Memory Jockish Holloway (b. 13 August 1946) is an American-born art historian, lecturer, art curator and critic and humanitarian who began her career in Australia in the 1970s, working and living there for twenty years before returning to America to the University of Massachusetts.
Training Holloway, born in Pennsylvania, studied in the cities of Berlin and Paris and spent 20 years in Australia, before moving to South Dartmouth, MA., and received an MA Certificate from Harvard, and an MA and Ph.D at the Courtauld Institute of Art 1995
Australia
Art critic Holloway was active from 1970 in Australia, was the art critic for newspapers The Melbourne Times 1977–78, The Australian 1978–81, The Age 1972–86, a contributor from 1982–88 to its Monthly Review supplement, and occasional contributor to The Herald. She wrote for Art + Australia 1980–1988. The Ewing and George Paton Gallery published her in its catalogues, and in 1976 its collective, including Holloway with Kiffy Carter, Gary Catalano, Lynne Cooke, Suzanne Davies, Ann Galbally, G.R. (Ross) Lansell, Charles Merewether, Bruce Pollard, Meredith Rogers and Ann Stephen began publication of Arts Melbourne a quarterly magazine, building on the success of Art Almanac, founded by the directors in 1974. Andrew Montana in Primitive & Pop: Keith Haring's Australia (Australian Scholarly Publishing 1984), notes that in Holloway's opinion Keith Haring's work was "sanitised graffiti" made "with his eyes glued to the art market.”
Style Holloway applied art-historical scholarship in her journalism without diluting it into cultural reportage or aesthetic opinion. She thus contributed to a strand of Australian criticism for which contemporary art was an intellectual product. When Denise Green, after successes in the USA, exhibited at Tolarno Galleries in Melbourne, The Age in August 1982 published two articles side-by-side: one a review of the show by Holloway, the other an interview with the artist by Philippa Hawker. Holloway's reaction to this savvy modernist is distinctly art-historical and theoretically informed, intellectually more aligned to writings of her near contemporary Terry Smith than to Daniel Thomas or Robert Hughes, a decade older than she, while remaining distinct from all three. By 1982, Holloway was well established in Australia not as a journalistic commentator but as a critic using close formal analysis, and historical context, being fluent in postwar European and American art discourse. Unlike Hughes' more polemical judgements, Holloway's eschews rhetoric for quiet authority grounded in method. While Daniel Thomas' writing for newspapers and galleries supported a connoisseur's interest with lucid exposition, Holloway, assuming her reader is critically literate and capable of following semiotic, structural, and modernist arguments without translation, is neither courting nor didactic. She is thus closest to Terry Smith’s contemporaneous insistence on the intellectual seriousness of art criticism, requiring attention to structure, temporality, and contexts of meaning in modern and postmodern art, though she is less theoretical, meta-critical or programmatic than Smith. Holloway attends to the internal logic of artworks within inherited modernist problems. It is evident that editor Peter Ellingsen felt obliged to include the Hawker interview being conscious of how Holloway, in her review, refuses biography or intention as the primary explanation of Green's work, preferring to read her painting as a system of signs shaped by historical precedent and conceptual constraint.
Reception Nevertheless, where it illuminates their work, Holloway does not avoid direct discourse with artists like Philip Guston in her articles, or in her July 1985 discussion with Bill Henson on his work, in which she concludes prophetically (given the later controversy) that: "Henson ventures into territory that has, until now, remained private, forbidden. That is why his photographs make us uncomfortable. Because we are intruders." Nor does Holloway avoid controversial judgements. Jenny Zimmer, in reaction to Holloway's review in The Age of Andrew Sibley show at Realities Gallery considers, in her discussion of his Circus series, that Holloway was "off the mark" in wanting "to limit the meaning of the pictures to a commentary on the alienation of the artist from society and his struggle for recognition, and to retain his individuality against the opposition of the masses" and in describing the paintings as "an index to the artist's most private fears and obsessions", the circus theme being judged to mean "artist as outsider". In her rejoinder, Zimmer merely asserts that "No profound artist could limit his description of the tragi-comic, ugly-beautiful world of the circus to his own concerns."
In July of 1982, when it was shown simultaneously with Popism and The Artist and the Printer at the NGV, Holloway takes George Paton Gallery curator Judy Annear to task over Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: "the more I looked at the work, the more I thought Benjamin had been misrepresented, mainly because many of these artists were making authentic original works that have an aura, and presence; qualities avoided by Benjamin's criteria" and accusing Annear of "jumping on the linguistic bandwagon of post-structuralism and semiotic theory." Conversely, while Holloway praises her colleague on The Age, Gary Catalano, as "the only writer who has fully realised the importance of light for the artist in his essay, 'The Incandescent World'", for the catalogue for Peter Booth's show at the Melbourne University Gallery, Catalano finds the curatorial thread too tenuous in her selections for Shipwrecked at 200 Gertrude Street. John McDonald however highlights the value of her article in Art Network on American Dennis Oppenheim.
Pat Hoffie, writing in Artlink remarks that "During the 1980s', both Memory Holloway and Paul Taylor described self-critical ambivalence as a typical characteristic of Australia's cultural identity. Holloway defined this tendency as 'skepticism'."
Holloway’s 1982 review in Art + Australia of Richard Haese’s Rebels and Precursors like many reviewers', affirms the book’s scholarly importance, and echoes Bernard Smith’s endorsement of Haese’s clarity of writing. "The intensity of political awareness in the 1930s and 1940s" she frames as a foreground concern of the author, not a detached ideological backdrop, by which artists of the period understood themselves as public intellectuals beyond disciplinary boundaries. While other reviewers concentrate on his narrative of the emergence of Australian modernism, Holloway notes how these painters were "not content to be regarded simply as creators of beautiful objects, and removed from the concerns of the real world. If art were a reflection of society then it should encompass and reflect the events that happen in society", quoting Haese: "it was a time when artists refused to see themselves or be seen by their literary friends as painters in a narrow sense. They could be and were both poets and painters, social critics and aestheticians, ideologues and craftsmen, literary editors and art activists — the old categories were irrelevant." From her broader interest in how cultural institutions regulate meaning and legitimacy, Holloway underscores Haese’s account of conservative resistance—especially of the Australian Academy of Art, state galleries, and figures such as Menzies, Daryl Lindsay, and J. S. MacDonald—not simply as aesthetic opposition to modernism but as political suppression of deeper ideological struggles within Australian society. Holloway highlights the role Haese discovers of patrons, writers, and critics—John and Sunday Reed, Max Harris, Basil Burdett, Adrian Lawlor—supporting "a vital and exciting intellectual dialogue, which", she writes "unfortunately, no longer exists", praising Haese’s book as a corrective to contemporary cultural amnesia. Holloway is unusually explicit in valuing Haese’s partiality, aligning it with a Baudelairean model of criticism that is committed, evaluative, and historically situated. In doing so, she distinguishes herself from more detached academic reviewers Charles Merewether (in National Times, 1981), and Jill Graham (in Art & Text, 1982).
American art Drawing on her visits there, and her contacts and origins in, America, Holloway continued in the late 1980s to provide The Age with distinctive reviews such as that for the Paul Klee retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art:In 'Outbreak of Fear', done in 1939, Klee confirmed the mood which predominated in his mind. It shows a figure cut into bits and flattened out on the page, as though one of the artist's puppets had come apart at the seams. The figure is trapped in an airless space. Paradoxically, these final works are bolder, more confident, broader, than anything Klee had done before. They are proof of the artist's anguish, of his inability to alter the historical events of the time, but they also demonstrate the belief in the power of art to regenerate at a time when destruction was so close at hand.Jeffrey Makin, reviewing the NGV's late 1983 Vox Pop for Art + Australia, and objecting to its slavish following of American trends finds himself echoing Holloway's comment that the exhibition "joined the long camel train of shows of this sort which have appeared in Europe and Britain... at the tail end," and agreeing with her opinion that Paul Boston's work was the most original in it.
Writing in 1987, Holloway contrasts the scale and intensity of the New York art world with the more modest, publicly-sponsored Australian scene, portraying American art culture as highly competitive and market-driven, where recognition—particularly through the Whitney Biennial—can rapidly transform an artist’s career and lifestyle, unlike the incremental gains typical in Australia. She presents the Whitney as both a powerful institutional arbiter and a focus of ritualised criticism, comparable in role, if not magnitude, to the Sydney Biennale. She also identifies a stylistic shift away from neo-expressionism toward cool, technologically inflected abstraction, photography, and 'simulationist' (appropriative) practices concerned with media, appearance, and consumption. Referring to the political climate of Reagan-era America, her Age article concludes that aesthetic values, institutional power, and market forces shape contemporary art in ways largely unavailable within the Australian context.
Through Gertrude Street, and in her frequent reviews, Holloway encouraged emerging art, Jan Murray's Berlin series for example, and championed that which 'throbb[ed] with energy and activity' from Roar Studios.
Academic Employed from the early 70s as its first lecturer in the Department of Visual Arts, Monash University, Melbourne, in 1983 Holloway is described as "lecturer in art and architecture of the twentieth-century". Ian McLean who studied at Monash University with fellow student Paul Taylor remembered: the…American lecturer, Memory Holloway, and Patrick McCaughey, drew you into the world of ideas. It created a lively atmosphere of true believers in contemporary art, and for Tim Abdallah who became a partner in Gerstman Abdallah Fine Arts International and subsequently administered their new gallery in Cologne, "It was an inspiring course and it fired up my interest in Italian Rennaissance art."
Of McCaughey, when he was director of the National Gallery of Victoria, Holloway praised his success: "You have to go back to English traditions, to Kenneth Clark or Roger Fry, to see how well Patrick combines connoisseurship and criticism. He's not a great art historian, but he is a great populariser of art and he's brought the gallery to life again."