A Companion to Australian Art. Группа авторов
disseminating new directions in American painting as revealed in expatriate Australian sculptor Clement Meadmore’s article, “New York Scene II – Color as an Idiom” (1966), in which he examines the work of Barnett Newman as a defining influence on color-field painting and Minimalism against a backdrop of color reproductions of Newman’s work (Meadmore 2006, 768). In 1967 the exhibition, Two Decades of American Painting, featuring work by Newman, Josef Albers, Ellsworth Kelly, Ad Reinhart and Frank Stella toured Sydney and Melbourne providing the first large-scale opportunity for the Australian public to see such American paintings.
Its design had a significant impact on The Field, a pivotal exhibition in the history of modernism in Australia. Held as the inaugural show at the new premises of the NGV in 1968, The Field, curated by John Stringer, presented a survey of local color-field abstraction with an emphasis on paintings and sculptural works by emerging artists exhibiting with the new network of commercial galleries. The exclusion of a number of established modernists from the exhibition triggered dissent among critics. Alan McCulloch, the most vocal opponent, denounced the participating artists as “band-wagon-jumpers” who were “gambling on the staying power of current international art fashions”, and reproached the NGV for “creating artificial standards of value” that represented ‘”a new kind of hazard to national creativity” (McCulloch 1968b). On the other side of the debate, the critic Patrick McCaughey championed the new autonomy of the art showcased in The Field: “It and it alone confronted the watcher and the feelings, associations, or references to things outside itself” (Eagle 1984, 146). He enthusiastically defended the artists, insisting that they signaled a “fresh enterprise” in Australian modernism (McCaughey 1968).
The Field signaled a generational shift in the Australian art world in which the old establishment represented by the Antipodeans and Bernard Smith was replaced by a new cohort of educated, middle-class artists, critics, and curators, many of whom had garnered significant overseas experience (Grishin 2013, 400). The theorist and artist Ian Burn designated this transitional period as one of crisis brought on by a variety of factors, including the deskilling of artistic practice and the decrease in the significance of the art object, the detachment of the artist from social issues, the exclusion of women and marginal groups by the art world, the commercialization of art, and the crushing influence of American culture on Australian art, all of which resulted in the proliferation of Pop art, color-field, and Minimalism (Burn 1984, 8). A member of the Conceptual Art group Art and Language, Burn proposed Conceptualism as paving the way for more democratic, collaborative, and expansive approaches to the production and perception of art in Australia in the transitional decade of the 1970s against the backdrop of the global demise of modernism.
Contemporary Currents
By the 1970s the art scene had substantially shifted from the twentieth-century notion of a mainstream modernism propelling ever forward towards a post-modernist plurality of alternative networks and subcultures in which the stylistic continuum was shattered. The primacy of painting was replaced by a flourishing of performance and installation art, photography, video art and film, body art, sculpture, and textile art, which were supported at the institutional level through an increase in state-funded art schools and galvanized by social movements such as feminism and the fight for Indigenous agency and land rights, and public political engagement, embodied in the mass protests against Australia’s participation in the civil war in Vietnam.
Established in 1968, the Australian Council for the Arts was transformed after the election of the Whitlam Labor Government in 1972, fostering a number of scholarly exhibitions by curators educated in art history programs that emerged in Australia after the Second World War. Art museums began to rethink their installations of Australian art, a movement spearheaded by the curator Daniel Thomas at the opening of the Australian National Gallery in 1982 (renamed the National Gallery of Art in 1993) where he instigated a display strategy in which Australian art was displayed “in its full range of media and cultures” (Sayers 2011, 3) in effect “diluting medium hierarchies in Australian art history” (Sayers 2011, 4).
In “Writing the History of Australian Art: Its Past, Present and Possible Future” (1983), the critic and art historian Terry Smith argues that the new art history was distinguished by the socially engaged practices of Marxism and feminism along with an emerging interest in cultural studies and marginalized groups in a multi-faceted revision of the combination of connoisseurship, iconography and modernism that had come to define institutional art history by the 1960s (Smith 2011a, 3). He cites Bernard Smith’s patronizing account of women modernists as a catalyst for works such as Janine Burke’s Australian Women Artists: 1840–1940 (1980). Burke rebuts Smith’s argument as “written from a viewpoint that has not taken into consideration the feminist movement of the 1880s and 90s (Burke 1980, 41–42).6 Feminist activism in the arts in the 1970s was bolstered by Lip Magazine (Melbourne, 1976–1984), which provided an important platform through its mission to “foster an awareness and evaluation of neglected areas of women’s work and the concerns of feminist art” (Smith and Smith 1991, 490).
Despite decreasing interest of gallery directors in Aboriginal art after the death of Tony Tuckson in 1973, the questioning of modernism in the 1970s and the federal government’s encouragement of Aboriginal self-determination both led to a new perception of Aboriginal art outside the confines of primitivism (McLean 2011, 32), especially with the rise of artistic enterprises in a number of remote Aboriginal communities. First was the Papunya Tula School of acrylic painting in 1971, instigated by the art teacher Geoffrey Bardon who introduced modern media but discouraged the use of non-Aboriginal modes of representation. The distinctive style of seemingly abstract designs that emerged, exemplified in Napperby Death Spirit Dreaming (1980) by Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, spoke directly, as the curator Judith Ryan has observed, “to a white audience accustomed to the visual language of Abstract Expressionism, Conceptualism, Minimalism and Op Art” (Sayers 2001, 202–203). By the early 1980s Papunya Tula painting was equated with contemporary art and integrated into postmodernist discourse through its inclusion in the Biennale of Sydney in 1979 and Australian Perspecta in 1981, as well as its acquisition and display in state gallery collections.
The increasing prominence of Aboriginal art combined with the introduction of biennales and triennales in international centers as well as in Australia – particularly the Mildura Sculpture Triennale – disrupted the center-periphery model of the art world, creating a sense of contemporaneous activity between Australian art and that produced overseas. Emerging out of this structural shift, Terry Smith’s “The Provincialism Problem” (1974) interrogates Australian artists’ perceived dependency on international artistic discourse. Fuelled by his activist views that opposed American capitalism and imperialism, Smith critiques Australia’s acceptance of externally imposed metropolitan models that contributed to what he saw as reactionary and derivative work (Smith 2011b).
Much of the debate about the autonomy or lack there of Australian art occurred in the pages of Art & Text, a Melbourne-based art journal edited by Paul Taylor and influenced by French theories of structuralism and semiotics. In it Taylor advocates a “New Wave” cultural sensibility that placed an emphasis on the constructed nature of meaning and the open-ended nature of interpretation, and challenged conventional notions of originality (Taylor 1984 a, b). In 1982 he promoted a model of antipodean inversion as a culture based on the copy in the exhibition, Popism (NGV), through its central theme of appropriation and the reproducibility of photographic medium.
The bicentenary of British settlement in 1988 acted as a catalyst for reassessing the relationship between nation and identity. Rather than rejecting international influences, a number of exhibitions and publications sought to reveal the variety and richness of local visual cultures (Smith and Smith 1991, 552). This was most visibly embodied in the national touring Great Australian Art Exhibition of 1988, curated by Daniel Thomas in collaboration with then-director of the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), Ron Radford. This inclusive approach was mirrored in the central placement of the Ramingining artist community’s Aboriginal Memorial, an immersive environment of 200 hollow-log coffins made at in Arnhem Land, at the Australian National Gallery, while Papunya Tula painting