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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
We were hoping to go back to Nevellan this week to interview Bob Peel but he rang to say he didn’t want to talk because he didn’t run the property according to Yeomans’ original principles and so he didn’t really have anything to say. It was disappointing because we wanted to discuss in more detail [...]
GetUp has a campaign going on water and sustainability in the Murray Darling Basin, a contemporary issue at the heart of Yeomans’ program for better use of water in agriculture. It needs more support so sign up here.
The late 1970s were a long time ago and it is sometimes a bit difficult to remember exactly what happened. My original proposal for an exhibition about PA Yeomans at the Art Gallery of NSW in 1976(?) seems so lost in the mists of time it’s hard to get much together about it. Maybe it’s [...]
as Gauguin put it in the title to his greatest painting. Well, I’ll try and give a quick summary of what we are doing here and what we hope to achieve. This blog is an exploration of the work of the Australian agriculturalist and engineer P. A. (Percy) Yeomans but that is just the starting [...]
