Electronic Space in Contemporary Australian Art: Practice and Theory

Abstract

Australian artists are obsessed by space. Those who are of European origin have been involved to an exceptional degree with the problem of siting themselves, geographically and psychologically, within the daunting scale and, in European terms, the inhospitable nature of the land [1]. Writer Ross Gibson has examined how post-Renaissance concepts of mapped and 'vacant' or 'empty' territory affected the specific character of Australian colonialization. (The 'vacuum' of Australia's interior drew explorers in from the coastline with the illusory promise of fecund earth.) Gibson described white Australian history and cultural myth as displaying in consequence recurrent, almost mesmerized preoccupation with geography [2]. Early settlers romanticized both the European colonialization and the land itself. In ethical and psychological terms, this eventually proved to be an unsatisfactory obscuration of the realities of settlement. Thus, in the 1970s a re-evaluation of such romanticization took place [3]. As a result of their need to locate themselves spatially, European Australian artists frequently engaged the tradition of landscape painting instead of developing a convincing visual vocabulary appropriate to the urban sites inhabited by the majority of the population. (Other art forms, such as sculpture, also suffered.) Landscape painters followed the Romantic and then the Impressionist schools and finally the Expressionist-Surrealism of the 1940s for which Australian art has become known internationally. Promoted as the essential character of Australian consciousness, the work of painters such as Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker filled the landscape with personalized introversion in an anxious pathetic fallacy [4]. It was not until the 1970s that another reconsideration of landscape painting took place, despite the fact that since the 1960s Australian artists had had much closer contact with