Wolfgang Sievers and the Revisionism of Australian Migrant Art

Abstract

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.