The English artist Ti Parks spent almost exactly a decade in Naarm / Melbourne. Arriving in 1964, after a stint in art school he was featured in the Young Contemporaries exhibitions of Swinging London, where generations of bright Brits cut their teeth (the 1963 iteration included both Parks and a young chap called David Hockney). Parks — government name Theodore — moved here as a Ten Pound Pom. Parks was included in a series of pivotal NGV exhibitions including Object and Idea, as well as I Want To Leave A Nice Well-Done Child Here, curated by star-curator Harald Szeeman, and multiple Mildura Sculpture Triennials (THE place to flex your conceptual credentials in the 1970s). He even represented Australia at the Paris Biennale in 1973.
Parks was prolific and, I’d argue, one of the pioneers of installation art in Australia. Despite Parks’ endlessly inventive work, his impact in the development of post-object experimental art, and his robust influence on Australian artists such as John Nixon and Howard Arkley, there has been relatively little (by which I mean no) in-depth scholarship on Parks’ work itself. This may be due to the impermanence of his stay Down Under. As others have noted, Australian art history isn’t kind to those who come, splash about, and go.[1]
Upside down in the antipodes and far from his birthplace in Sevenoaks, Kent, Parks became deeply involved in Melbourne’s avant-garde experimental spaces of the late sixties and early seventies. Parks had his first solo outing in 1967 at the Argus Gallery, a critically respected space in the Argus Building on the corner of La Trobe and Elizabeth Street, directed by Joan Healey that frequently showed what we’d today call “emerging artists” — an unfortunate combination of words that always makes one think of pale grubs or half-blind moles. He ultimately fell in with Bruce Pollard’s legendary Pinacotheca Gallery in St Kilda (then Richmond), who exhibited the majority, if not all of Australia’s young conceptual artists. The squad of sculptors dubbed the Hampton Mafia by critic Patrick McCaughey were also Parks’ friends, including artists like Clive Murray-White, Lenton Parr, Alun Leach-Jones, and Ken Scarlett.
Abandoning the ‘brush, splatter ways of working’ that characterised his student efforts in England, Parks looked to his surroundings in the Southside suburbs, from vernacular blonde brick architecture to elderly women knitting socks on the tram.[2] Incorporating mohair wool, chair backs, Venetian blinds, abandoned fans, and industrial barrels into his installations and paintings, Parks surveyed Melbourne from its street-level, embracing local materials as a means to address a more universal breakdown of painting and concept.
Australia is a wooly country with more sheep than people, baa baa — and Parks was struck by the prevalence of knitting, joking to art historian Margaret Plant that ‘there was more knitting activity in Brighton (substitute any suburb) than in the whole western world.’[3] The late sixties’ fad for acrylic fur in home furnishings also left its mark, with fuzzy, furry textures becoming a signature motif in his assemblages and installations — a good example of this being the fabulously odd Acrylic fur with barbed wire (1967-1968) in the NGV collection. The top half of the work is a patch of sickly-green acrylic fur inset into a slender red frame, while the lower half features the crisp silhouette of barbed wire, atop a slightly receding grid pattern. It’s a kitchen sink op painting, rather than illusory space, Parks’ grid is an exploration of ubiquitous lino-tiling.
The Melbourne works (from 1964 to 1974, when Parks returned to the UK) spanned painting, collage, installation, and artists’ books. They all disclose a keen sense of humour (Parks turned the Hawthorn town hall into a chicken coop — insert joke about local government here) and a deep attention to not only framing devices and structures that dictate seeing and encountering artwork, but the values and qualities that non-traditional art materials can offer.
From the artworks and various contemporary images that survive, there’s a winking playfulness, expansively stagey quality to his constructions and objects. This is only fitting, given that Parks’ day job was set construction for the ABC’s Channel 2, home of bizarre and wonderful children’s pantomime Adventure Island. For the uninitiated (read: those born this century), think camp surrealist Play School meets the petrifying second act of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Those with a phobia of puppets are advised not to Google.
Other Melburnian artists of note shared Park’s preoccupation with suburbia and sweaters — the obvious example here being Hawthorn icon Robert Rooney’s Superknits. A series of paintings from 1969 to 1970, Rooney’s Superknits featured impeccably flat, hard-edge renderings of carefully masked purls and loops. Dale Hickey, another Pinacotheca artist, contracted a tradesman to build wooden picket fences inside the gallery, before turning his attention to serial photographic documentation of white walls, before ultimately twisting out of the clutches of The Concept altogether by returning to painting with a series that featured twee teacups.[4] Parks’ work is engaged with the same conceptual developments, interrogations, and dematerialisations that other artists of the period grappled with. Yet he was notable for maintaining a surreal lightness and sweet humour. Tiptoeing through the meaning minefield in fluffy mohair slippers, Parks’ work situates itself in relationship to these developments nimbly. He too interrogated the concept of art, yet he did so without ever coming down so heavily on one side or the other. For instance, while in Melbourne he never adopted the systematised determination of seriality and procedure to the same extent as his peers. For hard-core conceptual art, there’s always Ian Burn, who coincidentally left for England the month before Parks arrived in Australia.
There’s much to say about suburban imagery and the representation of everyday objects in the minimal and conceptualist-ish work of this period in Melbourne; too much, I’m afraid, to get into here.[5] Suffice to say, Parks’ spin was outlandish even among all the fences, cups, and Holden sedans. Assembling a laundry list of materials from hacked up fur coats, yarn, chicken wire, Brussel sprouts, barrels of dirty water, ladies’ underwear, and audio tapes to the odd optical painting, this found-object-grunge-meets-conceptual formula can still be traced in Melbourne today in various suburban backyard galleries, as we trace the long arc of recession strategies and DIY sensibilities.
Virginia’s (see feature image above) was a 1969 ‘total sculptural environment’ shown at Georges Mora’s Tolarno Galleries that demonstrates this inclination perfectly: equally a sincere expression of conceptual painting, an expanded object strategy and a crude, gently perverted prank. Parks stretched a starburst canvas frame around the middle of the gallery, painted in lurid red and pink leopard print, and placed a small red empty frame in its centre. This structure was decorated with pube-looking fox fur tails at the top of its ‘legs,’ and on the floor, a phallic string of sausages was smeared with red and black paint. One was attached to a motor, flopping and writhing, impotently daubing paint onto the frame, dwarfed by the cavernous pink leopard print maw.
But there is one particular work that has had a long half-life, a more severe piece that people who remember Parks still remember. The Tent was first pitched in 1968 at Argus Galleries, with the pleasingly literal title-cum-roomsheet of The Tent, The Tent, The Table, The Mattress, The Robe. One of these titular tents was cheery green cotton structure, ‘a two man tent, with a ground sheet of plastic lunch bags sewn together with pink wool.’ — the type one might find illustrated in a child’s alphabet reader under T is for…[6]
Tent II, the second version, was a rather more provisional structure, with two peaked and stepped triangles standing in for walls, suspended by blue mohair, complete with a sleeping bag underneath, implying and extending the same structure as the real McCoy set up next to it. Throughout the gallery, Parks stretched and strew more pieces of furry mohair, using these new strings to connect and draw between the other sculptures. This continuation of Virginia’s perspectival play transformed the gallery into an expanded canvas or painting. Cheeky promotional pictures in The Herald provides a glimpse, posing a pert model next to the tent, her woolly jumper caught and stretched on part of it to mimic the sculpture itself. Love, as another clever Englishman once observed, is when you find strange hands in your sweater…
Parks’ tent has proved enduringly responsive to other historical moments, reexhibited and recreated multiple times since its initial camping trip in the midst of the CBD’s concrete jungle. Even once back in England, Parks maintained his friendships and connections with Australian artists and gallerists, sending back thousands of postcard-sized collages and artist books to be shown at Pinacotheca and Watters Gallery in Sydney.[7] John Nixon’s Art Projects also showed his work, with Nixon recreating The Tent, The Tent, The Table, The Wardrobe in 1980.
Pitch Your Own Tent at MUMA in 2005 took the tent as a sort of organising metaphor, a big tent to draw together and survey three pivotal artist-run spaces — Store 5, First Floor, and Arts Project. Curator Max Delany placed Tent I (the green one, for those keeping track) in a lineage stretching from Gustave Courbet’s DIY tent exhibition at the 1855 Exposition Universelle to Rirkrit Tiravanija’s tent at the 1998 Sydney Biennale. The tent itself is thus a neat analogy for the ‘itinerant and “perpetually provisional”’ nature of artist-run spaces and networks.[8]
As the artist Peter Tyndall has pointed out, to this campground, Delaney could have added Tom Roberts’ Artists Camp, the ultimate image of rugged Australian artist as heroic creative. Depicting the artist Frederick McCubbin camping out in Heidelberg with bourgeois patron of the arts Louis Abraham — slumming it while the billy boils. Or even the 9 x 5 Impression exhibition in 1889, which saw the interiors of the Grosvenor Studios on Collins Street draped in Whistler inspired silks and Japonisme screen-decor (an extended sculptural environment if ever there was one!). We’d now add Richard Bell’s Embassy, itself a restaging and continuation of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy pitched outside Parliament since 1972, and James Tylor’s series Un-Resettling (Dwellings), which sees the artist explore and relearn Kaurna cultural practice by constructing traditional dwellings on country. Perhaps unconsciously with his wool and his tent, Parks was tapping into a settler-vocabulary that he, as a temporary migrant, was more attuned to than other white Australians.
In his 1974 Artforum essay ‘The Provincialism Problem’, Terry Smith singles out Parks, alongside sculptor Tony Coleing, as exemplars of a ‘peculiarly Australian approach to creativity, reemerging through successive imported styles.’[9] This creative sensibility and embrace of absurdity, says Smith, is indicative of how Australian art develops — namely, that we explore and experiment in a manner ‘conventional to the categories of international art,’ dependent and lagging behind.[10] What does this quality of “Australianness” mean, given that it’s so readily tapped by a foreigner? Far from displaying a separateness, distance, and lack of achievement relative to global artistic developments, Parks’ work and career here (and in England too) can be seen to demonstrate a wonderfully idiosyncratic level of connection and complexity.
We can work around Parks and fit him in, contextualise him and naturalise him as an Australian (or UnAustralian) artist — compare him with the clunking literal puns of Aleks Danko, or the sexy (albeit in a Carry On, “ooh nurse!” way) pop endeavours of fellow Brits-down-under Michael Shaw and Pat and Richard Larter, fellow furry Kathy Temin, the laminate patterns of Constanze Zikos. Or perhaps use him as a key to unlock the weird and wonderful work of Lou Hubbard, or Josh Petherick and Lewis Fidock’s meticulous oddities, the sinister camp rubbish of Alex Vivian, or the tortured macho Dada of Jamie O’Connell’s Car Spa.
While there’s lots out there regarding Australian conceptual art’s connections abroad, transnationalism begins at home. Parks is worthy of more attention, and he is a progenitor in the trajectory of grime grungy backyard antics. Cast new light on the inheritors of the wild and woolly seventies — perhaps Melbourne has never truly broken free of figuration into an eternal backyard shed, cesspool, Pinacotheca cellar of found objects and total environments. The Parksian manoeuvre is troubling the everyday with a smile and a wink, looking at everything through the precious eyes of the tourist-artist, so that all acquires the sheen of the exotic and the valuable — even something as banal as a ball of wool.
[1] Rex Butler, and ADS Donaldson, ‘Stay, go, or come: a history of Australian art, 1920-40’, in Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, volume 9, number 1-2, 2008–2009, pp. 118–143.
[2] Margaret Plant, Irreverent Sculpture, Monash University Gallery, Melbourne, 1985, p. 61.
[3] Ibid., p. 60.
[4] David Homewood, ‘Return to Disorder: Dale Hickey's passage from Conceptual art to the 'Cup Paintings' (1972-73)’, in Discipline, number 3, 2013, pp. 157-166.
[5] The marriage of suburban content with high concept is covered in David Homewood, ‘Painting the Banal: Dale Hickey and Robert Hunter, 1966-1973’, PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 2019; Daniel Thomas, Melbourne Modern: The art of Robert Rooney, in Art and Australia 34, 4, 1997, pp. 476-483; and, Chris McAuliffe, Art and suburbia: a world art book, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1996.
[6] Ti Parks, The Tent, The Tent, The Table, The Mattress, The Robe, roomsheet, Argus Gallery, 1968.
[7] Nathan Firth, ‘Ti Parks Recent work at Pinacotheca,’ Artlink, Issue 22:4, December 2002, https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/2672/ti-parks-recent-work-at-pinacotheca/ .
[8] Max Delany, ‘Pitch Your Own Tent’ in Pitch your own tent: Art Projects / Store 5 / 1st Floor, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 23 June - 27 August 2005.
[9] Terry Smith, ‘The Provincialism Problem,’ Artforum, volume 13, number. 1, 1974, p. 57.
[10] Ibid.