Category 1970s

Walk Along This Line

Walk Along This Line got a lot of publicity when it was first exhibited in 1970 and it has since been remade at least half a dozen times. It has even had an entire exhibition of its own at Sydenham…

New Artist?

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…

Homage to Tatlin

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…

Victoria Street Squat

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…

The Shame File

floor names

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 first crossing of the Blue Mountains by English toffs (Blaxland,…

Doormats

doormat 1

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…

The Barricades

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…