Brisbane, the 1980s
In his recent book Thinking Contemporary Curating, Terry Smith suggests the need for a shift away from a narrow focus on ‘the curatorial’ to what he terms ‘the infrastructural’. Central to this shift, he argues, is the requirement for an account of what he calls ‘infrastructural activism’. Such an approach moves beyond a consideration of art works, and the increasing demands of the ‘para-curatorial’ within the gallery and museum context, to the issue of how a context for art and exhibition practice is developed and contested. To grasp this field of activity Smith suggests that what is needed is a focus on ‘the pivotal role that alternative spaces, artist-run cooperatives, and supportive site-specific organisations … have played since the 1970s in the growth and diversification of infrastructure for the visual arts’.2 It is an area of research that is only just beginning, Smith argues, noting that a ‘history of these kinds of quasi-institutional initiatives throughout the world, especially since the 1960s, would show that infrastructural activism has been with us for a while, but has only recently come to be valued within the artworld as inherently creative, transformative, and essential’.3
While Smith cites just a few examples of ‘the beginnings of such research’4 the field is growing rapidly, as indicated by the recent publication of collections such as Institutions by Artists (2012), Artist-Run Spaces (2012) and Self Organised (2013).5 This literature builds on the accounts of individual organisations provided in institutional histories and publications that capture snapshots of the field at a particular moment in particular places.6 But such publications are really just the tip of the iceberg, the bulk of which remains submerged—a mass of smaller publications, exhibition... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Jeanelle Hurst, Highrise Wallpaper, 1988. Photography Jeanelle Hurst.
That Contemporary Artspace openings, including artists Belinda Gunn, Adam Boyd, Robert Kinder, Malcolm Enright and Katie Smith aka Kate-astrophe. Photography Jay Younger and The Shared Camera.
