On the same day that I saw Ian Milliss’s mini retrospective of working drawings and propositions at Sydenham International in Marrickville, I paid a visit to the Art Gallery of NSW. As I walked through the twentieth-century galleries, I observed the somewhat random representation of practices from the 1960s and beyond, including artists who exhibited at Central Street alongside Milliss.

It’s hard not to flinch when you see who’s missing from the canon of recent Australian art history. Institutions like the AGNSW still struggle to incorporate and critically frame many of the experimental forms that arose out of the heady debates of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Milliss has made it harder than most. In 1973, at the tender age of 22, he famously gave up exhibiting as an artist, a decision he proceeded to justify in an essay commissioned by National Gallery of Victoria curator Brian Finemore to explain his absence from the exhibition Object & Idea. In the essay, entitled “New Artist?”, Milliss questioned the role of art and artists in favour of a social theory of art, close to what Donald Brook (critic and art history professor at the University of Sydney) was also advancing at the time. Milliss advocated for “the substitution of ‘official culture’ for everyday life,” and for breaking down the monopoly of artists over creativity. Elsewhere, quoting Brook’s idea of art as a principle of “memetic innovation” driving cultural evolution, Milliss argued for an art and art education that was more radically inclusive, even as both recognised that the seeds of this overhaul lie in the radical departures made possible by conceptual art.

True to these principles, over the next twenty years Milliss embraced a full-time role as artist-activist. Introduced to the union movement via his work alongside the Builders Labourers Federation on the green bans, Milliss took on union work with a number of different bodies (including the Artworkers Union and its role in increasing the representation of Australian artists in the Biennale of Sydney), and established the guidelines for the Australia Council’s Arts in Working Life program and its Community Arts Board.

Milliss’s years in the wilderness (both figuratively and literally, given his move to the Southern Highlands) were also a chance to explore the possibilities of uniting conceptual art with utilitarian and social outcomes, as in his work with Sydney’s Watters Gallery and The Yeomans Project (with Lucas Ihlein) proposing ideas of sustainable agriculture as a form of land art. The conceptualism of this work was too much for the Art Gallery of NSW when it was proposed for exhibition in 1976, but later it was revisited for a 2011 exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne curated by Hannah Mathews. My own acquaintance with Milliss began during this period. His role with the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation and the Futurelands program presented as part of Cementa began a series of conversations about sustainable practices for Artlink magazine, which I took over as managing editor in 2014.

I provide this summary preamble in part to explain what it means to turn or evolve from one type of practice to another, as Milliss’s insights have undoubtedly helped to expand the field’s capacity for memetic or cultural innovation.

The works at Sydenham Road might well be considered to be Milliss’s juvenilia, covering a brief if active period of his engagement in the contemporary art scene from 1967 to 1971. Milliss’s fleeting if meteoric rise to pre-eminence during this period is clear. In addition to his regular showings with the Contemporary Art Society and Central Street Gallery, he was included in a number of important exhibitions, including Harald Szeemann’s 1971 I Want to Leave a Nice Well-Done Child Here and the inaugural Transfield Prize in 1970.

For this exhibition the proprietors of Sydenham International, curator-directors Consuelo Cavaniglia and Brendan van Hek, have worked with Milliss to present a small selection of his working drawings from an archive that numbers far more (over a thousand works I am told). In the small shop front space, an expedient approach was clearly necessary to present a mixed archive of working notes and plans as well as propositional statements for performative ideas and strategies. Avoiding the obvious dilemma of categorisation between the two different classes of artworks, this is an intentionally rough job, in which the works on paper are arranged in chronological sets. Pinned to the wall in cellophane wrappers like artefacts, there is no attempt to label or annotate them individually.

In the earliest works, what you see is what you get, including colour notes and test swatches. These compositional roughs on gridded paper—some from Milliss’s high school days—are designs for colourfield and modular paintings. They engage in the dialectic of American postwar painting, wittily deconstructing what might once have been referred to as dominant forms. The closest thing to a square is here reconfigured as bold multi-layered zig-zags.

As Milliss’s room sheet explains, one work from this group, in ochre, sienna, and burnt umber, was exhibited at the Contemporary Art Society in 1967, and led to the ensuing invitation to show at Central Street Gallery, run by artist Tony McGillick. This was a major opportunity to show with a leading group of artists of the period, known for their experimentation and innovation in post-painterly abstraction. Another key modular painting in this section, representing a phalanx of strident, erect bright yellow forms, was notably refabricated in 2012 for inclusion in the Macquarie University exhibition, Sixties Explosion.

Other works in this first section expand the register for soft-sculptural deconstruction, reminiscent of the work of Robert Morris and Lucy Lippard’s theories of “Eccentric Abstraction.” A photograph of one work from 1969 (reproduced at milliss.com) shows a large rectangular white canvas lying crushed and prone on the floor of the Central Street Gallery. It is reminiscent of Christo and Jean-Claude’s controversial wrapped section of the coastline at Sydney’s Little Bay (which Milliss participated in). Here, a drawing’s scribbled mass underscores the work’s proposed redefinition of the canvas plane and artistic materials.

Further drawings of works for hung and twisted ropes and strings expand the material register. While few of these were exhibited at the time, Milliss eventually got to see one reproduced at large scale in the 2019 Kaldor Projects survey show at the Art Gallery of NSW, where it was installed dropping from floor to ceiling down the five flights of a central stairwell.

In further distinct bodies of work, Milliss’s work starts to shift from the perhaps conventional Central Street repertoire of standalone formal compositions, and towards interventions into the gallery space. This includes a series of rough drawings in blue pen for light works showing the arc and angle of installed lamps and rail-lighting systems. Increasingly, it is the denatured substance or object worn by the space that becomes the subject of the work, as in the variously installed hardware store plug-ins and fixtures that act as temporary barricades to further restrict or reorient movement. In one piece, the gallery furniture is also rearranged to intrude upon the space in a manner that anticipates the territory of British performance artist Anthony Howell (whose work from 1984 is currently on view at the AGNSW).

Reviews by Donald Brook for the Sydney Morning Herald (up to 1971) single out Milliss for going further than many of his Central Street colleagues in the pursuit of experimental forms and interventions. And it is clear by the half-way mark of this installation, that Milliss quickly moved in the late 1960s from the last vestiges of a Greenbergian formalism to embrace the minimalist theatre of spatial architecture and an awareness of our bodies in space. One work that has been exhibited numerous times (including at Sydenham International in 2023) is the instructive exercise to walk a line so closely positioned to the wall that the viewer has to squeeze and hug the space as a form of intimate encounter.

Yet more subtle modes of interaction with the space include proposals to use fixed and unfixed forms of mark-making to register the signs of life and labour. A proposed dusting of talcum powder or a set of instructions to polish and wipe floor surfaces suggests the passage of time and labour. One drawing suggests filling the floor of a gallery space with the names of people, while several versions of what became the exhibited work Life in One Room map out the bare requirements of an existence. Everyday life strategies and “Do It”-style propositions for practice might seem textbook now, but there is a delightfully whimsical humour to many of the proposed undertakings.

The drawings for the final section take this social exchange beyond the confines of the gallery, as in one cute sketch showing two hands holding a thin strip of dowel, and proposing that two people “walk down the street” with it. Graphic diagrams in more formal style denote urban spaces, carved up into green belts, roads, and waterways as examples of the social infrastructure that was clearly to become a greater preoccupation for Milliss in later life.

As I take myself out of the small gallery into the fracas of the light-industrial landscape of Marrickville, very different to the elegant boulevards and parklands of the AGNSW’s home at the Domain, I’m reminded of the precarity of this important archive of work, and the desirable outcome that it also be rehoused in an institutional space.

These days, Milliss works on many fronts to sustain his expansive practice: speaking in public forums, and contributing works to the kind of small survey exhibitions that are more likely to be presented in outer-metropolitan or regional galleries that engage more actively with local communities. It is not without irony that I consider that his own vocal resistance to the domiciles of “official culture” over the last fifty years might well be his undoing.

Milliss’s many followers on social media also know him as a force majeure and champion of soft power, galvanising an online community through his generously enabling and at times incendiary comments that strike a chord with many. Social media platforms might well be the last frontier of a social practice that Milliss has continued to lead. Come the revolution that accompanies the race to survival, I’ll be logging in to see what he proposes.