Anthony Bond  – short and full CVs

The core focus of my work as a curator and art historian has been the continuing significance of the avant garde in contemporary art world wide. This trajectory has been included in a book published by New South Press in 1915 The idea of Art: collecting international contemporary art at AGNSW.

The central ideas are built around Duchamp not so much as the critic of the market and delectation, but on his esoteric ideas about consciousness and representation.  This is very closely tied to his re-introduction to representation of the thing itself or the attribute or material that by association conjures the idea of the thing or as an attribute suggesting some other cultural memories.

Duchamp is only one of many avant-garde artists to find ways to engage an audience in the creative process for him it was the question of the delay in interpretation of his work as it has been for many artists keeping readings open as long as possible but none quite as definitively as Duchamp.  It was this as much as anything that Bacon admired.

The idea of embodied memory and of memory triggered by objects and materials or sensations from the everyday is a strand that links many of my projects and in a way exhibitions listed below run one into the other even if this sometimes seems unlikely.  A growing concern for me has been the Avant-Garde commitment to disputing the special status of the artist in relation to the engaged public. This has roots in the nineteenth century and particularly in the ideas expressed by the commune in Paris briefly in 1971.  Think of Rimbaud who preferred shop signs to the ‘high-art’ of the Salon.

I am also interested in the Avant-garde trajectory of inclusiveness and audience participation that can be traced back to the middle ages through the role of Carnival as described by Michael Bakhtin. This research will form a book including many interviews I made with leading practitioners who I knew in the 1960s and later in the 1980s but referencing common interests from the 1960s, this is currently underway.

The British Show 1985  AGNSW and Touring 1985-86

Boundary Rider: the 9th biennale of Sydney 1992-93

BODY 1997 an exhibition which develops a view of realism in modern art as it is manifested through works relating to the body.  AGNSW

Trace The inaugural Liverpool Biennale UK 1999

Self Portrait: Renaissance to contemporary 2005-06 NPG London and AGNSW Sdney.

Aperiatur Terra Anselm Kiefer  an exhibition for White Cube and Royal Academy London January 2007 & AGNSW May 2007

Mike Parr:  The Tilted Stage TMAG and Detached galleries Hobart  November 2008 to February 2009

Francis Bacon: five decades AGNSW 2012-13

Aside from these major projects I have continued to make modest exhibitions and publications in significant venues: The Ghost who talks an exhibition of Mike Parr’s recent performance videos shown at Venice 2015 and Val Wens ‘Banyuwangi’ at Palazzo Mora Venice 2019 for ECC and Ken Unsworth Macquettes at Wollongong City Gallery 2019.

 Recent books

A major book on Ken Unsworth published by ARTAND Foundation 2018.  In 2019, I published a substantial text on Jon Rose with Contemporary Music Review through Routledge.

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