Arts

Jenny McFarlane, in this fascinating study of Theosophical influences upon Australian artists, attempts a ‘cross-cultural and interdisciplinary interrogation of modernity’. Rather than viewing modernism in the arts as the progression of a series of ‘isms’, leading by a linear narrative to abstraction, she presents a picture of multiple, interweaving modernisms. Her period of interest extends from the 1890s, when prominent Australians such as Alfred Deakin and Henry Parkes were enthralled by Annie Besant’s Australian lectures, through the early twentieth century, when many artists officially joined the Theosophical Society, to the Society’s decline after the death of C.W. Leadbeater in 1934. By focusing on the way Theosophy encouraged artists to probe the nature of the visible and invisible, McFarlane gives an account of Australian modernism that is ‘gendered, decentralised and alternative’.

Jean-Luc Godard’s film about young French revolutionaries, La Chinoise (1967), was described by Manny Farber as having ‘a suspicious sideways movement […] sliding sideways, crab fashion, [that] bars progress to its inhabitants, keeps turning the actors whirligig fashion without revealing anything about them’. Named after graffiti from the Paris uprising of May 1968, McKenzie Wark’s The Beach Beneath the Street takes on the Situationist International (SI) with what look, at first, to be similarly crab-like gestures.

Despite its unrewarding title, The Steins Collect, both exhibition and catalogue, tells the most captivating story of early modern art and its patronage. The cast of characters ranges from the downright difficult (Leo) and the overweeningly self-important (Gertrude) to sunny Californian idealists (Sarah and Michael). Gertrude and her brother Leo set up their joint ménage at 27 rue de Fleurus, close to the Luxembourg Gardens, in 1903. A year later, Michael, their elder brother, and his wife, Sarah, settled in Paris and lived close by at 58 rue Madame. By 1909 the two households had assembled the largest and finest collection of Matisse and Picasso anywhere. Though comfortably off, the Steins were not remotely among the super-rich, yet only the Russian collectors, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, at the end of the decade, would challenge their supremacy.

Is there anything left to say about Hollywood? Thomas Elsaesser’s monumental compilation of twenty-three densely argued essays written during the last four decades, The Persistence of Hollywood, provides a straightforward, at times overwhelming answer: Yes. Elsaesser’s summary work also makes a strong argument for a lifelong engagement with Hollywood that stretches from the development and ‘genius’ of what is now commonly called the classical studio era to the contemporary blockbuster and its attendant practices of truly globalised film-making. Elsaesser’s pithy title refers to both his own continuing interest in Hollywood past and present and the remarkable ‘persistence’ and longevity of this profoundly dominant film-making system. The range of Elsaesser’s enquiry and his command of the various strands of film theory that have emerged since the 1960s are often breathtaking, and clearly illustrate the author’s importance to the field, particularly as a barometer or synthesiser of dominant and fashionable ideas and critical approaches.

David Rothenberg’s formal appellation at the New Jersey Institute of Technology is Professor of Philosophy and Music. He refers to himself as a ‘musician, composer, author and philosopher-naturalist’. Others have called him an ‘interspecies musician’. Rothenberg, a highly regarded jazz saxophonist and clarinettist, has published a range of books on science, technology, and music. But an ‘interspecies musician’? Much of Rothenberg’s fame stems from his improvised duets with ‘singing’ animals: whales (Whale Music, 2008), birds (Why Birds Sing, 2005) and even cicadas (see YouTube). With this background, Rothenberg is well credentialled to tackle a problem that lies at the heart of the apparent divide between science and the arts: what is beauty? Why do we find much birdsong beautiful? More critically, what do the birds themselves hear in these products of their evolutionary history? Can mere animals experience some kind of aesthetic sense, a sense of ‘beauty’?

Bernard Smith, who died in September 2011, was responsible for creating the first orthodoxy in Australian art history. His version of the story of Australian art has been persuasive and enduring. It held sway for half a century; in many ways we are still living with it. Smith’s classic account of the development of Australian art was Australian Painting, first published in 1962 and reprinted with updates in 1971, 1991, and 2001.

Simon Leys is the pen name of the distinguished academic Pierre Ryckmans, who came to notice, first as a sinologist, then as a critic and author. The essays in this collection, composed over more than three decades during which Ryckmans held appointments at the Australian National University and the University of Sydney, cover a wide range of subjects ...

‘One would have to be extremely naïve not to know immediately upon entering his room what was what when one saw the decoration with its reproduction Greek statues of hermaphrodites, and its strange collection of pictures, each boasting a posterior, mixed with pictures of pretty young men from the local garrison which the talented dilettante has made himself and continues to make.’