Visual Art

The Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award is the major event on the Indigenous visual arts calendar. Its significance rests with the quality art exhibited under the mantle of the award and the crowd it attracts to Darwin every August. Artists from disparate communities mingle to cement relationships through shared kinship, songlines, and history. Excited coordinators from community cooperatives mix with urbane curators and gallery owners – projects are conceived. Collectors jostle to reserve the best works.

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‘More difficult to do a thing than to talk scintillating dialogue of 1890, ‘The Critic as Artist’. To hold to such a belief, Gilbert declares, is ‘a gross popular error. It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In the sphere of actual life that is of course obvious. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.’

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In a scholarly study just published by MIT Press (Art as Existence, 2006), Gabriele Guercio considers whether the artist’s monograph is still a viable form, given various recent challenges to artistic and art-historical theory and practice. He concludes that although the monographic model does have a future, it must be reshaped inventively. Freud at Work – devoted to the English painter Lucian Freud – represents one possible approach, combining an illuminating interview with an extensive series of studio photographs taken between 1983 and 2006. The resulting volume may seem rather slight, but when consulted in conjunction with the major books on Freud, especially the 2002 Tate exhibition catalogue, it offers many insights and pleasures. I enjoyed particularly David Dawson’s 2005 photos of the artist in action, stripped to the waist, looking for all the world like Caravaggio’s St Jerome – a suitable alter ego.

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Some years ago, Robert Hughes bemoaned the capitulation of art museums and galleries to ‘the whole masterpiece-and-treasure syndrome’. Although made in the 1980s, Hughes’s point may still be valid, especially if the number of recent exhibitions with the word ‘master’ in their titles is anything to go by. A quick check reveals that, in Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria is particularly fond of the word. In Melbourne last year, we had ‘Dutch Masters from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam’ and ‘Albrecht Dürer: Master of the Renaissance’. In 2004 the NGV put on ‘The Impressionists: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay’.

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Copiously illustrated, though in black and white, multivocal yet with an emphatic philosophical tone, this MIT publication distinguishes itself as being at odds with much current Australian art publishing. Although visual arts audiences and readers in Australia constantly bemoan the lack of publishing in this field, Craftsman House and Thames & Hudson have actively taken up the mantle over the last two years, generating monographs on emerging and established artists (see Anthony Gardner’s review of the New Art Series on page 16). Certain state arts agencies have also channelled significant resources into commissioning substantial documents on local practitioners. Generally contextualised by one writer and lavishly illustrated in colour, such monographs are in contrast to this compilation of multiple voices and surprisingly monochrome record of the work of one of Australia’s best-known artists. ... (read more)

Picturesque Pursuits is a pioneering survey of a neglected area within Australian cultural history: the lives and works of colonial women artists. Caroline Jordan places her analysis of this subject within a broader social, political and historical frame. This approach allows her to reveal the multifaceted importance of an art tradition that was often interwoven with women’s daily domestic life. Evidently, colonial women’s art does not conform to traditional notions of a studio based ‘high art’, and its significance extends beyond the limited definitions of this category. As Jordan points out, most women artists produced works that were confined to the lower-value genres of miniatures, botanical studies, picturesque sketches and scrapbook collages. Their works were often small-scale mixed-media pieces of varying technical proficiency. The fact that the majority of colonial women’s art is found in libraries and archives rather than in the major galleries has further con- tributed to its virtual exclusion from the high-art canon.

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More so even than The Age, the New Yorker is a journal shaped and defined by its illustrators and cartoonists. For many decades it did not include photojournalism at all, and it only appears these days under sufferance. The cartoons contribute crucially to the ethos and style of a magazine that depends a lot on ethos and style. To think of the New Yorker is almost inevitably to think of the famous cover by Saul Steinberg that shows the cars, buildings, and people of Ninth and Tenth Avenues filling the foreground, then the Hudson River marking the edge of the real, figurative world, beyond which New Jersey, Nebraska, Japan, and the Pacific Ocean are just names on a vaguely conceived map. Parochial universalism fuelled by an ironic sophistication is the ethos of this famous image, and a thread of continuity in the work of the four New Yorker artists profiled in Iain Topliss’s fine and sensitive book.

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Things shimmer in the distance, as idiosyncrasies of air and light press in upon the eye, causing the terrain before one to wobble, smudge and dissolve. It was the singular achievement of Fred Williams to find an original pictorial syntax to poeticise such distance as it was experienced in the Australian landscape.

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Bernard Smith gave us Australian art. Before him, the subject was not part of our cultural discourse. We knew and could place the work of Michelangelo and Monet but not that of Eugene von Guérard, Tom Roberts or Grace Cossington Smith.

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Janine Burke’s Company of Images is a funny and socially astute book about painters and their promoters in contemporary Melbourne. The humour comes from sharp observations and deft characterisations. Burke’s minor figures are like good caricatures, but her major characters are a complex blend of impulses and emotions, which can be funny or sad. She takes the opportunity to send up predictably vulnerable members of her artistic community: the painter running to seed who often feels ‘small, helpless and angry’ and seduces or denounces his students according to the state of his ego; the curator with his eyes on New York and whose ambition is ‘to have friends he was unable to frighten’; the Professor of Fine Arts who roams his Department ‘inciting suspicion and acting out his own’; and the wealthy, titled collector who brings in a curator from the State Gallery to hang a painting in her toilet.

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