1984

An Australian Accent

15 April – 10 June 1984
P.S.1, New York

30 June – 26 August 1984
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC

22 September – 11 November 1984
Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth

1 December 1984 – 31 January 1985
Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney

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I have invited leading artists from the United States and Europe to work in Australia and thereby create an awareness of international contemporary art. Stimulated by the recent energy and direction Australian art has taken, I undertook this exhibition to do the reverse; to bring an Australian exhibition to New York accompanied by the artists whose work will be shown.

John Kaldor in Daniel Thomas (ed), An Australian accent, exhibition catalogue, John Kaldor Art Projects, Sydney 1984

The three artists involved ... are image makers (and, sometimes, image scavengers) of a driving, obsessional and visionary sort.

John Russell, ‘Three vigorous artists from Down Under’, New York Times, 20 April 1984

Now an affiliate of the Museum of Modern Art, P.S.1 was founded in 1971 by Alanna Heiss as the Institute for Art and Urban Resources Inc, devoted to organising exhibitions in under-utilised and abandoned spaces across New York City. It opened its first major exhibition in its permanent location in Long Island City, Queens, in 1976 with the seminal Rooms. Then executive director of P.S.1, Heiss had met John Kaldor in 1975, and knew him as a collector as well as the organiser of a series of artists’ projects. When Kaldor later proposed an exhibition, Heiss had already pondered such a show, but not, in her words, ‘a survey’, ‘a national advertisement’ or an ‘obscure trend’ exhibition. Kaldor researched for a year, and refined the exhibition from eight artists to three – Mike Parr, Imants Tillers and Ken Unsworth – presented more as three one-man shows combined, rather than as a group show.

In the early 1980s Australian film, music and literature were receiving international recognition but Australian visual art – which was enjoying a new burgeoning energy – had not been much shown in the United States. Indeed, An Australian Accent was the first time any of the three artists had shown in the US. Tillers showed his first Stack paintings and remembered that it really took his now-famous work with canvasboards much further. Parr made many new works, including a series of charcoal self-portraits. Unsworth presented large works drawn in bitumen and paint and a series of smaller drawings that included studies for his performance works.

When the exhibition opened in 1984 (following an opening night party hosted by Rupert Murdoch), it was so well received that the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC requested the exhibition and took down three rooms of the permanent collection to show it alongside Expressions, an exhibition of German artists including Jorg Immendorff, AR Penck, Markus Lupertz, Georg Baselitz and Anselm Keifer. Later, the show moved to the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth and the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney.

Each of the three artists’ works are now in Australian museums, including Tillers’ Pataphysical man 1984 and Parr’s The Trojan(ed) horse (self portrait as a stage) 1983–84 from the exhibition, which are now in the Art Gallery of NSW collection. In the book 40 years: Kaldor Public Art Projects, Parr remembered the show as ‘a breakthrough, with a real impact in the United States’, while at home – in Perth and Sydney – he recalled that it ‘precipitated a major change in Australian art’.

Read more about the Australian Accent artists.

Installation view of Imants Tillers' works in An Australian Accent at P.S.1 in New York in 1984. Photo: Andrew Moore Courtesy Kaldor Public Art Projects