Artist Notes by Billy Gruner

Australasian artists. As such, it is a significant issue if an artist wants or deserves to be considered, a contemporary artist. In a more progressive sense, if we are to understand why few if any know much about Australian formalist art making and, its unique history, we need to think about why it has been so poorly promoted since its an apogee in the late 1960s. What is most important is to understand the nature of a regional bias that can still provide a unilateral benchmark of conservative assumptions. And seemingly for some, those may never be crossed again. The original title for this essay was ‘Surmounting Regional Art Historicism’, a title that alluded to a line drawn in the contemporary art sand drawn long ago. In my opinion, more current concerns over formalism amount to very little actually. As any unsolicited or unwarranted international influence may be prohibited in one style of art making, but not in others, without comment. The facts of our own arthistorical precedence bare this claim out. Ultimately, a question that really begs is, what is formalism? A fiction! If so, isn’t all art making constructed information delivered for view, no matter how emotively felt, thought out, or journalistic by intent. Smiths own manifesto proclaimed art had to be an utterly considered process. Yet it is exactly this double standardisation of conventions and the inestimably complex negotiations that have profoundly affected artists in Australia for the last hundred years that need addressing. It is my aim in this essay on Australian formalism, or what I prefer to call PostFormalism since the ending of the 20 th century, to draw attention to a fantastic story that has unfolded around a nationalistic enterprise of suppression, and the utter ignoring of any value to found in regional ‘purist’ aesthetic interests. Recently, that same principle has operated in a renewed interest shown in the now dated ‘anything goes’ Popist assumptions, of the 1980s; as chiefly described by the Australian writer and editor, Paul Taylor. The sophistic process of art critical review is common enough, yet its neglect can lead to critically damaging side effects. I would argue that some of these are perhaps never been more deeply felt than in post-colonial environs. As such, contemporary Australian art appears in many forms but not all of it is understood as, contemporary. Or, qualified, which is an accompanying issue that has dogged and bewildered several generations of reductive artists in this region since the interwar years. Yet overall it is reasonable to note that Contemporary Australian Art today barely registers its’ important reductive artists within an overtly cautious system, a editorial process that seeks more Popularist entertainment within a strangely conservative industry nevertheless bent on the international promotion of selected regional or local styles. Reductive practice, like the many variants found in the non-objective or non-figurative genres overall, remain uniquely specialised activities that have developed into a kind of regional history of, and for, its own making. Peculiarly, those who are interested in contemporary art generally do not consider reductive practices as part of any justifiable account. The poor valuation of important abstraction in Australian art testifies to that claim every month in the auction rooms more readily obsessing about the value of a Fred Williams or a Nolan, as examples. In short, the real value is invisible. Yet both systems interconnect with a necessary criticality. And that requires either module belonging to a far greater system of assessments to be broken up into a significantly complex vista. Or, range of super-individuated activities within that. That is, each artist in the end is required to provide some kind of ‘alternate character’ from the rest, if we are to actually understand each other’s meaning. Again, generally speaking, there are many prior movements, debates, and as many critical concerns that can be readily linked in the Australasian arena, back to traditions familiar to American and European audiences. In summary, there are interesting regionally specific concerns that began diverging into art-historically obscure zones decades ago whose tenets should still be easily understood elsewhere. Yet, formalism is usually defined in the regional context as an exotic response to a demoted ‘international’ tradition. Oddly, that literally implies any local formalist style of production, itself identified as an exotic concern regardless, would however remain unfathomable to a disinterested mainstream looking for identity in more nationalistic signage, imagery, and ideas that exist someplace beyond that very same internationalised system