art

ARIADNE'S THREAD

BERNARD SMITH'S MONUMENTAL Australian Painting remains and -- with the additional chapters by Terry Smith in its most recent 1991 edition -- is bound to remain the standard reference guide to Australian art for some time. But there has always been a need for a shorter, less expensive and more immediately accessible text -- a role that has long been filled by Robert Hughes' The Art of Australia first published in 1966. Its last revision was in 1970 and only its combination of wit and critical edge has compensated for its increasing character as very much a period piece. Christopher Allen's Art in Australia seems set to replace it as the best available introduction to Australian art. It possesses something of Hughes' trenchant readability, and if Allen rarely matches the sheer zest of Hughes' engagement with the works themselves, he is every bit as forthright in his judgments and willingness to challenge fashionable dogma.

The strength and originality of the book resides, however, in its reconceptualisation of the entire project of Australian art. Its six chapters take us from a condition characterised as the alienation of a 'homeless' colonial era prior to Buvelot and the Heidelberg School to the more recent homelessness of our contemporary postmodern condition. In so doing Allen offers a clear and boldly stated thesis concerning the distinctive historical role of the Australian artist.

The book has already come under critical fire for its theoretical preoccupations, but that component (intrinsic to the book's purpose) is dispatched effectively in the introduction, and thereafter absorbed within the framework of its strong narrative drive. Running through this narrative is what Allen chooses to call the 'Ariadne's thread' of Australian art history, 'that of effectively inhabiting this place'.

This concern, understood in both a literal and a metaphoric sense, of inhabiting a land that was at first both strange and distant, accounts in large measure for the central role played by landscape painting as the privileged genre in Australian art. Indeed, so much of what passed for abstraction in the 1950s and 1960s remained a landscape based practice. While nineteenth century Australian and American art shared a preoccupation with landscape, its continued dominance as a vehicle for modernist form for most of this century has been the most distinguishing feature of Australian modernism. One suspects, more-over, that much of the success of recent Aboriginal art at a time when white artists had all but ceased painting landscape derives from, as Allen describes it, its symbolic and spiritual mapping of the land.

Given this centrality of landscape, Allen offers an art embedded within an unstable set of dialectical tensions: between that of work and that of alienation, of settlement and inhabitability, and ultimately between the social and natural orders of a sense of community and the insistent presence of the land. The challenge confronting artists in this context was less a matter of ridding themselves of imported cultural habits, than of 'constructing or adapting a set of practices, of ideas, of social, political models and values that would make it possible to live in a new environment'.

Not all artists succeeded in this task. Some, like Charles Conder, Allen suggests, had little intention of doing so. Conder's Impressionist-based work thus demonstrates an inability -- or a refusal -- to produce images that did not speak of anything other than a temporary and leisured stay in Australia. Earlier colonialist seekers after the sublime -- above all Eugène von Guérard -- found at least a `belonging-in-alienation'. Those who succeeded in establishing a sense of settlement -- a Roberts or a Streeton -- did so on the basis of their themes of rural work or an unambiguous sense of being at home in the bush. Half a century later, against a climate of economic crisis and war, the artists of the Angry Penguins group found a degree of accommodation through a shared concern for mythic figures `grown from the land and its history'. Yet it was, Allen argues, only an accommodation and, unlike the achievement of the Heidelberg artists, a further `dwelling-in-alienation'.

These achievements are always provisional and unstable -- and the angst of alienation a constant leitmotif of Australian culture. Allen's penultimate chapter 'Escape Routes' deals with the years of the late 1950s to the 1960s, an era characterised by a yearning to escape the burden of a provincialism that began to seem intolerable as a sense of cultural isolation from the avant-garde centres elsewhere increasingly appeared to condemn a local art practice to irrelevancy. For some, like Boyd and Drysdale, the route was into a geographical interior and an evocation of the Aborigine. For the majority, however, escape lay via the aesthetic ideology of abstraction, one that culminated in the minimalist abstraction of the late 1960s where, in Allen's terms, one might inhabit 'art history itself'.

Richard Haese lectures in art history at La Trobe University and is the author of Rebels and Precursors: The Revolutionary Years of Australian Art .

Return to September 1997 / AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW