'The Field' exhibition which opened the National Gallery of Victoria in its St Kilda Road location in 1968 has become a legend. It was brilliantly installed in the then new spaces, with sculpture in the open Murdoch courtyard and the paintings hung on silver walls. The work was for the most part by artists exhibiting at Pinacotheca and Gallery A in Melbourne, and Central Street in Sydney. It made no claim to be representative of Australian art at the time. It showed one coherent current direction: geometric abstract painting and sculpture. It was understood that 'The Field' took a stance against the overt Australian content of an older generation of artists. It was a manifesto for the international against the national. It was both a beginning point and an end point; its success and cohesion made it virtually impossible to continue.1
In 2003, 'Fieldwork' opened the Australian special exhibition programme at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia on Federation Square. It was to display 'the trajectory linking contemporary art in 2002 to The Field': 'plotting a curve of surfaces passing through a number of points' (according to our Oxford Dictionary). Thus there was an expectation that we would witness the continuation of abstract painting in Australia, including painterly abstraction; the critique of that abstraction offered by figurative painters as well as a number of contributing Field artists; and a sense of the various pressures on Australian painting and sculpture in the last thirty or so years of practice.
If 'Fieldwork' was intended to arch over Australian art since 1968, it did so idiosyncratically. Certain artists were represented in some number, and others were absent. Are we to take... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline