Max Lyle
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The South Australian School of Art at Stanley Street North Adelaide 1963-78
1. View from the ground floor - to 1962
Life at the new premises at Stanley Street was different, more certain compared to the general uncomfortable temporary feel of the Exhibition Building on North Terrace, which by late 1962 when I arrived was rapidly being torn down at the rear to make way for the Napier Building and extensive car park(!) of the University of Adelaide. Ironically, the car park marks the space at the east end of the Exhibition Building that was formerly occupied by the Art School. I spent a few months from November 1962 until April 1963 at North Terrace teaching in the basement sculpture studios with Owen Broughton who was appointed earlier that year.
I was appointed to the Art School on a temporary basis for over a year until the unfortunate dismissal of my predecessor was confirmed by the SA Education Department. Coming from comparatively low paid teaching positions at Victoria's Caulfield and Gordon Institutes of Technology, I appreciated that the SA Education Department had embarked on a policy of raising the status and salaries of teaching staff to lecturers. A further Education Department initiative, in concert with Art School Principal, A F Sierp, was the expansion of the School at the newly built Stanley Street site through the development of a number of specialist departments to meet professional expectations of the Adelaide and State communities. Advertising/Graphic Design, Crafts, Ceramics, Printmaking, Sculpture, Painting /Drawing, Art History and the Library were all beneficiaries of significant investment in additional staff and resources, including substantial plant and equipment. As I understand it, the driving force behind these changes was the Director of Technical Education, M H Bone. P D Roberts, Principal from 1964, and Vice Principal D Bettany later added Industrial Design to the School's course offerings.
So to the ground floor, street level at Stanley Street from 1963 onwards - Ceramics, Sculpture, the Courtyard, School administration offices, Library and staffroom all occupied that level of the building. It was a most conveniently arranged set of facilities for me. The Library was run by the genial Douglas Hardie and later by Judith Maddern, both of whom provided ready authoritative assistance to all comers. The many periodicals were very popular, as they came directly from the overseas hotspots of visual arts activity.
My immediate lecturing colleagues in the Sculpture Department were Owen Broughton, Regina Jaugietis, and later Herbert Flugelman. Part-time lecturers included Ieva Pocius and Maureen Gordon. In the 1970s a technical assistant, Richard Arthur, was appointed. In Ceramics, the lecturers in succession were Ben Kypridakis, Bill Gregory, Milton Moon and Stephen Skillizki. Other outstanding personalities were of course the students who were the most intriguing moving feast of characters, and really claimed my attention and nurtured my enthusiasm.
All the lecturers I have mentioned were very enthusiastic individuals and all were active practitioners in Sculpture, Ceramics or other art-related fields. Unfortunately there is no opportunity here to expand on the numerous, admirable teaching, professional qualities and achievements of each one. However, I still feel highly honoured to have worked with such a distinguished group of artists/educators and students who contributed so much to my own experience on many levels.
2. View from the ground floor - from 1963
In the decade or so after 1963 the worldwide dynamic cultural/social changes were reflected in the diverse kinds of student course work activity at the Art School. The school's population of staff and students represented a cross section of the community, which really made the Art School a lively and vibrant place in which to live and work. New influential ideas and working methodologies from the USA, the UK and Europe were literally flowing through the curricula using the conduits of the lecturing staff and the many periodicals and books seemingly flooding into the Art School Library. Any thing and everything it seemed was 'grist for the mill'. Extracted from the social/image/music revolution, be it in London, New York, or the Haight-Ashbury based hippy movement in San Francisco, it was all extremely wide ranging.
Another significant contributor to the school's life was the Bonython Art Gallery around the next street corner in Jernyngham Street. Kym Bonython brought much significant Australian and overseas contemporary art to Adelaide. Kym generously featured solo exhibitions of the school’s staff and students at his gallery too. Many of the lecturing staff were practicing artists/designers with either burgeoning or established reputations through exhibitions or commissioned public art works and this in itself added another dimension for students to absorb. The dynamism and flexibility in educational programs encouraged student experimentation and testing of recently evolved concepts, and extended the boundaries of what art could be. There was a decided willingness to maintain contact with the progress of cultural thought from the outside world, the beginnings of globalism.
These kinds of thought processes and outcomes were not restricted to the 'Fine Art' curricula but extended to the other departments of the school inclusive of the Design areas of study. Romantic figuration and abstraction coexisted with the New York 'New Edge' movement introduced into the School by lecturer Sydney Ball in 1966 as 'Hard Edge' painting which became very influential in student work from this time onwards. Minimalism was a succeeding influence with participation in 'The Field' Exhibition of 1968 at Melbourne's National Gallery of Victoria by Sydney Ball and Nigel Lendon. The subsequent Conceptual 'wave' which hit art schools in the 1970s caused some sense of crisis, and coping with its effects was problematic for many academics at the time. Eventually, conceptualism was accepted as another developmental phase of Art and included into some course programs. A large landmark exhibition of student works entitled 'Outlook' was held at the Art Gallery of South Australia in 1971. This was a unique achievement at that time and reflected an elevated status for the school on the national scene. The South Australian School of Art was also distinguished by being nominated by the national tertiary education body as the first College of Advanced Education in Australia.
The Diploma courses established in the 1960s were used as the foundation for the development of degree courses during the 1970s and postgraduate courses were being proposed by the end of that decade. The undergraduate courses incorporated the History of Art/Liberal Studies program which then developed into a broader Visual Art Theory program.
I believe this period set up the essential criteria for the Art School to operate upon. The built-in flexibility of thought processes, the ability to capitalise on change, and again built-in resilience and fortitude to overcome what seemed to be adverse circumstances for the School's status in the close amalgamated academic community and wider community - all served the school well in its various manifestations in the long term. Those years after 1978 when the School vacated the Stanley Street site were to test the veracity of many aspects of belief, particularly among the staff, although the school's structural and organisational 'troubles' had commenced earlier in the 1970s.
However, the ambience of the Stanley Street years continued into the future and largely nurtured and sustained the Art School through its inclusion in a number of amalgamations aimed at rationalising the seemingly uncontrolled proliferation of teachers' colleges (6 in number) and also involving the SA Institute of Technology. P D Roberts, the second to last Principal of the Art School, showed considerable, unusual boldness in speaking to a self published illustrated booklet issued to the assembled Council of the newly formed Torrens College of Advanced Education at Stanley Street in September 1976. Entitled 'Autonomy in Torrcae', the booklet was a tongue in cheek, extremely critical commentary on the Torrens College amalgamation. In one section he presented his take on the functioning of the Art School Community - 'They (are)…freedom loving, more interested in art than politics, and more prone to work with great intensity when fired to do so than to work like clockwork. Rather than adherence to strictly scientific tenets and formulae, they tend, somewhat in the manner of an artist composing his picture, to work in a method that mixes instinct with reason to achieve results seen at times to be extravagant and inexplicable to their newly acquired and sober neighbours'.