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GORDON BULL is Head of the Art Theory Workshop at the Australian National University, School of Art. He writes regularly and his criticism and commentary has been published in numerous journals, magazines, exhibition catalogues and surveys of Australian art. He is currently completing a doctoral dissertation on Australian Indigenous art in contemporary art exhibitions in the Graduate Program in Interdisciplinary Cross-Cultural Research at the ANU. Links Contact |
Reflections When the exhibition was installed I was surprised by its clarity and coherence. I wasn't surprised by the quality and integrity of the work of the individual artists, but by the ways in which those bodies of work were so effective when brought together in the show. It still isn't clear to me how the collaborative process achieved such a result. I think it's fair to say that the curatorial group intended such a result, but the result wasn't clear in the collaborative process: it wasn't directed, managed or determined by a single decision, or any decisive moment before the end of the installation. Rather, a long series of small decisions were set in play, where the ground shifted and the outcome changed right through to (and including) the installation itself, when several of the artists were involved in curatorial decisions too. As one of the curators I didn't have a clear vision of how the show would look until it was finished. None of the others could have either. In ways that are hard to pinpoint, the collaborative process, and the people in the process, made the exhibition the success that it was. Gordon curated Ruth Watson's works
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