...AUSTRALIANA......... A celebration of kitsch nationalism
Above, Australiana - Ned Kelly, 1946 by Sidney Nolan (image source https://www.wikiart.org/en/sidney-nolan/ned-kelly-1946 ) Nolan lived in London, and died there and not Australia. The "lessons" Australians learned from "modernism" were that for the work to qualify as "modern" it must be painted badly and Nolan’s art is badly painted kitsch masquerading as modernism par excellence.
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The art which has succeeded in Australlia is nationalistic. Indeed it is best described as racialistic parochialism - basically the noble Anglo-colonist bravely taming an inhospitable hostile land. This kind of art had its greatest success when it was exhibited in the motherland of the artists involved, England. And it was this success in the motherland that established these artists' bona fides in Australia. In Australia it has been the artists who pander to the national and racial psyche and illustrate national folklore and myths are the ones acclaimed and celebrated. Art, like sports, must serve the national interest to succeed - meaning it is propaganda posturing as art. This is, I suppose, is symptomatic of a nation lacking identity which, in endeavouring to create one, celebrates populist and mindnumbingly obvious symbols.
One such Australian artist is Arthur Boyd whose art brought Christian fantasies to the Australian "bush".
....... Jeffrey Makin, art critic of the Herald Sun recently wrote in his obituary on Arthur Boyd:
"Boyd, more than any other Australian painter peopled our outback with accessible motifs that helped form our national psyche and self image...he will be sorely missed." (Herald Sun 28 April 1999)
So "Australian" was Boyd that he lived in London....not Australia when he died...
My view is hardly unsupported:
"The late 1940s and on into the 1950s saw the perennial testing by Australian artists of themselves on the European [British] scene...Drysdale and Nolan (and subsequently Arthur Boyd) in particular were exhibiting their Australian imagery and achievement on the international [British] stage and, for better or for worse, not without success. For others, not so stridently identifiable in their Australianness, this was not always the case."p. 219 A Story of Australian Painting. Mary Eagle & John Jones, Macmillan Australia.
On 21 June 2000 the Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, made a speech at an Australia Council opening. He quoted from a report which studied how to best promote the arts in Australia. The following is part of the transcript:
"...the report found [that] the great majority of Australians saw the Arts as an opportunity to express...what we think it is to be Australian, what the essence of Australianism is and the values that we hold as Australians. And that very strong identification between the Arts and our national identity is always something that I believe has resonated very strongly in the Australian community." (my italics)
"Australians", on the realisation that they are merely Englishmen (& women) displaced from the English motherland, have sought to try to create an English identify separate from England while at the same time also celebrating their Englishness. The landscape is an obvious motif as a point of difference, and the role the artist serves is the same as the role served by the union jack in Australia's flag: the English reign here.
Artists such as Nolan, Boyd, Drysdale returned to their racial homeland at the conclusion of the second world war. There they were celebrated as greats simply because their Australian landscape did not look English. And on the basis of this recognition in England, they came to be celebrated as great artists in Australia despite the mediocrity of their work. Australians - notwithstanding claims to the contrary - define themselves as being of Anglo stock to the exclusion of those of other backgrounds and continue to look to the racial homeland for aproval and guidance.
Unsurprisingly, when given the choice, Australians voted to keep the Queen of the motherland, England, as their own head of state rather than have a president in the referendum of November 1999.
If art is merely the vehicle for expressing nationalistic visions then it is no different from the art of Stalinist Russia, or Nazi Germany.
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The photo, left, which I took at the Old Melbourne Goal, is of the "death mask" of Ned Kelly with the armour worn by his brother Dan beside it. The Kelly brothers were members of a gang of "bushrangers", that is glorified murderers. They made the armour depicted and had a shoot-out with police in the nineteenth century. Ned (wearing armour similar to Dan's) was captured alive and hung. It has become the stuff of legend... And 'Australian' artists (read: those of British ancestry), whose work is surprisingly taken seriously, have painted entire "Ned Kelly Series" of paintings. Somehow American depictions of the "wild west" are cringeworthy kitsch, ... but the equally cringeworthy Ned Kelly theme is the stuff that makes for great art here! You'd be embarrassed to call your self Australian .. you would think?
In 2002 there were a number of Ned Kelly exhibitions in both Melbourne and Sydney; there was a film on Ned Kelly; and a novel which won an international writer's prize..... Oh dear.
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Australianess still remains a prerequisite in Australian art. Artists still have to, in some way, demonstrate their "Australianness". The crisis in identity is not an issue yet resolved in this country.
A brief return to Gleeson. When Gleeson did finally achieve a level of success it was when he began to claim that his art was a product of the Australian landscape, visits to Perigian beach in Queensland, which he made in Lou Klepac's 1985 monography on him James Gleeson: Landscapes out of Nature. However this "Australianess" failed too molify the critics, going by the criticism of Robert Nelson, and Peter Timms quoted above.
