Towards an Asian Australian Art History
nonfiction by Soo-min shim
Bernard Smith (1916–2011) is often lauded as the founding father of art history in Australia. Australian art historian Jaynie Anderson calls him the “first truly Australian art historian”, as he continued to search for a definition of ‘Australian’ art. In his 1984 public lecture ‘Is There a Radical Tradition in Australian Art?’, he explored the role of European expatriates in Australian art and how they have contributed to the development of a ‘national art’①. He singled out three major artists: “Tom Roberts, for finding subjects in colonial history; Norman Lindsay, for confronting puritanical social mores with a liberating sexuality; and Margaret Preston, for promoting Aboriginal art.” Each, Smith said, had their roots in Europe, and he concluded that British expatriates and their peers “became the patriots, became trustees, directors of galleries, art critics, and received official honours; became in short, the establishment in painting”②.
Later, in Modernism’s History (1998), Smith stated: “I shall be writing therefore with Europe as my antipodes, seeing it from a distance, and yet seeing it also as part of myself, my cognitive space and my culture.” Referring to this statement, art historian Catherine Speck identifies that Smith was “continuing to see Europe in an antipodal relationship to Australia; that each sits opposite the other and that there is a cultural, spatial and cognitive relationship between the two continents. Europe is his antipodes in that the cultural links between it and Australia are deep and constant.”③ With this mentality, many of Smith’s books analyse the careers of artists such as Arthur Boyd, Eugene von Guerard and Grace Cossington Smith, linking their practices to European avant-garde movements such as surrealism and expressionism④. Such narratives seem to convincingly link art in Australia to the European centre.⑤
In 1861, the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) became the first art gallery in the settler-colony of Australia.⑥ According to historians Alison Inglis, Vivien Gaston and Deirdre Coleman, the NGV’s collection of plaster casts—acquired by the gallery’s first trustees—was one of the most significant displays in the building, and included copies of classical statues and busts of famous European men. Among the collection’s subjects were politician Benjamin Disraeli, scientist Michael Faraday, painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, and writers William Wordsworth and William Makepeace Thackeray. In the creation and maintenance of these effigies, art was part of an apparatus that actively defined what and who were deemed significant or worthy of valour.
Similar developments unfolded in later decades. In his 2016 Art Monthly article on the history of the independent Melbourne institution Australian Galleries, established in 1956, Sasha Grishin writes: “During the 1950s and 1960s, Australian Galleries exhibited virtually every important artist of the day—Charles Blackman, Arthur Boyd, John Brack, Judy Cassab, John Coburn, Noel Counihan, Robert Dickerson, William Dobell, Ian Fairweather, Leonard French, Donald Friend, Roger Kemp, Donald Laycock, Elwyn Lynn, Godfrey Miller, Jon Molvig, Sidney Nolan, John Olsen, Desiderius Orban, John Passmore, John Perceval, Clifton Pugh, Lloyd Rees, Eric Thake, Albert Tucker and Fred Williams.”⑦
In 1961, Whitechapel Gallery opened the Recent Australian Painting exhibition, which included British expatriate artists such as Boyd and James Gleeson. The curator Bryan Robertson wrote that Australian art was “cut off from our European environment, was highly inventive and had one unifying factor: an unremitting sense of the drama of the isolated moment”. Art critic and historian Robert Hughes’s catalogue essay echoed Robertson’s opinions by speaking of Australian artists as working in a cultural environment devoid of all history, in “complete isolation from the Renaissance tradition”, and yet having the advantage of being “confronted virtually with a tabula rasa”⑧. Around this period, journalist Cyril Pearl—writing pseudonymously as the ‘Melbourne Spy’ for the weekly newspaper Nation—decried that the fame of Australian artists such as Boyd and Nolan “seem[ed] to derive from the fact that Australians, hungry for a mythology in a country barren of legend, are prepared to confect one from any old ingredients’. The 1960s saw several exhibitions curated in a search for an ‘Australian’ art, such as the Tate Gallery’s Australian Painting: Colonial, Impressionist, Contemporary exhibition in 1963.⑨
More recently, the NGV’s 2013 exhibition Australian Impressionists in France, curated by Elena Taylor, explored Australian artists’ engagement with French impressionist practice from 1885 to 1915. For Taylor, “The expatriates and their exhibitions brought art in Australia into contact with the vital developments in early twentieth century French art, and played an important role in the reception and development of the modern movement in Australia in the decade to follow.”
This year, the NGV curated a large-scale survey of Australian impressionism (titled She-Oak and Sunlight) comprised of more than 250 artworks. It was marketed as featuring “some of the most widely recognisable and celebrated works by Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, Jane Sutherland, Arthur Streeton, Charles Conder, Clara Southern, John Russell and E. Phillips Fox’⑩. Grishin’s laudatory review in The Conversation concludes that this exhibition “will become the definitive exhibition of our evergreen favourite national artists who created quintessential images of Australia’⑪.
Footnotes
① The broken lights on level seven of the University of Sydney’s Fisher Library turn off and on intermittently. They are motion-sensored, so, if you are still, you remain cloaked in the penumbra. But, when you are relatively short, the sensors ignore your presence entirely. You can see yourself in the window’s reflection as a ghostly and anxious face among the books of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean Baudrillard and other French names you may have forced yourself to learn to pronounce through YouTube searches of “How to pronounce post-structuralist philosopher names so I don’t humiliate myself”. I found myself haunting these aisles at 2am in 2018 while gathering data and feverishly finishing my thesis on Asian Australian art.
② I scoured through Australian art books to locate Asian Australian artists by running my eyes past every page, living among silences, gaps and pauses. In Ashley Crawford’s Directory of Australian Art (2006), only seven out of the approximately 440 artists listed are Asian Australian. In Sasha Grishin’s Australian Art: A History (2015), Asian Australians are mentioned once in the entire book. These artists are listed together in a single sentence, as a desultory nod to diversity.
③ In my research, I often feel as if I am writing fiction. I am fabricating people and objects. If my research is published at all, it will most likely be published in anthologies as a mere footnote. In most of my art history classes at both the University of Sydney and the Australian National University, I have been the only Asian Australian student. Sometimes, my research is acknowledged—but they remain desultory nods to diversity, left to haunt the footnotes.
④ I use the term ‘haunting’ in the sense that sociologist Avery Gordon understands it: “when the people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving”. In Nusra Latif Qureshi’s 2009 photographic work ‘Did You Come Here to Find History’, a nine-metre-long digital print on transparent film, she superimposes a portrait of herself over 17 European historical portraits. She emerges in between these canonical paintings as a ghostly face, haunting history. Curator Hammad Nasar suggests that “[Qureshi’s] interest is not so much in ‘righting’ history’s ‘wrongs’, as in pointing to its erasures and highlighting its faded traces. Through her practice, she encourages us to distinguish between what was and what remains.” Qureshi is present but only barely, as a glimpse in a darkened window.
⑤ Qureshi’s use of translucence does not only point to the erasure of people of colour in Australian art history, nor, in her act of wilful insertion, does she simply state her presence; she alters the original European portraits as well. As such, there is a fluctuating tension between regression and resurgence. It is in these overlaps that an Asian Australian art history could perhaps be located. Art historian Francis Maravillas, in his essay ‘Constellations of the Contemporary: Art / Asia / Australia’ (2008), visualises Asian Australian art history as constellations, which then defies the chronological ordering of art history. By this logic, attempts to find any ‘genesis’ or ‘beginning’ of an Asian Australian art history may be misguided. Conceptualising history as constellations also leads to the understanding that Asian Australian art history is a political and constructed portmanteau category. It is a strategic category in itself and, hence, can only be understood as a process and a verb rather than as a static and essentialist subject of study. Scholar Jacqueline Lo has traced the term—in her essay ‘Disciplining Asian Australian Studies: Projections and Introjections’ (2006), she points to the inaugural Asian Australian Identities conference, held in Canberra in 1999, where scholars and creatives first mobilised and organised as ‘Asian Australians’. According to Lo, thinkers at the conference drew on postcolonial and cultural studies, leading to a range of interdisciplinary conversations between academics and creatives. Reports from 1999 recall writers and performers such as Anna Yen sharing biographical stories of Chinese women learning circus skills at the Shanghai Circus School, while cultural studies scholars such as Ien Ang were dedicated to a more theoretical deconstruction of terms such as ‘community’. The conference then saw a communion of accounts of real, lived experience by real, living people that were accompanied by theory. As it stands, art history as an object-based discipline often differentiates itself from cultural studies and anthropology. Part of art history’s fixation on discerning itself from other academic fields has led to a preoccupation with art and not so much history.
⑥ In the same year that Australia’s ‘first’ gallery opened, the Protection and Anti-Immigration League was established to discourage Chinese immigration. In 1861, the Parliament of New South Wales (NSW) legally enshrined Chinese discrimination in the form of the Chinese Immigration Restriction and Regulation Act, which required Chinese people entering the colony to pay a tax. The year also saw 1000 Chinese miners attacked and killed in the Lambing Flat Riots on the NSW Burrangong goldfields. Over the ensuing decade, South Pacific Islanders would be indentured as agricultural labourers in Queensland, and First Nations and Asian labourers exploited en masse in the pearling industry in Western Australia.
⑦ An alternative art history would engender an entirely different list of key figures, people and events. What would my list of artists, curators and writers look like? Are lists ever exhaustive, or are they fundamentally problematic for the gaps that they inevitably leave?
⑧ Is it simply enough to list new names and faces? Is it sufficient to expand the areas of study or to simply add new courses to university syllabi? If an Asian Australian art history simply replicates the paradigms and frameworks of the Eurocentric model, what new knowledges are actually being generated? Asian Australian art history must also recognise that it cannot happen in isolation and that it cannot simply co-opt the mentality of Australia as tabula rasa. Thus, situating an Asian Australian art history also means decolonising art history and prioritising First Nations artistic expression and endeavour. An Asian Australian art history should recognise that the structure—as it currently stands—disempowers, silences and erases anyone who is non-white; our histories are entwined. The research done on the art of the Austronesian Makassans (hailing from the region of Sulawesi in modern-day Indonesia) who had visited the north coast of Australia from the early 1700s is an example. First Nations communities and the Makassans shared not only knowledge and resources but art techniques such as batik, an ancient fabric wax-resist dyeing tradition. Lo has written on Aboriginal–Asian intimacies, focusing on the work of artists like Jason Wing, whose practice is based off his experiences as a biracial Chinese and Biripi artist.
⑨ The exhibition contained 214 paintings. Not a single work of Indigenous art was included, and, of the 66 artists, only four were women.
⑩ But why art history? At the brink of resignation, burnout and exhaustion, I return to a single quote. For Toni Morrison, “Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it from even the most tragic of circumstances. Art reminds us that we belong here. And if we serve, we last.” Morrison’s idea of service may be an entry point into a serious reconsideration of art history. Currently, art history is conceived as “a science, with definite principles and techniques”, per Mark Roskill in the introduction to What Is Art History? (1975). Instead, what if art history is conceived as an act of hospitality and care? The etymology of the word ‘care’ is tied to feelings of sorrow, anxiety and grief; it also connotes attention directed towards safety or protection. Meanwhile, the etymology of the word ‘history’ is rooted in ‘to see’ and ‘to know’. When there is seemingly no Asian Australian art history, it is difficult to either see or know ourselves presently. In many ways, my research is fiction: I am digressing from received knowledge, away from a chronological scaffold, forging alternative pasts to construct an alternative future, with attention and feeling.
⑪ In a 2018 Stanford University lecture on Asian American art, assistant professor Marci Kwon completes her class by quoting Viet Thanh Nguyen: “[A]fter the official memos and speeches are forgotten, the history books ignored, and the powerful are dust, art remains.” She then turns to an analysis of Maya Lin’s design for Washington DC’s Vietnam War memorial, completed in 1982, which is often criticised for having adhered to competition rules that it be ‘apolitical’ and contain the names of the 58,000 servicemen confirmed dead or missing in action in the war. Lin created an ostensibly conventional polished black granite listing of names of US soldiers, but not the Vietnamese who were killed; however, Kwon analyses the memorial differently. She draws on her bodily response to interacting with the work in person, stating: “One might choose to look at these works and excoriate them for what’s left out … I choose instead to focus on the reflections—the reflections of the people that walk in front of this polished slab of black granite with the hope and the idea that, if we look long and hard enough, and imaginatively enough, perhaps different histories and people might appear.” Even if I am only a flickering reflection, I am here to haunt.
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Soo-Min Shim is an arts writer living, working, and writing on Ngunnawal and Ngambri land.
