Page 21 - Studio International - July August 1971
P. 21

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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