Artist Hilarie Mais had just arrived in Sydney from New York with her expatriate husband, the late painter and educator William “Bill” Wright, who had been appointed the director of the 4th Biennale of Sydney (Vision in Disbelief, 1982). Mais recalls attending a meeting on 31 July 1981, one of several public meetings organised by the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council for the Arts to establish what at the time was described as an alternative gallery space, or as the funding proposal to the Australia Council put it, a “venue and focal point for the new developments in the visual arts.”
Other terms were also bandied about to describe Artspace, or to use its formal name, Artspace Visual Arts Centre, including artist-run-space or in more contemporary parlance, artist-run-initiative, or ARI. These descriptions are misleading at best, because from its inception Artspace had a salaried director, an operating budget and the rent paid, all financed from supporting grants provided by the Australia Council and the NSW Premier’s Department. This level of patronage, while meagre, certainly set it apart from other ARIs in Sydney at the time, such as Art Unit, Shepherd Newman Building, AVAGO and QED, many of which were rather hostile to the perceived special treatment that Artspace was receiving. There was also the short-lived Art/Empire/Industries, which I discovered shortly after returning from the US (where I had been studying at the Rhode Island School of Design) to see the rather intriguingly titled exhibition Hebdomus and Other Works 1972–82, by the then New York-based Australian artist Peter Burgess.
Artspace established a physical presence in 1982 on the first floor of the former Henderson Hat warehouse at 11 Randle Street in Sydney’s Surry Hills. The floor was shared with other culturally aligned tenants, including the publisher of the journal Art Network, Shane Simpson’s Arts Law, and the Art Workers Union. The building also housed the studios of numerous artists including Su Baker, Debra Phillips and Lynne Roberts-Goodwin. Regrettably, this century-old building was destroyed by fire on 25 May 2023, allegedly due to the actions of vandals making TikTok videos. Yet another part of Sydney’s cultural heritage was thus erased, although this was already in train: interviewed after the fire, the architects Tonkin Zulaikha Greer said that “the building was abandoned and was being developed as a hotel.”
The desire to establish a gallery space was driven, I suspect, by a peculiarly Sydney anxiety about having to be the first, the boldest and the brightest. Sydney was, after all, in the words of playwright David Williamson, “[a] sparkling metropolis, a city of greed and insatiability” — the “Emerald City,” as he called his 1987 play. The establishment of Artspace was. Significantly, these seminal performances are considered to mark Unsworth’s arrival as a serious contemporary artist.
