Islands of promise in the dark waters of a new world order
For almost a decade now, the Asia-Pacific Triennial, unquestionably Australia's most important contemporary art exhibition, has established a new circuit of cultural flows which has effectively disrupted and challenged the traditional trade routes tying Australia to a particular imperial/colonial history and geography. The main capital cities, Sydney and Melbourne, and many of the best known contemporary Australian artists living there have been locked into this imperial/colonial space/time, frequently unaware of local/global developments closer to home.
While Sydney and Melbourne have provided the (relatively) big name showrooms for contemporary art in Australia, it is not sufficiently acknowledged that the most important work in the last thirty years has been done outside of these centres. In the early 1970s, while most artists were orienting themselves towards New York or Europe and Documenta, a small group of painters at Papunya was forming an organization which has transformed the way the world views Australian art. At roughly the same time, another key development – the Mildura Sculpture Triennial – brought together some of the most radical art we have ever seen in Australia in a development which, if a more sympathetic local government had supported it, might have made Mildura a rival to Kassel. Then in 1981, in Christchurch, New Zealand, ANZART, the first of three trans-Tasman artist-run exchanges was held, followed by events in Hobart (1983) and Auckland (1985). In 1987, the first of the ARX events in Perth broadened the regional links to include South-East Asia. We have reason to be very grateful to the under-funded enthusiasts who established these precursor events before official government policy saw any economic advantage in cultural exchange. As Paul Foss once put it, 'Art rushes in... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline