Harry Georgeson and I were students together at The National Art School in the early 1970’s. Harry went to America not long after, to extend his education at The New York Studio School and to steep himself in New York’s culture. He and I have maintained our connection and he has maintained his engagement with sculpture. He follows my blog and offers feedback. He argues that my conclusions about the sculpture made here since that time is an overreach.
Dear Harry,
It may have been a beginning for you Harry, at the art school. For me it was the end of my education.
I was ready to go in 73.
In the same year, my father determined Australia was a mistake and returned to England, (this despite his being Australian born), and lived out his days there.
‘Australia is barren’, he said. ‘I need to be where culture runs deep.’
‘You go then,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay and help to build culture here.’
The world is your oyster when you’re young, and stays that way if you can make setbacks work for you.
Around that time in the mid-seventies, there was a flowering in all the arts, and in politics here in Australia. Gough Whitlam had proposed a new independence. We could speak with our own voice.
Depending on who you talk to, that awakening was delusory or exhausted after twenty, thirty, forty years. This culture building is slow.
We were fortunate in Australia to have enjoyed an educational foundation at The National Art School. With that knowledge we were reasonably equipped to make sense of where we found ourselves.
In Australia we are speaking alongside ancient landscape and ancient culture. This puts the whole of Asian and European culture into a virtually modern history context.
What we have an opportunity here is to navigate a well without a bottom.
You gave me feedback Harry, on my last post about The Sydney School of Sculpture. You argued that the history of sculpture I described was no more extensive than what has emerged from other art schools, citing St Martin’s, Stockwell Depot, The New York Studio School. These schools were interpreting the same history of Modernism in the same way, you argued.
You suggested that as lively as the possibilities seemed for the new sculptural language at the time, it was exhausted by the mid-seventies, both here and everywhere that that those histories were being explored.
When Rayner Hoff undertook the formation of The National Art School in the 1920’s, he furnished the studios with excellent benches. I used those benches when I was a student and I notice they are still there.
Progress is slow and non-linear. It presents itself as peculiar initially, which is fair and fine.
All the best,
Michael