1 LA HISTORIOGRAFÍA CLÁSICA EN LA MODERNIDAD.

Despite their relative geographic isolation, the Mildura Sculpture Triennials were key in the early development of site-specific art in Australia. What began as the Mildura Prize for Sculpture in 1961, an exhibition of Modernist object-based sculpture, by 1970 was showing some of the most cutting-edge contemporary art in the country; this sudden change exemplified by Thomas’ remark in 1970 that ‘sculpture of this kind did not exist in Australia three years ago.’145 The triennials continued to provide a platform for many of Australia’s best-known established and then emerging sculptors until 1982. In

Peripheral Vision, Green claims that ‘until the Sydney Biennales from 1979 onwards,

144 _{The press release announced, ‘in another first, the Biennale will exhibit more than 30 site-specific}

artists’ projects on Cockatoo Island,’ yet only about six of the works could confidently be identified as site- specific – perhaps an illustration of Buren and Kwon’s arguments outlined earlier, that the term is subject to misuse.

[the triennials were] the most important museum representations of advanced art’.146 While the 1970 triennial showcased a number of experimental works such as William Allen’s New Zealand Environment (1970), and Tony Coleing’s Wind Construction

(1970), it was the following event in 1973, in which new art forms, such as installation and site-specific art, were widely embraced. Subtitled Sculpturscape to indicate an expanded ‘gallery space’, artists were prompted to make art outside the Mildura Regional Gallery, taking advantage of the surrounding scrubby land and river beds. Under the directorship of Tom McCullough, artists were encouraged to experiment and push the boundaries of the meaning of art, with McCullough declaring

The Sculpturscape exhibition will be a post-Christo landscape in which an Australian public gallery becomes totally concerned with the outstallation of important works of art which define, react/respond to, contradict, transform, merge with or consciously ignore the set environment.147

In fact, Noel Hutchinson remarks in his Art and Australia review; that the only restrictions placed on the artists was ‘their pocket, imagination and ability.’148

Graeme Sturgeon in his survey publication on the triennials, Sculpture at Mildura, argues that the most successful works in the 1973 event were those that attempted to work with the surrounding environment, where ‘sculptor and landscape combined to speak with one voice.’149 This dialogue between environment and art, for instance, can be seen in the artworks by Domenico de Clario, King Fisher, and John Davis. For his aptly titled Tree

146 _{Green, Peripheral Vision, 34.}

147 _{Letter from Tom McCullough to participating sculptors, 22 September 1972, cited in Graeme Sturgeon,}

Sculpture at Mildura: The Story of the Mildura Sculpture Triennial, 1961-1982, (Mildura: Mildura City Council, 1985), 50.

148 _{Noel Hutchinson, ‘Sculpturscape ’73,’ Art and Australia 11, no. 1 (1973): 76.} 149 _{Sturgeon, Sculpture at Mildura, 55.}

Piece (1973), Davis wrapped trees in various materials. De Clario also used the trees growing on site, creating a string maze wrapped around and between existing logs, trees and branches. Kevin Mortensen’s Objects in a Landscape (1973) comprised a number of rope and bitumen mounds dotted throughout the dry scrub in response to the surrounding environment. Clive Murray-White responded in a slightly different way, making work

that referred to the environment’s previous history as a rubbish tip, stating that his work was

intended ‘to work well in that environment by not confronting it, but existing in it, rather like the way that we stumble across bits of old machinery, junk. After all it, was a reclaimed garbage tip, and there were many reminders of that as one walked around the site.’150

Artists in the following Mildura Sculpture Triennials continued to explore notions of site- specificity. In 1975, for instance, Mortensen moved into an empty shop site, hiring an actor to play out his elaborate deception, Delicatessen (1975). Davis’ sparse installation,

Place (1975), consisting of a small white painted board, black and white photographs and film, was an investigation into the sculptural process.151 Alison Cousland and Margaret Bell planted a flower garden amongst the Mildura scrub, and de Clario created another scatter piece, described as a ‘garbage garden’ by Sturgeon, which was ‘unfocused,

hermetic, and unrelated to any existing tradition or model for the making of sculpture.’152

Sturgeon adds:

In addition to the various forms of sculpture which could be accommodated within some kind of traditional definition, (installations, earthworks) the 1975 Mildura exhibition included other activities only remotely related to sculpture and which had crept in as it were, under the wire. Video, film, performance, photography, gardening, rituals, kite flying and various arcane forms of conceptual art all claimed to be ‘sculpture.153

What Sturgeon highlights was the dilemma artists and critics faced when trying to categorise and name these extremely diverse new artistic forms in this period. As

150 _Ibid. 151 _{Ibid., 78.} 152 _{Ibid., 70.} 153 _{Ibid., 71.}

22. Kevin Mortensen, Objects in a Landscape (1973)

Donald Brook, an influential critic and proponent of this new art, wrote in the late 1980s: ‘the post-object art of the 1970s to which I believed I was contributing was not one movement but at least a dozen, travelling in almost as many directions.’154 _{It was clear} that the art being produced at Mildura no longer fit neatly into the traditional categories of painting and sculpture. Articles and essays from the 1970s excitedly discuss these new art forms, yet for want of a better word they were still predominantly referred to as ‘sculpture’,155 or to a lesser extent ‘earthworks’, ‘impermanent art,’ ‘post-object art,’ ‘dematerialised’ art,156 or even (sarcastically) ‘other schemes.’ Whatever the word used, Sturgeon claims that the 1973 Sculpturscape indicated that the very concept of

‘sculpture’ had changed, a message that is emphasised throughout his book.157 In a

Nation Review article, Brook assessed that ‘the new art is not primarily the manifestation of a positive doctrine … it is rather a range of objects, activities and ideas formed in general by negating or inverting one or more features of the traditionally established paradigm of art.’158