Store 5 was not easy in just about every way. It was not easy to receive the blows dealt by fellow artists who felt excluded from exhibiting at Store 5 (not that they ever visited!). It was not easy to receive the cowardly blows of deftly delivered gossip that aimed to undermine one’s involvement in Store 5. Nor was it easy to receive the blows delivered by some historical commentators not only determined to rub out one’s involvement in Store 5 if not one’s involvement in art (full stop), but rub out Store 5.
So why did Store 5 cause such a bruise on the surface of Melbourne’s contemporary art scene?
Other artist initiatives before Store 5 ostensibly grew from radical 1970s and early 1980s activism, where artists collaborated to stand for their rights (e.g. artists’ fees) and, thereby, contemporary art. Pre-ordained definitions of art were questioned as well as the politics of inclusion and exclusion in public programs (e.g. the exclusion of women artists). By so doing, these artists furnished a better art world that many of us younger artists lazily lounged in a little, perhaps, too unthankfully.
Much of this activity, however, lost its heartbeat in the mid 1980s through a growing art market that eventually lost its pulse, too. Now a whale of an art world washed up on our fatal shore, putrefied by our midday sun, artists scrambled for shelter under a scantily staked ‘post-modern’ umbrella.
Into this environment of artistic sterility a number of us younger artists most unluckily graduated: no art activism, no art market, no art consciousness and, seemingly, no art direction. Then in 1989, Store 5 started. Yet, unlike many of its predecessors, Store 5 neither grew from, nor was about, the rights of artists. It was about art.(1)
Given previous initiatives were generally instigated by a demand for democratic inclusion, many artists were angry for being unable to apply to exhibit at Store 5 as they could, say, at Gertrude Contemporary.
Yet exclusion, here, happened by default, not design. For exhibited, mostly, at Store 5 was a type of art that was predominantly – itself – excluded: an un-appropriated modernism. This art grew from a particular lack at the time that caused a number of us to seek sight of visual art’s ‘specific’ argument.
As a result, much of the work exhibited at Store 5 contained no ‘issue’, ‘message’, ‘theme’, or depicted object. It was, instead, specific to itself. Without ‘content’, it was without the sort of stuff Australian museums like to publicise artwork as ‘about’ (e.g. this art is ‘about’ cloning . . .).
This is, perhaps, how my art fit given it squarely takes up the spatial quarrels of minimalism where, at its centre, is an empty space for a viewer.
The emptiness of much of the artwork at Store 5 further inflamed the hostilities towards it both then and, perhaps, still now. Perceptions of formalism is very much a part of this, where I once overheard an Australian curator say formalism was akin to totalitarianism. Though this formalism, it seems to me, does not rest on a Greenbergian sense of taste and judgement, but something more democratic, something that has a viewer ‘witness’ their response in order to see the artwork.
In other words, there is no Greenbergian judgement here that requires an eye educated in the nuanced conventions of art history but, instead, an eye prepared to witness one’s seeing.
Many walk away from such artwork angrily declaring they don’t ‘get it’. Yet, unless one is prepared to observe ‘how’, in the first instance, it is instead the artwork that ‘gets you’, then the artwork will be overlook. Accordingly, this question of animosity surrounding Store 5 is, in itself, extraordinary. For who would have thought so much passion could form around seemingly ’empty’ art?
Through this ‘emptiness’, a contemporary visual art in Melbourne previously numbed from vision was brought back into view whereupon it became, once more, significant.
My first visit? Stephen Bram dragged me there one day after I’d finished an eight hour cleaning shift that commenced at 6am, and after I had given every excuse possible not to go (I was still in my cleaner’s uniform, felt terribly dirty and was beyond exhaustion). I have to be thankful, though, for I was instantly invigorated to be in a place in which art by my generation was not shunned but hung. I will always remember with gratitude Gary Wilson’s invitation to me to exhibit at Store 5, for never before had I experienced the power of acknowledgement of one’s work by a fellow.
So, finally, my response to the question ‘Store 5 is …?’. Store 5 is a sad reminder to this day of how the art that I find integral to present aesthetic debates, was not given a proper place in Australia at the time it first emerged, was not again when it re-emerged at Store 5 and still isn’t, today.
Can this art still be so radical, or is it time to let it be (… here, in Australia)?
Gail Hastings
Sydney, January 2005 (shortened, May 2014)
(1) Not unlike Art Projects, 1979-1984, Melbourne (John Nixon and Jenny Watson).