Collecting the Ephemeral: Conceptual and Experimental Practice in University Collections

Writing about the Flinders University Art Museum (FUMA) collection as it was at the end of the twentieth century, Ian McLean noted that universities tended to have idiosyncratic art collections, owing to the serendipitous ways in which works were collected. He characterised state institutions by their tendency to collect works that demonstrated established narratives about nationhood, while regional galleries tended to serve their communities via the collection and representation of local art practices and contexts. University art collections on the other hand, filled-in-the gap between these two modes of collecting, albeit in haphazard ways. Subsequent decades have seen a tightening of collection policies and bureaucratic processes, but the legacy of these idiosyncratic frameworks remain evident through the relative volume of conceptual and ephemeral artworks collected between the early 1970s and the late 1990s.