Kiffy Rubbo: curating the 1970s

By Janine Burke and Helen Hughes

How one woman helped to shape the Australian art world

Kiffy Rubbo was a dynamic and unique force in Australian art in the 1970s. It was the time of ‘the personal is political’, of the Vietnam War and the draft, of Indigenous rights and feminism. It was under Kiffy Rubbo’s leadership — and at a time when the artistic community was increasingly seen as an alternative to the mainstream political rhetoric — that the George Paton Gallery, at the University of Melbourne, would become known as a vital, nationally recognised centre for contemporary art.

Through Kiffy’s visionary and progressive approach, the gallery was transformed into a hub for ideas and discussion, and art-political activism. It became the home for feminist enterprises such as the Women’s Art Movement and the Women’s Art Register, as well as fostering publications such as the Art Almanac and Arts Melbourne. Many major contemporary artists, such as Elizabeth Gower, Stelarc, Peter Tyndall, and Lyndal Jones, were early exhibitors there.

Featuring contributions by significant curators, artists, and critics, Kiffy Rubbo: curating the 1970s explores for the first time Rubbo’s enduring legacy — and the immense role that she played in nurturing Australian visual-art culture at such a crucial time in its history.

PRAISE FOR ‘KIFFY RUBBO’

‘It is hard not to feel that the culture of the past 35 years has been the poorer without Kiffy Rubbo’s ongoing contribution. But this book testifies to what she gave in her time.’ The Saturday Age

‘A reminder of what an extraordinary time the seventies was … I was amazed by what she achieved.’ Readings Monthly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Release date: Oct 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9781925307863

Book preview

KIFFY RUBBO

Janine Burke is an author, art historian, curator, and novelist. She has published twenty books, including Australian Gothic: a life of Albert Tucker (2002), The Heart Garden: Sunday Reed and Heide (2004), The Gods of Freud: Sigmund Freud’s art collection (2006), and Nest: the art of birds (2012). Janine won the 1986 Victorian Premier’s Award for Fiction. She has been the recipient of residencies and grants including an Australia Council for the Arts Established Writers Grant (2014). Janine is Honorary Senior Fellow, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.

Helen Hughes is Research Curator at Monash University Museum of Art, Assistant Lecturer in Art History and Curatorial Practice at Monash University, and is a co-founder and co-editor of the contemporary art journal Discipline.

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Front cover photograph: Kiffy Rubbo, George Paton Gallery, c.1979. Photo by Robert Rooney. Courtesy Tolarno Galleries.

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9781925307863 (e-book)

A CiP record for this title is available from the National Library of Australia.

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I was lucky enough to fall briefly, but memorably, within the aura of Kiffy Rubbo and her pioneering curatorial work during my 1975 visit to Australia. I met some wonderful women who have remained friends for decades. All our exchanges confirmed our passionate belief that women coming together and supporting each other in art and life would change the world ... still a work in progress.

Lucy R. Lippard

CONTENTS

Foreword Bridie Carter

Introduction Janine Burke and Helen Hughes in conversation

Frances Lindsay Leadership and Legacy

Meredith Rogers For Kiffy

Jaynie Anderson At University

Grazia Gunn A Tale of Two Mermaids

Stelarc Insert/Imprint/Extend: event for amplified, modified, monitored man

Janine Burke Kiffy Rubbo’s ‘Feminisms’

Rachel Fensham The Art of Curating

Peter Tyndall Tend the Soil

Elizabeth Gower The Place to Be

Peter Cripps Situation/Event/Exhibition: curatorial practice in context

Domenico de Clario The George Paton Gallery: some Seventies definitions

Matthew Perkins Tape Revolutions: Australian video art in the 1970s

Micky Allan Without Fear or Favour

Shaune Lakin Women Photographers at the George Paton Gallery, 1972–1981

Jill Orr Continuum

Anne Marsh A Brief History of Performance Art at the George Paton Gallery

Lyndal Jones On Consequences, Bequests, and Legacies

Sandra Bridie Coordinating New Spaces

Janine Burke interviews Lesley Dumbrell Magic Times with Kiffy

Letters to Mike, 1966–1980

List of Exhibitions and Public Programs at the George Paton Gallery, 1972–1979

Epilogue Anna Rubbo

Notes

Biographies

Acknowledgements

FOREWORD

Bridie Carter

The George Paton Gallery, or the Ewing Gallery, as some people knew it, was always and will always be far more than a space in a university to exhibit art — to me. Not merely because it was, in its time, a touchstone of the beginning of many artists’ careers, but also because it became a curatorial home for my mother, Kiffy Dattilo Rubbo, to work from. This hothouse, initiated by her, was a communal space where she enabled and encouraged artists to experience, fulfil, and often realise their true potential when they themselves, as an individual or group, could not. She curated with faith, not fear. With integrity, not superficiality. With intense devotion, dedication, and love. My mum did many great things for many great artists. She guided and walked alongside, and was not afraid to ask, to push, to demand when needed. A formidable female force through the ’70s, her influence and initiation is not forgotten, not dismissed, but often silently put aside because of the tragic nature of her death. As much as my mum was passionate, she was sad. As much as she loved deeply, she could not be. Some people, I believe, are not for this world. It is too difficult, too brittle, too hard. But my mum’s life continues in all the paint on canvas, in all the clay held warmly in hands, in all the people whom she touched at some time as a gifted curator and, more than often, dear friend. And of course she lives on lovingly and wonderfully fiercely in my brother, Barny, and myself. We both thank all the contributors of this book, for her legacy having a little light shone upon it. It truly means so much.

INTRODUCTION

Janine Burke and Helen Hughes in conversation

Helen Hughes: In August 2014, you organised a conference on the life and work of Melbourne curator and gallery director Kiffy Rubbo. What prompted you to do this? And what were you hoping to achieve by asking the conference’s numerous contributors to reflect on Kiffy’s legacy?

Janine Burke: The previous year, I’d co-launched — with Meredith Rogers — a wonderfully rich archival exhibition at the George Paton Gallery (GPG), titled Creativity and Correspondence: the George Paton Gallery archive 1971–1990. ¹ I found it a powerful and very moving experience because on display was a photograph of Kiffy and me, as well as letters between us discussing Australian Women Artists: 1840–1940, which we’d dreamed up and which she commissioned me to curate in 1975.

When it was my turn to speak at the launch, all these strong memories came pouring out as I recalled Kiffy’s commitment and passion for art, as well as her faith in me as a young curator. It hit me that her enormous contribution to the Australian art scene had never fully been recognised. After I’d finished speaking, I walked straight up to Mark (Kiffy’s younger brother) and said, ‘We’ve got to do something on Kiffy,’ and he immediately said, ‘Yes, and it should be here at Melbourne Uni.’ That’s how it began.

The Rubbo family was, of course, the first port of call for the project. As was Sandra Bridie, the current director of the George Paton Gallery, who was deeply involved from the get-go.

Because I’d been so immersed in the gallery in the 1970s and had seen most of the exhibitions, performances, et cetera, that formed its program, it was a relatively easy matter to draw up a list of significant artists, curators, and historians who had either contributed to the gallery in those years or who had subsequently produced substantial research on it. Helen Vivian’s edited book When You Think About Art: the Ewing and George Paton galleries 1971–2008 (2008) provided a helpful resource, too. And, gosh, of course it was a trip down memory lane — at times exhilarating and at others very sad and painful. Everyone we contacted was thrilled and moved to be involved, you know, to commemorate Kiffy. Of course, it was the circumstances of Kiffy’s death, her suicide in 1980, which made the process distressing. Will always make it distressing. But I hoped to go further, to frame Kiffy within her time, her ideas, her vision, her oeuvre, so her memory was not limited by the circumstances of her death.

I viewed the symposium, and this book, as the beginning of the process of positioning Kiffy securely within Australian visual culture. It’s a process I’m familiar with from my work on both Joy Hester and Sunday Reed. And what I’ve learned is that this process of ‘historicising’ an undervalued or ignored female cultural figure can take a long time, much longer than you initially conceive. It’s a manoeuvre that needs to be strategic — bold and strong as well as subtle and complex. Of course, the talent has to be there in the first place, and Kiffy had that in spades. Now we can begin to discern the dimensions of her achievement, which was really on a grand scale.

But let me ask you, as a young contemporary arts writer and curator, how you view the conference and your work on the book? What connections are there for you? And what are the dissonances?

HH: Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about art in the 1970s in Australia and how the infrastructural innovations of that period underwrite, in many ways, the contemporary art world that I operate in today. By infrastructural innovations, I’m referring to the feminist movement of which you, and Meredith Rogers and Rubbo, among many others, were such a great part. But also the innovations around curatorial practice, exhibition-making, arts administration, and funding.

A few key events from the mid 1970s kept coming to mind:

1) The establishment of the Australian Council for the Arts as an independent statutory authority in 1975 under the direction of then prime minister Gough Whitlam. This pivotal moment in the Council’s history kept coming to mind when the Australia Council had its funding cut severely in 2015 by then arts minister George Brandis, who was opposed to the Council’s relative independence from government — characterised by its arm’s-length peer-review procedures.

2) The sit-in at the National Gallery of Australia, initiated by Domenico de Clario and planned under the auspices of Rubbo at the George Paton Gallery in August of 1975 — due to the lack of interest in and respect for contemporary Australian art. Today, by contrast, the NGV is a major advocate of contemporary art from all around the world, and particularly of contemporary art from Melbourne and broader Australia: just consider its monumental 2013–14 exhibition Melbourne Now, which included work by more than three hundred contemporary artists from Melbourne.

So I was interested to learn about Rubbo’s role in ‘curating’ this period for numerous reasons: her grant-writing skills, her decision to document and archive shows through installation shots, her (at times) antagonistic relationship with larger organisations like the NGV, which of course helped to make it the strong base for contemporary Australian art that it is today, and her social justice agendas: namely, the foregrounding of women’s work and feminist concerns through her curatorial and directorial positions.

Today, one of the most rapidly increasing areas of study within and alongside the discipline of art history is that of ‘exhibition histories’. As opposed to the traditional monographic format that is associated with the discipline of art history, the exhibition history model is inherently more social in its scope: exhibition histories not only take account of the artists, artworks, and curators in question, but also the history of exhibition sites, of viewer demographics, of funding structures and corporate partnerships, cultural policies, and institutional and state directives. That this conference and our book on Rubbo’s work was not merely a portrait of Kiffy as a curator, but rather a complex, decentred, and thoroughly imbricated portrait of her as expressed through the art world in Melbourne in the 1970s, struck me as a very ‘contemporary’ approach. And one that would yield a large use-value for researchers exploring this period in Australian art history.

As someone who was a highly active figure in the Melbourne art world in the 1970s, what do you think, looking back? What infrastructural traces of the 1970s linger today? And what has disappeared?

JB: I think it’s interesting how you and I have framed our responses. I start off with a personal yarn and you discuss ‘infrastructural innovations’, which is a kind of bureaucratese. I’m not being a philistine. The issues you raise are worth addressing. It’s the way we’ve chosen different styles of language to present our views that is indicative, I think, of our approaches to culture. Perhaps that’s because there was a strong DIY ethic in the culture in the ’70s. For example, Kiffy had no training whatsoever to run either the Rowden White Library or the Ewing Gallery. And she ended up being a top contender for the post of director of the 1982 Sydney Biennale — that is, taking on an international role as an influential contemporary gallerist. I curated Australian Women Artists in eight months, go to whoa, and helped to lay out the catalogue as well. That’s because the whole rigmarole of loan agreements and fund-raising was at a bare minimum.

In 2016, if a curator wishes to borrow a work from the National Gallery of Victoria, for example, then the loan application has to go in twelve months prior or it won’t be considered. It reveals, of course, how vast the art world is compared to the 1970s. In those times, it was also much cheaper to curate an exhibition, publish a catalogue, and mount the sort of complex programs that Kiffy advanced. Money was tight but it wasn’t the horrific situation many smaller museums find themselves in these days, where donors and sponsors are the life-blood of the organisation and where being really smart about raising dollars is often the requisite characteristic for a director. I know of directors from major museums who sort of stagger from one social event to another, trying to bag a donor for their gallery or raise money for the acquisition of a particular artwork. Boards expect their directors to have all those skills — trip the light fantastic with the top end of town while having an excellent knowledge of art and a presence in the contemporary scene. It’s lead to an ‘executivisation’ of the arts in general, where curators sometimes speak in corporate jargon, just to get the attention and win the respect of the CEOs they’re putting the squeeze on. I think Kiffy would find today’s art world pretty loathsome. She was such an idealist.

HH: I suppose the difference in approach is to be expected: you were there, I wasn’t. On this point, I’m tempted to quote Lucy Lippard, writing a new introduction for a 1996 reprint of the 1973 book, Six Years: the dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972. She writes, of the conceptual art movement in the 1960s:

I was there, but I don’t trust my memory. I don’t trust anyone else’s either. And I trust even less the authoritative overviews by those who were not there … The times were chaotic and so were our lives. We have each invented our own history, and they don’t always mesh, but such messy compost is the source of all versions of the past. ²

I think this book is a great ‘messy compost’.

JB: Eeek, it’s not meant to be a great messy compost! It’s meant to be a considered evaluation of some of the major curatorial themes at the George Paton Gallery, and in Australian and international art in the 1970s. Of course, it also stands as a deep tribute to Kiffy’s role in engineering those exhibitions, public programs, publications, and protests. Further, it also functions as a personal portrait from some of those who knew and loved her to those who knew and loved her. I anticipate it will lead to greater recognition for Kiffy. An interested arts audience member might pick up this book, having never heard of Kiffy Rubbo, and be engaged by her achievements and her story.

LEADERSHIP AND LEGACY

Frances Lindsay

The emergence of the George Paton Gallery at the University of Melbourne in the 1970s as Australia’s first publicly funded art space specifically dedicated to contemporary art owes everything to the vision and inspiration of Kiffy Rubbo, who served as its inaugural director from 1971 until 1979, when she took a year off, prior to her death at the end of 1980.

Kiffy Rubbo was charismatic and memorable. Her luminous beauty, charm, and enthusiasm had a magnetic effect on those around her. Persuasive, energetic, and always open to new ideas, she had an absolute belief in art, artists, and the power of getting things done through collaboration. Her success was underpinned by an inclusive management style that encouraged and enabled others to facilitate and to explore innovative approaches. She seemed to know instinctively how to harness the energy and support of artists and curators, and in this respect invited them to form collectives as advisory committees for the George Paton Gallery and its programs. ² With this strategy, and a broad outlook, she effectively widened the relevance of the gallery not only within the university but in the larger community as well.

When Kiffy Rubbo was appointed director of the Rowden White Library in the Student Union in October 1971, her brief included displaying and managing the historical Ewing Collection and organising a program of changing exhibitions. ³ She embraced this aspect of her portfolio with gusto, staging a diverse program of exhibitions with a punishing three-week rotation schedule, so that fifteen exhibitions were held in the first year — and this tempo was maintained thereafter. ⁴ The program was funded solely by the Student Union for the first two years. However, additional funding was received from the Australia Council for the 1974 program, and this continued annually until 1990. The gallery became known as the Ewing and George Paton Galleries, or simply the George Paton Gallery.

It was not the first art gallery or art space within a tertiary institution in Australia. The University Gallery (also at the University of Melbourne) had opened in 1970 with a custodial brief for the university art collections and a program of temporary exhibitions. However, the George Paton Gallery, with its focus on experimental, cutting-edge art, was certainly Australia’s first publicly funded art gallery that defined itself by pushing the boundaries of contemporary art.

Under Kiffy’s leadership, and that of Meredith Rogers as assistant director from 1974–79, ⁵ the George Paton Gallery soon became one of Australia’s most influential contemporary art venues, noted for courageous exhibitions of experimental art, including painting, sculpture, performance, video, film, photography, and installation work; and for seminars, debates, and talks by visiting artists, critics, and curators. As a collaborative enterprise, the George Paton Gallery quickly became a touchstone for the rapidly changing contemporary art scene, not only in Melbourne but also nationally, and its ambit soon took on an international edge, featuring keynote programs with noted contemporary figures such as Lucy Lippard, Christo, Mario Merz, Les Levine, Lynda Benglis, and Lawrence Weiner.

The Australian art world of the 1970s was undergoing rapid change, as was society itself in an era of protest and ‘counter-culture’. The heightened political activism following the events of the previous decade — the Vietnam War, the assassination of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr — gave voice to a generation concerned with equality and justice for all people. The decade of the 1970s thus became a time of tumultuous change that redefined the social, political, economic, and technological framework of society. This was manifested through anti-war protest, multiculturalism, environmentalism, and the key movements for Indigenous rights and women’s rights, all of which the programs of the George Paton Gallery embraced and supported. Significantly, the gallery became a proactive force for feminism and the Women’s Art Movement.

The opening of the National Gallery of Victoria’s new building in 1968 was the harbinger of an unprecedented development in art museums, galleries, and contemporary art spaces in Australia over the following decade, creating a range of jobs for art historians and curators. ⁶ At the same time, the programs of the Australia Council, with their increased funding for contemporary art, enabled new possibilities that fostered a sense of optimism in the arts.

A focus on internationalism and ‘pluralist’ forms of art involving process, performance, new media, video, and conceptual art also emerged, spurred on by the Sydney Biennale from 1973, and by the privately sponsored Kaldor Public Art Projects, which commenced in 1969 with the spectacular wrapping of Little Bay, Sydney, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Alternative art spaces that embraced this new direction and avant-garde ideology were at the forefront of this cultural shift — namely the George Paton Gallery and Pinacotheca, in Melbourne; the Tin Sheds and Inhibodress, in Sydney; the Australian Experimental Art Foundation, in Adelaide; and the Institute of Modern Art, in Brisbane.

Under Kiffy Rubbo’s directorship, the exhibition program at the GPG embraced the broadest sweep of contemporary practice. Its programs were remarkable for their inclusiveness, diversity, and experimental edge. They included group exhibitions, such as Minimal in 1973, which focused on painters associated with Pinacotheca, including Peter Booth, Robert Hunter, Dale Hickey, and Michael Johnson; while Event/Structures, in 1974, featured installation and performance work by artists such as Domenico de Clario, Peter Kennedy, Tim Burns, Aleks Danko, Nigel Lendon, Peter Tyndall, Imants Tillers, and Mike Parr.

From time to time, the gallery expanded its programs into the grounds of the university,