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 was immortalized in Michael Tjakamarra’s Nelson’s commissioned mosaic for the forecourt of the New Parliament House in Canberra.7
The commodification of Aboriginality contributed to the increasing acceptance of urban Indigenous artists such as Tracey Moffatt and Gordon Bennett who refused to be pigeonholed as Aboriginal, aligning themselves instead with global postmodernism (McLean 1998, 57, 109). This coincided with a new level of Indigenous visibility in Australian culture through the Mabo decision of 1993, which overturned the doctrine of terra nullius in the continuing campaign for land rights, the recovered history and ramifications of the stolen generations, and the rhetoric surrounding reconciliation in the lead up to the centenary of Federation in 2001 (Neale and Kleinert 2000, v).
Within this evolving political and cultural context, Albert Namatjira’s Hermannsburg watercolors, which were increasingly viewed as a significant precursor to the developing Aboriginal contemporary art movement, provided fertile ground for reassessment. While several writers examined Namatjira’s landscapes as a manifestation of his relationship to Arrernte country, Ian Burn and Ann Stephen evaluated their complex relationship to the European tradition, exploring how the artist used mimicry to disrupt a western mode of vision, creating a sense of “being in the landscape” rather than observing it impartially from without (Burn and Stephen 2005, 226–227, 229–230). Nineteenth-century Aboriginal artists working in missions and other settled areas of the southeast, including Wurundjeri artist William Barak and Kwatkwat artist Tommy McRae, who employed European materials and techniques and thus offered an important precedent for Namatjira’s cross-cultural practice, were also reevaluated. Andrew Sayers’ Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century (1994) traces the shared set of experiences of these artists who lived a traditional way of life prior to the incursion of white settlement (Sayers 2011, 6).
The centenary of the Federation of the Australian Commonwealth in 2001 provided another opportunity to reassess the historiography of Australia. John McDonald’s touring exhibition Federation: Australian Art and Society 1901–2001 (2000) echoed the Great Australian Art Exhibition commemorating the bicentenary in its broadly inclusive approach and deliberate choice to represent artists previously neglected in mainstream histories. Reevaluating landscape paintings from the first decade of the twentieth century, Ron Radford’s Our Country: Australian Federation Landscapes 1900–1914 (AGSA, 2001) sought to reveal the spiritual associations of both indigenous and non-indigenous Australians with the landscape (Peers 2005, 193–194).
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