EXTRA ZINE ISSUE # 110 | Acknowledging Urszula Szulakowska 2024-25
Acknowledging Urszula Szulakowska b.1950-d.2023
Urszula Szulakowska lectured in Art History at the universities of Sydney, Queensland, and Leeds. Her research areas included the cultural history of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, as well as of 20th century and contemporary art. Her artistic and scholarly interest in alchemy in Art was a life-long passion.
For Urszula the concept of Alchemy in art refers to the process of transformation—whether it’s the process of altering raw materials into a finished piece or of an artist’s subjective experiences into universal expressions of humanity—creating something new, novel, extraordinary, and resonant with artists and viewers. This transformation can be literal, such as turning natural elements into pigments and then into paint, or symbolic, representing a journey of internal growth, affecting impact and enlightenment for both the artist and the audience. The concept of alchemy, with its grassroots in the ancient pursuit of turning base metals into gold, offers a framework evolving from eastern, indigenous, and western thinking and stories for understanding how art can transmute complex, difficult emotions and mundane and everyday experiences into works that inspire, reveal, and connect.
In 1984, Urszula arrived in subtropical Brisbane from her home in the UK and her recent residence in Sydney to accept her new position as a lecturer in Art History at the University of Queensland, St Lucia, Brisbane Magandjin.
Her groundbreaking and performative lecture at A ROOM artel or artist-run space on October 23, 1984, titled Alchemy and Anarchy emphasized the anarchic principles which endured in the art works produced by Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys. This lecture was foundational to her ongoing work, artistic advocacy, and social practice in Brisbane for over a decade.
More specifically, as it evinced unprecedented parallels and connective logic, made by aligning Duchamp and Beuys to Brisbane/Queensland artists working in a city of resistance during the oppressive Joh Bjleke-Petersen era in the 1980s. It was also a city where international influences in education and inside the Queensland contemporary art ecology were gaining increased interest and gravitas.
For example, she noted often in her lectures and social practice outputs that Marcel Duchamp was described by many as being anarchic because his art challenged societal, gender and artistic norms, questioned the very definition of art, and promoted a spirit of playful irreverence that rejected traditional aesthetics and authority. This encompassed an exploration of conceptual, assemblage and collage approaches. His creation and submission of the urinal Fountain to an art exhibition is a well-known example, where he used a mass-produced object as art, signed it, and demonstrated that an artist’s choice and concept, rather than artisanry, could define art. This act can be understood as an anarchic disruption of established artistic systems and a subversion of cultural values.
Similarly, Urszula often suggested that Joseph Beuys can be described as anarchic for his role in organizing “Fluxus events and his push for free and accessible education, challenging established norms in art and society through his idea of “social sculpture “and a “Free International University.” His work blurred the lines between art and life, and traditional institutions like the Düsseldorf Academy, seeking to broaden the definition of art to include a universal humanitarian attitude and the power of collective human creativity to transform society.
These anarchic and social elements and the intentional and conscious choices made by artists and artist groupings were drawn out and unpacked by Szulakowska during her lifetime. As an academic, author, artist, poet and performer she tirelessly advocated the transformative power of collective human creativity both in the context of the six month A ROOM activity where her important lecture was presented and more broadly in Queensland experimental conceptual art practice for over four decades, and one that persists. The fact that Urszula’s work has not been explicitly adopted, remixed, and reinterpreted by curators, galleries and researchers working in local institutions remains one of Queensland’s biggest art mysteries. Anarchic principles live!
Her 1984 lecture formed part of the significant Brian Doherty exhibition and followed on from an earlier Dada-like and site generated performance by artists Barbara Campbell, Brian Doherty and Stephen Stockwell titled: Bring on the Penguins.
Reflectively speaking, institutional critique characterised much of the activity at A ROOM, and the explicit reference to a media article depicted via the transformative and parodic potential of collage and assemblage like practice was/is a trope strongly embraced by Doherty over many decades
The Penguins in this performance also suggested both a popular culture reference to the character The Penguin in the Batman TV series; a city mobster and a ‘gentleman of crime,’ as well as a parody of the systemic elitism firmly entrenched in the Queensland arts ecology. A scenario where the ‘penguin suit,’ as slang for men’s formal attire, was the chosen media-image, mask and uniform of the Bjelke cronies, crooks, and mobsters, and this was the core subject of jest, critique, and good-humoured transformation in this instance. Brisbane has been described, anecdotally, as a Gotham-like City for decades.
In Urszula’s considered ‘international’ view, as expressed in that particular cultural moment, A ROOM, SEQ artists working inside artist groupings and artist-run sites proliferating both in Queensland and Australia during the 1980s and 1990s were articulated by her as spaces and places for artful transformations enabled through the power of anarchic principles. co-creative sociality, collectivism, performance, irreverence, art making and critical belonging.
Belonging isn’t something established overnight. It takes consistent action – a continuity of action – across five key areas: feeling welcomed, known, included, supported, and connected. Perhaps what Urszula also recognised in that A ROOM moment was the power and potential of artist-run culture and heritage, where critical assessments of place, lived experience, arts education, memory, playful irreverence, autonomy of representation and belonging were essential for artists and artist groupings to feel valued and acknowledged.
In 2024, over three months I made a series of memory posts and DIY zines to commemorate Urszula. I had the good fortune to meet and study with here at the University of Queensland in the 1985 to 1988 period. It was during Urszula’s lectures and tutorials that I garnered insights into Renaissance art, German Expressionism, Modernism and Post Modernism and understood the lens of alchemy and transformation that she advocated. Her are a few of those posts below. Please let me know if you have a story about Urszula to share too.
Paul Andrew
Artist.
It was wonderful to help enable this IMA commemoration too, I am immensely grateful for three months of conversations with artist Luke Roberts to make this possible.
Urszula Szulakowska and the Brisbane Art Scene in the 1980s
Panel
Talks
25 May 2024
2–3pm
Last year, art historian Urszula Szulakowska passed away. A key figure in the Meanjin/Brisbane art scene of the 1980s, she was an influential teacher, critic, curator, and mentor. The local art magazine Eyeline was named after her own eyeliner. Back then, Meanjin/Brisbane was a different place, still under the thumb of police-state premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen. It was culturally isolated, with little of the arts infrastructure we now take for granted. Along with two other key British-born, Brisbane-based academics—Graham Coulter-Smith and Nicholas Zurbrugg—Szulakowska was a catalyst for change. Join Michele Helmrich, Jeanelle Hurst, Luke Roberts, and Nancy Underhill as they discuss Szulakowska’s influence and impact on the scene.
Urszula Szulakowska, courtesy ARI Remix Living Archives and Social Memory Project.
Urszula and Glenn R Cooke were dear friends for many decades, Glenn was the only person with academic qualifications at the Queensland Art Gallery for many decades and their friendship was founded on shared scholarly interests and pursuits. Glenn authored the seminal work: A Time Remembered: Art in Brisbane 1950 to 1975 which ; in a sense, provided a prequel to Urszula’s seminal work Experimental art in Queensland 1975 to 1995: An Introductory study. Both books provide a critical archival function for artists, researchers, curators and scholars with so little formal documentation of a continuity of experimental conceptual practices in Queensland since the 1940s. While Urszula’s work has never been adopted towards further research or exhibition making so far, it provides an essential stepping stone for further work, along with Cookes’ book.