PAINTING IN PERTH AND THE SOUTH-WEST
Introducing a recent symposium on Bernard Smith, Brisbane art theorist Rex Butler complained that the Australian art historian had only included Sydney and Melbourne in his story of Australian art.2 Butler has little to complain about these days, however, since Brisbane is now the epicentre of Australian contemporary art. This is according to Sydney curator Glenn Barkley, speaking in hushed tones to a small Perth crowd.3 For Barkley, the rise of the city is best represented by artist Robert MacPherson, while for Butler, the Asia-Pacific Triennials (APTs) rescued Brisbane from its status as a backwater for visual art.4 To MacPherson and the Asia-Pacific Triennials, one could add Tracey Moffatt, Gordon Bennett, Fiona Foley and Richard Bell, who rose from the ashes of the Joh Bjelke-Peterson era to prove that they did not need Bernard Smith to make their own art history. Even the director of the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Stefano Carboni, confesses that Perth ‘does not see art as a priority and culturally lags about fifteen years behind Brisbane’.5 Where did Perth go wrong? It lacks an international event like the APT, star artists and, to add fuel to the flame, major infrastructure like Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art. While other state galleries have expanded into spectacular examples of contemporary architecture, the Art Gallery of Western Australia looks increasingly like a car park for its fast ageing collection of paintings.
A pair of recent exhibitions could well turn all of this around for Perth, however, as they mark the return of a collection of local modern art that was lost for more than fifty years. Koolark Koort Koorliny (Heart Coming Home) at the John... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Revel Cooper, Aboriginal Corroboree Among the Gums, c.1968. Oil on board, 35 x 50cm.
Howard Taylor, The Black Stump, 1975. Polished concrete and mosaic, 457 x 500 x 500cm.
