School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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    Painting the banal: Dale Hickey and Robert Hunter, 1966-1973
    Homewood, David Robert ( 2019)
    A significant development within art of the 1960s and 1970s was the dispersal of the traditional artistic mediums, and their replacement by a disparate array of installation, performance, documentary and theoretical practices that have come to define the landscape of contemporary art. This thesis examines the historical emergence of this contemporary ‘post-medium condition’ through the work of two Melbourne-based artists, Dale Hickey (born 1937) and Robert Hunter (1947–2014), from their hard-edge modernist painting of the mid 1960s, to their engagement with minimalism, post-minimalism and conceptual art at the end of that decade and the beginning of the next. During this period, Hickey and Hunter became key figures within an avant-garde scene increasingly hostile to the traditional forms and institutions of art. Yet in their work, painting, the most traditional form of all, did not disappear under the pressure of its avant-garde critique. Rather, issues related to the medium—including its ongoing viability—remained central to their work. The persistence of painterly concerns was crucial for both artists’ work, as was a preoccupation with ‘the banal’—manifest in Hickey’s depictions of domestic and suburban objects and Hunter’s exploration of the bare materials of painting within a restricted formal vocabulary. A principal argument of this thesis is that the emphasis on the banal in both artists’ works, rather than blurring the distinction between aesthetic activity and ordinary life, was coupled with an ideal of art as a vehicle for contemplation that has its roots in painting. Both artists’ work is shown to align with the mystical conception of art promoted by Bruce Pollard, who founded and operated Pinacotheca, the gallery with which the pair became associated in 1968. Positioned in dialogue with their dealer’s quasi-religious attitude towards aesthetic experience, and amidst the druggy, bohemian ambiance of his gallery, Hickey’s and Hunter’s traffic with illusion, contemplation and aura is understood not as an anomaly within the prevailing materialist and rationalist narratives of the end of modernism, but rather as integral to the local artistic and cultural context in which they worked.