Titled after an early work by Melbourne-based artist group DAMP (‘Art holds a high place in my life’, 1997), this substantial monograph by curator and scholar Rosemary Forde chronicles nearly 30 years of DAMP’s practice. Art Holds a High Place in my Life: DAMP Monograph 1995- includes reproduced archival essays, ephemera, reviews, alongside new critical writing and extensive visual documentation, as well as notes and drawings from DAMP’s archive. DAMP is the long-lasting result of a class project, initiated through the pedagogical experiments of artist-educator Geoff Lowe at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1995. With a shifting membership, DAMP's artistic identity is dispersed unevenly amongst at least seventy-five individual members who have joined and left the ranks over the past nearly three decades. Made up of artists, students, educators, architects, musicians, filmmakers, non-artists, and those who persistently asked to join, DAMP's membership is representative of a particular Melbournian artist peer group, embedded in a burgeoning artist-run scene.

DAMP was one of the first artist groups in 1990s Australia to work in social practice and relational aesthetics, to experiment with art and pedagogy, and in many cases, to exchange places with their audiences. Working across media including performance, video, painting, social exchange, public art, sculpture and curation, DAMP’s practice has at times been ephemeral, not easily collected, and not easily categorised. While dozens of short catalogue essays and reviews have referenced their work, Art Holds a High Place in My Life is the only book-length publication to provide a critical record of their pioneering artistic practice.

Writers reprinted in the publication include notable critics, curators and artists such as Hannah Matthews, Stuart Koop, Jarrod Rawlins, Andrew McQualter, Brigid Magner, Megan Backhouse, and Marc Misic. Rosemary Forde’s new essay complements these historic texts, critically positioning the group’s history, artistic practice, and ongoing legacy.Anne Marsh has highlighted the ‘scholarly neglect of our visual culture’ and scarcity of research and books on Australian artists, she estimates there are ‘thousands of monographs and essays that need to be written about Australian art’. Anthony Gardner raised similar concerns when writing of the ‘resounding lack of global traction’ for Australian art and artists. He attributes this in part to the Australian art sector’s ‘less than stellar record of self-historicisation, of documenting and disseminating their own histories’.

Through Art Holds a High Place in my Life: DAMP Monograph 1995-, Rosemary Forde offers a model for redressing this imbalance. Her scholarship and her experimentation with the monograph form extends 3-ply’s interest in artist-led and curator-led monographs on under-recognized Australian artists, including More Than What There Is by Elizabeth Newman, and 19 Desires and One Belief by Angela Brennan.

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