REVISITING THREE ARTIST-RUN INITIATIVES
Popularly known as ‘fringe’ or ‘alternative’ initiatives, artist-run spaces are pushed subtly to the margins of the art world by the very language with which they are described. The view that artist-run spaces serve as stepping stones towards the bigger, brighter possibilities of commercial representation, and the notion that their independent and innovative practices provide fodder for an art world greedy for the new are more cynical manifestations of this model of contemporary culture which positions artist-run spaces as adjuncts to the mainstream. Two recent exhibitions in Melbourne, ‘Store 5 is…’ curated by Deborah Hennessy at Anna Schwartz Gallery and Max Delany’s ‘Pitch Your Own Tent’ at the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), importantly formalise a more productive approach to these initiatives by celebrating the achievements of three of Melbourne’s artist-run spaces in their own terms.
With faith in the notion of history as personal recollection, Hennessy pieced together ‘Store 5 is…’ as an artists’ narrative rather than a formal academic or historical survey. The participating artists were each asked to propose one or two artworks for the exhibition—preferably including one piece that was shown at Store 5 and another that reflects their current practice. Although Delany’s curatorial framework was quite different, choosing only to exhibit works which featured in the programs of Art Projects (1979-1984), Store 5 (1989-1993) and 1st Floor Artists and Writers Space (1994-2002), he fostered a comparable sense of dialogue, change and continuity by teasing out aesthetic and conceptual relationships between the three distinct spaces.1 What unfolds in both of these wonderful exhibitions is an alternative history of contemporary Australian art, written by its practitioners, which focuses on the avant-garde, the experimental and the... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline