punk, art and after
The director of the Ian Potter Museum, Chris McAuliffe, describes ‘Melbourne><Brisbane: punk, art and after’ as ‘what it’s like to be inside a fan's head’. And indeed it is, a maelstrom of memories and memorabilia for a time not so long past, but oddly forgotten, cast into the mists of memory via distance, age and misinformation.
Were Melbourne and Brisbane, culturally speaking, really so close? The city of black jackets and cold winters and the city of Hawaiian shirts and year-round sunglasses? What, back in the 1970s and the early ’80s, could they possibly have in common? A great deal, it transpires, as this eccentric and peculiar exhibition amply proves.
And Melbourne><Brisbane: punk, art and after is, as McAuliffe notes, the work of an obsessive, almost anal-retentive, fan. Not that this is all from one collection—no, David Pestorius, with almost excessive fervour, scoured the country seeking odd items, the detritus of the birth of punk in Australia and proof of the tortured beginnings of artists’ do-it-yourself galleries.
It is hard, at my age, not to get mired down in nostalgia for these ‘fuck-the-system’, knee-jerk reactions against the institutions of the time. Whether it was the punk music of The Saints or the arte povera of Art Projects, those were indeed the days.
As Pestorius’s meticulous selection proves, the Brisbane/Melbourne links were intricate indeed, and unique in terms of intra-city creative crossover. Unlike the Sydney–Melbourne rivalry of the time, Brisbane and Melbourne seemed to undergo some kind of metropolitan osmosis. Bands such as the Queensland-based Go-Betweens invited Jenny Watson to execute an album cover. Watson was then partner with John Nixon who moved to Brisbane to act as director of the Institute of Modern