Design and Art Australia Online

On Sacred Land, 1” video, 18 minutes, 1983-4John Hughes with Peter KennedyAnimation: John Hansen
Warning to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers: this film may contain images of deceased persons …

November Eleven: Work in Progress, 1” video, 19 minutes, 1981John Hughes with Peter KennedyCast: Carolyn Howard, Paul Davies
November Eleven: Work in Progress is the moving image component of an installation work designed by Peter Kennedy,1 (installation two in a series of three) using a format identical with the earlier installation and again featuring a painted banner (‘November Eleven – An Australian History’, oil on canvas 274 × 305 cm, 1980-1) referencing the tradition of trade union banners, their street performance, and presented here in the service of a critical ‘history painting’.
The video develops themes and strategies from the earlier video, November Eleven (1979), deploying advertising, newsreel footage, children’s books as modes of found ‘performance’ in an ironic (‘blue screen’) play of ‘history’ and myth working around the dual constellations: 1890/1975 and 1968/1981.

1Bernice Murphy (curator) (1981) Australian Perspecta 1981, A biennial survey of contemporary Australian art, ...

November ElevenU-matic video, 18 minutes, 1979John Hughes, Andrew Scollo with Peter KennedySound: John Scott, Robert MooreVideo colorizing Robert Randall, Frank Bendinelli

November Eleven is the moving image component of an installation work designed by Peter Kennedy for the Biennale of Sydney in 1979.
Featuring the two combined elements of painted banner (‘November Eleven’, oil on canvas, 274 × 305 cm) 1978-79,1 and video (‘November Eleven’, U-matic video), this installation was produced in the aftermath of Australia’s “constitutional coup” when Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s Labor government was dismissed by the Governor General, Sir John Kerr, on November 11, 1975.
While the banner references trade union banners of the 1890s – the period when Australia’s constitution was written – the video deploys found material (dada-like) from radio and television coverage of the events of 1975 in a form later known as ‘scratch video’, to evoke an oppositional polemic using the ...

Introductions, 16mm colour film and video formats, 45 minutes, 1974 – 76Peter Kennedy

“Introductions” is, in part, a synthesis of those instances of radical thought identified by Peter Kennedy in his interviews with the artist subjects of his film ‘Other than Art’s Sake’, 1973-1974, combined with his own, evolving, concepts of a socially directed art practice.
Begun in 1974 and completed in 1976, ‘Introductions’ documents Kennedy’s creative interaction with four recreational groups – a hot rod club, an embroidery guild, a bushwalking club, and a marching girl club – each club representing a different cultural context and social experience either within Sydney’s inner suburbs or, as was then the case, that city’s more marginalised, outer western suburbs.
The film, or video as presented in a gallery exhibition, presents aspects of each groups’ activities, while also explaining the intention of the project in documentary mode …

Presented at Inhibodress as Trans Art 1: Idea Demonstrations.
Mike Parr and Peter Kennedy had been producing sets of instructions for performances, some of which could be realised …

Over two evenings in late 1971, Mike Parr and Peter Kennedy presented 80 minutes of video tapes they had made over the previous months …