Regionalism vs internationalism

The centres of the art world, and the global art market, have traditionally been New York, Paris and London. The supremacy of these art capitals and their centralised powers of distribution have made other countries feel marginalised. Art historian and academic Terry Smith called it our ‘provincialism problem’ (Artforum, vol 13, no 1, Sept 1974, pp 54–59). The marketing of Australian art, from Recent Australian painting at the Whitechapel in London 1961 through to shows such as Eureka: artists from Australia at ICI London in 1982 and the 1984 Exxon International Exhibition, Australian visions at New York’s Guggenheim have displayed a sense of gratitude and rejection, a cycle of cringe and strut, which became more marked towards the end of the 1980s.

Why? The ‘tyranny of distance’ was the famous phrase historian Geoffrey Blainey used in 1966 to describe the way Australia’s geographical remoteness shaped the nation’s history, with the country generally viewed as a British colonial outpost on the fringe of Asia. This ‘furthest shore’ of the New World was, of course, part of the historical narrative of a foreign consciousness – not so much a discovery as a projection. If Australia was the antipodes, this made Europe itself a site of presence.

The ‘tyranny of distance’ also meant that Australians growing up before the 1960s had to wait months for a new book, art magazine or hairstyle to arrive, until a new electronic sped-up age of super-high velocity airplanes and airwaves augured the death of distance. John Kaldor, according to curator Daniel Thomas in the catalogue for An Australian Accent, was ‘the first to realise that the new 1960s global village existed in terms of transport and could be operated for Australia’s benefit’ (p 13). The annual Alcorso-Sekers Travelling Scholarship Award for Sculpture was one such initiative: flying in major avant-garde artists to make art in Australia. But it also came from Kaldor’s own background. Born in Hungary, brought to Australia at 13, sent to England and Switzerland to learn about his parents’ textile business, his work after 1970 took him to Sydney, New York, Paris, Tokyo.

Likewise, the artists in An Australian Accent have multicultural connections: Imants Tillers’ background is Latvian; Mike Parr’s wife is Austrian; Ken Unsworth’s wife was Russian (born in Egypt). This, in fact, is contemporary life in Australia: today it’s not the migrant who must assimilate to the Anglo world, but the Anglo who must come to terms with what has become the multicultural mainstream. As the song says ‘We are one, but we are many’ and a good deal of Australian art has drawn much of its energy from this square of oppositions: combining national coherence and ethnic diversity, conflict and identification, each desire sabotaging the other. And visual art could be viewed as a toolbox to expose these often unseen tensions, shifts and complications in society and the way it figures things out through representation.

The crowning form of nationalist ideology in the visual arts – that sense of ‘one’ – generally draws on the pastoralism of the 1890s, namely the iconic landscape works of Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton. By the 1980s, among the conscience-knotted artists of the thirty to fortysomething age group – like Imants Tillers, Juan Davila, Tim Johnson and Gordon Bennett – Australia would be dealing perpetually with two shifting mirages: the European past and the Aboriginal past. There could be no dream of a fixed national identity so much as an identity called up and called into question.

By the mid 1980s, Paul Hogan’s film Crocodile Dundee reinforced the image of a macho pioneer tradition, misread as an earlier phase of US history. According to journalist Phillip Adams, it was also a clever marketing of innocence. Australians, so different in speech, physiognomy, attitude, were flavour of the month, but for being faux-naif.

Imants Tillers’ work, especially, is a kind of X-ray negative of our ‘provincialism problem’, seeming to play out his migrant’s sense of struggle to establish speech and visibility from the disenfranchised spaces of the periphery. He saw that the tyranny of distance, and this problem of belatedness, with the regard to a centre could be turned to our advantage.

In ‘Fear of texture’ (Art & Text, no 10, 1983), Tillers proposed that in Australia we know our art from reproductions and so we are not beholden to American or European cultural centres. Our reliance on photomechanical reproduction made Australia postmodern by default. In Untitled 1978, using a computer-scanning process, he was able to produce his own version of Summer 1909 by Hans Heysen which, when reproduced on canvas with colour precision-ink jets, was indistinguishable from the reproduction of Heysen’s original. These two straight original-scale versions of Summer amounted to a doubled painting on canvas of a reproduction of a painting of a natural object. This is a kind of self-reflexive deconstruction that skewers the provincialism problem in a highly sophisticated manner.

It became clear by the 1980s that artists could come from anywhere: Aachen or Kinshasha, Geneva or Melbourne. Australia was part of a global economy, and multiculturalism was a social and historical fact. It would no longer be a matter for migrants to feel they were persecuted minorities – as it turned out, in the streets of Sydney or Adelaide, younger Australians were becoming more Italian, more Greek, more Aboriginal, in a sense that they craved the food, the street fashions, the styles. With each minority lifted from the margin to the spotlight, boldness followed, courage spurred by public attention. From the perceived position of disadvantage as Australian artists always on the margins of the global art world, Tillers, Parr and Unsworth hit the spotlight at P.S.1. With unerring instinct, John Kaldor picked the right time and the right place for this presentation of Australian art in New York. Completely deprovincialised, these artists – localised, metropolitan, cosmopolitan – no longer suffered the psychological difficulties that had made previous generations struggle with the idea of being an ‘Australian’ artist.