SOME DISTANCES TRAVELLED

Helen Grace

When I arrived at UWS in winter 1989, it was the middle of the ‘Dawkins Revolution’ starting the process of endless university restructures – the permanent revolution of the everyday. July 1989 was just a month after the Tiananmen crackdown and before I’d been at Kingswood a full semester, the Berlin Wall had come down. So 1989 – the year that UWS came into being – was momentous. The university was always a kind of experimental space, picking up on the global zeitgeist and it did feel like the centre of the universe, just as the political weaponisation of western Sydney electorates was beginning. Heading west in the morning, we felt sorry for all those people crawling eastwards to work on the barely moving M4, still under construction. 

Taking the train or car-pooling every day – every day! – the car and the train became meeting rooms – and there were endless meetings. Face to face! Teaching had to be squeezed into the narrow spaces between meetings. I was also wrangling a PhD and a teenager at the same time as finding a way to manage an 18-hour per week face to face teaching load, the endless writing and rewriting of degree programs, review documents and the in-between-semester rush of preparing course readers for students. (This was a manual cut-and-paste job that involved the use of excerpts from our own libraries, before the UWS library could catch up with the orders we were submitting – and it was a bit like preparing four to six edited books a year, though it won no brownie points in the university.) This was my first full-time academic job after years of part-time schlepping and it felt like being thrown in the deep end, without knowing how to swim. I had to pretend I knew what I was doing, though it was all made up on the run. Everything was permanently precarious. In retrospect, it was really a ‘boiling frog’ situation and it was many years before I could breathe freely again, without the sense of drowning – or feeling in a state of shock! 

The dynamic Combined Studies course and the degree in Art History and Criticism were already underway when I arrived (first graduates in 1989). Combined Studies was utopian in its desire, and it built on the legacy of mythic Twentieth Century art/design schools such as the Bauhaus and VKhUTEMAS. All the students in the faculty – artists, designers, dancers, theatre students – came together once a week and the aim was decidedly industrial – encouraging students to be ‘job ready’, we might even say today. Students learned about teamwork through great lectures on Parade, the Ballet Russes production with music by Satie, choreography by Massine, scenario by Cocteau and costume design by Picasso. Many of the Ballet Russes costumes are in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia (one of James Mollison’s inspired purchases). Students saw grainy early footage of the wild dancing of Mary Wigman and early modernist graphic design, and it felt like we were all in the Weimar Republic!

The Bauhaus certainly featured as a key historical precedent in the (still then, largely Euro) content of that course, its team teaching method also a short-lived experiment in true collegiality. At the time, no other art school in Australia had networked these disciplines in quite this way. Although there had been a similar desire to lay the foundations for such an enterprising mix, when the (then) Australian Film and Television School had been set up in the mid 1970s, in the end it was only in western Sydney that a real attempt was realised.

Rapid institution-building was underway with extraordinary Stakhanovist enthusiasm on the part of everyone working there. Great support from the Dean and Head of School – the rarest of things! The magazine West, which we set up in 1989, made a splash, announced our presence. It was dazzlingly designed by Brian Doherty and Jane Richens, especially in the early tabloid format. The Art History and Criticism PhD was the first in the faculty to be established, as the push to graduate degrees began. Conferences to be organised, endless new initiatives, constant change. No time to think.  

The students were a hundred times more diverse, culturally, economically, than those at the other Sydney art schools at that time. We made big demands on them – and they on us! We could see an emerging Australia that was still invisible in mainstream images of the place (with a team of UWS colleagues and an early ARC grant, we reflected on this in Home/world: Space, community and marginality in Sydney’s West eds. Grace, Hage, Johnson, Langsworth, Symonds, Pluto Press, 1996).

Although there was fierce debate between the studio and the more formally academic methods demanded by a university, the Art History and Criticism degree was founded on the necessity of a fundamental relation between theory and practice. Rereading an early grad show catalogue I see that we aimed to produce ‘competent’ and ‘imaginative’ art historians, critics, communicators who ‘have an empathy with the personal and technical processes involved in art making’. It’s a nice register perhaps of the absorption of Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy, a reference in one of the early Readers, and though I might wonder wistfully where the empathy went, there’s no doubt that we can now see what we couldn't at the time – how far our former students have gone. 

Legend has it that studio academics David Hull and Rhett Brewer, drove around the industrial area behind Penrith station, searching for factory space for the art school studios, before settling on the Peachtree Road site – and the rest is history. Less than a kilometre from the UWS Peachtree studios, along Coombes Drive, a striking modernist factory building imposes itself on the nondescript surrounds of hastily assembled industrial units. I first learned of that factory when my art history colleague Phillip Kent announced with great fervour that he had discovered a Marcel Breuer building in the course of his research on the architecture of western Sydney and I always associate the site with Phillip. 

In projecting possible futures, let’s speculate on what might have happened, if, in the studio search drive-by that David and Rhett undertook back in the day, that the Torin building had been available for lease (or even purchase - it sold for $3m last year). We can dream on… When you visit the Bauhaus, mecca of modernism in Dessau, East Germany, you can still feel the spirit of that historical moment of the 1920s, curtailed too soon by fascism. In western Sydney in a not dissimilar landscape, the mere pragmatism of university managerialism crushed as absolutely – but the Torin building still remains as a kind of emblem, a sign of dreams in a bleak landscape. I think of it as an unused memory space, a disconnected fragment that stands in for an absence. 


Incomplete Lists


Helen Grace, 葛海崙 taught at UWS from 1989 to 2003; in 2006 she established an MA program in Visual Culture Studies in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at Chinese University of Hong Kong. In 2012, she moved to Taiwan where until 2014 she was Visiting Professor in the Department of English, National Central University, Taiwan on a National Science Council Fellowship. 

Her work is exhibited in Friendship as a Way of Life (UNSW Galleries, 2020). Recent projects include: The Housing Question (with Narelle Jubelin), Penrith Regional Gallery, Home of the Lewers Bequest, 2019, Thought Log, SCA Galleries, Sydney (2016) and Map of Spirits, Gallery 4A, Sydney (2015). She is Research Affiliate in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney and Adjunct Professor, Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her recent books include Culture, Aesthetics and Affect in Ubiquitous Media: The Prosaic Image (Routledge, 2014) and Technovisuality: Cultural Re-enchantment and the Experience of Technology. (Co editors, Amy Chan, Kit Sze and Wong Kin Yuen, IB Tauris, 2016) 

https://www.helengraceprojects.com