In 2001 London art dealer Julian Agnew extolled the virtues of Australian
culture:
For a population not much larger than that of London, it is extraordinary
that there should be such a high proportion of artists, writers,
musicians and film makers, not to mention those who read and listen
to their work. Within that culture, the visual arts have played
a more than proportionate role, perhaps because a young society
in an ancient continent has sought to define itself particularly
in terms of its unique landscape. Because of its importance as
a defining element of 'Australianess', Australian painting has
been enormously popular in that country but conversely comparatively
unknown internationally.1
Since Bryan Robertson's Whitechapel Art Gallery's ambitious, 'Recent
Australian Painting' in 1961 (111 works by 55 artists) and a larger
show still at the Tate in 1963 there has not been the sustained
interest in Australian art. Certain commercial galleries have represented
Australian artists, most notably Marlborough Fine Art, Fischer Fine
Art and more recently the Rebecca Hossack Gallery. The best Australian
artists have traditionally shown in London and their status in Australia
is defined in part by their success and reception in London. Artists
such as Arthur Boyd and Sir Sidney Nolan spent most of their careers
in Britain.
In the 1960s Australian art arrived in Britain at a point where
its appeal lay to a great extent in the fact that the artists represented
painted landscape and they did so in a way that such a persistently
Ancien Regime would find thrilling. The New World images
could thus purge the ills of the Old. One would have expected that
with individuals such as Bryan Robertson and Sir Kenneth Clark championing
Australian contemporary art that the narrative would have been sustained.
Alas, the 1970s were a period of individual exhibitions but little
comprehensive representation. It was not until the 1988 Australian
Bicentennial shows, 'The Angry Penguins' at the Hayward Gallery
and 'Stories of Australian Art' (Australian art in British collections)
by Jonathan Watkins, that Australian art was presented as such.
Individuals from Australia represent their country at international
art fairs and biennales such as Documenta, ARCO, Basel Art Fair,
the Venice Biennale. It is a vital involvement in an art world beyond
their own nation's boundaries which in career terms is important,
but it is also an excellent opportunity for a European audience
to experience the remarkable range of art from Australia. Where
commentators in Europe, and especially Britain were keen to categorise
Australian art as belonging to a bold, fresh place in the 1960s,
they would be hard pressed to make any such generalisations now.
'Face Up' reveals the dramatic changes that have taken place in
Australia on all levels. No longer predominantly European, Australia
now has an art world that is vital and varied. In fact, the art
world in Australia has been transformed in the past 20 years due,
very largely, to changes in immigration laws and the ensuing multiculturalism.
The great Australian tradition of painting, which in the latter
part of the 20th century was dominated by images of artists such
as Nolan, Boyd, Brett Whiteley or Fred Williams, has given way to
work in a broad variety of media - namely, photography, installation,
and video. As a consequence of the expansion in art practice to
include land art, and body art, a climate developed where it was
possible for White Australia to interact more meaningfully with
Aboriginal culture. In the 'Face Up' exhibition in Berlin at present
it is also obvious that the large increase in Asian immigration
has had a profound effect on Australian culture.
Indigenous artists and those from non-English speaking backgrounds
play an important part in defining the experience of being Australian
in the early 21st century and the dialogue with place in this vast
and dramatic landscape. A number of artists born outside Australia
are included in 'Face Up'. The definition of being Australian is
more complex than ever before, and brings into focus many issues
pertaining to identity in personal and cultural terms. The impact
of Asian culture since 1970 can be seen to be of great value to
Australian visual culture. The global network imposes infinite possibilities
and also restrictions on Australian artists, issues that we are
now able to focus on with this exhibition. The accompanying catalogue
comprises informative essays on Australian art of the past 20 years,
profiles of and interviews with the participating artists.
Britta Schmitz who travelled to Australia to select works for 'Face
Up' observed:
Restrictions based on geography have certainly lost their validity.
Phenomena occur within a particular context and circulate. Australian
artists are flexible, operating within diverse cultural and social
contexts both in the production and reception of their artworks.
Indeed in Australian cities and society, globalisation is actually
lived. This has given rise to a resistance on the part of Australians
against the notion that today's creative environment is regionally
determined. In fact, Australian artists withdrew from debates
surrounding centre and periphery early on.2
The works in 'Face Up' have not been chosen to present a cultural
homogeneity, rather they represent the diversity and plurality in
Australian culture. Inevitably a mere 14 artists cannot represent
such a culture, but they can present important aspects of it. Most
works in the exhibition do not represent life that is specifically
Australian; indeed many of the works could have been made anywhere
in the world. An exception is the work of Chinese artist Guan Wei
(born 1959, arrived Australia 1989) whose series 'Trepidation Continent'
(2003) presents military style maps of Australia with arrows to
denote military advances. There is the full wartime kit: helicopters,
tanks, fighter aircraft, soldiers in action. They constitute a political
comment on Australia's recent hostile and contradictory attitudes
to immigration.
Having myself lived away from Australia for the past 16 years,
this is quite a shocking image, because although Australia fought
in the two World Wars and in Vietnam in the face of great protest,
no war has been fought on Australian soil. Guan Wei's work presents
an image of personal and psychological battle; the military maps
are also weather maps with high and low pressure systems, aboriginal
hunters and native animals. Rather than the politically correct
image of Australia as the large, prosperous, tolerant country that
the last Prime Minister, Paul Keating, presented to the world, this
is a perception of immigrants who have in fact experienced blatant
hostility on arrival. Chinese woodblocks represent the artist's
culture and identity; boat people from Asia are greeted with "Piss
Off!" and "Not Welcome!" stamped alongside signs
of bureaucracy 'Secret document', "Urgent", "Confidential".
The applications create a menacing image of Australia, traditionally
associated with promise and prosperity. Multiculturalism and its
legacy of tolerance have in recent years been compromised. 'Trepidation
Continent' seeks to convey, 'the general global disquiet of the
past several years…[the] unease over migration and an accompanying
suspicion of outsiders.3
Aboriginal artist Darren Siwes' photographic images, 'Mis/Perceptions'
(2002) are among the most haunting in the exhibition. Siwes recently
studied in London in order to remove himself from his own, 'country,
cultures, and familiar surroundings, to see if it was possible to
experience anonymity in relation to cultural identity. Away from
Australia, I am no longer recognised as an indigenous Aboriginal.
I am free of the negative baggage normally associated with Aboriginal
people; I become almost invisible'.4
Siwes photographs churches, parks, and monuments in Adelaide (where
he lives). He captures an eerie atmosphere, still and silent, using
almost transparent photographic images of himself. The ghost-like
self-portraits are superimposed on the townscapes devoid of other
human presence.
One recognises that his identity is not entirely congruent with
the identity of these places, that the solitude, strangeness and
coldness are fixed in these images, and that he is thus able to
communicate the fracture points of an existence marked out by
loss and absence.5
There has been a lively debate in Australia since the early 1970s
when the Sydney Biennale was first established in 1973. Since 1993
the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) has been held
in Brisbane at the Queensland Art Gallery. These events and the
accompanying dialogue between artists, curators and the wider intellectual
community has elevated the discourse there, to keep apace of the
dramatic social and cultural changes as a consequence of multiculturalism,
and the ramifications of the assertion of Aboriginal culture and
land rights. The participation in European art events (Documenta,
Venice Biennale) has broadened the dialogue. 'Face Up' in Berlin
is a natural extension of these activities.
The changes to the immigration policy in Australia are one of the
most significant cultural catalysts in the past 15 years. Asia,
Japan and other countries in the Pacific are geographically closer
than Europe or the US. Ah Xian and Guan Wei from China are represented
in 'Face Up', with Simryn Gill from Malaysia. Ah Xian left China
in the wake of the Tian'anmen Square massacre. He takes what appears
to be a traditional approach to the human body, a practice that
had virtually disappeared from sculpture by the 1970s. 'China,
China', which he has been developing since 1999, uses traditional
Chinese glazed floral motifs with aspects of sculpture from the
European tradition: modelling from life, the bust, the full figure.
The famous portrait of Chairman Mao is referred to in Ah Xian's
busts, but he purposely introduces a contradiction. As he states
in an interview with Britta Schmitz:
Once I reached the idea of using the form of making realistic
human portraiture, I consciously decided to do a copy from the
lives of ordinary people rather than famous ones…most of
the sculptural portraits in history were made for imperial families,
politicians, heroes, or the rich and famous. Instead of deifying
those 'big' name people, I 'de-deify' the entire form of such
a tradition, by making many 'high craft' and 'high art' portraits
of ordinary people.6
It is important for Ah Xian that the word 'China' also means porcelain:
There is a vast space that I can wander around, from the age-old
civilisation to the current, from one of the oldest crafts to
the over-avant-garde concepts.7
Susan Norrie's video stills installation 'Undertow' (2002)
enables her to manipulate time and space:
I see film as an extension of painting, a synthesis between image,
sound and colour…My focus is digital imaging which enables
me to blur the boundaries of fact and fiction, to merge documentary
film and cinematic effects. This is an ideal medium to deal with
the sort of information overload we face in an increasingly 'mediatised'
world.8
'Undertow' 2002, is a bold and courageous confrontation with impending
environmental catastrophe. It presents the world as a world possessed.
In her essay on Norrie's work, Juliana Engberg quotes Isaiah Berlin's
definition of romanticism:
Romanticism is the primitive, the untutored, it is youth, life,
the exuberant sense of life of the natural man, but it is also
pallor, fever, disease, decadence, the maladie de siècle.9
The madness captured by Norrie's DVD images is pertinent to the
moment. In new media she captures the same element of despair and
of a world shorn of all hope, that Arthur Boyd, Australia's great
painter captured with 'Australian Scapegoat Triptych', shown at
the 43rd Venice Biennale in 1988. Beauty and terror can also be
found in the photographic work of Rosemary Laing. 'One dozen unnatural
disasters in the Australian Landscape' (2003) juxtapose the beautiful
and distinctive blue of an Australian sky with destructive images
of a world gone mad. These are distinctly Australian images, but
like Boyd's work they carry a universal message. In the context
of a discussion of Laing's haunting photographs, George Alexander
captures a central theme of the 'Face Up' exhibition.
Contemporary Australian culture remains haunted by both its European
past and its indigenous past, and a good deal of Australian art
draws energy from this misalliance. Orphaned from "Mother
England", and without the birthright entitlements of the
Indigenous people, we have to make do with a makeshift, synthetic
identity, for non-indigenous Australians, Australia may be our
first home, but it is our first 'elsewhere'. Only in the act of
making art, art as a combination of belonging and not belonging,
can we make up Australia.10
'Face Up' is a powerful and impressive show, which reflects the
integrity and calibre of the Australian art world at present.
References
1. Julian Agnew, ‘Foreword’, You Beaut Country, A
Selection of Australian Paintings, 1940-2000, Agnews, London, 3-26
October, 2001, no pagination.
2. Britta Schmitz, ‘Introduction’, Face Up: Contemporary
Art From Australia, Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof Museum
for the Present, Berlin, 2003, p.014.
3. Guan Wei, “Artist's Statement”, ibid, p.191.
4. Darren Siwes, “Artsist’s Statement”, ibid, p.169.
5. Britta Schmitz, op.cit., p.016.
6. Ah Xian, Interviewed by Schmitz, ibid, p.203.
7. Ah Xian, quoted by Claire Roberts, “China, China”:
Recent works in Porcelain by Ah Xian', Beyond the Future: The Third
Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Exhibition Catalogue,
Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1999, p.14, quoted by Schmitz,
ibid, p.204.
8. Susan Norrie, "Artist's Statement", ibid, p.135.
9. Juliana Engberg, “Susan Norrie”, ibid, p.136.
10. George Alexander, “Rosemary Laing”, ibid, p.104.
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