Review

'MODERN TIMES constantly challenges the reader to consider the nature of modernity and of modernism and its structure.’ Virginia Spate’s lucid preface to the volume articulates why this handsomely illustrated and well-researched book is such a ground-breaking history of Australian modernism. It acts as a companion volume to Modernism and Australia: Documents on Art Design and Architecture 1917–1967 (2007), which was an anthology of primary source documents including diaries, letters, talks and manifestos. These revealed Australia’s engagement with international modernist trends and the role of interior and fashion design in developing modernist principles. These developments occurred despite the Australian conservative government’s opposition to them, particularly when it came to the area of fine arts practice. Modern Times is aimed at a broader readership than its predecessor and is connected with a touring exhibition on show at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum until 15 February 2009. The book includes twenty-five articles written by academics, artists and curators from a range of different disciplines, including visual art, design, architecture, animation, fashion, popular culture, film and photography. These articles are divided into five themes that cover abstraction, the body, the city, space age, and electric signs and spectacles.

There are traces of a constant, oscillating motion of conscience in Sandy Fitts’s poetry. References to the burden of ‘history’ pit the poems, with ‘history’ standing for everything we need to address in the present, through the power of eloquence, but also in fear that such words are not enough. From the opening, prize-winning poem, ‘Waiting for Goya’, to the closing images of ‘Blue Mop’, the act of poetry emerges and is scrutinised for what it might do in the world:

 our figures leaning      toward each other

    to exchange a few uncertain words

about the mop-    utility-   aesthetics-

Public passion and debate about Australia’s indigenous peoples ebb and flow. During the 1990s, Mabo, Wik, reconciliation and the Stolen Generations dominated public debate for months on end. Indigenous leaders such as Pat and Mick Dodson, Lowitja O’Donohue and Noel Pearson became familiar figures, prodding politicians and the public to remember unfinished business. As the official reconciliation process ground to a halt during the Howard government, Aboriginal issues receded into the background. They re-emerged spectacularly in 2006 with the cataloguing of widespread sexual and physical abuse in remote Aboriginal communities. This was in the lead-up to the government’s Emergency Intervention in the Northern Territory.

There is an unfortunate tendency in contemporary fantasy for plots to become elongated, ungainly and unmanageable, much like teenage boys. Thankfully, Garth Nix’s The Keys to the Kingdom series is an exception, perhaps because the protagonist, Arthur Penhaligon, is not yet a teen-ager himself.

What if Kenneth Myer, not Sir John Kerr, had been Australia’s governor-general in 1975? There would still have been storms in Canberra, but no intervention, no Dismissal. Readers of Sue Ebury’s fascinating biography of Myer (1921–92) may be tempted to play the ‘what if’ game, speculating on how Gough Whitlam might have used a full second term as prime minister.

In an age when cricketing biographies predominantly lionise one-dimensional and vacuous individuals, this is a pleasurable reminder of an earlier era when even test players had regular jobs and a better sense of balance about life’s priorities.

Barry Oakley, in his brief introduction to Families: Modern Australian Short Stories, tells us that the quality he was seeking in the fiction was ‘vitality’. This seems a rather broad filter: surely all good writing must possess vitality if it is going to hold the reader’s attention? Notwithstanding, many of the stories here are good, even excellent.

Strange Museums is a strange book, a kind of fugue whose first theme is introduced by the poem ‘Tortures’ by Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. It is a lament of evasion, uncertainty, the reservoir of pain that is the body and the inability to escape. It is enlarged da capo with the author’s discovery of a plaque commemorating the day in 1942 when Jews were rounded up and shot in the town of Piatrk w Trybunalski.

It is the tale of a most unusual journey made through Poland by performance artist and writer Fiona McGregor from May to July 2006. With A A Wojak, her performance partner and former lover, the journey is focused around an international action art festival where the two women, as senVoodoo, perform their confronting work, Arterial. It involves fear and shock, with the pain and risk endured by the artists calculated to take them to the edge. Even in description, Arterial draws a gasp.