Off The Wall / In The Air: A Seventies’ Selection
Dates:
3 July – 10 August 1991
Artists:
Micky Allan, Hilary Archer, Howard Arkley, John Armstrong, George Baldessin, Jonas Balsaitis, Vivienne Binns, Peter Booth, John Brack, Ian Burn, Tim Burns, Jenny Christmann, Bill Clements, Tony Coleing, Marlee Creaser, Aleks Danko, Isabel Davies, John Davis, Domenico de Clario, Margaret Dodd, Helen Eager, Earthworks Collective 1971–79 (Mark Arbuz, Michael Callaghan, Jan Fieldsend, Colin Little, Chips Mackinolty, Jan Mackay, Marie McMahon, Toni Robertson, Ray Young), Rosalie Gascoigne, Elizabeth Gower, William A. Gregory, Joan Dickson Grounds, Marr Roy Grounds, Dale Hickey, Ian Howard, Robert Hunter, Bob Jenyns, Tim Johnson, Peter Kennedy, Richard Larter, Bruce Latimer, Nigel Lendon, Kerrie Lester, Tony McGillick, Chips Mackinolty, Marie McMahon, Robert MacPherson, Bea Maddock, Ian Milliss, Kevin Mortensen, Clive Murray-White, John Nixon, Jill Orr, Robert Owen, Ti Parks, Bob Parr, Mike Parr, Paul Partos, Paul Pholeros, Mel Ramsden, Toni Robertson, Robert Rooney, Gareth Sansom, Sam Schoenbaum, Ken Searle, Lynn Silverman, Guy Stuart, Imants Tillers, Peter Tyndall, Tony Tuckson, Ken Unsworth, Ruth Waller, Jenny Watson, John Wolseley
Curator:
Jennifer Phipps
About the exhibition
This major group exhibition of Australian art traced the relationship between 1970s art strategies and contemporary practice. Selected works were deliberately expansive, representing key 'alternative' developments from the early to mid-’70s, including installation, performance and conceptualism.
Guest curated by Jennipher Phipps (then Exhibitions Curator at the State Library of Victoria), the exhibition featured 145 works installed across two venues: the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) and Monash University Gallery. While ACCA focused on early examples from the decade, Monash highlighted later developments, including significant representation of the Women’s Art Movement.
In Phipps’ words, the key artistic concerns driving the radical shifts that Australian art underwent during this period included: ‘social and political meaning in art; the use of the mundane as an anti-aesthetic; irony; art as a serial process; repetition; the process of art-making as the artwork; the grid; and, above all, the words of Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity”’.
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Image: Robert Parr, Still Life 1976, washable French velvet, wooden frame, steel tubular legs, rubber, 77 x 72 x 128 cm. The University of Melbourne Museum of Art