Dangerous Liaisons

The University of Queensland Art Gallery's exhibition, Return to Sender, is a glittering and sober trip down memory lane in which curatorial flair and a spacious exhibition space enable an intimate experience of a politically volatile and sometimes dangerous era in Australian Art.

The two-fold curatorial focus of the exhibition concentrates on a small group of artists who left, or escaped, Brisbane in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The reasons for their exile were largely politically motivated, for the Joh Bjelke-Petersen government had created an environment that was stifling for both artistic creativity and free speechⁱ. The second focus of the exhibition focuses on narrowing the mediums that are presented, curating only works that “incorporate aspects of photography and photomedia”ⁱⁱ, following the influential blooming Sydney art scene to which those Brisbane artists fled.

With such a narrow set of guidelines dictating the form of the exhibition, I was somewhat suspicious of the type and quality of the work that I might find as I entered the upper levels of the UQ Art Gallery. Robyn Stacey's two photo montages on perspex greeted me as I entered and I immediately found myself thrown back into a 1970s film narrative of my my own devising. Both contain images of women I believe to be the heroines, movie-styled and gazing beyond the setting and the viewer. I was in a streetlight lit carpark outside a small-town pub or motel, and I was in a high-rise with the burgeoning city pulsing below as the emotional drama unfolded, reflected in the thick glass. The rise of feminism and the empowerment of women in the turbulent 1970's speak strongly through these works and I found myself drawn to the heroines and their challenges in the city and the small town, and their determination to achieve in the darkness of oppression, reflected in the artist's inspiration:

Stacey made these works four years after the ABC-TV aired in 1985 Chris Masters's investigative report 'The Moonlight state', which highlighted corruption, and coincided

with the release of the Fitzgerald Inquiry report.ⁱⁱⁱ

I was impressed, and was not disappointed as I discovered the photo-weaving of Fiona MacDonald in her glowing series entitled Universally Respected. The juxtapositions enabled by MacDonald's skillfully produced works are not just the weaving of two images, but also the interweaving of multiple histories through the conflagration of a colonial portrait of men from the Rockhampton Club, and a portrait of the 'other', indigenous or poor immigrant. This could perhaps be derided as an ideological vision, but MacDonald's voice is a protest against “whitewashing”, literally, the history of Rockhampton, and championing the rightful place of the non-white population through an “interrogation of local history”^iv.

Jeff Gibson's wall-papered wall of Trigger Happy posters refer more directly to the dark political undertones of the exhibition, and “signals the rule of the gun”^v, perhaps a direct reference to Bjelke-Petersen's 'police state'. His Dis- posters are more refined and less likely to arouse contention, even though they attempt dissonance, they end up being glossy dialectical compositional portraits of famous films and their stars.

The film component of the exhibition has great depth, though its outdated methods and technologies could be termed humorous. As an historical perspective on 1980s and 90s video art, the films, such as Gary Warner's Resistance Today and Mark Titmarsh's Viva, provide a genuine insight into the turbulence and experimental attitudes of the “new media” artists of the period. Biting anti-film chaos seems to be the favoured form of video expression in the exhibition, and succeeds in transporting the viewer into a vortex-like world of new sounds, sudden changes and general disquiet, perhaps also succeeding in capturing the paranoia and fear experienced by some of the artists within society at the time.

Along the other walls lay diverse pieces by the ever-consistent Tracey Moffatt glamourising her ancestry, a strange balustrade-spear piercing some photos in perspex by Rosemary Laing, and some intriguingly produced prints by Lindy Lee who repeatedly photocopied images in order to blacken them into nothingness.

The narrow curatorial selection criteria of Return to Sender had very little impact on the exhibition's ability to show a wide and varied range of experimental and new-era art that was being produced in the 1980s and 90s by this small group. The overarching theme of exile from the northern 'police state' of Joh Bjelke-Petersen only adds to the depth of the audience's interaction with the artwork, and strengthens them through placing the works in a wider socio-political framework that still retains the individual trajectories of each artist.

iReturn to Sender, Introduction, (Exhibition Catalogue), 2012, University of Queensland Press, Australia.

iiReturn to Sender, Introduction, (Exhibition Catalogue), 2012, University of Queensland Press, Australia.

iiiRedline Series, [didactic], Return to Sender Exhibition, Queensland University Art Gallery, Queensland University.

ivUniversally Respected, [didactic], Return to Sender Exhibition, Queensland University Art Gallery, Queensland University.

vTrigger Happy, [didactic], Return to Sender Exhibition, Queensland University Art Gallery, Queensland University.