Gene Sherman AM

Thank you so much, Andrew Parfitt, for that wonderful introduction. Chancellor Catherine Livingstone AO; and the Provost and Senior Vice President, Andrew Parfitt, whom I’ve just mentioned; the Dean of this Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, Professor Elizabeth Mossop, whom I met a little earlier; University Secretary Bill Patterson, whom I know; and Professor Charles Rice, who’s here representing the Academic Board – there’s a whole line-up; members of the university; medallists, very important; graduates, extremely important; family and friends. I too would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we gather. As we all know, there’s a long, chronological line that can be traced tens of thousands of years back, from those Gadigal people who were originally here, to our presence in the UTS Hall today. When you think of it, tens of thousands of years of presence on this very spot. I’d like to thank the Chancellor and the Vice Chancellor and Andrew as well, Parfitt, for the invitation to share thoughts with you this morning as you embark, as has been said, on the next phase of your professional lives.

Now, I decided to gather together a cluster of themes for today that have been mentioned, because they really are – they represent the zeitgeist, the moment, in which we’re living. And the themes – it’s a cluster – in French you say ‘thematique’ for a cluster of themes – are as follows: change, adaptation, innovation. And I thought I would share with you some personal stories in relation to those themes that have been sort of mentioned but not from my perspective, and not in an anecdotal way in the citation. I was born in Johannesburg, that’s been said, during the Apartheid era – remember that. My family was a secular Jewish family, very tightly knit, very education focused. I’m so comfortable in a university context. My father’s family was Austrian, one generation back, and for his family, the life of the mind and intellectual pursuits were the keys, the only keys, to a successful and fulfilled life. I don’t believe that is the case – they’re not the only keys, but they’re important keys, and particularly important to identify today. My mother’s family, again going back one generation, with Lithuanians living under Russian domination, and they were more focused on humanitarian concerns, and they had a specific maxim, which was never really stated but always lived by. And this maxim translates somehow into trying to mend the world, to fix the world in some way.

Now, how did these themes that I’ve described change adaptation and innovation? How did they relate to my own personal story? And I really could have taken almost any member of my family and I’ve chosen to nominate my grandmother, my maternal grandmother Gita – late maternal grandmother – just to give you a little glimpse of the movements, the change, that she undertook throughout her life. She was born in Vilnius, moved to Paris, onto London, to Johannesburg, and died in Sydney. She made five moves and spoke six languages. I then decided to talk about myself, one of her many granddaughters. I was born on Johannesburg, I moved to Melbourne, I went back to Johannesburg, I went on to London with my husband, back to Johannesburg again and on to Sydney. I made six moves and I speak two languages. Now, these moves, I want you to understand, were not job transferrals. They were not moves that were motivated by a desire to seek economic opportunity.

In my grandmother’s case, the moves were driven by very harsh political conditions. The Jews in Russia at that time, pre the revolution, were forced to live in the pale of settlement – the phrase ‘beyond the pale’ comes from that period. And they were forced to practise only certain professions, very few – they were hugely limited; they couldn’t go into the big cities without permits, into Moscow or St Petersburg, and the final straw that broke the camel’s back was when the Russian authorities, at the time – we’re talking pre-Revolution now; pre-1917 – insisted that their first-born sons went into the Russian army for 25 years, which was effectively a life sentence, so a lot of them moved, including my family. Now, in our case – remember I had the two examples, my grandmother and myself, in terms of change – we were driven out of South Africa by the hatred or the abhorrence, is perhaps a better word, of Apartheid. Sharpeville – most of you here are too young to have remembered it directly, but perhaps some of your parents and friends – it was an incident – would remember it, there was an incident in 1961 in South Africa, a little bit like Tiananmen Square on a small scale, whereby students just like yourselves were protesting against injustices. They weren’t perceived injustices; they were really injustices. And the South African government came in with machine guns and simply mowed them down. And at that point, my family decided to leave, and my entire family left through the sixties. So dramatic change was clearly at the heart of our lives, and looking at you and your names and seeing you come up on the stage, I can see that it doesn’t take much to see that dramatic change has been part of many of your lives as well. We’re all on the same journey; change is inevitable for all of us. Of course, the details differ, and the intensity of the driving force differs as well. Some people change simply because they’d like a change. Other people change because they’re fleeing something – that’s a little different.

And the key, as we all know, this is not my words of wisdom, but any 10-year-old child would probably know this: the key to transforming change from a negative to a positive; from something that overwhelms you to something that empowers you is adaptation, and our Chancellor – your Chancellor – mentioned that a little earlier. This is an era where more so than ever, we all need to adapt. Now, I want to go back in my personal story to my education. I have several degrees, but they were all consistently focused on French literature, as was mentioned earlier, specifically early 20th century French literature. And here today, as you saw earlier, I’m so honoured – I really do feel touched and honoured and overwhelmed in a positive sense – to have been awarded an honorary doctorate in design and architecture. My doctorate, I completed it in 1980; I was in a ceremony like this in 1981, in French literature. My thesis was on ‘Andre Gide and the Old Testament’ – it was written in French, and here, I’m getting an honorary document 37 years later in architecture in design. So one might ask oneself why? Why am I getting this doctorate in relation to architecture and design when I studied something for 12 long years that was so different? Well, there was change – we’re back to the theme again – in Australia’s political climate in the mid 1970s. Pre and during and post the Gogh Whitlam era, there was huge change. We arrived for our second time – it was my third migration – in ’76. I won’t go into why I migrated three times; it’s a very long story, and I’d get into terrible trouble if I started going on about that. But the change in Australia was from a focus on the UK, the sort of so-called mother country; the USA; and Europe. A new focus came into the forefront on the Asia Pacific region. And this political re-focus led to an educational re-focus, and I was teaching at that time. I was probably the most junior – in fact I think I was the most junior staff member, having recently arrived from Johannesburg via London, and I saw the students moving in droves over the five years that I taught there from the European department, specifically French, which was the biggest one, to the Asian departments, and in those days the students who did, who studied the Asian cultures, languages and literatures were doing Japanese and Indonesian.

And these changes necessitated a huge adaptation – I’m coming to my second theme – on my part. Because really, what I had prepared myself for was an academic career in a French department somewhere. And given that the student numbers were dropping by the second, I realised that, that was not going to be possible. So my question to myself at the time was what else was I interested in, and could I transfer at least some of my skills from those 12 years of educating myself in a very specific way to another field? And I have to tell you, only my husband here knows – my daughter’s not living in Australia, and my son couldn’t be here today, but they were very little children – I was devastated; I was in tears; I was hysterical at the thought of having to give up everything I’d studied for to do something, and at that stage I didn’t even know what. So I had to innovate, and I looked at what I was good at and I looked at what I was interested in, and I remembered that I had done two years of art history in my undergraduate degree, and our undergraduate degrees were much more kind of specific than the arts degrees are nowadays – we all sort of did the same thing at the same time. So I did two years of art history, and my father, who started as a journalist, became a super successful businessman at a point and then lost everything at the end of his life, but during that successful period, he became an art collector. In addition to that, my mother was one of four sisters, and her middle sister and the one she was closest to was an artist – a practising, exhibiting artist.

So when I thought about it, I was lousy at numbers; I would have loved to be an architect; I didn’t think I had the capacity, and also I’d spent 12 years at a university, and I thought well, I’ve got to go into something relating to art. I ended up working part-time after I left university and left school where I was head of modern languages for five-and-a-half years and working part-time in a gallery, not far from here, on St John’s Road in Glebe. And the gallery director at the time wanted to do some work on Zimbabwean stone sculpture. So she went off to Africa, to Zimbabwe, and she fell in love with Zimbabwe, with Africa and with a man – often happens – and she never returned. And I decided – I took over the gallery for the short time she was supposed to be away, but she never came back – and I decided to run the gallery and just to learn as I went, to re-focus completely and to adapt. And 31 years later, here I am, still running the gallery – it’s a little bit of a different gallery now, but that’s really where it all started. Now, I’m going to skip over this next part, because in the citation there were such generous words about my 21 years of running Sherman Galleries. All I wanted to say to you is that adaptation was not easy – I had to really change my mindset, and the biggest element, the most significant element in that adaptation process was moving from the education world – remember, that’s where I’d been – to the commercial world, and I had the help of my divine husband, who coached me along and then left me to float or sink. And I didn’t sink, thankfully, because of his good coaching.

Now, I did bring some skills with me – you remember, 12 years and I thought will I use anything? I found I brought reading skills with me – I’ve been a reader since I was a little girl; I taught literature, and just to give you an example, I read Japanese literature, focused on Asia, because I thought if you can’t beat them, join them; everyone seemed to be busy with Asia, so I thought I’d better get to find out more about this region that really was very unfamiliar to me. So I read Japanese literature in English for two years, and I’m a very diligent reader; I read every night, unless I’m sick. So I really, after two years, I think I could have almost done a master’s thesis on Japanese literature, but it was my pleasure, not my – I suppose it was my duty as well, but I didn’t see it that way. I was clearly a researcher, after all these 12 years, and I was able to research Australian art and Asia Pacific Art with well-honed research skills. And remember, there was no internet or smartphones or anything; you had to go to libraries and wait in queues and get people to bring books up from stacks; it was a very different environment, so consider yourselves extremely lucky. And then I was a writer; I did a lot of writing in French, but I found that when I moved into the gallery, the writing skills, in a commercial gallery came, very much in handy, because I did submissions to government saying why don’t you put sculptures in this or that space? I did quite a lot of work during the bicentenary of Australia, in 1988, with sculpture – we did 14 big sculptural commissions at the gallery – and all of those commissions came to me for the artists that I was representing and working with because I was able to write from all those years of study in a succinct, in a compelling, in correct English, and I didn’t have to use French anymore, and in a way that sounded as though I was reliable, I suppose. As has been mentioned earlier in the citation, in 2008, after 21 years in the commercial gallery, I changed again.

This was a voluntary change; it wasn’t driven by any political events or wars or famines or god forbid. And so I went into a not-for-profit, privately funded, contemporary visual practice gallery. And here I need to acknowledge my husband, Brian Sherman. Firstly, Voiceless was his endeavour and my daughter, Ondine’s. They built it up with a blank piece of paper in front of them – innovation. Nothing existed like it, and they simply created not just an institute for the protection of animals, but they created a movement, and Brian, which grows by the day. Brian has an honorary doctorate from this university for the work he did together with Ondine at Voiceless. But he was also very successful in business, and in a finance house, and once I understood that we had the financial resources, we had a family meeting and I asked for permission and I was granted permission by my family to have this Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, or SCAF (or ‘scaff’) funded – family funded. So it’s family funded, privately funded, principally by our family but not exclusively – we have some wonderfully generous donors who help us – publicly accessible, commissioning, exhibiting gallery. And you can go and see the gallery; you can go today. It’s open and we’ve got a wonderful, wonderful exhibition by Shigeru Ban, the Japanese architect, on.

Brian’s success of course made it possible. I mean, you could say to me ‘But Gene, obviously you could start the gallery – you had the money.’ I used Brian’s success; I took advantage, I innovated. From that moment, I adapted Brian’s success into a program whereby I built – I tried to build, and succeeded in some cases and didn’t, failed in others, coming back to the mistakes that we all have to make in order to learn – to build success for these visual practitioners with whom I was working. I wanted to expand my horizons, so I went from working just with artists, contemporary artists, to focusing not just on contemporary art as I had done in the gallery for 12 years, but on architecture art as well – architecture, fashion, film, design. And my rhythm changed, and this was something I was very pleased about, because I came back to the rhythm I was more comfortable with and that I had lost for 21 years, and that is a deeper rhythm, a slower rhythm and a deeper engagement with a subject. So instead of 15 exhibitions a year across two spaces at one time, and also many internationally, I now do four projects a year, which means that I can focus on them in a much more thoughtful and research-oriented and in-depth way.

Now, I’m going to finish by giving you some examples, moving a little bit outside my own experience, but still rooting this talk in my experience. I wanted to do architecture at the gallery, at this new exhibiting gallery, and I wanted to commission new work by architects. How to do it? Architectural exhibitions in galleries are often quite boring – well, at least they are for me; you’re all architects, so maybe you wouldn’t find them boring. Or designers. But if you have these plans, two-dimensional plans, and you’re not trained in the discipline, I find the extremely difficult to read. You’ve got to lift the two-dimensional plan on paper off into a three-dimensional object, and then you’ve got to scale it up in your mind. Now that’s part of your training, but I didn’t have that training, so I took inspiration from a series that I hope some of you know, and if you don’t, I urge you when you’re in London at some stage in the future, hopefully it’ll continue well into the future, to go and see the Serpentine Pavilions, which take place – they’re erected, they’re created – in Kensington Gardens in Hyde Park every summer. They’re up for about three months during the summer period. And the program was put together by a visionary, innovative woman who has since retired called Julia Peyton-Jones. And she decided to establish a program calling upon significant architects who had not designed a major structure in the UK. In other words, famous people who might have built in Europe or America but not in England.

And I saw so many pavilions, but I just wanted to mention Sana, who we hope is going to do the Sydney Modern; Ai Weiwei, together with Herzog and de Meuron in 2012; Sou Fujimoto, the Japanese divine pavilion; and then I believe this year there’s an African architect. It only opens in June; it hasn’t been launched yet. And I thought why can’t I do that? I’ve got a garden – there’s a courtyard garden at my gallery – and instead of trying to have these architectural shows with plans on the wall, which I can’t read, and I imagine I’m not alone in the world, why can’t I do a pavilion?

So I adapted the idea, borrowed it, and I adapted the idea and instead of having famous architects, I invited young architects. I felt on my own staff we didn’t have enough expertise, so I teamed up with BVN, a very large architectural firm which work across five cities all over the world and employs about 300, just under 300 architects. And to my absolute surprise, I wrote what I thought was a nice submission, they came to see me for lunch, and I thought they were going to say ‘Gene, look, no, this is too much for us – we’re a huge commercial firm, we’re building universities and libraries and Australian embassies in Bangkok; the whole thing is just not possible for us.’ And they said ‘Wow, we’d love to do this.’ And it turned out they were waiting for someone to present them with a project that was close to their heart –a passion project; a non-commercial project – and they have been absolute dream partners.

I established a $150,000 maximum, that was the cap, budget for each architect, and I invited four young architects – two Australians, an Israeli team from the Middle East, and a Vietnamese architect Vo Trong Nghia, who I think is here at the moment for an architectural conference, national conference, which is in Sydney over the weekend. And after those four very young architects – some of them were not long out of architectural school like you, but a little further down the road – I decided to change again, and I decided to try and invite the most famous architect I could think of who worked with social justice issues, Shigeru Ban, who apart from his major work, works with disaster relief shelters, or he designs disaster relief shelters in the wake of earthquakes and tsunamis and floods. And it wasn’t an easy process, I have to tell you – I could make you laugh if I told you what went on – but when he accepted, I asked him why? Why did he accept such a small, little exhibition in a small foundation in faraway Sydney where he’d never done any work, when he was building the Seine Musicale, a huge concert hall which had just opened – Bob Dylan was there in Paris – and he was building the Aspen Museum in Colorado, and he had a million other things on the go, far more important. And this is what he said. He said – I just need to find the quote. He said ‘Small or large, there’s no difference to me in terms of my attention. I only accept commissions that interest me. My disaster work too takes the same creative energy as the huge buildings. The only difference with my disaster work is I don’t get paid.’ So that explained to me why he took this on – it’s on at the moment, and I’d love to have you and to welcome you there at the gallery.

Now, in finishing, I wanted to just nominate and identify and commend two heroic projects that briefly comment on, in full, I think, on my selected themes for today. One is a project that’s been going the same as my gallery, since 1986. It was founded by a man called Soichiro Fukutake, who worked – I don’t know; I’ve never had the courage to ask him whether he actually bought these islands or he acquired them via long leases, but there were three islands, there are three islands, in the Japanese inland sea called the Seto – S-E-T-O – Inland Sea. And he decided, he came from a wealthy family where money had been made in printing, and when his father died, he decided he felt a little bit free of his filial responsibilities and he set up a project across the three islands which, you know, goes beyond extraordinary. Art and architecture in the midst of pristine nature. I had the great honour of having him speak at SCAF on the 22nd of April, just a short while ago. He’s a totally visionary man; he doesn’t like being called a philanthropist, even though he pays for all of this. He likes being called a social entrepreneur. He’s a man of great integrity with the highest of principles, and this is what he said – he said a lot of other things, but in essence, this is what he said: ‘Economics should serve culture.’ This is from a Japanese businessman. ‘In other words, economics is not a goal itself. Make money, but use it to serve culture.’ And then he said, ‘Use what exists to create what will be.’ So in other words, don’t throw out what exists already, and remember that as you go onto your career. Try and use what exists to create what is new – to innovate. He invited onto these islands the world’s top artists – really, the world’s top artists and architects – and he’s created there a community, a completely alternative way of being in the world. He’s transformed these islands; they are now thriving communities. There were a couple of hundred elderly people left, because there was no work. Young people are moving there. A whole new cultural entity has been created via art and architects in nature.

And my last model for you is not something I know about personally, but I read it the other day, and I just thought I’d share it with you and you might do some research on it yourselves. I read in an article that Ikea, this hugely profitable design company, European design company, has a goal now of empowering refugees, rebuilding morale in refugee communities, and upgrading skills of displaced people. And what they’re going to do, and have rolled out already, is to adequately finance and build workshops, and with a special focus on women, they’re going to return these women who are sitting around rotting, doing nothing, and becoming very miserable and disaffected, to their traditional skills, their core skills, like I went back to my core reading and writing and research skills, their core skills are often sewing. They relate to fabric, working with textiles and using Ikea designs to create small industries and up-scale them and up-skill them on new machinery. So I think there’s always a possibility to move along. And I’m really echoing your Chancellor’s words, Professor Catherine Livingstone. I wrote this before you said your words, Catherine, so adapt to change – change is inevitable; don’t be afraid to innovate – really, my words are so similar. Remain passionate about what you do; if you get sick of architecture, leave it and do something else, because there’s no point in carrying on if you’re not happy. Act with integrity; that’s an essential. Stretch yourselves don’t just repeat what you do again and again, what you do well, and remember the core values of kindness, empathy and loyalty. Thank you.