In the recent history of Australian art, there are some names which have not been given the attention warranted by the importance of their practice. These artists largely came out of Sydney College of the Arts in the early eighties, and from around 1984 they began to work in the context of French post-structuralist theory.¹ It must be em­phasized that they never formed a "group" as such, but, in common, their art worked with the theories of Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida and Lacan, which questioned the whole notion of "communication" in terms of concepts of the independent operation and function of language. 

Such ideas seriously undermined presuppositions in both the aesthetics of modernism and also in major political and psychological critiques which had acted as the alternative to modernist formalism. The old dialectic was severely pruned back to even more basic questions concerning the relationship of visual art to both its referents in "reality" (including psychological and political "realities") and to its addressee in the viewer. Post-structuralist analyses of this relationship ranged from the outright nihilism of Baudrillard regarding simulacrum and referent to Deleuze's attempts to subvert hierarchies of subject-object relations in favour of more fluid planarities. There was also the psychological-linguistic determination of self and other which in different ways, Lacan and, far more rigorously, Derrida inves­tigated. 

Such concepts were given airing at the highly influential Futur*fall conference at the University of Sydney in 1983 as a result of their sponsorship by certain members of staff at the Power Institute with whom the artists under discussion had contact.² 

The significance of the emergence of such interests among Sydney artists has not been sufficiently documented nor analyzed since they have largely been overshadowed by a slightly older generation of ar­tists promoted as the official face of the Australian avant-garde over­seas. In examining the bibliographies of the younger artists, one finds that, certainly, the theoretically oriented journals such as Art & Text and On the Beach took some note of their work. But, overall, some thorough re-assessment of the influence of post-structuralism on art in Sydney in the early eighties is necessary. 

Perhaps it is the austerely subtracted quality of such work (although still, in the main, within the tradition of canvas and paint) which ini­tially deterred any approach to it. Such cowardice is hardly to be con­doned in view of the paradoxical situation that it did not take long for the superficial look of these art-objects to be emulated as a "style". But this does not necessarily suggest that entry into the discourse of the Sydney work at a more rigorous level is difficult. In fact, the polemic of the work is very direct and forceful. Perhaps this is another reason why it has been neglected. Critics find it hard to answer direct questions. Beating around the bush makes far more stylish writing. 

It must be stressed from the outset that, in Carole Roberts' case, the minimalist "Look" is only an appropriated language and not the whole point of the work. She took on a particular intellectual stance questioning the possibility of communication between viewer and art­object. However, Carole Roberts organized this relationship in a series of very plain and immediate presentations which directed the issue along highly specific channels. This has not been adequately recognized. Instead, the tendency is to focus on the "minimalist" and "conceptualist" appearance of her work which at this historical mo­ment is, surely, hardly an issue any more. 

Carole Roberts' intention is to slip through the customary rhetoric of the surface, to turn it back against itself and question on what basis such a surface, whether illusory or abstract, is able to communicate. Or, more importantly, if it is possible for communication to take place at all. Roberts asks on what grounds has it been assumed that an in­ter-relationship between viewer and work ever existed? In short, what constitutes an art-work (specifically a painting) at its most fundamen­tal point of engagement with the viewer. 

Roberts tackles this minimalized discursivity via minimal visual means: such as a resistance to the seduction of canvas and paint; minimalism of form and surface; lack of finish or, conversely, such a high degree of finish that the surface becomes almost (though, sig­nificantly, not totally) impersonal. In addition, in her reaction to the ex­pressionism of the early eighties, Roberts turned to the objectivity of architecture and space, devoid of all human presence and the emotionality of brushstroke. The work at the first Future Unperfect Show at Artspace in 1984, and at the Traces of the Object at the Mori gallery in 1984, were an outright rejection of the expressionist canvas with its auras of both art-object and significant humanism. And her in­terest in the relationship of the art work to its architectural situation was especially evident in Open Plan, exhibited at Traces of the Ob­ject, which comprised of a ground-plan of the Mori gallery. 

Through such devices Roberts asked how communication was really possible from work to viewer outside of aesthetic conventions. When the traditional signs are removed, what is left in that inter-actional space? How is it that painting is?³ At this period, she was expressing more of a doubt that it really was at all and that the painting probably communicated, and had communicated, very little. Her discourse was to become more complicated from this point. 

THE CLEAVING

Roberts went on to tackle such issues more incisively in a series of works entitled The Cleaving. Created in 1985 this series was ex­hibited at the Mori Gallery in 1986. The Cleaving consisted of twenty small works. For each of these works Roberts used a flax canvas as the initial support, this was painted white. She mounted a canvas board over the middle section of this canvas leaving a top and bottom section exposed. A fluid black pattern was painted onto the white sur­face of the canvas board. Another, smaller, canvas board was at­tached to the first canvas board. This was painted black and varied in position according to the work. Sometimes it was in the centre, some­times to either side of the centre. 

The Cleaving was reviewed by Pamela Hansford for Art Network but, unfortunately, the magazine folded before the review could be published. Hansford spoke of the black rectangles functioning not as metaphors for nihilistic emptiness but "like psychological brakes to stop the viewer absorbing the work in a simple act of cash and carry viewing. Sight's easy voyeurism is put in check and the viewer is ask­ed to find a way to see." 

The viewer's expectations of such surfaces were frustrated. There was no fulfillment. No "insight" into some psychological illumination promised by the code of marks. Instead the viewer was conceived as "cleaving element between object and space". In particular, the viewer's perspective was seen as a cleaving element with regard to the painting's perspective. The perspective of the viewer cleaves that of the painting. It does not “realise" the work, nor bring it to comple­tion, nor to fruition, as in the Renaissance tradition of perspective in which the exact positioning of the viewer made sense out of the geometrical skeleton on which the painterly illusion was based. 

BUREN AND DECOR

Paradoxically, although this cleaving initially may be seen as an "intrusion" into the integrity of the work, the net result of the inter­change is that the viewer becomes aware of the totality of the situa­tion of the viewing. Carole Roberts' Decor installation at the Bellas gallery, in 1987, engaged the polemic of Daniel Buren as an exten­sion of her interest in the situational aspect of viewing. Buren, of course, is also particularly concerned with the situational aspect. 

For Roberts, Buren was to provide a textual site from which she could continue to alert the viewer to the preconditions operative on what was assumed to be an "innocent" procedure of "dialogue" with a painting. More than most artists, Buren had queried this seeming "openness" and immediate accessibility of art's "communication". Going below the surface constituents, as traditionally ascribed , he questioned the fundamental construction of the work of art. Buren has said of his work: 

The work in progress has the ambition not of fitting in more or less adequately with the game, nor even of contradicting it, but of abolish­ing its rules by playing with them, and playing another game, on another or the same ground, as a dissident.⁴

Buren transferred into a three-dimensional siting, into the vulnerability of a total environment, the two-dimensional painting which had hitherto been rendered inaccessible to pragmatic critique by those traditional discrete parameters which had demarcated it, in the European tradition, as a ·particular type of metaphysical "sign". That is, the siting of the painting within the conventions of frame, or canvas support, had served to locate it immediately within an inviolable, ac­cepted code. This had guaranteed to it the triggering-off of a whole range of stereotyped signification which, by no means, had any actuality. As in the case of any "script", painting, by reason of its material presentation, was able to rely on the conventionalized credibility of its surface to hide the fact that little or nothing might be being transmit­ted to the viewer. The cultural assumption, unless the situation is in­dicated to the viewer or reader, is that an “authorized" presentation is a warrantor both of conceptual value, as well as of missive coherence. 

Buren's approach was direct. He avoided the signification of "artness" by the simplest and now, in hindsight, most obvious, procedure of refusing to use either frames or traditional supports. He painted his stripes directly onto the walls. Alternatively, he has displayed them out in the open as if they were flags. As soon as the conventional, sup­portive parameters were removed and the work was confronted with its environment, it was clearly perceivable that both the form and con­tent of traditional painting could be remarkably thin and superficial. 

In the two Decor installations of 1987, at Bellas, Brisbane, and the Mori gallery, Sydney, Roberts amplified Buren's critique of the work of art by appropriating Buren's installations via reproductions. When Buren's extrusion of art into the environment is reproduced, his polemic collapses back into the condition of a two-dimensional sign. 

Roberts, starting with the reproduction of the Buren's spatial instal­lations, recodes his situational art as "painting". Thereby, her works acquire a paradoxicality, for her works are not really "paintings" in the accepted sense. Their intention, like that of Buren, is to problematize the traditional notion of a work of art. 

Whereas he had expanded the two-dimensionality of painting into an installation space, Roberts reversed the procedure, collapsing his works back into paintings. Buren's original critique, perhaps, thereby acquired a new edge by the reversal of his polemic. By turning his works back into "paintings", and further by placing these references back into an installation space, she critiques Buren's more avant-gar­dist subversion. What was important was to site the space from which the viewer perceives and, then, to make the viewer aware of its con­flicts and conceptual dangers. 

One could say that Roberts simultaneously uses and redirects Buren's "dissidence", both against the same uncritical superficial acceptance of the tradition of the constitution of an art-work, but, further, against Buren himself, thus questioning whether Buren had taken his own critique to its fullest extent (to the extent where the critique even turns on itself). In the Decor show, she implicated Buren's stripes with interior decoration, this could, at first, be seen as a denial of his criti­artness of art, as such this implication of fine art in another discourse, the related "territory" of design, serves to amplify his critical examina­tion and to extend it into issues which are of concern to more con­temporary theory. 

Her re-use/extension of Buren's polemic is more sophisticated than a simplistic anti-art stance which on its own, unguided by tighter theoretical discourse, would hardly contribute, at this historical date, to further understanding of the problematics of art as an ostensible site of "meaning". Roberts' work both rejects and accepts art. 

An increasing implication in the installation aesthetic itself was manifested at the Decor II show at the Mori gallery in November 1987. The Buren stripes became reflections of the real site of the gal­lery. Roberts' renditions of the Buren installations echoed the shifting perspectives of the actual rooms in Mori, the lowness of the ceilings and the placement of the doors. The play of reality and illusion ack­nowledged the fact that any exhibition of art consists not just of the works, but of the totality of the gallery space. Roberts seemed to be pointing to the fact that often, at such an exhibition, one is just as aware of the architecture of the exhibition space as of the works themselves. The "missing content" of her work on the wall intruded into the totality of the environment. She uncovered, through this reflecting process of surface on space, the ambiguity of all viewpoints. In her hands paintings lose their traditional authority as supports of reality, that is, as signs of a hegemonic gaze which determines the only possible viewpoint, instead all possible views are shown as paradoxical, as fallible. 

On what ground does validation stand when space itself is a deter­mined cultural construct, pre-coded into a sign system, reducible to surface, to a thin veil , mockingly rarefied, itself available to exhibition, to display, to survey. No longer the privileged site; privileged by materiality to the possession of an objectivity which alone empowers the ability to determine subjective and objective, valid and invalid, and, thereby, the very possibility of meaning itself. The ambiguous viewpoint of the Decor works cleaves the ."objective space" of paint­ing. Losing substance, the work of art becomes an interface, at this interface occur confluences and assemblages, incessant recom­binations rather than stable unity.