Page 21 - Studio International - July August 1971

Sydney• Luminal Kinetic 1970
David Smith

art in the 2 David Smith
Luminal Kinetic (Circuit View)
universities 1970

Donald Brook

I
There are no art schools in Australian
universities, nor is there much agitation about it.
Many academics doubt even whether the history
and theory of the visual arts are respectable
subjects, and only two universities—Melbourne
and Sydney—have art history departments
offering full degree courses.
The Australian National University in
Canberra supports regular Creative
Fellowships (Nolan first, and Arthur Boyd
more recently) but they are substantially
decorative. There is no local milieu—no art
school, not any local artists—in or on or with
which the Fellows' influence might be counted
seminal.
Nor do the artists look wistfully over the
academic wall. Their main practical use being
the provision of a few bread-and-butter jobs
teaching drawing in faculties of architecture,
the universities are generally not discussed at
all. Or if they are, it is likely to be with positive
hostility, as if to be scholarly, or even to be
reasonable, amounted to a form of aesthetic
provocation.
Things are changing quickly, but there is a
definite residue of anti-intellectualism in the
visual arts in Sydney. Public theorists (who
really ought to resign, on their own argument)
touch a ready prejudice when they reassure 2
their readers that art is strictly undiscussable,
and identifiable only as the cause of ineffable
states of the viscera. In the monopoly New South
Wales state art school there is a supreme value
called 'felt quality', the feeling of which binds
its initiates together in an unspeakable
communion of grace. There have been
occasional student jokes about felt quality—
especially since Robert Morris provided the
hint—carried through with carpet underlay;
but by and large the intelligence and its
institutions have not won the affection and
respect in Sydney art that has been freely given
to those organs that attach themselves to the
cortex (if at all) only at the remoter junctions
of the spine.
Here, as elsewhere in the world, young
people have tended to be separated by the
schools into the clever ones, who go to the
university, and the not so clever ones who must
therefore be good at art. To those of us who
work in universities this seems very unfair,
for we have no reason to think that
undergraduates are less creative than other
people.
It was against this background that the
Power Institute of Fine Arts opened its creative

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