In the recent history of Australian art, there are some names which have not been given the attention warranted by the importance of their practice. These artists largely came out of Sydney College of the Arts in the early eighties, and from around 1984 they began to work in the context of French post-structuralist theory.1 It must be emphasized that they never formed a "group" as such, but, in common, their art worked with the theories of Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida and Lacan, which questioned the whole notion of "communication" in terms of concepts of the independent operation and function of language.
Such ideas seriously undermined presuppositions in both the aesthetics of modernism and also in major political and psychological critiques which had acted as the alternative to modernist formalism. The old dialectic was severely pruned back to even more basic questions concerning the relationship of visual art to both its referents in "reality" (including psychological and political "realities") and to its addressee in the viewer. Post-structuralist analyses of this relationship ranged from the outright nihilism of Baudrillard regarding simulacrum and referent to Deleuze's attempts to subvert hierarchies of subject-object relations in favour of more fluid planarities. There was also the psychological-linguistic determination of self and other which in different ways, Lacan and, far more rigorously, Derrida investigated.
Such concepts were given airing at the highly influential Futur*fall conference at the University of Sydney in 1983 as a result of their sponsorship by certain members of staff at the Power Institute with whom the artists under discussion had contact.2
The significance of the emergence of such interests among Sydney artists has not been sufficiently documented nor analyzed since... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Decor II Installation Mori Gallery, 1987. Courtesy Mori Gallery.
Decor Installation Bellas Gallery, 1987. Courtesy Bellas Gallery.
