The Possibilities Are Immense: Fifty Years of the George Paton Gallery comes at a transitional moment for the University of Melbourne's student gallery, also known as the GPG. In 2022, the GPG moved out of the decrepit old asbestos-riddled student union building and into the new student 'precinct,' a conglomerate of sinewy grey concrete, golden mesh, and dynamic decolonial carpets. Whether this development is evidence of a thriving global university with state-of-the-art infrastructure or a glistening monument to corporate institutional rot depends on your perspective. "The new building is depressing, man," one fan of the old railed recently. "It was so dope how people used to have sex on those bean bags next to the library on the third floor." What a tragic loss. Others hypothesised that the new infrastructure represents broader threats to the student union's autonomy and informality, symbolising the university's transition towards being a soulless experience and service provider, rather than a place of genuine community and intellectual exchange.
But justified cynicism about the current state of the university should not tip over into blinkered nostalgia. As a student, I curated one of the last shows in the old space, and while there was a certain charm to the Union House gallery's wooden floorboards and mysterious, tucked-away location, the new GPG has a lot going for it. Polished concrete. High ceilings. Fresh white walls. A prominent location near the Swanston St tram stop. The architecture is not the only significant change. In 2023, the artist and curator Sandra Bridie, who had been dedicated to directing the gallery in some capacity since 2004, stepped down, with artist and art worker Channon Goodwin moving up from assistant director to the director role. Curator and researcher Chantelle Mitchell took up the assistant position.
New era; same archives. The Possibilities Are Immense is a historical anniversary show, presenting an eclectic mix of local artists who have exhibited in the storied gallery over the past five decades. Artworks by Vivienne Binns, Maria Kozic, John Nixon, Janet Burchill, Sam Petersen, Nicholas Currie, Olivia Koh, Moorina Bonini and Trent Crawford appear, among others. Most works on display are cool examples of artistic modes that have been influential in Naarm/Melbourne: a 2017 Burchill painting on scratchy hessian with fragments of Emily Dickinson poems and slivers of bright yellow on black grid represents conceptual minimalism; Koh's 2021 handmade Joss paper and ceramic dragon fruit offerings, placed gently on the floor and in plastic containers, represent rituals remade by diaspora. There is also a display of excellent publications from the GPG's archives, including a copy of a 1990 Issue F of now-defunct Pataphysics magazine, edited by Leo Edelstein and Yanni Florence. The magazine is beautifully designed and includes much intriguing material, including an interview with Timothy Leary — "You go through life and there are certain ordeals of Hercules you have to go through. So I got a PhD"— and a stream-of-consciousness, no caps story titled 'Elegance' by Ania Walwicz, which reads as a perfect prequel to Read the Room girl screeds.
All in all, this show is a party mix; you should go see it (quickly— it closes today, the 8th of November). For the purposes of this review, rather than discussing any of the works in significant detail, I want to focus on The Possibilities Are Immense as an inflection point. It represents a significant shift in the GPG's operations and, more broadly, is evidence of the seismic changes in art education that have taken place since the gallery's inception.
A brief foray into GPG lore is essential here. The gallery has a much-mythologised place in Australian, and particularly Naarm/Melbournian, contemporary art and curatorial history. It has been the subject of substantive memorialisation, with notable publications including Helen Vivian's When you think about art: the Ewing and George Paton Galleries 1971-2008 (2008) and Janine Burke and Helen Hughes' edited Kiffy Rubbo: curating the 1970s (2016).1 The gist of the well-known narrative is this: the GPG, led by a series of influential curators, was a trailblazing space which brought avant-garde art discourse to Melbourne, acting as a kind of ahead-of-the-curve microcosm of broader changes in art and culture. In Kiffy Rubbo and Meredith Rogers' 1970s, the gallery was filled with ecofeminists smearing themselves with mud and pouring glasses of toxic Murray Darling River punch. In Judy Annear, Denise Robinson and Juliana Engberg's 1980s, Art & Text and theory swept in. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Jean Baudrillard visited to rapturous crowds. The author died to the sounds of Clifton Hill muzak.
Then the GPG died too. Between 1991 and 1994, the gallery closed after disputes with the student union ('troglodytes,' according to Engberg). It reopened with a new mandate; previously the gallery had nominally served students by providing exciting, internationally-oriented programming, but now it would have to involve current students in gallery activities more directly. A show called No Corgis Allowed inaugurated this era. Apparently, according to its flyer, it was 'exploring notions of republicanism, multi-culturalism, Indigeneity and Australian identity.'2 The art speakish notion of 'exploring notions' had entered the building. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, under Sandie Bridie's guidance, the GPG rotated through fine art and art history student projects. During this period, the effects of the privatisation of the education sector set in. Universities almost doubled in size; in Mind of a Nation, Michael Wesley notes that 'in 2001 there were 842,183 students in Australia’s higher education sector; by 2020 that number had risen to 1,622,867, an increase of 92%.'3 Concurrently, the nature of tertiary qualifications for both art historians and artists changed, with a greater focus on internships and organisational skills that reflected a broader shift towards professionalisation in the sector. Significantly for the GPG, the university added the Master of Art Curatorship degree. The GPG became a place for students to gain professional development experiences (that's why I know how to use a drill now).
The lessons to take from this history is that firstly, the general climate of the university deeply impacts the culture of the gallery, and that secondly, the director, while technically in the role of student facilitator rather than star curator, has a profound influence on programming. As such, it's worth considering who Goodwin is — what interests and approaches is he bringing to the directorship?
Goodwin has been a devoted stalwart of the artist-run initiative (ARI) world for years, first in Meanjin/Brisbane, then from 2012, in Naarm/Melbourne. He worked for years at Bus Projects (an ARI), set up All Conference (a multi-ARI organisational network), and founded Composite Moving Image Agency and Media Bank (a video organisation, put crudely). He is a highly effective facilitator/art worker whose approach is perhaps best exemplified in Permanent Recession: a Handbook on Art, Labour and Circumstance, a collection of twenty-eight texts about artists' working conditions he edited in 2019. In the Preface, Goodwin writes that the book 'brings together a set of perspectives that call for change, empowering readers to take action on issues of sociocultural urgency.'4 This could describe much of his approach as an art worker. Goodwin is invested in the idea of art worker-as-advocate, whether that be via lobbying to change government cultural policy, forming and contributing to collectively-oriented industry organisations, or publishing critiques of institutions. His work is more focussed on class and labour politics than most, but he is also attuned to debates about race and gender in the Australian art world. He is skilled at coordinating and aggregating the work of many different people making work in many different mediums and spheres. He is also very good at creating minimalist websites.
How might Goodwin and his collaborators — Mitchell is also an accomplished arts worker who has recently led ecologically-oriented research projects — shape this era of the GPG then? In its curatorial gambit, The Possibilities Are Immense continues some of the archive-mining tendencies associated with the gallery in recent years. The golden '70s period has been somewhat of an endless well for each new generation associated with the GPG. Bridie's final show in the previous gallery used a prompt drawn from a 1974 Kiffy Rubbo show; 'When you think about art, what do you think of?' was reframed as 'when you think about feminism, what do you think of?' The current Possibilities show takes its name from a 1973 predecessor, The Possibilities Are Immense - A Participatory Exhibition, also curated by Rubbo. But the new Possibilities eschews the trappings of total nostalgia. It proves that the gallery has had significant, younger artists show this century, many of whom have engaged with pressing current discourses about First Nations sovereignty (Bonini) and screen-centric cultures (Crawford). It also demonstrates that artists associated with the early days of the gallery did not stop making work last century (Burchill, Kozic, Nixon). The way in which the show makes visual and thematic connections between works by disparate living artists signals that the gallery will play host to intergenerational exchange.
Putting the archives aside, Goodwin's interest in class politics and the organised labour movement will enter into dialogue with the GPG's pedagogical imperatives and the ambient stresses of its current university context. Now, by undertaking art-related degrees, students are in effect speculating on the value of their future human capital in a highly competitive labour market.5 They may be in debt for decades; this enterprise is now more expensive than ever before. Recent increases to degree fees under the 'Job-Ready Graduates' program enacted by the Morrison government have rendered arts degrees in some cases 113% more expensive than in previous years. Some hypothesised this would entrench privilege and elitism in the arts even further, though interestingly, data shows that the policy seems to have made next-to-no difference to student degree choices — meaning that elitism is not necessarily due to fees. Make of that what you will, because the fees will probably change again soon. This week, the Albanese government announced an increase in the HECS repayment threshold as a cost-of-living relief measure, with the Education Minister seeming to imply fee changes were incoming. The moderate tweak followed the government's announcement of a controversial policy capping international student numbers, which had prompted financial panic and stern missives from the university leadership, who see it as political opportunism, and missives from the NTEU advocating against staff cuts and halts to decasualisation plans justified by caps. All this is to say that this is a tumultuous time for the arts in the university, and thereby, de facto, for the university art gallery. Life beyond university bounds is similarly unstable.
Janet Burchill's painting in The Possibilities Are Immense quotes a short Emily Dickinson poem:
The Soul's distinct connection
With immortality
Is best disclosed by Danger
Or quick Calamity —
As Lightning on a Landscape
Exhibits Sheets of Place —
Not yet suspected — but for Flash —
And Click — and Suddenness.
The poem's subject is the way in which a dramatic event, such as a lightning strike, can make us immediately aware of the precariousness of our mortality. Goodwin's approach to curation and artistic collaboration rests on a long-standing observation made by artists and art workers: the arts landscape in Australia is defined by a kind of endless series of low-level lightning strikes, wherein participants are made continually aware of precarious job prospects, below-average incomes, limp markets, and fleeting opportunities. Artists live in a charred landscape of 'permanent recession,' to quote Goodwin quoting the artist Peter Cripps (another GPG alum). Students entering the university hoping to find careers as artists or academics or curators become imbricated in these conditions.
One response to these objective vocational challenges could be to double down on the GPG as a professional development space — a jobs pipeline. But to foreground this approach would be to build on a dubious premise, and one that runs the risk of creating a boring gallery. Taking the long view, the GPG's most exciting periods seemed to come when it hosted the most chaotic mix of programming — local and internationally-focussed shows and speakers, debates and performances, populism and esotericism, students and general public visitors. People have their whole lives to develop professionally. The GPG should be a space of unprofessional development, of experimentation, of leveraging the resources of the university to make and show new art often. To present new ideas. Perversely, this is what is likely to create the most pragmatically enriching environment for students. The gallery has always operated under somewhat calamitous conditions, and despite the general climate of polycrisis, in many ways it is arguably in the best position now that it has been in for years. The GPG has a great space; it is funded; Goodwin and Mitchell are capable and ambitious. One could say that the possibilities are immense. And was a finance degree ever really an option?