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When reading original art sources from the 1970s the name lan Milliss appears again and again, as an artist, a writer and an activist for artists' rights: yet now he is almost forgotten. When he is remembered as one of Australia's earliest conceptual artists he is seen, as he says, as a sort of Kurtz who started out well but took the logic of his art too far, way beyond the pale of institutional respectability into the jungle of left wing activism and union politics and the darkness of loss of identity as an artist.1 But in three recent exhibitions stylistic and attitudinal changes can be traced over a thirty year period, demonstrating an ongoing practice which challenges t_he reigning orthodoxy at every turn.
lan Milliss developed his art practice during a time of extreme questioning of the status of the visual arts-the end of the sixties. As a consequence his initial project was to collapse the boundaries between art, artifact and context in order to separate and analyse the component parts. Now, thirty years later, rather than using art to publicly dismantle categories, through a personal metamorphosis and resubstantiation of original forms, he is using art to symbolise categories, expressing addition rather than subtraction, construction rather than deconstruction. The three exhibitions in question have all occurred within the last eighteen months; the first and the one which included the most recent work being an exhibition in the United States.2 The other two are historical retrospectives involving the reconstruction of hard-edge formalist paintings, drawings, rope sculptures, installations and works involving audience participation .3 These were recreated from original plans, many constructed and shown for the first... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline