Artistic Tension

Melbourne, 1980. Amidst the post-punk arts scene that animated the city at that time, the artist-writer Philip Brophy reviewed, in the first issue of the small-run, photocopied magazine New Music published by the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre, a video performance/screening by a local duo, Robert Randall and Frank Bendinelli (known collectively as Randelli). I have never forgotten this line from the review: to the remark by Bendinelli that the collaborative process is ―a continual fight … we’re both either compromising or attacking each other’s throats,‖ Brophy responds: ―But that’s good because it means that the object hasn’t got an artistic intention but it’s just got artistic tension.‖ For what Brophy said there—deftly summing up an entire artistic and subcultural sensibility—was not an especially Romantic or Utopian view of the collaboration between two artists.