The National: New Australian Art

Abstract

An international fixation cultivated in recent times by biennales and museums through the elevated proposition of exhibition title and thematic rationale—with the artistic director or curator presented as visionary, the artist as advocate, the art proposing an “interrogation,” “examination,” or “confrontation”—declaring its presumption to apprise, offset, and/or enlighten the viewing public of current global or domestic travails—the sociopolitical, economic, environmental, and others—is that this art can absolve us from our ignorance or complicity and correct the world; art as panacea, deliverance, salvation.In 2017, the epitome of such an affectation was Adam Szymczyk’s documenta 14: Learning from Athens, calling attention to Europe’s economic, migration, and democratic crises and its violent progeny of racism, reemerging nationalism, and rampant capitalism. Szymczyk proposed a documenta in Athens and Kassel, thus making a political point about the hegemony of Germany within the European Union and its browbeating of Greece as the weakest member over its economic vandalism and political obstinacy. (Reports indicated that the Athenians didn’t take too lightly to the idea of sharing, accusing the title of being condescending and the exhibition of possessing “colonial attitudes,” subsequently castigated by graffitists as “crapumenta.”) Less sermonic was the 2017 Istanbul Biennial: A Good Neighbour, which focused on multiple notions of “home” as an indicator of diverse identities and a vehicle for self-expression and “neighborhood” as a microuniverse exemplifying the current challenges of coexistence, Turkey’s domestic political turbulence and regional power plays notwithstanding.Within the Australian region, the 2018 Biennale of Sydney: SUPERPOSITION: Equilibrium & Engagement advances an “examination” (there’s that word) of how, in our world of conflicting ideas, political ideologies, historical misperceptions, and definitions of contemporary art, opposing interpretations can come together in a state of equilibrium. Its 2016 predecessor, “The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed,” offered its venues as embassies, or “safe spaces,” implying a presumed indispensable need in our challenged daily lives to counter “our interaction with the digital world, displacement from and occupation of spaces and land, and the interconnections and overlaps between politics and financial power structures.”1 Leaning toward an equally homiletic yet geopolitical directive, Sydney’s regional biennale neighbor, the 2016 Singapore Biennale: An Atlas of Mirrors, positioned Southeast Asia as a “vantage point through which [Asians] recognise our world anew,” its arc of shared histories, diverse cultures, and prestate national entities highlighting “the challenges that beset contemporary conditions” (italics added).2When it was announced in late 2016 that a new biennial survey of Australian contemporary art, The National: New Australian Art, would be presented in the alternate years to the Biennale of Sydney3 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Carriageworks, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), it was doubtless acknowledged with a ringing sense of déjà vu as Australian Perspecta revisited and acknowledged speculatively as city-based artfulness. Australian Perspecta, initiated by the AGNSW in 1981, showcased Australian contemporary art in the alternate years to the Biennale of Sydney until its final presentation in 1999. The National, according to its media release, envisioned itself as the only large-scale recurring exhibition in the city (Sydney) focused solely on contemporary Australian art. Therein lay a triad of exigencies—the city, the title, and the art.The year 1990 saw the introduction of the first Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art (ABAA) at the Art Gallery of South Australia as “the only major biennial dedicated solely to presenting contemporary Australian art and . . . showcasing up-to-the-minute works by Australian artists,”4 followed by the first Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane in 1993, recognizing Australia’s cultural relationship with its neighboring geopolitical region. By the end of that decade, Sydney’s Australian Perspecta had coincidentally lost momentum and ceased to operate. Although both Adelaide’s ABAA and Brisbane’s APT still function, even if with divergent and more populist business models than their precursors, very recently another competitor has emerged for national visual art’s hearts and minds—the National Gallery of Victoria’s (NGV) Triennial, following the success of Melbourne Now in 2013, a frenzied magnum opus of all things Melbourne. With the increasing populism of these cities’ exhibitions, the added competition presented by the NGV’s Triennial and a Biennale of Sydney recovering from its 2014 corporate sponsor–activist –artist travails, the Harbour City’s angst in no longer being perceived as Art Central seemed credible.The National’s proposed presentation of 150 artists over three iterations until 2021 offers the potentially compelling prospect of consummately and candidly defining Australian contemporary visual art practice over this period. Although this may be true for the intentions of the presenting triumvirate, The National might also be perceived as being as much about—if not more—the project’s desire to be seen as embracing a geographical immensity from the city pivot of Sydney as about being a binding, choate absoluteness within a national environment of city art rivalry.5Its manifestation post-Brexit and with the arrival of Donald Trump as the American president, how might the title and theme reconcile normative interpretations of what is meant by “the national”—understood as of, relating to, or characteristic of a nation, peculiar or common to the people of a nation, or concerning the internal affairs of a nation—in prevailing global and domestic conditions of sociopolitical and economic uncertainty? Although such definitions assist in differentiating and identifying a country and its people while invoking the understanding that these terms confirm a majority attitude and a consensus of representation, post-twentieth-century theoretical interpretations, notably the cultural left (of which the “art world” is a conspicuous upholder), stridently present resistance to such centrist perceptions. The exhibition’s curatorium6 acknowledges in the catalog’s introduction the “provocation” of the title, “certainly towards the manner in which concepts of nationhood and the nation-state are engaged” while electing to resist any definitive attempt to summarize Australian contemporary art “through a set of shared characteristics or conditions” or “pitched at presenting an identifiable ‘national’ art, or at composing statements regarding national tendencies, characteristics or identities.”7 The accompanying essays by Sunil Badami, Daniel Browning, and Helen Hughes in fact propose that Australia is “a contested site . . . always under construction,”8 “a parasite . . . a metonym for a powerful ideology . . . invented,”9 “fraught [with] debates . . . over our national day, our national anthem, our national flag, our national head of state, and what it means to be ‘Australian’ or, worse, ‘unAustralian,’”10 thus advancing a slippery anti-theme, a two-way bet.This slipperiness presented the dubiety of The National’s premise. What might be assumed (only) about the nation if this exhibition’s artists, mostly draped in a disaffected cloak of political didacticism, propose a “contested, challenged . . . idea [of] Australia”11 through a multiplicity of “negatively determining conditions of present-day life that artists are often implicitly or otherwise expected to hold a mirror to”?12 Persuasively, neither the curators nor writers list any affirmative characteristics in league with the majority of the chosen artists. These disavowals are worth quoting in full, invoking one of the curatorium, the MCA’s Blair French:Each institution selected its own subgroup of artists through its own curatorial staff, the aggregate of this disjuncture reflecting “the diversity of cultural, political and social perspectives that preoccupy our artists, and our [my italics] Australian community”14—forces of social change, feminism, colonialism, the natural environment, hybridity of identity, actions of power, conflict, and relationship to society, eschewing any other national characteristic for artistic “interrogation” (there’s that word) or “confrontation” (and there’s that word).15 The AGNSW selected artists predominantly engaged with marginal narratives and contested histories—aesthetic, social, economic—of uneven power relations and conflicting value systems underpinned by social engagement, a prime exponent being Keg de Souza, with yet another insistent installation: Changing Courses (2017), a structure of “vacuum-locked bags, food and dialogical events” presented as a “safe haven for dialogue . . . encouraging marginalised voices . . . to share their knowledge” as a “possible alternative [to neoliberalism].”16 At Carriageworks, the artists focused on the fluidity of individual and collective, real and imagined identities—acutely articulated by Archie Moore’s United Neytions (2014–2017), with twenty-eight large invented Aboriginal-nation flags based on the flawed pre-Federation “mapping” by anthropologist R. H. Matthews, capturing the conflicts between European and Indigenous ideas of land, boundaries, and ownership. The MCA’s artists, less stridently, worked with repeated gestures and processes, returning to actions, images, or motifs.The collective mood was markedly plaintive, only intermittently considering other concepts of materiality or processes of artmaking. See, for example, the following:Singularly, this latter quality was jocosely embraced by the ever- combative Indigenous artist Richard Bell in Making It Big (2017) at Carriageworks; this work comprised archival black-and-white production stills from the 1973 ABC television program Basically Black, the first all-Indigenous television show created in Australia, with the actual thirty-minute program of comedic, satirical, and political sketches based on the stage production by the National Black Theatre. Irony, parody, and satire as constructive critique have been conspicuously absent in Australian art in recent years (as highlighted by French). Bell’s tribute simultaneously caused mirth and considered reflection, in stark contrast to fellow Indigenous artist Gordon Hookey, whose ongoing diatribe against “White Australia”—in this instance, a wall mural, Wall a roo (2017)—could be viewed as injurious, apart from its jejune histrionics, if the color binary were reversed.The last Australia Perspecta in 1999 addressed the theme of “living here now: art and politics” by “taking a critical look at contemporary Australian nationhood and testing the limits of Australian nationalism.”17 It would appear that for all artists’ and institutions’ dispositions toward contemporary issues, nothing has changed in the ensuing two decades. Perhaps we are just an unhappy lot. As Carriageworks curator Nina Miall states in her catalog text, “If individual identity in the 21st century is uncertain, our collective or national sense of self is no less precarious.”18 Or perhaps this disposition is simply endemic—to invoke French again, “for despite all that is positive and productive about contemporary Australia . . . the celebration of contemporary life is rarely the expected impulse of the contemporary artist.”19Although essayist Daniel Browning’s view is that “The National 2017 might expose the fault lines in any fixed notion of Australian national identity,”20 an inescapable conclusion from this inaugural iteration is that in a country with such democratic freedoms and economic prosperity (regardless of how they might be perceived by the political spectrum), and with an arts infrastructure of government funding (no matter how battered and abused in recent years), foundations, philanthropies, and sponsors absent in some regions of the world (either nearly totalitarian or experiencing varying degrees of violence and turmoil) and yet art is still made and presented, there endures the “expected impulse” from artists to engage in, seemingly only, political didacticism and disaffected activism through their “art.” If The National is representative of anything, apart from a misdirected or lost opportunity, “relating to [ . . . ] or characteristic of a nation,” it would seem, ultimately, to be a culture of complaint.Alan Cruickshank is currently editor of di’van | A Journal of Accounts, a journal that offers critical interpretations of contemporary visual art and its broader historical, theoretical, and sociopolitical contexts, focusing on greater Asia and zones determining historical and current affinities with contemporary Australian cultural endeavor. It has been copublished in conjunction with the University of New South Wales Faculty of Art and Design since 2016.