RSJ Barker

SMH article by Bronwyn Watson

I became involved with the setting up of ROM Gallery in 1993 when I was asked, along with Simeon Nelson, by Rosemary Luker and Gregory Smilth to be the inaugural artists. The Gallery was situated in the top right hand corner on the first floor of a warehouse building that occupied an entire block in Taylor Square. My experience at running galleries along with Gregory’s practical skills and Rosemary Luker’s marketing expertise - Rosemary was the marketing manager for the MCA for a few years - ensured the venture would be a success. Below is a Sydney Morning Herald review ROM Gallery’s first ever exhibition.

The exhibition consisted of approximately 100 drawings pinned to a plasterboard wall. The drawings were all representations of local and fictional scenes. As the title suggests and as the reviewer describes, I was simply recording anything that was going on around me at the time.

In fact at the time I had become increasingly involved with computers by that stage. By 1993 I had already had a solid 10 years working with computers in both the Macintosh and PC environments.

"Untitled - Memorial 1", rsjbarker 1993, 148mm x 210mm, acrylic & pencil on paper

For some reason I had decided that I no longer wanted to rely or even consider computers or software to generate artwork and that I really wanted to return to the traditional materials of painting and drawing. This exhibition was really a reaction to the use of technology I’d been using over the previous decade. A realisation that technology was not an end in itself but merely a means to an end. I decided to abandon all technology for the exhibition except for the marketing and database management and simply pinned the drawings to the wall.

"Untitled - Memorial 4", rsjbarker 1993, 148mm x 210mm, acrylic & pencil on paper

The idea seemed popular and the traffic to and from in the weeks following was very busy. The review above states 96 works were on exhibition, however there were  more smaller exhibits within the gallery and portfolios also on display. My notion that I was going to deny myself the use of technology for creative art purposes was soon thrown out of the window once the internet started to take off not long afterwards with the release of the Mosaic Web Browser.

The reviewer suggests that I’m a human scanner that sucks up imagery and spits it out in the form on works on paper. In fact I have a bit of a problem with that interpretation. I’m not sure if I suggested that to the reviewer and if I did - and it’s possible - I regret it.  It seemed sort of a pretentious idea to me even at the time it was published. That’s the problem with the print media. Once it’s printed it’s set in stone. Publish or be damned. Exhibit or be damned is just as valid for an artist.

"Untitled - Memorial 3", rsjbarker 1993, 148mm x 210mm, acrylic & pencil on paper

But just around the corner, while nobody’s looking up pops the internet. In a way this had an even more withdrawing effect on my art. While I’d absorbed the practical marketing and information possibilities of the internet I’d still not been completely convinced by digital technologies ability to deliver art.

"Untitled - Memorial 2", rsjbarker 1993, 148mm x 210mm, acrylic & pencil on paper

Over the following years however as I again became increasingly preoccupied with computer technologies again, I began to allow it to creep gradually back into my work for both practical and artistic reasons. Some of the ways in which the technology emerges however is not by design or intention.