Kaldor Public Art Projects

Ed Ruscha, 'Every building on the Sunset Strip', 1965

I finally went to see the AGNSW exhibition of John Kaldor’s public and private art projects. Kaldor is one of Australia’s leading art patrons – for international and Australian artists – and he has been working since the late sixties. His first project was to bring artists Christo and Jean-Claude to Australia in 1969 to wrap the coast of Little Bay. It was quite a feat, and the photos of that project still stun and delight me every time I see them. Since then, Kaldor has worked tirelessly to bring international art to the far-off land of Australia. I myself have had the opportunity to see some of the more recent works, and to even volunteer at the sites for Urs Fischer’s works on Cockatoo Island, and Gregor Schneider’s 'Bondi Beach/21 Beach Cells' [I've posted a review of this work].

Recently Kaldor generously donated his private art collection, rumoured to be worth about $20 million, to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and now the public has access to works that we otherwise may not have had the opportunity to see. The exhibition at AGNSW is a display of some of Kaldor’s private collection, and also of archives and art works from the forty years of Kaldor Public Art Projects, and it is fantastic. To walk through those rooms of art works and archives was like walking through a brief history of Modernism, Post-Modernism, and whatever ‘ism’ we’re currently living in now.

The most exciting moment for me was seeing Ed Ruscha’s 'Every Building on the Sunset Strip'; a concertina book of photos of every building on the sunset strip in downtown LA that was made in the 1960s, and is one of the quintessential works of Conceptualism. I had studied this artwork before, and found its banality, simplicity and mundane-ness interesting and intriguing; it really reflected the direction of art at that time. Needless to say, I never thought I would ever see this work. And when I saw it, encased in its protective glass, spanning the whole wall of a room, I was as breathless as if I had seen a grand renaissance painting. To see such an important work, in all its ordinary glory, and to know the history and significance of such a piece made me feel like, for that moment, I was almost touching history.

That feeling persisted as I made my way through the exhibition. Not only were the works magnificent and poignant in their own right, but the archives that were included really made one appreciate the lengths that were taken to make these works happen. Furthermore, seeing the correspondence between Kaldor and the artists was also like a trip through technological history; the typewritten pages from the sixties, the faxes of the nineties, and the now ubiquitous emails of which we’re all familiar tell the story of how swiftly the modern world has changed. Finally, the actual addresses of the letters – all those places Kaldor has inhabited over the years – instilled in me that sense of familiarity and immediacy, despite the distances in time from where I am now, to when the artworks were. It’s hard to describe, but just seeing familiar locations such as Riley St, Pitt St, George St, and Surry Hills allows one to feel closer to the projects of bringing those international works and artists to our backyards. It gave that added intimacy and appreciation that can only come when you are really privy to the background of an entire body of work, not just the final product.