Page 48 - Studio International - February 1971

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4 Tim Johnson There are many others here, in Melbourne, in
Exterior Window Installation, 1970 Adelaide and elsewhere. The choice is local and
Wood
5 Peter Kennedy personal; it is not meant to anticipate History,
Installation, 1970 or to force its hand.
Fluorescent lights and expanded metal Michael Parr is a painter who has turned
6 Peter Kennedy
Sheep, 1970 recently to the use of the typewriter as an
Photograph artistic tool. His concrete poems, like the Series,
7 John Armstrong 1970 and Structure, 1970, represent only a
Branch, 1970
Marble, wire and wood narrow and perhaps over-familiar range of the
machine's potential. He is also a most active
force in the new Sydney gallery INHIBODRESS,
which is the first of the forming co-operatives.
The impulse is everywhere growing to find a
form, a context, a common basis for artistic
activity outside the dealer-system and
uncommitted to the production of those
permanent, portable, marketable objects that
have sustained the traditional business of the
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visual arts.
A dozen artists combine at INHIBODRESS to
pay the rent for a large second-floor factory
space that they use in rotation. The ideological
dynamic of the thing is not at all well
articulated. Cynics say that a motive for
membership of the co-operative is the ordinary
failure to have work accepted by the regular
commercial galleries, and in some cases there
may be more than a grain of truth in it :
rejection of the status quo is at least as likely
to express mediocrity as radical genius. Even
in Sydney, where money only trickles to the
support of new art, there are one or two
commercial galleries that will support
unprofitable art up to the necessary limit of
over-all solvency, for the love of it.
Inevitably they are few, and their capacity is
quickly used. To maintain a vigorous activity
outside the constraints of the traditional
art-marketing and taste-making scheme it will
be important for INHIBODRESS, and others like
it, to work out their raison d'être at a much more

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