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Let there be light! Despite the fact that it took place in a small, unglamorous venue and was shown for only a week, Victory over the Sun (an invitation exhibition curated by Clinton Garofano and John Young) attracted considerable attention. It confirmed, among other things, that artist-as-curator is a role of increasing importance in the Sydney art scene (as it has been, for a longer time in Melbourne and Brisbane). Moreover, it is not too far fetched to say that this exhibition could only have been curated by artists.
The show's title comes from a Cube-Futurist opera of the same name produced in St. Petersburg in 1931. Kasimir Malevich, who in the following few years would develop Suprematism, designed sets and costumes for the opera. Suprematism, the painting of "pure feeling”, culminated in Malevich's famous ''white on white" series of 1917·18. Invoking the legacy of this pioneer of non-objective art, the curators invited twenty-five or so artists to contribute a work of the same dimensions and (non-) colour as Melevich 's Suprematist Composition: White on White. Thus, as well as being white, each work had to be twenty inches square. When I first heard about the exhibition I was intrigued by the provocative nature of these fascistic curatorial directives (who but fellow artists could get away with such a curatorial "method"!).
Victory over the Sun must be understood in the context of Perspecta, for which it was something of an antidote. The curators made a point of inviting artists not included in the Art Gallery of New South Wales ' show, and their selection brought work from a number of artists interstate. If the exhibition was, to some extent, a