Читать книгу A Companion to Australian Art - Группа авторов - Страница 11

Christopher Allen

Art in the Australian continent has two very different stories, which have become intertwined in recent times, but can never be reduced to a single narrative. The first of these, of course, is the story of the art produced by the original inhabitants of the land, who came here tens of thousands of years before the Neolithic Revolution and the beginning of urban life in the northern hemisphere, and whose way of life seems to have remained remarkably stable, all but untouched by the history of the rest of humanity, until the beginning of British settlement at the end of the eighteenth century. First contact with the Europeans, in fact, was much earlier, at the beginning of the seventeenth, but this encounter and others that followed had virtually no effect on the lives of the Aborigines until the colony of Sydney was established in 1788.

Aboriginal art before settlement is a complex and specialized subject, the study of archaeologists and anthropologists, who work with necessarily limited resources, since the indigenous people left no architecture and had no writing; their cultural artefacts were almost all perishable and discarded after their use in ceremonies, and the earliest samples of such material that we possess today were collected by explorers and missionaries from the late eighteenth century onwards. The most significant permanent monuments of past Aboriginal culture are in remarkable sets of cave paintings and stone engravings, but their significance is not always clear today. Traditional culture was entirely oral, and such a culture requires a constant line of transmission: when people are displaced from their ancestral lands and lose their local languages, such transmission is inevitably compromised.

The study of the ancient culture of the Aboriginal people, including their beliefs, their art and their languages, represents therefore a vast field, or a series of fields of research, but it is not the subject of this book. The Aborigines are constantly present to varying degrees in the art and the consciousness of European Australians throughout the history of modern Australia, and so appear in many of the chapters of this book. Aboriginal artists appear in the story too, as they begin to take part in the European practice of art. And an outstanding chapter by Philip Jones deals with the emergence of a new Aboriginal art and its embrace by the art market in the last decades of the twentieth century.

The second story, which is the main focus of this book, is that of the European settlers in Australia which, if we start with the art of Captain Cook’s voyages, is now some 250 years old. This story is, from one point of view, and like all colonial art histories, that of a branch of a much older tradition, or perhaps a better metaphor is a cutting transplanted and finding its own growth and development in a new soil. This image gives a better sense of the level of adaptation to the new environment, sometimes underestimated by careless observers who see only the rehearsal of imported customs and habits of seeing.

Nonetheless, if we compare what was achieved here with the great movements of Neo-classicism, Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism and the various phases of modernism that succeeded each other during the same two and a half centuries, Australian art will inevitably look like a very small corner of art history. Like all colonial traditions, it suffers from the asymmetry of center and periphery: the inhabitants of the periphery cannot understand themselves or their own history without reference to the metropolitan center from which they originated, while those of the center have no such reciprocal need to understand the colonial periphery.

At least so it seems, and even for American art, which has no real incidence on international art history until America, or New York at least, became part of the center with the postwar explosion of Abstract Expressionism. On the face of it, regional art is primarily of interest to the inhabitants of the region in question. And yet many such regional traditions, including that of Australia, have been extensively written about, especially in the last half-century, with the growth of an academic industry that demands the constant production of discussion, commentary and speculation that is called research in the humanities, even if it frequently adds little of substance to our knowledge of its subject.

Looking at the field of Australian art and at the vast amount of writing surveyed in Molly Duggins’ impressive bibliographic study in this volume, an outsider could be tempted to conclude that this was a rather modest subject crushed by a disproportionate weight of discourse, much of it dull and much ideological, too often engaging in ultimately sterile discussion with other regional academics rather than addressing a broader public of cultivated lay people, the ultimate audience for the art itself. And there would be some truth in this perception: writing about art in Australia reflects the general problems of humanities scholarship in universities today, burdened on the one hand by the ineffectual ideologies of a post-political age and on the other by the mechanical imperatives of production.

This book sets out to avoid, as much as possible, the futility of ingrown academic discussion, and is put together with the aim of helping the intelligent non-specialist reader understand and enjoy the art of Australia. It has no intention of preaching or of attempting to impose any ideological reading of our history. It seeks to present a clear and unbiased account of events from the time of settlement and trusts that readers will be able to draw their own moral and other conclusions. The book’s aim, in other words, is to make the art of Australia more accessible to its readers, including through an awareness of the historical circumstances of its production, but never losing sight of the role of art as an organon of knowledge and consciousness.

For art, in all its manifestations, is not simply a set of artefacts, of material deposits left behind by historical processes; it is a way of thinking that long predates rational thought and self-conscious, theoretical reflection. These tools of the human mind are only some two and half millennia old, dating from the first beginnings of philosophical and theological thinking; literacy itself is only twice as old as that, and alphabetic writing, which immensely amplified the power and range of literacy, is much more recent, only five centuries or so older than the beginnings of philosophy. But for thousands of years before literacy and the rise of rational thinking, art in its various forms, as stories, songs and pictures, was a vehicle for the human mind to represent the world to itself and assign meaning and shape to it.

And because the questions that concern human beings are much more obscure and subtle than can be fully dealt with by rational discourse, art was not made obsolete by the rise of philosophy and later of science. It has continued to be a way of thinking about qualities of experience that are not amenable to logical analysis: an intuitive mode of thinking that is deeply rooted in the beliefs, assumptions and aspirations that make up its ambient culture – as well as the collective memory of its community.

Some art has the power to transcend its specific circumstances, to become foundational to its whole culture and to successive centuries or even millennia, and even to reach beyond the boundaries of its original cultural universe and to impress itself on the minds of people raised in different circumstances. By far the greatest proportion of artistic practice in any form or at any time is much less significant. Even most art of relatively high quality remains more or less bound to its time and place, so that it becomes of interest and even accessible only to those who take the trouble to become acquainted with the culture in which it originated.

Regional or colonial art is a particularly interesting case. Typically, and with occasional exceptions, especially as the colonial societies mature, they are influenced by the center, while, as already noted, the metropolitan center is barely influenced by its colonial offshoots. And this appears at first sight to be true of Australia as well. Few Australian artists have had any influence on the mainstream of art in the last two centuries; some have made reasonable careers abroad or even been appreciated for their distinctive vision, as was the case with Sidney Nolan, Russell Drysdale and Arthur Boyd in the postwar years. But none has made any perceptible difference to the course of western art.

However we may be inclined to temper such a brutal assessment, it is a useful starting-point, mainly in order to be quite clear that the interest of Australian art has nothing to do with its significance or influence outside this country. Its primary value, especially in the first century or more, lies in the way that it speaks of the experience of settlement in a new and strange land. Then the experience that it articulates becomes more complex, pondering the relative importance of local culture and belonging to an international world of modernism; but even in the last half-century, a wider reflection on the evolving ethnic composition of our population and a greater awareness of the prior occupation and the current plight of the Aboriginal people have constantly brought us back to the dialogue of a colonial, if increasingly cosmopolitan society with the land in which it has established itself.

When I first wrote about Australian art over 20 years ago, I was struck by the many fallacies about the subject, and in subsequent years of lecturing, I was astonished to find that these fallacies were extremely hard to weed out, even when I had explicitly refuted them in the course of teaching. One of these was the habit of seeing every style or movement in Australian art as a late and pale copy of something done earlier in the metropolitan center. This was probably a habit of mind born in the postwar years, especially the 1960s and 1970s, when for a time Australian artists became neurotically obsessed with imitating the art fashions of New York. But such imitation was not at all the rule in the first century and half of Australian art.

The second and even more stubborn fallacy was that the colonial artists who came to Australia throughout the nineteenth century brought with them inflexible routines of seeing and painting the world, and lazily repeated these in the new continent, with the result that they could not see what our country was really like. It was not until the Heidelberg School painters, Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Frederick McCubbin and others, that Australian artists finally opened their eyes and saw the brightness of the light and the distinctive forms of the eucalyptus trees. This was clearly the view of the Heidelberg painters themselves, who only recognized Abram Louis Buvelot as a true precursor, and when they were subsequently canonized as the founders of the Australian school, the insignificance of the work of those who had come before them became axiomatic.

The demolition of this second fallacy has been a long and slow process, and although it has probably by now been recognized by Australian art historians and anyone seriously interested in the subject, it will probably survive for generations in the popular mind. The case of Eugene von Guerard, the greatest of the colonial artists, is exemplary. He was barely taken seriously even by the doyen of Australian art history, Bernard Smith, in his Australian Painting (1962), summarily dismissed in Robert Hughes’ youthful and rather impulsive The Art of Australia (1966) and all but ignored in the first edition of McCulloch’s Encyclopedia of Australian Art (1968). The process of revaluation began in the decades that followed, especially in the work of Tim Bonyhady, and Von Guerard was finally presented as an Australian painter of the first rank in Ruth Pullin’s Eugene von Guerard: Nature Revealed exhibition (2012), followed by her recent The Artist as Traveller (2018) devoted to his notebooks.

When we look at all carefully at the art of the colonial period, it is not lazy habits of seeing the world that strike us, but on the contrary curiosity and openness to a land that was full of new and unfamiliar phenomena. From the Port Jackson painter to Augustus Earle, John Glover, Conrad Martens, Von Guerard himself, Buvelot and others, we realize that these artists are not only alive to the many impressions around them, but also attuned to the collective experience of the community into which they have arrived. Coming as they did from England, Germany, Russia, Switzerland, and via travels that had taken them to places as different as Naples and Brazil, the colonial artists soon adapted to speaking of a new land and for those who were making a new life there.

For Australians, these early pictures of our country are part of a collective memory, part of the process of imaginative inhabitation of our continent. In the work of the colonial artists we can sense the alternation of curiosity and excitement with loneliness and nostalgia, and even moral doubts and melancholy about the dispossession and persecution of the native inhabitants: Aborigines are pervasive figures in colonial art, and almost invisible in the work of the Heidelberg period, reflecting a principle I suggested many years ago, that indigenous figures tend to disappear from Australian art in periods of confidence and return in times of doubt or existential anxiety. These works are part of our memory and our experience, in the same way that the lives of our colonial forebears are part of us. For more recent immigrants to the continent – for Australia is a land of migrants – the art of the nineteenth century helps to explain the deeper history of the land and the ethos to which they too have become heirs.

But the history of Australian art can be of interest even to readers who have no personal stake in the question of being Australian. For the cosmopolitan and traveling artists who came to Australia and so quickly became responsive to both the land and the settler community, tell us much about colonial art in general, and perhaps even more about the role of artists within the society they inhabit: artists are not only influenced by the culture that surrounds them, but respond to and speak for it in an active dialogue. They listen, as it were, to the community within which they find themselves, and then articulate and in turn help to shape the incipient feelings and intuitions of that community.

This is in fact simply a colonial manifestation of a more general principle that we can see at work in artists from Giotto to Picasso. Another principle is more particular to the case of Australia, and it reminds us of the important differences between Australia and America, in spite of the many parallels that were only too apparent to the colonists themselves, as well as to the authorities in London, who duly made sure they granted local self-government at the appropriate time and before there was anything like a unilateral declaration of independence.

In the first place, America was discovered by Columbus entirely by chance. The map on which he was relying, essentially corresponding to the Behaim Globe in Nuremberg (1492), shows a distance more or less equivalent to the width of the Atlantic Ocean between Europe and the China coast. The difficulty of accurately calculating longitude before the chronometers of the eighteenth century allowed the cartographers of the time to come up with a seemingly plausible globe that actually omitted not only the Americas but the whole vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean.

In contrast, Australia’s existence had been foreseen, postulated by ancient geographers who reasoned that the globe must have continental masses in the southern hemisphere capable of balancing those in the northern. The very name of our continent long predates any European contact: Terra Australis, the southern land. When Dutch mariners first came upon the coast of our continent in the early seventeenth century, there was little doubt in anyone’s mind that this was indeed the anticipated land mass, though Cook’s exploration of the east coast on his first voyage (1768–1771) revealed that it was somewhat smaller than expected; his subsequent voyage (1772–1775) had as a specific aim to ensure that there was no other considerable continent in the south Pacific.

There are other very important differences between the American and the Australian continents, and therefore between the experiences of the settlers in each case. In the first place, the natural environment that the American settlers encountered, in spite of its new plant and animal species, would not have struck a settler from the British Isles as fundamentally alien; the name New England, given to the northeastern part of the new country, is evidence of this. In Australia, on the other hand, the natural environment was extremely foreign, with poor soil, erratic rainfall patterns, and distinctly strange flora and fauna. Farming was initially hard, and unlike the Americas, Australia was not blessed with an abundance of edible native plants: macadamia nuts, in fact, are the only contribution that Australia has made to the diet of the modern world.

In addition to its strangeness, Australia was far more distant from Europe than the east coast of America. Colonists in the Americas could maintain business and other relations with their families on the other side of the Atlantic. Those who set off for Australia, especially in the first half-century or even the first century – especially if they were poor – might well never see their homeland again, and were most often bidding a last farewell to grandparents and even parents when they sailed away from England. Even news took weeks to travel between England and the new colony of Sydney Town, as Charles Lamb ponders in his essay “Distant correspondents” (1823), composed in the form of a letter to his friend Barron Field, who had arrived in Sydney as judge of the Supreme Court in 1817.

Distance had many effects on the development of Australian culture, which have been pondered by historians and sociologists, most famously in a book by Geoffrey Blayney which added an expression to our language: The Tyranny of Distance (1966). But the most important of these effects has been to develop a certain independence and self-reliance in the Australian character, even though this quality can be undercut by a vein of self-doubt and a kind of inferiority complex which was first named by A.A. Phillips in his essay “On the cultural cringe,” in the periodical Meanjin in 1950. The alternation of brash assertiveness and diffidence, even a fundamental lack of self-confidence and subservience to the dictates of fashions from abroad remains an element of the Australian character and of cultural discourse in this country.

Validation by the metropolitan center, as I have already suggested, became a more urgent preoccupation in the postwar years, and especially in relation to the fascination with New York as the epicenter of a new wave of modernism. It is to some extent present from the time that Australian artists first begin to travel back to the center, which is around the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, but the terms of the opposition were not as clearly defined at first, for even after Federation in 1901, which united the self-governing colonies into a new Commonwealth, independent in most respects of the British state, there was a tendency to regard Britain as home: to be an Australian artist was still be a British artist in the colonies, and a number of leading Australian artists, like Tom Roberts himself, had been born in Britain. There was still some sense of Australian art as a natural extension of British art in the time of Nolan and Drysdale, and as late as the end of the twentieth century, Peter Fuller regarded Arthur Boyd essentially as a great modern British artist.

Leaving aside such anxieties, however, the fact remains that Australian artists in the nineteenth century were working in a new and strange land at a very great distance from what they considered the home of their traditions. And this fact seems to have contributed to the rapidity of their adaptation to their new physical and socio-cultural environment. They were not looking over their shoulders at what was being done in London or Paris, but concentrating on what was around them. John Glover did indeed continue to exhibit in England after his move to Tasmania, but his was a special case, for he was the only colonial artist to arrive here with an established reputation and market in England. Few, if any, other Australian artists of the nineteenth century attempted to exhibit their works in London or Paris, until the “Exodus”, as Bernard Smith famously titled a chapter of his Australian Painting (1962), in which so many Australian artists returned to Europe to build careers there with varying degrees of success.

The clearest illustration of the difference that distance made to Australian art can be seen in the contrast between the American impressionist painters at the end of the nineteenth century and the artists of the Heidelberg School, who are today often, but I believe misleadingly, called Australian Impressionists. This appellation, ostensibly intended to bring the Heidelberg artists into the common narrative of art history in the last quarter of the century, has the perverse effect of distracting us from their originality. Although they did adopt the word “Impressions” in the title of their famous exhibition in 1889, they had little interest in fleeting effects of light and weather, or in any kind of optical reduction. They were more concerned with establishing an intimate connection to the new land, partly through confronting the extremes of Australian light and heat, and partly through depicting themes of labor and leisure.

Above all, though, they focused on the land around them, and were barely even aware of the work of Monet and the other French Impressionists. Their own direct inspiration came from French Realism and the Barbizon movement, as well as elements of modern tonal realism and the work of James McNeill Whistler. Their situation was completely unlike that of the American Impressionists, who, for both geographical and other reasons, were close to Paris, if not resident there, and who, in consequence, were ultimately imitators of the French rather than particularly original artists. The point can be confirmed from Australian art history too, since a painter like Emmanuel Phillips Fox, who was in Europe during the very years (1887–1892) that the Heidelberg artists were finding their own voice, remained for the same reasons an essentially second-rate imitator of French fashion.

Even in later periods, the best of our artists have always been closely attuned to the Australian environment and to the social and moral questions of inhabiting this land. Nolan, Tucker, Boyd, Drysdale and others assimilated a variety of ideas and forms from the common stock of contemporary and historical art, but in the end they became original by drawing on their circumstances in Australia, and even on elements of earlier Australian art. Nolan is an interesting case, for he specifically writes of drifting away from generic models of modernism and finding his roots in the Australian bush – which also coincides with finding roots in the still very short Australian art history: his image of Kelly, as I have argued elsewhere, is a kind of symbolic inversion of the industrious settler of Heidelberg.

Still later artists, such as Fred Williams, similarly return from a period abroad to discover their unique style in a connection with the land and experience of Australia. It was his encounter with the mysterious, elusive landscape of the You Yangs in Victoria that led Williams to articulate a distinctive poetic vision, inseparable from and embodied in his particular approach to painting and printmaking. Still later, in the following generation, Imants Tillers, the most significant postmodern artist in Australia, has evolved an art out of the most complex dialogue with Australia’s art history that we have seen until now.

Thus the interest of the art of Australia is not grounded in any influence it has had on the wider course of art history or of modern culture in general. If this story has a claim on the attention of any non-Australian, it is primarily because of the rather special circumstances of the colonial history and culture of Australia, compared to those of America in particular, but also to other centers of European expansion. Anyone interested in the history of colonialism, of colonial culture and of the emergence of a nation from its colonial roots – unlike in other countries where the colonists later withdrew, as in India or Algeria, or were outnumbered by the indigenous population, as in South Africa – will certainly find in Australia a rich case study.

But the greatest interest of Australian art, as I have already suggested, is for Australians. Just as the individual past is integral to personal identity, so is the history of a nation to its collective social and cultural life, its values and aspirations. That history can be known in many ways, but art, like literature or music, offers us a particularly living and intuitive access to the mind of another time, including its own uncertainties and ambivalences. To cite only a few artists already mentioned, Von Guerard, Streeton, Nolan, and Williams all offer us ways of seeing our land and of conceiving our relation to it that are quite distinct, belonging to successive phases of our history and sometimes seemingly incompatible, but ultimately cumulative in forming a sophisticated Australian cultural self-awareness.

What I have just referred to as Australian cultural self-awareness, of course, is not some figment of a nationalist delusion. The Australian mind, if we can call it that for the sake of brevity, remains a subset of the western mind more generally; it is a common and long-standing fallacy to call Australia a young country, since our memory and our tradition go back as far as those of any European nation. It is only our separate existence which is young, and our separateness is only relative, since we have continued to be in constant contact with Britain, Europe and America, as well as increasingly with the cultures of Asia, and the hyperconnectedness of the contemporary world has brought about a relative convergence in all cultures. The mix of what makes up the Australian mind has also been importantly modified and continues to evolve with our expanding migrant population. Nonetheless, anyone coming to Australia joins a specific local discourse or narrative which can offer ways of thinking about and coming to terms with a new land; and art history probably offers the most accessible entry into this narrative.

Art historians, especially in the world of the modern university, can easily forget that art belongs to the people of a nation, not to a group of specialists who use it as raw material for their own academic productions. The temptation for academics in writing about the art of the past is to turn away from the work itself to discuss the hypotheses and models proposed by earlier historians. There is clearly a place for such debates, especially if we believe an earlier model was ineffective or misleading in its interpretation of the material. But we must proceed with tact, trying always to keep the art itself in the foreground, and striving to ensure that everything we say about it helps the reader to approach and engage with its inherent meanings, multiple and complex as they may be. We must always remember that art is, in Harold Rosenberg’s words, a special way of thinking, and the task of critics and historians is to open up an access to this concrete and intuitive thinking, not to block it with an avalanche of theory and ideology.

Sympathy and historical imagination, as much as a critical perspective, are the tools that bring the art of the past to life. Theoretical models and perspectives can be useful as well, but we should bear in mind the etymology of theory in a Greek verb meaning to watch. Theory, in other words, should be an aid to seeing: bad theory can obfuscate, but good theory makes its objects clearer and more lucid.

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If the content of this book is designed as much as possible to help the reader encounter the art of Australia in its various periods and manifestations, its structure is intended to make the relevant information as easy as possible to find and to use. I have adopted an essentially pragmatic combination of chronological and thematic chapters, because while the main narrative may seem to flow through a sequence of painters of whom some have already been mentioned, that is only part of the story. In the first place, the most prominent painters have usually worked in or been associated with the capital cities of the two most populous states in the Commonwealth – Sydney in New South Wales and Melbourne in Victoria. But other states and their capital cities also had more or less significant developments, which are all part of the broader story of art in Australia.

These individual regional stories needed to be recognized, especially in the century before Federation when their developments were more truly distinct and comparatively independent. If they had been incorporated in a single chronological narrative, however, they would have made the story too complicated, disrupting the main flow and either being overshadowed or treated as mere parentheses. So for the nineteenth century, most of the significant regional traditions are dealt with in separate chapters.

The other parts of the history which deserved to be treated in separate chapters were those that concerned specific subjects such as photography and sculpture, or the genre of portraiture, often ignored or underrated in a tradition dominated, for a variety of historical reasons, by landscape painting. Once again, any attempt to incorporate these into a single chronological narrative would have been confusing and would have made it hard to appreciate the thematic and narrative themes proper to each of these subjects.