Our campus is scattered with paintings, sculptures, reliefs, and site-specific installations. Old and new acquisitions line corridors and walls, occupy pedestrian space or sit in various campus galleries while others are squirrelled away in archives, administration offices and boardrooms. The University’s deep investment in this art immediately seems at odds with their chronic disregard for arts and fine arts education. What appears at first to be a contradiction to be resolved becomes, on closer inspection, an innate quality of the modern, neoliberal university; as in capitalism, we find this contradiction integral to its structure. What then do we, as students, make of the artwork itself — the art of campus — while at the same time grappling with such a contradiction?
History
Before we meander through campus’ current curiosities, we must comb through the past. The University collections are almost as old as the university itself, instigated by Charles Nicholson in 1860. The University’s entire collection — spread across the institution’s archives, Fisher Library’s rare books collection, Power, Nicholson, and Macleay Museum collections — contains 700,000 artefacts. In the foreword to Into the Light: 150 Years of Cultural Treasures at the University of Sydney, then-Vice Chancellor Michael Spence justifies these collections as a “rich and fertile ground for research and teaching”. There is little self-consciousness of the University’s colonial history, with Spence lauding the collections for acquiring “the earliest known Aboriginal bark paintings” and other Indigenous artefacts, procured through dubious means. In corridors and official rooms, other historic Eurocentric works, like portraits, busts, reliefs and statues, enable the University to construct its Enlightenment legacy.
Today, much of the University’s art is housed in the flagship gallery, Chau Chak Wing Museum (CCWM). Combining the Macleay, Nicholson and University Art Collections, the CCWM opened in November 2020. While displaying Tom Bass’ 1953 sculpture, The Student, on its forecourt, the CCWM is distinctly separate from the student community. Excluding various excursions, many students have never entered this sunken grey block. CCWM’s rooms are used for conferences and management meetings: just last semester, meetings between Scott and the encampment representatives occurred in the boardroom. Named after a billionaire, the project seems more like a product of philanthropy and university marketing rather than any engagement with student life.
Elsewhere, art on campus occurs in the Tin Sheds Gallery, the Sydney College of the Arts (SCA) Gallery, USU-run Verge Gallery, and the student-run Backspace Gallery. Shows in these spaces seem to be advertised to and frequented by primarily art-school students and staff, rather than the University’s general community.
Outside these buildings lay the public campus works, the most visible but ironically the most overlooked. Most of the acquisition of this art is recent; only in 2010 did University curator Ann Stephen note “relatively few public artworks or monuments are visible along the grand promenade of Australia’s oldest university”. Coincidentally, this decade of art acquisitions occurred in parallel to the attempted shut down of SCA, and the University’s growing disdain for arts and fine arts education.
University’s agenda
As students at a university that persistently and ruthlessly guts the arts, it seems obvious to declare USyd as a philistine institution that is inherently against art, the artist, and the cultivation of both. While one would not be wrong in asserting such, they would certainly not be arriving at the entire truth. Seemingly in contradiction to its larger actions, the University buys, displays, and commissions art at a scale so staggering that such an assertion seems to become not only unstable, but unprovable. Obviously, this raises the question: why would an increasingly corporatised, mercenary institution devote time and money to something seemingly at odds with their larger agenda?
The University’s public art strategy falls under the remit of the Office of External Relations, the peak group of communications and marketing. This rather telling position of PR in the procurement of art is seen further within the 2018 Art in the Public Realm strategy document and its purported principles of ‘excellence, collaboration, partnerships, and place-making’.
Rather than ‘placemaking’, such art, especially public works, constitutes ‘placemarketing’: advertising the University as an appealing educational investment. The University co-opts art in their own way of seeing, offering themselves as a liberal institution decorated by culturally meaningful symbols. The space that is ‘The Campus’ is not constituted merely by interstitial roads and eating areas, but sites of pedagogical contemplation. Pressing on through bustling crowds of first years, we grow ignorant of these areas, yet their larger effect still permeates. Whether it be a brisk walk past Chau Chak Wing Museum, a cursory glance at the many chancellor portraits lining the Great Hall, or even the works of architecture that so often we forget exist for our viewing pleasure, it seems the effect of art on campus is largely unconscious. Ignoring art, sleepwalking through campus, its ideological purpose becomes only twice as potent.
Art on campus is our ‘free lunch’ as students. We walk about absorbing this great mass of culture without ever questioning for the most part why we are provided this opportunity by an institution that debases and degrades us for pursuing the study, critique, or creation of said culture.
Devaluing of artistic education
The University’s interest in certain types of art makes their agenda overt. The University’s recent — and rightfully maligned — Campus Access Policy effectively places any large-scale political, social and artistic expression on campus under the thumb of the University. The simple act of postering becomes one needing notification and approval. Even in instances of controlled art spaces, as with the Graffiti Tunnel, we see this power dynamic play out, when Honi uncovered the University’s deliberate removal of pro-Palestine messaging in the tunnel.
While your visual arts education hangs on by a thread, in your study break you can visit all five of the Camperdown/Darlington campus galleries. The University’s economic interests in art accession seem to synchronise with their flailing support for the discipline’s education.
Speaking to figures in the art school community, Honi has uncovered a culture of uncertainty and a cloud of cuts descending SCA. They state “SCA has been consistently underfunded and the staff are often overworked and underpaid”. They go on to explain that the SCA receives little institutional support. As explicated in an article last year, this passes on costs to students, with one such example being the $200 fee for mere inclusion in their own grad show. Yet this is historically unsurprising. In 2016, the University attempted to detach itself from SCA, and it was only due to student activism that the art school was revived, but moved from its expansive Rozelle campus to a few floors of Old Teachers College. Many students reported feeling unsupported in the move, and the school became a department at the mercy of course-cutting administrators. Sydney College of the Arts Student Society (SCASS) also receives little support. Amidst plans to demolish Wentworth, the existence of SCASS-run Backspace remains under perpetual threat.
Campus Art and Galleries
So what is the state of art on campus? To summarise campus’ art offerings is not a simple task, so we shall start with the obvious: the sculptures and installations peppered in pedestrian areas. In recent years, under the Walanga Wingara Mura Design Principles and the Art in the Public Realm strategy, the University has commissioned a few contemporary Indigenous art pieces. This seems, ostensibly, an acknowledgement of the University’s problematic museal inheritance. Dale Harding’s imposing sandstone blocks greet students, staff and visitors on Eastern Avenue in site-specific work Spine 2. This work is adjoined by Spine 1 in the Life, Earth and Environmental Sciences Building and Spine 3 on the side of Carslaw Building. On the side of the Social Sciences Building, Robert Andrews’ Garabara (2018) uses iron oxidisation to explore local Indigenous history.
Elsewhere, we also seem to walk past these carefully chosen works. Outside the Law Library, Andrew Roger’s’ Individuals (2013) deploys modulating bronze forms as a metaphor for individualism. Students living amid a cost-of-living crisis would be surprised to find this artwork they may walk past each day is valued at $1.4 million. A little further on, the 2015-esque neon lights adorning the side of the Footbridge Theatre are part of a site-specific installation, The Dash Wall (2019), representing design computing hardware platforms. Close by, an audio-based installation called Moodulation (2019), aurally disperses Parramatta Road noise pollution through nature sounds.
Beyond historic artworks housed in hallways, various sculptures speak to the institution’s history; The Raven in the Anderson Stuart Building courtyard, Spring (1910) in the Old Teachers College, and Gilgamesh (2000) outside it, the greyhound standing in the Vice-Chancellor’s garden and all the gargoyles hidden above. The libraries also house commissioned works. A neon installation in a former study room in the Law Library, Carolyn McKay’s Floating Between Couches & Motels (2023), depicts McKay’s research on motels as a place of crime and transgression. In the Conservatorium Library, three busts describe musical inheritances from women composers. Throughout Fisher, the ArtBoxes showcase student work while modernist and contemporary landscapes sit in the stairwells. Between Levels 3 and 4, Jeremy Smith’s cartographical Queer Sydney: A History (2022) reflects on local queer stories.
On City Road, Tin Sheds’ activist inheritance is widely appreciated. Its name derives from the University Art Workshop — the space for 1970s feminist and radical poster making and activities. Connected to the architecture school, Tin Shed’s exhibitions tend to focus on design and its role. Nearby, celebrating 15 years of life, Verge Gallery’s showings are diverse and often eccentric. Across campus in the Old Teachers College, the SCA Gallery regularly displays work by local and international artists. While CCWM may not be as student-facing as we would like, works like LEGO Pompeii undoubtedly capture student interest.
At this point, it becomes increasingly hard to criticise the University’s patronage to the arts, when it becomes evident that this patronage is not only tangible, but often artistically and socially progressive. The works displayed across campus are not just portraits of dead white men but include modernist statues, avant-garde digital art, and queer storytelling. Even more significant than this, over the last decade the University has increasingly platformed and commissioned the works of First Nations artists, such as Jessie Waratah’s mural Walking on Country (2024), Christian Thompson’s video triptych Heat (2010), and Judy Watson’s work jugama (2023). How can one criticise the University’s commitment to art when it so clearly reflects an endeavour not only artistically sound, but politically progressive?
After thinking so much about our perplexing present moment of art criticism, we must turn to its past.
Greenberg, Pollock and the CIA
1939. Clement Greenberg pens an essay entitled ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ in the Partisan Review. The modernist, the Avant-Garde artist, the Pollock — whom Greenberg praised and adored — was to be the bulwark against consumerism, propaganda, and eventually, fascism. By refusing to innovate, to push forward into dangerous areas of individual expression and feeling, we would be embracing a “simulacra of genuine culture” that is kitsch; from here, Greenberg asserted, began propaganda, authoritarianism and all their nasty associations.
Greenberg, though, was perhaps a touch naive in his conception of propaganda and its pervasion of forms. Much simpler and identifiable back in ‘39, propaganda even took on distinct national styles: socialist realism in the USSR and vulgar Neoclassicism in Nazi Germany. Post-war, propaganda had to adapt, and it was the Americans who saw this most clearly. Against the dominant nostalgic, sentimentalist style of the USSR, America would achieve cultural victory through its bold avant-garde scene emerging in New York. Opposed to the USSR’s cultural conservatism, the abstract expressionists like Rothko and Pollock would spread individualism and internationalism through their non-figurative works, works that could transcend borders and nationalities: ironically, much like the early Soviet artists. Yet these ideas of egalitarianism and liberalism retained their material basis as works produced under a capitalist system. It was not just art that they exported, but American imperialism. It comes rather unsurprisingly, then, to find out the abstract expressionist movement received significant support and funding from the CIA.
What then, if he was wrong, do we take from Greenberg? That all art is propaganda? That the abstract expressionists were imperialist agents? Plain and vulgar nihilism?
All this is to say that art, particularly good art, may be created, distributed, and displayed within a larger contextual purpose antithetical to our values that we are obliged to oppose. We should not be afraid then to be critical of art — even boldly, cruelly so — for its role in the material and social construction of our world.
A Rehearsal for the Future
What we see in the conjoining of art and the University campus is the future neoliberalism intends for both of these institutions. We see fantastic artworks become playthings of ‘place marketing’, deprived of any consequential appreciation or meaning, absorbed into the culture machine of the corporate University. We see increasing attacks by University management on any field in which ‘art’ exists as more than frames on walls and tax breaks. We see art captured by an institution that seeks to pacify and eliminate its democratic and radical nature. The presence of propaganda — fueled by base consumerism — that Greenberg failed to note in the works of the abstract expressionists has now gone beyond even the abstract form of Pollock to inhabit art itself.
Though it seems almost instinctual to denounce the University as a philistine institution, to insist they do not care for art, it is in fact the opposite that is true: the University cares about art, it must care about art, for art underpins its entire existence as a neoliberal institution.
The future we envision is not one in which art is allowed to die. In death perhaps, there is dignity. More horrifying, it is one in which art — zombified, pacified, artificially animated — is made to live.
