ART OF AUSTRALIA! It could be that this title suggests art necessarily belongs to a place. And maybe art does. Can there be anything too bad about that? Well, in the case of Australia, declared by one marginally nationalistic poet to be the “oldest of lands” (or something along those lines), the ‘art’ that Australian people think of when they write or say ‘art’ is mostly the art of Europeans. Even those within the non-Aboriginal community who have miraculously, albeit belatedly, pretended to bond with their Aboriginal brothers and sisters, tend to turn to European aesthetic principals when writing or talking about Australian art. Oh my God, and aren’t there a lot of Australians who, while steering clear of Aboriginal people, have – following a lead from the rest of the world - cultivated a love for Aboriginal art? These days some even trace their lineage in the hope of finding a wee drop of Aboriginal blood in there somewhere through which they might establish a genuine spiritual bond with the land. Already, by the thirty-second page of McDonald’s illustrated text, the reader has encountered 12 images by Europeans and by Aborigines depicting Aboriginal people. Among these is the extraordinarily powerful image, Bust of the Same Aboriginal, 1800-04 by Nicholas-Martin Petit as well as, from a Northern Territory rock shelter: ‘The legendary Lightening Brothers who brought the storms and torrential rains.’
It must be remembered that when Australia’s Canberra-based National Gallery opened in or around 1980, its founding fathers and first director set Aboriginal art off to one side. They didn’t even appoint a full-time curator to deal with the subject. Back then they were far more concerned that a few big abstractions from that warrior nation, the United States of America, should adorn the new gallery’s walls. Meanwhile the management’s interest in European Australian art was deep enough for them to oversee the appointment of a whole bunch of artily cultivated chaps and ladies to deal with the subject. There were curators of just about everything non-Aboriginal – drawings, prints, 19th century painting, contemporary painting, sculpture and so on.
With this sad recent history in mind it should be stated that most accounts of Australian art are liable to concentrate on European Australian art. This ‘Volume 1: Exploration to Federation’ is constrained by its title to stick with the art produced following the cruel British seizure of that big chunk of land way down in the world’s south. Indeed, it includes a great deal of whatever kind of art was noticed and therefore preserved by interested and influential individuals while the original population was decimated and set under the cultural thumb of profit-crazed British Christians.
A recent newspaper art review by John McDonald concluded with: ‘in the catalogue A. D. S. Donaldson suggests that Clem Meadmore’s career refutes ideas about Australian provincialism – “a condition that never existed”. One might just as easily say that Meadmore’s escape to New York, and subsequent success, is a confirmation of local provincialism…. Provincialism cannot be so readily consigned to the realm of myth. As this exhibition reveals, it was the counterforce against which Gallery A defined its avant-garde identity. Indeed, taking the recent Bill Hensen case as an example’ (suddenly and for no good reason in 2009 influential Australians became disturbed by Hensen’s photographs of naked nubile girls) ‘it could be argued that Australia is still deeply mired in provincial narrowness. Even in the age of globalisation the provincial mentality is a weed that requires constant attention.’
Ideas attached to the visual arts appear problematic to the over-connected few. So it’s no wonder that academic art chaps moonlighting as newspaper reviewers don’t seem keen on John McDonald’s first volume dealing with Australian art’s history: they have tended to concentrate on undermining the writer while leaving potential book readers with little or no idea of what the publication is actually like. From one reviewer, writing for The Australian, we learn that McDonald is ‘a contrarian critic’. This fellow gets the remark in early in that hackneyed university-lecturer style. Those characters do like attaching some tag to a perceived-to-be competitor to diminish the importance of what that person might have to say on a pet subject - thus ‘moralist’ or ‘battler’ or ‘no-hoper’, ‘existentialist’ or “Catholic”. Get that wee word in there and you are away, passive-aggressively.
The Australian’s reviewer rushed from the ‘contrarian critic’ point to state, ‘Once the journey has begun, the momentum allows for fleeting embellishments, but there's no hiving off on to new paths.’ Now that’s really interesting because it shows how these people can’t actually perform the tricks they are employed to perform. If an electrician happened to be as inexpert in his or her field people would be electrocuted.
Unconsciously, or otherwise, The Australian’s reviewer lifted ‘hiving off’ and ‘contrarian’ from the world of big business. (But, wait a minute, haven’t the visual arts become mere playthings of big-business husbands and wives?)
Late in his text McDonald observes: ‘While artists such as Conrad Martins and Eugène von Guérard depicted the homes and properties of the wealthy squatters, the Aboriginal artists made records of dispossession. The European artists showed the tides of progress and prosperity lapping the sides of the British colony, while Aboriginal artists painted corroborees and ceremonies that were already consigned to memory. All signs of the old tribal beliefs were frowned upon by the missionaries who looked after the remnants of tribes herded into small settlements.’
Certainly this lovely fat book deserves better. You don’t even need to read it to have a lot of fun: there is at least one engaging reproduction on each of its 656 pages. A person can flip through it, enjoy the damned thing while sitting under a chestnut tree and turning the pages sipping a glass of chilled wine by the sea.
Gazing at so many images introduces that old question regarding what ‘art’ actually is. And haven’t those passive-aggressive academics had fun with that one over the years? There used to be this character, Doctor somebody or other, who reckoned that art was what was produced in the here and now, and that all the rest of what is stuffed into public art galleries would be better categorized as historical something or other. But, do such ordinary types as ourselves need to go there? There can be no doubt that looking through this book gives a person a sense of quite a bit of what art might be even in a sparsely inhabited island continent like Australia. We encounter here the poncy opportunistic settler families sitting in their big houses through the second half of the 19th century, so pleased with themselves for having escaped poverty in the United Kingdom. And we encounter ghost-like Aboriginal people among grey-green trees, represented as weird, only just human types. Yet there are also in-focus photographs of the same Aboriginal people with their eyes brimful of a shared human consciousness. We catch as well European romantic responses to the newly possessed landscape, and come to examine the features of nasty looking high officials all dressed up and playing at being extra tough in the presence of tame portrait painters. And of course there are bushrangers.
So this, the first of three planned volumes on the subject, is a have-about-the-house kind of book essential for just about anybody who can afford the $120. It is a rich source of imagery for children and adults to share as well as being a fascinating study of the representations of an intrusive, self absorbed bunch of Europeans fitting into the place like so many square pegs in round holes.
People can pore over all this sad history while, at the same time – as long as they possess that non-academic type mind which permits a person to do two things at once – picking up on the many pleasures which may accompany looking at stuff. They may even think about the way colour is used and/or space is represented by artists, even consider where the horizon line is placed in this or that composition. There are quite a few nudes here, male and female, for the young or young at heart to get off on: among these is ‘Chloe’, that iconic, nubile gal from Melbourne’s famous hotel Young and Jackson’s.
What must really piss off the carping art academic reviewers is the fact that John McDonald can write sentence after sentence without letting loose with some self-conscious display of erudition. So, once familiar with the story told by the wonderful selection of reproductions, the owner of a copy of this book may take to reading and gain a great deal more than mere pleasure from the experience. Nobody is going to agree with everything that is contained in a text as long as this. But agreeing isn’t really the point. In truth this is the first lucid account of Australian art history up to the end of the 19th century. When Robert Hughes had a go at the same exercise way back when he was an all-fired-up young man, he fixed on the notion that the purpose of the whole of art history was to arrive at 1960’s North American abstraction. He wasn’t equipped to understand the Germanic-romantic paintings Eugène von Guérard produced in response to the Australian landscape, and so dismissed them in a few lines. Others who have undertaken the same task have displayed similar shortcomings, working their way through what has come before only so that they might arrive at some comfortable and forever falsely preconceived ‘now’.
The kind-of-impressionist, mostly-landscape-painting hallowed art character, Sir Arthur Streeton has usually been the Australian art historian’s go-to guy. This is because of his brush marks (far gone art morons sometimes see in them the first hints of a Franz Klein or Hans Hoffman art gesture). Of course, for others there is a profound Britishness about Sir Arthur which connects with his presentation of a landscape so quickly turned over to economically rewarding agricultural ventures. It is a relief to find that John McDonald has an eye for artists other than Streeton. ‘He…’ (Tom Roberts) ‘… was not the greatest, presumably, because Streeton – who had become an institution by 1935 – had a mortgage on the title. If Roberts was the father, Streeton was the brilliant son who took the genre to ever-greater heights.’ McDonald writes, going on to observe: ‘This is the orthodoxy of the 1930s, a decade in which a clique of aging nationalists sought to quarantine Australian art from impure foreign influences.’
Regarding all of that past referred to in the book’s title, one discontented reviewer declared: ‘But historical fact is stable and historical interpretation changes slowly: McDonald's story, in many ways, will be the same as earlier versions.’ Well, not if the above McDonald quote is anything to go by. The next volume may continue challenging a few ‘historical facts’ and, if this one is any guide, do quite a bit more as well. Of course, that ‘historical fact is stable’ is a silly thing to say. It could be wise to ask ourselves what an ‘historical fact’ might actually be like? And then test each possible answer by asking if there is a clearly established border between ‘historical fact’ and ‘historical fiction’. Or, better still, not go down that path at all just in case - how did that fellow put it again? - ‘there's no hiving off on to new paths.’
Buy Art of Australia, Volume 1: Exploration to Federation by John McDonald. Keep it handy. Get the kids to have a look and you will pretty soon be all talking the talk, walking the (gallery) walk and having so much more than mere academic fun.
