Gene Sherman
Chair and Executive Director, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation
Ceremony: 3 May 2016, 10.30am
Speech
Well, after that introduction, I feel a little embarrassed but um, my introduction’s as follows. Pro-Chancellor, Mr Robert Kelly, Vice-Chancellor, - Professor Attila Brungs, ah, Dean of the Faculty of Design, Architecture (and) Building and I noticed Arts and Photography Desley crept in there, Professor Desley Luscombe, University Secretary and Director of Governance Support, Mr Bill Paterson, Chair of the Academic Board, Associate Professor Joanne Grey, members of the University Council, Members of the University, graduates, families and friends and my Hhusband Brian Sherman who’s sitting in the front rowwho’s sitting in the front row. I too would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we gather, we must remember that there is a long chronological line of tens of thousands of years, stretching back from the Ggadigal presence on this land to our presence here in this great hall today.
I want to thank the Ppro-Cchancellor and vVice-cChancellor for the invitation to share my thoughts with you as you embark on the next phase of your professional lives. I chose, I wanted to choose a theme for today and I chose change,. Tthe benefits of change, the opportunities that change can offer, the disappointments that are sometimes inherent in change, particularly if the change is not driven by oneself and also the dangers that can come with change. And what I wanted to say to you overall is that you are clearly a generation of mostly young people but living in a time where change is key and change is constant. The world has changed enormously since I got my first degree many years ago in 1968 and it’s changing by the minute almost as we move into this period of the 21st century. So I thought how I would start is to use the changing landscape of my own family.,
tThe landscapes that my own family, particularly me, myself, found ourselves in., wWe had to adapt to changing circumstances that were mostly beyond our control, although not totally, and as you will see as I describe this to you as I tell you about my personal story, art, design and architecture played a key role. My family story is as follows just in brief,. I could go on for hours as each and every one of you could, I’m sure. Born in Johannesburg in South Africa, a very tight nit, nuclear family and extended family, my father was one of six6 siblings, and my mother, one of 4 girls, 4four daughters,. mMy family was completely education focused and looking back from my vantage point now, I realised that we were education obsessed, not focused. A secular Jewish family that was absolutely, how can I put it, sort of oriented towards intellectual capital, particularly in my father’s side of the family. They considered intellectual capital almost the only goal worth striving for. My father was a great believer in tolerance and I don’t know how many of you, not the younger ones, will remember when there was a moment when Esperanto, coming from the French espoir and the Llatin route before that, meaning hope. Was one of the hopes of bringing the peoples of the world together via a common language, the thought was that people would speak their own languages separately, at home and in appropriate circumstances but when they came together, they would speak a common language, everyone in the world. It didn’t work out but that was my father’s hope for the world.
My mother’s family was humanitarian in focus, not so much in education focussed. But both sides, father and mother, could not tolerate the deep unfairness of the apartheid system in which we lived in South Africa at that time. So, my entire family, both the nuclear family and extended family emigratedimmigrated to Australia in the 1960’s. We were second in our family, our nuclear family to leave for Melbourne in 1964., mMy father’s eldest sister was already there as was her son who was a barrister there and later became a judge in Hong Kong. It was a miserable year,. I went and had my first year of University, my undergraduate degree in Melbourne at Melbourne University in 1964. I chose the wrong university, Monash had only just started and I would have been better at a smaller University.; Melbourne University felt very large and very, somehow unforgiving. There was no body quite like me at the University or so it felt. We chose the wrong school for my late brother who was in about 15 at that time. My father was given the wrong advice in starting a new professional life. In Melbourne, he wanted to work on a computerised methodology for the stock exchange and we found that at that time that Johannesburg was further ahead in terms of technology and ideas than was Melbourne. We chose the wrong city for my mother and the wrong timing. So you can see how many wrongs there were. There was actually nothing right. And the reason that the city was wrong and the timing was wrong is when the rest of the family arrived in 1966 and 1967, they came to Sydney a. And we were already back, we went back a year later.
We returned with our tail between our legs really, and I started my University life again in Johannesburg. In those days, there were no individual assessments or individual, certainly not in Ssouth Africa and I doubt if that wasn’t the case, I imagine that was the case at Melbourne University as well. Were you in South Africa at any rate, you did at the end of the year, a series of exams, like 34, 45 or 53 hour written exams. and iIn every subject, you stood in a oral set, an oral situation in front of a jury. So there were no individual assessments that were added together leading up to the final exam. So if you didn’t write the final exam which went over weeks, together with the oral, there was no way you could pass into the next year. So I had to start again. I did my BA, I majored in English and French Literature and I did a sub-major, it was called in those days, in art history. Those were the only subjects I did. I then did ann Hhonours in French literature. I did aan Mmaster’s in French literature,literature; my thesis was on Jean Cocteau. It was a 2 year research thesis and I wrote my thesis in French. And then I did a PhD on Andrée Gide and the old testamentOld Testament which took me 6 years and I mostly did it through the University of Paris, Paris Quatre it was called when the Sorbonne was divided after the student revolution of 1968. They took this huge monolithic university, public university in Paris called the Sorbonne, some of you would know it, and divided it up into smaller units and my unit was called Paris Quatre We then emigrated to Australia and I finished the PhD at Sydney University.
There were lots of ups and downs., lLots of changes,. Llots of illnesses and . tThere were deaths in the family. I went back and forth,. Iin fact, between, over a period of 11 years, 1964 -– 1976, I moved initially without my husband, with my family, and then with my husband 6 times from Johannesburg to Melbourne, back to Johannesburg, to London, back to Johannesburg and onto Sydney. And each move, we thought was a permanent one. It wasn’t just a move for 2 years., wWe thought we were going to go permanently. So there were six6 permanent, but only the final move was permanent. 6 wannabe, if you like, permanent moves. I really had to change my professional goals because when I arrived in Sydney in 1976, Australia, from a government perspective filtering very quickly down through the education system, decided, and this was government policy which became education policy, that Australia was going to orient itself as a country towards our neighbouring countries and see itself geographically and partially culturally in the aAsia-pPacific region. I was teaching French at the Sydney University at that time, finishing my doctorate as I said in the French department and the numbers just dropped, like, plummeted, year after year, I was there for 5 years and eventually, there were so few students studying French and all the potential French students, those that would normally be studying French were, studying at that time Japanese or Indonesian, that there was no need for the number of teachers from professors down to the most junior member of staff that had started or that had been there when I started. We started with 20 on the staff and ended up with 8. So I needed to change and this comes back to my theme of change. I need to change my professional goals., I needed to change my whole vision of what I was going to do in life. I had to think of those 12 years of formal study at University in another light. I felt very disappointed. I felt quite angry but there was no one to be angry with because I could see that the logic of Australia finding itself in this region and becoming much more integrated with the neighbouring countries.
So, I went to a school for a while, for 5 and- a-a halfhalf years and found that that path of going towards, you know, I don’t know, vice head mistress or head mistress was not what I really wanted. And then I decided to look at my sub-major which was art-history. My aunt, one of my mother’s sisters was a practicing exhibiting artist and my father when he became successfully in business was a connector. And with my two little meagre years of art history, with57.29 my aunt ?the artist and my father the collector in mind,? I opened a gallery. Eventually, I ran the gallery for 21 years, a commercial gallery focused on the Aasia-pPacific region and Australia and eventually on the middle eastMiddle East as the vVice-Cchancellor has mentioned. My husband Brian Sherman who I acknowledge is here today in the front row, became successful in business and in 2008, I changed from the commercial gallery which I had run for 21 years across 2 sites with exhibitions all over the Aasia-pPacific region, I changed the gallery from a commercial endeavour to a not-for-profit foundation and I opened with with ? 58.16Ai Weiwei. I also changed from focusing exclusively on contemporary art, or almost exclusively to focussing on art, architecture, design, fashion and film. And everything I’ve always done has been underpinned by literature which is my first love and first profession. I read every single day of my life unless I’m ill. So we have book launches and writers coming to the gallery to speak.
Now I want to move on from my personal life and I guess my professional life and just establish a theoretical framework for you. Because we are after all, in university and theory must be established and must be respected. I think that to a greater or lesser extent, and I’m talking about you as a generation., and I know there are a number of generations amongst the graduates, some of you mature aged students but we are all products of our time and our moment in history. Many of you, I don’t know how many of you, but many of you, Would I imagine belong to generation Y, which means you’ve come of age between the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the fall of the twin towers in New York in 2001. I apologise for the mature aged students but I do say to them that you have the great advantage from my perspective anyway, of growing up in one era and studying at university in another. But let’s go back to generation Y, in the west, in economically developed countries,countries; this is my own personal perspective on this generation Y. This is not a cynical generation, nor a conservative or reactionary generation. This is a generation I think that disregards constraints. You’re not so bound in as our generation was and previous generations even more so. You are the creators, not individually but collectively and the masters of social media and your identities looking from the outside at you as a generation are connected our web of associated relationships. You are much more connected via the web obviously, and also your way of socialising is very different from previous generations. You’re aesthetically conscious and particularly this group, cool is the contemporary word. There’s a Japanese word, iki, which you should have a look at. I could give a lecture on iki, it’s a wonderful concept and it contains cool. The feeling of cool, or the what the adjective of cool now means in contemporary life but more than that, ??? 1:01:10it’s not the moment now. But very importantly, you are the master of turning Culture into economy. You take cultural pursuits and all of you are in that area, that zone and you turn them into an economic enterprise. You only have to look around you to see that that is the case more so in this generation than in previous ones.
Now, what about this globalise world we live in. Well, a century ago, aristocratic classes or the upper classes, they thought sought to become educated as all, I suppose, ambitious people do (I hope). But they ???1:01:53sought to add to their education by becoming cosmopolitan and what the upper classes and aristocratic classes did is they went generally if they could afford it on the grand tour. They spent a year or sometimes two years, sometimes even three, to the cradle of western civilisation - r. Remember I’m talking about the west here. - tTo Greece, to Rome and to Europe. Well, your generation is a cosmopolitan world. You don’t need to go on a grand tour. You tour on the screen. We all do every day. You travel for pleasure regularly, . Hhordes of people on the planes. You move constantly for work opportunities, I’m sure most of you will find that you haven’t lived and worked all your lives in one place. You cross Cultures regularly and looking at the group of graduates today, you’re all crossing Cultures as you’ve been studying at University. So, I think this cosmopolitanism is no longer an elite concept and we don’t even use the word anymore. Globalism is now the reality of daily life, not just for you but for each of us. How do art, design, architecture and building, how does this all fit into this new globalised world. Well, this is a subject of an ambitious PhD and I’m certainly not going to try and cover it today but a few thoughts.
I want you to find for you the word Culture or if you prefer to use the word “art”, doesn’t matter, to encompass literature, film fashion, music, art, architecture, design, building and I wanted to think for myself and I’ve thought of this before. What does it actually mean.? What does Culture mean.? How useful is it and why do governments struggle with it. I’m not going to answer that question but at it’s very best, I think that art, or Culture if you prefer to use that word, explores the human condition. It shines a spot light on humanities darkest corners. I’m going to give you some examples in a minute and also shinesshine a light on humanities greatest potential. That’s what art and Culture does, at least for me. Also, art and Culture or art or Culture, explores humanity’s many faceted ways of being in the world and takes the temperature of the times.
Now what about humanity’s darkest corners? Well, I take my examples either from contemporary art, sometimes architecture, often architecture, literature or design. There’s a book that’s just come out that’s called “A little life” by an American writer with a Japanese name “Hanya Yanagihara” it was published last year and she’s here for the Ssydney’s writers festival. It’s a book that’s on the best sellers list and I haven’t read it. And the reason I haven’t read it, I’ve started reading it, I didn’t continue beyond the first hundred pages is because it’s about abuse of the most violent and savage kind that you can possibly imagine. Described in graphic detail and I just couldn’t take it, it was for me it meant a month of sleepless nights, just with the memories, they tend to remain etched in my mind. But I did read a book some years ago now that shone a spotlight on humanity’s darkest corners called “A Fine Balance” which I can recommend to you, by Rohinton Mistry. This was a fictional storey based on reality of Iindia, post- independence in the late 1940’s and a family that came from the untouchable caste and the difficulties that they went through are very dark and depressing and heart wrenching story. How many of you, I hope many and if not, I hope many will, have read “The First Circle” which was published in 1968 by Solzhenitsyn who was a prisoner, he himself was the prisoner in the story in Stalin’s Gulag in the labour camps in the 1950’s in the Soviet Union.
Don’t letsget depressed as it’s a celebratory day, so letslet’s think of humanity’s greatest potential. Well think of the great gothic cathedral of medieval Europe, 13th century Europe. Think of Frank Gehry’s Fondation Louis-Vuitton which was initiated in 2006 and opened in October 2014 and of course this University’s got your wonderful Frank Gehry Building. I’ve just read a biography on Gehry, he was quite and extraordinary man. Think about our own Opera House finished in 1975 or if you want to go back a century, think of New York’s Statue of Liberty which isn’t the greatest artwork of all time but it symbolises so much of human potential. I think also, there are, when you think of Culture, now I’m talking about Culture and I’ll come back to change. There are changes in the way Culture connects with audiences, there are changes in the way that Culture is perceived and I’ll give you an example of that as well.
When I was growing up, museums were seen as the providers of Culture. They were almost like temples where the viewers or visitors to the museum went to ‘worship’ in inverted comma’s at the alteraltar of Culture. Objects were in glass cases and important paintings were framed in gold frames and you weren’t allowed to touch anything. Well, if you think of museums today, and I hope all of you go to museums, whether it’s MAAS (Museum of Applied Arts and Science) down the road or the various other wonderful museums we have in this country, they’ve now become sites of interaction;. Ssites where networks are forged. Museums are sites of architectural significants. SANAA (Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates), a varyvery dear Japanese friends of mine, have won the commission to build the new extension to the Art Gallery of New South Wales and also, we’ve got the Powerhouse Museum or the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences will be looking apparently for an architect very soon. Museums now are a site of education inquiry like the university we are in today. They’re sites were collaboration now, is possible, desirable and encouraged and my final word on that is that museums have become sites of co-production which is quite the opposite to what they were when I was growing up. I know I’m quite old but not that old. There’s been a huge change in how visitors interact with museums. I want you to imagine a world, thinking about the importance of Culture, where, and remember Culture with a capital C or art if you prefer it. A world where there are no books, no films, no architecture, no landscaping, no graphic design, no posters, no web design, where there’s no creativity at all. Everything is functional, everything is practical and everything is standard. There’s just one template for everything. Well, if we had such a world, god forbid, we would have demolished Culture entirely and if we demolish Culture, we demolish history. And if we demolish history, we demolish memory, because if there’s no knowledge of history, then people don’t have memories, either family memories, or group memories or cultural memories generally. And if you demolish memory, you demolish community because communities come together as the pro-chancellor said, through shared experiences. And if there’s no memory of shared experiences, no history of shared experiences, you can’t have a community.
I’ve just finished reading a book by Juiliaen Barnes who’s one of my favourite authors, this wasn’t one my favourite book. I hope he’s no wherenowhere around because he is coming to Sydney for the writers festival but he talks about the whispering of history over the noise of time and I’m going to remember that phrase, maybe you will to. Time is noisy, we’re all busy with things but history whispers through. I think and I’m almost done now, that Culture, if it’s going to be any good, if it’s going to be of a high standard, whether it’s design, whether it’s art, whether it’s architecture, whether it’s building, it should be founded on truth and authenticity. Truth is a loaded word isn’t it? Not monolithic truth but truth as a layering of different realities, the many truths, to truth;. Aa differing perspective. If you think of truth as a monolithic truth, you know somebody saying “this is the truth and nothing but the truth and any other perspective you bring is wrong and can even be dangerous will kill you”. You think of North Korea and of Kim Jung Ill and his tyrannical son. You think of Iran under the Mullahs where there’s one truth or South Africa under apartheid. That’s not the kind of truth I’m talking about. I’m talking about truth, a questioning place we all are so lucky to be living in a place where we can ask question an open minded place, a non-judgemental place, well, no place is no judgemental but less judgemental at least than in previous times in history. And a place as we know today deeply embedded in the notion of change. You are as I’ve said,said the inheritors and makers of the digital revolution.
You need though, remember when I said at the beginning that change can be dangerous and also disappointing. Well, look back at the disappointments I had when I was forced to change and it all worked out fine, with a lot of hard work, it all worked out fine. You do need to interpret all signs whether they’re cultural, political or commercial, critically, sceptically and constructively. What people tell you isare not necessarily the truth or even any version of the truth.truth? You need to be aware, I think , of the dangers of being mesmerised by the medium, mesmerised by the screen, dazzled by whatever’s on the screen, lead astray by what’s on the screen as well. That medium can be very seductive. You need, I think, to realise that change can be dangerous and adaptability is a necessary road to success, whatever success means to you because it doesn’t mean the same thing to everybody. But what are the dangers of change. Too many changes can lead to too many choices. And too many choices can lead to too little focus and too little focus can lead to confusion, to scattered thinking to the grass is greener syndrome where you always think what someone else is doing sounds better than your chosen path or the way you’re doing things. And if you don’t have vision and you don’t have authenticity, you lose your way.
So, my final message to you today is hold to a strong vision, whatever it is, speak and act with an authentic voice, your own voice, be adaptable because things are going to change around you, be collaborative because that’s the way of the world now and the best way forward. Be true to yourselves and warm congratulations on reaching this end of your first degree, it’s a fabulous moment and take the time to enjoy it.
About the Speaker
Dr Gene Sherman is Chair and Executive Director of the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, a philanthropic organisation dedicated to the public exhibition of significant contemporary art from Australia, the Asia-Pacific, and the Middle East.
Gene’s former appointments include the Powerhouse Museum Board of Trustees, Power Institute Council at the University of Sydney, and Deputy Chair of the National Portrait Gallery Board.
She regularly lectures on gallery management, the art of collecting, philanthropy, private foundations, Australian and Asian contemporary artists, and contemporary Japanese fashion, and is an Adjunct Professor at the University of New South Wales. Furthermore she is a Board Member of the National Gallery of Australia Foundation and a special advisor to the Powerhouse Museum.
Gene was awarded the title of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Government in 2003 and a Doctorate of Letters honoris causa by the University of Sydney in 2008. She received the Member of the Order of Australia in 2010 for her cultural philanthropy and her support of emerging and established artists.
