New artist? was written for the Object and Idea exhibition held at the National Gallery of Victoria in November 1973. The curator Brian Finemore had discussed the exhibition with me several years earlier when I had jokingly complained about being left out of the the NGVs 1968 opening blockbuster, The Field. "Dear boy, we did [...]
Usually when you hear the name Vladimir Tatlin you think of his proposed 400 metre tall Monument to the Third International, a project that was never built but if it had been would now be regarded as one of the wonders of the world. But there was far more to Tatlin than that. In fact, [...]
This is a lecture I gave in 2010 at the University of New South Wales College of Fine Arts. Joanna Mendelssohn, the lecturer who asked me to give the talk , is one the very few academics in Sydney who has both been aware of my work from almost the beginning and is politically as [...]
I had the Victoria Street Resident Action Group and the squatting there in 1973 on my list of future posts. It was a critical experience for me and I have already talked about it before but I thought the whole event needed a bit more detailed discussion. Before I could get the time to do [...]
I've been thinking a lot about memorials recently partly because of other things I have been working on like Lithgow's proposed Inch Street memorials and also the bicentenaries of the the first crossing of the Blue Mountains by English toffs (Blaxland, Lawson, Wentworth) and the building of Cox's Road shortly after. But I've also been [...]
I produced a lot of work between the late 1960s and early 1972 when I stopped showing in galleries. There are at least 1200 drawings still in existence from this period, mostly for works that have never been exhibited. The works that were exhibited are usually just one of a series of variations and there [...]
The Barricades was written in January 1974 for The City Squatter, the newspaper we published within a few days of the massive police raid that closed down the Victoria Street squat and forced the Resident Action Group out of the buildings we had occupied for most of 1973. The complete text is at the end [...]