Nick Waterlow; curator of the Sydney Biennale (murdered)
Hyfler/Rosner
Cultural diplomat and curator of the Sydney Biennale
Janet McKenzie
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/nov/17/nick-waterlow-obituary
The loss of the art curator Nick Waterlow, who has been
found dead aged 68, has robbed the Australian - and
international - art community of an individual both pastoral
and radical. Under Waterlow's directorship, the Sydney
Biennale became an international showcase for contemporary
art that challenged Australian attitudes.
Waterlow's first Biennale, in 1979, was entitled European
Dialogue, thereby challenging New York's hegemony as the
international art capital, and introducing Australian
audiences to the European avant garde. Waterlow recalled
that the event "caused quite a stir and it made people sit
up; there were even demonstrations. Contemporary art became
a very hot item. There were great expectations then . I had
to walk a tightrope, and they were a very persuasive bunch."
Like a number of key British critics before him, such as Sir
Kenneth Clark, Bryan Robertson and Peter Fuller, Waterlow
found Australian art particularly exciting, and he presented
it in an international setting: global "regionalism"
replaced "provincialism". But Australia in the 1970s was
subject to significant political turmoil, marked by the
dismissal of Gough Whitlam's Labor government by the
governor-general in 1975. In effect, Whitlam's innovative
policies on the arts, education and Aboriginal rights were
defeated by conservative forces. In intellectual and
cultural circles, the anger that this precipitated became
focused on the role of the monarchy in postcolonial
Australia.
In such an environment, being British might well have been
held against Waterlow, but he managed to move this cultural
focus on to the European avant garde and indigenous art.
Dialogue through, and prompted by, the visual arts
subsequently came to play a key role in addressing issues of
national and international significance.
Born in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, Waterlow went to Harrow
school, in Middlesex, and studied French history at the
University of Grenoble, in south-east France, and
Renaissance art at the British Institute, in Florence,
Italy. He first travelled to Australia in 1965 to marry
Rosemary (Romy) O'Brien, whom he had met the previous year
in London, where she was working as a teacher. They returned
to England, where Waterlow worked for art galleries in
London and Oxford. He was later appointed senior arts
officer for the Milton Keynes Development Corporation,
before settling in Sydney in 1977.
Many critics visited Australia for the first time for the
1979 Biennale, resulting in coverage by key international
art magazines. The show also saw the first exhibition of
Aboriginal art within an international context. Waterlow's
next Biennale, in 1986, was entitled Origins, Originality +
Beyond, and presented a groundbreaking survey of
postmodernism's many guises.
Waterlow's 1988 Biennale coincided with the bicentennial of
white settlement in Australia. From the Southern Cross: A
View of World Art c1940-1988 was a revisionist narrative of
20th-century art, enabling important links between European,
American and Australian artists to be reassessed. The
centrepiece was The Aboriginal Memorial, 200 hollow log
grave posts from Ramingining, in Arnhem Land in the Northern
Territory. Djon Mundine, then a Ramingining art adviser, had
approached Waterlow to propose the memorial. Mundine recalls
that Waterlow "understood it right away", linking the
concept to the fields of crosses at the Somme, in northern
France, that mark the graves of first world war soldiers.
The memorial was bought by the National Gallery of
Australia, Canberra.
Based in Sydney, Waterlow travelled annually to art fairs
and exhibitions around the world. Highly respected by his
peers, in 2000 he was appointed chair of the Sydney
Biennale's international selection committee. He was awarded
the medal of the Order of Australia in 1990.
He curated many original exhibitions, such as Larrikins in
London: An Australian Presence in 1960s London (2003), and
held many key posts in the Sydney art world. But Aboriginal
art increasingly became his focus, and he acted as a
cultural diplomat for it on many projects.
Waterlow and his daughter Chloe, a cookery writer, were
found stabbed to death at her home in the Sydney suburb of
Randwick. Police are searching for Waterlow's son Antony in
connection with their deaths. Waterlow is survived by his
partner, Juliet Darling, and his two sons with Romy, who
died in 1998.
. Nicholas Anthony Ronald Waterlow, art curator, born 30
August 1941; died 9 November 2009