IN the brief 3-plus decades that I spent at the Art Gallery of NSW there were a couple of questions that I would be endlessly asked; and one major irritation that I never succeeded in dispelling. The questions were – predictably enough: one, who is in your view the great Australian artist, and two, who will be the next..blah blah bah…..maybe answered subjectively.
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The irritation though was something else - related but different – my great frustration was not ever succeeding in organising a great exhibition of Australian art overseas…something that as well know Alan did succeed in achieving with his Outsiders show in Paris in 2006.
Whether we like or not, it seems a fact that the art of Australia – the visual arts that is – remains something of a mystery to the wider world; Australian art – painting and sculpture – is a largely unknown quantity around the world and this is a matter that has for years both vexed and bewildered me.
This is not at all to say that nobody likes Australian art…it’s just that it tends to remain so little known.
When you think of the very successful image of Australian cultural and artistic achievement in the realms of, particularly music, the cinema and literature, one wonders how and why it is that the visual arts have received such a relative lack of recognition.
After all it’s not as though Australian artists in so many disciplines have not achieved great recognition…or notoriety .. and made a hugely acknowledged impact around the world: they come flooding into mind – from Joan Sutherland to Marc Newsom.
From Germaine Greer to Patrick White and David Malouf, Barry Humphries to Peter Weir to Baz Luhrman to the ubiquitous Cate Blanchett…but let’s face it the names of our classic painter heroes, Streeton, Boyd, Whiteley, Drysdale, even Sid…are barely know and little recognised…..I have become a trifle obsessed with this issue….and have a theory and a few thoughts about this matter.
In 1961 the English art critic and curator Bryan Robertson, did Australian art a huge service when he staged an exhibition at London’s then most avant-garde public art museum, the Whitechapel Gallery.
Titled ‘Recent Australian Painting’ it featured the works of artists well known to us of course, but with the possible exception of Nolan and Drysdale, pretty much totally unknown to British audiences – and pretty much unknown anywhere outside Australia – all those familiar names, Nolan, Boyd, Whiteley, Daws, Drysdale, Balson, Pugh, Blackman, Olsen, Smart etc were included.
There had been one or two more modest Australian shows overseas, mainly in London, in the 1950’s, all of which tended to portray the art of Australia as something mildly exotic – even the Whitechapel show, which was a far more serious and highly regarded event, was perceived in the media as ‘adorable exotica’!
There was, as Simon Pierse has noted (Australian Art and Artists in London 1950-65: 2012), an almost ubiquitous misconception of Australian art among British critics at the time.
Quote from Pierse: (Bryan Robertson twice reviewed the exhibition himself (bit odd that!) – once for London Magazine and again for the Sunday Telegraph – in both these articles he centred on the concept of Australian art as a product of the ‘remote’ and the ‘exotic’…as a quote from the Sunday Telegraph notes : in a vast Pacific world, bordered by New Guinea and fringes on one side by the primitive Torres Strait Islands ..comes the exoticism that sometimes floods through Australian art…”
Such observations imply a view that must have been fairly well implanted at that time into what might be termed the British art scene….I happened to come across an observation of the critic John Berger who, writing in the journal Meanjin on another of the early shows titled ‘Twelve Australian Artists’ held in 1953 at Burlington House (now the Royal Academy) he noted something about ‘national traditions’ in art – that “such tradition implies generally accepted standards, the integration of the artists into society and, above all, art having a place in the lives of the majority of the people” (Berger was as you probably know something of a Marxist ).
But in that same piece he also wrote of that Australian show: ‘as one walked through the gallery one became conscious of a climate, a conditioning of life, a type of landscape, a quality of light, which seemed specifically Australian..etc despite superficial differences, there are overall Australian characteristics, a common unity of atmosphere was established’.
Exactly right – it was an art absolutely tied to place.
So we have to thank Bryan Robertson, and also the late lamented Robert Hughes (who also wrote for the Whitechapel catalogue) for at least making a start on trying to, if not quite release Australian art from that stranglehold of perceived ‘exotic’ place, then at least seeking to gain recognition for Australian art abroad.
Lord Civilization (Kenneth Clark – he who ‘discovered’ Nolan) was instrumental in this happening…and he wrote in his foreword for the catalogue “…there is something about the light, and the dead white trees and the feeling of Australian myth…”
In fact in his catalogue essay the young Mr Hughes (also then a painter who had one work in the show) wrote “ to think of Australia as a jardin exotique is a fashionable way of missing the point – for painters it is not an exotic garden – it’s where we live”
But of course in merely making that point he was in fact emphasising just that point – that Australia was then perceived to be as exotic as it was distant and so in an odd but, I suppose, understandable way its painters were presumed to paint an exotic world….and behave in an exotic manner too!
And in fact at that time, and to some extent a direct result of that Whitechapel show, there was a genuine and enthusiastic interest in Australian painting…but really only in the UK.
Then came the Tate Gallery exhibition two years later (1963) which had begun life as the ‘Antipodean Vision’ (at Adelaide Festival in 1962), and that after much effort was also shown in Canada later that year.
So at least Australian art had some currency within the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic realms of the Commonwealth I suppose.
I can recall seeing both the Tate and Whitechapel shows and, yes, can also add that there really was this faintly exotic sensibility, a hint of contrived myth, and both shows were of course to be viewed against a background of what was the current thing in London for people like myself…we were then looking at a very different aesthetic and a very different type of art - those great flashy moments by Motherwell, Kline, Pollock and pop art by Warhol and Hamilton, and even in the local and European traditions paintings by Hodgkin and Ecole de Paris abstract painters like Hartung and Soulages et al….against this gregarious and cosmopolitan background Australian painting did indeed look slightly out of sorts, remote and other worldly…..there was an aura of mythological exotic earnestness I must admit.
The selection of artists in that famous Whitechapel show I suppose was very much a selection of its time - note out of the 55 artists represented just two were women painters and there was no Aboriginal representation at all.
But it also tended to reflect Robertson’s predilection for then fashionable abstract-expressionism even though the more radical Australian art of the late 50’s and early 60’s was still really figurative,(just a few names: Blackman; Boyd A and D; Dobell; Dickerson; Fairweather; Juniper; Molvig; Nolan; Olsen; Perceval; Pugh; Smart;Tucker; Whiteley); all figurative artists albeit with an abstract and expressionist twang, one might say.
Interestingly, as a sign of the then paradoxical art contest that was going on in Australia at the time, the show was severely criticised by Bernard Smith and his so-called ‘Antipodean’ group which championed the cause of figurative art with a rather more restrictive view of the genre….they deemed the likes of Drysdale, Boyd and Whiteley as beyond the figurative pale!
I imagine many of you will have read Bernard Smith on this topic….he had a good turn of phrase in condemning those sloppy messy artists inclined towards abstraction and expressionism…..”today tachistes, action painters, geometric abstractionists and their innumerable band of camp followers threaten to benumb the intellect and wit of art with their bland and pretentious mysteries..”. or “destroy the living power of the image and you have humbled and humiliated the artist, have made him a blind and powerless Samson fit only to grind the corn of Philistines…:etc etc.
It was that short-lived and rather parochial little battle of the Figs versus the Abs.
It was over 50 years later that the opportunity to present the art of Australia to the wider world in a really substantive way presented itself.
Late in 2013 at the Royal Academy in London the long-awaited Art of Australia show opened – the RA, arguably the best possible venue with a great and certainly willing audience, were waiting in anticipation.
As I think we all now know it was sadly roundly criticised….and I’d have to say justifiably so.
Apart from anything else its declared theme, which was to focus on the influence of the landscape – was far too proscriptive with an inevitable tendency to pander to those views of five decades ago, and as I hope to show, is no longer the defining or persuasive premise.
Enough has been written and said about that RA show and this is not the place to go into the whys and wherefores of its failure – it is though part of the story that I would like to address – that is the recognition and image of Australian art around the world.
In ruminating on this issue, I’ve noted one or two incidents that have bewildered me about the laboured travels of Australian art around the world: firstly, going back to shortly after those early Whitechapel and Tate shows – in 1965 Antony Armstrong-Jones (Snowden), Bryan Robertson and John Russell produced a large coffee table book called Private View – about the then very lively British art world – it was the ‘swinging sixties’ - and its main protagonists…it was a hugely popular and evocative glimpse into the lives and workings of a panorama of the then finest British artists – this was a time when I was getting very much involved in the business of art (studies etc) – and slightly to my surprise two definitely Australian artists were included - Nolan and Whiteley!
Was Australian art seen as some kind of outpost of British art?
But of course I acknowledge that both at the time were resident in Britain (Nolan more so than Whiteley)– but British artists they most certainly were not!
Then some decades later I was at the Tate Gallery on a quest to borrow a certain Nolan picture owned by the Tate – a splendid Central Australian work – this was for our 2007-8 Nolan show, so well after the opening of Tate Modern.
I was told that the painting was in Tate Britain – not Tate Modern…I then discovered that other Australian works held by the Tate – by Williams, Boyd, Whiteley etc. were also under the aegis of Tate Britain.
There was an indelible association here…Australian art did not, it seemed, to belong on its own.
But at least I can now happily report that, certainly towards the end of last year, the Nolan picture was actually hanging in a permanent collection display at Tate Modern!
Of course there have been a number of other Australian shows around the world in the last half century or so…mostly of modest scale and aspiration though, and which, to be honest, have really made but a modest consolidated impact.
For example, in 1983 we at the AGNSW organised a show called ‘Mood and Moment – a century of Australian landscape painting’, which was shown in the National Gallery of China in Beijing, then in Shanghai and Guangzhou.
A very different effort to present Australian art abroad took place in 1984 with John Kaldor’s An Australian Accent (Tillers, Parr and Unsworth) in NY, Washington (then Perth and Sydney)…there was an interesting review of this show by the critic John Russell who wrote “…their pictures come freighted with dreams often of a complex and disquieting kind, and the idioms employed allow of a rapid and comprehensive attack upon a range of problems…emotional, conceptual, aesthetic and perceptual..”
There is a hint there of that quest to be part of things but different…not unlike their predecessors.
But back to A century of Australian landscape – that was of course a perfectly reasonable and legitimate sub-title – but therein I think lies the issue for me – we all know and acknowledge two decisive episodes in the history of Australian art that have so profoundly conditioned the image and the journey of Australian art – two moments of ‘national identity’….firstly with the Heidelberg School when artists like Roberts, Streeton, McCubbin, Walter Withers, Jane Sutherland et al painted en plein air and, for the first time, captured not merely the appearance of the landscape but its texture too – the breath and the air, the feeling of being in that landscape….the sultry heat and dust of Streeton’s Fire’s On captures the climate, the atmosphere, the torrid air, and that pervasive blue sky, far more than it does the moment of human drama of the narrative.
Thus was born the notion of Australian Impressionism – a genre that was unique to Australia – paintings that could have come from no other place than Australia…bound and tied by that commitment to describing the experience of the Australian landscape.
Much the same happened, I believe, in the late 1940’s and the 1950’s with truly ‘modern’ artists like Nolan, Boyd, Drysdale, Tucker, Perceval and Fred Williams. All created a visual language that had an undeniable sense of place to it…just think of Drysdale and Williams and even John Olsen.
Their works demonstrate a determined and successful quest for independence and affirmation – at the time a flight perhaps from the horrors of a second World War and of a great depression, both then very much within living memory; they demonstrate a real attachment to the Australian experience and above all to the Australian landscape – it was perhaps a very deliberate exercise in seeking to establish identity within the context of a European tradition and yet at the same time seeking to distance itself from a disagreeable immediate past.
Whilst Drysdale and Williams captured those distinctive textures and the ‘temperature’ of the landscape, so too did Nolan and Boyd but for them that landscape was more of a stage for the human drama and experience which they inserted into that unique Australian experience, thereby creating a slightly contrived mythological context and status for Australian painting….albeit one of essentially a European and classical measure.
What all their work has in common is that indelible sense of ‘national identity’ to them. –– which we can identify with and to some extent confirm or re-affirm our own backgrounds.
It’s rather like the great ‘cultural monuments’ drive of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when our city fathers built our galleries and libraries in the image of the British Museum.
It is all quite understandable as a quest of its time but let’s face it, it is arguable that the only true mythological status that can be attributed to Australian art is that of indigenous traditions.
And yet strong as the image of that quintessential Australian landscape as immortalised by its early progenitors Streeton, Roberts et al and then re-imagined by Nolan, Drysdale etc, maybe and continues to be, it has nonetheless struggled for any kind of recognition beyond Australian shores (with the possible exception of that brief ‘golden’ era of Australian art in London in the late 50’s and early 60’s)– and I frequently asked myself the question, why?
Why was the convincing achievement of those national styles and identities, the achievements of our foremost artists –whether at that moment of so-called Impressionism at the end of the 19th century or its modern equivalent in the late 1940’s and 1950’s, such a seeming hindrance to recognition, even interest, around the world?
There was as we know an interest in indigenous art, stimulated of course by the notion of the ‘exotic’ and the different….this was new frontier territory for the traditional Western museum curator and exemplified in an exhibition that was verging on the academic, and to be honest slightly patronising in that Gallic way, but at the same time revelatory – ‘Magiciens de la terre’ held at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 1989– which included works by three Australian Aboriginal artists, all bark painters, in what must be described as more in an ethnographical rather than an artistic context.
That exhibition interestingly enjoyed a temporary renaissance –at the Pompidou in Paris as it was being re-visited just last year and promoted as ‘a look back at a legendary exhibition’.
By then, in the 1980’s, Australian Aboriginal art had become something of a standard bearer for our visual arts around the world – but such recognition did not represent the whole spectrum of modern and contemporary Australian art activity and aspiration….in fact the powerful presence of contemporary Aboriginal art on the international horizon I think tended to obfuscate the broader spectrum of Australian art.
The revelation of Papunya Tula and Western Desert painting had, of course, great, far-reaching and I think quite understandable impact – we are familiar with that ‘renaissance’ of indigenous art that had its origins in Papunya Tula in the early 1970’s – a revelation that has since inspired Aboriginal creativity throughout the country rekindling ancient traditions into a modern idiom. (Clifford Possum)
We’ve probably all heard that famous comment attributed to Bob Hughes – although he has admitted that he cannot recall actually saying it (but that would be true of many of Bob’s utterances) - in describing Papunya Tula as ‘the last great art movement of the 20th century’!
Although I also like Les Murray’s comment that it was – ‘Australia’s equivalent of jazz’. The fact is that here we have a visual language, of unique origin and vision, one deeply enshrined in its history, traditions and place, and yet, remarkably, wholly contemporary in spirit, aesthetic and appeal.
Absolutely an art determined by place, fully informed by place and tradition, but nonetheless not proscribed by that place.
In fact quite the reverse – it travelled and travels the world very well.
Western desert painting became the standard-bearer for Australian art around the world.
In the year of that great festival of running, jumping and standing still in Sydney – the 2000 Olympics – we staged a show at the AGNSW of Papunya painting (Fred Ward Tjungurrayi)– ‘Papunya Tule: genesis and genius’ which Hetti Perkins curated.
Some 50 artists were included in this show…and I have to say that it was a remarkably beautiful exhibition, the first to provide a really comprehensive look at this ancient genre in its contemporary garb…I recall taking the then Italian Minister of Culture, Giovanna Melandri, around not once but twice…she was entranced and determined to get the show to Italy and then hopefully elsewhere in Europe.
In spite of our best combined efforts nothing came of this…..Happily though others have succeeded in this particular venture where I failed and only last year a major Australian Aboriginal art exhibition toured a number of venues throughout China.
Then there was another great celebratory exhibition - ‘Golden Summers’ – held in 1985-86 – the pick of Australian paintings from that great era of national identity, the Heidelberg School and beyond – it had just about every national icon in it…including of course Streeton’s famous Golden Summer – Eaglemont (1889) from which the show took its name…among the many notables we took through the show was the then legendary curator and Chairman of the Dept of Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Bill Lieberman…a great friend of Australia and Australian art and he truly did love Australian painting – not just the focus of this show with its Streetons, Roberts, MCubbins et.al. but even more so the ‘modern’ generation of Fred Williams, Olsen, Tim Storrier (another of our artists whose hugely evocative and meticulously rendered works are generally defined by their sense of place) and of course Whiteley.….but try as I might he was not to be persuaded to take that show, or a more modern one, to New York.
There was it seemed to me some mysterious stigma attached to the very notion of Australian art at the time…that Australian art seemed, irritatingly, destined to stay at home.
But what of now?
Has Australian art at last leapt over some of those irritating hurdles in recent years?
In my view and experience it is now a very different prospect and, above all, a very much more encouraging and gregarious one.
Our contemporary artists are much less inclined to any commitment to that sense of place…artists like Bill Henson, Tracey Moffatt, Patricia Piccinni, Callum Morton, Ricky Swallow, Shaun Gladwell, James Angus, Mikala Dwyer etc, are all almost as well know and recognised in Europe, America and increasingly Asia as they are in Australia.
Their names are known in the global contemporary art world; whereas the likes of Jeffrey Smart, Fred Williams, John Olsen, even Boyd and Drysdale, and other pillars of the Australian art and auction scene are simply far less known.
All of which begs the question – why?
I think there is perhaps one simple answer and a whole raft of other possible causes – the simple reason is that those artists I’ve mentioned, and others of the contemporary, world have largely shed the ‘made in Australia’ label.
That pervasive presence of the landscape in the Australian artists’ psyche has been superseded by an urban culture, and a global engagement and aspiration.
The work of artists such as these does not betray any strong sense of place, and if it does so, then that is not the raison d’etre of the work nor its defining characteristic.
In a way the indefatigable and marvellously veracious Tracey Moffatt has alluded to this process when she spoke of her own attitude – in her own spirited and independent way – that she was not an Aboriginal artist…she was an artist who happens to be Aboriginal.
That of course is not denying that she is an Aboriginal but simply that in her role and life as an artist the fact that she is Aboriginal is not really for her, the defining issue.
And I’d like here to make what might appear to be a slightly contentious comparison – with the American experience.
What did the world know about American painting up to around the 1940’s and 50’s?
Very little I’d suggest.
Think of American painting of the first half of the twentieth century – the so-called American ‘impressionists’ like William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, John Henry Twatchman; or those American post-impressionists like Arthur Dove, Charles Demuth; or the social realists like of the 1920’s and 30’s, Thomas Hart Benton, Ben Shahn etc…some names like Hopper, Bellows and Grant Wood (American Gothic) might be a little familiar, but on the whole, in Europe, in Australia, and elsewhere at the time, American painting, much like its Australian counterpart, was, if they were known at all, generally regarded as something parochial and derivative.
Such art belonged, it seemed, to America in much the same way the Australian art belonged to Australia.
In America that all changed with the great abstract expressionism movement of the New York school which began to emerge in the late 1940’s – here was a flamboyant, gestural, urgent and urban art that did not have to bear the cross of place or provincialism – I remember well in London of the late 1950’s and 60’s those great muscle-flexing pictures of Franz Kline, Motherwell, Pollock, Frankenthaler et al and how they so captured the mood of urban pace and urgency.
But the impact that those pictures had around the world at the time was emphatic…it was a new blatant, urgent, exciting and universal global language - that’s when the world took notice of American painting – because it was a universal expression – not a local condition.
My contention is, therefore, that being liberated from that emotive sense of place was, for Australian art, a passport to a much wider and to be honest more appreciative audience worldwide.
For here we have images and imaginations not constrained or determined by a sense of place and its inference of ‘national identity’, but images dealing with ideas, notions, concerns that might just as well be located in Berlin, London, Beijing, Los Angeles, Mexico City or Tokyo.
And it is a fact that many contemporary Australian artists have achieved recognition in those global art circuses like the Biennales of Venice, Sao Paulo, Istanbul and Singapore; at Documenta in Kassel and in the great international art fairs…they have achieved the kind of international reputation and acknowledgement that those modern masters of Australian art – Nolan, Drysdale, Williams even Whiteley et al, seldom if ever achieved.
And they did that simply I think because their art is not so wholly identified with a place….that place being Australia.
And to come back to Tracey Moffat’s comment – perhaps too these artists very much of our time now in the 21st century, like her, see themselves as artists first and Australian artists second.
That is, artists who happen to be Australian.
There are of course extenuating circumstances in this – every aspect of our world today is inevitably more global…the art world too (when we see Qatar splashing $300 million on a Gauguin, or Abu Dhabi buying Cy Twomblys by the veritable metre!
And some lunatic spending over $40 million plus on the appalling Basquiat and in that global world the community of artists have found much common ground to explore.
But having said that our contemporary artists have given Australian art a real and convincing place in the world of art….that is a great and laudable achievement.
So who are these artists who have put Australia onto the global art map?
It goes back I believe three or more decades to that era of artists like Mike Parr, Imants Tillers, Ken Unsworth who sought inspiration and to some extent direction from mould-breaking artists dealing more with ideas than with material objectivity….the Beuys, Kiefers etc of this world.
Now we look to artists like Shaun Gladwell for one – in spite of Clive James’ friendly but acerbic views!
Gladwell is an artist who through his work being exhibited in such events as the Biennale of Venice has achieved international recognition – nobody is denying that he is an Australian artist and whilst he often , but not inevitably, uses Australian locations for his work, they are nonetheless not about place nor are they defined and identified by any sense of place.
The work that really launched Gladwell was Storm Sequence (2001) – shot at Bondi beach but in weather that was clearly more London than Sydney, is a video work about movement, about the suspension of real-time to the pace and lyricism of a kind of visual poetry.
This is a work that is urban with a resounding familiarity whether it be Berlin, Beijing, London or Sydney…it is a work of no fixed abode a work that belongs to the art of the world.
In Woolloomooloo Night (2004) Gladwell creates an Edward Hopper like scene – a capoeira dancer (developed from African slaves in Brazil) spins, twists, lunges in movements that echo the skills of self-defence and combat, orchestrated into a visual experience with a universal eloquence.
This is urban art….the marriage of performance and street culture…..this is Gladwell’s global world…it’s just that it all happened in a service station in Sydney!
And to just reaffirm my contention about Gladwell and his colleagues – last year alone Gladwell exhibited in Toronto, London, Paris, Antwerp, Croatia, Istanbul, South Korea, Indonesia and Melbourne and I believe Baltimore too…!.
This is a far cry from a Williams or a Drysdale and their very deliberate, evocative expressions of a distinctively Australian experience.
Like Gladwell, Bill Henson’s quiet, at times almost sinister, evocations of human vulnerability explore the human condition in a universal sense…there is nothing parochial about Henson’s work – his interest lies not in any devotion to place but in the vulnerabilities of the human condition.
His sublime and often suspenseful works have, as we know, on occasions brought to him unwanted speculation about the nature of his work – but it is mature, sophisticated, urbane and quietly intense.
We are left with a sense of hovering but sympathetic uncertainty…his work speaks to all, not of place but of the human condition, arresting in their familiarity, unnerving in their anonymity and so eloquent in their vulnerable beauty.
The banner of contemporary Australian art around the world is similarly carried by such artists as Patricia Piccinini and Ricky Swallow – but neither artist betrays any particular Australian identity in their work – Patricia explores the frontiers between science/technology on the one hand, and the fantasies of the human imagination on the other – her work in a way questions our faith in technology but is inspired by our inherent human instinct for hope; whilst Ricky Swallow is an artist very much of our time – one who looks with a kind of loving almost nostalgic air at the bric-a-brac of our lives…and then makes the most carefully crafted souvenirs of those objects.
Killing Time is one of his most ambitious works……an echo of a 17th century Dutch still-life painting perhaps…but very much a memory of personal experience.
Again it is a work of art invested with a certain timelessness, a work that respects great traditions of craftsmanship, but above all a work of no fixed abode….Swallow is an artist of the modern world, and he happens to be Australian, he is this year represented in the Whitney Biennale in New York.
This whole process of what one might call the global democratisation of the art of Australia in our times has also been, if not enabled then certainly assisted, by the changing demography of our community of artists.
Inevitably the creative community of modern Australia is a reflection of its population make-up and that, as we all know, is as mixed and cosmopolitan as anywhere – those more recently arrived creative spirits have brought with them differing and enlarging cultural heritages and sensibilities, and indeed aspirations, which may well belong in Australia but are not exclusive to Australia – and thus again belong in a wider sphere of interest.
In this process it must be recognised that artists from the broader Asian region have been of particular significance.
I think, for example, of one of an artist whom I have long admired – Hossein Valamanesh, Ah Xian; Guan Wei, Dadang Christanto; Simryn Gill, Liu Xiaoxian and particularly contemporary ‘urban’ Aboriginal artists like Brook Andrew, and the ubiquitous Jonathan Jones, Daniel Boyd etc have all contributed to this more gregarious and less overtly Australian image for our art in the 21st century.
What has happened to Australia and Australian art in the past 3-4 decades does rather put that infamous comment by the Minister who promoted immigration but with a very definite perspective on where that migration should come from, Arthur Calwell comment in Parliament in 1947– “two wongs do not make a white”.!
Rather like a kind of cultural revolution these artists have helped to emancipate Australian art from the stranglehold of ‘identity’…and here I would even include some of our indigenous artists whose work transcends a quest for ‘identity’ .and whilst of course I acknowledge that we are all beholden to the very idea of an art and its traditions that belong strongly and emotionally to the identity of place – it is my belief that, worthy, indelible and defining those traditions maybe and are – they have nonetheless been a strange and unexpected kind of limitation to the liberation of Australian art to the world.
What we can do now is applaud the maturity and sophistication of our new generation of truly international artists – from the likes of Bill Henson and Ricky Swallow and Shaun Gladwell to Hossein Valamanesh et al who are making such an impact around the world.
Although again we should always be mindful of the often fragile power of the now in the face of that ultimate critic – time: looking at the list of painters represented as Australia’s finest in that 1961 Whitechapel show….how many do we still recognise as of significance?
Does anybody remember the names of Don Laycock, John Lunghi, Ross Morrow, Ian Sime, Roy Thompson and others….all were in that famous Whitechapel show representing Australia’s finest…. It is a rather sobering reflection upon the mortality of much once lauded art!
Let’s finish with a trip to Mundi Mundi (part of Gladwell’s MaddestMaximus videos) – so obviously an Australian location, and here Shaun is doing his slightly menacing antics on a motorbike, on his mysterious journey through an ever-opening landscape…it is a work that celebrates place but is absolutely not proscribed by that place.
