Antipodeans in America: a cautionary tale - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 6: Our Global Face
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Patrick McCaughey
DURING MY EIGHT YEARS AS DIRECTOR OF THE WADSWORTH ATHENEUM, I acquired a small group of Australian paintings for the permanent collection. The experience proved to be a cautionary tale. What I chiefly learned from the experience was that Americans experience Australia, either vicariously or actually, as place rather than culture. So long as the acquisitions directly reflected this bias, everything went swimmingly. The frustration for Australian artists and writers is that there is little or no curiosity about their identities, their histories, their reputations but only about how their work is a revelation of place.
Like most Australians of my generation and beyond, the revival of contemporary Aboriginal art from the early and mid-1970s on changed one's understanding and perception of the Australian landscape, its potency and significance, and the canon of modern Australian art. Soon after my arrival in the US, exhibitions of Aboriginal art began to attract sympathetic attention. Dreamings at Asia House in 1988 was followed by the Holmes ˆ Court collection at Harvard in 1991. In 1994, in conjunction with an enterprising young Australian art dealer, Mary Reid Brunstrom, who ran a gallery in St Louis devoted to Australian art, I brought to the Atheneum a strangely hermetic exhibition of body painting, which had been transferred to shield-like supports. The exhibition also included a pair of monumental paintings by the Petyarre family, plus three contemporary Aboriginal paintings I had recently acquired for the Atheneum on a return visit to Australia. The artists were Gloria Petyarre, Emily Kngwarreye and Fred Ward Tjungurrayi. Although they were substantial works, they were inexpensive, ranging from $4500 to $5500 and could be bought from the director's allowance. On the same trip I bought a large painting by Jan Senbergs of a West Australian mining subject, Open Cut. It was very much a paysage moralise. Machinery had ripped the earth apart and left the landscape looking like a large open wound. There was not a human figure to be seen, only a record of human exploitation. On the rim of the horizon, a band of untouched desert formed a fragile margin against the sky.
I deliberately bought the four paintings as a group. They were to form in nuce an allegory of Australia. The Central Desert painters vividly conveyed the art of the Dreaming, naming, as they so often do, the presence of a food source, a place that provides identity to an individual or a ritual to a group. Gloria Petyarre's painting was her familiar landscape where a lizard in the Dreaming shaped the contours of her country. Fred Tjungurrayi painted a Tingari people dreaming – those mysterious ancestors who moved across the land in the Dreaming and whose fire sites became associated with men's initiation ceremonies. The painting was a series of silver grey circular motifs, locked and linked to each other. It was the perfect image of initiation where the young man becomes himself and joins the others. The painting brilliantly evoked the one and the many.
What really stirred staff and trustees back in Hartford was Emily Kng-warreye's Alagurla 3. The particular picture I bought for the Wadsworth Atheneum had an extraordinary "all-over" surface as though the canvas itself was flowering. Gabrielle Pizzi noted:
This work followed an enormous rain that caused the Sandover River on Utopia Station to overflow. The plant species depicted in the painting are preferred foods of the emu; the bush plum and the myneroo bush seed. The spontaneous dot work forms a ground covering showing various stages of ripeness and decay ... the desert and its power of transformation when the simple ingredients of fertile seed, earth warmth and water combine to carpet the earth with food sources and ensure survival for the following season.
You had to imagine walking across the painting, I suggested to the Hartford eyes, for the surface imitates the texture of the ground itself after the rains. The painting drew strongly on the tradition of the sand paintings of the earlier nomadic existence of the tribe. The sand paintings, I explained to my American listeners, were maps of their country so that the whole tribe could recall where they had been, where were the waterholes, the sources of vegetation and the game that fed from it so that they could survive in the desert. And the maps became mythologies so that they entered the imagination of the tribe.
When the Americans looked at the three paintings with these brief explanations, they were convinced beyond doubt. Accustomed to reading abstract art, the austere forms of the paintings caused no difficulty. What moved them was that these painters of the Central Desert understood the landscape both in its microforms – the sudden desert germination in Emily Kngwarr-eye's dreaming – and in its macroforms – the constant experience of distance and space in central Australia found in Gloria Petyarre's work.
Against these visions, the Senbergs struck an even harsher than normal note of white intervention and disruption to the natural order. The group was received with enormous enthusiasm by the curatorial committee and entered the collection with many hurrahs. Some commentators have put down the American response to contemporary Aboriginal art as a further chapter in modernism's penchant for the primitive. This misses the point badly. Americans have a profound longing for a landscape of significance. So much on the eastern seaboard has been destroyed and devoured and the Great Plains and canyons of the west are distant places and tourist destinations. What Americans saw in the Aboriginal paintings was a profound and intimate connection between the human and the natural world, long lost to them. That the Aboriginal connection has a spiritual, quasi-religious dimension made Americans all the more susceptible to its power. The abstraction, the minimalism, Emily Kngwarreye's "all-over" effect spoke such a contemporary language to them that there was nothing hokey or folksy about the work. The austerity guaranteed its authenticity. The Senbergs mining painting played the spoiler to this elevated vision of the Australian landscape. It was a powerful ensemble.
THE WARMTH OF THE RESPONSE ENCOURAGED ME TO BELIEVE that I could build a small but telling collection of Australian art at the Wadsworth Atheneum. Planning for New Worlds from Old was in its early stages and that helped build momentum for the cause of Australian art. When a year or so later I bought substantial paintings by Robert Jacks and Richard Larter, again with a mildly allegorical purpose, contrasting the Melbourne-Sydney antithesis, the urban versus the landscape as sources for Australian abstraction, the reception was notably unenthusiastic. Unfairly, they were deemed to look like everybody else.
My real comeuppance in acquiring Australian art for the Wadsworth Atheneum came towards the end of my tenure at the museum. Agnews, the distinguished London art dealers, had taken over the estate of Sidney Nolan. Boldly, it brought a group of Nolan's paintings to a contemporary art fair in New York in 1995. Among the group was a celebrated painting from the early 1960s, Convict (1962). Nolan was then 45 and at the height of his powers. For Nolan, the ur-convict is David Bracefell who rescued Mrs Fraser after she was wrecked on Great Sandy Island off the coast of Queensland and led her to safety. She promptly betrayed him to the authorities. He escaped back into the bush and probably survived because he lived with Aborigines. He became "the genius of the place" and like Nolan's other heroes, Ned Kelly, Burke and Wills, destroyed, but not defeated.
The painting is unusual for Nolan for it shows a standing male nude, arms behind his head and with recognisable features. Across his body are ambiguous markings. They could be the ghostly tracings of his convict uniform or the body markings from an Aboriginal ceremony. He stands alone in a barren and featureless landscape. He is the absolute outsider, the outcast, the damned survivor. The figure was homo Australiensis, large, ugly and difficult. I had known and admired the picture for years. After some negotiation, the price was set at $US72,500 ($103,300), well beyond the director's allowance but not beyond the acquisition funds of the Wadsworth Atheneum. It was more than all the previous Australian acquisitions put together.
So I proposed the work to the curatorial committee. Now this committee was the most prestigious and sought-after committee for a trustee to be a member. It alone decided what entered the Wadsworth Atheneum's collection and what did not. It bristled if the full board of trustees ever so much as queried its decisions. It met over lunch and was the only committee where wine was served. (Keep 'em happy, was my motto.) The chairman was deft and saw his role as supporting the acquisition proposals put forward by the staff. All curators attended the meeting and a general sense of excitement and expectation prevailed rather than one of judgement and acrimony. All my proposals normally sailed through, although all were carefully presented and documented.
Two of the many professional vices afflicting directors are complacency and conceit. I presented the Nolan to the committee, telling the dramatic story of Bracefell and Mrs Fraser, filling in the background of Nolan as Australia's leading figurative painter and dashed for the door to catch a plane to Italy before the meeting ended.
Well, even as I was speeding to JFK, the peasants' revolt was on. Who was this Sidney Nolan? What direction was the contemporary collection at the Wadsworth Atheneum taking? How did another Australian painting fit into the collection? It was all quite unprecedented. In the absence of the director, the trustees had found their voice. Rolling a director on an acquisition is the birthright of every trustee the world over. When I returned to the museum a week or so later, these questions were dumped on my plate by a nonplussed chairman.
Now there happened to be living in Hartford in those days an extremely successful Australian businessman named Kenneth Butterworth. He was CEO of what had once been a small family business called Loctite, which made industrial-strength adhesives and glues the like of which had never been seen before. The company was worth approximately $US300 million when he took it over and he promptly built it into a Fortune 500 company worth upwards of $US1.5 billion. Butterworth had recently joined the board of trustees of the Atheneum. I could not, in those days, have called Butter-worth an arts hound but he was no philistine. He chaired and largely ran a foreign affairs forum in Hartford where they thought nothing of bringing the Chinese ambassador (terrible liar he turned out to be) and other luminaries of the international scene to talk about the state of the world to a city eager to throw off its provincialism. In addition, Butterworth chaired the Salvation Army's major appeal. He was impressive in a craggy, worldly way and learned to curb his instinctive feelings about artists like Brett Whiteley.
Naturally I turned to him and asked if he would consider helping with the acquisition. Together with the chairman of trustees, I took Butterworth down to the basement to look at the Nolan. Before I could finish my spiel about Bracefell and Mrs Fraser and homo Australiensis, Butterworth, who looked hard and sceptically at the painting, declared: "I'll give you $25,000 towards it and you'll have to find the rest."
It was just enough to turn the tide. New England principles are immune to every sound but the sound of the cash register.
It was, however, a cautionary tale. Nolan was by far the best known of all the Australian artists I had proposed. The year before (1994), the early Ned Kelly series had been shown over the summer at the Metropolitan in New York to some acclaim. If Nolan could not speak to the American imagination with a rich narrative painting and such an impressive, bold and difficult image, what did that say about the chances of others less well known? On reflection, I believe the trouble surrounding the Nolan acquisition was that the painting spoke from within Australian history and culture. It was not simply the record of place. Americans found it hard to give credence to such a work of art. The experience, historical and cultural, was not theirs and they could not enter into it.
Looking back, how puny one's efforts and achievements look in this matter. Although the Wadsworth Atheneum does not put its Australian works on view too often – shame on them! – Elizabeth Kornhauser, in a good stroke, made sure they were all on view when the Atheneum showed New Worlds from Old, a timely reminder that Australian art did not cease after 1900. Still, I have a quiet satisfaction that lodged in one of America's oldest art museums, there is a small group of Australian masterpieces that must inevitably see the light of day. ♦