Peter Pinson: It's April, 2013, and we're in the house of Ken Reinhard, in Lucinda Avenue, Wahroonga.

Ken, you went to school at Homebush Boys High, in Sydney. As a boy's school, it didn't teach art. What propelled you to a career in the visual arts?

Ken Reinhard: Probably the fact that I did that in the high school in Victoria before we came to New South Wales. My father was a school teacher and his appointment was to the primary school in Moama, which in on the Murray River in the point where it dips just above Melbourne. And across the road... across the river is Echuca.

I went to Echuca High School. And there everybody did art. Certainly in first, second, third, and the fourth year I left. We did art, and I enjoyed it. I did well. We moved to Sydney when dad was appointed to Fort Street primary school.

I went to Homebush, because you went to the school that was appropriate to where you were living. There was no art. So I did the only thing that was close to it. It was called descriptive geometry and drawing. But my mother used to pay for me to go down to a gentleman named Edward D., probably David, Redfern. He lived at Burwood.

We used to go down on the Parramata river, and draw the river and the trees, and whatever you'd paint. That sort of retained the interest in art until I left Homebush, and went to the National Art School, in East Sydney Tech.

Peter Pinson: You studied at the National Art School and Sydney Teachers College. Were there any teachers there who were influential on your subsequent development.

Ken Reinhard: A number of them, I suppose, influenced me. You can't help but be influenced by teachers that you have for a period of 12 months. And...you know...up to four hours a week. But I don't know...apart from life drawing, which became an addiction, and I had a number of people, including, I said his name earlier, but I've forgotten it now.

Peter Pinson: Wallace Thornton.

Ken Reinhard: Wallace Thornton, yes. Apart from Wallace, who used to do little scribbles on the corner of the paper showing me which was coming forward and which was going back - I remember that quite vividly. Apart from that, there are many people who I came in contact with whose attitude would have influenced me, but not their own work in particular.

Peter Pinson: Were there any outstanding fellow students at that time?

Ken Reinhard: The same year was Brian Dunlop, who I think has recently died. In my section I remember a number of people - Helen Lancaster, John Seivl, Elizabeth...she married John, so she became Elizabeth Seivl, but John died.

Leads to the next question - when am I going to fall off the twig? But yes, once again, I haven't maintained contact with any of them...so you know, their names crop up occasionally in exhibitions and reviews that you see, but I haven't had a major contact with any of them.

Peter Pinson: You won your first art prize in 1963. Sydney modernism at that time was really dominated by abstract expressionism, and you began to work in an abstract expressionist manner.

Ken Reinhard: Yes, certainly.

Peter Pinson: The work related to, I guess, the organic rhythms of the landscape, although it was essentially abstract.

Ken Reinhard: Yes. And I suppose then there was some external influences - John Olsen, obviously, Charles Reddington, and...who was the chap who went to Adelaide?

Peter Pinson: Oh, Tom Gleghorn.

Ken Reinhard: Tom Gleghorn. I remember Tom saying on one occasion that "Don't worry about what you're using. If it's good enough, someone will find a way of preserving it." Yet he was the one who introduced a lot of people at that time to acrylic paint, which he especially either imported or manufactured or something.

But the things I did at that time were landscape-based and made little sense to me. I wasn't in love with the country. I thought I'd hate Sydney when I came to it, but it was quite the reverse. I disliked the country and found that my...I was just more compatible with suburban city life.

So, it was then that I changed from the abstract expressionist mode, method, technique, what everyone likes to call it, into something that eventually...ran on the edge of pop...it all came about.

I don't know whether you want to know this, but I was involved at a boys' high school by then. The manual arts master and I became quite good friends. We involved the boys in doing projects that involved both departments. I was head of the art department, he was head of manual arts.

At one stage, the school decided to run a trade fair, a sort of glorified...money-making affair where you invited various industries to come and put up stalls. We had the police there, we had the Army there, we had the Air Force.

And he and I volunteered to run this thing, to run this trade fair. Interesting coincidences, but I won't go into that. As a result of that, I produced a painting called "The Organizers". That was the very first one that started to become figurative, more figurative than anything I'd done before, which was all this sort of gestural landscape.

It was actually commented on by a critic in the Contemporary Art Society's exhibition. Whether one responds to a little bit of praise or not, but that certainly caused me to further go down that track.

And so I started a line of what Elwyn Lynn graciously called...satirical...I don't know that he used the word "pop," but Daniel Thomas did, pictures and led to the one that won the Sulman.

Peter Pinson: And one of the critics said that that Sulman prize winning picture, which I think was the fifth prize you won that year, the critic said that that really announced the firm arrival of Pop Art in Australia.

Ken Reinhard: Well it's very nice of him to say that. It certainly was different to both American and British pop. It was something that grew out of a personal experience, which I found harkened back to somebody saying, "The best work you produce is what you produce from personal experience."

And "The Organizers", that picture I referred to in regards to the trade fair, that was a personal experience. The one that won the Sulman was about art openings, was a very satirical comment on art exhibitions and the openings and the sort of people that go there and the comments they make, comments in little balloons out of their mouth.

So, it was very gracious to say, it was the entry of. There are a number of other people who obviously would be regarded as pop at the time, one was Michael Allen Shaw. It was Michael who had come out from England, so there was an influence in his work of the English pop.

Peter Pinson: There were not many pop artists in Sydney at the time. Michael Allan Shaw, Richard Larter, Allen Oldfield perhaps, Dick Watkins. Were you in contact with these other artists who were beginning to deal with pop art?

Ken Reinhard: Only, Peter, in as much their work was in Contemporary Art Society exhibitions. The Contemporary Art Society at that time was fairly strong. It used to have at least two exhibitions a year apart from one which they called "The Young Contemporaries." It used to have a sort of...summer and winter show usually in Farmers Blaxland Galleries as it was at the time. And their work I would see there.

But I think their paintings did draw more on what I alluded to earlier in the English style of Pop. It was more painterly. Mine tended to be a little crisper, not that it was better. It was just different and probably drew more on the American side of Pop in that sense.

Peter Pinson: Although the satirical and whimsical character related perhaps more to English Pop than American Pop.

Ken Reinhard: Yes, and that's interesting because it was the comments by the critics [laughs] once again. How weak can you be that you're being influenced by the critics? The constant referral to my work as being satirical and whimsical and aligning what I did with the work of Martin Sharp, caused me to think, "I want my stuff to be different."

So I in fact took a positive step if you like to call it that and tried to eliminate the whimsy and the satirical element from a painting. I took certain things out of the pictures, the nudes, the checks, the arrows, the words, the numbers, and started making what I considered to be abstract pictures using those elements.

Peter Pinson: You mentioned "The Organizer" painting that you did at Granville Boys. There were certain drawing, graphic qualities about that work. One of the central elements of your early pop art would be the play between abstract shapes and drawn female figures. How did you come to this idea of drawing on a masonite surface?

Ken Reinhard: Probably because I was still hung up on life drawing from when I was a student and I liked drawing. I enjoyed drawing, so drawing was an element in it. But I distorted the drawing because, I don't know, it's facile to say that it was searching for something that was more me than a straight life drawing or a straight abstraction.

And the elements in the abstraction, certainly in "The Organizers" were these sort of off-shaped circles that were nudged out of shape and looked a bit like TV screens. Probably my addiction to television caused that to happen. It's very hard to analyze yourself and say what were influences and what weren't.

But looking back on it, and now we're going back, what, 40 years, are we? '65 to 2013, it's got to be...nearly 50 years. It is 50 years. You sort of look at the things and say, "Well, is that what caused it or what did cause this to happen in that way?"

Peter Pinson: The female figures in those paintings of the middle 60s, they're neither cold and arid as you might find in some classical liferoom study of the figure nor are they voluptuous as you sometimes find in the paintings of people like Tom Wesselmann, the American pop artist. There's a slightly erotic girl next door quality about them. What would you say to that?

Ken Reinhard: I'm delighted [laughs] if you think that's how it looks.

The models in all of my work since the days when I was...since the mid-60s, right, the mid-60s, have all been...20 year olds from next door. None of them were next door. In most instances, that was students...students who were interested in modeling and who I paid, in most instances, with a picture except the latest ones where I paid money.

But you now, they were the very first ones, in 1965, the lass was a student at Fairfield Girls High School, which was my first teaching appointment, and left there and went on to Teachers College and was out teaching and got in touch. I said, "Would she model for me?" and she did and they're the drawings. So it's young.

It was through doing those drawings that I went...moved to photography. Because I found to do a drawing on a four by three foot...surface would take me at least half a day if not more. Where in the same time I could take hundreds of photographs and then choose what I wanted. I then gave up the drawing. From then on, they've been photographs.

Peter Pinson: You mentioned you gave up drawing the figure and moved to far greater abstraction. The other movement that was gaining ground at the time in the mid-60s was the formal color abstraction group of artists who would later exhibit in the Field exhibition. You were never tempted to go all the way to abstraction.

Ken Reinhard: No, because there seems a logical to me...a logical development from being influenced to do abstract landscapes through the personal experiences that brought about..."The Organizers" and the public/private preview the Sulman won, through to a reaction to being labeled as cynical and comic strip.

To drop out the elements that caused me to be seen as cynical, and to just use the figure and the abstract shapes, and it wasn't...I wasn't sort of thinking about joining any club or clan or group, or whatever it was, so obviously I was eliminated from any of them. But that didn't matter.

I just pursued using any of those things. Once I felt...there were two things that brought about the photograph. Three things. One was the fact that I took so long to do the drawing. Two was a picture I had purchased from the Clune Galleries. That was a photo-litho, I think it was called. It was three feet by four feet, and it was a photographic print, only it was on newsprint so it wasn't a good photograph.

It was a print of some sort...of the English football team running onto the SCG when they beat Australia, or Australia beat them. I'm not sure which. The front page of the Sydney Morning Herald, and it was blown up to that size. Blowing something up to that size intrigued me.

The next thing was a book by Sam Haskins which I bought called Cowboy Kate, and it had full-page nudes, beautifully photographed. And I thought, OK, photography can be blown up to that size and I don't do the drawings. So the nudes sort of stuck. I couldn't get rid of the geometric shapes from the days in high school when I [laughs] did solid geometry.

And these things all came together in what I did for some years, and even up until now where there are photographs in many instances now, not nudes. They have the geometric shapes, and the letters and numbers which fascinated me. I wasn't part of that color field movement. I wasn't part of anything, I don't think. I just did my own thing.

Peter Pinson: The 1960s saw a number of quite important exhibitions of international contemporary art exhibited at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Were those exhibitions of interest to you?

Ken Reinhard: I remember seeing...What was the one called that came to the Art Gallery of New South Wales?

Peter Pinson: Two Decades?

Ken Reinhard: American painting, was it? Yeah. I remember seeing them, and I would regularly see these things. I would...Let me tell you a little story.

Mike Kitching and I were quite good friends, and I started collecting...receiving Art International. Mike rang me up one day and he said, "The greatest joy I have is to go through Art International and discover that nobody's doing what I'm doing. And I must say that something's similar with reaction to these big paintings from America.

And I must say that my very first trip overseas to see the real thing, I was delighted to see that I was doing something different to everybody. Just slightly, but it was different. It was me.

Peter Pinson: Then, in 1967 came the Engine Exhibition, an exhibition of three artists, Syd Ball, Col Jordan, and yourself. All of you were working in a clean, crisp manner. Work that was, so to speak, engineered. How did that exhibition come about?

Ken Reinhard: That's a very good question, because I can't remember exactly. Col and I...met, and we sort of reminisced because we'd both been to the same high school. We both ended up as teachers...even though he was a year older than me. So he was obviously born in '35.

And I think we met because his wife...his first wife, had her hair done at the hairdressing salon where my wife worked, and we sort of met and realized that we had this background in common. Syd Ball..I think I was introduced to Syd by Elwyn Lynn when he came back from America.

We sort of chatted, and the three of us...somehow came together and realized that this would be an interesting way of doing something. Putting our work together because there were elements in common. Certainly, the hard-edged stuff of Syd's and Col's related, and there was an edge in mine, although I still had photographed nudes in them.

And you know, I had three-dimensional shapes, which also related to Col's. The whole thing worked as a group exhibition by three people. We were able to arrange it through..de Taliga girl, what was her name? Marie de Teliga ran the gallery at the time, at Farmers. It wasn't Farmers. Might have been Grace Brothers by then.

And so it happened. We produced a catalog, posters, and what have you. It took off like a lead balloon. [laughs] Well, it wasn't until many years later that people finally realized that it happened, I think.

The fact that it wasn't in a state gallery, it wasn't in a dealer gallery...meant that unless you're used to going to that gallery, the Blaxland Gallery, or saw the posters, or if you did go and see it, people probably...it might have fallen on deaf ears a bit. Syd had just got back from America and his stuff was very close to what they were doing there, related to there.

Col was probably a little bit of a lone voice in he was doing. Certainly apart from my Sulman one. I don't think anybody knew or cared what we were doing, but it was a good show, and it's only years later that people said, "Do you remember that Engine show, it was a bit before its time."

Peter Pinson: It was a big exhibition. Col was represented both by paintings and sculptures, so he was bringing his stripes into a three-dimensional format. Syd was on top of his form. Both of them would the next year be starring in the Field Exhibition. So you're right. It is an exhibition that art historians have unfairly overlooked.

In 1968, the year of the Field, you had an exhibition at the Bonython Galleries. Big galleries, sleek, stylish. The work that you showed there that year seemed to involve all the senses. Not just sight but also hearing and smell. Can you tell us about the multimedia, multi-sensory works in that exhibition?

Ken Reinhard: I'm just trying to think whether that was the one that had the cars in it. I think it was. I borrowed...two Alfa Romeos...no one Alfa Romeo. It might've been two, and a motorbike from Honda. Because of the size of the gallery, it had a courtyard. There was a laneway, came into the courtyard, and from the courtyard there were these very wide doors that went into the gallery space.

And it was a good U-shaped gallery. Kim kindly allowed me to have the lot of it. We had a couple of Alfa Romeo cars in there. It may only have been one, but certainly a car and a motorbike. And I was making sculptures of female bodies. I wasn't making them. They were window dressers' dummies that I had specially made, so they had no joins.

After they were made, they cut them down through the center, and they were chrome-plated, which was a difficult exercise because they had put bricks in them to keep them down in the tanks for the chrome plating process. And then I joined them back together with a sheet of fluorescent pink perspex in the join, and put lights on either side which went to a cable out the back. They lit up.

I also made, in my carport, at Epping, where we were living at the time, what I called "Artcomp", which was my interpretation of a computer. It was six feet square by 18 inches deep. It had rows of lights and disks that went round, and all this sort of thing. Fortunately, it was on casters so it could be wheeled around, because it's as heavy as all get-out. And it had a light hanging off the side of it.

And I did another one, a tall one, which was called...that was "Artcomp", and this was "Enviromachine". That's right. It was about nine feet high. It had lights in it, and it had wheels that went round, and it made noises. It actually puffed perfume. There were two glass canisters on the side.

The opening night, I spent more than I should have on a litre of Arpege perfume, which was put in it. There was a little tap on the bottom which was just enough for it to drip through and be blown out. Of course, everyone who went there couldn't smell it, so they turned the tap on. We went through a litre of Arpege in the evening. The gallery stinked to high heaven.

That one made noises. Projected onto the wall as well. There was a projector in the top of it. So it involved the environment, as it was called "Enviromachine". There were a whole lot of other things that made noises and had lights flashing and so on in that show.

Peter Pinson: There'd never been anything like that in Australian art before.

Ken Reinhard: I don't think so. Even now, I mean, the kinetic stuff that Frank Hinder did was very different to what I was doing, and there hasn't been too many other people involved in kinetics in that way. I mean I have a... well actually the Enviromachine ended up in the gallery in Melbourne, where it was re-shown in 19...2004 I think it was, I got the catalog there.

The computer one is out in the garage, sitting there, glowing and...no it's not. It's sitting there all right. But it was, fair...well...as I said, there was a car in it, this Alfa Romeo sport 1750 GTV, which had this chrome plated figure standing beside it. So, the two things resonated with one another.

In fact it was the reason...well, I borrowed the car under the pretense that I was going to buy one, which I did. It was probably a silly thing to do. But I had four or five Alfa Romeo's in my time. It was an interesting exhibition.

Peter Pinson: But you saw this high performance, well designed European car tradition as being a form of sculpture, didn't you?

Ken Reinhard: Absolutely. It's always been some hidden desire of mine to put out an exhibition called, "Car Art", in which I doctor...decorate, or do something to a series of very smart European cars. Alfas, and Audis, and BMWs and so on. I haven't put it to anybody, I've never done it. It would be interesting.

Because I do find the top end of cars to be beautifully designed. I'm sure the designers think the same. But they are a...they are something I have always had a mild passion about. I've always owned, since the very first car I ever owned, I've always owned a European car.

The Saab I've got now, even though they've stopped manufacturing Saabs, it's the one I've had for the longest period. I've had it for 15 years.

Peter Pinson: In 1974, you were appointed foundation head of The School of Art at Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education. You continued to lead the state's largest tertiary art college, until 1998. Did the responsibilities of that significant educational role impact on your art work?

Ken Reinhard: Well, from '74...I don't have a CV with me at the moment, but I think till '84, I didn't have an exhibition in a dealer or commercial gallery. I did have two shows in my studio.

Mainly because, even though most of my waking hours were involved in how the school was developing, I still...you still have a commitment to make things, and I did. I made small pictures and sculptures and that was what was shown in the studio. It was fortunate that I had a decent size studio.

But the impact was primarily that you can't fit all of that into 24 hours. So something had to give and the art had to give, because the responsibility to develop the school from nothing was the most important.

When I was appointed in 1974, 23rd of October, there was me and nothing else. And I was told by the principal of the college, that we were a part of, that by March...the beginning of March the following year I would have 600 students. So, we had to appoint staff, we had to find some where to accommodate the school. We had to get equipment, we had to write courses.

We started two weeks late, which wasn't too bad considering, with a lot of help from two people in particular, Col Jordan and Rod Milgate, who labored many hours with me over writing courses and ordering equipment, and that sort of thing.

We got it together, and we occupied good old East Sydney Tech. Because we took over the National Art School, we became, if there was such a thing, as the National Art School, I mean the school of art in Alexander Mackie College.

We also occupied, what is now Robin Gibson's gallery, and the apartments next door which then was a...it was a deceased Marist Brother High School, if you can call it that. But we moved in there and fixed it up. The staff were in the...what is now the gallery, and the students had the studios in the main part of the school. That and East Sydney.

And we also had a building in Cumberland street, in the Rocks, which is right beside the Harbor Bridge. We had a six story building there which used to belong to Johnson and Johnson. So, we had a school, a jail and a baby powder factory.

Peter Pinson: During your position as head of the art school, you did have three exhibitions at the Bloomfield Gallery in Sydney.

Ken Reinhard: That was after the eight...the 84, I think, was about the first one of those, then there was another one two years later at Bloomfield Galleries, yeah.

Peter Pinson: And you turn to it, a new theme there of signs.

Ken Reinhard: Well, I probably...I'd always been fascinated by the signs on the road. It's interesting when you go in via, from here, so into the city. And you have a look at the signs that are along the side of the road, they just get to the point where there's such a conglomeration of them, that you wonder if anybody can take note of them, which ever one they are suppose to be watching.

So, yes, I had an exhibition which I've called "Signs", and even though it had large, I'm not supposed to be looking there...large pictures, there were nudes, large, life size nude photographs, standing in front of them were road signs. The connection is simply an abstract one. People would like to interpret it as having some secret hidden or involved meaning, but to me they're simply abstract arrangements.

Peter Pinson: They also relate back to those geometric formats that came from descriptive geometry and drawing.

Ken Reinhard: Absolutely. Right back to that.

Peter Pinson: You also included banners on some of the works of that time.

Ken Reinhard: Yes. That was the next show. Although I've got the two muddled up now. I wish I had the thing in front of me. Yes, my long time partner did some sewing for me. Barbara volunteered to sew on these...stitch onto these banners, some of the motifs that I use in the pictures, the diagonal lines, and the checks and so forth. They were put on as little flags on the front of some of the photographs.

I think that was the one before the signs. I'm not sure exactly, but it was interesting because I was then using Cibachrome transparencies and having them blown up and printed onto canvas. Life size figures printed on canvas.

Which at that time was a slightly different process to what you do now. You can get your stuff printed onto canvas by digital means. In those days they were Cibachrome taken on a 35 millimeter camera, and they had to peel of the back of the resin coated paper.

So, it was printed on the resin coated surface, then they'd peel the paper off the back and it would be heat pressed onto canvas. Hell of a process. I didn't do it, I had to pay for it to be done. They were the ones that had the signs...the little flags on them. The lot with the signs in front of them were simply printed on paper, and were put in very elaborate frames.

There must have been a trip overseas, because I couldn't get it out of my head, going to The Louvre and the British Museum, the V&A and so forth. So, the size of the frames around a lot of these early paintings, and I knew it didn't make it any better, but I was fascinated with the idea of putting large frames around the nudes, the photographic nudes. Photograph...the frame.

So there are a number of quite big, life size nudes with quite elaborate gold frames around them, and they were the ones that had road signs in front of them.

Peter Pinson: The frames were quite shocking to some people who visited that exhibition. They were used to everything with you being clean and crisp, maybe a aluminum and perspex as a frame, but to actually have ornate gold frames. You did see that as being, as well as referencing museums, was there a slightly tongue in cheek quality about the use of those sort of frames?

Ken Reinhard: I thought they looked good. And I was a little bit sort of..I suppose I was hoping to raise the public's perception of the photograph to be art. Not that I'm brandishing any flag, or pushing any bandwagon, when the big frame went around the oil painting everybody marveled at this being a wonderful painting, and I thought, "To hell with that. I'll put a big frame around the photograph."

If that disturbed them, well and good. I mean, I'm not out to provide answers. I love asking questions, but I'm not necessarily wanting to provide answers. People can interpret it any way they like.

Peter Pinson: Some of the imagery that appears in those photographs, let's say, scenes in Venice beside a canal, seem to be candid photographs. They haven't been carefully arranged. Whereas a number of the figures that you've photographed, it does look as if you've been suggesting what the pose might be to the model. Can you talk about that issue, of composed photographs and candid photographs? Natural photographs?

Ken Reinhard: The Venice ones came about after a trip overseas, which Barb and I took.

Peter Pinson: To see the Venice Biennale?

Ken Reinhard: Yes. Actually that particular visit we saw Venice Biennale, The Kassel Documenta and the Basel Art Fair. it was a very interesting trip from that point of view. But I just took...I wish I'd had a digital camera, which I didn't, it was a normal 35 mil, Nikon, and I just took photos. Happy snaps as I went around.

I mean, Venice you can't take a bad photo. It's just there, beautiful laid out for you. So I just happy snapped every where. In the case of the photos of the nudes. They're all taken at home, in the studio for example. And therefore you can say, "Sit this way or that, or sit on this or whatever." So they are some what contrived.

And the Venice shots, and the shots of the...well the Venice shorts are very happy snappy. Those are where I've used motor cars usually taken at the Sydney motor show. And there...I realize I have a whole set of photos from one of the motor shows, where I take the back of the car, which I couldn't understand why, but there's rows and rows of these photos taken at the back at the angle looking towards the front of a whole range of new models in the car line.

So apart from the process, happy snaps of Venice, somewhat controlled shots of the model, most of it is...starts with an I, what word am I looking for? ... Right off the top of my head. Instinctive, I knew it started with I. Most of it's instinctive.

Peter Pinson: You had completed a small number of sculptures for public spaces. Most notably the Marland House Sculpture in Melbourne. How did that commission come about? How did you conceive that sculpture as functioning?

Ken Reinhard: It was a competition. It was run...they invited people to...invited them to go down and look at the site. I think we got paid the airfare or something, and then to submit a marquette. The site was this plaza, I suppose. It was an open space in front of this newly erected, very tall building.

And I submitted my marquette, which was a series of cubes. They were 12 inch ones in the marquette, made of a stainless steel frame and infilled with acrylic...colored acrylic sheets.

Somehow they got to the bottom of the barrel and there was mine, after they had foisted out all the ones on top. So I was named the winner. I think it was $20,000 I got, in whatever the year was. Did you say the year? No. Which was quite a lot of money.

But it cost virtually every penny of that. The only thing I ended up with was a wrist watch, which now won't go because it's one that takes batteries that they don't make. It was manufactured in Sydney, down in Woolloomooloo, by a firm that put the front shaped walls in the Opera House.

The people who did that, made these cubes and they were infilled with glass. Each one was probably five foot square, five foot cube. Five feet in every direction. They were sealed, the glass, which was...the one they dip into oil. What's it called? Toughened, toughened glass. They were fixed into the frame with the same sealant that the glass in the front Opera House was done.

So the cubes, which must have been one, two, three, four, five. Five, were taken down on the back of a semi trailer to Melbourne and all survived in one piece, and were installed on this forecourt in front of the Marland House. It was very interesting, because they were designed with trap doors in the bottom of each cube which sat on a plinth.

There was a st...a...brick plinth...which was, had tiles on it. They sat on that with a hole that went into the car park underneath, so the system of fixing them was bolting them down to this narrow plinth, coming up from the car park were holes were drilled into the concrete, up inside the cube.

And I knew what that was, because I had to go in and paint. There was chamferred piece around the bottom, which hid the bolts that went down into the...to hold them in place and I had to paint that matte black around the inside.

Then the other pieces that went in, there was a box that went over the top of the manhole, and other shaped pieces of perspex and chrome plated cubes and things. Then when you got out there was a trap door which was based on the one used in a submarine, because one of the people working in this place in Woolloomooloo, was a submariner and an engineer. And he also knew how to do this.

These things were sealed, and there were little nipples there which were attached to pipeline, which went off to dry nitrogen. They were pumped full of dry nitrogen to make sure that there was no condensation inside and they would last indefinitely. Which they would have, except that the building was purchased by an overseas company who decided they didn't want the things at the front.

They were chuffed off somewhere and they extended the building out there. Well they were chuffed of as it turned out, to a back paddock outside the McClelland Gallery and Sculpture Park and were discovered by, this is a long story, I am sorry to be going on, by the director of the gallery.

Who rang me and said, "I found your Marland House sculpture in the back paddock." He said, "Would you like it fixed up and installed"? I said, "I'd love it to be." So, he apparently got a grant from the government to re-fix the thing. It's now down there on a little hillock in front of the McLelland Gallery and Sculpture Path.

Peter Pinson: One of the perils that public sculpture faces is attracting the attention of vandals. But I don't think the Marland House sculpture was ever defaced in any way, was it?

Ken Reinhard: No. I don't think it was. And the glass...nobody tried any diamonds on the glass either. Strangely enough. Probably because it was...although opposite was...the big piece by...Australian who lived in America.

Peter Pinson: Clem Meadmore.

Ken Reinhard: Clem Meadmore. There's a big Clem Meadmore which was defaced. They had to fix that up. No it wasn't, except in a strange way. I don't know whether you want to hear the story. When it was finally installed, the person whose gallery I was going to show at down there in Melbourne, one Sweeney Reed, decided we needed some publicity.

And a chap who did publicity for Sweeney was also doing it for Marland House. So he arranged for some strippers from Sydney to come down to Melbourne, and to sit on top of the sculpture. In an effort to attract a bit of attention.

Which it did. It stopped the traffic. But nobody contacted the police, which was part of the whole scheme. Until he, Deeble his name was, something Deeble, sitting in a small Fiat on the other side of the road rang the police and complained. They finally came down and got the strippers off.

They didn't want to use strippers from Melbourne because that was going do them [laughs] out of their night's business if they were put in jail. So they paid for the ones to come down from Sydney. This, of course, made the front pages of the local papers. That was the only defacing that [laughs] might have taken place on the sculpture in Melbourne.

Peter Pinson: Did you see that as a departure from pop art?

Ken Reinhard: Well, the whole act might have been.

Peter Pinson: Not the act. I mean the sculpture itself.

Ken Reinhard: No, the sculpture...well the sculpture, they were cubes and the things inside them were the same abstract shapes I use in the pictures. So it was purely turning the picture from a flat surface into a three dimensional work.

Peter Pinson: Pop art or neo-pop attitudes seem to have found their way into recent Chinese art. Do you think pop art is little bit like Surrealism in that it's a tendency, an interest, an attitude that is going to continually refresh itself and find expression in different ways in different generations?

Ken Reinhard: I think the simple answer is yes. Because, these...it's amazing to talk with the young students now who are doing abstract expressionist paintings and think that they've just discovered it or to be doing something that is pop-related as though it's brand new without realizing that we did it all and bashed it to death in the 1960s.

So, yes, I think these things will reinvent themselves. Photorealism will reinvent itself. Certainly gestural abstraction will, has. Surrealism does. It think these things are very cyclic.

Peter Pinson: The New South Wales branch of the Contemporary Arts Society was a very valuable clearinghouse for many emerging artists and established artists with its monthly meetings where issues of contemporary development were discussed, where forums were held and so forth. Were those meetings influential for you?

Ken Reinhard: Yes. I went to them regularly. In fact, there was a woman who was the secretary to the Contemporary Art Society, who lived...where were we? We were living at Epping, she must have lived, no...yes, she lived in the next suburb or something. So, if I was going in, or I went from work, I was going home, I would drop her off, and so forth.

She was the secretary at the Macquarie Galleries, and must have mentioned my name to the two ladies who then ran the Macquarie. And they got in touch and asked if they could come out and have a look at some of my work, which they did. This has nothing to do with the Contemporary Art Society.

But they did, and it was the...they were primarily, at the time, pastels on paper. And they were the sort of...abstract landscapes and very abstracted figures. They said, "Yes, we'd love to give you a show." This is 1963, I think. So, they did.

And in any case, so they did...agreed to it, and the truck arrived and what came out of the truck really shocked them. Because it was all the satirical, early pop stuff that I did. Something called "Between Air Raid Siren and a Pop-up Towel Dispenser." And a triangular painting based on the topless fashion that had a brief occurrence down at Circular Quay, "The Wedding Breakfast." A whole lot of things that I had a real shot at.

And of course, this was a bit of a shock for them. So the exhibition went up and two pictures sold, one to James Gleason, who was critic for the "Sun" at the time, and the other to Barry Stern, who ran a gallery.

One was about...I think it was called the...the one Barry bought was called, it was to do with Anzac Day, no it wasn't, it was called "The Equalizer," that's right, and there was a dapper looking soul on one side with a tie. The body was split in half and the other half was obviously with a blue singlet that was the working man. So it was the middle-class and the working man, each holding a handle on either side of a mug of beer.

There are a whole lot of other things, too. But they came...that show came because of the connection, but I'd already had pictures hung in the Contemporary Art Society, so they had been aware. And my name had been mentioned in reviews, so that was a bit of luck.

Peter Pinson: We didn't discuss the furniture. And...do you see a parallel between this work and the furniture of the Memphis Folk? In that it's work designed by people who are architecturally highly visually-literate, and who are making something that is both a work of art and something that is functional at the same time.

Ken Reinhard: Very much so. I'm very enamoured of the Memphis people, the things that they did. I owned a very important piece which I had to sell because we needed money and all of the things that they make and do, I find quite exciting.

I think the difference between that and mine is that...there's not an attempt in theirs to integrate imagery from another place. It's very...they're very unified. They're very...they're very content in their wholeness. It's a very strange way of putting anything but the things are quite complete even though they aren't the obvious, aren't what we expected. They're different.

Mine still have a reference to what I do in two dimensions, whether it's the color or colors because they are always quite brightly colored, whether it's a photograph that you use, or the road sign. It's a painting gone..not a painting, it's a picture gone three-dimensional.

Peter Pinson: My own feeling is that if there was to be a room full of your very best work, these pieces would be in that room.

Ken Reinhard: Yeah, I would hope so. I mean I like this piece obviously, where we are sitting at. It includes elements underneath the dish on the top which are there to be seen. I once had a meal around this with the Rector of the Royal College of Art in London, which is interesting. So it's been touched by famous hands.

Peter Pinson: Particularly apposite since the Royal College is really where English pop art got its great impetus.

Ken Reinhard: That's right, that's right, yes.

Peter Pinson: Ken Reinhard, thank you.

Ken Reinhard: Thank you Peter.

Credits

Interviewer: Peter Pinson

Camera, lighting & sound: Cameron Glendinning

Video editing: Dr. Bob Jansen

Technical & assembly: Dr. Bob Jansen