Small Grand Tours

Walk to major Australian galleries through areas of nearby bush or parkland. Preferable if this involves crossing a high hill. My clearest example: walk across Canberra’s Mt Ainslie to the Australian National Gallery. The aim is to mimic aspects of the European Grand Tour in miniature and alienated terms. We are not passing across northern Europe and the Alps to Italy. We are ascending a small eucalypt-covered hill and then wandering across parkland to the gallery. Can all manner of major Australian public galleries be approached in this way – through a preparatory journey that negotiates a relation between everyday life, natural space and art? My concern is to make explicit the often unstated relation between art and a complex exterior – and to explore this relation in playfully classical experiential terms.