This catalogue is the outcome of research into Australian
artist Ian Burn’s work of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Grounded in the traditional genres of landscape, still
life and portrait, little is known about this early work,
yet a substantial collection of it- juvenilia, art school
paintings, yearbook cartoons, hinged boxes, paint
palettes, still lifes, orientalist prints and more—resides
at the artist’s brother Robert’s house in Newton, Geelong.
This material has not been exhibited or reproduced
previously and thus expands knowledge of the artist’s
oeuvre. Evidence of lan’s artistic coming of age, Robert’s
collection illuminates an unlikely prehistory of New York
conceptual art in Geelong watercolourism and
Antipodean painting.

The following pages document two exhibitions
of Burn’s early work held at Guzzler gallery in 2022
and 2023. The first exhibition rehung his ambitious entry
into the 1962 Travelling Scholarship Prize at the National
Gallery School, Melbourne, a large Antipodean-esque
painting of a bar scene. The second exhibition, comprised
of several genre pictures and a drawing exercise,
further showcased the humble origins of Burn’s art.
Accompanying the documentation is an essay that offers
an art historical reading of the scholarship painting.

The book presents documentation of two exhibitions of oil-stick paintings and corresponding interviews with the artist by art historian David Homewood. On the occasion of FIEND?, the December 2020 exhibition at Guzzler, Homewood spoke with Vivian about the weight of advertising, the leftovers of pop art and the politics of condiments. A follow-up interview conducted for Porn: squared, hung, drawn, quartered, at Centre D’editions Melbourne in March 2022, wanders from Treasury Gardens to Golub, Genet to the use-value of pornography. Designed by Alexandra Margetic and offset printed and bound in Tallinn, Estonia the volume records recent work by a significant Australian artist, giving insight into his life and working process.

Carpark was an exhibition-for-documentation by David Homewood, Luke Sands and Alex Vivian that was held over three Tuesday mornings, 4th October, 18th October and 1st November 2016, at Kew Junction Woolworths underground carpark. Objects including a KFC box, an International Roast tin, a champagne bottle, cardboard boxes and pharmaceutical packaging were transported to the carpark in a Toyota Yaris. Junk was found and organised in the carpark: bloody tissues, a dead bird, a Hallmark stand, and a melamine-topped board; there was also a piss painting on concrete. Shopping trollies were used to distribute items around the carpark, and for the transportation of participants around the space. Materials were placed, thrown, positioned, scattered and stamped, and mayonnaise was smeared on the wall by hand. Each morning came to be seen as an interconnected episode or relapse. The audience consisted of a police patrol car, and a sewerage truck worker who pumped sewerage out of the pipes. Included in this publication are various texts by Daniel Dawson: theories and conspiracies, shopping lists, debt lists and inventories, confessions, poems, posts, rants and stories that were written between 2014 and 2019. The texts refer to places in the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne, and the Dandenong Ranges; the titular carpark, conversely, is in the inner east of Melbourne. Leo’s, the supermarket next to Kew Woolworths where the photographs were shot, is owned by the same company that owns Maxi Foods in Upper Ferntree Gully, a supermarket alluded to several times in the following pages.