Sheridan Palmer – Disequilibrium: Presence/absence in the art of Tony Woods, October 4, Buxton Contemporary

As part of the ongo­ing lec­ture series, His­to­ries and The­o­ries of Sound, Dis­ci­pline and Liquid Archi­tec­ture present Dr Sheri­dan Palmer’s ​‘Dis­e­qui­lib­rium: Presence/​absence in the art of Tony Woods’, fol­lowed by dis­cus­sion with Doug Hall AM.

During the 1960s the Tas­man­ian artist TONY WOODS (1940 – 2017) emerged as a rare talent in the Aus­tralian art scene. An advo­cate of modernism’s plu­ral­ism, his bold fig­u­ra­tion, vig­or­ous abstract for­mal­ism, irreg­u­lar shaped can­vases that often incor­po­rated col­lage and the ready­made, was a syn­the­sis of Amer­i­can mid twen­ti­eth cen­tury avant-garde, Pop and counter-cul­tural mys­ti­cism edged with exis­ten­tial angst. This diver­sity was not so much a con­tra­dic­tion but a fluid enquiry into ideas that informed his analy­sis of visual rep­re­sen­ta­tion.

When Woods began exhibit­ing on the Aus­tralian main­land he acquired an impres­sive col­lec­tor base that included the Amer­i­can mil­lion­aire Harold Merz, the mod­ernist archi­tect Robin Boyd, Bernard Smith, Lord Talbot of Malahide, with Joseph Burke and Albert Tucker as avid admir­ers. These con­nec­tions partly explain Woods’s award of a Hark­ness Fel­low­ship to New York in 1967 (the last given to an Aus­tralian artist) and a guar­an­tee of a Power Insti­tute Cité des Arts Inter­na­tional studio in Paris; he also hosted the Amer­i­can art critic Clement Green­berg on his Hobart visit in 1968. To all appear­ances, Woods’s rep­u­ta­tion and suc­cess was sealed.

In the final months of his Man­hat­tan res­i­dency, how­ever, fire gutted his studio and he lost every­thing; his Amer­i­can dream a pal­pa­ble absence that left him in a state of dis­e­qui­lib­rium. Return­ing to Aus­tralia Woods slowly recov­ered and went about re-estab­lish­ing his career and, while his artis­tic pro­duc­tion expanded into a rich body of paint­ings, draw­ings, prints, video and sound works, he lacked val­i­da­tion from the art system and grad­u­ally retreated into seclu­sion. In this lec­ture I con­sider prob­lems of inclu­sion and exclu­sion and why a tal­ented artist like Tony Woods became periph­eral. Para­dox­i­cally, this ​‘neg­a­tive free­dom’ enabled him to explore alter­na­tive medi­ums and con­cepts of ​‘error’ as a pos­i­tive pro­jec­tion and absence as a pro­duc­tive pres­ence. As an artist Tony Woods was ​‘a lab­o­ra­tory of approaches that lies out­side of—or in vital oppo­si­tion to— quo­tid­ian and bour­geois struc­tures of value and mean­ing’, in which his visual aper­ture revealed the undis­closed rather than the obvi­ous in both real and abstract terms. Despite the art critic Patrick McCaughey once rating Woods as ​‘per­pet­u­ally promis­ing’, a new gen­er­a­tion of young artists from the late 1990s onwards rec­og­nized his artis­tic integrity, his invig­o­rat­ing cul­tural knowl­edge and the value of Woods’s empir­i­cal enquiries that com­ple­mented postmodernity’s insta­bil­ity.

Sheri­dan Palmer is an art his­to­rian, cura­tor and biog­ra­pher, who has pub­lished exten­sively in art and lit­er­ary jour­nals. She has degrees from the Vic­to­rian Col­lege of Arts, La Trobe Uni­ver­sity and a PhD from the Uni­ver­sity of Mel­bourne where she is an Hon­orary Fellow. Sheri­dan has worked in paint­ing con­ser­va­tion, as inde­pen­dent art dealer and has curated The God­dess Grins: Albert Tucker and the Female Image at Heide Museum of Modern Art in 2007 and The Lake Hind­marsh Project, 2010, for which she received an Arts Vic­to­ria Cre­ation Grant. She was awarded the National Gallery of Vic­to­ria Trustees Prize for sculp­ture (1973) and Joseph Brown Prize for draw­ing (1976) and as an art his­to­rian has been awarded numer­ous grants, includ­ing a Paul Mellon Centre for Stud­ies in British Art research grant in 2012, a Harold White Fel­low­ship at National Library of Aus­tralia in 2010, a Sidney Myer Arts Grant, 2009 and a Man­ning Clark CAL Res­i­den­tial Fel­low­ship in 2009. She was short­listed for the Hazel Rowley Lit­er­ary Fel­low­ship in 2013 and the Aus­tralian Book Review Raft Fel­low­ship in 2016.

Her books include Dean Bowen: Argy Bargy; Centre of the Periph­ery: Three Euro­pean Art His­to­ri­ans in Mel­bourne, which is a major study of the estab­lish­ment of art his­tory in Aus­tralia, and Hegel’s Owl: The life of Bernard Smith, among others. She is cur­rently research­ing post-war Aus­tralian mod­ernism.

DOUG HALL AM

Doug Hall grad­u­ated from the Vic­to­rian Col­lege of the Arts and was direc­tor of two regional gal­leries before moving to Bris­bane in 1987 where until 2007 he was direc­tor of the Queens­land Art Gallery. Under his direc­tor­ship the Queens­land Art Gallery expanded its inter­na­tional focus and devel­oped a strong engage­ment with Asia, espe­cially through his ini­tia­tive, the Asia-Pacific Tri­en­nial of Con­tem­po­rary Art. He con­ceived the idea for the Gallery of Modern Art and over­saw its devel­op­ment. He was Com­mis­sioner at the 53rd and 54th Venice Bien­nale from 2009 to 2011, and was appointed Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor and Hon­orary Fellow in the School of Cul­ture and Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, Fac­ulty of Arts at the Uni­ver­sity of Mel­bourne.

Doug ini­ti­ated, nego­ti­ated and curated many major exhi­bi­tions from within Aus­tralia and inter­na­tion­ally and con­tin­ues with aca­d­e­mic and advi­sory roles in Aus­tralia and abroad. He has worked for cul­tural organ­i­sa­tions includ­ing the Visual Arts Board of the Aus­tralia Coun­cil, as a member of the Aus­tralia Inter­na­tional Cul­tural Coun­cil (Depart­ment of For­eign Affairs); and as a member of the Asia Art Coun­cil, Guggen­heim Museum (New York), Exec­u­tive Com­mit­tee of the Aus­tralia-Thai­land Insti­tute, Aus­tralian Japan Foun­da­tion, Sher­man Con­tem­po­rary Art Foun­da­tion, Gertrude Con­tem­po­rary and Chair­man of the Michael Buxton Col­lec­tion.

He is widely pub­lished in news­pa­pers, mag­a­zines and jour­nals and wrote art crit­i­cism for the Aus­tralian Finan­cial Review. His forth­com­ing book will be pub­lished in 2019. Hall was awarded the Uni­ver­sity of Queensland’s Doctor of Phi­los­o­phy hon­oris causa for his con­tri­bu­tion to the visual arts in Queens­land and in 2001 he was awarded a member of the Order of Aus­tralia. In 2006 he was made a Cheva­lier dans l‘Ordre des Arts et Let­tres by the Repub­lic of France.