Robert Rooney

(born 1937)

Holden Park 1, March 1970, and Holden Park 2, May 1970

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Collection of Daniel Thomas, Sydney
Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1998

EXHIBITED
Pinacotheca, Melbourne, 1970
Project 8: Robert Rooney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 4 October - 9 November 1975, cat. 10 (illus., another example in exhibition catalogue)
Off the Wall and in the Air, A Seventies Selection, Monash University and Gallery and Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 3 July - 10 August 1991, cat. 128 (another example)

LITERATURE
Charles Green, Off the Wall and in the Air, A Seventies Selection, Monash University and Gallery and Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 1991, p. 6 (illus., another example)
Helen Ennis, Photography and Australia, Reaktion Books, Sydney, 2007, p. 118, pl. 65 (illus,. another example)

RELATED WORK
Holden Park 1 and 2, 1970, photographs and polaroids, 76.5 x 101.5cm, examples held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and Monash University, Victoria

Like many of the artists who took part in the exhibition The Field in 1968, Robert Rooney quickly moved away from colourfield painting to develop a more conceptual practice. He turned to the camera as his primary tool to create conceptual pieces which involved serial images of random subjects from everyday life – the garments worn every day for a month, sugared almonds in the carpet, views of the corners of an apartment. His best known work in this period was Holden Park 1 and 2, May 1970, in which Rooney chose locations at random from a Melbourne street directory, to which he was then driven by a friend, Barry McKnight, in his FJ Holden. At each location the Holden was parked and Rooney took a photo. He assembled them into two groups of images. In the first version, he included a text describing the process of making the piece; this text was dropped in the second version. The second version is in several Australian public collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, and has been described as "one of the key works of postwar Australian photography".

This is the only known impression of version 1 and was purchased from the artist by curator Daniel Thomas when preparing the exhibition Project 8: Robert Rooney, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, in 1975.