In the wake of discussion sparked by Mark Davis's critical study, 'Gangland', 'youth' has become a priority government policy area. This can be problematic, for two reasons. Firstly, in terms of how we define the period of youth, and secondly, because these sorts of policy priorities can essentialise and homogenise the experiences of being young. Youth is a condition which cuts across all other demographic categories and any attempt to see young people as an homogeneous population is automatically doomed to failure. The inability of the 1985 International Year of Youth campaign to capture the imagination of young people in this country should have been a warning to all those who seek to cater to the needs of the nation's youth in a broad all-encompassing way. Fortitude, a group exhibition of art produced in Queensland by practitioners under thirty-five years of age, appears to suffer from these limitations. Including a range of artists at various stages of their careers and from widely differing artistic backgrounds, the show purports to be an overview of young art produced around the state. it makes no other curatorial claim. I have several concerns with this.
The definition of a young artist as any within more or less the first half of his/her life seems overly broad. The point is made on the show's opening didactic panel and in the catalogue that a majority of the immigrants on board the settler ship Fortitude, after which the show is named, were under thirty-five. Given the average lifespan of those living in the early Nineteenth Century and the rigours of the boat voyage from Europe this would hardly be surprising. Being in one's thirties at that time