Jenny Holzer Selection from The living Series (More than once I’ve wakened with tears running down my cheeks. I have had to think whether I was crying or whether it was involuntary like drooling.) 1980 82 cast bronze National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1997 © Jenny Holzer/Copyright Agency.
Giovanni Anselmo, Entrare nell’opera [Entering the work], 1971, gelatin silver photograph. Purchased 1980, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
Joseph Kosuth, One and eight – a description, 1965, fluorescent tubes, electrical components. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Purchased 1978 © Joseph Kosuth. Licensed by ARS & Copyright Agency.
Yoko Ono (artist) A box of smile 1971/ 1984 black synthetic polymer box with mirror National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1986
Aleks Danko [Imagination] c.1975 photographic reproduction National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Gift of Daniel Thomas, 1980 © Aleks Danko.
Alex Selenitsch raingold 1969 screenprint, printed in blue and yellow ink, from two screens National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Gordon Darling Australasian Print Fund, 2005 © Alex Selenitsch.
A man dashes across the centre of a field in a huge silver gelatin photograph, made by Giovanni Anselmo in 1971. It measures almost five metres wide by three metres in height. You can almost fall into it: and that is the same with much conceptual art featured in the National Gallery of Australia exhibit Power + Imagination, of which Anselmo’s Entrare nell’opera [Entering the work] is a centrepiece.
Curator Elspeth Pitt says she has focused on one decade (1966-76) of the National Gallery of Australia collection, essentially exploring the way art was so deeply transformed during that period. Conceptualism had an element of mysticism about it, she says, with American art critic Lucy Lippard referring to it as a dematerialisation of the art object. “This was really a period in which art absolutely changed,” Pitt says. “It was at this time when art didn’t have to be a painting or a sculpture anymore, it could be a movement or a performance or an action or a book.”
She also thinks younger artists will be especially stirred seeing how disruptive this period was and the way in which the exhibition challenges some perceptions that conceptual art is too cerebral and text-heavy. Grouped loosely in terms of performance, land art, word and language works and so on, Power + Imagination also reflects the early collecting history of the NGA when James Mollison was prolifically collecting for the country. Pitt says the works as a group resonate with each other to reveal something light, experimental and an atmosphere of the instability of change.
Power + Imagination: Conceptualism 1966–1976
National Gallery of Australia
11 August – 28 January 2019
This article initially appeared in Art Guide Australia July/August 2018.
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