State of the Union

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State of the Union

State of the Union

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Cover: Richard Lewer, What is a scab? A traitor … (detail) 2011, oil on canvas. Collection of Sarah Mosca and Todd McMillan. Courtesy of the artist

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State of the Union

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State of the Union

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Foreword State of the Union Kelly Gellatly, Director

Sometimes a chance encounter with one art work can lead a curator on a fascinating journey into the relative unknown, resulting in a project that they would not have necessarily conceived without that initial jolt, and one that is at once complex, expansive and highly rewarding. For the Potter’s Curatorial Manager Jacqueline Doughty, that work was Im Heung-Soon’s Factory Complex, 2014; first encountered in the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. The film powerfully captures the oppressive conditions of workers, primarily women, in South Korea and Cambodia for the creation of products consumed by countries where the working conditions and costs of manufacture, while always contested, far outstrip the relatively modest ‘rights’ of the marginalised people who produce them.

State of the Union explores the relationship of artists to political engagement through a focus on the labour movement and trade unions. The exhibition presents a fascinating array of union material such as banners, posters, documentaries and newsletters, alongside artworks which demonstrate the many strategies employed by artists to explore the issues associated with labour and working conditions. Together this material demonstrates a heartening belief in the relevance of art to everyday life and its capacity to work for positive change.

This publication includes new writing by the exhibition’s curator, Jacqueline Doughty, and I congratulate her for her lively introduction to some of the key interactions between unions and artists in Australia, which we hope will inspire our audience to investigate this rich history further. Thanks are also due to Imogen Beynon, Organiser, National Union of Workers and Professor Andrew Reeves, Senior Research Adviser to the Vice-Chancellor, Deakin University for their illuminating essays.

State of the Union provides a meaningful platform for dialogue about a number of important issues around labour and the production of art. During the course of the exhibition the Potter will host a series of panel discussions with union officials, academics and artists that will explore some of the exhibition’s themes in greater depth, such as the ongoing need for an artists’ union and the increasing casualisation and precarity of Australia’s workforce.

An ambitious exhibition such as State of the Union would not have been possible without the generous support of Creative Victoria, the City of Melbourne, the Australian Council of Trade Unions, the National Tertiary Education Union and the National Union of Workers. We are grateful to the union officials who have shown support through the loan of important artworks and archival material, and have shared information invaluable to our research, in particular the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union, the Australian Meat Industry Employees’ Union and the Victorian Trades Hall Council. Sincere thanks are also due to the lenders to the exhibition: Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne; Art Gallery of Ballarat, Victoria; Artangel, London; Australian National Maritime Museum, Sydney; BANDAL, Seoul; Monash University Collection, Melbourne; Museums Victoria, Melbourne; the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne; University of Melbourne Archives, Melbourne; Workers Health Centre, Sydney, and the many private lenders who have generously shared artworks from their collection.

Thanks and acknowledgement are also due to the entire Potter team for their dedication and hard work and for ensuring the exhibition’s success; in particular, Collections Manager Robyn Hovey; Assistant Curator Alyce Neal, and Museum Preparators James ‘Ned’ Needham and Adam Pyett.

Finally, thank you to all of the artists for their participation in the exhibition, and for inspiring us by their commitment to social and political commentary through their creative endeavours.

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Im Heung-Soon, Factory complex (still) 2014, HD video. Courtesy of the artist and BANDAL, Seoul

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W.D. Dunstan, Operative Painters & Decorators Union of Australasia Victorian Branch 1915, oil on silk. Courtesy Museums Victoria

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Megan Evans, Operative Painters & Decorators Union of Australia banner 1988, acrylic on canvas. Photograph: Christian Capurro

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Raquel Ormella, A handshake with the past (detail) 2017, used work clothes, acrylic screenprint

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May Day parade, 1984. Photograph: Collin Bogaars. Courtesy of Geoff Hogg

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Maurice Carter, May Day march c. 1940, oil on board. Photograph: Christian Capurro

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Rick Amor, March on May Day 1980 1980, commercially printed poster. Photograph: Christian Capurro

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W.D. Dunstan, Operative Painters & Decorators Union of Australasia Victorian Branch 1915, oil on silk. Courtesy Museums Victoria

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State of the Union Jacqueline Doughty

State of the Union explores collaborations, partnerships and intersections between trade unions and artworkers. Given the location of the Ian Potter Museum of Art within the University of Melbourne, this exhibition takes place on a significant site in the history of the Australian labour movement. On 21 April 1856, stonemasons working on the Old Quadrangle building downed tools and marched through the city to Parliament House, stopping along the way at other building sites to gather fellow workers. This protest led to the awarding of an eight-hour working day for stonemasons, the first such victory in the world, and a defining moment for the development of trade unions in Australia. The 1856 march provided inspiration throughout the second half of the 1800s and into the early 1900s for nationwide Eight Hour Celebrations, which commemorated the stonemasons’ protest in a triumphant procession of floats and banners.

This tradition is represented in State of the Union by a magnificent banner dating from 1915, which is displayed alongside an array of artworks, documentaries and archival material, all demonstrating both the commitment of the labour movement to culture over the past century and the continued interest of artists in the politics and aesthetics of labour. The exhibition includes art that investigates industrial action and labour issues alongside the work of artists whose formal language draws upon the communication strategies of political activism. In addition to artworks that take trade unionism as a subject matter, the exhibition also considers artists who work outside of conventional exhibition contexts as a form of cultural activism, through which they advocate for fair working conditions.

Alongside a selection of recent contemporary artworks, State of the Union highlights two periods in Australia when interactions between artists and the labour movement were particularly rich: the mid-twentieth century, when social realist artists depicted the hardships caused in the wake of the Depression, with a belief in the power of art to incite change; and the late 1970s and ’80s, when new forms of community arts funding nurtured a flowering of cultural activity within trade unions and trades councils. Central to this activity has been the reciprocal commitment of the union movement to art and culture through the establishment of theatre groups, film units, libraries and artist residencies, and by their patronage of artists in the commissioning of campaign material such as banners, murals and posters.

Whilst it is not within the scope of this exhibition to provide a national survey, a focus on Melbourne and Sydney provides a window onto artist and trade union collaborations around the country. Similarly, the inclusion of three international works provides a broader context for the global political and economic shifts that have impacted the labour movement in recent decades: the demise of manufacturing in first-world Western economies; the rise of conservative governments in the 1980s and ’90s, with the concomitant growth of neoliberalism and waning of union influence; and, importantly, the unseen side of factory closures, when workplace standards taken for granted in developed nations do not transfer along with factory operations to ‘off-shore’ locations, meaning battles that have long been won in places like Australia are still being fought in other parts of the world.

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ART AND LIFE State of the Union opens with one of the most spectacular trade union banners to survive from the early twentieth century, commissioned in 1915 by the Victorian branch of the Operative Painters and Decorators Union of Australasia (OPDU). Banners such as this were made to be held aloft during marches, when they were carried at the front of groups of workers to establish the identity of the union they belonged to. In their important 1985 study Badges of Labour, Banners of Pride, Ann Stephen and Andrew Reeves establish that while the banner tradition originated in the United Kingdom, it had a distinctive association in Australia with the annual Eight Hour Day procession. In the period leading up to World War I these processions were not protest marches, but rather celebrations of the accord between workers and manufacturers, conveying a positive message about working in unison to achieve social progress. Attracting over ten-thousand participants and onlookers at their peak, Eight Hour marches were ‘the greatest annual celebrations staged in Australia.’1 The significance of these occasions explains the investment unions were prepared to make in commissioning banners, which were expensive to produce, particularly those of the scale and quality of the OPDU banner. To cover costs, unions gathered donations, held fundraising parties, and even issued debentures.2 Such commitment demonstrates a strong belief in the power of visual communication. As well as displaying solidarity and pride, the banners represented an understanding on the part of unionists of the capacity of visual material to convey a message and promote a strong identity.

As with many banners of this era, the example in State of the Union displays allegorical imagery alongside detailed depictions of work, combining grand symbolism with the quotidian in a way that ascribes importance and dignity to labour. The type of work depicted in the OPDU banner relates to the decorative crafts of the building industry: the painting of friezes and murals; and the application of wallpaper and ornamental finishes, such as gilding and trompe l’oeil marble. Of the many fine trade union banners preserved from the early 1900s, the inclusion of this particular example is pointed, given the exhibition’s focus on the relationship between artists and unionism. The banner’s depiction of overall-clad craftsmen at work presents an unspoken division between painting as a utilitarian, workplace endeavour and painting as a creative endeavour – between the real world of work and the rarefied world of high art.

While this may be an artificial division, and one which artists have laboured to dismantle since the early twentieth century, it retains a power in the cultural imagination – as well as having a detrimental effect on the capacity of artists to earn a living. It is poignant that in the 1980s the Victorian branch of the Operative Painters and Decorators Union endeavoured to erase the distinction between industrial and creative labour by establishing an Artworkers Section within the OPDU, in an effort to extend the protections afforded to painters in the building industry to visual artists.

This initiative was accompanied in the 1980s by a surge of creative activity within the trade union movement, including an Arts Workshop at the Victorian Trades Hall which initiated a revival of banner and mural painting in Melbourne, a development that was mirrored around Australia. While banners in the golden age of the Eight Hour Day parades were painted by professional sign makers, in later years banners were often painted by visual artists: from Noel Counihan’s monumental portraits of Marx and Engels in the 1930s, to the Wharfies Art Group banners for the Waterfront Workers Federation in 1950s Sydney, and in the 1980s, the many banners painted for unions by artists of the VTHC Arts Workshop and around Australia. These contributions by visual artists for and within the labour movement represented a deliberate decision on the part of artists to pursue their creative practices outside of the artworld context of museums and commercial galleries, underpinned by a belief that art should be accessible to everyone – that the line between art and life should be dismantled.

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TRADE UNIONS AS CULTURAL PATRONS The labour movement has long reciprocated this desire to traverse societal divisions, a goal that stems back to the earliest days of the industrial revolution and trade unions, founded in a socialist ideology of anti-elitism and equal access to education, healthcare and culture. The value placed upon art by the labour movement is aligned to a belief that the role of unions is not just to advocate for fair working conditions, but also for a comprehensive vision of a good life for workers. In this regard, it is highly significant that the foundational moment of the Australian labour movement was the winning of an eighthour working day. Inherent in this victory is the freeing up of a corresponding number of hours for leisure and recuperation: eight hours work, eight hours play, eight hours sleep.

In 1859, three years after the first Eight Hour win, the Trades Hall and Literary Institute was opened in Melbourne as a place where workers and their families could be educated. The world’s first Trades Hall building, it was home to the Artisan’s School of Design, where some of Australia’s greatest artists undertook early training, Tom Roberts amongst them.

This commitment to culture has expressed itself in many ways since the 1850s. In addition to the commissioning of magnificent banners, Eight Hour Day celebrations included union band performances, dances, family picnics and sporting events. The high value placed on literacy was demonstrated by Trades Hall libraries and study groups, as well the publication in the late nineteenth century of an impressive range of labour newspapers and journals, which combined political commentary, poetry, essays, philosophy and artist-commissioned illustrations with contributions from important literary figures such as poets Henry Lawson and Bernard O’Dowd.3 In Sydney in the 1940s and ’50s, the Waterfront Workers Federation (WWF) supported the use of their wharf-side building at Sussex Street for cultural pursuits. A studio on the first-floor hosted training for a circle of ‘wharfie artists’ who worked on the docks during the day and honed their drawing skills in the evening. For over a decade the New Theatre held rehearsals and performances in the Sussex Street Hall. Through the union’s provision of a production studio, funding and distribution for the WWF Film Unit, it supported the creation some of the Australia’s most important documentaries about mid-century working life, including The Hungry Miles (1955), an account of the impact of the Depression era on Sydney’s waterfront workers and their families. Artists associated with Sydney’s Studio of Realist Art (SORA) worked out of the WWF studio and provided art lessons to workers and their children. One of the great achievements of this period is the Sydney Wharfies Mural, which represented the parallel histories of the WWF, the labour movement and Australian democracy on the walls of the workers’ cafeteria. Designed and initiated by SORA artist Roderick Shaw in 1953, a number of artists contributed to its creation over the course of ten years, often to the amused commentary of wharfies watching on during their lunch break.4 During the height of the Cold War period in the 1950s and ’60s, anti-Communist attitudes worked against wide public support of union-affiliated creative endeavours. The easing of this environment in the 1970s, along with the broader social and political movements of the time, enabled a renewed interest within unions and trades councils around Australia in fostering cultural activity. A Youth Arts Festival was launched in 1969 by the Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union (AMIEU), with the aim to provide access for workingclass children in Williamstown to art, dance, theatre, music and literature. State of the Union highlights the activities of two key figures from the AMIEU, the then Secretary Wally Curran, who spearheaded the Festival and amassed a significant collection of art and ceramics still on display in the Union’s Lygon Street headquarters; and George Seelaf, Curran’s predecessor and mentor, a legendary union figure and cultural supporter, who founded the Footscray Community Arts Centre and the Footscray Historical Society, was instrumental in the publication of Frank Hardy’s historical novel Power Without Glory, 1950, and in his retirement established himself as the first Arts Officer at the Victorian 17

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Trades Hall Council (VTHC) in 1975. During his time in this role he demonstrated a thorough understanding of the cultural sector, from minute detail (urging libraries in blue collar neighbourhoods to acquire foreign-language books for migrant workers), to high level strategy (Seelaf sat on a committee with leading industrialists tasked with fostering a culture of private arts funding in Australia).

Arts Officers were appointed in Trades Halls throughout the country in the late 1970s, their role to program cultural activities such as factory festivals, workplace art exhibitions, lunchtime concerts and plays, art classes, and even to secure discounted tickets for union members and their families to the opera and theatre. While their efforts were not always instantly embraced by unions and workplaces, their activities were lent a greater authority with adoption at the 1980 Congress of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) of The Arts and Creative Recreation Policy, which declared: there is an urgent need for the trade unions to become more involved in the arts and cultural life of all Australian people … The trade unions have a responsibility to bring the means of personal expression and communication into the workplace and the workers and their families’ leisure hours in recreation outside the workplace.

This is the right of all people and not the prerogative of a privileged elite in our society.5 This resolution underpinned the ACTU’s collaboration with the Australian Council of the Arts in 1982 to launch a program designed to encourage artistic activity relating to working culture. The Art and Working Life program was part of the Australia Council’s community arts funding stream, and earmarked Federal Government arts funding for projects initiated by or situated within trade unions. Under the aegis of this program (along with State funded community arts programs around the country) artists embedded themselves within work culture through a range of initiatives: banner and mural painting workshops; printmaking collectives that produced posters for unions on issues such as equal opportunity and safety in the workplace; and a range of artist-in-the-workplace residencies, from photographic documentation of union members at work, to collaborative projects in which artists facilitated the cultural activities of workers. These projects resulted in a flourishing of government-supported, trade union–based artistic activity in Australia throughout the 1980s, the like of which has not been seen before or since that time.

ARTISTS AS ACTIVISTS In the context of State of the Union, with its spotlight on art and labour in Australia in the 1930s–1950s and the 1970s–1980s, the clear place to begin a consideration of artists whose political convictions have moulded their creative output is the social realists. The artists who gathered under this description held an ardent belief that art has the power to make social and political change, and as such, should be clear in its message and distributed widely and equitably, beyond the limits of the usual audience of museum and gallery goers. In Melbourne, Noel Counihan was at the centre of a circle of artists that included Yosl Bergner, Vic O’Connor, Ailsa O’Connor and Maurice Carter who pursued an art dedicated to raising awareness of social injustice. In Sydney the artists of the Society of Realist Art published a statement of purpose in their first Bulletin, stating: It is natural that such a group as ours should come into existence, in opposition to the large amount of other worldly, art-for-art’s sake that fills the walls of so many exhibitions – work that is an expression of decadence and puerility, that is impossible to relate to the mass of the Australian people … for art is no longer the prerogative of a few, but is rapidly becoming the concern of the many.6

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Coming of age during the Depression, the unemployment and privation the social realists observed in the early 1930s, and their concerns about the implications of the rise of fascism in Europe, impacted both the way they chose to make art and their endeavours as social and political activists. These artists were at the core of the Workers Art Clubs that formed around Australia in the 1930s and were committed members of the Communist Party of Australia, contributing through its campaigns and committees, as well as to more traditionally creative outlets like graphic artwork for labour publications, posters and banners. In 1933 Noel Counihan was arrested for his role in a demonstration by the Unemployed Workers Movement on the right to make public speeches. Ailsa O’Connor represented Victoria at the World Congress of Women in Copenhagen in 1953 and was a founding member of the Union of Australian Women. The SORA artists similarly aligned themselves with the labour movement through their involvement with the Waterside Workers Federation. Artists such as Nan Hortin moved fluidly between art projects and political action, teaching art to children of wharfworkers, making WWF banners for May Day parades and anti-war papier maché figures for the Australian Women’s Charter, attending Communist Party meetings and contributing to SORA’s gallery-based exhibitions. These activities existed upon a continuum in which art and activism merged.

In the same way that the economic and political conditions of the inter-war period politicised the social realists, many artists working in the 1970s and ’80s were responding to broader social movements and upheavals. Anti-Vietnam War sentiment, the dismissal of the Whitlam Labor Government, feminism, Aboriginal land rights, environmentalism – these were issues that were to transform Australia’s political and cultural landscape, and also the nature of artmaking. Community arts funding was established at this time and arose out of the same political and social conditions. Many of the artists who chose to work under the umbrella of community arts funding in the 1970s came to this type of practice through their involvement in broader activism, finding that this new formulation for artmaking was accepting of political practices that had not yet found a place in institutions and private art collections.7 The Art and Working Life program provided funding for artists to pursue their creative practices within the union movement.

In Melbourne Geoff Hogg initiated a revival of mural and banner painting based out of the VTHC. Megan Evans managed the VTHC Arts Workshop in the late 1980s, and as Vice President of the Operative Painters and Decorators Union, advocated for fair working conditions for artists. In Adelaide Ann Newmarch, Mandy Martin and fellow members of the Progressive Art Movement aligned their political poster making practice with an involvement in the radical Worker Student Alliance, supporting working-class struggle through their protests against lay-offs in the auto industry. In Sydney, Ian Burn and Ian Milliss situated themselves within the union movement for much of the 1980s, running a company called Union Media Services to provide graphic design, marketing and journalism services to trade unions. Considered at the time to have turned their backs on the art world, in retrospect the activities of these artists appear more like an early form of socially-engaged art practice, demonstrating an expansive approach to the potential venues, forums and means of communication for art that extends well beyond the gallery.

The north tower of the Victorian Trades Hall has recently been put back into action as an artists’ studio, hosting the activities of the Working Artists Collective, a group that includes Mary Leunig (a member of the VTHC Arts Workshop in the 1980s), Tia Kass, Nicky Minus, Van T. Rudd and Sam Wallman. Across a range of platforms, from spray-painted murals to cartooning and illustrated zines, the Collective displays a commitment to addressing industrial issues through creative practice. In early 2018 Minus and Wallman ran a bannermaking workshop with farmworkers in Victoria’s Goulburn Valley, an agrarian region where the National Union of Workers has done much work in recent years to organise migrant labourers. Together with the artists, farmworkers made banners in their native languages, to be carried on the streets during a Melbourne rally held as part of the Australian Council 19

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of Trade Unions’ current ‘Change the Rules’ campaign. In State of the Union, these banners represent a recent instalment in the long history of banner making, this time in the service of one of the most pressing issues for trade unions today, that of casual, precarious labour. Other activities by members of the Working Artists Collective tap into the potential of online forums for activism, suggesting new ways for creative practitioners to merge cultural work with political action through an involvement in the labour movement.

ARTISTS AS WORKERS State of the Union considers labour issues across a broad spectrum of industries and professions, including artworks that explore working conditions in the shipping industry, abattoirs, call centres, textile and whitegoods factories, farms, coal mines and prisons – but it must not be forgotten that artmaking is also a form of work, and that at various times artists have joined forces to safeguard their own working conditions. One of the most damaging outcomes of the severing of art from life is the largely unarticulated assumption that creative labour is not work, is unquantifiable, and as such, not eligible for standardised conditions or remuneration. Add to this the difficulty of collectively organising for practitioners who, for the most part, work as individual ‘sole traders’, moving from project to project, employer to employer, in a market where supply outstrips demand, and you have an industry that provides textbook conditions for the exploitation of labour.

The Artworkers Union, formed in Sydney in 1979 by a group of artists and art writers including Ian Burn, Nigel Lendon, Charles Merewether, Ian Milliss and Ann Stephen, advocated for visual art workers on issues such as artist fees and contracts, safe working conditions, and equal representation in exhibitions and funding rounds. Artists in Victoria, Western Australia and South Australia followed suit, forming Artworkers Unions that were not formally affiliated, but shared information and concerns. The Artworkers Union in Sydney achieved formal registration as a trade union in 1989, before merging with the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance in the early 1990s. The Artworkers Union in Melbourne sought formal union status through an alternate route, disbanding in the early 1980s after many members left to form the Artworkers Section of the Operative Painters and Decorators Union. The OPDU established an Award for visual artists, at one point initiating industrial action against the Victorian Ministry of the Arts over its ‘artist in the community’ projects. The Union was responsible for the introduction of the first Percent for Art scheme in Australia, which required building projects in Melbourne to allocate 1 per cent of their budget towards the commissioning of new art. Also formed in the early 1980s were a number of associations that chose not to seek union status but advocated for the same concerns, such as the Artworkers Alliance in Brisbane and the National Association for the Visual Arts, which continues to be a strong voice today, setting industry standards and lobbying for legislative change in arts policy.

The issue of fair payment and working conditions in the arts industry remains a battle to be won. Even when juggling a number of paying jobs alongside their creative practice, artists’ incomes fall well below the national average. An ongoing survey of artists’ careers carried out by Macquarie University and funded by the Australia Council for the Arts has tracked the working conditions of artists over three decades. Its most recent iteration shows that in 2015 the average total income for artists was 21 per cent below that of the overall Australian workforce average.8 Its findings also indicate that artist income from creative work has decreased significantly since the last study in 2009, with 19 per cent of artists earning less than $10,000 per annum from all income sources, creative and other work combined. When the income measured derives solely from creative work and excludes income from the ‘day jobs’ most artists undertake to stay afloat, the number of those who earn less than $10,000 per year jumps to 58 per cent.

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This ongoing dilemma is addressed in State of the Union in a newly commissioned work

by Melbourne collective the Artists’ Subcommittee.9 ARTSLOG, 2018, is an online database through which artists can upload stories about working conditions they have experienced.

Their narratives are accessible to the public online and in the gallery. When read as a whole, they build a picture of systemic underpayment and a fear amongst artists of losing opportunities as a consequence of speaking up. The database makes transparent the uneven standards applied across different organisations and highlights what the Subcommittee characterise as a devalorisation of creative labour. In an acknowledgement of the frequency with which artists are expected to work for free, ARTSLOG measures how long it takes for participants to upload their stories, and pays a fee for their time (an amount, it should be noted, that the Subcommittee forfeit from their own fee). During the course of the exhibition the Artists’ Subcommittee will host a discussion forum, Courtesy of the Artists: Conditions of creative labour, to explore the continued need for an artists’ union.

THE GREAT DIVIDE Many of the recent artworks in State of the Union hinge upon border crossings between art and the everyday, be it Emily Floyd’s remixing of the design language of political posters and fliers, Tom Nicholson’s flags flying over Trades Hall, Tully Moore’s wall paintings reminiscent of union banners and murals, Raquel Ormella’s use of textiles and craft practices to model the formal language of activism, Alex Martinis Roe’s adaptations of documentary making, speeches and consciousness-raising discussion sessions, Kay Abude’s references to slogan-imprinted garments, the Artist Subcommittee’s performative interventions, or the community-based collaborations enacted in Jeremy Deller’s public events and Mikhail Karikis’ videos. In their appropriations of the languages of protest, political messaging, social engagement and mass communication, these artists’ practices are fuelled by the continued tension between aesthetics and politics, art and life.

This tension plays out on the gallery walls, upon which, at times, the various forms of cultural material in the exhibition sit uneasily together. In each gallery, works of distinctly different character coexist – some are unapologetic agitprop, others are journalistic or marketing material; some have developed out of community art practices for public spaces, others have been made for a gallery context and evolve from a conceptual art tradition in which activist aesthetics, while present as a reference, are abstracted into what one artist has described as a ‘spectral’ presence.10 But all share a relationship to political thought and action.

In the 1977 publication from which this conclusion takes its name, Charles Merewether and Ann Stephen present a compendium of texts and images detailing ‘oppositional culture’ in Australia in the late 1970s. ‘The Great Divide,’ they declare in their opening statement, ‘is class division in Australia.’11 The writings that follow make a case for the ongoing urgency of class war, and the need for it to be fought within the cultural sphere as well as the economic and the political. The implication throughout is that political art made for and situated within the traditional structures of art institutions will always be compromised: ‘High art’ – ruling class culture – needs … the associated gallery network to give it a liberal edge. But when faced with the reality of its contradictions – galleries, exhibitions and publications’ dependence on government grants and private sector support for funding – their response does not challenge the ruling class. What are the real relations of these people and institutions to capitalism?12

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In the publication’s opening essay, Ian Burn, Nigel Lendon and Terry Smith go so far as to argue that any suggestion of a balance between the ‘fake “dialectical unities”’ of high art and popular culture is an indication of ‘bourgeois thought’, which serves to displace real class divisions and therefore upholds the status quo.13 The uncompromising tone of The Great Divide reflects its time, emerging as it did towards the end of a period of great social and political upheaval. Over the next decade the cultural landscape and the nature of artistic practice would shift again, and by the early 1990s Ian Burn’s writings were more measured, reflecting upon the limitations of the community arts model and acknowledging that the theatre of political art had expanded beyond the industrial and class-focused to include a multiplicity of perspectives and fault lines, with some of the most critical contributions to Australian art practice relating to the politics of gender, race and cultural identity.14 Political artistic practice has continued to transform in the intervening decades, with much critical work occurring outside of gallery environments as socially engaged, participatory practice.15 And yet the tension between political art, political action and the grey area between remains. To what extent can artists encourage or enact real social or political change through their creative work, and where should that work be situated, what kinds of audiences should it address?

If in recent years these questions have not been explored in conversation with trade unions to the same extent, it is due to shifts in the labour movement. The challenges of an expanding neoliberalist agenda and the steady erosion of trade union influence and membership have required that cultural programs take second place to the pressing business of winning back lost ground. But State of the Union takes place in interesting times. Over the past year a sense of renewal in the Australian labour movement has accompanied a growing momentum behind the message that the industrial relations system is fundamentally broken, and it is the job of trade unions to fix it. The aforementioned recent Australian Council of Trade Unions ‘Change the Rules’ rally saw over 100,000 union members take to the streets of Melbourne in protest, the largest union gathering in over a decade.16 At the entrance to State of the Union is a work by Sam Wallman which refers to another march, the 1856 Eight Hour procession from the University of Melbourne to Parliament House. Wallman recounts this episode along with a number of other occasions from the University’s history when interactions between students, trade unionists and staff mirrored broader shifts in the political and social landscape. The positioning of this work at the introduction to the exhibition encourages visitors to consider the context in which it takes place. Just beyond Wallman’s work are the banners made by migrant workers for the ‘Change the Rules’ rally. It would be a glaring omission not to mention that of the tens of thousands of people protesting on that day, only a relatively small proportion were formally striking over issues specific to their workplaces – and amongst that number were members of the University of Melbourne branch of the National Tertiary Education Union.17 Given the University’s supporting role in one of the most iconic events in the history of Australian trade unionism, it is a poignant moment for the Ian Potter Museum to be presenting an exhibition which explores the uneasy relationship between employers and workers, between so-called high and low forms of cultural production, and between art and life, right in the midst of an industrial dispute.

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Notes 1. Ann Stephen and Andrew Reeves, Badges of Labour, Banners of Pride: Aspects of working class celebration, Trustees of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in association with George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1985, p. 8.

2. ibid., p. 5.

3. Between 1870 and 1899, 107 labour newspapers were launched.

See Sandy Kirby, Artists & Unions: A critical tradition: A report on the Art & Working Life Program, Australia Council, Redfern, Sydney, 1992, p. 8.

4. The Sydney Wharfies Mural was preserved upon the demolition of the Sussex Street building, and is now in the collection of the Australian National Maritime Museum. A rich account of the cultural activity on Sydney’s wharves in the 1950s is provided in Andrew Reeves, A Tapestry of Australia: The Sydney Wharfies Mural, Waterside Workers Federation, Sydney Port, 1992.

5 The Arts and Creative Recreation Policy 1980, Australian Council of Trade Unions, Melbourne, 1980, p. 1.

6. Reeves, Badges of Labour, Banners of Pride, p. 26.

7. Ian Milliss, for example, spent a good part of the early 1970s involved in the Green Bans movement in Sydney, which worked to preserve buildings of cultural importance.

8. A summary of the report’s findings can be found at http://www. australiacouncil.gov.au/workspace/uploads/files/making-artwork-companion-repo-5a05105696225.pdf, accessed 11 July 2018.

9 Artists’ Subcommittee is an offshoot of Artists Committee, the activist arts collective that recently carried out a protest action drawing attention to connections between the National Gallery of Victoria and the immigration detention industry. Members of Artists Committee all have individual practices in different sectors of the arts industry, and come together under this banner as a collective form of art activism with a desire to incite real change 10 Tom Nicholson, email to the author, 26 June 2018.

11 Charles Merewether and Ann Stephen, The Great Divide, The Great Divide, Fitzroy, 1977, p. 3. In this book the term ‘oppositional culture’ encompasses a range of activities, from community art and radio to political cartooning, all aligned by a left-wing stance on social justice for workers, women and Indigenous Australians.

12 ibid.

13 Ian Burn, Nigel Lendon and Terry Smith, ‘Why is Australia a world of absolute silence?’, in Merewether and Stephen, The Great Divide, p. 6.

14 Ian Burn, ‘Art: Critical, political,’ in Sandy Kirby (ed.), Ian Burn: Art: Critical, political, the University of Western Sydney, Nepean, 1996, pp. 62–63.

15 It is the topic for another essay to discuss the fine distinction between community art practices of the 1970s and ’80s and socially engaged practices of the twenty-first century, and why the latter is characterised as possessing an experimental criticality that the former lacks.

16. Simone Fox Coob and Adam Carey, ‘“It’s not just fluoro jumpers”: 100,000 marchers bring city to a halt’, The Age, 9 May 2018, https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/war-on-workers-ison-protest-crowd-of-100-000-brings-city-to-a-standstill-20180509p4ze5z.html, accessed 15 June 2018.

17. Since early 2017 the University of Melbourne and the NTEU have been in negotiations over the renewal of the Enterprise Bargaining Agreement, which sets out the terms and conditions of employment at the University. On 9 May 2018 to coincide with the ‘Change the Rules’ rally, NTEU members from the University of Melbourne went on strike in protest against changes proposed by management. This strike was a ‘protected industrial action’ under the terms of the Fair Work Act 2009, meaning it was formally proposed to members, voted on and approved by the Fair Work Commission for a particular date and length of time. This process provides workers with immunity from civil liability under State law. https://theconversation.com/as-melbourne-university-staff-strikeover-academic-freedom-its-time-to-take-the-issue-seriously-96116

Overleaf: Marie McMahon, Michael Callaghan, Paul Cockram, Ann Stephen, Women and work 1988, commercially printed poster Printed by Redback Graphix for the Australian Council of Trade Unions. Photograph: Christian Capurro

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Geoff Hogg, Melbourne Central Station Mural (detail) 2012. Photograph: Dr Nicholas J. Vardaxis

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Megan Evans, Art bullies (still) 2018, digital video, mixed media.

Videography by Wāni LeFrère and Megan Evans with many thanks to Albert Littler Megan Evans, UNION ART BULLIES 2018, digital print on rag, an artist’s impression from memory of a Herald Sun Banner.

Photograph: Christian Capurro

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Kay Abude

Alison Alder

Kay Abude’s performance-based practice considers factory work and systems of production, often focusing on those who, until recently, have fallen outside of the advocacy of trade unions – migrant workers, family business employees and market stall holders. When Abude’s own parents moved from the Philippines to Australia in 1986, they made a transition from white collar jobs to factory work – a common migrant experience. As a child, Abude helped her mother to assemble the electrical components she brought home from work to earn extra income. The artist refers to her family’s experiences in a performance from 2010 called Production Line (Family). Enlisting her mother, father and sister as artistic collaborators, Abude put them to work in the gallery, tasked with cutting sheets of paper into notes the size of $100 bills in a staged action that alluded to the devaluation of repetitive manual labour.

In State of the Union Alison Alder’s politically engaged practice is represented by a number of posters she made for Redback Graphix. Alder established her printmaking practice in the early 1980s prior to joining Redback, spending several years at the Megalo print workshop in Canberra and in 1983 undertaking a brief residency in Melbourne at the Williamstown Naval Dockyard Arts Project, a community arts initiative which employed artists to facilitate creative projects by workers. This exhibition includes two posters produced by Alder in collaboration with the Williamstown dock workers to promote awareness of workplace issues such as health and safety.

For State of the Union, Kay Abude has researched factory closures in the textile, clothing and footwear industry.

In 2009 Pacific Brands announced that it was no longer economically viable to make clothes in Australia, and that they would be taking off-shore the manufacturing of prominent brands such as Bonds and Holeproof. The subsequent factory closures resulted in the loss of 1850 jobs across several states.

Abude has gathered phrases from news stories about the shutdowns and printed them onto fabric: ‘local communities dependant on manufacturing;’ ‘It wasn’t just work, you know;’ ‘mass layoffs;’ ‘regretted redundancies.’

During the exhibition, front-of-house museum staff will wear garments made from the fabric. In addition to referencing the dwindling of manufacturing work in Australia, the work also prompts a reflection on the rise of the service economy, particularly jobs which facilitate the leisure of others. In clothing gallery workers, Abude draws attention to their labour as a kind of performance.

Alder moved to Wollongong in 1984 to take up an artisttrainee position at Redback Graphix. Formed in 1979

by Michael Callaghan and Gregor Cullen, the print workshop was run as a business with additional funding from the Art & Working Life program. It had strong connections to the local labour movement and provided graphic design services to a range of trade unions and community groups.

Wollongong is located in a steel mining region that was badly hit by the recession of the 1980s. One of Alder’s first commissions upon joining Redback was for the Kembla Coal and Coke Miners’ Women’s Auxiliary. Women’s auxiliaries worked alongside male-dominated unions to safeguard the wellbeing of workers, also campaigning on broader social issues like housing, Aboriginal rights and anti-nuclear activism. During industrial action, auxiliary members provided support by feeding striking workers on the picket line and running charity drives for needy families. Alder’s poster When They Close a Pit They Kill A Community, 1984, depicts the Auxiliary’s Honorary Secretary Dolly Potter wielding a sign as if in protest.

Alder’s poster was also carried through the streets of Wollongong during demonstrations against the loss of thousands of steel working jobs due to mine closures.

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Rick Amor

Artists Subcommittee

Best known for his virtuosic paintings and prints, characterised by dreamlike, psychologically-charged cityscapes, Rick Amor’s political work of the late 1970s may be less familiar to gallery goers. As with many artists working in Australia at this time, Amor was deeply affected by the dismissal of the Whitlam Government in 1975, which prompted him to join the Australian Labor Party that same year. His political activities brought him into contact with key figures in the union movement, including Norm Gallagher and Ralph Edwards of the Builders Labourers Federation and George Seelaf, former Secretary of the Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union, who at that time was working as the Arts Officer at the Victorian Trades Hall.

A Melbourne-based collective of creative practitioners, Artists’ Committee expose the intersection of money, ethics and culture through performative actions and media-based interventions. For State of the Union four members of the group have formed Artists’ Subcommittee to examine the ongoing issue of artist working conditions.

Through his union contacts Amor gained access to workplaces where he could observe and sketch. Many of his images of plumbers, builders, meatworkers and laundry workers from this time still hang on the walls of union headquarters. Amor exhibited in the Green Bans Gallery, an exhibition space in Trades Hall managed by the BLF, and in 1980 took up a residency in the north tower studio at Trades Hall – a scheme that he and George Seelaf devised together and procured Australia Council funding for. This was the first in what would become a series of artist residencies at Trades Hall throughout the 1980s.

Alongside his art practice, Amor designed posters, fliers and cartoons for unions and publications. This exhibition includes a small selection of the prolific array of material produced by the artist from the mid-1970s through to the early 1980s, including health & safety posters, caricatures of political figures such as former Prime Minister Malcom Fraser, and a particularly scathing anti-Newport Power Station poster for a campaign jointly supported by trade unionists and environmentalists.

ARTSLOG, 2018 is an online database which highlights the devalorisation of creative labour. Artists are invited to log stories about the payments they receive and the negotiations they engage in with institutions, funders and commissioning bodies. Available to read online and in the exhibition, these stories build a picture of uneven standards in the visual arts industry. Some artists share stories of fair remuneration and working conditions commensurate to the value they bring to the project; many others share stories of expectations that they work for free, or for lower rates than other participants; one artist tells of a project in which a lack of payment was justified by the more urgent need for port-a-loos.

Although standards have been set for the industry by advocacy bodies such as the National Association for the Visual Arts, there is no mechanism to enforce them.

As a result, artists find themselves in the position of accepting exploitation and undercutting each other in order to win opportunities. At the heart of this insidious arts industry secret is the very contemporary labour issue of the ‘gig economy’, something that artists personified even before a name was found for it. It is difficult to organise a workforce made up of independent, freelance contractors, who shift quickly from one temporary project to another. Through the ARTSLOG database and a related discussion forum, Artists’ Subcommittee argue that it is time to revisit the idea of an artists’ union and to implement a strategy for nationwide industrial action.

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Ian Burn

Bob Clutterbuck

An important figure in Australian art and internationally, Ian Burn is well known for his work with Art & Language in New York in the 1970s, and for an art practice that spanned geometric abstraction, conceptual art and landscape painting. Less known is the work he did after his return to Australia in 1977 when, for over a decade, Burn stepped away from artmaking to focus on work within the union movement. A founding member of the Artworkers Union in Sydney, he was central in advocating for formal union registration, which eventually was achieved in the 1980s. Along with Ian Milliss he ran Union Media Services, the company formed in 1980 to provide communications services to unions.

Redletter Press, one of a number of screenprint workshops in Melbourne in the 1980s, was started at the beginning of the decade by Bob Clutterbuck as part of an initiative to retrain unemployed people. Initially a small co-operative, it developed into an incorporated organisation jointly funded by the sale of posters, the teaching of classes and government grants. An important component of its operations was to provide facilities and training to marginalised and minority groups that otherwise may not have had the means to creative expression. Artists employed by the workshop assisted individuals and community groups to design and print their own posters, and were also commissioned by organisations to design promotional and campaign material.

In this exhibition, Burn’s activities in the 1980s are represented across a range of materials, including articles he wrote for Union Media Services, syndicated around Australia in union newspapers; and a catalogue and poster promoting the exhibition he curated at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1985, Working Art, which surveyed the resurgence of support for cultural work in the Australian labour movement. Burn wrote authoritatively about art in the context of labour history, including a review of a 1983 exhibition in Germany exploring American labour movement culture, Das Andere Amerika/The Other America.

Ian Burn did not make art under the auspices of the Art & Working Life program, in fact he wrote critically on a number of occasions about instrumental political practices and community art. However, through his work with UMS he was one of the program’s greatest advocates. In 1984 Burn developed a slide kit for the Australia Council to promote the achievements of the program. In State of the Union, the slides are projected alongside a printed version of the text which was originally spoken to accompany the slide presentations.

While at Redletter Clutterbuck produced a series of posters for the Australian Insurance Employee’s Union (AIEU), which drew attention to issues such as repetitive strain injuries and the threat of job losses posed by new technologies. Union projects undertaken outside of the artist’s work for Redletter (which he left in 1985) include a mural on the exterior of the Launceston Trades Hall, a large double-sided banner for the Victorian Railways Union and a series of paintings for the Storemen and Packers’ Union, a collaboration with Jeff Stewart.

In 1982 Clutterbuck contributed to the Wolloomooloo History Mural project, a series of eight murals commissioned to represent the history of this innercity Sydney neighbourhood – the site of an important Green Bans win in the early 1970s. Clutterbuck’s mural depicts the Right to Work March, a protest against mass sackings in the mining industry in Wollongong. A member of the Victorian Artworkers Union and part of its steering committee, Clutterbuck had strong connections with members of the Union in Sydney, designing the poster for Working Life, the 1985 exhibition curated by Ian Burn at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

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Noel Counihan

Jeremy Deller

Noel Counihan began his career in the early 1930s at the outset of the Great Depression. The economic and social hardships Counihan observed during this time were to mould his political views and his artistic practice.

A founder of the Workers Art Club and a member of the Communist Party, he demonstrated his convictions through artworks that documented the struggles of working class people. Adopting a figurative, social realist style at a time when Modernist abstraction was coming to be seen as the most progressive form of artistic expression, Counihan’s main concern was to make accessible art that conveyed a political message.

He extended his practice into forms of communication with greater reach through the design of union banners; illustration work for publications such as Proletariat, the journal of the Melbourne University Labour Club; and through a commitment to printmaking as a way to produce affordable artworks for equitable distribution.

In 1984 miners in the United Kingdom launched a yearlong strike in response to the National Coal Board’s plan to close 20 pits, which threatened the loss of 20,000 mining jobs. Led by the National Union of Mineworkers, the strike was ultimately unsuccessful in fending off closures, due to a pre-emptive government strategy of stockpiling coal supplies. The miners’ defeat came to symbolise a wider ideological battle against Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, and a turning point in power relations between trade unions and government in Britain.

During the Second World War Counihan spent a month in Wonthaggi, home to the Victorian Government’s State Coal Mine, where he spent every day sketching the miners at work. He found the perfect vehicle for these images in linocut printing, a powerfully direct medium with strong associations to the political critique of the German Expressionists. His series The Miners, 1947, depicts the dangers of work in the coal pits. In one image a miner is pictured at work in a narrow seam which requires him to lie flat on his stomach in claustrophobic conditions; in another, a seated man hunches over in a convulsive cough, a victim of the lung disease silicosis. Counihan produced these works as a complement to the miners’ own protests at their working conditions, in the ardent belief that forceful artistic imagery can enhance the aims of the labour movement.

In 2001 artist Jeremy Deller orchestrated a re-enactment of the clash at Orgreave, in an event that has similarly become iconic as an early example of sociallyengaged, participatory art. Deller worked with over 800 collaborators, including former miners and police officers, alongside members of historical battle re-enactment societies, to restage the key moments of the battle.

One of the strike’s most iconic moments took place on 18 June 1984 in the South Yorkshire town of Orgreave, where a violent confrontation between thousands of miners and police officers left over 70 people hospitalised. Three decades later there are still calls for an inquiry into the incident.

Deller’s re-staging of the Orgreave protest represents just one moment in a chain of representations. Meticulously choreographed through an analysis of photographs and film footage of the original event, Deller’s performance was documented in turn by director Mike Figgis in a film that has come to stand in for the transitory artwork.

This process is significant in light of recent analyses of the 1984 news coverage, which reveal the way media outlets edited documentation of the clash to mould public opinion. Ultimately, Deller’s Battle of Orgreave is a study in the tensions between subjective histories, documentary realism, fact and fiction.

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Megan Evans

Emily Floyd

The joining of forces between visual artists and the Operative Painters and Decorators Union in Melbourne in the 1980s stemmed from an encounter between Megan Evans and Albert Littler, an organiser with the OPDU who would go on to be National Secretary. In 1983 Evans was halted in her plans to build a wall for the now iconic Northcote Koori Mural due to a ban on the site by the Builders Labourers Federation. Littler negotiated on the project’s behalf to enable its continuation, and an enduring friendship was struck between artist and union official.

The prints in Emily Floyd’s 2015 Field Libraries series relate to a work developed for the 56th Venice Biennale.

Titled Labour Garden, 2015, this installation of brightly coloured, geometric forms plays upon the idea of the sculpture garden, but also doubles as a library. Each sculpture houses a collection of leaflets, downloaded by the artist from online ‘fair use’ platforms, representing a range of left-wing theoretical writings about labour conditions in a globalised, dematerialized economy.

Littler has demonstrated a commitment to supporting opportunities for skilled practitioners throughout his career, be it decorative gilding in the building industry or socially engaged painting practices in the visual arts industry. It was at his suggestion that artists in Melbourne decamped from the Victorian Artworkers Union in 1984 to form the Artworkers Section of the OPDU. Littler also procured funding around this time to renovate the North tower of the Victorian Trades Hall Council (VTHC) building for artist residencies.

Evans served as Vice President of the OPDU, as well as managing the VTHC Arts Workshop after Geoff Hogg finished his tenure there. The historical OPDU banner in this exhibition is presented in counterpoint to a banner painted for the Union by Evans in 1988.

Evans has produced a video work for State of the Union in collaboration with Littler, in which they reflect upon their successful advocacy in the late 1980s for Australia’s first Percent for Art scheme, whereby building developers are required to allocate a proportion of their budget towards commissioning new art for the site. The work’s tongue in cheek title, Art Bullies, refers to a backlash to the scheme in the conservative press at the time.

The Field Libraries prints reproduce the titles of these writings on book spines superimposed upon a background of found graphics, images and typography characteristic of Emily Floyd’s practice, which has long demonstrated an interest in the visual strategies of communication.

Particularly insistent amongst the texts represented are titles which speak of the exploitation of creative labour: ‘Making ends meet: Precarity, art and activism’; ‘Invisible labour: an art work reader’, and ‘Why are artists poor: Exceptional economy of the arts’. While workers across all industries suffer from the uncertainties of the ‘gig economy’ – in which temporary, freelance work is increasingly the norm – artists are especially vulnerable, so much so that Floyd contends, ‘artists are the personification of the new Precariat.’

The imagery that provides the background for these texts derives from Floyd’s research into the archives of Ruth & Maurie Crow who, from the 1950s to the 1990s, amassed a collection of pamphlets and printed material documenting grassroots political activism in Melbourne. Floyd’s invocation within her Field Libraries of these community-based endeavours, both utopian and pragmatic, grounded in concerns for gender equality, inclusive urban planning and access to education and childcare, provide an empowering counterpoint to the economic texts, one in which collective, social activism offers a corrective to the excesses of capitalism.

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Sam George and Lisa Radford

Helen Grace

How to turn a ship around (They could say love), 2018, is a performance which references the 1998 waterfront dispute, a landmark industrial action waged by the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) against Patrick Stevedores, prompted by the sacking of 1400 waterfront workers in favour of a non-unionised workforce recruited from overseas. Picket lines at docks around Australia were peopled not just by workers locked out from their jobs, but by thousands of family members and other supporters.

‘It’s not a bad job’: Re-Presenting Work, 1984, was one of a number of workplace documentation projects undertaken in the 1980s. Commissioned by the Workers Health Centre in Lidcombe, New South Wales, and with the co-operation of a number of unions, the project’s aim was to document working life, with an emphasis on health and safety.

The title of Sam George and Lisa Radford’s newly commissioned work refers to a related incident in May 1998, when a group of community activists prevented a container ship from docking and unloading in Los Angeles, forcing it to turn back to Australia. This ‘voluntary act of conscience’ provides the starting point for George and Radford’s script, which is based upon conversations with two supporters of the dispute in Melbourne, artist Danielle O’Brien and lawyer Josh Bornstein. O’Brien sat at Webb Dock for a month in 1998 collecting signatures from the stevedores, with the intention of making a quilt.

This exhibition includes a 2015 collaboration between O’Brien and Lisa Radford – a fragment of an embroidered quilt and a painting – which depicts the signatures.

Bornstein, a lawyer at Maurice Blackburn, developed a legal strategy for the MUA. George and Radford’s performance combines quotes from the interviews with text and costume referencing the international signal code, an allusion to an earlier painting by the artists which spelled out the phrase ‘We can say love’ in this system of maritime code. The new work signals the past in its phrasing, acting as both a celebration of what was achieved by the MUA in 1998, but also a lament to unionism and solidarity of this time.

A collaborative project involving artists, unions and workers, the photographs were taken by Helen Grace, Julie Donaldson and Warwick Pearse and displayed on posters, story-board style, with accompanying textual narratives. The panels were designed by Ruth Waller.

Their format is characteristic of union-supported photo projects at the time. More akin to magazine layout, the presentation diverged markedly from the conventions of contemporary art photography. The selection of panels in State of the Union were exhibited at the Workers Health Centre in 1984 and then toured to other workplaces and union venues.

Re-Presenting Work was distinctive for its self-reflexive concern with different approaches to workplace photography. One panel analyses the limitations of corporate photographs, another explores a workerinitiated camera club in Chullora Railway Workshop.

Where possible, workers participated in the final selection of photographs, giving the subjects of the work a say in how they were represented, and each represented worker was identified by name – as distinct from the incidental, anonymous worker of corporate photography.

Helen Grace’s work is also represented in State of the Union by her project Before Utopia, A Non-official Prehistory of the Present. Compiled as a CD-ROM, this work presents a narrative of the intersections between art and politics from the mid-1950s to 1990, with an emphasis on the activities of the Artworkers Union in New South Wales. The history includes documents, images, interviews and video clips which combine to build a picture of artist activism in Sydney in the late twentieth century.

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Geoff Hogg

Im Heung-Soon

Geoff Hogg attended art school in the late 1960s, and like many students at that time participated in antiVietnam War protests. Through these activities he became acquainted with trade unionists and began a life-long involvement in the labour movement. A key concern for Hogg from the earliest stages of his career was how to connect political life with artistic practice. He found a powerful model in the tradition of political mural painting, which he researched first hand on a trip to Mexico and Chicago to view the work of great muralists like Diego Rivera. Upon his return to Melbourne Hogg began painting public murals.

Throughout the 1970s and 80s a system of ‘company friendly’ unions in South Korea was slowly undermined by alternative organisations formed by workers outside company structures. Known as democratic unions, these groups were initially ruthlessly supressed by the government. Im Heung-Soon’s film Factory Complex, 2015, gives a human face to these struggles through interviews with female workers from a range of South Korean corporations, from sewing machine operators in textile factories in the 1960s to current-day call centre workers.

The labour movement provided Hogg with an alternative context, outside of the art world economy of galleries and collectors, to create art of broader social relevance.

His first mural was painted in 1975 at Lygon Street, Carlton, in collaboration with Charlotte Clemens and with the support of the Builders Labourers Federation.

By the early 1980s he was receiving commissions for major projects, such as the monumental mural at Museum Station (now Melbourne Central), which explored the contribution of labour to the city.

Hogg was also one of the key drivers in the revival of banner making in Melbourne, his activities coming on the heels of efforts to retrieval and conserve historical banners by historians such as Andrew Reeves. In 1982 Hogg and Mark Wotherspoon made a banner marking the centenary of Victorian Trades Hall Council. The studio space provided at Trades Hall became the basis for the Arts Workshop, which, throughout the 1980s, employed artists to make union banners and murals. Referring to the labour movement’s history of cultural support, Hogg has written, ‘Our hope was to reconnect these threads of democratic cultural activity and so help create a more inclusive and broad based artistic practice with trade unions as its economic and cultural foundation.’

This affecting film progresses without a framing, authorial overlay, presenting a cumulative oral history that gives voice to marginalised workers. Its most compelling moments document government retaliation against democratic unions in the 1970s and 80s, with many women sharing stories of imprisonment. An interview with labour activist Kim Jin-Sook recounts more recent mistreatment in the wake of a her 309-day protest at Busan’s shipyards in 2011. Other women speak of wrongful dismissal after claiming government-mandated minimum wages; of their battles with leukemia caused by work at a semi-conductor plant; or their difficulties in meeting relentless productivity measures in distribution centres.

At intervals the film shifts to Cambodia, where a number of South Korean-owned factories are located. Im HeungSoon includes footage of a 2014 protest over low wages in Yakjin, during which the army were called in and five people lost their lives. Present-day textile workers reveal how much they earn a week making high-end sportswear and hesitate when asked about the retail value of the garments they produce, leaving the viewer to imagine the disparity between the two. Viewed in a global context, Factory Complex speaks of the human toll of outsourcing, and the way that labour battles must constantly be fought anew as manufacturers move their operations to developing countries where rapid economic advances often outstrip social change.

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Mikhail Karikis

Richard Lewer

The Endeavour, 2015, brings a poetic, contemplative sensibility to the tradition of workplace documentation, in this case, a shipbuilding yard in North East England.

In Mikhail Karikis’ two-channel video work, the camera lingers upon the colours and textures of a shipyard, finding beauty in surfaces worn by use and the elements.

The soundtrack is provided by a musical layering of hammer blows, clanging metal, hissing furnaces, and the companionable conversation of workmates in the tearoom as they take a break from their labour.

Considering himself a contemporary social realist, Richard Lewer’s paintings depict life in all its ambiguity.

The artist’s fascination with true crime stories, what he describes as the ‘gothic underbelly of contemporary life,’ led him in 2011 to research Melbourne’s notorious waterfront wars of the 1960s and 1970s, when a battle for control over the Federated Ship Painters and Dockers Union is said to have claimed the lives of forty people.

These vignettes of working life are interspersed with footage of a choir reciting a list of largely unfamiliar words: whitesmith, floater, tipper, bobbin ligger – names of professions, now obsolete, the nature of which can only be guessed at. At the time of filming, the members of the choir were out of work. This knowledge, along with the information that the shipyard depicted was about to close, lends the film an elegiac air. The work speaks of the passing of traditional skills and of economic and technological developments that leave individuals, communities and sometimes entire regions behind.

The north-east of England was the birthplace of the industrial revolution, and of the labour movement that accompanied it, and as such, has been hard hit by its transition over the past century to a post-industrial economy. A reference to this history threads throughout The Endeavour in the strains of a harmonica playing Swanee River, which was sung by a group of ship builders during an iconic 1936 march from Jarrow to London in protest against the closure of the town’s main employer, Palmer’s Shipyard. The Jarrow Crusade has come to symbolise the political issue of unemployment in the United Kingdom, and in this video underlies a broader consideration of the changing nature of labour.

The story is peopled with legendary figures from Melbourne’s criminal underworld, such as Billy “the Texan” Longley (charged in 1973 for the murder of the Painters and Dockers secretary Pat Shannon) and Brian “the Skull” Murphy, a former detective whose investigations – conducted with a disregard for the rules of policing – prompted a Royal Commission in the early 1980s to expose corruption on the docks.

After reading Murphy’s autobiography, Richard Lewer got in touch with the retired detective to speak about his experiences first hand. His conversation with Murphy and a subsequent meeting with Billy Longley resulted in a series of paintings about this violent chapter in the history of the Painters and Dockers Union, when its unofficial but widely known motto was ‘We catch and kill our own.’

The series includes portraits of some of the key players, including Longley, Murphy and the vividly named Jack ‘Putty Nose’ Nicholls, who followed Shannon as Victorian secretary of the Painters and Dockers, and met a similarly violent end.

Lewer represents these episodes with a deadpan simplicity that is at once unflinching, compassionate and gently humorous. While the series does not shy away from the uncomfortable topic of union corruption, the focus, as always in Lewer’s narrative-driven practice, is on the way individual actions reveal broader insights into human nature.

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Ruth Maddison

Alex Martinis Roe

And So… We Joined the Union, 1985, is one of a number of photographic projects funded by the Art & Working Life program to document union members in their place of work. Commissioned by the Victorian Trades Hall Council (VTHC), this project enlisted Carolyn Lewen, Ruth Maddison, and Wendy Rew to represent the diversity of roles women played within the workplace. In the 1980s the public image of unionism was still overwhelmingly male, even though a third of membership at the time was female. The aim of the VTHC commission was both to celebrate contributions of women to the workforce and to encourage increased participation in trade unions.

In 1973 staff and students at Sydney University went on strike when funding for a new course, ‘Philosophical aspects of feminism’, was not approved by the professorial board. Student protests were plentiful in the 1970s, but what made this one distinctive was the support lent to the strikers by the New South Wales Builders Labourers Federation (BLF), who threatened a campus ban on building work if the students’ complaints were not addressed. The strike was a success, resulting in the splitting of the philosophy department into two divisions to accommodate the teaching of feminist thought.

Many of the images in the series sought to destabilise assumptions about the types of roles appropriate for women. In the caption accompanying an image by Wendy Rew, an apprentice plumber called Sally says: ‘Plumbing apprenticeships haven’t taken off as much as other trades with girls. They’ve been conditioned against it. It’s not dirty work. I have friends working in the mental hospitals and they see a lot more shit than I do.’

In State of the Union this project is represented by three sets of photographs by Ruth Maddison, including a muchreproduced image Yvonne Wegner and Jan Cashman, Prison Officers, Pentridge 1985, notable for a slight awkwardness in its subjects that has been interpreted as capturing the conflicting expectation for women to simultaneously project authority and glamour. Other photographs capture narrative tensions that suggest the resistance often met by women in leadership roles and traditionally male industries. In one photographic triptych, union organizer Julie Ingleby makes no headway with an unresponsive group of Turf Club workers, the image caption quoting her unruffled analysis, ‘You win some, you lose some.’

Alex Martinis Roe explores this unexpected alliance in her three-channel video installation It was about opening the very notion that there was a particular perspective, 2015-17. The Philosophy Strike is placed within the context of a broader cultural history, through the interweaving of interviews with people connected to the philosophy department in the 1970s and 80s, including members of Feminist Film Workers and the Sydney Filmmaker’s Cooperative. Central to the work is a consideration of the notion of collaborative activism, the banding together of different communities and interest groups in solidarity for each other’s causes.

Interviews with filmmaker Pat Fiske recount her experiences as the first woman to be accepted as a builder’s labourer in Sydney, and are combined with footage from her documentary Rocking the Foundations.

A social history of the BLF in the 1970s, the film provides an account of Sydney’s Green Bans, imposed by the BLF to halt developments which threatened the city’s parks and historic buildings. Although later known for the corruption which brought about its deregistration, during the 1970s the BLF was notable for its alliances with groups of squatters, feminists, Indigenous rights activists and environmentalists, demonstrating a collective approach to democracy and social justice.

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Melbourne Popular Art Group

Ian Milliss

In 1854 when miners raised the Eureka flag over their defensive stockade on the Ballarat goldfields, the focus of their rebellion was not working conditions, but exorbitant licence fees and overbearing policing. The union movement was still in its infancy at the time, yet this revolt against authority has come to be seen as foundational to the story of Australian trade unionism. The Eureka flag remains a potent symbol for unionists, permanently flying over Melbourne’s Trades Hall building and displayed on banners and clothing during union marches.

Ian Milliss’ early practice traversed hard-edged abstraction, minimalism and conceptual art, before coming to what appeared to be an abrupt halt in 1972, when he stopped making gallery-based art and turned his energies towards cultural activism. Initially channeling his activities through the Contemporary Art Society, Milliss soon moved beyond art industry issues to undertake advocacy for the preservation of Sydney’s residential neighbourhoods from commercial development.

To mark the centenary of Eureka in 1954, a group of social realist artists collaborating under the moniker the Melbourne Popular Art Group produced a portfolio of prints representing key moments of the rebellion: the stirring speech by Peter Lalor on Bakery Hill, the burning of licenses, the building of the Stockade, the moment soldiers breached its walls, and the aftermath of a battle which resulted in the death of twenty-two miners. The artists’ statement on the folio’s opening pages illustrates the mythic power of this story: ‘In remembering this anniversary, we celebrate men standing together, in mateship, to defend their rights and liberties. We celebrate the birthday of Australian democracy.’

Amongst those contributing to the portfolio were wellknown Melbourne social realists Noel Counihan and Vic O’Connor, alongside like-minded artists such as Maurice Carter and Peter Miller. Many of the group were members of the Communist Party and remained politically active throughout their lives. Ailsa O’Connor represented Victoria at the World Congress of Women in Copenhagen in 1953 and was a founding member of the Union of Australian Women. Mary Hammond (neé Zuvella) has continued her association with the union movement into her 90s, still undertaking commissions for the Australasian Meat Industry Workers Union, which holds a large collection of her work.

This activity was also supported by the Builders Labourers Federation, who at the time were imposing ‘green bans’ on building projects which threatened Sydney’s architectural heritage. To Milliss, the Union’s bans amounted to a cultural action, making the unionists involved artists – an attitude that indicated a reformulation of what it means to be an artist and of what activities can be considered art.

Milliss has continued to develop an expanded definition of art practice. In the following years his work involved participation in protests against the Sydney Biennale and the foundation of the Art Workers Union, but also in prison reform groups, radical agriculture, and anti-uranium mining actions.

In State of the Union, his work is represented by the activities of Union Media Services, a company devised with journalist Dale Keeling in 1980. UMS evolved out of Milliss’ earlier involvement with the Media Action Group, a broad-based group whose founding members included Ian Burn, Terry Smith and Nigel Lendon, who soon joined him to develop what would become a first in Australia – a social marketing company providing journalism, marketing and design services to trade unions. Over the next decade UMS worked with over fifty unions to develop professional communications. The goal of these publications, presented here as digital prints, was twofold – to assist unions to better communicate with their members, and to provide an alternative to the mass media as a source of information.

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Tully Moore

Tom Nicholson

For State of the Union Tully Moore draws upon the iconography of trade union banners in a large-scale mural which pays homage to a factory in the artist’s home town Orange, in central west New South Wales. For seventy years the Electrolux fridge factory was one of the area’s main employers. Built in 1942 to manufacture munitions, it was converted into a whitegoods factory after World War II. At its peak in the 1970s, the factory employed over 2000 people, many of whom moved to Orange in order to work there, including a significant number of European migrants.

In State of the Union Tom Nicholson presents a new iteration of a 2005 work in which he installed four flags on the roof-top of the Victorian Trades Hall building.

Presented as part of The body. The ruin, an exhibition at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, the flags at Trades Hall were mirrored by four flags hanging horizontally inside the museum.

Former employees remember the factory feeling like a community, some even described it as a family.

There were social and sporting clubs, dinners and field trips, even a staff rose garden, and a sense that it was more than a place of work, it was integral to the social fabric of the town. When Electrolux’s owners moved its manufacturing operations off-shore and shut down the factory in 2016, it was also the closing of a significant chapter of Orange’s history, one that had shaped its character in the post-war years from a small agrarian town to a thriving city.

The factory photographs represented in Moore’s mural as trompe l’oeil vignettes are sourced from the Orange and District Historical Society, which holds a large collection of negatives depicting factory life – from assembly line scenes and stop work meetings, to social functions and sporting events. In contrast to the lively historical images in the mural, an accompanying video work shows footage of the abandoned factory site. Moore’s work is not a protest about factory closures, but rather a rumination on the way that some places of work provide far more to a community than a source of income.

The face on the flags derives from Jacques-Louis David’s painting from the period of the French Revolution, The Death of Marat, 1793, a painting famously paraded through the streets of Paris, and regarded by T. J. Clark as an originary modernist moment. The painting depicts the revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat, slumped in his bathtub after his assassination. David represents Marat at his last breath, suspending his final moment of living.

Nicholson extends this suspension through a process of re-forming, beginning with three large charcoal drawings. These were re-worked over many weeks, and photographed during different “states” to create digital files for printing on fabric. The movement of air and the endless motion of the flags then infinitely extended this re-forming process. In this reprising of the work for State of the Union, the multiple versions of Marat’s face are suspended anew as long-exposure photographic registrations.

These flags flew over Trades Hall when the Howard government was launching new industrial relations laws.

Nicholson’s photographs are presented alongside a Trades Hall poster promoting a march against ‘Howard’s IR Extremism,’ upon which the artist has superimposed text alluding to the strident flag-waving seen in post9/11 Australia. Nicholson’s images are poised between banishing Marat’s face and endlessly extending it into the present, and posit the persistence and complexity of images as a form of resistance to the easy certainties of nationalism and the erosion of hard-won principles often concealed by its invocation.

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Raquel Ormella

Society of Realist Artists and WWF Film Unit

The Great Strike of 1917 was the largest, and one of the most important, industrial actions in Australian history.

Lasting almost two months and involving over 100,000 people nationwide, the dispute began in Sydney’s railway workshops with the introduction of a system designed to log productivity, which required foremen to dock the pay of those who did not achieve set targets. Specific though this innovation was to a particular context, workers across Australia joined the strike to protest what was feared to be the first blow in a broader attack on union solidarity, one which placed foremen and workers in opposition and turned individuals into cogs in a machine.

One of the most fertile periods of cross-pollination between the union movement and the arts in Australian history took place on the wharves of Sydney in the 1950s. Through the enlightened support of the Waterside Workers Federation (WWF), the Union Hall building at Sussex Street near Darling Harbour provided a headquarters for the Society of Realist Artists, the New Theatre, and the WWF Film Unit; a venue for art classes, music and theatre performances, and the creation of the Sydney Wharfies Mural.

Raquel Ormella’s A handshake with the past, 2017 is a series of fabric banners commissioned as part of a project to mark the centenary of the Great Strike at Carriageworks, an arts venue located in the disused railway yards of Eveleigh, Sydney. Patched together from recycled work clothes, the banners derive their aesthetic from traditional union banners, but personalise their message through the appliquéd names of union members. This gesture is poignant given the dispute’s central concern over the dehumanising effect of new technologies, and also because strikers went to great lengths to keep their names secret in order to avoid being marked as troublemakers. Indeed, the few names Ormella could identify were found in court records, such as Louis Eisenberg, who was charged with verbally abusing strikebreakers.

In commemorating the names of these workers, Ormella lends a dignity and weight to lives deemed too insignificant to make their way into history books. The work’s power lies in its retrieval of individual stories from a tale of collective action, highlighting the dynamic tension at the heart of trade unionism, in which the many band together to ensure due acknowledgement of every individual.

State of the Union includes a powerful seated portrait of a wharf labourer by Rod Shaw, a founding member of the Studio of Realist Artists and the designer of the Wharfies Mural, along with a series of lively sketches by Clem Millward of wharfies at work, hauling bales and wielding tools – tasks that he as a wharfie himself would have been familiar with. Very little of Nan Hortin’s work has survived. In this exhibition, her practice is represented by a small watercolour, its title (The lesser bosses’ leisure is legitimate) indicating that Hortin leavened her strong commitment to labour issues with wry humour.

These artworks are contextualised by a screening of films by the WWF Film Unit, alongside John Hughes’ 1981 documentary Film-Work, which examines four WWF films within their historical and political context. The first film production unit in the world to base themselves within a union, they made fourteen films between 1953 and 1958, funded and distributed by the WWF. Films such as The Hungry Miles, 1955, and Hewers of Coal, 1958, focused on issues that impacted workers – industrial disputes, housing shortages, and workplace safety. Their slogan ‘We film the facts’ underscored a belief that their films were a corrective to the distortions of commercial media.

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Sam Wallman The University of Melbourne claims a supporting role in the story of the Eight Hour movement as the starting point of the 1856 march to Parliament House, which won an eight-hour day for stonemasons. Sam Wallman reflects upon this legacy In A Student Rubbed Their Eyes, 2018, presenting a series of vignettes representing encounters between workers, students and unionists on the University campus.

Sam Wallman is a political cartoonist whose drawings have been published in the Guardian and the New York Times. Three of his pieces of long-form comicsjournalism have been nominated for Walkley Journalism Awards, including Winding up the window: The end of the Australian auto industry. Describing himself as a committed unionist, he has worked as an organiser for the National Union of Workers and is part of the Working Artists Collective, a diverse group of practitioners currently based in the Tower Studio at Melbourne’s Trades Hall.

Wallman’s project in State of the Union was originally commissioned by the Next Wave Festival in partnership with the University, as part of a public art project related to the development of a new student precinct on campus.

The work is re-presented at the entrance to the Potter to encourage visitors to State of the Union to reflect upon the exhibition’s context within the University of Melbourne.

Each vignette highlights wider social and political moments through the lens of campus interactions – encounters that are sometimes models of solidarity, at others evidence of continuing tension and class struggle. One image refers to a successful industrial action by University cafeteria workers in protest against the homophobic expulsion from Melbourne University’s Graduate House of student Terry Stokes. A more recent vignette hints at the way a wider environment of neoliberalism in Australian politics and society reveals itself in small moments on campus.

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Tully Moore, Source image for Greater together 2018, synthetic polymer wall painting Archival images courtesy of CWD Negative Collection, Orange and District Historical Society

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Tully Moore, Greater together 2018, synthetic polymer wall painting Archival images courtesy of CWD Negative Collection, Orange and District Historical Society

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Are we all precarious now? (We don’t have to be!)

Imogen Beynon

Right now, today, as I write this, up to 700,000 retail and other service sector workers in Australia had their penalty rates cut.1 Every other week during the past few months, new wage theft allegations have emerged from hospitality workers in high-end restaurants.2 Within the last month, for the first time in recorded history, statistics indicate that less than half of all workers in Australia are in a permanent full-time paid job with leave entitlements.3 Wage growth is also breaking records: it has never been lower.4 Casualisation looks likely to be entrenched in the future, too: the incidence of casual work for young people (under twenty-five) has grown sizably in the last decade, from 47 per cent to 54 per cent.

It seems we are now a nation of insecure workers.

But, this essay argues, whether you are an artist or a warehouse worker, we don’t have to accept insecurity as the new normal. Instead, our shared (if not always equivalent) experience of precarity – coupled with a renewed workers’ movement – has the potential to foster new, radical bonds of solidarity that can be put to collective use in challenging the structures that govern our working lives.

WHAT IS INSECURE WORK? At its core, insecure work is work characterised by uncertainty and a lack of protections.

Given the statistics, odds are that most readers will have experienced some form of insecure work. It is casual, seasonal, atypical, part-time, project-based, freelance, peer-to-peer and platform-based work.

Insecure work often uses complex structures to disguise employment relationships, such as labour hire, subcontracting and ‘sham contracting’, using short-term and fixed-term contracts. Increasingly, labour insecurity is a category that cuts across traditional class and occupational lines. More than half of teaching and research academics are casual, of whom only 12 per cent are casual ‘by choice’.6 The public sector is not immune: its core business is increasingly done by labour-hire workers or by consultants or through rolling, fixed-term contracts.7 Extending the scope of the problem, new forms and categories of insecure work are proliferating, for example through third-party sharing services like Airtasker, Uber or e-contest design sites, which recruit workers for short-term tasks.

Without the equivalent legal protections afforded to permanent employees, insecure workers are more vulnerable to exploitation. Consider labour hire exploitation in the food supply chain, where farm workers earn as little as five dollars an hour in conditions likened to ‘modern slavery’.8 Or casual hospitality workers who are often expected to work unpaid overtime in workplaces that don’t pay the minimum wage. Workplace injuries are underreported because of the lack of employment security and a resultant fear of reprisal.9 Collective bargaining, too, which is a key factor in driving up wages, is largely illusory for insecure workers under current laws.

While casual labour is promoted as offering flexibility and freedom, the reality is a level of uncertainty that extends beyond just insecurity in employment; precarity entails a thoroughgoing shift to living without security. It limits economic participation (try getting a loan with unpredictable work hours), it prevents social mobility (try saving if your pay fluctuates wildly from week to week), and it makes it more difficult to be actively involved in the community (trying volunteering or coaching sport if you have to be available 24/7).

Unknown (Operative Painters & Decorators Union of Australasia), Building work for artists n.d., commercially printed poster Photograph: Christian Capurro

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HOW DID WE GET HERE? It’s important to note that insecure work is not new – capitalism exploits workers when and wherever it is unrestrained – but its current iteration is unprecedentedly pernicious.

Although not straightforward, a brief history of contemporary insecure work can be charted through an examination of a couple of fundamental shifts.

NEOLIBERALISM HOLLOWS OUT JOBS AND THE JOBS MARKET The liberalisation of the labour market over the past thirty years has come as the economy has been opened up to competition and privatisation. Since the 1970s, there has been a massive shift in the ideological, social and material circumstances of the developed world: globalisation started to move jobs around, new economies developed and the West started to de-industrialise, moving from manufacturing-based to services-based economies.

Technology has changed and replaced jobs to date, and further automation stands to reconfigure work again and threaten jobs further.

Concurrent to this, neo-liberalism (broadly defined) started a political project to emphasise ‘flexibility’ as a moral imperative of free-market-based economies. The flexibility demanded is twofold. First, neoliberalism required the state to re-regulate work, dismantling any barriers that would prevent temporary labour from being moved around and hired-and-fired at will. We see this tendency in the long march of employment legislation that has whittled away the hallmarks of ‘decent’ jobs won through union struggles: security, collective voice and the right to strike.

Secondly, the notion of ‘flexibility’ must be internalised by workers themselves, to create a ‘new labouring subjectivity’10 that sees a freedom from the continuity of colleagues, a particular workplace and a given role or occupation as freedom to be entrepreneurial and agile. Neoliberal rhetoric has been remarkably successful at developing the notion of flexibility as a freedom, whilst concealing its function as a device to push risk onto workers by tipping the scales in capital’s favour.

GOVERNMENTS ADOPT NEOLIBERAL FRAMEWORKS AND HOLLOW OUT THE SOCIAL CONTRACT Prior to this market fundamentalism arising in economic thought, there had been a shared (albeit always contested) understanding between labour and capital that, in order to get the kind of productivity needed after the Second World War, workers needed to be employed and remunerated in a decent and relatively stable way.11 In Australia and elsewhere, this productivity bargain was also underpinned by a social contract in which a ‘welfare state managed the major risks and needs associated with an economy based on capitalist growth’.12 That is, the state provided a reasonable level of education, healthcare and welfare if you couldn’t find work.

Starting in the 1980s, successive governments have adopted neoliberal frameworks that diminish the social safety net. Welfare, Medicare and other services have been pared back and their responsibilities – and the corresponding risks – have been pushed onto individuals.

The consequence of these twin shifts is a degraded socio-industrial framework that creates two classes of workers: insiders, who are full-time, permanent workers with decent rights and conditions, and outsiders, who are casual, precarious workers, potentially employed in the ‘gig economy’ with no rights and poor conditions and limited access to a proper safety net.

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UNIONS ARE IN CRISIS These political and material shifts toward insecure work have also transformed Australia in other ways. They have helped dramatically weaken organised labour: the Australian union movement has suffered a sharp decline in membership, from around 62 per cent of the workforce in 1954, today only approximately 12 per cent of the workforce are union members.13 Parallel to this decrease, concerted political campaigns, such as the Trade Union Royal Commission, have sought to dismantle the social legitimacy of workers’ movements. As such, it is clear that such movements are now in crisis.14 Precarious work is a challenge for the union movement in two interwoven ways: insecure work proliferates when worker movements don’t have the scale or capacity to push back, and it is harder to build strong worker movements when workers are feeling the threat of insecurity across all aspects of their lives.

The catalogue of the union movement’s achievements – the eight-hour day, paid leave, equal pay, workers’ compensation and safety laws, etc. – demonstrates organising in unions has been one of the single strongest collective forces in shaping progressive social democracies. However, as traditionally unionised industries have been moved offshore, outsourced or downsized, with these workplaces thus becoming disaggregated, unions have failed to keep up with the shifting paradigms of work. They have not successfully unionised new economies or young workers, or have not been able to reset anti-union, anti-worker laws. Tackling insecure work, then, will require new forms of collectivity, and bigger numbers of people acting together in concert to exercise power and change their working lives.

ARTS GIG ECONOMY Nowhere is the wannabe-disruptive logic of insecure work more self-evident than in the idea of the ‘gig economy’. Not only does the concept valorise working insecurely from project to project (or ‘gig’), but the term points to a desire to build a whole series of relations – an economy – around insecurity.

Now, there is nothing inherently problematic about temporary or freelance jobs.

Proponents of an ‘on-demand’ economy argue its transformational properties, where new forms of work and flexible approaches let people work whenever and wherever they want.

Workers with strong bargaining positions in the labour market, such as highly educated specialists, may in fact benefit from these conditions. However, even a cursory analysis of who actually participates in the ‘gig economy’ – predominately service-sector and other low-skilled sector workers – reveals the real ‘disruption’ that it represents: the gig economy is a model designed to sidestep the protections of employment law and encourages workers to compete by undercutting one another on wages. Structuring work as a series of gigs individualises risk. Costs usually borne by the employer, from holiday pay to insurance, health costs and training, among others, are instead borne by the worker. The crisis of employment relations presented by the ‘uberisation’ of labour may be met with little more than a shrug by visual artists who have never been labour market ‘insiders’.

The economy of the art world (for most participants) is structurally analogous to gig economics, and most visual artists typify the precarious work force.15 Where artists are working in the creative field, their employment is often intermittent, freelance or contractbased. Wages, if paid, are low.16 Many major cultural institutions rely on the unpaid ‘hope labour’17 of interns (i.e., “sure we’re not paying you now, but this will really pay off!”).

Many artists are self-employed, relying on sales, commissions or grants to provide income and are likely to fund their own practice through other jobs,18 which are also likely to be insecure.19 Carrying individualised risk heightens the lived experience of precarity 49

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which has wide ranging social implications for artists, including greater levels of anxiety, diminished happiness and poorer health. At least anecdotally, income insecurity prevents artists from continuing to make art, a problem that is amplified as it intersects with race, gender, sexuality and class.

The last decade has seen governments, policy makers and theorists take an unprecedented interest in the ‘creative economy’ and cultural labour.20 Part of this shift can be attributed to the markets’ assumption that creative activity generates value,21 will revitalise cities22 and drive ‘innovation’. According to at least one metric – real estate prices – this has certainly turned out to be a productive assumption.23 In an economy obsessed with creativity, ‘art has been put to work like never before’.24 Another reason is that the infinitely exploitable working practices of artists are fetishised by neoliberalism – capital wants to figure out how it can make all workers as chronically productive.25 Artistic labour is often viewed as ‘do(ing) what you love’ (DWYL). It’s a passion! The DWYL dictum co-opts the idea of meaningful work in order to conceal the value of work as labour. It’s apparently okay to remunerate in symbolic and cultural capital (rather than actual capital) if it’s not ‘real work’. Miya Tokumitsu notes DWYL26 logic means a worker is less likely to complain about the conditions of their work if their discontent is viewed as a personal failing to be sufficiently passionate.27 Of course, complicity doesn’t rest exclusively with individuals. Despite the boon of art’s economic bottom line, resources for the visual arts remain scarce.28 This self-exploitative tendency is instrumentalised by art institutions that harness the value of artists’ labour and asks artists to compete against each other – for scarce cultural and actual capital – through immaterial and actual labour.

A further hurdle is more complex: many artists don’t see themselves as ‘workers’. In ‘The Paradox of Art and Work’, Lars Bang Larsen teases out the ‘schizophrenic consciousness’ of artists’ work by positing ‘we are damned if we define art as work, and we are damned if we don’t’.29 Art-making defies reduction – it is a specific mode of practice that cannot readily be understood as labour. The ‘work’ of this work can be difficult to quantify it resists measurement in time, units or similar outputs in ways that can be applied to other forms of labour. Being an artist can also be viewed as a practice of refusal to work.30 These factors, combined, undermine the possibility of collectivity and mean that artists are generally willing to endure a level of precarity that other kinds of workers have struggled against.

In my view, refusing to think of art as work is risky. Market capitalism is making money off labour that is freely given in exchange for cultural capital. In a world that now valorises ‘creativity’ as an inexhaustible resource, not claiming art practice as work leaves it susceptible to being subsumed by the economy with little to none of the surplus generated returned to its makers.31 SHARED STRUGGLES If, like me, you’re not prepared to accept the current state of affairs as the new normal, how might we change our collective future?

Tackling exploitative economies based on precarious work requires rebuilding strong worker movements that have the capacity to take on capital, and challenging the internalisation of infinitely flexible work. Worker movements need to include everyone that works, not just ‘insiders’. There are practical challenges to organising precarious workers, but none are insurmountable.

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Despite the particular challenges posed by the nature of artistic labour and the art economy (or perhaps because of them), I argue that artists should collectively organise, as part of a broader, reimagined worker movement, to improve the conditions of their artistic production. The strong artist-run ethic in the Australian visual arts world and recent protests against funders with links to offshore detention demonstrates that forms of collectivity are valued, and possible.

Capitalism’s current appetite for cultural production in all its forms – art, design, curation – presents a moment to exercise creative leverage. It may mean revisiting Ian Burn’s questions of the ACTU ‘Art and Working Life’ programme: what role can artists play in rebuilding worker movements through cultural participation? Concomitantly, what role can unions play in changing the conditions of artistic labour?32 In my experience as a union official and (in the past) as an art worker, rebuilding a legitimately strong worker movement requires unions to adopt an ambitious and transformative agenda that invests in building solidarity across all workers, communities and progressive groups, including artists, designers, architects and other ‘creative industries’ workers, whose non-standard, non-blue-collar work has generally seen them excluded from the purview of unions. As institutions, unions are unique in having the experience, scale and resources required to build this new collective solidarity.

On the part of the union movement, the project would require articulating to artists how unions can build hope that change is possible through exercises of collective power. It may be that artists form and create new collectives, new bodies or new unions, or become embedded as activists in existing ones, to take control of their working lives and of how creativity is valued.

I mogen Beynon works for the National Union of Workers. She has previously alienated her labour to lots of arts institutions and encourages you to join your union, today.

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Notes 1. As of 1 July 2018. See: ‘4 yearly review of modern awards – Penalty Rates, AM2014/305 [2017] FWCFB 1001’, Fair Work Commission, https://www.fwc.gov.au/documents/sites/ awardsmodernfouryr/2017fwcfb1001.pdf, accessed 10 July 2018.

2. For example: Rockpool Dining Group: Royce Miller & Ben Schneiders, ‘Rockpool restaurant empire ripping off workers’, The Age, 30 June 2018,https://www.smh.com.au/business/workplace/ rockpool-restaurant-empire-ripping-off-workers-20180621-p4zmwk. html, accessed 10 July 2018; Ben Knight & Matilda Marozzi, ‘Vue de Monde restaurant staff underpaid’, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 21 May 2018, http://www.abc.net.au/news/201804-09/vue-de-monde-restaurant-staff-underpaid-former-workersclaim/9613110, accessed 10 July 2018, and Ange McCormick, ‘Former bartender takes Chin Chin to court’, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 4 December 2017, http://www.abc.net. au/triplej/programs/hack/former-bartender-takes-chin-chin-tocourt/9181178, accessed 10 July 2018.

3. Tanya Carney & Jim Standford, ‘The dimensions of insecure work: A fact book’, Australian Institute’s Centre for Future Work, 29 May 2018, https://www.futurework.org.au/the_dimensions_of_ insecure_work, accessed 10 July 2018.

4. Stephen Letts, ‘Wages flat and jobs rising’, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 13 May 2018, http://www.abc.net. au/news/2018-05-13/wages-flat-and-jobs-rising-theme-likelyagain/9753052, accessed 10 July 2018.

5. Lachlan Clohesy, ‘The casualisation of academia: Impacts on Australian universities’, The Australian Independent Media Network, May 7 2015, https://theaimn.com/the-casualisation-ofacademia-impacts-on-australian-universities/, accessed 10 July 2018.

6. ACTU, ‘Lives on hold: Unlocking the potential of Australia’s workforce’, the Report of the Independent Inquiry into Insecure Work in Australia, 16 May 2012, pp. 28.

17. David Throsby & Anita Zednik, ‘Do you really expect to get paid?

An economic study of professional Artists in Australia’, 2010, Australia Council, http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/workspace/ uploads/files/research/do_you_really_expect_to_get_pa54325a3748d81.pdf, accessed 10 July 2018.

18. Miya Tokumitsu, ‘Do what you love and other lies about success and happiness’, Regan Arts, New York, 2015, p. 88. Tokumitsu attributes the term ‘hope labour’ to Kathleen Kuehn and Thomas F Corrigan, initially used in: Kathleen Kuehn and Thomas F Corrigan “Hope Labour”: The Role of Employment Prospects in Online Social Production’, The Political Economy of Communication 1:1, (2013) 9 – 25.

19. ibid, Throsby & Zednik.

20. ibid.

21. Rosalind Gill, & Andy Pratt, ‘Precarity and cultural work in the social factory? Immaterial labour, precariousness and cultural work’, e-flux, issue 16/13 (2013), http://www.eflux.com/wpcontent/ uploads/2013/05/Precarity_cultural.pdf, accessed 10 July 2018.

22. Andrew Ross, ‘The new geography of work. Power to the precarious?’, The Precarious Labour in the Field of Art, Theory, Culture, Society, vol. 25, nos 7–8 (2013), pp. 31–49.

23. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life, Basic Books, New York, 2002.

24. Martha Rosler, Culture Class, Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2013.

25. Lars Bang Larsen, ‘On the paradox of art and work: An irritating note’, in Work, Work, Work: A Reader on Art and Labour, Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2011.

26. Ross, ‘The new geography of work’, pp. 31–49.

7. Caro Meldrum-Hanna & Edward Russell, ‘Slaving away: The dirty secrets behind Australia’s fresh food’, Four Corners, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 4 May 2015.

27. Miya Tokumitsu, ‘In the name of love’, Jacobin, 1 December 2014, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/in-the-name-of-love/, accessed 10 July 2018.

8. Melissa Davey, ‘Thousands are having wages stolen by bosses in hospitality industry, says union’, The Guardian, 11 April 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/apr/11/ thousands-are-having-wages-stolen-by-bosses-in-hospitalityindustry-says-union, accessed 10 July 2018.

28. Bourree Lam, ‘Why “do what you love” is pernicious advice’, The Atlantic, 7 August 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/ archive/2015/08/do-what-you-love-work-myth-culture/399599/, accessed 10 July 2018.

9. Elsa Underhill & Michael Quinlan, ‘How precarious employment affects health and safety at work: The case of temporary agency workers’, Industrial Relations, vol. 66, no. 3 (2011), pp. 397–421.

10. I borrow this term from Rosalind Gill who uses it to describe a particular form of entrepreneurial subjectivity required to survive as a cultural worker and/or academic: Rosalind Gill, ‘Unspeakable inequalities: Post feminism, entrepreneurial subjectivity, and the repudiation of sexism among cultural workers’, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, vol. 21, no. 4 (1 December 2014), pp. 509–528.

11. Tim Dunlop, Why the Future is Workless, NewSouth Publishing, Sydney, 2016, p. 42.

13. ibid.

14. Bradley Bowden, ‘Three charts on the changing face of Australian union members’, 2015, The Conversation, https://theconversation. com/three-charts-on-the-changing-face-of-australian-unionmembers-80141, accessed 5 July 2018.

29. Arts funding cuts since 2014 have been severe, particularly for individual artists, see: Alison Croggon, ‘The 70% drop in Australia Council grants for individual artists is staggering’, The Guardian, 19 May 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/ may/19/the-70-drop-australia-council-grants-artists-funding-cuts, accessed 10 July 2018.

30. Bang Larsen, ‘On the paradox of art and work’.

31. ibid.; Daniel Bell, Work and its Discontents: The Cult of Efficiency in America, Beacon Press, Boston, 1956.

32. Bang Larsen, ‘On the paradox of art and work’.

33. Ian Burns & Ian Milliss, ‘Art and working life: Cultural activities in the Australian trade union movement’, Australian Council of Trade Unions and Community Arts Board of the Australia Council, Melbourne, 1983, University of Woollongong, http://ro.uow.edu. au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=hcp, accessed 10 July 2018.

15. There are many reasons put forth to explain the decline in unionism that are beyond the scope of this essay. Both Tom Bramble and Tim Lyons offer excellent analysis. Tom Bramble, ‘Our unions in crisis: How did it come to this?’, Marxist Left Review, no.

15 (Summer 2018), http://marxistleftreview.org/index.php/no15-summer-2018/154-our-unions-in-crisis-how-did-it-come-to-this, accessed 10 July 2018; Tim Lyons, ‘The Labour movement: My part in its downfall’, Meanjin, Spring 2016, https://meanjin.com.au/ essays/the-labour-movement-my-part-in-its-downfall/, accessed 10 July 2018.

16. Ray Markey, ‘Marginal workers in the big picture: Unionisation of visual artists’, Journal of Industrial Relations, vol. 38, no.1 (1996), p. 22.

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Artists’ Subcommittee, ARTSLOG (still) 2018, video projection and website

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Unknown, Artworkers Union annual general meeting n.d., commercially printed poster.

Commissioned by the Artworkers Union. Photograph: Christian Capurro

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Kay Abude, LOCAL COMMUNITIES DEPENDANT ON MANUFACTURING 2018, digital print on cotton Kay Abude, LOVE THY LABOUR 2018, hand silkscreen on wool, sewn into garments and performed by staff at the 2018 Auckland Art Fair, Photograph: Auckland Art Fair 2018 and Matt Hunt

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Overleaf: Jeremy Deller, The battle of Orgreave (an injury to one is an injury to all) (still) 2001, video Directed by Mike Figgis, co-commissioned by Artangel and Channel 4, The Artangel Collection ŠMartin Jenkinson Image Library. All rights reserved. DACS/Artimage 2018

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Ailsa O’Connor, Building the stockade (from Eureka 1854-1954 folio of 14 linocuts) 1954, linocut. Printed by The Mail Publishers, Melbourne; published by Melbourne Popular Art Group, Melbourne. Estate of Ailsa O’Connor Ian Milliss and Dale Keeling, Trade union media 1979 (detail) 2013, digital prints. Photograph: Christian Capurro

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Alison Alder, Is your workplace safe? 1984, screenprint

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Ambrose Dyson, Eureka/Unity n.d., ink on paper. Photograph: Christian Capurro Proletariat Journal, vol. II, no. 2 June 1933

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Michael Callaghan and Gregor Cullen, Art and working life conference 1981, screenprint on paper.

Printed by Redback Graphix in collaboration with the Australian Council of Trade Unions and Australia Council. Photograph: Christian Capurro

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Artists’ Subcommittee, ARTSLOG (still) 2018, video projection and website. Courtesy of the artists Alison Alder, Permanency 1986, off-set lithograph on paper. Printed by Redback Graphix. Photograph: Raquel Ormella

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Roderick Shaw, Portrait of a wharf labourer 1947, oil on board. Estate of Roderick Shaw

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Two Australian social realists: Noel Counihan and Rod Shaw Andrew Reeves

It is appropriate for the venue of this exhibition that one of the earliest, tentative efforts to define proletarian art in Australia was published in the first edition of Proletariat, the journal of the Melbourne University Labour Club by Winston Rhodes. In an article titled ‘The new realism’, Rhodes, then journeying from Christian Socialism to a life of freethinking Marxism and a Chair in English at Canterbury University in New Zealand wrote: ‘An infant among new literary movements, what is usually described as Proletarian Art has not yet been accorded the customary civilities [but] we may agree that the basic principle of all art is an unhesitating acceptance of the realities of life.’1 Few left-wing artists in coming decades would dispute this but what really was at issue was not just support for realism but agreement, or dispute, about realism’s political purpose and aesthetic content.

Consideration of art appeared only sporadically in the Communist press through the 1930s, although lively debates were sponsored by the groups sympathetic or close to the Party like the Workers Art Groups, formed after 1932. Their slogan ‘art is a weapon’ reflected the determination to embed art in class struggle and industrial militancy.

Significantly, though, after 1936, Communist Review began to follow radical American and Soviet trends and experiment with cover design and illustrations.2 Politically, the 1940s proved a very different decade, with politics practiced under the exigencies of global war and its aftermath. In Australia the artistic collaboration and personal friendship between artists such as Noel Counihan and Albert Tucker, bound up in shared politics and membership of the Contemporary Art Society, fractured spectacularly after 1943, with a series of bitter articles in Angry Penguins and Communist Review revealing fundamental fault lines resulting from the increasing artistic gulf between adherents of modernism and realism (and the inevitable political differences that resulted, exacerbated by realism’s full-blooded commitment to total war after mid-1941 and what they saw as the lukewarm commitment of their opponents). This brief essay considers two notable artists from these years – Noel Counihan and Rod Shaw – and the efforts they made to express their art through working class struggle and aspiration.

NOEL COUNIHAN In 1949 a further article by Noel Counihan, ‘The decline of bourgeois art’, appeared in Communist Review.3 Taking aim this time at impressionism, he identified its fundamental weakness as ‘the elevation of the study of light above the study of man.’ In the same article he also provided a clear, mid-career statement of his intent as both a Communist and an artist: ‘Progressive artists in Australia should be encouraged to throw away the remnants of formalist influence … [instead] they should be encouraged to return to an art of social responsibility and democratic ideals of truth and beauty to which people can and will respond.’4 Five years earlier, Counihan had spent a month studying the archetypal industrial man – the coal miner – at close quarters, working and living with mining families in the Victorian black coal town of Wonthaggi, which in the preceding decade had earned a well-deserved reputation for industrial militancy. But if in Wonthaggi in 1944 truth outshone beauty, it may be because Counihan was sketching and drawing a workforce worn thin by the demands of war, mining ever narrower coal seams to the detriment of their health and morale.

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Counihan had been an active Communist and artist since 1931, establishing a noted reputation for his skill as a cartoonist, illustrator and printmaker. He had been blooded in the fierce political battles of the Depression years and had been a driving force behind many left-wing cultural initiatives in 1930s Melbourne. Between 1944 and 1947, Counihan produced an extraordinary body of work based on this time in Wonthaggi. The paintings in particular marked the culmination of his transition from a cartoonist and printmaker to a painter as well, with his Wonthaggi paintings following hard on the heels of the critical acclaim he received for his Depression-inspired paintings, such as At the start of the march 1932, 1944, and At the meeting, c. 1945.

At Wonthaggi, Counihan lodged with Communist mining families, gaining access to the town’s State Coal Mine with the support of the Miners Federation in the face of opposition from managers who could not grasp why an artist would wish to study coalminers as exemplars of Australia’s war effort. Driven by his close identification with the global antifascist war, Counihan threw himself into the patterns and rhythms of a mining community.

No workface in the mine, however remote or insecure, was off-limits. As he later explained: ‘I wanted the experience … I crawled wherever they crawled. I know that in the narrow seam, for example, the lengths of timber used to prop up what they’d call the ground, we’d call it the roof, were only eighteen inches long.’5 From his sketches and drawings he produced a series of celebrated oil paintings, an unknown number of smaller studies and a folio of six linocuts.

Four paintings form the intellectual core of his Wonthaggi work: Miners working in wet conditions, 1945, Preparing for a shot, 1945, and In the 18 inch seam, State Coal Mine, Wonthaggi, 1944, all depicting underground mining and, a little later, a group character study Waiting for the mine bus, 1945. If the first three are deliberately painted in an impersonal manner and remain politically orthodox, with the miners painted as almost generic figures of male labour, the fourth of this group shares elements of portraiture with Counihan’s contemporary study of noted violin maker and fellow radical, Bill Dolphin.

Two of the three figures are studies of his Wonthaggi host, Bill Webb, and Wattie Doig, a Communist, Scottish miner and union leader. The first three works continued to develop Counihan’s long-standing studies of working life, capturing the inherent dangers of mining in confined spaces where elemental forces of compression and explosion created dangerous, unforgiving conditions. He described the challenge in painting such scenes as ‘tough. There [were] no examples or precedents to turn to, the problems must be tackled originally.’

Waiting for the mine bus, however, presented a different challenge. By 1946, post-war euphoria had ebbed, global flashpoints were heating up and the Communist Party’s attitude to artists and art had become more doctrinaire, now defining socialist realism in terms of political alignment rather than by any acceptable aesthetic. This required that works focussing on a critique of the old order remained susceptible to ‘bourgeois realism’: instead, an artist needed to focus on the successes of building a new socialist future. For Counihan, the air of unreliability now attached to originality in art presented a dilemma and in Waiting for the mine bus he sought to square this circle. So much of his work, in Party terms, was a critique of capitalism’s excesses and the figures in this painting share elements of this. Certainly, they bear the scars of many years of difficult and oppressive mining. But while their ragged, worn working clothes and the elemental dwellings in the background extend this metaphor, they are not at all broken. There is an air about them not just of defiance but resistance, even aggression. In this respect, these three miners anticipate the prints of moulders and other metal workers that he produced later that decade. As ever, Counihan broke his own path. He sought to achieve a social and a critical realism but one, as so often, painted on his own humanistic terms.

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In 1947 Counihan completed his suite of Wonthaggi works with a set of six linocuts, priced at 5 guineas to be affordable to all. As well as the cost, linocuts had the advantage of lending themselves to strong, direct imagery. These are not the complex images of his Wonthaggi paintings. Rather, they represent singular, evocative moments of life in a mining community, with their power lent by the intensely personal emotions of the figures portrayed: the almost feral grimace on the face of the miner in In the narrow seam, the despair of In the shadow of disaster…the wife, and perhaps most disturbing of all, the dying miner coughing his life away from incurable pneumoconiosis in The cough … Stone dust.

ROD SHAW Active in left-wing circles since the 1930s as a painter and graphic artist, Rod Shaw joined the Communist Party before the war, later becoming the preeminent figure in the Sydneybased Society of Realist Artists (SORA) during the 1950s. In 1947 he intervened in a debate in the Communist press about the art of Pablo Picasso, who had recently joined the French Communist Party. Some party artists, Counihan included, sought to censure much of his earlier work. Shaw intervened in support of fellow Sydney artist John Oldham who, while strategically accepting that a measure of censure was necessary, instead argued the case for Picasso having been able to successfully ‘break through the romantic vision of painting’. In the course of his defence, Shaw sketched out his own appreciation of art and politics: It is our job to influence the kind of contemporary art in this country towards a realist approach and to convince the contemporary artist that art is not the prerogative of the intellectual or the depiction of beauty and happiness alone.

But how are we to succeed if we tear down everybody else’s standards like a bull in a frenzy?

Shaw had many contacts, both artistic and political, in the Waterside Workers Federation (WWF or Wharfies) who had made space available in the late 1940s to SORA after their own premises had been damaged by fire. It would prove a fortuitous circumstance. On the one hand, the Wharfies’ Sydney premises at 60 Sussex Street were in urgent need of renewal. On the other, the union already contained a growing number of members eager to learn about and practice art. As one of them, Sonny Glynn, later recalled, ‘the wharfies started going to SORA when it was in Sussex Street. And then the artists wanted to know all the wharfies because the wharfies were well known and most of them were Party members … These were the first artists I’d seen and I’d loved to have them teach me.’ Over the course of four or five years, this partnership between wharfies, artists and other cultural workers transformed the building. It contained a library, staged debates led by current authors, art exhibitions, live music performances (Paul Robeson sang for appreciative union audiences after his Sydney Town Hall engagements had finished for the evening), experimental theatre groups and, after 1953, the WWF Film Unit, formed by union members Keith Gow and Jock Levy.

In 1953 Shaw organised an artists’ collective at Sussex Street, initiating and leading the first phase of painting a major mural in the building’s canteen. Shaw’s mural remains one of the primary legacies of this extraordinary period of trade union cultural creativity. He gathered around him a group of union and similarly-inclined artists, including Vi Collings, Evelyn Healy, Sonny Glynn, Harry McDonald and Pat Graham. Ralph Sayer and Clem Millward joined later. While the mural as it exists today is not precisely the work Shaw first imagined, his original concept continued to shape its evolution. The themes – the politics – of the mural remain intact. The mural comprises three interrelated themes covering the years from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1930s. Australian history is at the top, evolving in linear form. Below that, labour history and, thirdly, the history of the

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Wharfies. Shaw originally envisaged the mural in monochrome or sepia, with scenes representing the three themes interspersed with smaller coloured vignettes or cameos.

The mural, or tapestry as Shaw described it, is clearly aligned to a progressive, democratic interpretation of Australian history. And did so in form as well as content. The mural’s cameos, incorporating union imagery and regalia, industrial scenes and notable union leaders, are borrowed directly from the practice and form of Australian (and British) banner design formulated a century earlier.

Shaw chalked the original figures and designs onto the canteen wall, sketching and painting three or four nights a week, mixing the painting with taking art classes. But Shaw ‘finished on it’ in 1956, following his resignation from the Party, effectively bringing to a close the first phase of the mural’s creation. From then on, the work on the mural would be largely undertaken by Wharfie artists. Remaining true to Shaw’s original design, they added to and extended the themes, added greater detail and provided the mural with its distinctive high-toned colour that is now one of its highlights.

But art at the Wharfies did not begin or end with the mural. A series of history panels, designed by Sonny Glynn and researched by union staff hung in the main hall, while art exhibitions featured many of Sydney’s leading realist artists. Many women artists contributed to the mural and to the union’s wider art programs. A number have already been mentioned, but perhaps the most deeply involved was Nan Hortin. An original member of the Wharfies Art Group from the late 1940s, Hortin worked on posters and May Day banners, collaborated with Vi Collings and Madeleine Kempster on children’s art classes and was commissioned to produce two panels, or small murals, for the meeting hall. These two works are painted in bright primary colours and juxtapose scenes of waterfront industrial life with workers’ recreation and leisure, including music, art, cricket and football. In the central section of one panel, a wharfie gestures towards three men and women of different races, a symbolic reference to the union’s commitment to justice, peace and international solidarity. Nan Hortin had a long-standing interest in murals, and contemporaries remarked on the influence of Diego de Rivera in her work. But it is also worth speculating as to whether her design and use of prominent, almost sun-lit figures echoes another mural from the 1930s – the Hastings Mural, painted at the Marx Memorial Library in London in 1935.

The polemics of the Sydney Wharfies Mural are perhaps more muted, and rhetorical, than Noel Counihan’s Wonthaggi paintings and prints. Both represent extended projects in realist, Communist art. Counihan’s wartime series reflect the grinding, numbing impact of dangerous work, and by extension, war. Shaw’s mural provides a counterpoint – a more optimistic depiction of a union and its members, confident in its strength and its future, even as national and global politics turn to their disadvantage. But ultimately both bear out the assertion made by Winston Rhodes in Proletariat decades previously, that art must be ‘an unhesitating acceptance of the realities of life.’

Professor Andrew Reeves is Professorial Fellow and Senior Research Adviser at Deakin University. A historian by training, he worked for many years in Australian museums and more recently as a senior adviser to Senator Kim Carr, then Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research. He has published widely in the fields of labour and industrial history and material culture studies. Since the 1970s he has been instrumental in preserving the material culture of trade unions, including many significant banners.

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Notes 1. Winston Rhodes, ‘The new realism’, Proletariat, vol. 1, no. 1 (April 1932), pp. 12–13.

2. See, for example, the photomontage covers of Communist Review, vol. 5, no. 5 (May 1938) and vol. 5, no. 7 (July 1938). The November 1938 issue carried a full-page cartoon, ‘Solidarity’, by the American artist Hugo Gellert, who would exercise a considerable influence on Noel Counihan. A similar role would be assumed, after 1938, by the branches of the Contemporary Art Society (CAS) formed in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide.

3. Noel Counihan, ‘The decline of bourgeois art’, Communist Review, no. 90 (February 1949), pp. 59–60.

4. ibid., p. 60.

5. Quoted in Bernard Smith, Noel Counihan: Artist and revolutionary, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1993, p. 195.

6. They proved highly successful: Miners working in wet conditions won first prize at the 1945 Australia at War exhibition staged at the National Gallery of Victoria, while Waiting for the mine bus won the 1948 Albury Art Prize.

7. Quoted in Smith, Noel Counihan, p. 201.

8. John Oldham, ‘Picasso and the arts under capitalism’, Communist Review, no. 73 (September 1947), p. 662.

9. Rod Shaw, ‘The artist in our society’, Communist Review, no. 84 (August 1948), p. 259. In the same article Shaw delivered a shrewd crack at the Party bureaucrats who had set themselves up as arbiters of artistic style: ‘Most artists in Australia are conditioned under the bourgeois conceptions of art, and to believe that these can be swept away by a phrase or two is to entirely underestimate the task’.

10. Sonny Glynn, interview with the author, 20 November 1991.

11. Rod Shaw, interview with the author, 20 March 1991.

12. About the same time, Counihan made his own contribution to the developing democratic historical narrative with his major work, On Bakery Hill, 1954, celebrating the defiance of gold miners on the Eureka Leads in Ballarat in 1854. This he supplemented with three linocuts on the same subject, part of a folio of fourteen works created by the ad-hoc Melbourne Popular Artists Group.

13. Two phases followed c. 1957–60 and the early 1960s. Some of preliminary sketches from the third period remain incomplete.

14. The mural and associated sketches and drawings are now held at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney.

Overleaf: Noel Counihan, Farmer – Worker unity 1940, charcoal, gouache, ink and splatter on paper Estate of Noel Counihan. Licensed by Viscopy

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Emily Floyd, Field libraries #39 2015, unique state screenprint

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Lisa Radford (with Danielle O’Brien), Furniture painting (Danielle’s MUA) 1998-2015, acrylic on wood, tarp, plastic bags, glass, frame

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Alison Alder, Is your workplace safe? 1984, screenprint

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Julie Donaldson, Helen Grace, Warwick Pearse, ‘It’s not a bad job’: Re-presenting work 1984, laminated photo panels. Photograph: Christian Capurro Ruth Maddison, Portrait of Yvonne Wegner and Jan Cashman, prison officers, Pentridge, Melbourne, August 1985; 1985 printed 2018, pigment print

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Previous: Alison Alder and Leonie Lane, Art and working life festival 1985, screenprint on paper. Printed by Redback Graphix Photograph: Christian Capurro Tom Nicholson, Flags for a Trades Hall Council (detail) 2005, public installation of four flags, and a simultaneous installation at the Ian Potter Museum: four flags, four flag poles, two type c photographs. Photograph: Christian Capurro

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Mikhail Karikis, The Endeavour (feat. The Noize Choir and Tom Pattinson) (still) 2015, two-channel video

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Sam Wallman, A student rubbed their eyes (detail) 2018, vinyl

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Overleaf: Alex Martinis Roe, It was about opening the very notion that there was a particular perspective (still) 2015-17, three-channel video installation. Š Pat Fiske

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List of works in the exhibition Kay Abude (p. 31) born Manila, Philippines 1985; lives and works Melbourne

Rick Amor (p. 32) born Frankston, Victoria 1948; lives and works Melbourne

Onshore production 2018 digital print on textiles, sewn into garments and performed by workers dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist

Gutting 1977 oil on board 30 x 45.9 cm Collection of Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union

Soosie Adshead Australian, active from 1972 3,000,000 workers, only 39% unionized. Organise now! n.d. commercially printed poster 92 x 64 cm Photographs by Ruth Maddison, Wendy Rew, Carolyn Lewens, Tony Chaffey Victorian Trades Hall Council Arts Office Collection, University of Melbourne Archives Alison Alder (p. 31) born Melbourne 1958; lives and works Mongarlowe, New South Wales and Canberra Leonie Lane born 1955; lives and works Lismore, New South Wales Art and Working Life Festival 1985 screenprint on paper 49 x 73.3 cm Printed by Redback Graphix Collection of Ann Stephen Alison Alder born Melbourne 1958; lives and works Mongarlowe, New South Wales and Canberra Democracy at work 1984 screenprint on paper 76 x 51 cm Printed in co-operation the Combined Unions Shop Committee, Williamstown Naval Dockyard

Newport 1977 commercially printed poster 66 x 51 cm Produced in co-operation with Combined Unions, Melbourne Victorian Trades Hall Council Arts Office Collection, University of Melbourne Archives Newport scab of the year 1977 commercially printed poster 63 x 43 cm Printed in co-operation with the Victorian Trades Hall Council, Melbourne Victorian Trades Hall Council Arts Office Collection, University of Melbourne Archives Slaughterman 1977 oil on board 38.2 x 30 cm Collection of Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union Slaughterman 1977 oil on board 45.6 x 38 cm Collection of Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union Workers! Support the building trades picnic 1978 commercially printed poster 30 x 20 cm Courtesy of the artist

March on May Day 1980 1980 commercially printed poster 57 x 38 cm Courtesy of the artist Protective gear. Get it, wear it! n.d.

Is your workplace safe? 1984 commercially printed poster screenprint on paper 45 x 32 cm 51 x 67 cm Courtesy of the artist Printed in co-operation the Report it, Fix it n.d.

Combined Unions Shop Committee, commercially printed poster Williamstown Naval Dockyard 46 x 33 cm When they close a pit they kill Produced in co-operation with a community 1984 the Workers’ Health Centre, screenprint on paper Victorian Trades Hall, Melbourne 76 x 50.8 cm Victorian Trades Hall Council Printed by Redback Graphix in Arts Office Collection, University co-operation with Kembla Coal and of Melbourne Archives Coke Women’s Auxiliary Too heavy? get Help n.d.

Permanency 1986 commercially printed poster off-set lithograph on paper 46 x 33 cm 75.6 x 50 cm Produced in co-operation with the Printed by Redback Graphix Workers’ Health Centre, Victorian Work related childcare 1986 Trades Hall, Melbourne. Victorian off-set lithograph on paper Trades Hall Council Arts Office 69.6 x 47.6 cm Collection, University of Melbourne Printed by Redback Graphix Archives All works courtesy of the artist

Watch out for hospital hazards! n.d. commercially printed poster 45 x 33 cm Courtesy of the artist Women and men equal in unions n.d. commercially printed poster 54 x 41 cm Courtesy of the artist

Wordsmiths & images n.d. commercially printed poster 58 x 45 cm Victorian Trades Hall Council Arts Office Collection, University of Melbourne Archives Workers compensation n.d. commercially printed poster 46 x 33 cm Courtesy of the artist Artists’ Subcommittee (p. 32) A small collective of artists living and working in Naarm (Melbourne), est. 2017 ARTSLOG 2018 video projection and website 4 minutes 30 seconds Courtesy of the artists Bernadette Callaghan Sexual harassment in the workplace is a union issue n.d. screenprint on paper 60 x 38 cm Printed by Mantis Prints Victorian Trades Hall Council Arts Office Collection, University of Melbourne Archives Michael Callaghan born Wollongong, New South Wales 1952; died Exeter, New South Wales 2012 Gregor Cullen born Wollongong, New South Wales 1954; lives and works Kiama, New South Wales Art and working life conference 1981 s creenprint on paper 76 x 50.9 cm Printed by Redback Graphix in co-operation with the Australian Council of Trade Unions and Australia Council Collection of Ann Stephen Maurice Carter born Melbourne 1920; died 1965 May Day march c. 1940 oil on board 54 x 41.5 cm Collection Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union No title (walk out) 1952 oil on masonite 33.5 x 44 cm Collection of Andrew Reeves Bob Clutterbuck (p. 33) born Melbourne 1951; lives and works Newstead, Victoria The A.I.E.U. … a history 1984 screenprint on paper 77 x 57 cm Courtesy of the artist The greatest story never told …

The A.I.E.U. 1984 screenprint on paper 77 x 57 cm Printed in co-operation with the Australian Insurance Employees Union Courtesy of the artist

Would they still smile if their jobs were threatened by technological change?? 1984 screenprint on paper 57 x 77 cm 13/18 Printed in co-operation with the Australian Insurance Employees Union Courtesy of the artist Working art: A survey of art in the Australian labour movement in the 1980s 1985 commercially printed poster 65 x 47.5 cm Collection of Geoff Hogg Noel Counihan (p. 34) born Melbourne 1913; died Melbourne 1986 The miners 1947 series of 6 linocuts on paper 34/50 dimensions variable Printed by James Flett Collection of the Art Gallery of Ballarat In a foundry 1948 lithograph on paper 28.4 x 39 cm (image) 43.1 x 54.5 cm (sheet) artist proof Collection of State Library of Victoria Farmer – worker unity 1940 charcoal, gouache, ink and splatter on paper 27.4 x 37.9 cm (sight) 28 x 38.4 cm (sheet) Collection of State Library of Victoria Jeremy Deller (p. 34) born London, England 1966; lives and works London, England The battle of Orgreave (an injury to one is an injury to all) 2001 video 62 minutes Directed by Mike Figgis, co commissioned by Artangel and Channel 4 The Artangel Collection Julie Donaldson Helen Grace born Warrnambool, Victoria 1949; lives and works Sydney Warwick Pearse ‘It’s not a bad job’: Re-presenting work 1984 laminated photo panels 8 parts; each 102 x 72 cm Collection of Workers Health Centre

Often the best man for the job is a woman!! 1984 offset print on coated paper 42 x 56 cm Courtesy of the artist

Bob Clutterbuck, Often the best man for the job is a woman!! 1984, offset on coated paper. Photograph: Christian Capurro

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We are not machines 1984 screenprint on paper 77 x 57 cm Printed in co-operation with the Australian Insurance Employees Union Courtesy of the artist

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W. D. Dunstan Operative Painters & Decorators Union of Australasia Victorian Branch 1915 oil on silk 430 x 350 cm Courtesy of Museums Victoria Collection of Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union C&G Division VIC/TAS Ambrose Dyson born Ballarat, Victoria 1876; died Kew, Victoria 1913 Eureka/unity n.d. ink on paper 27 x 23 cm Collection of Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union Eureka 1854–1954 1954 folio of 14 linocuts, various artists Ray Wenban Noel Counihan Pat O’Connor Ailsa O’Connor Len Gale Ernie McFarlane Peter Miller Maurice Carter Naomi Shipp Mary Zuvella Printed by The Mail Publishers, Melbourne; published by Melbourne Popular Art Group, Melbourne Collection of the State Library of Victoria Megan Evans (p. 35) born Melbourne 1957; lives and works Werribee, Victoria Operative Painters & Decorators Union of Australia banner 1988 acrylic on canvas 366 x 304 cm Collection of Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union C&G Division VIC/TAS Art bullies 2018 digital video, acrylic on wood 9 minutes; dimensions variable videography by Wāni LeFrère and Megan Evans with many thanks to Albert Littler Courtesy of the artist UNION ART BULLIES 2018 digital print on rag 70 x 43 cm an artist’s impression from memory of a Herald Sun banner Courtesy of the artist Emily Floyd (p. 35) born Melbourne 1972; lives and works Melbourne Field Libraries 2015 (Series 1: 11, 17, 19, 21, 23) (Series 2: 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 45, 47, 51) unique state screenprint 18 parts; each 96 x 69 cm Field Library 2018 aluminium, epoxy paint, brochures 90 x 45 x 45 cm Courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery

Sam George (p. 36) born Melbourne 1987; lives and works Melbourne Lisa Radford (p. 36) born Melbourne 1976; lives and works Melbourne

John Hughes born 1948; lives and works Melbourne Is it working? George Seelaf for the record 1985 video 48 minutes

How to turn a ship around (they could say love) 2018 performance, sail, brass weight, printed ticker tape performed by Chloe Martin and Tref Gare, movement consultant Riske Ginsberg 8 minutes 8 seconds Courtesy of the artists

Film work 1981 v ideo 43 minutes

Helen Grace (p. 36) born Warrnambool, Victoria 1949; lives and works Sydney

The Endeavour (feat. The Noize Choir and Tom Pattinson) 2015 two-channel video 12 minutes 45 seconds Courtesy of the artist

Before utopia: a non-official prehistory of the present 1997 CD-Rom Courtesy of the artist Geoff Hogg (p. 37) born Tatura, Victoria 1950; lives and works Melbourne Studies for Melbourne Central Station mural 1984 mixed media dimensions variable Geoff Hogg Collection, University of Melbourne Archives Studies for the Australian Timber Workers Union banner 1985–86 mixed media dimensions variable Geoff Hogg Collection, University of Melbourne Archives Studies for Pastrycooks, Bakers, Biscuitmakers and Allied Trades Union banner 1985–86 mixed media dimensions variable Geoff Hogg Collection, University of Melbourne Archives Study for Melbourne Central Station mural 48 x 543 cm Courtesy of the artist Im Heung-Soon (p. 37) born Seoul, South Korea 1969; lives and works Seoul, South Korea Factory complex 2014 HD video 95 minutes Courtesy of the artist and BANDAL, Seoul Nan Hortin (p. 42) born Melbourne 1916; died 1971 Interlude – the lesser bosses’ leisure is legitimate 1945 pencil and watercolour on paper 18.1 x 26.5 cm Collection of Andrew Reeves

istributed by Contemporary D Arts Media Mikhail Karikis (p. 38) born Thessaloniki, Greece 1975; lives and works London

Mary Leunig born Melbourne 1950; lives and works North Eastern Victoria Untitled (888) 1987–89 watercolour, pen and ink on paper 22 x 27 cm Untitled (Health and safety) 1987–89 watercolour, pen and ink on paper 22 x 27 cm Untitled (Outworkers) 1987–89 watercolour, pen and ink on paper 22 x 27 cm Untitled (Workers) 1987–89 watercolour, pen and ink on paper 22 x 27 cm ollection of the Victorian Trades Hall C Council, Melbourne Richard Lewer (p. 38) born Hamilton, New Zealand 1970; lives and works Melbourne Billy “The Texan” Longley 2011 il on canvas o 120 x 120 cm Private collection, Adelaide Brian “The Skull” Murphy 2011 oil on canvas 120 x 120 cm Private collection, Adelaide Cricket match at Webb Dock 2011 oil on canvas 65 x 65 cm Private collection, Adelaide Elbwolf 2011 oil on canvas 60 x 60 cm Private collection, Adelaide Funeral of Jack Nicholls 2011 o il on canvas 60 x 60 cm Collection of Kate Daw and Robert Hassan

Ruth Maddison (p. 39) born Melbourne 1945; lives and works Eden, New South Wales Telecom worker, South Melbourne 1985 1985; printed 2018 pigment print 8 parts; each 30 x 30 cm Portrait of Yvonne Wegner and Jan Cashman, prison officers, Pentridge, Melbourne, August 1985 1985; printed 2018 pigment print 50 x 50 cm Untitled 1985 1985; printed 2018 pigment print 30 x 90 cm Courtesy of the artist Ruth Maddison born Melbourne 1945; lives and works Eden, New South Wales Wendy Rew Australian Carolyn Lewens born England 1948; lives and works Melbourne and so … we joined the union 1985 ommercially printed poster c 60 x 38 cm Victorian Trades Hall Council Arts Office Collection, University of Melbourne Archives Marie McMahon born Melbourne 1953; lives and works Sydney azardous chemicals at work 1987 H commercially printed poster 40 x 28 cm Printed by Lidcombe Workers Health Centre in co-operation with Printing and Kindred Industries Union Collection of Ann Stephen Marie McMahon born Melbourne 1953; lives and works Sydney Michael Callaghan born Wollongong, New South Wales 1952; died Exeter, New South Wales 2012 Paul Cockram born 1951 Ann Stephen lives and works Sydney Women and work 1988 commercially printed poster 104.6 x 155.3 cm Printed for Australian Council of Trade Unions Collection of the Australian Council of Trade Unions

What is a scab? A traitor … 2011 il on canvas o 60 x 60 cm Collection of Sarah Mosca and Todd McMillan The workers united will never be defeated 2011 oil on canvas 120 x 120 cm Collection of Dani and Marc Fiorili

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Alex Martinis Roe (p. 39) born Melbourne 1982; lives and works Canberra It was about opening the very notion that there was a particular perspective 2015–17 three-channel video installation: HD video and 16 mm film transferred to video with sound; powder-coated aluminium and MDF display structure designed by Fotini LazaridouHatzigoga; offset print poster with graphic design by Chiara Figone 220 x 655 x 276 cm (overall); channel 1 8 minutes 1 seconds; channel 2 8 minutes 40 seconds; channel 3 16 minutes 21 seconds Monash University Collection Purchased 2017 Members of the National Union of Workers Change the rules or down the tools 2018 painted fabric banner 185 x 86 cm Courtesy of the National Union of Workers Members of the National Union of Workers mnesty, Perpaduan 2018 A painted fabric banner 176 x 117 cm Courtesy of the National Union of Workers Members of the National Union of Workers NUW farm workers 2018 painted fabric banner 114 x 85 cm Courtesy of the National Union of Workers Members of the National Union of Workers We feed you, Tanpa pekerja buah tiada 2018 painted fabric banner TBC cm Courtesy of the National Union of Workers Peter Miller born Yorkshire, England 1921 No title (Stopwork meeting) 1961 oil on board 43 x 54.2 cm Collection of Andrew Reeves Ian Milliss (p. 40) born Sydney 1950; lives and works Linden, New South Wales Dale Keeling Trade Union Media 1979 2013 digital prints dimensions variable Courtesy of the artists Clem Millward born Melbourne 1929; lives and works Sydney Untitled (Waterside worker holding a crowbar) 1958 ink on paper 33 x 20.5 cm (sheet) Collection of Australian National Maritime Museum

Untitled (Waterside worker pushing a cart) 1958 ink on paper 33 x 20.5 cm (sheet) Collection of Australian National Maritime Museum Untitled (Waterside worker carrying a sack of grain) 1958 ink on paper 33 x 20.5 cm (sheet) Collection of Australian National Maritime Museum Untitled (Waterside worker holding a crowbar) 1958 ink on paper 33 x 20.5 cm (sheet) Collection of Australian National Maritime Museum Tully Moore (p. 41) born Orange, New South Wales 1981; lives and works Orange, New South Wales Chasing shadows 2018 v ideo, sound 5 minutes Courtesy of the artist Greater together 2018 synthetic polymer wall painting 400 x 400 cm Courtesy of the artist Archival images courtesy of CWD Negative Collection, Orange and District Historical Society Tom Nicholson (p. 41) born Melbourne 1973; lives and works Melbourne detail of Flags for a Trades Hall Council (Marat at his last breath) 2005/2018 inkjet photographic prints, framed found poster, silkscreen text dimensions variable Photograph: Christian Capurro Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery Raquel Ormella (p. 42) born Sydney 1969; lives and works Sydney A handshake with the past 2017 used work clothes, acrylic screenprint 7 parts; each 120 x 50 cm Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane Greg Pryor Kay Douglas The Slaters, Tilers and Roofing Industry Union of Victoria 1985 oil on canvas, applique on satin (reverse side) 152 x 195 cm Collection of Victorian Trades Hall Council Lisa Radford (with Danielle O’Brien) born Melbourne 1976; lives and works Melbourne Furniture painting (Danielle’s MUA) 1998–2015 acrylic on wood, tarp, plastic bags, glass, frame 2 parts; each 60 x 55 cm Courtesy of the artist

Mervyn Russell

Unknown

Racism is union business c. 1995 commercially printed poster 71 x 43 cm Victorian Trades Hall Council Arts Office Collection, University of Melbourne Archives

Work + art n.d. commercially printed poster 54 x 40 cm Commissioned by the Artworkers Union Collection of Ann Stephen

Roderick Shaw born 1915 Sydney; died 1992

Unknown (Operative Painters & Decorators Union of Australasia)

Portrait of a wharf labourer 1947 oil on board 78.2 x 56.3 cm Collection of Australian National Maritime Museum

Building work for artists n.d. commercially printed poster 76.5 x 50.8 cm Collection of Megan Evans

Union Media Services Art & Working Life: a slide kit produced by Union Media Services for the Australia Council 1984 80 slides Collection of the Estate of Ian Burn Unknown Artists Union: Why is an organisation necessary? n.d. commercially printed poster 58 x 45 cm Commissioned by the Artists Union Collection of Ann Stephen Unknown Artworkers Union annual general meeting n.d. commercially printed poster 58 x 45 cm Commissioned by the Artworkers Union Collection of Ann Stephen Unknown Artworkers Union annual general meeting n.d. commercially printed poster 58 x 45 cm Commissioned by the Artworkers Union Collection of Ann Stephen

Unknown Racism divides the working class n.d. commercially printed poster 76 x 56 cm Victorian Trades Hall Council Arts Office Collection, University of Melbourne Archives Sam Wallman born Geelong 1985; lives and works Melbourne A student rubbed their eyes 2018 vinyl dimensions variable This work was researched in consultation with University students, staff and alumni, and was originally installed as the first public artwork in a series to be presented across the University of Melbourne’s Parkville campus in 2018 by Next Wave, in partnership with the New Student Precinct Project Courtesy of the artist

State of the Union features a selection of archival material from The University of Melbourne Archives and the private collections of Megan Evans, Andrew Reeves and Ann Stephen.

Unknown Should Australian art have a national content? n.d. commercially printed poster 54 x 40 cm Commissioned by the Artworkers Union Collection of Ann Stephen Unknown Support or control n.d. commercially printed poster 54 x 40 cm Commissioned by the Artworkers Union Collection of Ann Stephen Unknown Who gets the most out of community arts? n.d. commercially printed poster 54 x 40 cm Commissioned by the Artworkers Union Collection of Ann Stephen

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State of the Union

Acknowledgements

The curator would like to acknowledge the many colleagues who have been generous with their knowledge of this expansive topic. Conversations with Geoff Hogg, Ian Milliss, Andrew Reeves, Ann Stephen and Nic Tammens have been invaluable, as have the reminiscences of Rick Amor, Viv Binns, Bob Clutterbuck, Megan Evans, Helen Grace, Susan Hewitt, John Hughes, Peter Kennedy, Deborah Mills and Kay Morrissey. Special thanks are due to Nic Tammens for his assistance in presenting the Union Media Slide set.

STATE OF THE UNION Curated by Jacqueline Doughty, Curatorial Manager

Published by the Ian Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne, on the occasion of the exhibition State of the Union, 24 July – 28 October 2018 Text © 2018, the authors and the Ian Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne

Images © the artist, unless otherwise stated This catalogue is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purposes of research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means without the prior permission of the publisher. The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Ian Potter Museum of Art or the publisher.

ISBN 978 0 7340 5445 6 Printed by Bambra Press, Melbourne Cover image caption: Richard Lewer, What is a scab? A traitor … 2011, oil on canvas The Ian Potter Museum of Art The University of Melbourne Victoria 3010 Australia Email potter-info@unimelb.edu.au www.art-museum.unimelb.edu.au

Patrons Lady Potter AC Christine Simpson Stokes

Thank you to all of the artists who have contributed to State of the Union and to the lenders who have generously made works available for exhibition: Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne; Art Gallery of Ballarat, Victoria; Artangel, London; Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union, Melbourne; Australian Council of Trade Unions, Melbourne; Australian National Maritime Museum, Sydney; John and Jane Ayres, Adelaide; BANDAL, Seoul; Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union, Melbourne; Kate Daw and Robert Hassan, Melbourne; Dani and Marc Fiorili, Adelaide; Monash University, Melbourne; Sarah Mosca and Todd McMillan, Sydney; Museums Victoria, Melbourne; Danielle O’Brien, Warrnambool; Andrew Reeves, Clunes; State Library of Victoria, Melbourne; Ann Stephen, Sydney; University of Melbourne Archives, Melbourne; Victorian Trades Hall Council, Melbourne; Workers Health Centre, Sydney. Our thanks also include the various private lenders who wished to remain anonymous.

We are indebted to colleagues who have gone beyond the call of duty to make loans available: at the Art Gallery of Ballarat, Anne Rowland and Robyn Walton; at the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union, Maria Farrugia; at Hugo Michell Gallery, Hugo Michell; at Museums Victoria, Elizabeth McCartney, Hannah Perkins, Deb Tout-Smith and Nell Ustundag; at the State Library of Victoria, Des Cowley, Sarah Haselton, Susan Long, and Fiona Wilson; at the University of Melbourne Archives, Stella Marr, Georgina Ward and Katie Wood; Jane Eckett and Giles Fielke Visual Cultures Resource Centre; and Russell Evans and Gordon Yau, Learning Environments, University of Melbourne and most especially, at the Australian National Maritime Museum, the extraordinarily accommodating Daina Fletcher, Agatha Rostek-Robak and Anupa Shah. Thank you also to Julie Donaldson for tracking down the Workers Health Centre panels.

Thank you to Helen Hughes for her editing expertise, and to a number of University of Melbourne colleagues who have assisted with technology arrangements: Jane Eckett and Giles Fielke, Visual Cultures Resource Centre; and Russell Evans and Gordon Yau, Learning Environments.

The insights provided by the following trade union officials and experts have been immensely helpful: Steve Adams, Branch President (University of Melbourne), National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU); Imogen Beynon, Organiser, National Union of Workers (NUW); Professor Verity Burgmann, Adjunct Professor of Politics, School of Social Sciences, Monash University; Edwina Byrne, Media and Communications, Victorian Trades Hall Council (VTHC); Ben Davison, Chief of Staff, Australian Council of Trade Unions; Ralph Edwards, Branch President (Victoria), Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union (CFMMEU); Gwynneth Evans, Workcover Officer, Australasian Meat Industry Employees’ Union; Luke Hilakari, Secretary, VTHC; Tim Kennedy, National Secretary, NUW; Albert Littler, former National Secretary, Operative Painters & Decorators Union; Colin Long, Victorian Secretary, NTEU; Professor Stuart Macintyre, Emeritus Laureate Professor, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, the University of Melbourne; Dave Noonan, National Secretary, CFMMEU; Julius Roe, former National President, Australian Manufacturing Workers Union; Jeana Vithoulkas, Project Manager, Strategic Communication and Public Affairs, Cbus Super.

The curator is grateful to her colleagues at the Ian Potter Museum of Art for their tireless assistance in bringing this exhibition to fruition, particularly Robyn Hovey, Alyce Neal, James ‘Ned’ Needham, and Adam Pyett. Thank you also to Kelly Gellatly and Samantha Comte for their support and expertise.

This project is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria, the City of Melbourne Arts Grants Program.

Richard Lewer, What is a Scab?

A Traitor... 2011, oil on canvas.

Courtesy of the artist and Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide

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Cover: Richard Lewer, What is a scab? A traitor … (detail) 2011, oil on canvas. Collection of Sarah Mosca and Todd McMillan. Courtesy of the artist

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