Contemporary Knitwear by Australian designers
Art Knits is an exuberant and unashamedly colourful tribute to the quality of contemporary Australian dress design. Jane de Teliga must be congratulated on a presentation that does much to remove the sour aftertaste of the cynical Yves St Laurent show last year, with its aura of self-congratulation and couture worship. The ravishing colours of the knitwear, the frank acknowledgement of the Australian motifs and at times the witty comments (like Amy Hamilton's lugubrious "Sheep" jumper part of an outfit "An Historic Yarn” which is definitely more amusing than the Tom Roberts to which it vaguely alludes are optimistic signs for the future of this kind of creative art practice. As the designer Ruby Brilliant confesses, "Knitting is a journey through tactile and visual probabilities”. This journey takes the viewer through a welter of images, imaginatively culled from bush and forest, from wildlife, the sea, from Australian popular culture and even mediaeval sources.
Yet the exhibition does raise some significant theoretical issues. Its stated aim (and that of Wearable Art in general) is to explore dress as an art form, or to legitimize fashion/dress by somehow attempting to move it nearer to art. But to conflate fashion with art is a false oversimplification. There is an important sense in which the art system and the fashion system are separately located within the cultural economy, although each refers back to the other for meaning. To attempt-to move fashion to a position outside the pernicious consumer cycle is laudable but ends up as an impossibility within a gallery context. The objects still remain, in some ways, as rarefied as couture or high art. Even the attempt to distance the knitted and embroidered
Rose Borg and Peter Bainbridge, 1987/88. Photo: Martyn Thompson
