We met at ACCA in the morning. Some enthusiastic punters beat us to it, and were already milling around in the foyer. They had brought cute-looking picnic baskets and thermoses, and there was an excited feeling of agricultural anticipation. Field Trip!
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The big FAG printing press (from which Big Fag Press gets its name) is a wondrous thing especially to someone like me who once worked in publishing. It is horrifying to think it almost went into the scrap metal crusher. Its survival is partly responsible for this project which originated in discussions Lucas and I had about some prints I wanted to do, a series to be called “What didn’t happen” about my past projects that had never happened or had failed or turned out differently to the way they had been conceived.
Lucas with the first print photo Louise Anderson
But one fact about the original Yeomans Project as envisaged back in 1975 was that it would never have contained prints, or anything else resembling conventional art works. The original proposal was an exploration of the idea that if you regard cultural innovation as the essential characteristic of artists then a lot of people working in areas that would not conventionally be regarded as art media (like farming) could be seen as artists. As a consequence their work should be collected, analysed and presented in cultural institutions.
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I know we have looked really slack not posting for two months but the reason was simple enough, we had to do the work for the exhibition Power to the People: Contemporary Conceptualism and the Object in Art . What an effort it has been, you wouldn’t think anything so simple could involve so much work and not just by us, an enormous amount was done for us by ACCA and the exhibition curator Hannah Mathews. The irony of this exhibition, with its title that references the radical activism of the 1970s, occurring at the same time as there is finally some growing public resistance to the pervasive corruption and decadence of the last few decades is an irony you could never have scripted.
The Yeomans Project installation at ACCA photo Andrew Curtis © ACCA
Of course the Yeomans Project overall consists of this blog which will continue as we put in more of the mountain of research we have accumulated, the work in the Power To The People exhibition and the bus tour to Taranaki Farm on October 8. We’ll talk about the bus tour later but in the exhibition we have a recently manufactured Yeomans Plow, a vitrine of Yeomans publications, signage of Yeomans logos, six prints recently made at Big Fag Press and the AGNSW Trustees minute book, kindly lent by AGNSW and showing a snippet of the exhibition’s history. Let’s talk about the prints first.
Lucas and I have been looking at photos to use in the prints we have been working on and I’ve been struck by the way the suburbs are creeping up on Yeomans’ early properties. I was born in late 1950 and the population is two and half times what it was then which in itself explains why sustainability has become an issue during that time and also why the art world is a very different place.
Just look at this early photo of Yobarnie, Yeomans’ first property
and this recent shot from Google Earth.
The figures are that Australia’s population in 1950 when Yobarnie was being developed by Yeomans was around 8.3 million and in 1975 when this project was originally proposed it was around 13.9 million, a 67% increase. Now in 2011 the population is around 21 million, a 153% increase.
Sydney’s population was 1.7 million in 1950 at which time Yobarnie was well out in the country, now in 20011 when it is over 4.5 million (165% growth) Yobarnie is probably closer to the geographical centre of Sydney than it is to the outer edge which in reality is probably the western escarpment of the Blue mountains near where I live and nearly 150 kilometres from the coast. Much of the land that is being swallowed up in urban sprawl was among the most fertile agricultural land in the country and crucial to food security.
Recently Ian and I visited Kirsten, Nick, Ashar and Trevor at the wonderful Milkwood property outside of Mudgee. We were all having a cup of tea after touring the farm, and chatting about P.A. Yeomans and the wider Yeomans clan. All of the sons (Neville, Ken, Allan) have gone on to do interesting things with their lives. Each of the sons contributed to P.A.’s book The City Forest (which I explored here): Ken wrote a back-cover-blurb entitled “For Youth”; Neville wrote the Foreword; and Allan the Afterword.
But, as Kirsten asks in her email,:
What was the story with P.A.’s wife? I was thinking about the sons this evening and realised I had no idea about her, or where she intersected with Yeoman’s work, the sons’ take on things, etc…
Good question Kirsten!
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On Friday I attended part of a conference at the National Institute of Experimental Art at UNSW specifically to listen to Donald Brook’s keynote address where he summarised his recent thoughts on defining art. His approach corresponds closely with what we have argued here, that art in the cultural evolutionary sense can take any form … but anyway you should read his address rather than my clumsy precis. This is the clearest and most readable summary of his ideas that I have seen and it relates closely to the overall theme of the ACCA exhibition. It is important to understand that from very early on there was a split within conceptualism between those intent on developing a marketable product and others like myself more determined to pursue the radical implications of the analysis inherent in early conceptualism. The commercial strand of conceptualism won out of course (as money always does in the short term) and has dominated for decades.
But seeing Donald reminded me that he also had ideas that were torpedoed by the cultural gatekeepers that now look increasingly prescient. Take a look at this project that failed to get funding.
My feeling is that the original exhibition never happened precisely because of the very issues it was addressing, the limited nature of the prevailing definition of legitimate “art” activity, especially because it didn’t look like anything that had been done somewhere else. Of course I would not be surprised if there were a lot of similar things going on all over the place but not well publicised. One of the ironies of the internet is that artists like me are discovering in our old age similar artists we should have known about when we were desperately isolated a few decades ago.
I finally heard of one about a year back from Diego Bonetto via Lucas, the incredible Italian artist Gianfranco Baruchello and his small farm outside Rome, ‘Agricola Cornelia’, which he assembled in the 1970s by buying back, one by one, the small plots of a fairly unsuccessful real estate development subdivision.
I suppose the cancellation of the exhibition was the clear omen that redefining who was an artist and what activities were legitimate forms for generating cultural change was not going to happen here any time soon, in fact probably not until it had already been done many times in Europe or the US for a few decades. As I always say, Australians don’t really like art but they like stuff that looks like art and what I mean is that if something is a genuine example of “memetic innovation” as Donald Brook says, then it is going to be different, probably a bit threatening to the existing order and certainly not necessarily easy to come to grips with.
And despite claims to the contrary, the Australian art world doesn’t really like anything that is actually different in underlying thought, they just like the window dressing to change regularly because that’s all part of business as usual. Today I saw a quote by Cocteau making a similar point:
Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.
If an artwork instantly looks like the most brilliant work of its time that will be because it conforms to an already well digested meme and will probably be completely forgotten in a few decades – but not before a lot of mug punters have been fleeced. There are a whole range of human cognitive biases that come into play in the art world that then get dressed up as “connisseurship” or “having a good eye” – things like the bandwagon effect, the mere exposure effect, status quo bias, availability cascade – and none of them are helpful in terms of understanding cultural innovation. But since I find cognitive bias the most interesting subject imaginable I’ll back off immediately before I get completely diverted.
The excursions with Lucas are turning out to be fun. Lucas is good company especially because he is uncommonly polite – his suggestion that I might be “hallucinating” when anyone else would have said “bullshitting” is an illustration of his politeness which hasn’t however prevented him from suggesting that I’m selling out by dealing with the art world again, a question I will deal with later in the unlikely event that anyone else gives a rats.
photo by Sacha Fernandez under Creative Commons Licence
But faced with ponderous bureaucratic might of the AGNSW I must confess I didn’t expect to find anything much on our trip. I thought the archives might have, say, a list of proposals and then a later list without the Yeomans show. But it turned out there are several mentions, two of which are fairly detailed. That is probably because of one of the first things you notice reading through the minutes, the fact that the Trustees in the mid 1970s were incredibly intrusive and overbearing to a degree that these days would earn them a fail in any Institute of Management corporate governance course.
It is now taken as standard practice that boards are there to give an organisation direction, to inform policy and also to help generate necessary linkages to the wider world, particularly in the case of art institutions for fund raising. They aren’t there to dictate which exhibitions will be programmed, how the exhibitions will be managed or to vet every phone call a curator makes yet back in the 1970s that seems to be what they were doing. No wonder that a number of key staff took off to the NGA and NGV in the mid 70s including all the people involved in my proposed exhibition – Daniel Thomas, Francis McCarthy (now Frances Lindsay) and Rob Lindsay.
But as Lucas points out, it wasn’t simply my exhibition, it was presented as PA Yeomans’ exhibition with myself and Frances as the organisers. This was of course always the point, he had produced everything that was to be in the exhibition, it was just that by putting it in the AGNSW we were raising issues about cultural innovation and cultural change – that if you defined artists as the producers of cultural change then in fact they weren’t necessarily, or even commonly, going to be found in the art world. We were arguing that it was the role of art museums to cast a wider net both in terms of how they defined art and culture and who they exhibited.
It was also interesting that the backing for the exhibition went to the top. The minutes mention specifically that the director and deputy director argued strongly for the exhibition, as if they had insisted that it be noted. The incredible thing about that is that in preceding years I had waged a very public campaign against the director, Peter Laverty, an artist and former head of East Sydney Tech, accusing him of being a timid and unimaginative bureaucrat who was not up to the job. I had such an effect that I was summoned by George Freudenstein, the Minister for Cultural Activities, to a lengthy meeting in his office to explain exactly what my complaints were. Laverty has certainly been overshadowed in public memory by his successor, the flamboyant Edmund “Fast Eddie” Capon, but it seems I owe him and his deputy director Gil Docking an apology in this case. If you ever see this Peter accept my genuine thanks even if it is thirty six years late.
The other interesting thing in the minutes, well actually there were a lot of interesting things if you understood the implications of what you were reading, was another exhibition proposal that didn’t get up. It was by Terry Smith and Ian Burn, to set up a room at AGNSW with a telex (them were the days, high tech communication at the cutting edge) direct to them in New York where they would discuss regionalism on line with all comers. I hope I misunderstood this, since they were both my friends, but sadly there seemed to be not the faintest hint of irony involved. If you read this Terry, please explain?
An amusing story has it that Ian Milliss met his now-wife, Wendy, because she was a keen art historian rummaging through the archives at Sydney University’s Power Institute. Wendy was researching the legacy of conceptual art in Australia, and found a few traces of this rather elusive character, who seemed to have disappeared from the art scene in the mid 1970s. Wendy somehow found some contact details for Ian, and went to visit him, digging through his piles of paperwork for a more detailed version of his role in (and out of) the Australian art world.
Besides the very narratable fact that all this librarianship led to romance, one of the things that tickles Ian the most is that a whole lot of his dishevelled paperwork ended up in carefully coded white cardboard folders, like the one pictured above.
I’m working my way through this, the “IM 1975/Yeomans” folder (aka Pr198.436-444) right now. As to what that complex code could mean, I have no idea, but it does seem to lend some authority to the scraps of paper, carefully wrapped in glassine, inside. (Ian has referred to some of these scraps in a previous post).
For the moment, I just want to draw attention to this one letter addressed to “Mr Melliss”, from Jeff Moss, the Managing Director of Random Writers. It is unclear as to what kind of arrangement Mr Moss might have had with Mr Melliss.
Our only clue: “I will be very interested to discuss the Yeomans project with you but will not be in Sydney from Thursday, September 18 to Sunday, October 12, inclusive. My wife and I are taking a trip to Malaysia”.
Who was this Jeff Moss? (The use of the word “inclusive” in the letter suggests he must have had a secretary to help him “put pen to paper” with his typewriter.)
Anyway, the answer surely is not hard to find. Up in Wallewerang, on t’other side of the Blue Mountains, sits Mr Melliss himself. I’m hoping my posting of the letter here will prompt him to reveal all.
If, that is, he can recall! (If not, perhaps Wendy can jog his memory).
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[ps - you can read Wendy Carlson's essay about Ian, entitled the invisible artist, here.]
A lot of Yeomans’ criticisms of city design are based around the idea that we’ve lost our ability to “see” the landscape. (I’m still exploring ideas from his book The City Forest, 1971…)
His argument is that a farmer living on an acreage for some time (if s/he is that way inclined) can get to know it intimately: the topography of the land, the different minerals, soil-types, and micro-climates which prevail within the property boundaries. This knowledge of the land (the ability to see it properly) comes from a lot of time spent living and working on it.
In cities, by contrast, the density of buildings often distracts from our capacity to read the rise and fall of the land. We are tempted to see vast areas of space as largely undifferentiated, even thought they do still consist of ridges and valleys which determine water flows. The much smaller parcelling up of land boundaries contributes to this problem – it’s that much harder to see “the bigger picture”.
Besides which, no individual (or team) is ever given the jurisdiction over the design of the bigger picture:
The professions have produced many masterpieces of design within the environment, but for the landscapes of town and country, which should have been planned to last indefinitely, there is no logical basis of design. The best of cities appear to be Topsy planned – they just grew and grew out of a series of accidents into the malignancies they are now.
(Note Yeoman’s use of the words “planned to last indefinitely”. These days, the term “sustainable” would surely be used to signify the same thing.)
Much of Yeomans’ teachings, then, are an attempt to get us to “read” landscape topography, as this will aid in our development of more intelligent urban/rural designs.
I have to say I agree with him about the difficulty in reading urban land. When Ian and I visited the Nevallan property, I could see (or least I imagined I could see) the contours of the land. (This perception was, of course, assisted by the inscribed lines in the landscape formed by strips of trees, and the judicious placement of dams.)
But in the city, it’s much harder to see this topography. Take downtown Sydney, for instance. The only reason I know that there are ridges and valleys in Sydney is because, when I ride my bike through town, I feel gravitational resistance. But apart from that, my perception of the city horizon is muddled by tall buildings, and water flows are sequestered underground through drainage. The natural undulations of the land have been experienced by urban designers as an inconvenience to be tolerated or flattened, rather than as a potential asset.
I reckon it’s reasonable to suggest that Yeomans’ work here — attempting to educate the public (and professionals) in techniques of perception — is a good example of what we’re trying to call “art”.
He uses his skill and experience to push us to see the world with fresh eyes; his work grants us an improved intimacy with our immediate environment; it expands our horizons of understanding. It’s a kind of landscape-literacy.
