Art

Here is a production that most poets would die for. Peter Steele’s new book is a spectacular hybrid beast, a Dantesque griffin in glorious array: it is a new volume of poetry and an art book, with superb reproductions of works of art spanning several centuries, from collections all over the world. Paintings most of them, but also statues, sculptures, objets d’art, a toilet service, the figured neck of a hurdy-gurdy, a hoard of Viking silver and a diminutive six-seater bicycle. And the reason for this pairing is that these are all ekphrastic poems, ‘poetry which describes or evokes works of art’, as Patrick McCaughey glosses it in his introduction. How Steele brought off such an ambitious venture I can’t imagine.

Last summer, Peter Booth became the first living artist to have a full-scale retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria’s Ian Potter Centre at Federation Square. With eighty-one paintings and 150 drawings, it ranked as one of the largest surveys ever accorded a contemporary painter. It was a bold move on the gallery’s part and made a claim for Booth’s pre-eminence within his generation. Surprisingly, there were no interstate takers for the show.

The last couple of years have seen a revival in the post card – not your glossy view card of opera houses, kangaroos and koalas (I am told popular postcards of our furry friends sell in the millions over a year), but a much more small circulation kind which, because of its limited interest, can’t be sold in normal card outlets. Hence the tear-out, four per page, thirty-two per book, post card extravaganzas sold through normal book channels.

A conversation is an interactive exchange usually of a spontaneous nature. Janet Hawley’s essays are a mix of journalistic intention, conversational ruminations, observations, enquiries, and a gentle goading of her subjects about the ‘twin crucibles’ of creativity – the personality of the artist and what occurs in his or her sanctum, the studio. Assuming the role of confessional nursemaid and curious witness, Hawley profiles more than thirty successful artists, grand old men and women of the art world, explorers of real and psychological terrains, and deceased enfants terribles. These ‘conversations’ make unexpectedly compelling reading.

Over the past three decades, Edmund Capon has transformed the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Before he arrived, you could have swapped the contents of the Sydney gallery with Ballarat’s and nobody would have noticed the difference. How a city of that size, wealth and international ambition could have wound up with such a provincial collection puzzled the mind. No more. Capon has thrown out new wings, created a distinguished Asian collection virtually ex nihilo, attracted the generous benefaction of some remarkable old master paintings from James Fairfax, and acquired major twentieth-century and contemporary works. As importantly, he has made the AGNSW the liveliest of the state galleries. Even a wet Tuesday morning sees the central court thronged. Often Capon installs a medley of works there which would look inchoate in most other galleries but which emerge as resounding and triumphant. I once saw the big Kirchner Three bathers hung with the august Max Beckmann’s Mother and daughter and Picasso’s crackling Seated nude from the mid 1950s. Collectively, they gave off the whack and weight of modernity more excitingly than any other display in Australia.

The discipline of art history in Australia has passed through four stages. The foundations were laid in the 1940s with the arrival of three eminent émigrés. Ursula Hoff, schooled in the rigours and erudition of the Warburg Institute, came first. Franz Philipp, a Dunera survivor, well educated in the Viennese School, under Julius von Schlosser and others, came next. Then came Joseph Burke, first Herald Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne, and a product of the Courtauld Institute in London and the Anglophiliacs of Yale. Hoff would become the first trained art historian to work in a public Australian art gallery. Over the years, she made the Prints and Drawings Room at the National Gallery of Victoria a powerhouse of scholarship and connoisseurship. Burke and Philipp joined forces to create the Department of Fine Arts. Burke modestly proclaimed that ‘Franz was the architect and I was the builder’; I suspect that Philipp felt he was both.

Of all art forms, photography has probably had the most contentious and complex reception. Graduating from the ‘bastard child left on the doorstep of art’ in the 1840s to the darling of the art world for some 170 years, the critical understanding of this quintessentially modern medium is in a constant state of flux.

These thoughts occurred to me as I read this lavishly produced hardcover book. Indeed, as the rather prosaic title, states, this is photography that self-confidently declares itself as art. Blair French, who co-authored Twelve Australian Photo Artists with Daniel Palmer, brings one of the touchiest aspects of the medium to the fore when commenting on the work of Pat Brassington: ‘the relationship between photography and the world may appear transparent, but photography is in fact an opaque medium with its own material qualities ... it is an act of fabrication and construction.’ This is the sticking point that still brings the medium into contention: photography as a reflection of the world or as a construction. Or, to use a more crude conjunction, document verses art.

Australia’s major galleries, with the odd exception, have generally conducted their exhibition programs to show that fanfare for blockbusters is reserved for exhibitions that come from somewhere other than Australia. The die was cast long ago. In the past thirty years, temporary exhibitions have increasingly consumed the lives of public galleries – and blockbusters represent the embodiment of this phenomenon.