“. . . the body and emergent electronic technologies.”
Dancing the Music: Philippa Cullen 1950–1975 was the title of an exhibition curated by Stephen Jones at Sydney Non-Objective (SNO) Contemporary Art Projects in the autumn of 2016. This show gazed meticulously back upon documentation of Cullen’s oeuvre, through video recordings, the artist’s notebook drawings, and other material. One could venture that, through the intimacy which suffuses such meticulous curatorial work, it invoked Cullen’s person and practice here in the present as well. Dancing the Music is also the title of an exhibition on Cullen at McClelland Sculpture Park+Gallery, curated again by Jones, and with a similar project newly inflected by its institutional context.

Philippa Cullen with Marr Grounds’ sculpture Berkeley Revisited, 1974, Mildura Sculpture Triennial, 1975. Photograph: Don Turvey. Courtesy Evelyn Juers, Garamond Publishers, and the Estate of Philippa Cullen
These exhibitions are part of a recent fluorescence of remembering focused on Cullen and her short yet brilliant career. This fluorescence, like Cullen’s work, is concerned with and channelled through both the body and emergent electronic technologies. Daniel Mudie Cunningham’s “Ghost-writing: on the posthumous invention of Philippa Cullen,” 2022, catalogues this creative and curatorial remembering. Cunningham recalls Jo Lloyd’s Archive the Archive, 2020, which was commissioned by the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) for the canon-building project Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now. Then there is Evelyn Juers’ biography of Cullen, The Dancer, 2021; Barbara Cleveland’s performance video Bodies In Time, 2016; and Diana Baker Smith’s exhibition Tasks yet to be composed for the occasion, 2021, at Artspace’s Ideas Platform.
These acts of memorialisation take place in the context of a broader surge of interest in the recording, archiving, and exhibition of ephemeral artworks, including historical performances, in visual arts institutions. The establishment of the Precarious Movements: Choreography and the Museum research consortium, Lucy Guerin’s recent exhibition at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia’s Primavera 2022, curated by Michael Do, exemplify this ambient concern with the auratic body here and now (or there and then), and with the forms of “evidence” which index it.

Philippa Cullen on a pedestal antenna rehearsing Homage to Theremin II at the Joseph Post Auditorium, NSW Conservatorium of Music, 1972. Photograph: Lillian Kristall. Courtesy of the Estate of Philippa Cullen
Jones himself recorded some of the evidence of Cullen’s work, including video footage of 24 Hour Concert, 1974. Despite its title, this performance took place over twenty-three hours; it fell on a day when clocks changed for daylight savings. This incompleteness is emblematic both of Cullen’s life cut short at twenty-five, and of the deficiency which all of our efforts to clasp at artistic and personal histories must surely obtain. That this iteration of Dancing the Music takes place at McClelland, with its focus on “spatial practices” broadly conceived, draws attention to the architectural edifice of all of this memorialising. We have many reasons to understand Cullen’s practice itself as a spatial one: some of her diary entries liken the impact of electronic sound sources on dance to the impact of pre-fab concrete on architecture, and the 6th Mildura Sculpture Triennial was one of the last places to host her work during her lifetime. The memorialising structure being built around the artist is not a monument, and not even a cenotaph (which often retains a phallic symbolism, despite the nameless gap at its centre). Like Cullen’s choreographies, it is probably something more like an interactive system which artists alter, in wonderful welcome, and sometimes unpredictable ways, by entering into it.
Erin McFadyen is a writer and editor from Awabakal and Worimi land in Newcastle.
McClelland Sculpture Park + Gallery
18 March to 17 July 2023
Victoria