Shifting the Rear-View Mirror
Gallery director Andrew Sayers
takes a boldly farsighted look at the story of Australian
art
By
MICHAEL FITZGERALD Canberra
The secret
life of andrew sayers unfolds in the quiet garden studio of
his Canberra home. It's here the director of the National
Portrait Gallery of Australia composes his still-life studies-or
"arrangements of meaningful objects," as he likes to call
them. The fact that his paintings might never reach the public
light doesn't faze him. Instead, his private ritual is "to
really understand something about painting and seeing," he
says. "Let's say my ambitions are modest."
Sayers'
public achievements-attained with the same careful deliberation
as his painting-are anything but. As the gallery's founding
director, he has helped shake up portraiture's sometimes staid
image, bringing magazine photography, video and performance
art into the mix (boldness also characterized the gallery's
$A5.3 million purchase last year of John Webber's portrait
of Captain Cook, the most costly acquisition yet by an Australian
gallery). And as author of Australian Art (Oxford University
Press; 257 pages), Sayers presents a quietly radical new model
for the appreciation of his country's visual culture. In weaving
together the stories of Aboriginal art and the Western traditions
that have developed since colonial times, "the terrain he
explores is new, fresh, and unfamiliar," writes Patrick McCaughey,
the Australian director of the Yale Center for British Art.
It's a novel
new approach-"a journey through a landscape," writes Sayers,
"with stops along the way to look at some features in detail."
While Aboriginal art has loomed conspicuously large internationally,
until now it has been treated separately or ignored in national
art surveys. Bernard Smith's landmark Australian Painting
(1962), for instance, was essentially the story of European
painting transformed by an antipodean landscape. In Australian
Art, Sayers shifts the frame. At its center is indigenous
art, which-with rock paintings up to 50,000 years old-is "the
oldest continuous art tradition in the world," writes Sayers.
The story he paints is of a country slowly awakening to its
rich prehistory. Aboriginal art is "the most recognizable,
the most distinctive and indigenous in the true sense of the
word," he says. "So it seemed to me important to try to bring
the two paths of Australian art together."
But marrying
two styles informed by different worlds (one intent on maintaining
ancient spiritual ties to the land, the other on forging a
new national identity) has its dangers. As Christopher Allen
warned in his book Art in Australia: From Colonization to
Postmodernism (1997): "Aboriginal culture is not our culture-neither
in the sense that we own it nor that we belong to it." Sayers
succeeds by exploring where the two traditions overlap and
converge. As his book documents, this first occurred with
19th century Aboriginal artists William Barak, Tommy McRae
and Mickey of Ulladulla, who adopted Western materials-pencil
and watercolor on paper- to record the encroachment of white
settlement on traditional lifestyles. The process continued
with anthropologist Baldwin Spencer, who began collecting
Arnhem Land bark paintings early last century as much for
their aesthetic as for their ethnographic value; a mission
completed in the 1950s by artist and curator Tony Tuckson,
who first introduced Aboriginal works into a public art gallery.
But it is
modernist Margaret Preston who emerges as the real hero of
Sayers' book. At a time when her contemporaries were experimenting
with "feeble Cézannism" or derivative Surrealism, Preston's
robust paintings and prints gave birth to the idea "that an
Australian national art would arise from Aboriginal art,"
Sayers writes. Her 1942 painting Flying Over the Shoalhaven
River employed ocher colors to describe an almost Aboriginal
mapping of the land. And her extraordinary 1946 monotype Bush
Track, N.S.W., which sought "to give the rough and tumble
of our growth of trees, without design or any other purpose
than that of covering space, as the natives do in their well-covered
rock paintings," has the spiritual force of a yam Dreaming
painting by Emily Kngwarreye. Here Aboriginal and European
art are reconciled in paint.
In the process,
Sayers manages to dismantle a few myths about Australian art.
He questions the assumption that an authentic view of landscape
began with the Heidelberg School, when Tom Roberts and his
fellow plein-air painters set up their easels on the bushy
outskirts of 1880s Melbourne, and points instead to "the grace
and lightness" of John Glover's scenes of 1830s Tasmania,
and the honesty and richness of the work that accompanied
Australia's pioneering naturalists, surveyors and explorers.
In downscaling the importance of artists like Norman Lindsay
("the judgment made in London by William Orpen, a British
painter much admired in Australia, that Lindsay was not so
much a scandalous artist, but simply a bad artist, seems completely
just") and Brett Whiteley (whose works "represent the ultimate
in lifestyle aspiration paintings"), Sayers allows the achievements
of Sidney Nolan to stand as tall as his Ned Kelly pictures
of the 1940s. "Nolan was the great intuitive Australian artist-everybody
else was struggling away," says Sayers. "With extraordinary
originality, he actually grasped what it was to make modern
art."
In Australian
Art, Nolan rubs shoulders with a number of less familiar figures.
As an art history student at Sydney University and later as
curator of Australian drawings at the National Gallery of
Australia, Sayers was intent on uncovering what he calls "the
hidden part of Australian art history": the private scribblings
of artists' sketchbooks. And Australian Art is filled with
the fruits of his labor. As well as the Aboriginal artists
of the 19th century, whom Sayers wrote about in a 1994 book,
there is convict Thomas Bock and his drawings of executed
criminals, S.T. Gill and his jewel-like watercolors of the
exploration of South Australia's desert interior, and modernist
Florence Rodway and her luminous pastels. According to Sayers,
Australian art is as much about these quieter voices as it
is about the louder egos of its painters.
It's an
inclusive approach. And one that has typified the reign of
the affable and erudite Sayers at the National Portrait Gallery.
Already exhibitions have thrown light on forgotten colonial
figureheads and the distinguished but neglected early 20th
century studio photographer Walter Barnett; planned for next
year is a major survey of portrait sculpture. "We've shown
that portraiture is about contemporary artists, it's about
photography," says Sayers. "It's not only about admirable
people but it's about every part of our psyche."
So the gallery
director can retreat to his garden studio with pride. Not
only has he helped shade in the features of a national face,
but with Australian Art he has provided a lively new shape
for the body of its art as well.
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May 7, 2001 | No. 18
COVER
STORIES
Haunted
by Vietnam
Former U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey confesses under pressure to killing more
than a dozen innocents in 1969. In his sadness, shame and decades-long
silence, fellow vets see themselves-and the rest of America confronts
war's wrenching ambiguity
TRAVELER'S
ADVISORY
SOUTH
PACIFIC
PAPUA NEW GUINEA: Murder in the Dark...
The still potent fear of sorcery is leading to vigilante killings
THE
ARTS
ART: Andrew Sayers reframes Australia's
view of itself...
THEATRE:
The RSC takes on Shakespeare's histories..
BOOKS: Inside the domestic interior of
Vermeer
MUSIC: Irish boy band Westlife goes transatlantic
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