Australian Art Research Articles

‘I see their hatred’. Ethics of witnessing and The Missing Image – an intervention in Austria’s Holocaust memory space

ABSTRACT The film installation by visual artist and filmmaker Ruth Beckermann, The Missing Image (2015) uses historic archival footage to re-configure the meaning of a contested memorial in central Vienna, Memorial against War and Fascism (1988–1991) by Austrian artist Alfred Hrdlicka. Based on first-hand research, field observations and interviews with contemporary visitors, this article interprets The Missing Image as representative of a counter-archive memorial intervention which facilitates ethical acts of witnessing and which, in their turn, help re-frame and correct public understandings of compromised war monuments. The article offers an account of how viewers create meaning out of their experiences of witnessing difficult visual material. In doing so, I emphasize the importance of empirical reception studies to understand more deeply the impact of public art and of memorial art interventions on contemporary audiences.

Antipodean Prints: Joseph Burke and the development of the University of Melbourne’s Print Collection

ABSTRACT The Baillieu Library of the University of Melbourne hosts one of the finest old masters’ print collections in Australia, the equivalent of a state institution or national gallery. Begun with a donation made in 1959 by Dr Orde Poynton, it was enriched in the early sixties thanks to bequests and acquisitions orchestrated by Joseph Burke, Melbourne’s first Herald Chair of Fine Arts, and enhanced by the participation of key figures in the Australian art world. Prompted by new archival discoveries, this paper retraces how the print collection was created, highlighting the acquisitions made in the period 1960–1966. The paper highlights the collection’s teaching function and emphasises how its development was supported by an extraordinary synergy between art historians and local philanthropists.

Leadership Reluctance in the Australian Arts and Cultural Sector

Academic approaches to arts and cultural leadership have focused predominantly on established leaders in the organizational context. Taking an alternative approach, this paper considers the identity development of emerging leaders within disciplinary-based communities. It argues that leadership is both socially constructed and not universally embraced, analyzing 41 interviews with Australian arts and cultural practitioners to demonstrate that emerging arts and cultural leaders are often reluctant to identify as leaders. The paper explores reasons for this reluctance and discusses implications for the sector. The research contributes to theoretical knowledge of arts and cultural leadership and of the development of emerging leader identity.

Heterogeneity in Auction Price Distributions for Australian Indigenous Artists

Studies of auction prices for artworks typically relate the conditional moments of a single realised price distribution either to characteristics of the artist, the artwork and the auction or to pre‐sale information. Using data from the Australian Art Sales Digest for the 100 best‐selling Australian Indigenous artists over the period 1987–2014, we use finite‐mixture models to understand heterogeneity in auction prices. Our results complement the existing literature by identifying new ways in which factors previously used in the literature may be related to price heterogeneity in a differentiated market such as that for Australian Indigenous art.

FROM THE OTHER SIDE: FEMINIST AESTHETICS IN AUSTRALIAN MUSICOLOGY

AbstractThe rise of new musicology and feminist music criticism in the 1980s prompted a rethinking of gender in Australian art music spheres and resulted in over a decade of advocacy on behalf of women music makers. Local musicological publications began to cover feminist concerns from the late 1980s, with a focus on composing women. Catalysed by the proliferation of feminist musicology internationally in the 1990s, a series of women's music festivals were held around Australia from 1991–2001 and accompanied by conferences, symposia and special-issue publications. Aesthetic concerns were at the forefront of this debate as women musicologists and practitioners were divided on the existence of a gendered aesthetic and the implications this might have. This article examines the major feminist aesthetic contributions and debates at the time and how these considerations have impacted music-making practices, with particular reference to women composers of new music.

Wildflowering culture: Kathleen McArthur and creating a popular wildflower consciousness

Abstract Changing people’s hearts and minds requires courage, conviction and creativity. To change attitudes and reach the public consciousness, a diverse range of communicative and cultural tools need to be employed. Australian artist and conservationist Kathleen McArthur rose to the challenge using all the forms that were available to her. Working with others such as renowned poet Judith Wright, she sought to change the way Australians regarded our native plants and landscapes. Kathleen understood that to protect the precious environments that remained would require reaching out to ordinary Australians. Therefore, she utilized a suite of arts and communication forms, ranging from postcard campaigns to weekly newspaper columns, public talks, slide presentations, paintings, exhibitions and published books. Inspired by natural forms and utilizing cultural forms, McArthur was able to promote a form of ‘nature culture’ and public consciousness to protect and promote the nature that she loved.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR): Curators’ specific responses from Australian museums and art galleries

ABSTRACT Presented and analysed are interviews with a blend of museums and art galleries in Victoria, Australia, conducted within the wider context of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the global scene of curated collections as tourist attractions. A subsequent website content analysis of public communication by the organizations augments the CSR insights of the interviews. The findings suggest the interviewed organizations follow a contextual form of CSR and its expression depends on the underlying knowledge of the role of CSR as a tourism issue. Successively, a range of socio-cultural drivers and inhibitors enter the mix for the curators of the collections and tend currently to converge in the social and economic dimensions. The definition of CSR and the debate about the theoretical and practical economic pressures of tourism management for museums and art galleries are uncovered, along with directions for future research indicated within this significant sub-field of the tourism sector.

Lines of doubt, fear and tenderness in the work of José Luis Cuevas and Tommi Parrish

ABSTRACT How is it that within the graphic tradition particular images, often composed of only lines and washes on paper, can convey complex states of being and speak to questions of existence? For the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) to exist is to face uncertainties and commit oneself passionately to a way of life, which emerges only through the acting-out of that commitment. This paper considers the work of two very different artists and aims to illuminate the common philosophical ground and expose significant differences. José Luis Cuevas was a Mexican self-taught artist who made drawings of human suffering. He began drawing fallible images of humanity at a very young age after a prolonged illness. He worked in opposition to established works of art in his home country. Tommi Parrish is a contemporary Australian transgender comic book artist whose work often traverses gaps in human understanding, sexuality, identity and anxiety to convey tenderness and humour. The work of Tommi is noteworthy in terms of how sequenced imagery builds on often wordless tension between awkward individuals and the situation they find themselves in. I seek to reveal an alternative narrative layer for each artist by considering gestures within their work.

Mysterious Australian rock art may depict the chaos following rising seas

Mysterious Australian rock art may depict the chaos following rising seas

Copyright, Heritage and Australian Aboriginal Art

How Australian copyright law deals with Aboriginal painting has changed since the late 1980s. Prominent cases have moved the law towards greater protection and offered some recognition of Aboriginal understandings of their cultural heritage. This paper focuses on writing about copyright and Aboriginal art and comments on four issues that may warrant closer attention: copyright, cultural heritage and self-determination; the criteria for copyright protection; appropriation of art works; and the 'common place' of law and Aboriginal art. The first point examines the value of adding ideas from cultural heritage into writing about copyright. It suggests a tension with heritage may be present in some copyright writing, and that an underlying motif for both areas is self-determination. The second section examines the criteria for copyright protection. It questions a continued concern in some copyright writing with the requirement of originality. And it explores an apparent lack of appreciation of the significance of recent case law in some of the literature, especially from North America. The third section considers appropriation of art works, both as a narrower concept that may infringe copyright and more widely. It considers how the cultural value of a work could be drawn on in arguments to limit appropriation. The final section argues that continuing to rely on copyright law, if specific indigenous cultural legislation is not achievable politically, may not be so serious a limitation as is sometimes suggested. In the paper, attention is centred on Australian Aboriginal painting and legal writing about it from Australia and internationally. References are made to the somewhat similar legal and political situations of indigenous people in Canada and the US, and some contrasts are noted with the situations in Africa and elsewhere. The paper concludes with the thought that there may be little point debating the merits of copyright (and other law) reform. It is over twenty years since high-level reform reports have emerged in Australia. They have suggested that copyright does not provide adequate protection to indigenous cultural heritage. The law, however, has not changed in response - at least it has not changed in terms of explicit law reform. As far as case law is concerned, a series of copyright cases has strengthened protection, and native title litigation in Australia has revolutionised the underlying framework. Through these developments, copyright protection of Aboriginal art has gained a greater place in legal discourse. But it seems likely that the perception has changed even more in other areas of society. What could be called the 'common place' of copyright law and Aboriginal art may be one of the most important changes in Australia since the 1980s. At one time, infringers of indigenous cultural heritage genuinely may not have considered that any legal protection could exist for the material they used. Other appropriators may have made a pragmatic decision based on the perceived unlikelihood of indigenous legal action. Now, neither approach could be nearly so likely.

Loudon Sainthill’s “Antipodean” Vision for Michael Benthall’s Tempest

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the Australian artist Loudon Sainthill’s stage and costume designs for Michael Benthall’s Shakespeare Memorial Theatre production of The Tempest (1951, 1952). Calling upon a variety of performance documents, it considers what Sainthill’s work reveals about the hierarchical cultural relationship between Britain and its former colony at the time. At first glance, the acclaimed designer appears the ultimate cultural insider, a gifted cosmopolitan artist who successfully navigated his way from Tasmania to the summit of the British theatre industry. On closer examination, however, there is evidence that despite his apparently conciliatory approach, Sainthill’s complex visual style expressed the anxieties of Britain’s post-war transition from Empire to Commonwealth. Sainthill’s early career in the UK was shaped by theatrical-imperial networks intent on strengthening Commonwealth ties, and his fantasy-inflected settler-modernist style transplanted to Britain especially well during a period when the metropolis sought to imagine new post-imperial futures for itself. The surreal quality of Sainthill’s “antipodean” vision corresponded with increasingly ambivalent attitudes towards Britain’s imperial status, complicating its intended celebration of Britain’s post-war cultural renewal during the significant commemorative event of the Festival of Britain.

Indigenising Australian music: authenticity and representation in touring 1950s art songs

ABSTRACT Aboriginal-influenced compositions have been central to Australian art music practice since the 1960s, and key to conceptions of an Australian style. While in other creative arts practices (for example, dance and visual arts) appropriative practices have largely become unacceptable, or at least highly contested, compositions influenced by Aboriginal music have retained a central role in art music composition. In this article, I trace this practice back to touring post-war performances of the ‘Aboriginal songs’ of Alfred and Mirrie Hill, Arthur S. Loam and Victor Carell from Carell and Beth Dean’s ‘Dance and Song around the World’ shows in the early 1950s. I suggest that the performance of these songs familiarised audiences with a notional ‘Aboriginal’ sonority that has continued to influence composers and their audiences. Dean and Carell’s claim to authoritative representations of Aboriginal music and dance has had ongoing reverberations throughout Australian performance history, disconnecting Indigeneity from individual Aboriginal people (historical and living) and their traditions. Although ultimately these representations have failed to replace the performance of culture by Aboriginal people, reductive portrayals of Aboriginal musical characteristics remain persuasive.

Dr Mary Mackay (1931–2017)

Mary Helena Mackay (nee Short) was an Australian art historian, researcher, teacher, printmaker, collector and feminist. She was an original and innovative thinker whose pioneering research in Aust...

Needle

Needle Eileen Chong (bio) But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. —Proverbs 5:4 She lifts amber to her lipsand speaks of roses and light.Eyes broken as k aleidoscopes,histor y spliced and repeating— a torrent: pain like a forestsprung from needles tossedfrom a basket. Tangled threadsglisten and vibrate, taut as webs. Listen: we can hear the fiddlers,urgent at their strings. The windwill carry music across the water.The river has worn a hole clean through the stone's heart. Everydrop relentless, hungr y for the sea. [End Page 115] Eileen Chong Eileen Chong has published eight collections of poems, including most recently A Thousand Crimson Blooms (UQP). Her work has been shortlisted for the Anne Elder Award, the Australian Arts in Asia Award, the NSW Premier's Literary Award, the Victorian Premier's Literary Award, and the Prime Minister's Literary Award (twice). She lives in Sydney. Copyright © 2021 Wayne State University Press

Ethnicity: Exploring omani people's diversity through their crafts

It seemed that the lack of the involvement of ethnic groups, in crafts industries in Oman, is very clear. As a result of this shortage, crafts industries in Oman are affected negatively, because of losing ethnic groups contributions in this field. Regarding this challenge, this research paper will explore ways that can help to take advantage of these groups’ craftsmanship and participation in crafts enterprise in order to contribute to society's diverse forms of identity. The researchers Richardson and Dorr (2003) have not treated the issue of ethnic groups and their contribution in crafts industries in detail. They built their judgments on the fact that crafts in the capital Muscat, asserted that Omani ethnic groups are involved deeply in crafts industries and this could be considered as a generalisation. They did not provide any evidence to show ethnic groups involvement in crafts in the other areas of Oman. The art and crafts of ethnic groups as a research topic, appears in some studies, such as Gary Ferraro (2001), when he dedicated a full chapter to discussing art and its relation to anthropology. Also, Coote and Shelton (1992) when they presented Australian Aborigines, New Guinea, Indonesia, and Mexico ethnic groups arts and crafts. Furthermore, Afred Gell (1998) where he explored the anthropological theories of visual art using traditions - European, Indian, Polynesian, Melanesian, and Australian ethnic art and crafts. The ethnic crafts’ production line suggestion will cost the PACI money and effort to meet the authority's cultural objectives only, as the production line method (by prototyping crafts objects) usually creates a type of craft with less consideration of the market and the demands of the contemporary consumer. This comes about because the priority will be given to imitating ethnic styles of production.

Hitlers Sonderauftrag Ostmark: Kunstraub und Museumspolitik im Nationalsozialismus by Birgit Schwarz

Reviewed by: Hitlers Sonderauftrag Ostmark: Kunstraub und Museumspolitik im Nationalsozialismus by Birgit Schwarz Katherine Arens Birgit Schwarz, Hitlers Sonderauftrag Ostmark: Kunstraub und Museumspolitik im Nationalsozialismus. Schriftenreihe der Kommission für Provenienzforschung 7. Vienna: Böhlau, 2018. 236 pp. This volume continues the recent tradition of intensive, archive-based, and grant-supported reports on Nazi interventions in the Austrian cultural sphere, [End Page 116] an ongoing stock-taking of how the historical record preserved within particular institutions and disciplines needs to be corrected. Brigit Schwarz is an expert on NS art policies and politics (with a 2014 book Auf Befehl des Führers: Hitler und der NS-Kunstraub, which places the Austrian art thefts in the context of Hitler's Europe). Hitlers Sonderauftrag Ostmark is about the Führer's project of redistributing art expropriated from Austrian Jewish collectors to museums in his "Greater Germany" and to a depot in preparation for his own museum planned for Linz. Her compelling story is superbly written and documented, thanks to its origin in a research project conducted between 2014 and 2016 under the aegis of Austria's Kommission für Provenienzforschung, which was founded in 1998 by request of the Bundesministerin für Unterricht und kulturelle Angelegenheiten and which, in twenty years of work, has established the provenance of over thirty thousand objects and returned them to owners and heirs. Schwarz outlines the exact planning and logistics of this expropriation, starting with a June 8, 1938, directive that gave Hitler the exclusive rights over confiscated artworks, most of which had been in Jewish hands. After a few false starts, Hitler took over personal command of the project, and in 1939 named as executive advisor the director of the Gemäldegalerie Dresden, Hans Posse, a well-connected and-respected museum professional and art historian as well as a former student of Franz Wickhoff's in Vienna. Posse, as Hitler's "Sonderbeauftragter für Linz," and his assistant, Gottfried Reimer, eventually "distributed" five thousand valuable artworks that had been taken as Jewish property, using the Wiener Denkmalbehörde. Vienna was the center of interest for these confiscations not only because of the city's extensive collections but because of a law for protecting monuments that had been enacted in 1923, which had made it difficult for owners to move their collections out of the country. It seems that, after 1937's Munich Entartete Kunst exhibit led to the destruction (or sale abroad) of Germany's art, Hitler hoped to burnish his reputation as an art collector, and so conceived of Führerspendungen, "donations" made to German museums out of the stolen art to enhance their collections. The "gifts" were to be publicized only after the war; since that did not happen, the museums who had eagerly competed for the best works were able to simply bemoan their losses of modern art and, until such recent research, overlook or deny the provenances of some of "their" iconic works. As competition intensified, works were moved into storage at important cloisters and [End Page 117] monasteries, even over the protests of NS-organizations that were trying to use them for other purposes, such as housing refugees. Aside from this volume, the project also has put extensive information about lost and displaced art into international databases, assembled thanks to the discovery of Posse's work notes, which probably survived because he died of cancer, almost without warning, in 1942. (Schwarz is currently editing his travel diaries, which have also survived and which fill out the available information.) This project had access not only to Posse's correspondence but also to his notebooks that documented the work on the project, which were similarly preserved because of the sudden circumstances of his death. The documentation assembled is heart-wrenching and compelling. Collections like those of Louis Rothschild in Vienna were removed to the provinces and broken up; others were "purchased" in the occupied territories and also dispersed. Posse traveled extensively to catalogue and evaluate holdings and to collaborate with his director-peers. He presented lists to Hitler, who personally approved plans for the holdings—and sometimes reward his museum directors by filling orders on their "wish lists." The book is organized...

Josef Strzygowski (1861–1942), Dmitry Ainalov (1862–1939) and the Question of Geographical Borders in the Theory of Art: The Possibility of a “Geographic Eye”

Cyril Mango in his book “Byzantium. The Empire of New Rome” (1980), wrote that Byzantineart, along with Byzantine studies, flourished as a prolific ally more in Russia than anywhere else in the world. In contrast, the theory of art in Western European countries branded as derogatory for many centuries the typical iconographical and stylistic features of Byzantine art with the geographically-based stigma “maniera greca” (Greek Manner). This definition often compromised, with some rare exceptions, a correct appreciation of Byzantine and Eastern art in Europe, minimizing the contribution of the East to the development of art in western civilizations. An exception, and a break with this misconception of the Byzantine component of western art, is the controversial essay by the Austrian art historian Josef Strzygowski “Orient oder Rom”(1901). In his study, Strzygowski radically opposes the Rome-based aesthetical theories, such as the widely accepted ideas of Franz Wickhoff and Alois Riegl, surprisingly finding the roots of German and Slavic art in Iran, Armenia and Egypt. The theories of Strzygowski, although connoted from anti-Roman resentment and strong German nationalism, gave a fundamental impulse to the revaluation of Eastern art in Europe. Indeed the ideas of Strzygowski are not very new. In 1890, during a sort of Eastern Grand Tour, he attended the Russian Archeological Congress where he met the Russian scholar Dmitry Ainalov. In 1900 (one year before “Orient oder Rom”), Ainalov published the essay “The Hellenistic Origins of Byzantine Art”, in which he emphasizes the originality of Byzantine art as a Hellenistic product and claims its independency from Roman art. These ideas, which were shared by the Russian scholarship and tended to see patriotically Byzantine art in its uniqueness, helped paradoxically through the mediation of the radical ideas of Strzygowski European scholars to be able to “break down the borders” and develop a better comprehension of the importance of the East. The case of Strzygowski–Ainalov is an example of a typical attempt by the History of Art to evaluate an art object as a pure expression of the spirit of a population and of a particular geographical area. From this initial situation, the paper intends to examine the fundamental contribution of the geography of art to the formation of art theories. To paraphrase Michael Baxandall and his famous “Period Eye”, can we speak of a “Geographic Eye” when we try to comprehend an art period? To what extent is a Geography of Artpossible today? What are the roles of geographical features and borders in the analysis of an art work? What is meant with the geographical definitions (such as “German”, “Italian”, Russian”, or “Western” and “Eastern”) once they are applied to art? In the light of the recent debates on the possibility of a global art history, as well as the developing of new geopolitical horizons, do we have the same conception of the Geography of Art today as the scholars of the past? What are the advantages and the risks of a methodology based on a geographic parameter in considering an art object or an art period?

Lyrical Referencing in Australian Hip Hop

Australian MCs, like other hip hop artists around the world, often quote lyrics from others in their own works. Australian MCs quote from a wide range of texts to help situate their music as being distinctly hip hop. The positioning of these quotes allows MCs to place themselves into a lineage of hip hop music, and this lineage identifies their influences. By quoting from previous works, Australian hip hop artists are constructing a hip hop identity that is constructed through an interaction with other works. Drawing on ethnographic research with hip hop practitioners in Australia, I will argue that lyrical borrowing and quotation is an essential aspect of hip hop culture. This interaction with other, global, hip hop texts not only forms a crucial structure to the genre, but has also drawn many of the artists into the genre. The intertextual nature of the genre is something that the MCs seek to explore, with many wishing to insert themselves into the narrative of the genre.

Inalienable Signs and Invited Guests: Australian Indigenous Art and Cultural Tourism

Australian Indigenous people promote their culture and country in the context of tourism in a variety of ways but the specific impact of Indigenous fine art in tourism is seldom examined. Indigenous people in Australia run tourism businesses, act as cultural guides, and publish literature that help disseminate Indigenous perspectives of place, homeland, and cultural knowledge. Governments and public and private arts organisations support these perspectives through exposure of Indigenous fine art events and activities. This exposure simultaneously advances Australia’s international cultural diplomacy, trade, and tourism interests. The quantitative impact of Indigenous fine arts (or any art) on tourism is difficult to assess beyond exhibition attendance and arts sales figures. Tourism surveys on the impact of fine arts are rare and often necessarily limited in scope. It is nevertheless useful to consider how the quite pervasive visual presence of Australian Indigenous art provides a framework of ideas for visitors about relationships between Australian Indigenous people and place. This research adopts a theoretical model of ‘performing cultural landscapes’ to examine how Australian Indigenous art might condition tourists towards Indigenous perspectives of people and place. This is quite different to traditional art historical hermeneutics that considers the meaning of artwork. I argue instead that in the context of cultural tourism, Australian Indigenous art does not convey specific meaning so much as it presents a relational model of cultural landscape that helps condition tourists towards a public realm of understanding Indigenous peoples’ relationship to place. This relational mode of seeing involves a complex psychological and semiotic framework of inalienable signification, visual storytelling, and reconciliation politics that situates tourists as ‘invited guests’. Particular contexts of seeing under discussion include the visibility of reconciliation politics, the remote art centre network, and Australia’s urban galleries.

#MirandaMustGo: Contesting a settler colonial obsession with lost-in-the-bush myths through public and socially engaged art

In January 2017, settler Australian artist, Amy Spiers, launched a creative campaign to contest habitual associations at the site of Hanging Rock in Central Victoria with a white vanishing myth. Entitled #MirandaMustGo, the campaign’s objective was to provoke thought and unease about why the missing white schoolgirls of Joan Lindsay’s fictional novel, Picnic at Hanging Rock, prompted more attention and feeling in the general public than the actual losses of lives, land and culture experienced by Indigenous people in the region as a consequence of rapid and violent colonial occupation. The campaign incited significant media attention, substantial public debate and some reconsideration of the stories told at Hanging Rock. In this article, Spiers will describe how she conceptualized the artwork/campaign as a propositional counter-memorial action that attempted to conceive ways in which non-Indigenous Australians can acknowledge, and take responsibility for, the denial of colonization’s impact on Indigenous people. She will do so by discussing the critical methodology that underpinned this socially engaged artwork and continue by analysing the public reception and dissensus the campaign provoked. She will conclude in presenting some thoughts about what #MirandaMustGo produced: a rupture of the public secret of Australia’s violent colonial past, a marked shift to the discourse concerning Hanging Rock and an ongoing, unresolved agitation stimulated by Picnic at Hanging Rock’s persistent reproducibility.