift of ACON (Aids Council of NSW) Anne MacDONALD Untitled from the series Above a11d below the gm11e 1991 type C photograph 31.2 x 31.2 x 4.2 cm Robyn McDONALD (Jnkahoots) Betrayal of a 11atio11 from the series Special edition 1994 screenprinted poster 64.0 x 90.0 cm Marie McMAHON (Redback Graphix)

Pay the re11t you are 011 Aboriginal land c1982

screenprinted poster 76.0 x 56.0 cm

Robert MacPl·IERSON

Ma111111al-ma111mal (U11titled} 1979/80 ink on paper and found object seventy sheets, each 29.5 x 21.0 cm

26

.,

Under bridges II 1989

Under bridges IV 1989 lithograph on paper 43.7 x 43.5 cm

Tracey MOFFATT Untitled from the series Per 1lla11g 1992 cibachrome photograph 109.0 x 81.6 cm Mike NlCHOLLS and Tim KREGER *B(furrnte 1994 feedback video FX image and music 11'30" Frank OSVATH

Homage to 101111 Cage 1992 super VHS

TOO"

Gift of the artist Mike PARR

•Gegliena E Regl,ena (perspecti,,e as sword and ceiling) Geghena (self-portrait as a dream) 1983

charcoal on paper 183.8 x 272.0 cm David PERRY

Interior with 11iews 1976

VHS colour video from low-band U-llllatic master

s·oo·

Gift of the artist Eugenia RASKOPOULOS Untitled 110 10 from the series Dangli11g l'irgi11s 1992 67.5 x 81.5 cm gelatin silver photograph Scott REDFORD

Map of the world 1987

construction with wood and found object 55.0 x 43.2 x 9.6 cm (irreg) luke ROBERTS U11ritlcd I 990 featuring Chrisr and Kallio 1989 from the photograpl1ic performance series I+ I =3. Performers: Luke Roberts and Joanna Meighan. Camera: Stephen Crowther. photograph and various media 41.8 x 58.9 cm

Luke ROBERTS

FRIDAPEOPLE (detail} 1993 seventeen polaroid photographs, each 10.4 x 10.2 cm Gift of the artist Toni ROBERTSON and Chips MacKlNOLTY (Earthworks Poster Collective)

Daddy, what dill YOU da i11 the nuclear war?

1977 screenprintecl poster 76.1 x 50.7 cm Gift of Dr Margriet Bonnin Paul SELWOOD

l"IISI c1978 steel and paint 360.0 x 395.0 x 75.0 cm

Purple a,111

Martin SHARP Mo 1982 screenprinted poster 90.0 x 45.5 cm Chris STANNARD (lnkahoots)

New world order 1991

screenprinted poster 91.2 x 70.9 cm

STELARC Untitled from the portfolio S11spc11sio11s 1991 photo-etching on paper 45.0 x 60.3 cm

Mike STEVENSON Pre-mille1111ial trib11//ltio11 1994 pastel 011 paper 57.0 x 76.0 cm

James SWAN (Pitchas)

Dynamic hepnorics 1984 screenprinted poster 75.7 x 50.5 cm Albie THOMS •a111ro 1967 t 6mm colour film 5'00" Hiram TO

*Ctmtal 11ictim 1991 type C photograph 157 .0 x 103.0 cm John TONKlN

"Air and water I-I I 1994 I

computer animation 10'30"

UNKNOWN Give Fmser rhe razor c1981 screenprinted poster 76.0 x 56.5 cm UNKNOWN

Per�ormance Art

Thursday, 15th August, 1996.

Barbara CAMPBELL The seductio11 of an 1982

Deb VERHOEVEN and Ambree HEW1TT Pucker up 199 I shot on super 8, completed on video 10'00" Gift of the artists Geoffrey WEARY

The stolen land cl981 screenprinted poster 58.4 X 45.7 cm

Luke ROBERTS Hypnotism 1996

UNKNO\<\IN [Earthworks Poster Collective) No god no masrer c 1980 screenpri11ted poster 96. 7 x 60.5 cm

Film and Video Art Screening6 Permeable Bodiel>

Thursday. 22nd August, 1996.

Tlrnrsday. 29th August, 1996.

UNKNOWN (Griffith Revolutionary Cabal) Vore for nobody c1981 screenprinted poster 51.0 x 38.0 cm

Paul ANDREW •£11gaged I 994 shot on Super 8 and SYHS. completed VHS 9'00"

UNKNOWN (Griffith University Union of Students) Ten years of student press c1985 screenprinted poster 76.3 x 51.2 cm

ARF ARF (Marcus BERGNER. Frank LO\/lCE, Merisa STIPE and Michael BUCKLEY) 'T/1read of voice 1993 16mm, transferred l'o VHS colour video 18'00"

CAAMA (Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association) •Dam special from the series Ngmwmpa A11we11eke11/1e 1991 VHS colour video 7']0"

UNKNOWN (Redback Graphix) Artists for peace 1984 screenprinted poster 75.8 x 56.0 cm

John GlLLIES and TI1e Sydney Front Tec/1110/Dumb/Show 1991 VHS colour video 20'00'"

UNKNOWN (Women's Domestic Needlework Group) Women who toiled 1979 screenprinted poster 79.9 x 51.1 cm Ruth WALLER

*Deep time in red 1993 oil pastels and photocopy on paper fifteen panels, each 30.0 x 42.0 cm

Diana LEACH

·Brief secrets 1993

35mm colour, VHS colour video 7'00" Penny McDOWELL and Tim SLADE "Li11k 1994 shot on super 8 and Hi-8, completed on Beta SP 8"45"

10 Rillingron Place WI I (still from t1 proposed 16mm film) 1964

Mahalya M10DLEM1ST and Sue-Ellen KOHLER •v,,,arium from the solo dance performance Hybrid 1993 16mm film, colour and black and white 1]'00"

Judith WRIGHT

•Projection 1993

Brett Wl-llTELEY

screenprint on paper 59.0 x 55.0 cm

lnrage of absence 1996 etching and aquatint on paper diptych, each 89.0 x 88.8 cm Anne ZAHALKA •me gentleman 1995 colour ilfachrome print, digital image 100.0 x 74.6 cm

•objem for the bli11d 1994

VHS colour video 6'00"

Land Markl>

Peter KEN

EDY

and John HUGHES

•011 sacred land 1983

VHS colour video 20'00"

Tracey MOFFATT

*Night cries: a rural rragedy 1990

VHS colour video 17'00"

Rachel PERKINS *Freedom ride from the series Blood brothers 1992 VHS colour video 60"00" Randall WOOD

*Goori Goori dreaming 1993

VHS colour video 7'00"

Martina PALOMBl

shot on video 8, completed VHS 5'00" STELARC

•psycho/Cyber: llirrua/ and robot e1Je111s

/992-1993, 1992-1993 VHS colour video 18"00"

27

acknowledgment6 The Griffith University Art Collection's development owes much to many people, not least the Founding Vice-Chancellor of Griffith University, Professor John Willett, whose early vision secured a place for the visual arts in the University. Dr Margriet Bonnin played the major role in the development of Griffith ARTWORKS as it is today. Under her directorship and with the support of the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Roy Webb, and the Griffith ARTWORKS Advisory Committee, Dr Bonnin achieved a national profile for Griffith ARTWORKS, and the respect of the arts and University communities for ARTWORKS' program. ln March 1996, Griffith ARTWORKS was organisationally re-located to the Queensland College of Art. The Provost a Director, Queensland College of Art, Professor lan Howard's interest in this project is acknowledged with thanks. re collection has been a team effort from ARTWORKS' staff - Curator, Beth Jackson; Curatorial a Technical Officer, Kath Kerswell; the Arts Assistant (temporary) Priscella Oliffe, and Project Manager, Panos Couros. The contributions from Art Attackers Geoff Heller and Edwina Bartleme, and our volunteer Hans van Diest, are acknowledged with appreciation.

Our thanks to all artists in the Griffith University Art Collection. Thanks also to the Brisbane City Gallery Director Frank McBride and staff, and to Manson Framers, and International Conservation Services. Special thanks to Griffith University's Office of Community Services for their initiative in producing nine postcards of works from the University Art Collection, to be released with re collection. For the generous loan of computer terminals for the duration of the exhibition, we thank Choice Connections of Toowong.

B Tuckerman

Published by Griffith University Nathan Queensland 4111 © Copyright Griffith University 1996 ©

Copyright, all images reproduced by kind permission of the artists.

Cling tight sister by kind permission of Mr l E Bradshaw. lSBN O 86857 813 4 Curator: Beth Jackson Graphic Design: Susi Blackwell

photography

Tony Armstrong: pages 7, 9, 11, and 17.

Simon Poynton: page 19.

Martin Wulf: page 13.

�

Courtesy the artists: pages 15, 21, and 23.

The Brisbane City Gallery is operated under a management agreement between the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University and the Brisbane City Gallery.

28