Karen Hall and Ruth Waller, Cabaret Conspiracy at Maxy’s, Screen gems Studio, Darlinghurst 1979, Screenprint, 51 x 76 cm.
Paul Worstead, Settlement Dance – Sports and Annual General Meeting, 1978, screen print, 76 x 51 cm.
David Humphries and David Thomson, One Way Ticket to Sunshine, Cell Block Theatre, National Art School, 1970, offset print, 25 x 33 cm.
Gary Robinson, Land rights teach-in, 1979, Earthworks Poster Collective/Tin Sheds Art Workshop, screen print.
Martin Sharp, Kaspar, Nimrod, Nimrod Theatre 1973, Screenprint, 58 x 44 cm.
Toni Robertson, International Women’s Day. March on March 11th, 1978, Earthworks Poster Collective/Tin Sheds Art Workshop, Screenprint, 50.3 x 74.6 cm
Paul Worstead, A warning to warners, 1975, screen print, 86.6 x 61 cm.
Toby Zoates, Garibaldis, Tin Sheds Art Workshop, 1979, screen print from five stencils, 76.0 cm x 51.0 cm. Lender: Damien Minton.
Michael Callaghan, Films on Black Australia, 1978, Earthworks Poster Collective/Tin Sheds Art Workshop, Screenprint, 51 x 76 cm.
Paper Tigers is an exhibition of some 200 posters and other printed ephemera from the 1970s; ranging from posters for Mental as Anything gigs to anti-Vietnam War protests. It’s part of the broader Sedition festival which celebrates the creativity, political passion and spirit of dissent that fomented in Darlinghurst during that decade. “But it’s not an exercise in nostalgia or a history lesson,” says Lesa-Belle Furhagen, co-instigator of what she and Toby Creswell hope will become an annual event. Except it kind of is.
“In Sydney we don’t really take much care of our history,” says Creswell. “I think Melbourne honours their cultural heroes,” adds Furhagen, “but we tend to move on and not acknowledge our cultural legacy. There was this intersection between creative disciplines here at the time, whether it was music, art, film or theatre. A sort of perfect storm. So revisiting that is a reminder that we don’t need to just have one view.”
Another lesson that Paper Tigers points to is the cyclical nature of history.
The issues that range across the brightly screen-printed posters in the show – a woman’s right to choose, the senselessness of war, the inequity of racism, the need to protect the environment – are, as Furhagen puts it, “still front and centre in public conversation.”
Without resorting to nostalgia for a simpler time when rent in Sydney was cheap and love was free (at least from the risk of HIV), Furhagen and Creswell hope that these posters will inspire a new generation. “A poster is kind of an incitement to action,” explains Creswell. And Furhagen says, “We want to remind people that people got up and spoke up. It was a significant time.”
Paper Tigers: Posters From Sydney’s Long ’70s
National Art School Gallery
30 August—12 October
Have you ever wondered if someone who is no longer alive could create art? In answer to this question, biological artists Guy Ben-Ary, Nathan Thompson and Matt Ringold, in collaboration with the now deceased Alvin Lucier, have extended the experimental composer’s “ideas about the resonance of sound” for their immersive exhibition, Revivification at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.
A quiet power pulses through It’s Always Been Always at Fremantle Arts Centre, where six First Nations women artists reflect on kinship, Country and cultural memory.
Under Sammy Hawker’s gentle guidance, whale song takes shape, ocean water becomes collaborator, salt crystals scatter themselves like stars across analogue film, and ashes murmur secrets onto silver nitrate-soaked paper. Through what she terms “facilitated acts of co-creation,” Hawker gives voice to places, materials, and the more-than-human world.
In Fairfield City Museum & Gallery’s latest exhibition Within Heaven and Earth, seven artists, including Linda Sok and Tianli Zu, use storytelling as a device to explore personal identity and cultural memory.
Now showing at HOTA, Writers Revealed is an ambitious exhibition covering six centuries, presenting manuscripts, letters, illustrations and rare editions from many of the most influential authors in English literature.
With an approach to artmaking drawn from the “fieldwork of life”, twin brothers and artistic collaborators Man&Wah, who are now showing at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, use plant migration to explore duality and movement.
