In the flâneur, the joy of watching is triumphant. It can concentrate on observation; the result is the amateur detective. Or it can stagnate in the gaper; then the flâneur has turned into the badaud.
— Walter Benjamin. 1
Deborah Edwards, Senior Curator, Art Gallery of New South Wales: Just a point of judgment then. Around about that time, who were you looking at as the most interesting artists? [...]
— Donald Brook: Tim Burns.2
1970s. Photo by Ruth Maddison. Reproduced courtesy and © Ruth
Maddison
Artist Tim Burns is no stranger to controversy. For over sixty years he has interrogated contentious ideas in public forums. Most recently, mid-2022, his exhibition in the small town of York, Western Australia made national news headlines.3 When considered against his career continuum, markers of so-called ‘controversies’ resound at a different scale. Burns has forayed repeatedly through notoriety, provocation and cancellations. Such examples read as a proxy for broader socio-political conflicts concerning how Burns’s oeuvre has hitherto been written. These events illuminate the mechanisms for understanding public controversy and scandal, and art’s covert and overt mythmaking strategies.
Burns has always approached his practice through the deliberate extension of an artistic–problematic. He calls himself a ‘context artist.’ Often, he devises dynamic situations that he exploits and explodes; working with smoke devices, performance and activist–interventions. Whilst prone to mishaps, counter–protests or exaggerated retellings, Burns’s artworks are never enacted for controversy’s sake; to cause a scene. They are considered logics with historical precedents. However, in their being recorded, they become interpolated into, and inflame, controversy.
Most of Burns’s works have exacerbated his reputation as enfant terrible, sensationalist, renegade, etc. However, the events of 1973 are a significant progenitor for how Burns would continue to be read long into the future. The resultant quantity of public attention (press coverage) is one metric for scandalousness. Events considered provocative, harmful or deceptive generate greater upset and polarised reportage. Invested journalists, critics or spectators are aware of the complexity of these records; not simply good or only bad, but never neutral. As Gregory Shaya explains in The Flâneur, the Badaud, and the Making of a Mass Public: ‘The news report […] is more than a report, it is an important site for the production, the maintenance, and the revision of a social imaginary.’4
The residual effects from sensationalist media coverage amalgamate into a strange and persistent cult of personality. Today, Burns’s reputation owes as much to how it was first written as it does to any subject of his works. Tracing how the recordings of his career inform and produce a social imaginary evidences how the badaud triumphs in both consumption of art’s content and production — or erasure — of its records.
Burns’s imaginings began on front pages following Sydney’s 1972 Anzac Day ceremony. Marching soldiers found flares attached to timing mechanisms concealed at Martin Place Cenotaph. The Daily Mirror headline read ‘BOMB’ AT CENOTAPH — omitting this event was a performance–artwork–protest against the former US president Lyndon Johnson’s visit, created by Burns with the Tin Sheds artist cohort.5 The Returned and Services League (RSL) State President decried the stunt the next day in the Sydney Morning Herald, calling it ‘an insult to the memory of those who paid the supreme sacrifice to keep this country free,’ and offensive to ‘every man, woman and child in Australia.’6 In twenty-four hours, Burns’s mythology evolved from artist–activist to domestic terrorist.
Today, 1973 is infamous for art–related public furors, following the National Gallery of Australia’s purchase of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles (1952). Burns’s annual variety of brouhaha the same year in some ways outmanoeuvred the Blue culture wars. His logics were diffuse; there was no physical object or significant monetary cost to criticise, but a type of outrage at perceived fraudulence remained evident nonetheless. In April 1973, Burns’s earthworks–sculpture Minefield (in Sculpturscape’73, the fifth Mildura Sculpture Triennial) was destroyed before opening. Mildura Council members requested the work be demolished. A frontend loader drove over ‘about twenty loosely packed gunpowder charges powered by batteries and controlled by [the artist with a] ubiquitous chemist mat.’7 Despite purporting to showcase ‘new experimental Australian art’, the 400–square–metre installation was considered too speculative by Triennial curators, in that it was unpredictable — namely ‘unsafe’ and a ‘public risk.’
You can’t say he didn’t warn you: Burns hand-painted and silk-screened warning signage around the installation. Reading ‘DANGER MINE FIELD ENTER AT OWN RISK’, this precaution was ignored or distrusted. By limiting audiences’ abilities to evaluate and consent to risk-taking, any effects of experiencing the work were neutralised. We can only know of it now through its compromised historical records. Regardless of harm done or avoided, Burns remarked that for daring to conceive of such an idea, Mildura residents threw rocks at him in the streets. According to critic Donald Brook, the hidden explosives were ‘not powerful enough to do any real damage but they WOULD frighten people and make them experience very real alarm, not the pseudo alarm usually reserved for art.’ In pseudo–alarm, the badaud rejoices.
Later in October 1973, Burns’s A Change of Plan debuted at Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) in Recent Australian Art. The ‘controversial closed–circuit video installation’ — as now characterised by the National Gallery of Victoria website — was a last–minute inclusion featuring two nude performers (Barry Prothero and Ursila Maerle) inside a purpose-built room within the gallery. A two–way television broadcast enabled interactions with visitors. Curator Daniel Thomas recalls: ‘After a minute or two of furtive perving viewers were suddenly horrified when the naked couple started talking to them.’8 When Prothero exited the space to use the bathroom, still naked, a disturbance ensued. The gallery guides performed a citizens’ arrest. About twenty audience members stripped naked, laying on the floor in counter–protest. The exhibition was temporarily closed. Prothero was charged with indecent exposure and released on $1000 bail. Concurrent exhibitors threatened to withdraw ( Richard Larter, Mike Parr and George Haynes vociferously). Burns’s intent here was to deceive: having planned the nudity, he initially concealed its inclusion from curators. Regardless of any moralising interpretations of the work (‘pornographic’ as one article noted), the succès de scandale only exacerbated Burns’s reputation. The next year, Art and Australia called the performance the ‘single work which brought notoriety to the exhibition’ and noted it provoked ‘outraged editorials in the afternoon press’9 .
Prothero’s indecent exposure charge was eventually tossed out of court. In the hearing, (transcript records now lost) the judge reportedly ruled: ‘Mr Average would not have been there.’10 In the context of an obscenity trial, ‘Mr Average’ could be interpreted as the Reasonable Person Test — the legal benchmark determining reasonability in behaviour, using judgment or skill — or a comment on the artwork’s expected audience. ‘Bourgeoise conceptualists — middle-class wankers’ as Burns described such commonly-held perceptions.
If art, in the eyes of the learned judge, was for highfalutin intellectuals, the government was oblivious; politicians of the era simultaneously touted art for average Joes. A twenty-minute walk from AGNSW, the Sydney Opera House opening was held concurrent with Recent Australian Art. This moment expresses 1973’s contradictory impulses and ideological oppositions in writing about, censoring and sentencing art. Before the nudity trial, the NSW government assured audiences there would be no ‘class conscious barrier,’11 to accessing culture in the Opera House. Prior to its opening, the Premier stated the ‘average working family’ could ‘afford to go’ and the building would become ‘a monument to democratic nationhood’12. Ideas of ‘Mr Average’ further politicise Burns’s controversy–stoking, scandal–making artwork. The audience class–typecast upends assumptions about who is badaud and who is flâneur. Mixed viewer responses — perving–horrified turned solidarity–performing–spectators and gallery guides–cum–modesty–police — evidence this incohesion. Daniel Thomas pinpointed the irony: ‘the attendants […] were the ones whose sensitivities were outraged; the special–interest art public was never going to rise to a young artist’s expectations of shock.13 And yet, they did.
The unpredictability inherent in Burns’s works and the resultant hostile ways of dealing with them (erasure) exposes the artworld’s love of faux–controversy and scandal–mongering. That Burns has not yet been afforded a degree of coherent particularisation in Australian art history is a symptom, caused by a fundamental artworld allergy to real (that is, not merely ideological) risks. This pervasive, structural hostility is incompatible with Burns’s ephemeral, context–based performances that demand something back: his works ask of themselves and their audiences, how they came to be what they are.
Burns’s work escapes palatable narratives (of positionalities, aesthetic modes, legal constraints) and refuses to be commodified. In exploiting possibilities, his art is no longer from a distance or ‘about’ life but itself live, full of chance. Beneath his surface–level shocks lurk deep intellectual provocations: that our foundations of knowing and seeing are unstable; that terrorist crime is a model for the capitalist system; that Australian law fails to adequately protect freedoms, including freedom of expression. These situations dismantle their own limits and spill into our ability to name them — in reading the news or writing art–history — as definitively one thing, not another; a scandal and not an artwork, a controversial artwork and not a performance-based intervention. To keep pace, we must adapt. Donald Brook recalls an article he wrote for a 1973 review was ‘the first time that the word “fuck” had appeared in print in an Australian paper.’14
To describe the indescribable, or overcome the diagnostic upset of Burns’s works, we must innovate our methods of naming, producing and maintaining art’s social imaginaries. Badaud–culture persists in favouring iterant dismissal. Perhaps, instead of the review section, we turn instead to the crossword in the newspaper. Anagrams, relied–upon tricks of crossword enthusiasts, can occasionally also reveal antigrams — where a word rearranged produces from the same letters an opposite meaning (for example: SILENT LISTEN). Burns’s oeuvre can be thought of as a profound and intelligible anagram among our current paradigms, despite — or because of — the fact that he remains presently unsolvable.
[1] Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn. London: Verso, 1983, p. 54.
[2] Deborah Edwards, ‘Interview with Donald Brook,’ Art Gallery of New South Wales Archive, Balnaves Foundation Australian Sculpture Archive Project, 23 February 2011, p. 43.
[3] Sam McManus, ‘York art exhibition by Tim Burns taken down after Indigenous appropriation claims,’ ABC News, Wheatbelt, 9 June 2022
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-09/art-removed-aboriginal-appropriation-claims-wa-wheatbelt/101135708
[4] Gregory Shaya, The Flâneur, the Badaud, and the Making of a Mass Public in France, Circa 1860-1910, United States: American Historical Association, 2004, pp. 76–77. Cited in Petula Iu, ‘A Triumph of American Police Methods: Representations of Police Work in Two Sensational Kidnap-Murder Cases of the 1920s,’ Crime, Histoire & Sociétés, vol. 9, no. 2, 2005, pp. 9–42.
[5] Front page of The Daily Mirror, Tuesday 25 April 1972, facsimile reproduced in artist’s monograph manuscript with annotations. This was the second smoke-related ‘performance happening demonstration’ by Burns, following what he terms ‘the exploding of small smoke bombs in the reflection pool at Hyde Park’. The Daily Mirror became the Daily Telegraph in the early 1990s.
[6] ‘Crowd responds to new veterans: 150,000 in city streets,’ first published in The Sydney Morning Herald on 26 April 1972 https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/from-the-archives-1972-crowd-responds-to-new-veterans-20220408-p5ac1u.html
[7] Burns’s manuscript description – see Minefield, ed. Edward Colless, Art+Australia, 2016 for more on this work.
[8] Daniel Thomas, ‘Museum Pieces: 3D TV, 1973’, Art & Australia, vol. XLI, no. 4, Winter 2004, pp. 550–51.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Artist’s manuscript. Tim Burns, I Was Framed (artist’s own MA Thesis Scrapbook, Murdoch University WA, unpublished and gifted author’s copy, ca. 2014, np). All recorded quotes from Burns attributed to this source unless otherwise noted.
[11] Scott Hill, The People’s House, What’s in a name, Museums of History NSW, published 19 February 2024 https://mhnsw.au/stories/general/the-peoples-house-whats-in-a-name/
The Opera House opened 20 October; the AGNSW show ran 18 October to 18 November; Sydney Biennale opened at the Opera House on 23 November.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Thomas, ‘Museum Pieces’, p551.
[14] Edwards, ‘Interview with Donald Brook’, p. 52.
