The Past is Another Country: 50 years after the Whitlam Cultural Revolution
1 December 2022 at 11:30:00 pm
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Session Convenors
Dr Wendy Garden, AAANZ
Session Speakers
Wendy Garden, AAANZ
Dr Ben Eltham, Monash University
Dr Joanna Mendelssohn, University of Melbourne
Professor Terry Smith, University of Pittsburgh
2022 marks the 50th anniversary of the election of the Whitlam Labor Government on 2 December 1972. The first time the Australian Labor Party had been in government in 23 years, it enacted wide-sweeping reforms including abolishing university fees to provide free tertiary education. Amongst an unprecedented number of legislative reforms, it was Whitlam’s support for arts and culture that most indelibly altered Australia’s cultural identity. Stating ‘of all the objectives of my Government none have a higher priority than the encouragement of the arts, the preservation and enrichment of our cultural and intellectual heritage,’ Whitlam substantially increased the arts budget, developed a national arts and culture policy, set up the Australia Council for the Arts (ensuring artists had a role in its decision making processes) and established the Art Acquisition Committee for the nascent National Gallery. Whitlam supported the purchase of Jackson Pollock’s painting Blue Poles for a record $1.1 million creating a national conversation about the role of contemporary art. At a time when the film industry was dormant, he set up the Australian Film Commission creating a renaissance in local film production and he reformed Australian radio, establishing Double J. His leadership gave rise to increased arts investment by local governments and state bodies resulting in the establishment of a number of new galleries and arts organisations in metropolitan and regional communities around the country. Our thriving arts and cultural sector today is a direct product of his ground-breaking reforms.
This session will reflect upon the impact of the Whitlam Government’s arts policy, the legacy of the Whitlam reforms and their influence on the arts landscape today.
Dr Ben Eltham, Monash University
Dr Joanna Mendelssohn, University of Melbourne
Professor Terry Smith, University of Pittsburgh
Biographies
Wendy Garden, AAANZ
Wendy Garden is a curator and writer. She has held curatorial positions in a number of institutions including Curator of Australian Art at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory and Senior Curator at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery where she curated solo exhibitions, group shows and touring exhibitions. She regularly writes about Australian art including a chapter in the forthcoming publication Crosscurrents in Australian First Nations and Non-Indigenous Art edited by Caroline Jordan, Helen McDonald and Sarah Scott published by Routledge.
Dr Ben Eltham, Monash University
Ben Eltham is a lecturer in cultural and creative industries in the School of Media, Film and Journalism at Monash University. He also writes regularly about Australian arts and culture for a range of publications including the Guardian, ArtsHub, Meanjin Quarterly and Overland. His report tracking the impact of the pandemic on Australian culture, Creativity in Crisis, co-written with Alison Pennington, was published by the Centre for Future Work in 2021. Ben's latest essay, 'Clive James is dead, alas' was published in the book Art Writing in Crisis by the Sternberg Press in 2021.
Dr Joanna Mendelssohn, University of Melbourne
Joanna Mendelssohn is an Honorary (Senior Fellow) at the School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. She was previously Associate Professor at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW, Sydney. She was one of the first cohort of honours graduates in Fine Arts (Art History) at the University of Sydney and on graduation was employed at the Art Gallery of NSW, working under Daniel Thomas. She was for many years, the Art Critic of The Bulletin and in 1991 was awarded the Geraldine Pascall Prize for Art Criticism. Her most recent book (co-authored with Catherine de Lorenzo, Alison Inglis and Catherine Speck) is Australian Art Exhibitions: Opening Our Eyes.
Professor Terry Smith, University of Pittsburgh
Terry Smith is the Andrew W. Mellon Emeritus Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory, Department of the History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh; Professor in the Division of Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought, European Graduate School; and Faculty at Large, Curatorial Studies Program, School of Visual Arts, New York. In 2010, he became Australia Council Visual Arts Laureate and received the Mather Award for art criticism from the College Art Association (USA), which named him its Distinguished Teacher of Art History in 2022. Books include What is Contemporary Art? (2009), Contemporary Art: World Currents (2011), Thinking Contemporary Curating (2012), Talking Contemporary Curating (2015), The Contemporary Composition (2016), One and Five Ideas: On Conceptual Art and Conceptualism (2107), Art to come: Histories of Contemporary Art (2019), Curating the Complex & The Open Strike (2021), and Iconomy: Towards a Political Iconomy of Images (2022). See www.terryesmith.net/web/about