Writing was on the wall

The furious spirit of youth revolution of the 1960s and 70s was captured in the colour and style of poster art.

Detail from Karen Hall and Ruth Waller Cabaret Conspiracy at Maxy’s Screen Gems Studio, Darlinghurst 1979. Image: National Art School Gallery.

We are accustomed to thinking of decades, especially in recent history with which we are more familiar, as having distinct characters, in rather the way that we think of cities or quarters and suburbs within a city as having an ethos, typical classes or categories of inhabitants and businesses.

To think of periods, as of places, in such a way is necessarily a generalisation, but it is only by generalisations that we make sense of a world of multiplicity and change. The 1920s clearly does have, if not a single character, a bundle of characteristics that are distinctive and are in many respects different from those that prevail in the 1930s, after the great crash of 1929 and with the rise of totalitarianism in Europe.

In the same way, the decade of the 1970s has certain cultural and political characteristics that are, in important respects, distinct from those of the periods that preceded and followed, even if these characteristics are neither entirely confined to this period, nor limited to the years 1970-79.

In the world of art and culture, for example, this period can be seen as one of transition between high modernism and postmodernism. The last phase of high modernism had been the explosion of abstract painting in America after World War II: this had initially taken the form of abstract expressionism or action painting, but by the 1960s had been superseded by flat, hard-edge or post-painterly abstraction.

Detail from Paul Worstead Dance: Wasted Daize … Settlement, 1977. Picture: National Art School Gallery

This late form of abstraction can be considered the ultimate reduction of the art of painting to the verge of nihilism, although some ultimately implausible claims were made about mysticism and transcendence. More to the point, increasingly vacuous paintings became an expensive investment product and a status symbol for the rich.

In Australia, this style arrived a bit later than in America, and had its brief triumph in The Field exhibition that opened the new National Gallery of Victoria building on St Kilda Road in 1968. After this, as in America and elsewhere, there was a reaction against art as a commodity and the following decade was the high point of non-commodified forms such as conceptual and performance art, as well as political art, of which more later.

Towards the end of the 70s painting reappeared in various guises, including some that were infused with conceptual themes. The word “postmodern” first appeared in connection with architects who were rebelling against the modernist rule that form should follow function, and there was discussion about whether it could be applied more generally.

In Australia postmodernism arrived with the Futur*Fall conference at Sydney University in 1984, and all of a sudden popular magazines were rushing to explain what the new fashion meant. One thing it certainly meant was a tone of camp cynicism and systemic relativism that were very different from the confused, agitated earnestness of the 70s.

Toby Zoates Garibaldis’ 1979 Tin Sheds Art Workshop Screenprint. Picture: National Art School Gallery

For the culture of the 70s was much more political than either the periods that preceded or that followed it (it was unimaginable then for credible contemporary art to be sponsored, as it all is today, by big business). But the political energy released during those years was the by-product of much bigger tectonic shifts that were taking place but of which no one at the time was aware.

The events of 1968, first the failed riots in Paris and then the Soviet tanks in Prague, had been the death-knell of communism in the West. The Soviet empire did not collapse for another two decades, until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, but it was in an increasingly moribund state, reflected in the decline of the fortunes of communist parties in the West.

You could still meet people in the 70s, in the intellectual backwaters of universities where ideologies fester so readily, who would endeavour to justify Stalin’s campaigns of mass murder, while others on the left turned to a rosy dream of utopia being forged in China, until the ugly reality of Maoism was also revealed, and China turned in another direction altogether.

But as the old millenarian dreams of revolution and a fundamental change in society faded away, political energies once harnessed to a common goal were released in a kind of entropic dissemination, expressing themselves in special interest and sub-political campaigns about feminism, gay liberation, or anti-racism.

Paul Worstead Settlement Dance – Sports and Annual General Meeting, 1978. Picture: National Art School Gallery

And this is the political world represented in the collection of period posters gathered in the Paper Tigers exhibition at the National Art School Gallery. There are anti-war posters, since agitation against the Vietnam War reached a height in the late 1960s and the first years of the 70s. There are anti-apartheid posters too, as well as others concerned with the welfare of Aborigines in Australia.

Gay liberation was an important concern at the time; homosexual relations between men had been decriminalised in 1967 in England (those between women had never been illegal), although homosexuals were still subject to various kinds of restriction and police harassment, which led to the rise of a gay rights movement that was soon reproduced in Australia. South Australia was the first Australian state to repeal laws against homosexuality in 1975; the ACT followed in 1976, and Victoria in 1980 (though soliciting remained illegal); in Sydney, the repeal did not come until 1984, in Queensland until 1990 and in Tasmania until 1997.

Women’s liberation was one of the other prominent themes of the time. The modern history of the women’s movement is long, going back at least to Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women (1791), with countless subsequent publications. After the war, however, there is a different tone in works such as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), which takes a much broader perspective on the situation of women than simply the campaign for legal rights.

De Beauvoir considers historical and cultural aspects of the female condition as well as physiological and psychological ones: in other words, the complex interplay of innate or intrinsic factors with others that are social or political.

And by the 70s, almost any field of human studies was seen through various combinations of three kinds of lens — Marxism, psychoanalysis and linguistics — refracting these subjects, in the hands of academics, into a kaleidoscope of frequently sterile complexity.

Feminist posters, however, tend to convey relatively simple messages: about rape and domestic violence, medical services, the availability of shelters and about the right to live an independent life.

But the form as well as the message of these posters is significant. Most of them are handmade, sometimes at student facilities like the Tin Sheds at the University of Sydney, sometimes with more rudimentary equipment. Lettering, images, registration, alignment and other elements can be approximate or rough, but this adds to the sense of urgency and spontaneity. Few if any appear to be the work of commercial printeries.

Works of this nature are inherently ephemeral, often damaged or destroyed by the very way they were stuck up in the first place. Accordingly, these posters come either from collections preserved at the time, or in some cases from the artists or activists who had the foresight to keep a few copies.

Most of them are attached directly to the wall in a way that does not damage the paper, but reproduces the informal way that they were originally put up; framing posters of this nature is not really appropriate because it invites us to look at them in a way that is neither true to their original intent nor fair to their inherently occasional and ephemeral nature as functional images and texts.

One thing that may particularly strike those not already familiar with posters of the 1970s is the juxtaposition of political tub-thumping with advertisements for rock bands and parties. So was that all there was? Come to the demonstration and then finish with a rock band in the evening? Or perhaps just go and listen to a rock band with angry political credentials?

Such an impression would be a little reductive, but perhaps not entirely unfair. After all, in this aftermath of failed revolutionary politics, many of the social issues of the time were ultimately about the self-interest of the groups concerned: young people didn’t want to go to war, and they didn’t want anyone else to tell them how to express themselves sexually.

They often liked to think, as some people still do today, that feminism and gay liberation were part of a traditional left-wing struggle against capitalism, but this was a fundamental misunderstanding. Capitalism, insofar as it can be personified in this way, simply wants workers and consumers. In reality, capitalism is the most revolutionary of systems, breaking down traditional social and moral norms that get in the way of its simple priorities.

Besides, this was also the climax of the sexual revolution, which began with the invention of the Pill in the early 1960s and ended dramatically with the shock of AIDS in 1983. It was the high-water mark of promiscuity in general, when sexual encounters seemed to be without consequences, although this was never entirely true, and the benefits of free love were often asymmetrically weighted in favour of men, partly for natural and biological reasons.

Nonetheless, there was a spirit of anything goes in this period, which there has never been since. Even though there were plenty of residual Stalinists on the left and old-fashioned authoritarians on the right, the dominant mood of the time was one of libertarianism. There was a feeling that no one should tell anyone else what to do, especially not with their personal lives.

Perhaps the most interesting difference between our own time and this period, which is now four or five decades past, is in moral and political tone. There was political anger in the 1970s, and because those who were angry had inherited the paradigm of revolution and did not recognise it as obsolete, they believed things could be changed, which is why they made these posters and marched in demonstrations.

In reality, as already observed, the greater part of their energy had moved away from any idea of economic change to focus on the interests and rights of various special groups. And in that sense they were the forerunners of the identity politics of today, which has displaced concern for the economic condition of the working class, with the political consequences that we have seen in America and elsewhere.

On the other hand, the 70s were not as passive or smug as we have become in the age of social media. Political discourse today is dominated by moral indignation, blame and outrage, preferably expressed on a smartphone without even rising to one’s feet.

In the 70s, though, moral indignation, and moralising in general, were all but unthinkable, and no one imagined that pious words were the equivalent of action.

Paper Tigers: Posters from Sydney’s Long ’70s

National Art School Gallery, until October 12