Vale Richard Dunn

Richard Dunn (1944‒2024) was a key figure in Australian art, known for his powerful intellect, his commitment to the material qualities of art, education, and his astute understanding of our shared contemporary world.

As many artists of his generation experienced, if as a student you showed the slightest creative inclination but also demonstrated academic ability you were funnelled by the school guidance counsellor into an architecture degree: if you were, God forbid, also numerate, your destiny was engineering, certainly not art school.

Richard Dunn began his studies in architecture at the University of New South Wales and undertook further studies in painting and sculpture at the National Art School (also known at various times as East Sydney Technical College), winning the NSW Travelling Art Scholarship in 1966. The scholarship was judged by the Antipodean painter and director of the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, John Brack. After winning the scholarship, which changed the course of his life and career, Dunn moved to London, and for a period shared a flat with the painters Royston Harpur and Brett Whiteley. He enrolled at the Royal College of Art, graduating in 1969 with a Master of Art in painting. Dunn spent the next decade living in London, where he continued to paint, and later Paris, where he was the music correspondent for the American cult magazine Rolling Stone.

Returning to Australia, Dunn took up a teaching position at the newly established Sydney College of the Arts (SCA), in the School of Visual Art. Under the stewardship of the painter Guy Warren, a group of employed artist / teachers, which in addition to Dunn included Nigel Lendon, John Lethbridge, Peter Myers, Imants Tillers, and the program director Jim Allen (later head of school) began work on a new educational model. SCA commenced during a time of great reform in art education internationally, one that saw radical change imposed by the actualities of contemporary art practice. The era saw new approaches introduced at several institutions globally, such as the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, California Institute of the Arts, and Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and the establishment of the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy in 1975. SCA set out to implement an entirely different philosophy of visual arts education from the one that had prevailed and from what is currently practised in most Australian art schools.

Dunn brought his intellect, and a deep understanding of contemporary art and its various histories, informed by his own rigorous art practice, to the SCA, eventually being appointed director in 1988. The next several years proved to be particularly challenging, as the tertiary education landscape in Australia was dramatically altered in 1990 by the then federal Labor education minister John Dawkins. The changes forced all publicly funded colleges into amalgamations with public research universities. Several institutions were considered as possible partners for SCA, including Macquarie University—it already had a long-standing arrangement that would allow the College to build a school on its campus. However, Dunn judged that the University of Sydney would be the most appropriate and strategic partner, and so he began initial negotiations with the gentleman-scholar and then vice-chancellor John Ward. Ward from the outset was very constructive about SCA (and the Conservatorium of Music) joining the University as he thought that such a merger would be mutually beneficial for both institutions. Unfortunately, Ward’s untimely death in a train accident led to the appointment of a new vice-chancellor, Don McNicol, in mid 1990. McNicol from the outset was extremely hostile to the College and its staff, and Dunn’s vision of SCA as a school of contemporary art. He was also categorically opposed to the College’s relocation from several industrial sub-standard buildings spread over Balmain and Glebe to the Kirkbride buildings at Callan Park, although he didn’t offer any alternative sites.

Dunn, I, and other SCA staff were subjected to a regime of intimidation, harassment, and extreme forms of bullying by McNicol and his cronies. However, Dunn’s strategic abilities as a chess player came to the fore and, with the assistance of the University of Sydney’s chancellor, Leonie Kramer, the NSW state government made the Kirkbride buildings available for the use of SCA under a ninety-nine year lease. The College was only able to move there in 1995, after an extensive refurbishment, with the teaching program beginning in April 1996. Importantly, the refurbishment costs were not met by the University but by government: because Dunn had fostered working relationships with Peter Collins, who was the state Liberal minister for the arts, and the federal Labor treasurer Paul Keating, he was able to negotiate a joint $19.4 million contribution from both governments. Regrettably, this herculean achievement by Dunn was unravelled when the University management, under the leadership (a term I use loosely) of vice-chancellor Michael Spence, decided in 2015 that it would “reimagine the art school”—an Orwellian style of phrase used by bureaucrats when they plan to destroy an institution. Dunn felt this process was intended to deliberately erase him from SCA, once the most enlightened and influential art school in Australia, is now little more than a hollowed-out husk.

The art historian Pamela Hansford begins her lucid essay in the majestic catalogue (Dunn called it a picture book) Richard Dunn: Thinking Pictures, 2024, (Kerber Verlag) with this 1989 quote by Dunn “the purpose of painting is to unite on one surface the contradictions of material, objects, product, history and production in one focus.”  It is from this singular vision that Dunn’s work proceeded over the next three decades.

Demonstrating a sophisticated understanding and knowledge of twentieth century modernism that ranged across supremacism, pop, minimalism, and conceptual art, Dunn engaged in strategies that destabilised what the English art critic and poet John Berger called “ways of seeing” in his 1972 book of the same title. Dunn’s work also signals the changing political, social, and cultural context in which art operates and is understood by the viewer; to put it another way, he explored the “complex problem of perception and interpretation.” In a 2003 interview with the Norwegian theorist Stian Grøgaard, Dunn stated: “When I look at the things I’ve made, what may be difficult for the casual viewer, I think, is the absence of a signature style. This is the result of a very conscious decision on my part … things are simply too complex to be able to be accommodated by a single approach.” While Dunn saw the world through a global lens, he was acutely aware of and sensitive to the local context in which his works were made and shown. This is evident in the tartan paintings that drew upon his own Scottish heritage (his four grandparents were Mcfarlane, McGregor, Anderson, and Dunn) and particularly the politics that surrounded the prohibition by the English against Highlanders wearing tartan after the Battle of Culloden in 1746.

Richard Dunn leaves us a complex legacy, and in some ways, it is a conundrum. He was one of Australia’s most thoughtful, inventive, and serious artists; and yet there is a playfulness and humour evident throughout his work. Dunn was a very private person but also a public intellectual who understood how art and art schools help foster what David Malouf so eloquently calls a “spirit of play.” He will be missed.