Trying to burn a rainbow: some thoughts on experimentation within artist-led initiatives

In a lecture entitled 'Experimentality: Theories and Practices', the Australian art historian Terry Smith turned his attention to thinking through different possibilities for experimentation within art practice. He prefaced his thoughts with an important caveat: the term "experimentation", he rightly noted, could cover "a vast range of meanings".1 It must therefore be a contested term and we should beware any easy conflagration of 'art' and 'experimentality'. For art - including contemporary art - is not inherently experimental, despite some lazy assumptions to the contrary. With his critically keen eye, Smith looked across a broad arc of art history to find rigorous and interesting models for experimentation. It was the section that recounted the beginnings of different Australian artist-led projects in the 1960s and 1970s, such as the alternative Sydney gallery Inhibodress and the emergence of Adelaide's Experimental Art Foundation, that offered up language that seemed most resonant for me with ideas still important to artist-led practice today. In the rousing excerpt of text reproduced here, Smith begins by quoting Donald Brook, a formative voice in post-object practice in Australian art in the 1970s: Art objects [wrote Brook] are public constructions that have been recognised in the course of a transinstitutional appraisal to be useful and radically new models of some actual or possible thing or state of affairs in the world