Irreverent Sculpture

About the exhibition
Curated by Margaret Plant, Irreverent Sculpture helped fill in a largely unwritten chapter in the history of Australian art with a focus on art that was made in the 1950s and 1960s and relied on unashamed strategies of wit and humour—whether intellectual or juvenile. Barry Humphries’s early Dada experiments, including several recovered and reconstructed works, were positioned as an entry point to the exhibition. Humphries’s work was allied to the earlier European Dada tradition, but his references were distinctly local. Reviewer Ken Scarlett wrote, ‘his Battle of the plate and Forkscape constructed from a multitude of twisted and tortured forks were in total contrast to the cool detachment of John Brack’s paintings of cutlery’. The inventive Sydney group of artists known as the Annandale Imitation Realists (Ross Crothall, Mike Brown and Colin Lanceley) contributed examples of their anarchic assemblages. Also featured was Ti Parks’s Tent II, 1968, in which the basic elements of a tent are held up—rather than held down—by ropes, and Clive Murray-White’s Fragments of a Larger System, 1967, made of four elbow pipe fittings placed against the wall.

Reference: Ken Scarlett, ‘Irreverent Sculpture’, Art and Australia, vol. 23, no. 3, 1986, pp. 318–322.

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