Unseen Ways - Eight Sydney Artists, Macquarie University

UNSEEN WAYS E I G H T

S Y D N E Y

A R T I S T S

MACQUARIE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY 9 December 2010 - 14 January 2011

Unseen Ways: Eight Sydney Artists Exhibition produced in collaboration with the Office of the Pro Vice-Chancellor, Social Inclusion, Macquarie University.

Sponsored by Macquarie University Lighthouse Press (Printery).

9 December 2010 – 14 January 2011 Published by Macquarie University, Sydney, 2010 ISBN 978-1-74138-368-3 All rights reserved. Apart from fair dealing permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part of this catalogue may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system or transmitted by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Macquarie University Art Gallery Office of Institutional Advancement International and Development Building E11A, Macquarie University Sydney, 2019 Australia Tel: +612 9850 7437 www.artgallery.mq.edu.au Monday - Friday 10am - 5pm Holiday Closure: Monday 27 December – Sunday 2 January Building E11A, Macquarie University

UNSEEN WAYS E I G H T

S Y D N E Y

A R T I S T S

ARTISTS

James Ackhurst Luke Bayshco Matthew Calandra Clarrice Collien John Demos Mark Hood Kevin Meagher Rachelle Rodriguez FROM THE STUDIOS

Macquarie Hospital (MQE) Studios Roomies Artspace Studio ARTES Northside Curated by Hugh Nichols

UNSEENTO SEEN Some Thoughts on the Specialised Studio

Colin Rhodes Word and idea are not born of scientific or logical thinking but of creative language, which means of innumerable languages — for this act of ‘conception’ has taken place over and over again.

Art schools emerged in Europe when the Church’s importance as major patron declined and the secular state became increasingly interested in controlling the production of art and artists. An increasingly bourgeois market gave rise to the profession of art and design, which was some way distant from the old guild tradition that had been the norm for so long. Artists now had ‘careers’. Besides the staterun academies, private art schools cropped up, further confirming art’s bourgeois commoditisation.

Modernism grew at least partly out of a desire on the part of emerging artists to challenge and subvert the formal training they had received at art school, though in true Freudian fashion generations subsequently returned to their old schools as teachers and the cycle began again. Eventually the state-sponsored art schools, in what

Johan Huizinga

by the mid-twentieth century had become the ‘international’ tradition, had become sites of institutionalised transgression: the important thing was ‘to be against’, whilst operating finally within the bounds of political and social acceptability.

An important parallel story of early childhood education placed art and creativity at the centre of development and learning.

Stemming from a Romantic belief that individuals are complete in their ‘natural’ state from the start, the educational imperative was framed by the desirability of encouraging children to find their place in the world without imposing an undue overlay of ‘unnatural’ rule-making. JeanJacques Rousseau is the emblematic progenitor, and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Friedrich Fröbel are

Mark Hood Two Boys and a Girl at the Beach III 2008 Acrylic on canvas 71 x 35.5 cm © courtesy the artist

key early theorisers and practitioners.

From them a line can be traced that saw creative arts become central in the primary curriculum of many countries for a time in mid-century, on the grounds that children are not so much merely innately creative, but able to channel freely and without inhibition the forces acting on human life and action. Art, it was argued, is itself a process of self-creation.

Such notions are also linked to beliefs in the fundamental importance of play for learning and cultural development and transformation. Fröbel, for example, developed a system of objects – so-called ‘gifts’ – that enabled structured play in the classroom as a means of facilitating children’s awareness of their place in the world.

And a century later, in Homo Ludens (1938), the Dutch cultural theorist

Johan Huizinga claimed that play lies at the base of all things throughout the animal world. The play element, he argued, is generative and crucial throughout society and culture, but because it stands outside the practicalpurposive,‘Play is free, is in fact freedom’.

I make these observations because the existence of specialised studios, devoted to facilitating creative arts practice across a range of groups denied access to mainstream art schools, is nevertheless unthinkable without them. Whether catering to artists with intellectual disabilities, mental health service users, or mixed marginalised social groups, these studios share a vision that accords with the modern idea of the art school as a place in which teachers pass on their knowledge, not in didactic ways, but in an enabling spirit, and serve, essentially,

to facilitate the development of each individual according to their personal creative identity. Specialised studios are places in which personal growth is facilitated through artistic activity.

Central planks of the specialised studio ethos are the ideas that human creativity is innate and that play and the ‘aesthetic’ impulse are universal qualities that are also life-affirming and support human interconnectivity.

The individuals attending Roomies Artspace, Macquarie Hospital Studios, and Studio ARTES are therefore identified as artists before all else, and not defined by any disability or other non-normative characterisation. At this level, parallels with the mainstream art schools continue: some students may go on to develop public reputations as artists, entering artworld mechanisms of display, collecting and criticism; most will not. But all will identify as artist at the most fundamental level of being.

Of these three specialised Australian studios, Studio ARTES conforms to the most common contemporary notion of identity and function insofar as its members are people with learning disabilities who are also often physically challenged.

Founded just over a decade ago, it provides education, training, and leisure opportunities for a broad client base through the lens of creative and performing arts. It shares similarities with many broadly-based creative arts studios in Europe, such as the KCAT Art and Study Centre in Kilkenny,

Ireland (1999), La Pommeraie in Ellignies-Sainte-Anne, Belgium (1989) and Créahm in Liège, Belgium (1979).

All have high local public presence, especially through performing arts activity, though their wider impact is much less and largely through performances at disability-oriented events, or through dissemination of visual artwork within the so-called ‘outsider’ network. Moreover, though committed to education and life-skills development through art, there are often internal organisational tensions between the encouragement of a wholehearted art-school-type culture and the leisure and care impulses. Put crudely, in many specialised studios there are those who don’t quite believe in the quality and status as art of the best work being produced, set against ordinary aesthetic measures.

Around the world there are other studios for teaching artists living with disabilities, which cater specifically to the visual arts, including notably, Creative Growth in Oakland, California (1974), Galerie Atelier Herenplaats, in Rotterdam, The Netherlands (1991), Atelier Incurve, in Osaka, Japan (2002) and in this country, Arts Project Australia (APA), in Melbourne (1984). These are focused much more clearly on enabling each member to develop and sustain an individual practice; on its website, for example, APA asserts that members are “encouraged to find their own artistic voice and to pursue themes of personal interest and meaning”. Furthermore, to

be accepted into the studios members must have a commitment to pursuing art. Herenplaats and Incurve are particularly fastidious in this respect, expecting new recruits to work towards ‘graduation’ after a period of training and facilitation devised to suit individual talents and needs. A crucial difference to the modern art school, though a similarity perhaps to the old academy, is that artists will characteristically continue to work in the specialised studio after ‘graduation’. In this way the group situation abides, which is both supportive and encourages artistic cross-pollination, but also throws more clearly into relief differentials of quality between one member and another, as well as their public impact. Each studio has its established names – at APA, for example, Lisa Reid, John Northe, Julian Martin and Alan Constable come immediately to mind – and projects like Unseen Ways, whether consciously or not, will contribute to the development of the reputations of Matthew Calandra, Rachelle Rodriguez, Kevin Meagher, John Demos, Luke Bayshco, Clarrice Collien, Mark Hood and James Ackhurst.

Much less common are permanent art studios devoted to mental health users; though a good Australian example is NEAMI Splash Art Studio in Melbourne (which grew out of the art class at the old Larundel Hospital in Bundoora after it closed in 1999). Other more common studio models include those in which users range across people with learning disabilities and adults with mental

Matthew Calandra The Mock Turtle (Queen of Hearts Man) 2010 Ink and gouache on calico 33 x 57 cm © courtesy the artist

Luke Bayshco A Person, Playing Ball 2009 Ink and graphite on paper 50 x 70 cm image sheet 73.3 x 93.5 cm framed © courtesy the artist

health issues, such as Project Ability, Glasgow, Scotland (1984), or even more widely in the case of organisations like Roomies. All of the specialised studios mentioned here rely to a greater or lesser extent on public funding for their long-term sustainability, usually through a mixture of grant and project funds from government and nongovernment agencies and fees paid directly or indirectly from the public purse. This explains partly why they can be found in some places and not others, and also why they did not begin to appear until the late-1970s, as care in the community began to take the place of mass residential care, and when funding began to be available in the West for organisations providing this kind of support outside the hospitals.

In ‘classes’ in the old residential hospitals and institutions emphasis was commonly on pacification, leisure and menial, taskled work. Not mindful of the possibility of individual aptitude or desire, activities were invariably simple, mechanical and homogeneous: basket weaving, envelope stuffing, colouring books and such like, were the order of the day. Such circumstances are hardly conducive to artmaking. From the late 1940s, in the mental health system, Art Therapy also began to develop as a discipline and with it the phenomenon of the therapeutic art class. Unsurprisingly, in this situation the emphasis was on image-making as part of the therapeutic process rather than on the production of art or the development of artists. But whilst this is not in itself contentious, the rise of

Kevin Meagher Undine Prince (detail) 2010 Coloured glazes on clay 18 x 31 x 24 cm © courtesy the artist

Rachelle Rodriguez Coloured Woman 2009 Mixed textas on paper 32 x 47 cm image size 50.5 x 35 cm sheet size © courtesy the artist

James Ackhurst The Werewolf Acrylic and tempera on board 121 x 91 cm © courtesy the artist

Art Therapy tended to compromise institutionalised opportunities for artmaking pure and simple. The most famous critical response within the institution was the establishment in 1981 of the so-called ‘Artists’ House’ in the psychiatric hospital in Gugging, Austria, where a small number of long-term psychiatric in-patients were liberated as artists in an experiment in anti-art-therapy that was somewhat subversive, but nevertheless permitted by the hospital authorities.

these units to support effectively the development of talented artistclients. Furthermore, opportunities to progress artistic reputations from within the studio are hampered and often thwarted by bureaucratic and ethical strictures. Within these often constricting conditions the studios at Macquarie Hospital are an increasingly present feature in at least those parts of the Sydney artworld that demonstrate an interest in art that emerges from uncommon places.

The art class continues to be a regular feature in what remains of the residential psychiatric hospitals, commonly catering for a mixture of residential and non-residential clients.

Almost inevitably under-resourced and usually viewed as being primarily a leisure provider, it is difficult for

Attaining artworld recognition is, perhaps, the most difficult hurdle for artists working in specialised studios.

As I have written elsewhere, like any field, for living artists to be in the artworld, they have to be engaged in discourse about it, and be recognised as being so; they are expected to talk to

other artists, to dealers, critics, curators, and to collectors, about art. Yet, in the case of artists from specialised studios, the ability to do this ranges from the extremely difficult to the impossible.

In very recent years, occasionally someone has slipped through into broader artworld acceptance; American fibre sculptor Judith Scott (from Creative Growth) is the most obvious example. This is encouraging.

But more often than not, artists are exhibited in non-mainstream contexts; the ubiquitous mixed disability exhibition, or ‘outsider’ art show. There are honourable exceptions, to be sure, and encouraging signs that this is increasingly the case among a younger generation of artists and curators less interested in categorisation and highart-low-art debates.

However, whilst pigeonholing artists according to their medical histories continues to be the greatest hurdle to broader acceptance of those extraordinary practitioners from specialised studios, I believe that one of the other major limiting factors is the specialised studio gallery. All of the studios mentioned here have their own exhibition space where visitors can see and acquire work by their artists. Attaining a gallery space is a key goal for those studios that do not have one, but almost invariably there is little sense of how the gallery will operate as an artworld space. The norm is essentially to act as shopfront, and even when shows are ‘curated’, they tend to be parochial. This

has three major negative results: first, a deepened inscription of artists from the studios into discourses of separation; second, a tendency to flatten artistic distinctiveness through interminable mixed, group shows; and third, a complacency that much reduces attempts to place artists in exhibitions in other artworld spaces outside the studio gallery. There are signs that some of the longer established studios have recognised this and have begun to curate exhibitions drawn from other places – most notably Herenplaats and more recently Creative Growth, especially through its Parisian offshoot, Galerie Impaire. Similarly, both Herenplaats and Creative Growth have been much more successful in ‘mainstreaming’ the best of their artists through fairly aggressive advocacy outside mental health and disability circles.

Much has been achieved in the last thirty-odd years. The number of studios actively catering for people previously denied access to serious, sustained opportunity for creative arts learning and work has risen sharply, especially in the last decade. Public interest in, and understanding of, art created in these contexts has also deepened. The artists themselves have transformed from vague, anonymised presences behind shoddily exhibited works made from poor materials, to real people with an identity and story, behind works whose materials and presentation reflect the seriousness of their creators’ art practice. There

John Demos The Indian 2009 Charcoal on paper 59 x 84 cm image sheet 106 x 81 cm framed Š courtesy the artist

is much still to be achieved, though.

With only a tiny number of exceptions, the specialised studios only really support the development of individual artistic vocations. The advocacy and support necessary for sustaining an artistic career is beyond them – mostly, for reasons of finance and resources. Yet, if forty years ago even the possibility seemed unreal that people with intellectual disabilities, for instance, might be artists, now we are able to (we must) ask ourselves how careers might be supported.

After the Second World War, most western nations recognised the need to support artists from the public purse – for example, the Arts Council of Great Britain was formed in 1945, and the Australian Council for the Arts in 1973 – through a system of grant award funding to organisations and individuals. Artists working outside mainstream career structures have almost never had access to such funding. It is now time for governments to recognise not only that substantial artists can emerge from the specialised studios and that they deserve state support, but also that their needs must be catered for differently to the normative career artist. Similarly, the specialised studios themselves need to be better networked.

Moves are already afoot in Europe, with the establishment last year of the European Outsider Art Association. Studios should also separate the idea of gallery as

shopfront from that of curated art gallery. And finally, studios must never lose sight of the importance of employing trained artists with careers of their own as facilitators and enablers. They provide the studio culture that encourages artmaking, rather than hobbyism. They introduce the edginess, spontaneity and experimentalism that makes for the production of authentic, substantial work. And their professional networks – both formal and, perhaps more importantly, informal – are crucial for making truly visible the ‘unseen scene’.

Colin Rhodes is a writer and artist.

He is best known for his work on SelfTaught and Outsider Art, including the book Outsider Art: spontaneous alternatives (Thames & Hudson). He is Dean of Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney, Chair of Museums & Galleries NSW, and a Visiting Professor at Macquarie University.

STUDIOS

Macquarie Hospital (MQE) Studios

Artists: James Ackhurst, John Demos, Kevin Meagher The Macquarie Hospital (MQE) Studios consists of the Ceramic Studio and the Art Resource studio held within the Macquarie Hospital at North Ryde, Sydney.

The studios facilitate individual, group and project-based work, and cater to a network of artists engaging with the Hospital’s services. The Ceramic studio currently runs a volunteer artist-in-residence and mentor program for artists who experience mental health issues.

As an adjunct to the studios, the Hospital also operates the Inside Out Gallery, which provides exhibition opportunities for practicing artists from within the Macquarie Hospital and the broader Health Service network. Using the Hospital’s suite of services the gallery manager’s role is to provide an environment that fosters artistic and professional development as well as advocate for the inclusion of artists with mental health issues into the broader contemporary arts and education communities.

Roomies Artspace Artists: Clarrice Collien, Mark Hood Roomies Artspace began as a centre-based program for residents of licensed Inner West Sydney boarding houses under the aegis of Newtown Neighbourhood Centre’s (NNC) Boarding House Project. Fortnightly art workshops ran out of a local community centre. This group still operates however due to interest from some of the artists in being able to work more often and independently, Roomies Artspace studio was established in 2005.

Roomies Artspace is situated in the Addison Road Centre in Marrickville, in Sydney’s inner west. The studio is coordinated by practicing artists, and aims to provide professional artistic development opportunities to the artists who attend. Through a combination of individual work, workshops and opportunities to work with mentors, Roomies provides the means by which their artists can enhance their practice and expand their professional experience in a supportive environment.

Studio ARTES Northside Artists: Luke Bayshco, Matthew Calandra, Rachelle Rodriguez.

Studio ARTES Northside is an independent not for profit community organisation in the northern Sydney suburb of Hornsby. The studio provides training and artistic programs for over 120 people living with disability. Operating with a ‘whole of life’ approach, ARTES is an acronym for the programs offered in Art, Recreation, Training, Employment and Skills.

Central to the Studio’s activities is a full-time art program that sees practicing artists mentor members and assist them in developing their practice. The Studio also operates Gallery ARTES in which members’ work is exhibited and sold, as well as advocating for the inclusion of Studio ARTES members in external exhibitions and contemporary arts projects.

Clarrice Collien Autumn in the Park II 2010 Acrylic wool on window wire 17 x 14 x 19.5 cm © courtesy the artist

Acknowledgements Hugh Nichols would like to thank all the exhibiting artists for sharing their time and work with him.

Thank you also to the following people and institutions for their support and assistance in the development of Unseen Ways: Paige Haines, Glenn Barkley, Tane Cavu, Josie Cavallaro, Rhonda Davis, Jamie Ferguson, Leonard Janiszewski, Emma Johnston, Natalie Mccarthy, Paul Meszaros, Gabrielle Mordy, Amanda Muscat, Colin Rhodes, Kristina Tito and Anne Wasner.

Macquarie University Art Gallery; Museum Studies, Macquarie University; Office of Institutional Advancement, Macquarie University Catalogue Design: Tane Cavu Photography: Effy Alexakis (Photowrite) Unseen Ways has been developed as part of the Other Academies research project. http://otheracademies.com