Sydney Non Objective:
Redrawing the geography and history of abstraction in the context of the contemporary

By Carolyn Barnes

Much cultural discussion today focuses on the movement of ideas, images, goods and people across physical or virtual boundaries, stressing the apparent mutability of all things in the present. Indeed, it is several decades now since there were any clear organizing principles in contemporary art. v Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood and Anton Vidokle describe the use of the ‘modest temporal signifier’ contemporary to refer to recent art as a ‘de facto standard’ through which the institutional cornerstones of the art system stress their currency. To be contemporary, they write, ‘is to be savvy, reactive, dynamic, aware, timely, in constant motion, aware of fashion.’(1) In deferring to the immediacy of the present, the art system no longer expects artists to have a specific investment in or response to art historical schemas. Equally, the predominance of social themes in recent art means that art is rarely the subject of art today, the social, political and philosophical dimensions of cultural practices monopolising cultural debate to the exclusion of interest in the historical unfolding of the aesthetic, past and present.

This essay, by contrast, concerns an artist-initiated gallery with a deep and specific investment in aesthetic frameworks and the threads of art history. This specificity of engagement begins with an explicit and unique connection to the gallery’s national context and to a distinct set of art practices: non-objective, concrete and new abstractionist forms of art understood by their makers as contemporary in style and intent. In a period in which the art system privileges diversity, expansiveness, boundary-crossing and diffusion, the name Sydney Non Objective (henceforth SNO) bears witness to exacting, self-limited interests in ways that are simultaneously straightforward, complex and involve a deliberate degree of risk. For instance, if globalisation discourses have made the exploration of the ‘local’ credible and current, incorporating Sydney in SNO’s name invokes an older, more burdened, modernist dialectic of internationalism/ provincialism. To those attuned to the inference, a name evoking an earnest artists’ society of a much earlier era underscores the seriousness of the SNO enterprise, rejecting the requirement that contemporary art be merely ‘au courant’. In fact, it stresses that an alternate route is required.

It was in late 2003, following the closure of the galleries CBD and Pendulum, which had supported newer abstractionist styles and the work of grunge and ambient artists, that the artists Billy Gruner and Andrew Leslie saw the need for a gallery for non-objective art.(2_ Shortly after, Pam Aitken, Vincent Butron, Kyle Jenkins, Sarah Keighery, John Nixon, Tony Triff, and later Salvatore Panatteri joined Gruner and Leslie to establish the first iteration of SNO in a factory in Marrickville, aiming to provide a sympathetic and well-organised exhibition venue for the non-objective artists they knew living in Brisbane, Fremantle, Melbourne and Sydney. Founding SNO sought to highlight the specificity of developmental, experimental, purist and reductive forms of abstractionist art as a counter to the normalisation and lack of attention to difference in Australian art. Others have since given their considerable support to the gallery, expanding its program, these including Ian Andrews, Daniel Argyle, Sophia Egarchoz, Giles Ryder, Ruark Lewis, Adrien McDonald, Brian Mahony and Trevor Richards.

The opening of SNO in March 2005 declared the interest of the artists involved in autonomy and self-determination, the gallery augmenting a group of important artist-initiated exhibition venues established in Australia since the late 1960s, the most relevant to SNO being Central Street Gallery (Sydney, 1966–1969), Art Projects (Melbourne), Q Space (Brisbane) and associated exhibition venues established by John Nixon (1979–1984), Store 5 (Melbourne, 1989–1993), CBD (Sydney, 1992–1999), Pendulum (Sydney, 1994–1999) and Penthouse and Pavement (Melbourne, 1999–2002). Each historical period, however, presents artists with different reasons to extend their involvement in art beyond art making. Where early, artist-initiated exhibition venues stressed the importance of freedom, experiment and a refusal of aesthetic or ideological compromise, the increasing instrumentalisation of Australian contemporary art from the mid-1970s by various cultural and social institutions highlighted the redundancy of outsider positions as an approach to influencing art world change, raising artists’ need to intervene in the contextualisation and discursive framing of their work.

As a program, SNO has sought to harness the collective agency of artists to address the meanings of abstraction from the perspective of the present and that of art history, attending to a tangle of assumptions about the nature of Australian abstract art and abstraction in general. For instance, the gallery’s name, in linking the practice of abstraction to a specific place, addresses the problematic relationship between modernist arguments for the universality of abstraction and the Euro-American bias in canon formation in abstract art, modern, postmodern and recent. The exhibition program at SNO engages art critical and art historical discourses and curatorial practices on two levels. It asserts the existence of a strong and continuing thread of abstraction in Australian and overseas art. By elucidating the heterogeneous nature of related practices in Australia and further afield, it contests the poverty of analysis and understanding of abstraction, both concrete and pure non-objective styles.

When cultural and geographic boundaries are perceived as open and permeable, as they are today, it is routine to see what happens in any one place as the result of divergent cultural and social influences, both external and internal. For much of the twentieth century, however, totalizing claims about the nature of ‘genuine’ Australian art demanded that artists focus on elaborating something distinctive about Australia, introducing pervasive tropes of derivativeness and inauthenticity and centre/periphery divisions into historical discussions of Australian abstraction. SNO’s name recognises debates in the 1940s and 1950s over the nature of authentic contemporary art between the supporters of Melbourne figurative modernists and Sydney abstract artists. Conversely, formalist representations of abstraction that circulated in Australia during the late 1960s and early 1970s negated the value of the local and national in art.

Managing a line
SNO’s exhibition program is designed to exemplify the development of new genres of abstract art by groups of well-informed Australian and overseas artists, highlighting specific aesthetic and theoretical concerns, media and means of production, artists’ developmental positions and the different cultural and social realities from which they emerge. There are also kinds of contemporary abstract art that are not exhibited at SNO, rejecting perceptions of abstraction as a unitary field of art practice. The work presented at SNO takes a reflexive stance towards abstract production beyond realist interpretations of the abstract. The work mostly seeks to demystify art making by systematically demonstrating its conceptual, material and procedural basis, the directness of production excluding overly aesthetic or market-driven qualities and all ironic uses of local forms of abstraction. In this respect, the artists involved all see that overcoming regional art history to assert specific and advanced positions on the nature of the abstract is a necessity.

Billy Gruner describes the work presented at SNO as post-formalist in continuing to develop, in radical terms, a significant and complex array of counter-modernist interests in aesthetic structures, thus declaring the particularity of the gallery’s offerings in relation to the flux of contemporary abstract art. An example is Gruner’s essay ‘Post-Formalism in Recent Australian Art’, which accompanied the 2008 exhibition of the work of artists associated with SNO at the Brooklyn artist-run gallery Minus Space.(3) Of course, linking current abstraction to formalism, even as a ‘post’ form, provides more than a convenient term of reference. Given the history of formalism internationally and in Australia, it is an act of ideological confrontation that links the art presented at SNO to a particular hermeneutic position on the nature and purpose of art as well as some of the most intractable debates that have run through late modernist and postmodern art. Having formalism stand for the all of the work presented at SNO is clearly an historical abstraction, but it is a term that provokes people to think about what is on offer. Otherwise, the gallery locates the art it presents within the broader ambit of non-objective, concrete and abstract art.

Mainstream art history and criticism
In revealing the continuity and strength of pure forms of abstractionist/non-objective art through its survey-style exhibition program, SNO intercedes in art history, contesting the representation of abstraction as an exhausted modernist project. The related historical dynamics of artist critique and postmodernism in recent Australian art also comes into play here. In the late 1960s and 1970s, formalist modernism came under sustained attack in Australia from vanguard artists with new interests in the effects and structures of the art system and other social institutions. Their representation of formalist abstraction as encapsulating elitism and hermeticism added a new layer of negative meanings to the one-dimensional perceptions of abstraction already circulating in the Australian art world following the debates over cultural authenticity and orientation, abstraction and figuration in the 1940s and 1950s.(4)

The growing influence of formalist art and criticism in Australian art during the 1960s coincided with the emergence of an art system based on the unprecedented commercialisation and institutionalisation of contemporary art. A reactionary academicism had kept modern art, both abstract and figurative, out of Australian public galleries for much of the twentieth century. The linking of late modernist abstraction to the Australian museum sector through the exhibitions Two Decades of American Art (NGV, 1967) and The Field (NGV and AGNSW, 1968), each in their own way an unprecedented presentation of modern art in an Australian museum, pointed to a new period of exclusion for any artists not involved in formalism. The curatorial schema and catalogue essays for Two Decades of American Art and The Field stressed a modernist teleology, representing recent American abstraction as heir to a singular tradition of modernist painting and sculpture established in Europe in the mid-19th century and constituting the only valid basis for contemporary Australian art. The connection to Euro-American art eroded the cultural integrity of Australian abstraction, while the priority both exhibitions afforded formalist accounts of modernism denied the diversity of abstract practices in the exhibitions, reinforcing myopic views of abstraction already operating in Australia.

For many younger, radicalised artists, however, formalism’s self-reflexive aesthetic came to spell the lack of social engagement and implosion of modernism. Some, like Ian Burn, Tim Johnson, Peter Kennedy, Ian Milliss, John Nixon and Mike Parr, were already exploring the critique of formal independence found in minimal and conceptual art. Where late modernism declared the radicality of limitless formal invention within the traditions of painting and sculpture, minimalism and conceptualism countered with the radicality of the limitless critique of art, its systems, institutions and processes. Throughout the 1970s, artists attacked art’s restricted contexts, embracing anti-art strategies and seeking to suffuse art in everyday life, the plurality of issues and forms that resulted establishing heterogeneity as a primary characteristic of contemporary art.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the conflation of radicality and critique mostly crumbled into a quest for the simple expression of novelty, the reactivity of much contemporary art leading to a proliferation of new/old themes and practices lacking any interest in vision or reform. Postmodernism highjacked modernist abstraction through practices of appropriation and simulation, representing it as evidence of the failure of modernist ideals of aesthetic progress, transcendence and truth. Producing endless variations of generic abstraction became a favoured tool for postmodern artists seeking to draw attention to the collapse of difference, meaning and effect in a world perceived as a post-historical wasteland of artifice and superficiality. The SNO program responded to the fact that few participants in the Australian and international art worlds understood that some modes of abstraction, especially the most hardcore, emerged out of a long considered counter-modernist drive that had operated almost independent of contemporary art. In Australia, the group of artists engaged in non-objectivity argued among themselves for and against its character as an ongoing genre of art practice, few others being interested in listening to what was being said. This discussion mostly sat outside the binary debate between the supposed real in art and its iconic opposite, the abstract, SNO generally avoiding abstract artists with an interest in presenting ‘realist’ abstraction in its iconic end-mode.

Abstraction, it never left
This history of the coming-into-being of the contemporary in Australian abstraction gives impetus to the SNO program. Despite long held perceptions of hardcore and purist styles of abstraction as a set of failed, inauthentic, lapsed or prohibited practices, a very significant number of Australian artists continued to make abstract art as a first-order practice from the late 1960s, waves of younger artists joining original artists from the 1960s and 1970s over the decades. Like all those involved in this unique program, Billy Gruner argues that: SNO’s collective and survey-based program literally began uncovering what can only be defined as a massive arena of activity that a great many informants believed in. That was for what it was, new and very exciting post-formalist activity, as distinct from postmodern revisionism that prevailed a decade earlier in the barbaric, appropriationist 1990s.(6)

SNO’s exhibition program gives visibility to the scale of this intergenerational group of artists, demonstrating the continuity, breadth and value of abstract art. The sequence of solo and group exhibitions examines the relationship between the work of abstract artists to a degree and in ways that surpass what is possible and what is found in any other Australian venue. Most importantly, however, SNO’s exhibition program has highlighted the presence of groups of Australian non-objective artists whose work constitutes an important split in one way or another from what has gone before, from contemporary agendas and from what is understood about them, the exhibition program reflecting a ‘secession’ rather than a ‘succession’ model of Australian art.(5)

Details of all exhibitions up to No. 57 (March 2010), including images or all works, are recorded on the SNO website.(7) Noting some simple facts about the first few exhibitions is a salient demonstration of the historical evolution of SNO and its objectives and achievements in demonstrating the translation and transformation of particular ideas of the abstract from the work of one artist to another. Exhibition One presented the work of Kyle Jenkins, Andrew Leslie, Vincent Butron, John Nixon, Tony Triff, Pam Aitkin and Billy Gruner. Exhibition Two presented the work of thirteen artists, the invitation listing the home city of each: David Atkensen (Brisbane), Trevor Richards (Fremantle), Salvatore Panatteri (Sydney), Justin Andrews (Melbourne), Sarah Keighery (Sydney), Giles Ryder (Sydney/Brisbane), Simon Morris (Wellington), Stephen Bram (Melbourne), Beth Kirkland (Albany), Helen Smith (Fremantle), Melanie Khava (Sydney), Jurek Wybraniec (Fremantle) and Tilman (Brussels). There was also a separate exhibition by Daniel Göttin (Basel). Exhibition Three presented wall works by Daniel Göttin, Billy Gruner and Stephen Little. Exhibition Four consisted of two exhibitions, the first comprised of small objects by Majella Beck, an installation by Sarah Keighery and paperworks by Melanie Khava and Jan Van der Ploeg’s second Winter wall-work project, which was painted on an external wall next to the gallery’s entrance.

I could note other exhibitions among those that constitute the unbroken line of more than 60 exhibitions presented at SNO since 2005, but describing the first four establishes some basic points about SNO, such as the contributors to the gallery’s founding (Exhibition One); that Sydney may be the gallery’s location, but that it gives exposure to a group of Australian and international artists (Exhibition Two); abstract artists forge individual paths of investigation within shared concerns (Exhibition Three); abstraction spans a range of media and—in deference to gender bias in the canon of abstract art—women artists are deeply involved in its practice, plus overseas non-objective artists are routinely visiting Australia to make work and exhibit (Exhibition Four). Five years on, the on-line information on the history of exhibitions at SNO describes a growing, geographically dispersed network of artists, practices and exhibition venues. By grouping and regrouping artists and art works, the program of exhibitions reveals in real time a range of formal and personal connections between non-objective artists in contrast to the endless fragmentation of themes and practices in contemporary art in general.

The program of exhibitions also reveals certain periodising indicators in the practice of the different generations of participating artists. Senior artists tend to approach aspects of non-objectivity through rigorous investigation into the formal structures of painting and sculpture, where younger artists are more inclined to explore non-objective practices from the perspective of their discursive investment and socio-cultural mediatisation. The survey basis of the exhibition program outlines the lineage of advanced Australian abstraction through the inclusion of the work of Sydney Ball, Tony McGillick, Richard Dunn and Robert Owen, who began working in abstraction when formalist and concrete art were still in their initial phases of development, against general expectations of what constituted Australian art. Exhibitions by John Nixon and Ian Milliss represent a second wave of reflexive abstraction emerging in the late 1960s and combining the lessons of early twentieth century geometric painting with minimalism and conceptualism when few would have recognised the connection. The exhibition program shows both streams being developed by the groundswell of younger non- objective artists beginning to practice in the 1980s, 1990s and early twenty-first century and recognising the important and distinctive work that has emerged from Fremantle’s Australian Centre for Concrete Art, Melbourne’s Store 5, Penthouse and Pavement, Conical and Grey Area galleries and Sydney’s CBD gallery to challenge postmodernism’s trade in superficiality.

SNO’s exhibition program also affords an opportunity to compare the work of artists from across Australia with that of overseas artists to an extent and with a frequency that is rare in Australia, including in much larger public galleries. Relations between the local, the regional, the national and the global are continually being argued in the broad literature of globalisation. Surveying work from a range of places challenges the restriction of accounts of the development of abstract art to the work of a small number of artists in a few locations, suggesting that a model of concurrence—rather linear progress through the influence of a few originators—may be more useful. The program thus raises suspicions that the development of Australian abstraction cannot be explained away by mythologies of dependence and time-lag, challenging critics and historians to check for the presence of alternative lineages and relationships and to better value the differences highlighted by discontinuity and local specificity.

Indeed, the fact that artists from different and often distant places exhibit in a specifically positioned venue like SNO indicates that marginalisation can be felt anywhere and that any art world can constitute a problem space for artists on some level. It also highlights the reflexive nature of the formation of contemporary artistic identities, with artists intervening in this process by working together rather than waiting for the recognition of critics, curators, gallerists and historians. Danny Lacy argues that, ‘From an Australian perspective the creation and connection of strong networks between like-minded artists has opened up opportunities and possibilities within an international context like never before.’(8) He notes that one could make a round-the-world trip by visiting each of the artist-run spaces that exchange art and artists with SNO, these including the Center For Contemporary Non-Objective Art, Brussels, H29, Brussels, Hebel_121, Basel, Minus Space, Brooklyn, ParisCONCRET, Paris, PS, Amsterdam and Raum 2810, Bonn.

In charting the movement of non-objective practices between artists, places and times, the exhibition program at SNO underscores how varied and multi-located frameworks create meaning and value in contemporary abstraction, which is best understood as a set of situated practices. For instance, if one did visit each of the galleries that exchange art with SNO, one would find mostly basic venues in industrial areas or modest suburbs that echo non- objectivity’s character as an outgrowth of urban life, while requiring a level of dedication on the part of gallery goers. The location of SNO in the working class suburb of Marrickville reflects the circumstances in which the artists who exhibit there make art, the character of the gallery being far removed from the deluxe, reductivist architecture of Australian public and commercial galleries.

At the same time, the socio-cultural and historical circumstances of Australian, European and American abstraction are very different. Australian artists gain a sense of possibility in encountering the respect and resources afforded to abstraction in Europe and America. Overseas artists have little context for understanding the depth and duration of the Australian art world’s negative response to abstraction, given its stature in modern art, the Belgian artist Tilman describing this as ‘an Australian mystery’.(9) Yet the responses that have blocked abstraction in Australia, such as concerns about identity due to modernism’s investment in non-representation, have been a problem for abstract artists everywhere since the late 1970s, the situation in Australia arguably preempting the swamping of late modernist abstraction by a torrent of art focused on identity and the coded social meanings of artifacts and visual systems. The marginalisation of abstraction has made Australian non-objective artists alert to the importance of documentation, polemic and self-initiated activity in the support of their work, providing an object lesson for artists from other places. In working in a context still substantially perceived as distant from the centres of world art, Australian non-objective artists are prepared to look out and travel, thus understanding the international project of non-objective art to be a nomadic enterprise, supporting manifold cultural engagements and translations.

The Internet assists the process of making links with artists in other places and in disseminating information about SNO. However, the key connections between SNO and overseas artists and venues are the result of Australian artists, notably John Nixon, meeting artists in Europe since the late 1980s, becoming friends, starting to do things together and passing on the connections, CBD, and to some extent Store 5, being useful vehicles for inviting overseas artists to Australia to exhibit before the foundation of SNO. The effort involved in executing international exhibitions for artist-run galleries underlines the depth of the connections and the mutual nature of the interaction. With minimal resources, significant exhibitions have been exchanged between venues. For example, in 2007, SNO presented Escape from New York, curated by Matthew Deleget from Minus Space, Brooklyn, which featured the artists Soledad Arias, Richard Bottwin, Sharon Brant, Michael Brennan, Bibi Calderaro, Mark Dagley, Gabriele Evertz, Daniel Feingold, Kevin Finklea, Linda Francis, Zipora Fried, Julio Grinblatt, Lynne Harlow, Gilbert Hsiao, Andrew Huston, Steve Karlik, Daniel Levine, Sylvan Lionni, Rossana Martinez, Juan Matos Capote, Manfred Mohr, Karen Schifano, Analia Segal, Edward Shalala, Robert Swain, Li-Trincere, Don Voisine, Douglas Witmer and Michael Zahn. Artists’ networks in Australia saw this exhibition travel to Curtin University, Perth, in 2008 and RMIT University, Melbourne, in 2009.

Overseas exhibitions initiated through SNO include Upside Down: Sydney Non Objective Artists (2008), held at Minus Space and including the work of Justin Andrews, Vicente Butron, Lynne Eastaway, Anthony Farrell, Kate Fulton, Billy Gruner, Kyle Jenkins, Sarah Keighery, Andrew Leslie, John Nixon and Salvatore Panatteri. The connection between SNO and Minus Space led to the Australian and New Zealand artists Vicente Butron, Julian Dashper, Christopher Dean, Lynne Eastaway, Billy Gruner, Inverted Topology, Kyle Jenkins, Sarah Keighery, Andrew Leslie and Salvatore Panatteri participating in Minus Space at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (October 2008 – May 2009), an exhibition that marked the fifth year of the Brooklyn gallery’s operation.(10)

The unique UND series of exhibitions, which began in 2005, is an annual show co-curated by the artists Billy Gruner from SNO, Tilman from CCNOA, Brussels, and Jan Van der Ploeg from PS, Amsterdam. Every year, each of the curators invites six contemporary non-objective artists from around the world to present new ideas. SNO has played a major role in shaping the series as an important opportunity to bring a group of international non-objective artists into a single frame of contact. The exhibitions have been highly successful in revealing variants of non-objectivity to be inherent and important expressions of the intense visual orientation of our times. The context for each encounter is also important, giving meaning to the work in addition to their formal and conceptual basis. The 2009 exhibition was held in an abandoned villa in Nice, provided by a local art enthusiast. Others have been held in a vineyard in Tulette, an old factory in Ghent, an underground room painted totally black in Amsterdam, a shed in Queensland and a private home in Holland.

Between June 2007 and August 2008, the large contemporary survey show Australia: Non-Objective Art, curated by the German artist Christoph Dahlhausen, appeared at Gessellschaft für Kunst, Bonn, raum2810, Bonn, Museum im Kultuurspeicher, Würzburg and Kunstahlle Dominikanerkirche, Osnabrück. Dahlhausen had visited Australia on several occasions, coming to know the strength and vibrancy of non-objective art in Australia. As the first substantial survey of Australian non-objective art in Germany, Australia: Non-Objective Art was a major undertaking on Dahlhausen’s part, though here he had Billy Gruner’s support in realising the exhibition, all of the artists in the exhibition having exhibited at SNO. In the exhibition catalogue, Dahlhausen reflected on the unequal flow of information in international art, noting the incongruous lack of knowledge about Australian art in a world awash with information:

Although, as far as I know, there has been no dearth of contact between artists and contact travels to Australia from the German side, the awareness and knowledge of Australian art in this country is very marginal, if indeed it exists at all ... The German, perhaps even the world-wide notion of Australian art ... apart from some internationally known stars of the art scene ... extends little beyond a clichéd awareness of Aboriginal art.(11)

The international exhibitions discussed above demonstrate the transformative agency and social capital captured in the artists’ networks of which SNO is an integral participant. Pierre Bourdieu defines social capital as a network of robust relationships created through deliberate and unconscious social investments, providing individuals and groups with substantial concrete and symbolic benefits. Moreover, Bourdieu argues that as social capital accrues, it increases the capacity of individuals and groups to act and eventually the capacity of the network to act as well.(12) The history of SNO exemplifies this potential. The gallery operates with a combination of grant money and the artist-subsidy provided through volunteer labour, achieving much with limited resources.(13) Harnessing the social capital in artists’ networks has been vital to this achievement and after five years of operation, the capability and reciprocity built up in SNO’s local, national and international networks shows increasing scope for collective action and the furthering of possibilities.

The conviction invested in SNO’s activities can be attributed to the decision to take a stand and to tackle the less than ideal circumstances for Australian non-objective art. When artists establish a gallery rather than leaving the contextualisation of art to others they identify the issues and values that motivate them. As a dedicated venue for non-objective art, SNO has used immediate and bottom-up strategies to chart the unfolding character and historical underpinnings of Australian abstract art, rather than wait for the diffuse and remote processes of art criticism and history to grind into action or not work at all. Its commitment to art is serious. Importantly, no one has ever paid to exhibit at SNO; they are invited to participate as an artist first and foremost.

Conclusions
The view from SNO is that the representation of Australian art, in failing to sufficiently acknowledge the role and dimensions of Australian abstraction, is of necessity contestable. Anxiety at the lack of a distinctive national cultural heritage has skewed accounts of Australian art away from giving due recognition to the non-objective. Mark McKenna, however, argues that changing historical contexts have shifted cultural frameworks in Australia, revising what is claimed as part of Australian canons of culture and history.(14) The success of grassroots action from abstract artists in establishing an international context for their work may produce such a frame changing effect in Australian art history and criticism. Billy Gruner describes SNO as having ‘a national program with international interests.’(15) In bringing the work of artists from many different places and cultural circumstances together in Sydney, its exhibition program captures something of the scope and character of international non-objective art. This international dimension has national implications, raising the issue of how specific, localised developments in art relate to general accounts of Art History.

SNO models a cosmopolitanism outlook for Australian art, one that holds that individuals, cultures and societies can engage with things outside their immediate locality without losing their identity or authenticity. In focusing on the non-objective, the cohesive character of SNO’s exhibition program raises salient questions about the neglect of commonality and difference in a period of art marked by the plurality of conceptual positions, practices, media and mediatory contexts. At the same time, transcendent proclamations about art can no longer be delivered through the agency of a single newspaper column, catalogue essay or survey exhibition as they were in the late 1960s when formalist criticism briefly claimed flatness, colour, edge and form as the sole basis of quality and importance in contemporary art, alienating large sections of the Australian art world to the ongoing detriment of local abstraction. Nevertheless, if art works are still to an extent defined by where they are displayed, discussed and reproduced, the artists connected with SNO know the value of taking control of this process to actively shape understandings of their work.

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Dr Carolyn Barnes is Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Design, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, where she is involved in a range of research projects investigating the role of art and design in public contexts. She is an assistant editor of the International Journal of Design, A member of the editorial board of The Journal of Visual Arts Practice and visual:design:scholarship: Research Journal of the Australian Graphic Design Association and book reviews editor for Artifact. Craftsman House published her monograph on the Hong Kong-Australian artist John Young in 2005.

NOTES
1. Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood and Anton Vidokle, ‘What is Contemporary Art?’, E-Flux Journal, No. 11, December 2009, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/ view/96, Accessed 28 January 28, 2010.
2. The address was 11 Faversham Street, Marrickville.
3. See Billy Gruner, ‘Post-Formalism In Recent Australian Art’, in Upside Down: Sydney Non Objective Artists, New York, Minus Space, 2008, Available at http://www.sno.org.au/text.html. Accessed 12 November 2008.
4. For example, see the essays by Brian Finemore, Gregory Heath and Ian Milliss in the catalogue to Object and Idea, Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, 1973.
5. See Gruner, ‘Post-Formalism In Recent Australian Art’.
6. E-mail correspondence B. Gruner and the author December 2009.
7. See http://www.sno.org.au/1_Ad.html.
8. Danny Lacy, Myopia (part 1), p 1. Available at http://www.minusspace.com/log/lacy-myopia.pdf. Accessed 2 February 2010.
9. Gruner, ‘Post-Formalism In Recent Australian Art’, p. 1.
10. The other artists in the exhibition were: Soledad Arias, Shinsuke Aso, Marcus Bering, Hartmut Böhm, Richard Bottwin, Sharon Brant, Michael Brennan, Henry Brown, Bibi Calderaro, Melanie Crader, Mark Dagley, Matthew Deleget, Gabriele Evertz, Daniel Feingold, Kevin Finklea, Linda Francis, Zipora Fried, Daniel Göttin, Julio Grinblatt, Terry Haggerty, Lynne Harlow, Gilbert Hsiao, Andrew Huston, Simon Ingram, Mick Johnson, Steve Karlik, Daniel Levine, Sylvan Lionni, Lotte Lyon, Gerhard Mantz, Rossana Martinez, Juan Matos Capote, Douglas Melini, Manfred Mohr, Dirk Rathke, Karen Schifano, Analia Segal, Edward Shalala, Tilman, Li-Trincere, Jan van der Ploeg, Don Voisine, Douglas Witmer and Michael Zahn.
11. Christoph Dahlhausen, ‘Long Distance Call’, in Australia: Non-Objective Art, Bremen, Hachmann Edition, 2008, p. 5.
12. See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977 [1972].
13. The list of directors supporting the program at SNO since it was opened include Pam Aitken, John Adair, Daniel Argyle, Vicente Butron, Lynn Eastaway, Sophia Egarchoz, Billy Gruner, Kyle Jenkins, Sarah Keighery, Andrew Leslie, Ruark Lewis, Brian Mahoney, John Nixon, Salvatore Panatteri, Trevor Richards and Tony Triff.
14. Mark McKenna, “Australian history and the Australian ‘national inheritance’”, Australian Cultural History, Vol. 27, No. 1, April 2009, p. 2.
15. ‘Interview between John Adair and Billy Gruner”, SNO 46 / Folk 1, Marrickville, SNO Contemporary Art Projects, Available at http://www.sno.org.au/Images/ Text/SNO_Folk_1.pdf, p. 3, Accessed 8 December 2009.