Paul Taylor 1, 1984

Paul Taylor (1957-1992), critic and curator, graduated from Monash Univeristy in 1979. Two years later, he became the founding editor and publisher of the journal Art & Text, which was the first Australian art journal to achieve an international readership. He curated the influential exhibition Popism at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1982, writing the manifesto ‘Popism – The Art of White Aborigines’ to accompany and explain the exhibition: ‘Our art and criticism have recently sought to reverse the shame of earlier generations concerning cultural alienation and instead to exploit that alienation as part of a multi-national strategy. A search for a regional Australian culture, ultimately a worthless past time, reveals a centrifugal impulse wherein our art, like the mythopoeic Dreamtime of the Aborigines, has gestated upside down and is expressed in a carnivalesque array of copies, inversions and negatives.’ Taylor moved to New York in 1984. There, he became a regular contributor to Vanity Fair, Manhattan, inc., Fame, Connoisseur and Interview magazines as well as The New York Times, Flash Art and Parkett. He conducted the last interview with Andy Warhol. Having served as Australian Commissioner at the Venice Biennale in 1986, he curated the exhibition "Impresario: Malcolm McLaren and the British New Wave" for The New Museum of Contemporary Art in 1988. A few weeks after he returned to Melbourne in 1992 he died of AIDS-related illness at the age of 35.

Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Purchased 2012
© Estate of Robert Rooney