Political posters in Queensland
Signs of the Times: political posters in Queensland was an exhibition that served as a panegyrical catharsis for a post-Fitzgerald state. The seventy-five posters displayed dealt with nearly every conceivable issue: land rights, gay rights, women's rights, civil rights-all of those 'rights' which we, as a community, had so meekly allowed to be violated in the previous twenty years of conservative government. In applauding the tenacity and commitment of the political postermaker we, the audience, attempted to purge the guilt of our own destructive indifference. In many respects this exhibition was a doubleedged sword which allowed us both to celebrate and to mourn. In its recognition of the political poster as an important and vital art form Signs of the Times made an essential contribution to our understanding of this much maligned medium. However that self-same recognition was tinged with just a hint of regret for it carried with it the suggestion that radical politics was now a retrospective activity which we could happily consign to the archive. It was almost as if political posters, and indeed the polemics of political art, were things of the past-relics of a different age to be kept and conserved as curios.
Such a notion was never the intention of the curator, Clare Williamson, but differing perceptions of the political poster through its integration into the state gallery were inevitable. It is the nature of political art that its existence be tenuous and peripheral for it is from this marginalised position that it draws its power to disrupt. A political artform's reputation for veracity relies heavily upon the very lack of official sanction or acknowledgment it receives. In mounting this exhibition of political art