FIRST YEAR

José Da Silva

In autumn 1997, artist and academic Debra Porch introduced me to the work of American conceptual artist Robert Barry. I was then a first-year student at the University of Western Sydney (UWS), where Debra was a member of the cohort teaching interdisciplinary studio practice. One work that figured in Debra’s assessment of art’s potentiality – and that seemed to characterise the spirit of the UWS studio program – was Art Work (It Is Always Changing . . .), 1970. Barry’s text-based installation put forward a case for the open interpretation and mutability of all art. In Barry’s assessment, art had no boundaries and is always in the process of becoming. “SOME OF IT IS FAMILIAR / SOME OF IT IS STRANGE” – Barry’s observations are echoed in my memories of UWS where the pleasure and uncertainty of art felt most prominent.

While 20 years have now passed, I still consider UWS to have been one of the most important art schools in Australia. What remains distinct about its pedagogy was its connection to lived experience – a belief driven by the feeling of working at the periphery and the reciprocity of support between staff and students that forged enduring ties. These mentors, now colleagues and friends, developed confidence for ideas and shaped a particular politics in which to live life with intention. They led by example and gained our respect for their knowledge and vulnerabilities as practitioners, with active exhibition schedules enthusiastically supported by students. Many lecturers were also early participants in regional exchanges and residencies throughout Asia, creating a more expansive worldview in which to understand contemporary practice.

Reading through my diaries from the first semester, it’s evident that seeing Nan Goldin’s slide show The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, 1985 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in February 1997 was momentous for staff and students alike. It was said to be one of the last live performances of the work, with Nan handling the slides herself. For a 17-year-old freshman, it was utterly affecting and established two principles that studying at UWS would validate: that the personal and deeply felt were valid subjects for art, and that art could be a catalyst for translating a past ‘ordinary’ experience into something ‘extra-ordinary’. Debra understood this especially in the permutations afforded by installation practice and in the testing of objects, images and memory in space. As her student, we learnt that the extraordinary occurred in the discovery of the recollection itself – a way to perceive life that would transform my interests and outlook completely.

Projects I produced during the year-long Foundation Studies sought to magnify intimacy like Goldin but weren’t exactly convincing. I wasn’t a strong artist, but I tackled ideas with the sort of enthusiasm encouraged by my teaching. It was not merely the acquisition of skills, but the ability to find and harness ideas, that was critical. The studio program was a pretext for activating thought and driving experimentation through various, and often novel conceptual strategies. (My favourite assignment was the Gin Tonic, Not Icing project that encouraged us to reconsider the unnoticed.) Debra would orientate my eagerness with research. She would photocopy additional readings and take pleasure in opening me up to new ideas. After a year of learning to print colour photographs, I presented 20 blank sheets of photographic paper for assessment, each captioned with descriptions of the unseen coupling of two men. Debra was impressed by its brevity but conservative with her grades. UWS lecturers were tough; critiques were robust and productive, if not always favourable.

For many students, the location of the Kingswood and Werrington campuses provided a condition for activating a particular, creative practice. Attending class required the dedication of time and my own daily commute was a four-hour return trip. The walk from the station to the studios was often gruelling when armed with materials and equipment. Like many of my peers, I was the first in my family to attend university and took the privilege seriously, which meant visiting campus most days. Students at all stages of their degree filled the studios with a sense of possibility, and the exchanges (flirtation included) created a tight-knit community. At the edge of the campus, Z block opened up to a field where we would smoke, do earthworks and get distracted. There was a sense of isolation that extended beyond the site itself. In those days, there was little interest in art from western Sydney, and perhaps an awareness of this enabled greater independence and experimentation among the students and lecturers crafting the program. It was a shared challenge that inspired collective efforts and prompted many alumni to find ways to increase the profile of art from the greater Sydney regions.

I was mentored by several significant figures, notably artist-lecturers Joan Grounds, Eugenia Raskopoulos, Helen Grace, Noelene Lucas, and David Haines; while I fondly remember technician and artist Tony Schwensen also presiding over the studios in his orange overalls. They were all eccentric, caring in their own way and approached teaching with originality I haven’t seen replicated. During my first year the most unexpected learnings came from Head of Fine Arts Donal Fitzpatrick, Video Ideologies lecturer Dennis Del Favero and Modern Art, Modernism and Modernity tutor Daniel Mudie Cunningham. Like Porch, Fitzpatrick was an artist and theorist interested in art as an extended material practice of memory. Our time together was brief as he left for Brisbane in mid-1997. Donal would be the catalyst for my relocation to Brisbane in 2000, with an invitation to begin a postgraduate program at the Queensland University of Technology. He encouraged the move so I could also follow a budding romance. Somehow the lessons at UWS were always about making life and practice coexist and putting you in the right situation for future opportunities. Dennis became a significant influence through to my postgraduate studies, helping cultivate a keen eye for editing and a visual poetics for trauma. My first-ever art acquisition would come from his exhibition Parting Embrace at Mori Gallery in January 1998. Daniel would go on to write about my practice and curate me into my first major projects, as he did for many other graduates. He has since been pivotal in raising the profile of artists and professionals from UWS and advocating for recording the school’s significance.

My memories of people, events and encounters from this formative period are fond and have been nourished and deepened with time. What I couldn’t have anticipated in 1997 was how individuals would reverberate throughout my adult life. In the intervening years, they would provide an entrée to opportunities, friendships, travel and intimacies. In 2019 I curated the posthumous survey Debra Porch: Art Should Make Life More Interesting Than Art for UNSW Galleries, finding myself now working in an art school environment. In developing this exhibition, I revisited Barry’s proposition on the mutability of art as a strategy to restage and reinterpret Debra’s works. I drew from memories of objects and images I had seen in production or encountered over the course of our 20-year friendship. It was a love letter to a mentor and more broadly, a mark of gratitude for the whole UWS milieu that has steered the direction of my criticality and appreciation for art and life.