ON RECORD - Tim (3rd degree) Burns Retrospective at Urban Dingo

One of Australia's true avant-garde  and socially active Artists who's works using interactivity, surveillance, performance film, TV, video and painting often broke new ground in their innovative uses of the media. A majority of the works remain unknown to a Western Australian audience although he grew up in the WA wheat belt he lived and worked out of New York for 20 years and few here realise the importance of the work or his place in the history of Australian art.

The arrest of his work 'A Change of Plan' at the art gallery of NSW in 1973 became a platform for artists rights in public galleries, his successful postcard campaign in Mildura to have crosswalks installed won the American institute for graphic arts book award in 77 and his super 8 feature film why Cars? - CARnage! Won the New York creative Artists award and predicted the destruction of the world trade centre by Arab extremists' decades before 9/11. His use of super 8 as a serious medium predates any of the movements either in the States or in Australia. His extremely low budget 16 mm film Against the Grain took the writings of Jean Genet on terrorism and state control and contextualised it within an Australian context and has been translated into Japanese and Spanish and he is probably the only white man to make an international award winning comedy about the stolen generation and get away with it, again way before it became the public issue it is today.

How ever the confrontations over installations and opposition to him and his works has meant that that there has not been a contemporary work of his in an Australian public gallery since the 70s and in WA there are no works in any public collections except early paintings at UWA. He was even recently censored and fired from the artist in residence program IASKA in Kellerberrin. Partially as a result and because his work has been viewed as film or theatre rather than art his current works reside in alternative spaces and as a resalt he has worked extensively in the theatre both in NYC and the east coast. Unable to finance a film after the Grain he started again in the music video business to survive eventually going on into TV and again made break throughs with interactive reality shows that were the first of their kind in the states and here. Again his project DEVICE TV funded by Australian Film commission for community TV [for the first time] was refused broadcast in Melbourne’s channel 31 where John Howards' community censorship laws were put into affect. He is also currently in litigation with the town of York over the attempted censorship and banning of a work he did for the 175 year celebrations of white settlement where he looked at court cases involving Aboriginal defendants. As a consequence there has been little written about his work and he has been overlooked in most Australian art history records.

Burns' piece has turned out to be a key work in Australian art history. Now in an age of terrorist bombings his other works are again in tune with the times but this less characteristic closed-circuit television concept can claim to be Australia's first public debut of what today is called New Media art. More important than art-historical priority, it was artistically stimulating to set up confusion between broadcast or pre-recorded vision on one hand and real-time view back on the other.
Daniel Thomas AM, Emeritus Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Art and Australia, June 04

Unfortunately for Burns' career the prophetic words of Professor Donald Brook hit the nail on the head when reviewing the bulldozing of Minefield at the Mildura sculpture scape in 1973 for the Nation Review he wrote;

"I wonder whether modern societies will be ready to find a way to pay and protect their most cunning dreamers..?.. Somehow it must be, or we are condemned to purgatory around the galleries where nobody would dare plant explosives for fear of the wrath of the curator."

This show photographically describes the public record and works in which visual records exist. The exhibition includes a series of photo prints, the recreation of three of the installations and DVD's of a number of his films. Part of this show was most recently shown at Uplands Gallery in Melbourne.

An Exhibition not to be missed by art historians, filmmakers, photographers and collectors alike.