Why have there been no great Asian-Australian artists? Towards an alternative (Asian-) Australian art history

Nearly all of the existing histories of Australian art – by Bernard Smith, Robert Hughes, Christopher Allen – seek to identify some peculiarly ‘Australian’ quality to the work, some distinctive quality of either the light, land, or people that gives the art its particular quality. But, in order to do this, they must exclude much art practice that took place in this country and much art made by Australians overseas. What would happen if we opened the aperture of Australian art history a little wider to include these usually excluded artists? We would get a different vision of Australian art and a different sense of Australian art’s place in the rest of the world. We would understand Australian art as a part of rather than apart from the world. We would as it were look at Australian art from the outside in and not the inside out. We would perhaps even produce a history of ‘UnAustralian’ rather than ‘Australian’ art. This paper attempts to write a short history of such a possibility, beginning with the great expatriate Australian artist John Peter Russell, who taught Matisse how to paint, and ending with the equally great Utopia artist Emily Kngwarreye, who inspired the American conceptual artist Sol LeWitt. In between, we look at a number of moments from the history of Australian art where we might be offered the opportunity to think about ourselves differently.

Work by Australian artists made during time spent overseas in art colonies before returning, and the work of artists who lived in art colonies overseas and did not return has almost entirely been erased from Australian art history. Therefore the participation of Australian artists in art colonies across the world has largely remained unwritten. This paper presents an outline and framework for further work to be done on the histories of art colonies in Australian art history. It is first of all something of an exercise in an expanded art history, including those artists who should rightly be part of a more widely encompassing account of Australian art, but, more than this it proposes that the art colony as such contests the idea of a national art history: that, beyond the specifics of any particular art colony, the principle of the art colony—of artists from different countries or from different regions of the same country living and working together—challenges the assumption that modern art must come from an identifiable people and place within modern state formations. We argue that the art colony is always international or even transnational in character. Therefore the art colony in modern art might be best understood as a forerunner to contemporary art in its crossing of spatial and temporal borders and its flattening of (if not its complete doing away with) imposed hierarchies.

Bernard Smith’s canonical book, Australian Painting, 1788-1960, was shaped by the Cold War. This forced the emerging discipline of Australian art history onto a trajectory that would not be shaken for another two decades. More than art history determined Smith’s innovations. This article proceeds from that obvious but easily overlooked point, that Smith and his book were deeply conditioned by the intellectual climate of Cold War Australia. The appearance of Smith’s book and, henceforth, Australian art history’s concerns with postcoloniality and anxiety about nationality derive from this. Smith’s particular Cold War has shaped Australian art history ever since.

The history of Australian art has been punctuated with survey exhibitions in London from the late 19th century to the present, just as our artists were drawn to Europe both to study and for the possibilities of wider recognition. This review article focuses on the post-war years from 1950 to 1965, a high point of Australian cultural expatriatism focused on London – now viewed as a significant episode in the history of Australian art. The two most influential figures supporting key Australian artists were Kenneth Clark (promoting the work of Sidney Nolan and Russell Drysdale) and Bryan Robertson, director of the avant-gardist Whitechapel Gallery. Robertson was responsible for organizing the most significant of these exhibitions of Australian art: Australian Painting Today in 1961, focusing on the work of a younger generation of artists that included Charles Blackman, John Olsen, Fred Williams and Brett Whiteley. Australian’s most significant art historian, Bernard Smith, who had also sought to bring about comparable exhibitions, but without success, challenged the orientation and the cultural framing by Robertson and the young Australian art critic Robert Hughes in the catalogue of this key exhibition.

This chapter is an attempt to make myself better appear in Australian art history. My research focuses on art and migration, but I rarely speak from my own migratory experiences. Perhaps this absence is a symptom of disciplinary norms. Arguably, art history has disciplined me to speak with critical distance, that is, without a subjective attachment to its subject matter. Or perhaps art history overall prefers to erase, exploit and/or subjugate non-white subjects (e.g. migrants from the global south). I suggest that to appear is to be accountable, and to make the discipline accountable to the subject matter. Maybe to appear is also to enable a voice that doesn’t (by default) reproduce what a dear friend of mine terms the Straight White Guy of Art History (SWGAH), mimicking Kant, Hegel, Winckelmann and so on. To try and appear, I reflect on my art history training, especially during my PhD, when I was writing a thesis on the nexus of contemporary art and the aftermath of the Pacific Solution (2001) at a sandstone university in Melbourne/Naarm. I also try and appear as a Latinx art historian shaped by my flight from Chile across the Pacific to Australia during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990). Because the art historian’s possibility of appearance is always dependent on an external subject—the artist, the artwork and the museum—I chose as my object of affection and analysis the Chilean-Australian artist Juan Dávila, who also left Chile after 1973. I write this chapter as a letter to Juan, who I address as ‘you’. So, when I speak as ‘I’, I do this in relation to Juan. I want to trace how, via Juan, it might be possible to locate a place in Australian art history for intergenerational dialogues and experiences of migratory subjects in/out of the Pacific after 1973 and after the Pacific Solution. However incommensurable migratory experiences are, is it possible for art history to allow an ‘I’, ‘you’ and ‘we’ to appear? Is it possible for art history to make intra-Pacific solidarity appear in Australia? If I have been able to appear at all it is because I now work at an art school, which has cultivated in me a deeply undisciplined, but generative, approach to art history.

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the nationalist historiography of the Heidelberg School, an Australian art movement from the Federation period, known for its iconic representations of national life and landscape. Drawing on recent scholarship of Australian nationalism, it questions conventional accounts of the Heidelberg School in Australian art history, especially those based on Bernard Smith’s radical interpretation of this movement. For Bernard Smith, and the generations of Australian art historians he influenced, the nationalism of the 1890s was a progressive force for national culture. Yet, in the post-Federation decades, national art declined (or ‘soured’) into a reactionary form of insular nationalism. By focusing on the ‘souring’ narrative of Australian national art, this article critiques the nationalist interpretation of the Heidelberg School. It explores an apparent contradiction: the role of Britishness in the construction of a distinctly Australian national art.

This paper contends that in looking to Australian migrant art, such as that of the German–Australian photographer Wolfgang Sievers, we can better understand the significance and politics of revisionist discourse in this country and begin a much needed enquiry: to rethink the historiography of modernism in Australia. Drawing on the experience of migrant identity situated between the past and the present (and potential future) – the present now represented by the new Australian locality – the concept of the ‘inbetween’ and identity renegotiation that is implicit here are seen to condition and structure the local settler culture more so than the concept of provincialism. It is the dynamic of the ‘in-between’ (both cultural and psychological) with its postcolonial implications, with which Australian art historical revisionism is ultimately concerned, and it is through modernist migrant art that this condition can best be understood and articulated. 1 Over the past twenty years, Australian art historians have struggled to reassess the contribution of the post-Second World War migrant artists to Australian art history. Establishing an effectual framework for this project has been met with little to no success. The work of German–Australian photographer Wolfgang Sievers, for example, has been institutionalised under the safe banner of modernism, yet the problems posed by such definition and institutionalisation in terms of art production and reception in Australia have not been taken into account. Nor has the already viable revisionist framework, instrumental in re-modelling Australian art history over the past two decades, been considered in accounts of migrant art. An enquiry into how and to what degree emigre artists have responded to the presumably inherent provincial condition of Australian culture and society, and how their local artistic efforts can be considered in terms of revisionism, reveals crucial elements in the structure of the revisionist framework. The work of Wolfgang Sievers serves as the catalyst for this analysis, largely because his work illuminates the condition of ‘settler art’, the condition which embodies the dynamic that revisionism identifies as the driving force of Australian art practice. This article starts with the premise that the very name ‘Australia’ denotes a country defined by the settler–colonialists, either before or after settlement. In referring to the ‘settler’ culture, I am referring explicitly to the non-Indigenous element of Australian society, regardless of whether someone would consider her or himself a settler. The term relates less to a particular period in history, the nature of occupation or nationality than it does to a mentality: it is thus psychological and political, as the revisionist writing reveals. The terms ‘settler’ and ‘migrant’ are in the present context interchangeable.

Australian art history is the subject of constant revision. For the last couple of decades, Australian art historians have increasingly revisited standard accounts of the country's artistic development, rereading Australian art according to current precepts. Largely, these researchers are motivated by a desire to engage with issues that, ignored or marginalised by traditional approaches, are now deemed important. Like most traditional accounts of Australian art history, Bernard Smith's foundational Australian Painting 1788-1960 is based on the sense of a chronological continuum that stretches from Australia's annexation by Europeans to the present day. However, as the revised editions of Australian Painting show, such a history becomes divided around the seventies.

The 1961 Recent Australian Painting exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London is an important and much-discussed moment in Australian art history. It is when the idea of Australian art as “isolated” and “exotic” first became popularised in both British and Australian cultures. The prominent Australian art historian Bernard Smith criticised the idea, but in many ways his book Australian Painting, published the year after, repeated the assumption. What is overlooked in accounts of the show is that many of its artists were not “isolated”, frequently having spent extended periods in Britain living and studying. But, more than this, what is rarely, if ever, discussed is how many of the artists in the show were queer, as was its curator, the director of the Whitechapel Gallery, Bryan Robertson. In many ways, the social and professional connections between Australian and British artists were forged through their shared homosexuality. It is this that puts Australian artists in connection with the British art scene and, on occasion, explains their influence upon it. Queerness has often connected Australian artists to those around the world—it is also the case for the Australian women artists in Paris before and after World War I.

The subject of this article is the absence of Aboriginal art during the period that established the idea of a distinctively Australian modern art. It is intended as a contribution to the historiography of modern and contemporary Australian art history. The period discussed is the two decades between 1962, when Bernard Smith published Australian Painting, 1788–1960, and 1988, the year of the Australian Bicentenary. The article explores what changed in these years when art historians, critics, and curators, albeit belatedly and reluctantly, finally began to acknowledge the great contemporary Aboriginal painting that had long been in many artists’ sights as inspiration and model, and in plain view on display in the so-called primitive cultures’ sections of state museums. It argues that this was because it did not seem part of the national story of art.

The relationship between cosmopolitanism and nationalism is very complex, especially from the point of view of Australian art history. National accounts form only a part of a whole, and hence, such a way of writing Australian art history would disperse with accounts of modernism and in terms of its passive reception or as a local manifestation.

Compared with the prehistoric parietal art of Europe, Australian Aboriginal rock art is little known in art historical contexts, despite that fact that many of these works are older, more dynamic, and more sophisticated. More than the laneways of inner-city streets, much of the Australian landscape is literally layered with art. There are thousands of rock art sites recorded in Australia and perhaps an equal number that have been forgotten or destroyed. New galleries and cathedrals of colour are regularly reported in the popular press. Yet the status of rock art in Australian art history, like much of the rest of Indigenous art production, is under-researched and poorly conceptualised within the discipline. To address this, we devised a panel session for the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand’s 2017 annual conference, at the University of Western Australia, upon which this special issue is based. The responses we received were curated into two parallel interdisciplinary sessions, each of which had an artist, an art historian and an archaeologist.

Detail of Tommy McRae, Corroboree or William Buckley and Dancers from the Wathaurong People, c. 1890, ink on paper. University of Melbourne Archives.Nineteenth-century Indigenous art is remarkably absent from Australian contributions to World Art history. This close reading of Tommy McRae's drawings of a Victorian ‘Corroboree after Seeing Ships for the First Time’ argues that the presences and absences in Australian art history are epitomized in these nineteenth-century Indigenous works. The influence of photography and popular press imagery on McRae's representations of ceremony is analysed. How renderings of figure and ground bring colour and race into the very material support of his drawings is explored. The reverse assimilation of the ‘wild white man’ William Buckley is assessed in regard to the proto-national apparel in the colonial space that McRae illustrates. The reassessment of this early Aboriginal artist is framed by the exhibition of his work in London at the Royal Academy in 2013. Comparisons with Eugene von Guérard and William Barak are made in the visual analysis. The significance of the reception of the Australia exhibition as imaginary grandstand for the nation is further highlighted through Judy Watson's fire and water sculpture.

This thesis brings together textual and visual research work. Natural history and Indigenous connection to Country are presented and discussed in cultural and educational terms. As a Wiradjuri narrative, the work chronicles community arts’ initiatives in practical and theoretical terms, making the connection between the two dimensions by documenting and illustrating processes and relationships. The arts items<br>are discussed in their genesis and their realisation as expressions of cultural sovereignty, but also as elements supporting and feeding into economic sustainability.<br><br> The thesis is framed and saturated through oral history and social commentaries presenting a background to Australian Indigenous art history, placing it in the context of the story of a living culture, reaching back into times immemorial, but also establishing a firm present-day basis for a confident and sustainable future. The work thus attempts to <i>decolonise</i> art theory and history as well as decolonise the community arts' dialogue. The interconnections between ancient philosophy and ancestral knowledge link land, kinship and spirit and find expression in cultural and artistic work.<br><br> Finally, the dissertation examines the concept of story as an expression of the connection to Country which is realised and supported through an Indigenous <i>place pedagogy</i>. Throughout the work a context is established within which research protocols and ethics are firmly and consistently based on cultural guidelines and imperatives of Respect, Responsibility and Reciprocity. <br><br> Throughout, the argument of the thesis is supported by illustrations from my own studio work, by photos from Australian Indigenous history and relevant Australian art, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. The work concludes with a set of recommended approaches which undergird the above cultural guidelines.<br><br> Lexicon: Aboriginal, Indigenous, Koori and Wiradjuri are all terms used in this thesis to discuss Australian Indigenous person, with whom I identify. <br>

This book investigates how identities have been constructed in Australian art from 1788 onwards. Ian McLean shows that Australian art, and the writing of its history, has, since settlement, been in a dialogue (although often submerged) with Aboriginal art and culture; and that this dialogue is inextricably interwoven with the struggle to find an identity in the antipodes. Beginning with a discussion of how Australia was imagined by Europeans before colonisation, McLean traces the representation of indigeneity through the history of Australian art, and the concomitant invention of an Australian subjectivity. He argues that the colonising culture invested far more in indigenous aspects of the country and its inhabitants than it has been willing to admit. McLean considers artists and their work within a cultural context, and also provides a contemporary theoretical and critical context for his claims.