摘要：In the early 1970s, within the small art worlds of Melbourne and Sydney, the contributions of art theorist Donald Brook were as crucial to the innovation of Conceptual art as the art itself. He was an important, prescient but ultimately lonely participant in these developments, as were artists Peter Kennedy and Mike Parr, and alternative Sydney galleries Inhibodress and the University of Sydney workshop, Tin Sheds. Brook considered that national identity was irrelevant in art; was resolutely concerned with art but not at all concerned with “Australian art”. He was opposed to a methodology that excluded everything that did not fit into a preconceived and often teleological system, insisting that if a theory could not account for post-object art then the theory was flawed and not the art. While conceding that there may have been a basis for claims that postobject art was ‘simply not art’, he criticised conservatives for resisting post-object art, insisting that the issue was still to be argued.
