At the first Canberra Sculpture Forum the naked Liz and Phillip were be-headed down by the lake. Media attention on this work and the different responses to it was seen around the world. What a hard act to follow! Certainly at this time no controversy has appeared to rival that of Liz and Phillip.
The Canberra National Sculpture Forum Board of academics, galleries, artists and architects selected 24 out of 160 proposals and negotiated with potential venues. There are only two part-time casual staff, as well as a Media Officer from a government department (unrelated to the arts) who volunteered her holiday time. They operated from a room in the sculpture department at the Canberra School of Art (CSA). Overall the total result was outstanding for a city a third the size of Perth. The Forum presented a high standard of work from elsewhere alongside the talented locals.
By arriving four weeks prior to the opening I was able to create my large work at Canberra Grammar School, and to observe and participate in the media and general build up to the event. My participation was funded by an ArtsWA grant, Canberra Grammar employing me as an Artist in Resident for their own Arts Festival and art sales, as well as the Forum underwriting some of my costs.
What does the public see? For events of this nature more people will see it in newspapers, magazines and on the TV, than actually go and see the work.
ABC News (Sydney) filmed three works-in-progress two weeks before the event; just prior to my first mockup collapsed. They also filmed CSA PhD student Nien Schwarz wrapping in cloth and stacking bricks to create a large X on the floor outside the National Library map section and Anne Murphy collecting and painting thousands of bones gold for a 4 metre high visual feast for her dog called Bouncer (media event one).
Then the Canberra Times arts editor, an ex-teaching staff member from the school where I was artist in resident, came down and photographed me building the second mockup for an artist profile in the Sunday Times (media event two).
The CNSF was “kicked off” by the ACT Minister for the Arts and artist Hayley Hillis tossing their shoes into her 4m high plexiglass cyclinder located in a shoppping mall (media event three). The public were encouraged to fill the cyclinder with their old shoes.
Then there was a lunchtime electronic media event by a pond where Bert Flugelman’s inflated Six (half) Tetrahedrons floated (media event four). There I also met Kate Murphy, who along with David Nugent had produced realistic street signs which banned happiness and Hawaiian shirts, amongst other things in the CBD. Also present was a representative from Women in Action who had provided over 400 shields for women to decorate with their personal responses to war. They have been inundated with requests to participate and it may eventually tour the country.
Just prior to this I finally tracked down Perdita Phillips, the other West Australian, who was busy preparing Termitaria: automated mobilised papier mache anthills inside the Canberra Museum and Gallery.
Friday sunset was the Opening by the lake where the plastic half tetrahedrons reflected in the water to create themselves whole.
The first day of the forum was a panel discussion at the National Gallery between Donald Brook (Emeritus Professor at UWA), Julie Ewington (Australian Art Curator at Queensland Gallery), Ian Howard (Provost & Director at Queensland College of Art) and Julie Copeland (ABC Radio). Brook theorised that sculpture is any real world sensory experience and exists pre-linguistically, therefore making null and void our linguistic dependent art theories. Ewington was more focused upon examining installation as an artform, whilst Howard argued that sculpture lost its dominance in the object hierarchy after the industrial revolution. Modern consumer products were producing more sublime experiences than sculpture produced by Enviromentalists, Experimentalists, Story-tellers, Traditionalists, Materialists and Authenticists.
The audience found their own way to three locations to view and discuss nearby sculptures with their creators. The result is that everyone only got to hear/discuss a third of the works and could not move between the groups because there was no timetable.
I saw CSA tenured staff member Michael Le Grand’s wave of rolled, twisted and painted metal sheets outside the National Library (larger than his first attempt during the first Forum), Schwarz’s brick X, Peter Naumann and David Sequeria’s bowl with text forms commenting on the classic form and function of the National Library and Susan Ostling / Toni Warburton’s Ground, an abstract work that unfortunately puzzled everyone. Rebecca Cummins’s Rainbow Machine, an inverted mister that fulfilled the promise of its title, and her Floral View, a raised pot of plants on a busy intersection (an inside joke on annual flower shows), were fun.
On the way to the informal dinner that night in the CSA café, I saw Judith Kentish’s (recently returned from France) cloth blister/sacs at the CSA Photospace Gallery.
The Sunday saw progressive openings at all the commercial galleries which had organised their own sculpture exhibitions. Solander Gallery presented a demented collection from local senior sculptors, while the professional Beavers Galleries presented machine sculpture by Sydney artist Leslie Oliver along with landscape-like portrait paintings, prints and sculpture by Dean Bowen.
These were followed by the Chapman Gallery, which like Solander is a suburban home with a few rooms both gallery and living spaces.
At aGOG (australian Girls Own Gallery), Anna Eggert exhibited lace stencil printed lead dresses. The canny Narek Galleries presented Alan Watt (the past head of ceramics at CSA) and his paperweights at the Botanic Gardens. The bush furniture, possibly by Stephen Rowley, was beautifully made.
As the sun set over the lake, hundreds of people watched a performance of the Bird King, Kevin Mortensen, followed by his exhibition of two decades of performance memorabilia, at the CSA. For the forum artists this brought to a close the more interactive part of the event. Now the media, editors and the public will look at the work over the next three weeks and create their own conclusions.
Reprinted from: Hay, G., (1998) Second Canberra National Sculpture Forum, Voices from the Underground, Perth, 3, 3-4.