Helen Fridemanis, Artists and aspects of the Contemporary Art Society, Queensland branch
Boolarong Publications Brisbane, 1991
While Helen Fridemanis's historical work on the Queensland Branch of the Contemporary Art Society (CAS) has produced a number of outcomes—an MA thesis, an exhibition, and a book—in this review I will focus mainly on the last of these. This should not be taken to imply that there is anything insubstantial about the exhibition, nor anything particularly impenetrable about her academic work, far from it. It is simply that the book, Artists and Aspects of the Contemporary Art Society, Queensland Branch, provides the most succinct and graspable account of the activities that are her subject matter.
Fridemanis is primarily concerned with the local history of modernism, and the way such tendencies were linked to the activities of the CAS. Thus, the exhibition, Contemporary Art Society, Queensland Branch 1961-1973, presented a range of exemplary art works from the period. However, as individual objects, they were not able to articulate their own history. Even the inclusion of various pieces of ephemera and a short catalogue essay, did not seem sufficient to clearly map out the links between the various pieces and their collective relationships to local artistic struggles.
The book is organised by what seems to be Fridemanis's central thesis: that the consolidation of modernist tendencies in Queensland based art practices, was a product of the private teaching activities of a number of artists from the late fifties onwards, and the collective interaction brought about by the formation of the CAS in 1961. The first chapter is very broad in scope, and provides a really excellent introduction to local contemporary art activities from the beginning of the fifties, through to the establishment of the Institute of Modern Art in 1975. There