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Nostalgia Redux: The Field Revisited

For those of us who discovered art in the sweeping succession of rooms on the upper floors of the State Library on Swanston Street, Melbourne, the opening of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in its own building on St Kilda Road in August 1968 was a landmark moment. You entered Roy Grounds’ ‘art box’ in a state of considerable excitement, were amused by the water wall, then bemused by the department-store-like escalators in the foyer, to be uplifted again by a huge room with walls papered in glinting silver, divided by screens on which vividly coloured, shaped canvases hung, while the floors carried eccentrically shaped sculptural forms that spilled out into the expansive courtyard. We had arrived at The Field, the opening temporary exhibition that signalled the NGV’s commitment to contemporary art, to art made by local artists and to being – in marked contrast to its predecessor – a ‘living museum’, in the words of its director Eric Westbrook. The Field Revisited, expertly curated by Beckett Rozentals, pulls out all the stops to recreate this kind of experience, and succeeds in doing so more than might be expected in having to fit what was essentially a one big room plus outside courtyard exhibition in the St Kilda Road building into three smaller rooms and a foyer at Federation Square. The silver wallpaper and the hanging partitions remain prominent, and an effort is made to provide a similar sequencing of the display. Halfway through we arrive at a vantage point that almost entirely recreates the setting captured in a well-known black and white photograph of the original show. This is an uncanny simulation, albeit at one remove, one that is mediated by the few surviving photographs. I can attest that The Field Revisited nevertheless evoked many aspects of the original experience. Rozentals managed to retrieve all but 12 of the works that were shown in 1968, the main casualties being sculpture, notably all four works by Noel Dunn. The result is that, slowly, The Field as a storied exhibition recedes, and the individual works take over. Each retreats as a memory image, as a token of its stylistic type. It becomes instead a singularity, a specific instance of each artist’s struggle with the issues to hand, a struggle that is more or less successfully resolved. We start to see art, rather than an exhibition, which is an effect that even a recreated exhibition wants to achieve.