1972: group performance works by Tim Johnson

In April 1972, a discussion group was convened at the University of Sydney. The group was tasked with processing a three-part performance by Tim Johnson, held at the university eleven days earlier at the invitation of Guy Warren for the School of Architecture, as many involved considered the performance works to be anti-social and misogynist in nature. The group was modelled after North American consciousness raising groups, which were emblematic of second-wave feminism. The performance lasted two hours and was composed of three distinct works: Induction, Disclosure and Fittings. Disclosure was performed twice — first with female participants and second with male participants — and was the primary focus and cause for discussion. Twenty or so persons — most of whom were also present for the performance — partook in the group. 

The New South Wales chapter of the Contemporary Art Society published sections of their discussion as a transcript shortly thereafter. The partial document shows an artist explaining his decisions in an attempt to clarify the perceived incongruence of the works’ politics across its multiple scales — aesthetic, psychosexual, personal, relational, etc. 

A description of Disclosure: the audience arranged their desks in a circle. Inside the circle four students were asked to lay down and close their eyes. The artist — without speaking and without prior notice — made small alterations to their dress one by one. Adjusting a collar, unbuttoning a fly, raising a skirt, untying a shoelace, etc. 

The female students laid still and silent as the artist made his interventions. Their stillness was later — perhaps wrongly — described by Johnson as ‘no response.’¹ The male students however made it explicit that they ‘were going to resist’ before laying down.² Initially, they did. There was some light wrestling but their resistance fell away over time. Johnson attributed this to ‘repressed homosexual fears’ whereas Liz Fell — a feminist activist and Freudian analyst associated with the Sydney Push — read this as evidence that ‘most men want a fight in bed.’³ Michelle Haniotis, one of the female participants, described Disclosure’s sexual disposition as a-sexual. From her perspective, eros was absent and in that absence psychosexual phenomena emerged as material for both speculation and direct-experience, which she likened closer to rape than to sex. 

Disclosure’s theoretical basis was outlined by Tim Johnson and sociologist Vivien Elliott — Johnson’s then wife and partial collaborator — as follows:

‘Observe everything erotic around you.’ This instruction serves to legitimise and encourage a voyeuristic activity […] Disclosure attempts to place the participants’ actual and potential sexuality in a situation that releases maximum information about sexual mores. […] Exposure in public, of aspects of people’s physicality, together with their response to the act of exposure […] requires staging if a complex and spontaneous response is to be achieved. […] Interpretation depends very much on the responses given: reactions of aggression, indignation, embarrassment, enjoyment etc., [...] One can expect an illustration of sex-role conditioning in differing responses.⁴

Adopting the artists’ logic, Disclosure was not made to expose students’ bodies but rather to expose their ‘sex-role conditioning’. One, among many, distinctions between the two is that one’s ‘condition’ is largely an interior phenomena and that without ‘staging’ it remains mostly imperceptible. Despite the above conceptualisation, many found Disclosure to be not much more than a thinly veiled self-justifying means of sexually objectifying and molesting students. It goes without saying that eroticism has a well established history in art with respect to its representation. Less established is its live presence, enactment or satiation. 

Importantly, though, this work departs from solely representational, aesthetic and theatrical devices. The constitutive material of Disclosure is emergent psychic and sexual phenomena at the level of the ‘actual and potential’ in the here-and-now. Disclosure draws the participants’ sexuality out before a group for purposes of either observation (audience) or direct-experience (audience-participant). The analytical refrain of the work’s posture — rather than its ethical accommodations — refracts over its audience in the sense that one’s interpretation — in the moment or retroactively — from the surrounding circle of desks exposes one’s ‘condition’ as much as those experiencing the more direct participation of being undressed. Johnson attributes the negative reception and anti-social characterisation of Disclosure not as evidence of his own perversity but rather as illuminating a pre-existent logical progression in the audience’s associative unconscious between the lifting of a skirt or the exposure of a nipple with ‘violence, rape, murder etc’.⁵  In this sense, the feminist critique as expressed by some involved is not external to the work but rather constitutive of its being.

There is a suggestion in Disclosure’s conceptualisation that the work and its enactment — by making the unconscious conscious — purges negative contents and expressions with respects to sexual mores and conventions. Whether this can be evaluated in any quantifiable way will remain an open question. What can be argued though is that if there were a toxicity or a transgression it rests not in the art nor in the artist but rather in this particular group of people representative of a society in a particular time and place. Moreover, that such ‘sexual mores’ are to be worked-through once brought into consciousness within the limited context of that particular group. Such a process can only be accelerated and recodified by establishing a retrospective — reactive — discussion group. 

In the transcript there are competing interpretations of Disclosure. The work is characterised as both feminist and fascist. Similarly, its critics are described as passive by some and as authoritarian by others. 

Liz Fell: There was so much social pressure, plus the fact that most women see themselves this way; and although there’s a lot of male fantasy involved in women fighting them off, on the whole due to social pressures, women just do act passive. 

Mitch Johnson: Did you think that by showing people what happens in a group you’d help people form a more liberal attitude? [...]

Tim Johnson: The girls could react in two ways - if they were sexually liberated they would have put up with it, in fact enjoyed it, they must have been slightly exhibitionistic to get into the situation anyway.

Liz Fell: I think if they were sexually liberated they would have fought you off.

Tim Johnson: If they were liberated as women they would have fought me off. 

Liz Fell: I think the two are the same thing... 

[...]

Ian Milliss: Couldn’t these statements be some sort of reaction against the sexuality of the work?

David Morrissey: I think your only authoritarian act was to set the scene up at the start; the major authoritarianism was in the crowd. 

Tim Johnson: Yes, in everyone’s preconceived attitudes.

Michelle Haniotis: I didn’t know what was going to happen and I tried not to think of what could happen. [...] I didn’t want to react, because I thought it might show me up. It was the group pressure, and also what he did wasn’t that bad; if he’d done anything a bit more aggressive I probably would have reacted. [...]

Tim Johnson: What I’m interested in knowing is whether the work is concerned with sexuality, for you?

Michelle Haniotis: No, it wasn’t a sexual advance, it didn’t have any sexual overtones, it was too clinical. I mean you were too rough for one thing, if anything it would have been rape rather than a sexual advance. [...] It just seemed too clinical and methodical, you worked from one girl to another, and we were all lying there like sardines.⁶

Michelle Haniotis: But we weren’t approached as women, we were approached as guinea pigs.

That this project took place in the context of a university is significant. Students were not brought into consciousness as to their ‘sex-role conditioning’ through an academic presentation or reading list but through a limited and experiential construct established in the here-and-now. This allowed the artist — and the students — to work directly with the social-sexual dynamics of the group and its unconscious in real time rather than relying on external subjects — a means of learning less likely to establish meaningful psychic integration. The distinction between didactic (theory) and experiential (enactment) pedagogy has some rich applications in both performance theory and psychoanalysis. The tension and slippage between the two modes of working form the basis of practices as diverse as Jerzy Grotowski’s theatre training methods to Tavistock style Group Relations conferences — each notable for both their theatrical and psychotherapeutic properties and contributions.⁷

Tim Johnson’s practice in the early 1970s was ephemeral work — performative and or sculptural — made through a written score or generalised instruction. While not all, many of his works purposefully breached normative conventions of eroticism. Oftentimes the particulars of a work’s execution varied while maintaining a principle function. Fittings, for example, is the spontaneous changing of items of clothing from one person to another. However, it has been performed in total darkness, another time in public and another time performed with everyone standing in a straight line. These slight alterations and rescriptings yield different results and thus the work is not static in neither its visual composition nor in the experience afforded to its participants. While representative of many conceptual artworks from this period in history, this framing reorients the exercise away from art and aesthetics and toward something like topological and behavioural psychology or even cybernetics. Johnson himself says, however, as a kind of self-defence, ‘[...] but I was doing an artwork’.⁸ Implying that he was not actually doing what he was doing. Whether this is strategically deployed plausible deniability or not, the qualifier of ‘art’ — consciously and unconsciously — relegates action as outside of the realm of the real and into the parallel but distinct world of representation. For this work in particular, that representation concerns depersonalised social systems. A discourse of systems necessarily depersonalises and augments normatives relations, where one would otherwise derive expectations of and processes for accountability. 

One member of the discussion group recalls a separate work by Johnson from one year prior where he was photographed smashing light tubes inside of a public train carriage. There is an understanding among the group for this work, however, that in this train performance he is not exhibiting actual ‘delinquent [aggressivity]’ but rather a performance of delinquency for a specialised audience deferred into the future who will experience the works as photographs — irrespective of whether those on the train recognised this qualitative distinction or not. 

Guy Warren: My first question is whether this is an anti-social act, and secondly whether a work of art can be anti-social, and thirdly if one accepts that a work of art can be anti-social, just how far can one continue in this logical sequence. 

Tim Johnson: Well, as I see it, no work of art is exclusively anti-social, and none of the work I have done is intended to be anti-social. It seems to me to be a side issue. If it’s a very anti-social act, chances are it doesn’t have very much to do with art. But I’d say the anti-social content is just the means to an end, it’s just a part of creating the art work.⁹

Noel Hutchison, while defending the work against claims that it is ‘anti-social’ and ‘anti-human’, makes clear, ‘I see society as a system. You may see it as a conglomerate group of people. I see it as a system of living.’¹⁰ It follows then that the primacy of one’s subject position and personal experience is uniquely unmoored in both topological psychology and conceptual art.

While working through a similar set of distinctions, art historian and curator Eric C.H. de Bruyn observed — particularly in relation to artists such as Dan Graham, Robert Smithson and the media-collective Raindance Corporation — how certain tenants of conceptual art allowed for key developments in the formalised social sciences, with respect to topology and the mapping of social relations, to be brought to fruition. Art events, such as Disclosure, are able to realise, spatially and socially, what would otherwise remain at the conceptual level.  

Topology was a pervasive “metaphor” in the social sciences during the 1960s […] The models of topology, which Graham appropriates from cybernetics, systems theory, and group psychology, constitute theoretical (and often utopian) diagrams of social relations which [...] are not just conceptual in nature but operate on a kind of micropolitical level. They have an experimental nature in a communal sense, which enables the involvement of real subjects within a ‘shifting time of collective relations’ [...]

Disclosure similarly appropriates quasi-scientific, analytical and pedagogic tools and postures for a micropolitical end. It is however, an artwork and thus the ambiguity it generates and the historical context it engages in are critical. Alongside its investments in transgressing ‘sexual mores’ at the social or psychic level, as a performance Disclosure is equally invested in this tendency in, mostly, North American art practice. 

It is not my effort to artificially expropriate the historical legitimacy of figures such as Graham or Smithson to qualify or account for this entirely obscure and marginal 1972 performance at the University of Sydney. Johnson was at this time a fairly established member of these discourses and milieus. His practice and an account of Art Experience Week — which I detail in later paragraphs — was written about by Willoughby Sharp in the Winter–Spring 1973 issue of the seminal conceptual art and performance magazine Avalanche. Also, in 1971 Johnson held a solo exhibition at the Mezzanine Gallery at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Canada during Garry Kennedy’s equally seminal tenure as President. The NSCAD exhibition, Installation as Conceptual Scheme, was a systematised collection of black and white photographs documenting installations Johnson had made in hotel rooms, parks, roadsides etc. In the NSCAD archives there is a description of another work by Johsnon titled Light (Event) which was not realised on-site.¹¹ A version of this same concept was later realised for ‘Project 02’, curated by Harald Szeemann in 1971 at both National Gallery Victoria in Melbourne and at Bonython Gallery in Sydney. 

The discourse generated by this first staging of Disclosure did extend beyond the discussion group. The performance was written about in an art column by Rodney Milgate in The Australian on 1 July 1972. Milgate charges the work with revealing the malaise and apathy of his surrounding society. He does not, however, note this in the affirmative. He writes: 

There has been a breath of insanity sweeping through the world these past few weeks and months. Even more than unusual [...] Mr Johnson is a sad victim of this world [...] he is revealing us all as members of [...] ‘The Affectless Society’ [...] This very unremarkable non-event took place in a tertiary institution, by invitation. It was afterwards discussed seriously as artistic achievement, it was recorded, the information was distributed and it has been accepted [...] The disturbing factor is not in the desperate search for self-aggrandisement by Mr Johnson and his sycophants, but in ourselves, by taking lying down (careful now) this very dangerous piece of murky tom-foolery [...] our acceptance of the misnomer, which is used to cover almost anything these days, God help us, ‘art’. There must be no misunderstanding here, the only moral issue is the revealed paucity of the feelings and sensibilities of a society accepting the lie which describes this nonsense as art, and as education.¹² 

Irrespective of the negative experiences had — by the feminist students in-person or by the conservative art critics after-the-fact — Disclosure was a serious and sincere artistic proposition. It is all too reductive to understand these works as merely the gratification of a person’s sexual phantasy, except perhaps the phantasy of realising a work of art. Though, the constitutive phantasy — the one the work reveals — might be that these two drives are separable and or distinct from one another. 

Later that same year, Tim Johnson was invited by architecture lecturer Bill Carr to participate in Art Experience Week, a week of conceptual art programming and lecturing for undergraduate architecture students at the University of Queensland. Only two of the major works planned were realised. Those were, Clive Murray-White’s Smoke Bomb Sculpture — a synchronised unletting of smoke bombs in the front lawn of the university — and Johnson’s Induction. ‘After a series of confrontations’ regarding Induction, the program was cancelled by the Acting Head of the department, Bill Greig.¹³

This version of Induction was as follows: inside the former Alice Street Masonic Temple — gifted to the university in 1933 — almost one hundred students gathered. On a chalkboard Johnson wrote:

Lay on your back, and attempt to produce an erection (penile or clitoral) by directing your thoughts towards erotic subjects and attempting slight movement of your organ inside your underclothes. ¹⁴

Twelve students left in protest and issued complaints to the university’s administration. The remaining students partook in relative silence. The performance lasted approximately thirty-minutes. The photographic documentation shows that the space was also fitted with two box monitors running a live feed through two broadcast cameras also stationed in the room. 

Following this, Johnson performed Disclosure — this time with only Vivien Elliott as a participant — and Fittings — which was performed in darkness with an intermittent camera flash illuminating the room every twenty-seconds or so. There was another work made by Peter Kingston involving beer cans and ‘mind photographs.’.¹⁵ This work however was not technically a part of the curated program. Likewise, there was a screening of a film by Albie Thoms and a subsequent group discussion on noise music, after which Johnson performed a ‘light drawing’¹⁶ where he smashed illuminated light bulbs. This was recorded on audio. Unknown to the artist, all of this took place under the surveillance of undercover staff observers ‘conspicuous by their lack of involvement’ and the following day Art Experience Week was cancelled.¹⁷ Bill Carr was brought before a disciplinary tribunal at the university. Some students unsuccessfully staged a sit-in in support of the artists and organisers.¹⁸ 

Some days later a member of the Queensland Legislative Assembly Tom Aikens described Induction in Parliament. Aiken’s recounting of Induction differs in many ways from ‘known pervert’ Tim Johnson’s.¹⁹ Aiken’s descriptions of the ‘erotica display’ included ‘every conceivable kind of filthy sexual deviation’ and that ‘no orthodox sex was featured only all the filthiest things in the sexual lexicon.’²⁰ Johnson was described as ‘noisy, filthy, scruffy, sex-perverted [...] selfish and anarchistic.’²¹ Aiken’s commentary was repeated in several newspapers. 

Johnson was ‘dismissed’ and he returned immediately to Sydney. Despite being given the brief of ‘[jolting] the Architecture students out of lethargy’ Johnson, citing extreme feelings of guilt and shame, stopped making performance works after this and returned to painting.²² 

Peter Kingston in an interview after-the-fact said:

The authorities said Art Experience Week was depraved and macabre. That was a real eye opener, seeing something you knew to be one thing and the newspapers and politicians beating it up to be something else. That helped me in the future to make my mind up about things and to try to see things first-hand—not to take newspapers and politicians at face value. Tim Johnson was not depraved: he was doing something very important for these students, making them think for themselves in a creative way. It was totally misunderstood by the authorities, and Tim was punished for it.²³

Despite Induction having been performed multiple times, the memetic capacity of its newspaper reporting and parliamentary discussion over its actual unfolding meant that the basic reality of the work became outmoded by its representative image. The splitting between the two has, necessarily, been remodelled and reassessed over time. The work, or its representation, however was instrumentalised greatly in the media and sat among a suite of sensationalised events regarding student activism at the university. Induction was cited in Janina Gosseye and John Macarthur’s Angry Young Architects: Counterculture and the critique of modernism in Brisbane, 1967–72, in which they argue that the ‘clampdown on experiments in architectural education was a fragment of a wider conservative reaction that led to the landslide victory of Bjelke-Petersen in the 1974 state election.’²⁴ 

The unfolding of Art Experience Week, and Induction in particular, circulated as myth in Queensland’s underground art community for decades. Reminiscent in multiple ways of Aliza Shvarts’s 2008 Untitled (Senior Thesis) for Yale, Induction derives multiple competing fictions. Here lies part of the work’s strength, its rumours, its misrepresentations in gossip, in media and in myth. Overtime, compounded by its unfixed discourse, the performance transcends its own vulgar material formulation and coheres mostly as story.²⁵ This memetic drift in Queensland is borne in many ways by the artist’s own refraining to command the works reception and its post-facto affectation by quietly returning to his studio and redevising his practice. This post-performance period of relative drop-out starkly contrasts Johnson’s response to Sydney’s earlier counterpart where he, in some sense, capitulated to criticism by responding to it in his sincere clarification of intent. Understandable as the impulse may be, this foreclosed the capacity of the work’s ambiguity to mobilise itself or be mobilised into something else, something freer.

In the aftermath of Induction, artist and critic Donald Brook wrote: 

Tim Johnson is surely one of the most dedicated, determined and potentially important artists now working in Australia. [...] What, then, is the order and sense of Tim Johnson’s erotic art activities? It is very largely the order and sense of a systematic inquiry by model building—by conjunction of fact and fantasy—into the habits and conventions of life. Art and life are kept in a relation of constant engagement that puts the presuppositions of both of them up for continuous re-examination. The Queensland MLA who believes that art like this ought to be stamped out is methodologically correct. He is a primitive art critic, who should be encouraged to sharpen his talent. And those of us who disagree with him have no right of recourse to the spurious defence that art is amoral. It isn’t. We have to say, rather, that the indecency, the violence, the waste and dirt or hectic appetitive allure of recent art represents the experimental adoption of attitudes and feelings that we should not otherwise learn to articulate and to handle in a collective way—whether by a form of imitative adoption or by rejection. For better or worse, the serpent in Eden was the first artist.²⁶ 

The works’ inexact historicisation was, in part, what motivated David Pestorius to publish a ‘fact sheet’²⁷ on Induction in the accompanying publication for the 2006 exhibition TURRBAL JAGERA, curated by Pestorius in and around the University of Queensland campus. One of the great ironies of Induction is that its documentation was later purchased by the university for their art collection in 2011. This was the university recognising and atoning for the issues — namely censorship — in their response in 1972. Rex Butler noted how this acquisition was a kind of ‘self recrimination’; an institution engaging in some public — bordering on masochistic — self-flagellation in an attempt to make up for former wrongs.²⁸ One can see some connections with Disclosure through the institution’s exhibition of their ‘bad parts’ otherwise concealed from view.

In its strategic re-modelling of latent psychodynamics, these works bring into sharp relief the otherwise unseeable ideological compatibility between two (or more) ostensibly oppositional groups, feminist university students in Sydney and conservative Christian politicians in Queensland. This bilateral dismissal, and the unlikely alliance it cohered, perhaps leads to the work’s enduring interest. 

Earlier in 1972, Johnson had performed Induction in Sydney at the Central Street Gallery for The Political Dinner. This was a one-night performance festival organised by Paul McGillick and Noel Sheridan that parodied ‘the type of dinners held by political parties during election campaigns.’²⁹ Present at the event were artists, anarchists and leaders of the gay liberation and black power movements. For this version of Induction, Johnson was the sole participant while the audience watched. Also in 1972 Johnson performed the three works at the now-defunct avant-garde Melbourne gallery Pinacotheca. Presumably the absence of surrounding controversy for these showings of the performances is attributable to their being not on a university campus but rather in artist-favoured galleries — an insider affair.

Returning to the Sydney discussion group:

Noel Hutchinson: I still don’t see that art has any responsibility to humanity - I think that is a different thing. Art, and the artist as a human being are two different things. You are the agent and the agent has to bear any responsibility for his actions [...]

Ian Milliss: I don’t think the artist has the right to plead any sort of innocence due to the fact that it’s a work of art. 

Noel Hutchinson: I don’t either. 

Guy Warren: No more right than any other individual. 

Tim Johnson: That is obviously true, but you have the right as an individual, as a member of society, to change your priorities, to commit an illegal act because you believe you have a higher purpose, or a better reason for doing it. As Noel has said, we break the law all the time, at demonstrations, for instance.³⁰ 

This statement from Johnson is made toward the end of the transcript. It is the first mention of any ‘higher purpose.’ Earlier in the discussion the work’s motivation was presented as a matter of plain curiosity or strategic agitation. The framing of the work as engaged with a higher plane — a liberatory consciousness — uplifts the work from the underground libertarian context that it was first conceived in and draws in associations with flower power, free love or — then developing — Western interest in Eastern spiritualities, witness consciousness in particular. Counterintuitively perhaps, the work’s motivations rest not in libidinal nihilism. In the decades following, Johnson became — and remains — a rigorous practitioner of Vajrayana Buddhism.  This less hedonic appraisal of the work establishes some continuity with projects like Geoff Lowe’s pre-A Constructed World collaborations with Sid Forsey and the human relations group Rosebud (1983-1995). Likewise, Stuart Ringholt’s Osho Rajneesh-informed group exercises in Anger Workshops (2007 - ) and its adjacent video work AUM (2007) or his similar but distinct Funny Fear Workshop (2004). What these works share is their pointed dissolution of the therapeutic dyad — mirrored often in the artist-audience dyad — in favour of something more utopic, collaborative and personally transformative.

Vivien Elliot wrote in reference to these group performance works:

The primary socialisation which has made us what we are now is as much an emotional as an intellectual process. Accordingly, the kind of exploration of human feeling with which these works are concerned has a place in the process of re-socialisation which is crucial to any significant personal transformation.³¹

When I first met Tim Johnson, chemtrails flew directly overhead. We talked about what they might be. We talked about angels and buddhas and the sky. 

Ragnar Thomas is a curator and art historian.

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• [1] Tim Johnson et al. Tim Johnson at Sydney University, Contemporary Art Society of Australia NSW Broadsheet, Sydney, May 1972, p. 4.
• [2] Ibid., p. 4.
• [3] Ibid., pp. 4-5.
• [4] Ibid., p. 4.
• [5] Ibid., p. 10.
• [6] Ibid., pp. 5-6.
• [7] Olive McKeon, ‘Learning from Experience: disciplinary hybridity between group psychoanalysis and performance,’ Performance Research 25, no. 4 (2020), p. 84.
• [8] Tim Johnson et al. Tim Johnson at Sydney University, Contemporary Art Society of Australia NSW Broadsheet, Sydney, May 1972, p. 8.
• [9] Ibid., p. 8.
• [10] Ibid., p. 10. [9] Ibid., p. 8.
• [11]  Eric C H de Bruyn, ‘Topological Pathways of Post-Minimalism,’ Grey Room 25, no. 4 (2006), pp. 35-36.
• [12] Descriptions of Various Artworks, February 1972 , nscad:5240, Administrative Records of the Mezzanine Gallery, Mezzanine Gallery collection, CAUL-CBUA Atlantic Islandora Repository Network, NSCAD University, Halifax. https://nscad.cairnrepo.org/islandora/object/nscad%3A5240#page/1/mode/2up 
• [13] Tim Johnson : Australian Art and Artists file, 1947 -, press cuttings, ID 9911064983607636, material collated by the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.
• [14] Tim Johnson et al. Tim Johnson at Sydney University, Contemporary Art Society of Australia NSW Broadsheet, Sydney, May 1972, p. 2.
• [15] Tim Johnson, Induction, 1972, black and white photograph, 21 x 29.7 cm, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne.
• [16] Wilson Gavin, Harbourlights : the art and times of Peter Kingston, Fishermans Bend: Craftsman House, 2004, p. 34.
• [17] Ibid., p. 34.
• [18] Unnamed author, Editorial: Brisbane, 31/7/72-2/9/72, Contemporary Art Society of Australia NSW Broadsheet, Sydney, September 1972, p. 2.
• [19] Pestorius, David. ‘The 'Art Week' controversy of 1972 - FACT SHEET, TURRBAL-JAGERA: The University of Queensland Art Projects 2006, (Queensland, University Art Museum, 2006), pp. 38-39.
• [20] Queensland, Parliamentary Debates (EROTICA DISPLAY, QUEENSLAND UNIVERSITY), Legislative Assembly, 26 September 1972, 694 (Mr. Tom Aikens, member for Townsville South) (Australia) https://documents.parliament.qld.gov.au/events/han/1972/1972_09_26.pdf
• [21] Unnamed author, Editorial: Brisbane, 31/7/72-2/9/72, Contemporary Art Society of Australia NSW Broadsheet, Sydney, September 1972, p. 1.
• [22] Ibid.
• [23] Wilson Gavin, Harbourlights : the art and times of Peter Kingston, Fishermans Bend: Craftsman House, 2004, p. 36.
• [24] Ibid., p. 38.
• [25] Janina Gosseye and John Macarthur , ‘Angry Young Architects: Counterculture and the critique of modernism in Brisbane, 1967–72,’ Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand  31 (2014), p. 274.
• [26] Carrie Lambert-Beatty, ‘Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility’, October 129 (2009), p. 71.
• [27] Tim Johnson : Australian Art and Artists file, 1947 -, press cuttings, ID 9911064983607636, material collated by the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.
• [28] Pestorius, David. ‘“The 'Art Week' controversy of 1972 - FACT SHEET,.’” TURRBAL-JAGERA: The University of Queensland Art Projects 2006,. (Queensland, University Art Museum, 2006), pp. 38-39.
• [29] Rex Butler, ‘Tim Johnson: Induction’,in NEW v2 : selected recent acquisitions (2009 - 2011),
•  Brisbane: The University of Queensland Art Museum, 2012, p. 25.
• [30] Neil Howe, ‘Seventies Performance’,in Parallel Realities: The Development of Performance Art in Australia, Sydney: Thames & Hudson, 2017, p. 83.
• [31] Tim Johnson et al. Tim Johnson at Sydney University, Contemporary Art Society of Australia NSW Broadsheet, Sydney, May 1972, p. 9.
• [32] Vivien Elliott, ‘Introduction’in Disclosure (Self published artist book, 1972), p. 2.