Looking at Seeing & Reading

About the exhibition
Looking at Seeing and Reading  was an exhibition about perception and language in the art of the past three decades. Curated by  Ian Burn (who passed away unexpectedly the year prior to the exhibition’s opening), it set out to illustrate different ways of looking at works of art, and to show that the primary argument of a work of art is visual rather than textual. The exhibition’s value was positioned in terms of enriching dialogues between artist and audience, object and viewer, practice and theory.
As Nick Waterlow, then Director of Ivan Dougherty Gallery, explains in the exhibition’s foreword, the idea for it emerged at a forum coinciding with Banal Art, curated by Rex Butler for Artspace in Sydney in 1991. There, Ian Burn presented a paper citing the 1960s as ‘a time when the object seemed to theorise itself’ as opposed to the 1990s ‘when the tendency is for theory to be objectified’.

Featuring forty-five works, the exhibition reviewed the conceptual nature of perception developed in the 1960s and represented in different ways in works by international artists such as Jasper Johns and Ad Reinhardt. It also emphasised alternative modes of seeing, apparent in works by contemporary Australian artists such as Aleks Danko and Jacky Redgate.

MUMA Online Exhibition Archive
MUMA’s online archive is expanding. We welcome your feedback and input. Please contact muma.communications@monash.edu with any information that could help enrich the archive for future audiences.

^{Image: Ian Burn, This Is Not a Landscape 1992, oil, ink, wood, Perspex, 83.5 x 83.5 x 12.8 cm. Monash University Collection, Melbourne. Purchased 1993}