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It would be easy to see re/form as an inexorable display of 'political correctness'. While its time frame is 1979 to 1995, these are works of the 1980s, overtly political, didactic and idealistic. They are modest yet incisive statements about how some of us would like the society we live in to be. When I began Art School in 1980, I remember being irritated by a lecturer who believed that art had changed nothing. I thought, perhaps naively, that the explicit politics of Picasso's Guernica and Goya's Madrid, 3 May, 1808 or the photographic project of the Farm Security Administration must have made some impact.
re/form's appearance at the Logan Art Gallery is timely in that it not only enables us to view these works in a new historical/political context but also to assess their success. Many of us had lived through the 1980's in the belief that Australia was a tolerant society with fair play as its driving force, where racism, sexism and poverty were on the wane. 1998, and thanks to the rise of One Nation we are horrified to find that nothing could be further from the truth. The works that Beth Jackson has selected from the Griffith University Art Collection represent a period of noble intent when many people really believed that art could be a powerful force for change.
Although I now see art as having a limited ability to motivate social and political change, the bringing together of Griffith University's art and law departments has laid the foundations for an interesting project. The catalogue which accompanies the exhibition is a series of essays by lawyers of varying