1988, AND I’M IN MY THIRD AND final year of a Bachelor of Arts degree at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne. My student-studio is part of a cluster that fills what is now an entrance foyer for the Buxton Contemporary Art Museum on the corner of Southbank Boulevard & Dodds Street, Melbourne. 

One year earlier, in 1987, I’d discovered several small works by Ian Burn in a corridor vitrine at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA). They weren’t part of an exhibition, but an aside, an afterthought. A curator’s passing inclusion. For which, as it will turn out, I’ll be thankful.

I was already familiar with Burn’s Xerox Book of 1968 that Norbert Loeffler advised the VCA library to purchase. It was one of many treasured finds amidst the library’s shelves I’d spend lunchtimes meandering. There was nothing, however, about Burn’s work. Nothing published, let alone planned.

Yet here it was in a surreptitious vitrine. The find dumbfounded me. Moments earlier, in my student-studio, I had stumbled into new artistic territory I’d thought mine alone. The realisation thrilled me. Then, on seeing Burn’s work in the vitrine, I found the same territory already so well traversed as to be mummified by a museum, forgotten. New artistic ground on which to tread is, instead, unnoticed artistic ground already well trodden. 

If Burn’s work had been more broadly recognised, earlier, I needn’t have wasted student days reinventing the already invented. My earlier thrill plummeted. I accosted the then director of ACCA, Jenepher Duncan, with my despair. Why was Ian Burn’s work tucked away in a walkway’s vitrine? 

Back at VCA, I challenged the first sculpture teachers I came across. Regrettably for them, it was Maggie May and Loretta Quin. Why hadn’t you introduced Ian Burn’s work? Answer: It was too difficult for a second year undergraduate student. Hands-on studio practise was more important, not theory. My student week, for instance, included at least nine hours of life drawing. Much of which I’d loaded on myself.

Years later, repetition of a similar scenario instead suggested another answer. Ian Burn is Australian. Art by Australians is less important to discuss at the tertiary level. To criticise — yes, of course. But not to research, study and observe the difference in art it makes. Without uncovering the differences our current art makes, however, we cannot appreciate what it is, in art, we’ve already discovered. Art’s current difference enables its past.

Back in 1988, having discovered Ian Burn’s work sidelined in a corridor’s vitrine a year earlier, I resolve to organise a lunchtime theory-discussion group. A few days before each session, I’d visit those expected to attend to collect fists-full of five cent pieces needed to photocopy the agreed text. I’d then distribute the text in hope at least one person would turn up who could shine a light on the text’s dark passages the rest of us could then follow with a hand on the preceding person’s shoulder. 

A year later, en masse, Australians take up the newly invented internet. Photocopying-endurance needed to facilitate independent extracurricular learning becomes antiquated overnight. An emailed PDF will soon suffice. As will — a decade later — the internet’s index of every artist’s name and Wikipedia entry of every plausible theory. Yet, amidst much change, has much changed?

To prepare this ‘about’ page, I contacted Anne Kay and Jane Polkinghorne to include an excerpt from an artwork they made in 2005. They video interviewed 100 artists as an archive, and exhibited the unedited interviews on monitors as part of ‘Situation’, a group exhibition by Russell Storer at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. My thanks to Anne Kay and Jane Polkinghorne for allowing me to include an excerpt of their interview with me, here. 

The interview takes place on 13 April 2005. This is 18 years after my happenstance discovery in 1987 of our missing home-grown art history had shocked me. As chance has it, another 18 years have passed since the interview. 

Is the capricious uncertainty governing Australian art’s public circulation a reliable determinator of its worth? Based on my firsthand experience 36 years ago, I suggest it would be a mistake to think so.

Gail Hastings
14 April 2023