Page 57 - Studio International - October 1972

Eventstructure and to offer some remarks about the significance race, complete with heats, a grand final and
of their work.
generous prize money, along the Yarra river,
Culture in Melbourne shows its official face in frenetically propelled by footballers from each
Research Group two ways which, in their happy contradiction, of the twelve competing teams.
ERG also provided a 'soft-long orange- and
in Australia broadly typify the Australian sense for culture. turquoise-banded pvc centipede, which
Melbourne boasts a huge department store of a
State gallery called 'The Cultural Centre', functioned as a superbly luminous interior
middling as a museum by world standards, environment when merely inflated on land, and
housing all the standard accoutrements of high a crowd-pleasing spectacle when towed along
Terry Smith culture which it displays as a privilege to the the river during Moomba's opening ceremonies
people. High culture can thus be visited and carried along the main street of the city
occasionally by the people; they in no sense during the festival procession.
participate in its creation because it mostly Nearly all the more than fifty events staged by
originates from overseas, but the building itself, ERG since 1967 have involved an inflated
a prestige symbol raised from their taxes, proves plastic structure which is visually and physically
For a moment in 1968-9 'air art' looked as if it that they ultimately own this culture. modified by a great variety of secondary systems.
would become as significant a trend as 'land art' As everywhere else, popular culture is These modifications reflect many themes of
(earthworks) but, as shows like James Harithas's entirely different, a matter of everyday life, current art — 'expanded cinema'; participatory,
bumper 'Air' 197o (Australia and little further) especially at weekends. It is embodied in the environmental art; a fascination for new
showed, it didn't. local f00tball, in certain morning and evening technologies, untried materials and systems, for
Air is too easily conceptually and in practice newspapers, in 'entertainment' films and mixing media; ephemerality, spontaneity,
confused with space, the great traditional subject stage-shows, in endless TV variety and chance; experimental architecture; the invention
of art; air art concerns soon became swamped by adventure. Every March in Melbourne a of prototypes that all are welcome, and able, to
artists working with 'rooms' (Morris, Nauman, sprawling festival, Moomba (aboriginal for re-use or adapt.
Irwin, Sonnier et al.), who in turn were acting Let's get together and have fun), concentrates Process activity is the defining characteristic
within the post-studio current central to later thousands of these entertainments into eleven of recent art. It is not simply that many artists
196os sculpture, the core of which has become days, and stamps the brand names of sponsors' have recently decided to stress the early phase of
art as a life-engaging process activity; and, apart products over every visible thing and person. the so-called standard model of creative arts->the
from this, many artists saw air art as inevitably ERG's huge pvc Rainbow, striped in five work of art, the spectator's response. It is not
a matter of plastic inflatables with a basic colours, spanned 'soft over the central merely a return to abstract expressionist
pop-technology loading that they found courtyard of the Melbourne Cultural Centre, subjectivism in reaction to the work-stressing,
distasteful. spraying gentle rain over sculptures by Rodin closed-off character of formalist art. It is rather
So air art became peripheral before it could and Moore while the sound of taped thunder that art-making is pursued as an activity itself, of
define an area of operation as potently as did bounced around the enclosing walls. Rainbow the same order and using the same systems and
earthworks. And by now we can see the 'land' looked amusing, it aroused gently puzzled sequences as most life-activities (albeit a little
`earth' character of earthworks as non-essential, and/or indulgent smiles amongst visitors. But it more consciously and in more concentrated
as the surface gloss, the 'look', of out-of-studio wasn't potent as an object or an image, it failed forms). The activity is the art work, and any
process sculpture. So in both cases, only those to threaten the constipated 'artness' of its objects that occur during the activity are more or
artists whose concerns were deeper survived the carefully-staged architectural environment. less, but always only relatively, significant.
initial fad. The two events ERG staged for Moomba Underlying this is a world-view that has been
The work of the Eventstructure Research functioned much more naturally. They were made explicit by only a few artists and
Group (now Jeffry Shaw and Theo Botschuyver) completely absorbed by Moomba itself, and few commentators, although it is implied in the work
since its formation in 1967 has come to claim of the spectators would have seen them as of nearly all. It is a description of reality, a
attention as the most persistent and various user anything other than slightly odd — but physics, that contrasts with linear and
of inflated structures in recent art. There are nevertheless 'good' professional entertainment, hierarchic structuring, is not object-founded,
obvious parallels and overlaps in the work of certainly not as art (which, by in-practice but open, keyed to sequences of events. A form
groups such as Haus Rucker Co. in Europe and definition, is high culture). of it has been elaborated in recent times by
Ant Farm in California. I want here to discuss ERG's well-known Waterwalks were used as John Latham.
ERG's events in Australia in March of this year, props for a very Melbourne spectator sport — a One of Latham's leading ideas (`the notion
Insistence') concerns the tendency of events to
repeat themselves. An object is seen as an event
(or coincidence of events) which repeats itself
with such insistence that we take it to be solid,
that is, we can predict its repetition in a specific
form. If all things and acts can be seen on this
model, then they become accessible to the
transformatory acts of individuals (artists) who
can intervene in an event sequence and change
the direction of its insistence. They can
structure events.
Thus Latham's instruction to all workers at,
say, an automobile manufacturing and assembly

New Australian Landscapes, project, 1969
Grass Sea (Floating grass carpet over the sea at
Half Moon Bay, Melbourne.)

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