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By the end of the 1960s, art of the international avant-garde was rarely seen in Australian public galleries. 1967 saw 'Two Decades of American Painting', which represented a retrospective of late formalism, but a 1968 survey of Marcel Duchamp provided our first real exposure to more progressive ideas - and even that was a posthumous touring exhibition. At the time there was no Biennale of Sydney, no Australia Council for the Arts, no museum with a contemporary curator - although Daniel Thomas at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) clearly had a deep personal commitment to new art - and there were no publicly funded contemporary art spaces. In this impoverished art scene the young Sydney collector and textile businessman John Kaldor began thinking of novel ways to develop an appreciation of the international avant-garde in Australia ...

In 1968 Kaldor also acquired a small Package by the young Bulgarian-born artist Christo. Recognising an artistic link to Duchamp, whose work he had seen at the AGNSW earlier that year, Kaldor then invited Christo and his wife and collaborator Jeanne-Claude to Sydney as visiting artists. The original idea had been to organise a series of public lectures and perhaps exhibit some wrapped objects, but the artists already had a project in mind. Their proposal to wrap a section of Californian coastline had recently been rejected and they were still looking for an alternative site. Kaldor jumped at the chance, offering to secure a location for their project. While Australia has over 36,000 km of coast, negotiating access to a site near a city was always going to be extraordinarily difficult. Faced with penetrating local politics, laws and by-laws, not to mention the physical and economic challenges, anyone with more practical experience would almost certainly have abandoned the idea very quickly. But against all logic, and by dint of youthful enthusiasm and relative inexperience, Kaldor somehow succeeded ...

Kaldor had not envisaged Wrapped coast as the first of a series of public commissions, but working with Christo and Jeanne-Claude was so exhilarating for everyone involved, and for the general public, that he was inspired to continue. And so Kaldor Public Art Projects (KPAP) was launched. In the presentation of contemporary commissions in public spaces, Kaldor had few precedents to guide him: it would be a further decade before the non-profit Public Art Fund was formed in New York, and a further eight years, in 1985, before Artangel began commissioning innovative projects in London ...

After Szeemann's visit, the third project came straight from swinging London. In 1969 Gilbert &George were students at St Martin's where they began presenting themselves as living sculptures. I was enjoying the Blind Faith concert in London's Hyde Park on a gorgeous sunny Saturday when they turned up for their first public appearance. Everyone wore kaftans and beads except these two 'business men' in black suits wielding walking canes. In the context of the concert their incongruous formality seemed pretty weird, but their gilded faces and hands lifted the experience to a surreal plane. Given the hallucinogenic state of the crowd, I doubt if many people noticed anything unusual at all. Four years later, in 1973, Gilbert &George tripped to Sydney to perform a more developed piece, The singing sculpture, 1969-73 ...

Let's now jump a quarter of a century - and into the future. To commemorate the 40th anniversary of KPAP, Kaldor has invited young Cologne-based Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi to Sydney to make a new project: a major intervention outside the AGNSW ...

If one of the purposes of contemporary art is to allow us to see the world differently and to experience the everyday as if for the first time, then Nishi's work is exemplary. In the tradition of Duchamp and surrealism, things have been made strange. Scale has been subverted or accentuated while context has become the stuff of dreams. Like Christo and Jeanne-Claude's wrapping of Little Bay, something monumental but made invisible to us through familiarity has been recontextualised and rendered unforgettable.

One of the small tragedies in contemporary culture is that some artists, curators, writers and collectors have become so closely identified with the moment of their own emergence that in struggling to sustain that moment they have become fossilised. In a remarkably short period of time they represent a living history that can hardly be described as contemporary any more. Not so Kaldor. His point has not been about novelty for its own sake but about keeping an open mind, seeing new opportunities in artistic practice and being responsive to creativity in whatever shape or form.

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Spring 2009 issue.