Art world changes in the 1970s

Twentieth century Australian art was often split by intense, even bitter, debates over Modernism and tradition, abstraction and figuration, regionalism and internationalism. But in the 1970s, disruption and change arose from the potentially much greater threat of anti-art and the wholesale rejection of the art system. Artists embraced immateriality, impermanence and the everyday, and developed new kinds of 'alternative' exhibition venues for the growing body of art activity seen as unsupported or unsupportable by existing galleries. The Ewing and George Paton Galleries was one of the first 'alternative' venues, and possibly Australia's first institutionally affiliated venue for new art.' It negotiated its institutional role during its formative years according to a unique script, and became a centre for vanguard art through its support for installation practices, intermedia works, experimental film and video, performance and women's art, even though a substantial part of its program comprised exhibitions of standard painting and sculpture.2 What unfolded at the Ewing and George Paton Galleries during the 1970s was groundbreaking and important, not because it upheld a strict partitioning of the art world into commercial/non-commercial, mainstream/alternative but because, from the outset, it included progressive artists with established reputations and strong links to private galleries