McCulloch’s Encyclopaedia of Australian Art has been Australia’s leading art reference work for almost 40 years. This new edition is the first in 12 years.
Carlton, Aus Art Editions in association with the The Miegunyah Press/Melbourne University Publishing, 2006 [fourth edition] 1968, 2006
This completely revised and updated edition of the McCulloch’s Encyclopaedia of Australian Art includes over 8,000 entries on Australian artists, galleries, art communities, organisations, curators, writers, prizes and awards. There is an extensive section on Australia's Aboriginal art with detailed information on artists, community art centres, language groups and regions and more than 1,500 new entries on contemporary artists and art styles. This was obviously a massive undertaking for this three-generation family.
The foreword titled Homage a l’art by the late Alan McCulloch, the founding editor and father and grandfather of the current editors, indicates a sensible man of ‘art influence’ qualities. He includes humorous interludes from the great and the good, such as a quote from Goethe “a work of art is like a monarch, you stand in front of it and wait for it to speak to you”. This humorous and articulate opening is an encouraging introduction.
Emily, Susan McCulloch’s daughter, came on board as co-author for this edition. She has added her knowledge of contemporary art to the Encyclopaedia, providing additional material on new media, street art essays and artists, as well as co-writing the new section on Aboriginal art.
Since the 1994 edition there has been a worldwide awakening of interest in Australian indigenous art. This edition deals with this vast change by including a separate section on Aboriginal art: it lists the artists, their family groups, the art centres where they work and the regions that they work in. In fact this edition makes such a claim for this vast change that they put this section at the beginning rather than, as I expected, at the back of the book.
Because the Aboriginal section is new and the entries are of interest to an international audience I am concentrating my review on this section. Before reviewing the book I will give a brief synopsis of contemporary Aboriginal art as related in this encyclopaedia. In the 1930s a group of anthropologists asked the indigenous people they studied to record their traditional images. By 1938, Albert Namatjira, an indigenous artist stationed at the Hermannsburg Mission and trained by Rex Battarbee, exhibited in cities across Australia. National and international success followed these exhibitions of desert watercolour paintings in the European landscape tradition. UNESCO became involved in 1957 by sponsoring exhibitions of bark paintings of traditional subjects, mainly spirit ancestors, in Europe and America and fostering the collection of bark paintings in International museums.
In 1971 Geoffrey Bardon, an artist and teacher, was posted to the Papunya reserve in the Central Dessert of Australia. He found a depressed and demoralised community. Bardon started working with the children, encouraging them to paint using traditional designs, and then he worked with the men. He encouraged them to paint a mural on the school walls. Soon the men were using the acrylic paint Barden gave them to paint on any flat surfaces to hand, mainly masonite boards (why masonite boards were lying around in the desert I don’t know). At first the paintings were of literal ancestral and creation stories. The more complex paintings came with the overlaying of dots to the initial ancestral creation story. Later that same year one of the men of Papunya won equal first prize at the Caltex Art Award in Alice Springs. Within the next eighteen months approximately one thousand paintings were produced at Papunya, the first artists co-operative having been established with a dedicated art advisor. This was a community initiative and the first of many indigenous-owned art co-operatives in Australia. Within two years an Aboriginal Arts Board was set up to support indigenous arts initiatives.
This book gives a fantastic overview of Aboriginal art for the uninitiated, or even for the partially initiated, with descriptions of the art producing regions of Australia, the community art centres and the main galleries that represent the artists or communities, including their web addresses at the end of each entry.
One of the other great aspects of the Aboriginal art section is the narrative about the artists which is incisive and witty. These well written sections stand out from the rest of the book as there is clearly one writer of exceptional story-telling ability among the team, although some entries are left of field, such as the one of a policeman who became the first Inspector in charge of police in the Northern Territory in 1870. Paul Heinrich Foelshe was a lay photographer who took important historic photographs of the Indigenous population, their ceremonies and their secular life. He wasn’t indigenous and didn’t really have any effect on Aboriginal art and his inclusion in this section is one of the curiosities in the selection criteria of the editors.
Another interesting inclusion is a direct quote from Julie Gough in the entry on her work, and is the only direct quote from an artist I found. Gough is a Tasmanian Aboriginal artist whose career started as an academic researcher when working on a study of 19th century museum practices. Gradually it dawned on her that the Indigenous people and objects collected by museums depersonalised the people and their culture. This realisation heralded an artistic awakening. She says “I am interested in shorelines; the places between past and present, day and night, conscious and unconscious. My art-making navigates these spaces of evocation in an effort to trigger re-surfacings of cultural memories beyond habitual contemporary frameworks that distrust the sensorial. My feeling is that there is something ‘other’ through which humans individually mediate the world.” This quote came from her exhibition ‘Intertidal” at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi in 2005 and it allowed the reader a personal insight into the rationale of the artist’s work. Although this inclusion seems unusual in an encyclopaedia, more artist’s quotes in the next edition would be a welcome addition.
A point that the book has raised that I wasn’t aware of is the cross pollination of exhibition histories of Indigenous artists. We are used to non-urban Aboriginal artists exhibiting in their local regions, Australian capital cities and internationally, but I hadn’t realized that urban artists such as Fiona Foley are exhibiting in remote Art Centres. One thinks the progression should be regional, national then international, but exhibiting in remote areas must be important to Fiona Foley.
On their website the editors note that:
“A key strength of this book is its critical base. This ranges from selection of entries (based on a solid set of criteria) to descriptive texts on artists and their works, those of significant aspects or events in Australian art. It is this critical factor accompanied by detailed and comprehensive factual material which gives the Encyclopaedia its character and the standing it has maintained since it was first published in 1968.”
There are problems with this statement: strangely, the edition is already out of date. Perhaps this is to do with the fast and changing pace of the art world, but some of the entries from the previous edition have not been updated. The entries that aren’t updated are most likely to have been overlooked because of a lack of response from those asked to update their entries or a first contact enquiry about represented artists of the gallery who are in State and National collections. The ‘facts’ that I know are wrong are generally those where the entry has not been updated, or the individual being written about has misrepresented elements of their career. The artists are not asked to send information about themselves - their agents are asked for the information, and perhaps for the next edition a third party should be asked to research the details of the careers of the individuals entered who are not artists or businesses. It is human nature after all to exaggerate our achievements if asked personally. Some of the business entries sound like advertorials with their enthusiastic appraisal of their own achievements. The rigorous set of criteria and comprehensive factual material needs some rigorous editorial checking of the non artist and business entries.
But being out of date isn’t the only fault. Some major events in Australian art history have been left out altogether: for instance the debacle that happened in 1988 when the Australian Pavilion that was designed by Philip Cox opened with an exhibition by Arthur Boyd, arguably one of Australia’s most famous artists. Arthur Boyd’s entry in the New McCulloch's Encyclopaedia of Australian Artdoes not mention his representation at Venice that year. Established in 1895, the Venice Biennale is one of the world's most important art events. Australia’s participation in the Venice Biennale has contributed to the professional development of many artists. All of the Indigenous artists who have represented Australia at Venice in the Pavilion have the biennale mentioned in their entries. Perhaps the farce that surrounded the exhibition which was closed during the event, and the pavilion in its inaugural year contributed to its exclusion, but then shouldn’t that be considered history? I remember that Arthur Boyd wrote to Peter Fuller expressing his disappointment with the Venice exhibition, telling Peter that his works had been taken down after the VIPs and media had left and been put into storage. There was a problem with the roof and the paintings getting too hot which affected the thicker painted areas. This letter from Arthur Boyd is in the TATE archive in the Peter Fuller section.
My overall impression of the New McCulloch's Encyclopaedia of Australian Art is of an essential reference book, however my previous edition is already out of date and I rarely referred to it, preferring the internet as my first point of call. Now my understanding of Aboriginal art and the communities that support the artists has been broadened and I would always refer to this book as my first point of call for precise details and referrals for websites and dealers to contact for more specific information. Because the art centres that support indigenous artists allow anyone to paint who wishes to, there is a lot of work out there of an uneven quality. This book only refers to the greats among them, not the up and coming but the already historically great, and it details their agents, explains where and why their work is made and where you can source the work. It also relates, obliquely, which are the main galleries that have a continuous track record in exhibiting the best indigenous artists of Australia and where they can be contacted, and most importantly it includes website details wherever possible. This is a valuable and important book aiming to present the facts about the artists of Australia and their commercial world.
Image Top Left: Portrait painting of Stephanie Burns by An Pan Pink Roses 2007, oil on canvas, 160 x 145 cm, that was painted for entry into the Archibald Prize 2007.
