ARTS
A brush with political correctness
Giles Auty believes a new book on Australian art will have a pernicious effect The publication of any new history of Australian art is something of a rarity. Since Bernard Smith's safe, scholarly but predominantly left-wing survey Australian Painting 1788-1960 was first published in 1962 — it was updated subsequently in 1971 and 1992, latterly to incorporate the three most recent decades — the publica- tion of Robert Hughes's breezy and opin- ionated The Art of Australia way back in 1966 has unquestionably been the main event.
However, in the last month, a new pre- tender has crept on to the scene: Christo- pher Allen's Art in Australia: from Colonization to Postmodernism.
Those unfamiliar with life or art in Australia in recent times possibly need a few words of explanatory background before tackling this last book. The days of the tough, self-reliant, straight-talking Australian have largely become a thing of the past, except in rural districts where throwbacks may still sur- vive.
With the exception of Cana- da, political correctness proba- bly reached its most virulent form in Australia, especially under Paul Keating's Aus- tralian Labor Party govern- ment, which made its exit in From icon to March 1996 after 13 long years of rule. Republicanism, left-wing revisionist history and violently anti-British sentiment flourished under the latter, along with almost any banner-carrying 'alternative' or minority movement. Nowhere were the effects felt more keenly than in the arts, academic life, education, broadcasting and the press. Shortly after my arrival here in May 1995, I was astonished to hear the phrase 'British concentration camps' used on a television programme in relation to the second world war.
Contemporary Australia is among the safest, easiest and potentially most prosper- ous lands in human history. It is also among the most adolescent, sentimental and solipsist. A major part of this condition is manifested in adolescent contempt for the erstwhile parent — Britain — which, in the eyes of almost any fashionable Aus- tralian academic, historian or writer, never did anything right. Colonisation and colo- nialism are among the most appalling words and concepts to be found in the new, `correct' Australian's vocabulary. Indeed, many Australian journalists rejoiced at the recent British expulsion from Hong Kong as though a particularly unfortunate child were about to be handed over at last to a political message: 'Shearing the Rams, 1890, by nation of kindly nurses. I wondered how many of my fellow journalists here could find Tibet on a map. Were all ignorant of its recent history?
Without the foregoing preamble, I fear Christopher Allen's Art in Australia: from Colonization to Postmodernism might strike the average British reader as difficult or even impossible to comprehend. Basically it is not a book about artistic, so much as sociological and political values. Artists, along with other unfortunate citizens, are judged not so much by what they did, as by what the writer thinks they thought. It is basically their attitudes and political align- ments which are fed through the fine mesh of 'correct' contemporary attitudes and thinking. For some reason, an insistent image of an early, bare-chested, axe-wield- ing Australian pioneer keeps returning to me. The man is desperately trying to clear scrub to plant crops for his family. In the meantime a threatening thought-balloon hangs over his head: 'Oh, my God. I can't help wondering what post-structuralist fem- inists will think of my life in 150 years time.'
Probably the most graphic expression of Australian indifference is 'not to give a rat's arse' and there seems to me a fairly clear invitation not to give a rodent's poste- rior for most of the findings expressed in Allen's book. For a start, far too few of them are justified: on the rare occasion when Allen expresses an opinion about quality rather than 'correctness', his view generally has not only the abruptness of a rabbit plucked suddenly from a hat but is also highly likely to be fallible.
The history of immigrant or non-indige- nous art in Australia is of fairly brief dura- tion, a mere 200 or so years. The basic deeds, facts and events are pretty easy to grasp and any fresh history must largely be a re-interpretation of these. Much of the same dramatis personae will appear in Smith's, Hughes's, Allen's or any other would-be chroni- cler's book. Thus John Glover, Conrad Martens, Eugene von Guerard, Abram Louis Buvelot, Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Charles Conder, George Lambert, Hugh Ram- say, Lloyd Rees, Max Mel- drum, Ian Fairweather, Grace Cossington-Smith, Margaret Preston, Russell Drysdale, William Dobell, Donald Friend, Fred Williams, Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, John Tom Roberts Olsen and Brett Whiteley, say, are more or less bound to fea- ture, although typically Allen's text omits any mention at all of the tragically short- lived Hugh Ramsay (1877-1906), who was one of the most accomplished painters in the entire history of Australian art. Allen is almost as dismissive of Lloyd Rees — sim- ply 'a romantic realist' — yet Rees (1895- 1988) was one of Australia's very best artists of this century.
Allen received his PhD from the Univer- sity of Sydney in 1992 and is thus a fairly typical product of the teaching of new art history, in Australia. Unlike old art history which concerned itself with such vital ques- tions as aesthetics and artistic quality, new art history concentrates largely on sociolog- ical and political judgments and also indulges in a good deal of retrospective moralising based loosely on some Marxist ideal.
In the meantime, paintings are analysed for their political symbolism in a manner which would have astonished their creators. Thus even Tom Roberts's 'Shearing the Rams' 1890, which once enjoyed the status of a national icon in Australia, is 'read' only for its extremely dubious and purely supposed political message: 'who does the work and who profits from it?' What we are being invited to do by Allen is not to share the pleasure of a remarkable natural- istic period painting of men at work but to bond in mutual hatred of a purely hypo- thetical farmer/capitalist/exploiter. Clearly any owner of sheep stood to make most of the profits — just as he stood to make all of the loss if wool prices plummeted. Should one presume the author yearns here for the famous collective farming methods of the former Soviet Union? If he does, this would suggest his knowledge of `ordinary' history is every bit as defective as his grasp of the purposes of art.
Because intellectual life in Australia is habitually rather less than effervescent, the publication of Allen's book is likely to be something of an event here. Although I suspect it was written innocently, as though by a bright student simply following instructions, I feel its consequence will be pernicious — especially among the young. Students of art and art history in Australia already strike me as quite sufficiently con- fused. Allen's book compounds 25 years of pretty indifferent thinking on almost any subject you can name which begin during the era of the Whitlam government. It will probably prove just one more nail in the coffin of art and of truly liberal thinking in Australia.
Art in Australia: From Colonization to Postmodernism by Christopher Allen is pub- lished by Thames and Hudson at f7.95 in the UK $19.95 in Australia.
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