A Melbourne Mood: Cool Contemporary Art

Dates:
1 March – 4 April 1984

Artists:
Howard Arkley, Jonas Balsaitis, Jenny Bannister, Frank Bendinelli, John Brack, Jeffrey Bren, Mike Brown, Ian Burn, Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, William Delafield Cook, Peter Cripps, Janet Dawson, James Doolin, Lesley Dumbrell, John Dunkley-Smith, Ivan Durrant, Sue Ford, Dale Hickey, Robert Hunter, Robert Jacks, Bob Jenyns, Maria Kozic, Michael Lee,Bea Maddock, Clement Meadmore, Clive Murray-White, John Nixon, Ti Parks, Paul Partos, Mel Ramsden, Robert Randall, Ian Robertson, Robert Rooney, Peter Rosman, Sam Schoenbaum, Edwin Tanner, Eric Thake, Peter Tyndall, Trevor Vickers, Les Walkling, Jenny Watson, Gary Willis, David Wilson, Michael Young

Curator:
Peter Cripps

Opened by:
Bruce Pollard

Location:
Exhibition Gallery
Monash University, Clayton Campus

Touring:
Australian National Gallery at Melville Hall
Australian National University, Canberra
13 July – 14 August 1983

About the exhibition
A Melbourne Mood: Cool Contemporary Art featured works drawn from the collection of the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), and later toured to Melville Hall, Canberra, the site for a number of temporary exhibitions of contemporary art organised by the NGA in partnership with the Australian National University. The ‘cool’ of the exhibition subtitle was used less as a statement of value or fashion, and more so to designate practices that illuminated Marshall McLuhan’s notion of cultural producers increasingly working with the depersonalised and shared language of emergent media and communications industries. The grouping of artists included was representative of smaller Melbourne exhibition ventures such as Gallery A, Pinacotheca and Art Projects, contrasting with the institutional authority of the NGA. An intergenerational and multivalent show, A Melbourne Mood paired works by John Brack with Maria Kozic, and William Delafield Cook with Mel Ramsden and others.

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^{Image: Dale Hickey, Untitled 1969, oil on canvas, 173.1 x 172.8 cm. Monash University Collection, Melbourne}