Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Artist Barbara Campbell- ARI Remix- The Ephemera INTERVIEWS - A ROOM ARI- Qld 1984


Born in Brisbane 1961. Barbara Campbell currently lives and works in Sydney, Australia.

Barbara Campbell has performed in Australia, Europe and the USA, in museums, galleries, public buildings, photographs, on film, video, radio, and the internet, in silence and with words, still and moving, since 1982.

Barbara has been actively engaged in the research and development of the Arts and Culture Sector during this time in a number of significant roles including as Gallery Co-ordinator of the Institute of Modern Art (1982-83) and as an office bearer of the Qld Artworker’s Union which became the Artworker’s Alliance. During the 1980’s, Barbara instigated and worked with the A ROOM collective an influential six month Artist-Run Space located on the first floor of 446 George Street, Brisbane from June 18- December 18, 1984. In 2015 Barbara is due to complete her PhD at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney researching how migratory shorebirds direct human performance. Barbara chats here about her active role in Artist-run culture and infrastructural activism in Queensland during the 1980's.

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ARTIST INTERVIEW
January 23, 2015

PA: 1980’s Queensland/Brisbane Social History: By way of a detailed personal snapshot, the milieu you experienced during the early 1980s as a young artist living, working, collaborating in Brisbane?

BC: For me, Brisbane was my youth. I was very art focused. I worked with art, studied it, read about it, made it, formed friendships and working relationships within it. I can’t remember doing anything that was ‘outside’ of it.

PA: The Bjelke Peterson Regime, “The Police State”  political backdrop, what did this mean to you at the time?

BC:  My awareness of the Police State came vicariously through association with people who were more directly political – students at University of Qld or volunteer staff at 4ZZZ that broadcast from UQ campus. 4ZZZ did great journalism, exposing not just conditions in State-run institutions like Bogo Road Jail but national issues such as Australia-Indonesia relationships over Indonesian territories.

Really, I was very naïve. I was middle-class and straight. I’d grown up naturalized to a political reality ruled by Bjelke Petersen with a one-house parliament in a one newspaper town. I was unemployed but working as an artist; I’d received a free education; had access to birth control and other health benefits, most of these thanks to the Whitlam government.

PA: A brief biography?

BC: I grew up in the country (Lamington, SE Qld) but went to a private boarding school in Brisbane from age 12. Both my brothers also went to private boarding schools so we siblings did not see a lot of each other. My own conception of my parents’ lot is that my father was a farmer who should have been an engineer and my mother was a city girl who should have been living and working in the city as a lawyer.

I think of them both as emotionally displaced but also aspirational through their children. They both had imaginative lives through books. My parents actively supported me to go to art school although my mother worried from then on about how I was going to make a living. There was a professional artist on my paternal grandmother’s side – a cartoonist for the Bulletin. All of this meant that I met with no resistance from the family to being an artist. It also meant that because I hadn’t really lived at home since 12 my emotional life and main influences came from friends and my partner during this time, artist Ted Riggs.

PA: An early artistic influences?

BC: Well one particular visiting artist certainly left an impression on my first year at Morningside TAFE where I was studying art in 1979: Dragan Ilic from Sydney. Ilic had been invited onto campus by some of the painting staff who were themselves artists. It seemed just an amusing distraction during our lunchtime. Ilic and later a couple of students stripped off and became canvases for audience members to draw on their bodies using coloured pens fitted into electric drills.

The event had been videoed.

We all went back to our classrooms in the afternoon. But that night, I guess word spread from students to (presumably outraged) parents, to media, to police. Overnight Bjelke Petersen’s Vice Squad raided the homes of some of the lecturers who’d been present, looking for the video recordings of the “nude” performance.

The tabloid press had a field day. It would have been nasty for the staff and to make it worse, they were not supported by the head of school. In the wash-up to that event, all the professional painters resigned their positions en masse and the head of school refused any further outside visitors onto campus. But rather than agitate or leave, I moved from the painting to the printmaking department and found an alternative education outside that institution through the activities at the IMA.

PA: Pop Culture- Tell me about the popular culture that mattered to you during the eighties?

BC: I seemed to spend a lot of my life at the IMA or hanging out with other artists. I was doing a part-time art history degree at UQ during my final year at IMA (1983) and the year of A ROOM (1984). I spent some time at the Student Union’s Activities unit at UQ where Brian Doherty ran the screen-printing department. So the graphic arts aesthetic that ran through there was an important part of my cultural landscape. The “only gay in the village” I had significant contact with was Luke Roberts who was still running his vintage shop in the Brisbane Arcade. I wasn’t part of the live music scene.

PA: The Red Comb House Precinct: Tell me about the confluence of artist studios, exhibitions, performance art and events circa 1981-1984?

BC: My memory of the timelines is a bit shaky here. I don’t remember when Red Comb House started. Maybe it was the same year as A ROOM (1984). But in any case, although they were geographically close by in that Roma Street area of the CBD, I can’t remember showing work there (although the archival evidence suggests otherwise). I didn’t have a studio at Red Comb House because my studio was already set up in the A Room building.

PA: Earlier experiences or memories of ARIS, local, interstate or overseas?

BC: I was pretty aware of what artists were doing in Sydney, not just the work they made but the way they made it, the lives they led that created the circumstances for art practice.

My perception of it was that shared studio complexes led to artist collectives which led to the ARIs. All of these things share an ethos of collectivity which appealed to me hugely. I think in Brisbane, where it was hard to get critical mass for any kind of alternate action, the model of the collective was essential. The only artist-run project I remember prior to Janelle's One Flat Exhibit was John Nixon’s Art Projects run from his flat in Spring Hill. It wasn’t really an open space though. John invited whomever he liked to show there and visit.

PA: And the One Flat Exhibit in the early 1980’s?

BC: Prior to Red Comb House, I’d been involved in One Flat Exhibit - Jeanelle Hurst’s first ARI in her flat at Edmonstone St, South Brisbane. During my last year at art school (1981), she and I both lived in flats in that terrace house. I did one or two performances there. One Flat Exhibit became O’Flate when it moved into the shop front space in the city. I was probably working at the IMA at that time.

I did a couple of performances with Ted Riggs at One Flat Exhibit.

I’m not sure if I knew to call them performances. We called them actions. They were very simple. In one I made up my face using Ted’s highly reflective sunglasses as a mirror. We had to sit very close to each other. In another, I think we were in underwear facing the audience, each of us alternately reciting “I have slept with [say a common given name]” and because we just kept going, pretty much everyone in the audience got named. Yes, it seemed to be about sex at that time – another reflection of my youthful state (disarmingly heteronormative too). Gay culture, let alone queer culture, was yet to make a claim on the Brisbane art scene…AIDS likewise.

PA: The Institute of Modern Art: This year marks the 40th year anniversary of the IMA, tell me about the role the IMA played in your personal experience towards the development and promotion of what in turn became an ARI scene in Queensland?

BC: In 1981 I’d graduated from a conservative art school (Morningside TAFE) in 1981 without any sense while I was there that there was any correlation between going to art school and becoming an artist. That awakening—the idea of becoming an artist—only happened in the parallel education I sought out through my association with the Institute of Modern Art.

At the time, the IMA was run by an artist, John Nixon, who used his own personal contacts with other artists to build a program of (mostly) solo exhibitions by contemporary artists from elsewhere (with the exceptions of Robert MacPherson and Hilary Boscott-Riggs).

During John’s time, the IMA was a real precursor to the ARI model in the sense that it was artist-run. It was only in about 1984 that the Visual Arts Board changed the model for spaces like the IMA by insisting that boards professionalise the position of Director and become VAB-funded “flagship” spaces in their respective states.

It led to centralised homogenization and less scope for local responsiveness. But between one model and the next there was the hybrid model that (my partner) Ted Riggs proposed as IMA board member. It was a program of guest-curated exhibitions in 1982 and 1983 which I oversaw as part-time gallery co-ordinator.

By not having an in-house director-as-curator, my role was broadened to institute or guide an ancillary program that would boost the level of critical dialogue amongst artists in Brisbane and between those artists and visiting artists. That program included reading groups (using the IMA’s considerable art journal collection), film groups (initiated and run by Brian Doherty using the NLA’s film collection); artist lectures; performance and video workshops; Artworkers Union meetings, etc. I think about that program now, the amount of (mostly unpaid) hours I put into it, how casualised the labour was (both the IMA secretary, Joan Sherriff, and I had to go on the dole during the two months of exhibition down-time each year) and I realize that it utterly depended on youthful energy. When I left the IMA I transferred that same energy, local networking and economic precarity to being an artist and setting up A ROOM.

PA: A Room in 1984 (the year of the eponymous George Orwell novel) – Tell me about how A ROOM came about?

BC: The structure of it was pretty much my design. I wanted it to be as manageable which meant cutting down as much as possible on administrative tasks in order to have more time for art-making. This meant that it wasn’t the open model of most ARIs at the time or since in which an ever-widening circle of artists were included in the program.

A ROOM had a limited time frame of six months that matched the 6 month lease and during that time there would be one group show and one solo show for each of the seven members of the collective. We all shared the minding of the space but the gallery was only open two days/week because again, no one wants to spend all their time in a rarely visited gallery not being paid. We all shared in the rent and other associated costs and could even opt to pay those costs on a $5/wk basis.

These were the days when parts of the CBD were pretty shabby and untenanted, when the cost-of-living was low and the dole was not heavily policed. It was pretty fabulous.

PA: Infrastructural Support-Tell me about the measure of support, patronage and interest from established Brisbane/Qld galleries, networks or institutions you witnessed during the early to mid 1980’s?

BC: The networks that I’d brought with me from the IMA; from my time as a student in the Art History Dept at UQ and through friendship circles all helped to sustain A ROOM. There were some very good institutional people around who understood contemporary art culture. I’m thinking particularly of Jenny Harper at QAG, Cassie Doyle at SLQ, Nancy Underhill at UQ, Marguerite Bonin at Griffith Artworks and Nicholas Zurbrugg at Griffith Uni.

PA: Exodus: During the 1970’s and 1980’s many artists across many arts and culture platforms left Qld for interstate or overseas, tell me about your experiences around this mass exodus of Queensland arts workers?

BC: There were two main factors that led to Ted and my departure from Brisbane at the end of 1984. The first was that Ted was on a path to self-realisation. In a short period of about two years he’d gone from being on an invalid pension due to crippling dyslexia to being treated for that dyslexia and then receiving government assistance to enroll in an undergraduate degree at Sydney College of the Arts so Sydney was our trajectory. Coupled with that was a sense that we’d done all we could in Brisbane. We needed to be somewhere bigger.

PA: Tell me about your early photographic work, "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", 1983

BC: That is funny, given what I said about the lack of gay/queer culture yet there was I queering myself back in 1983. That photograph was taken by a young photographer named Laura McLeod for an exhibition at the IMA called "No Names" in which none of the exhibiting artists, all local, would be credited by name either in the show or in the catalogue.

I called the image “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” so the impetus was literary rather than gender-politics, although I think I was somewhat aware of all the codifications of power including gender, whiteness, Europeaness, bourgeois entitlement, higher education and so on.

At around the same time as the show, I noticed the Offset Print place near the IMA had a special offer on where they’d print any colour for the same price as black. So I had a series of postcards made, printed in ‘sepia’ and just distributed them freely to friends.

That 1983 postcard would be the first in a series of 25 annual portrait cards, each taken by a different female friend, the series ending with a group portrait of me with all the photographers on my 50th birthday.


ABOVE: A ROOM Opening Poster, Artist Designer Brian Doherty in collaboration with artists Barbara Campbell and Ted Riggs, 1984 ( Courtesy QAGOMA, ARI Ephemera Collection)

ABOUT; REMIX.org.au

Read the behind the scenes blog about R and D for The Remix Project here:

Follow the development of The Remix Project here during 2015-2018

And if you are an artist directly involved in Artist-run culture in Queensland during 1980-1990 please join our social media open group study and R and D pages here:

Sunday, March 08, 2015

Photography + ARI Remix Project + Writing + Paul William Andrew Artist



Thanks dear INTERVIEWS readers for following my blog over the past nine years I am truly grateful for your attention. 

This year I am currently working on my photomedia art - and slowly building my artist website.

I am also working on my autobiographical flash writing...

- and -

I am currently researching "The Queensland Remix- Queensland Artist-Run Culture 1980-1990- A public archive transmedia project. A selection of interviews from this project will be posted here for your reference.

You can read a few examples of my flash writing here:


You can see some samples of my art since 1984 here:


And if you are interested in Artist-Run Culture you can follow this public archive as we grow and build it. This project is funded by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland. You can visit the principle web site and its links to artists independent web sites here. This project is in development now from April 2015 - April 2018.


There is a blog about the behind the scenes work for the remix Project beginning in April 2015 here:


And if you were an active member and/or peer of the lively Queensland/Brisbane/Australia 1980-1990 Queensland Artist-run space scene and would like join in the research and shared archival journey please visit and join the Remix Collective here at our social media open group study research and reconnect pages, it is this social media group that has in turn produced a remix cohort since the group began in November 2012:


Have a great year. Thanks again for your attention :)

Best,
Paul