The Melbourne Review

Review: Australian Art: A History

March 2014

Sasha Grishin / Miegunyah Press  MUP



Packing 46 chapters this history of Australian art has weight to go with the heft. My dog-eared little copy of Robert Hughes’ The Art of Australia (revised edition 1970) looks a minnow in comparison. Blame it on population growth. Sasha Grishin, the author of Australian Art: A History estimates that there are 25,000 – 30,000 artists working actively in Australia today. Hughes just escaped the tsunami of mushrooming art courses, organisations, exhibitions, galleries and journals.

Likely by the time I’ve typed this sentence another two or three artist sites will have been published on line. That said and with many more artists at his disposal, Grishin has retained some of the era chunking that held Hughes’s history together. From this perspective this book has a clear narrative structure, which favors chronology over thematic clustering and is the more coherent for it. Why write a new history of Australian art? I suspect the author weighed this question a number of times before heading down that long lonesome trail. That the topography of contemporary Australian art has been in constant churn mode since the 1970s and is populated by new generations of artists dealing with the hybridity and the tensions between dominant and subcultures are good enough reasons for any writer with a sense of destiny to want to try. But there are more, and Grishin has seized the moment.

From the outset the author deals with Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian art as two sides of one coin, a rather thick coin it transpires as considerable attention is given to the zones of demarcation that in some other historical accounts are absolute. In citing not only the many examples of cultural interface and exchange between contemporary era Indigenous artists and others, but key instances of early to late colonial explorer/settler encounters with Indigenous art, Grishin enters a strong argument for re-envisaging this divide as dynamic and reciprocal.

The second element is that of inclusivity. Recent exhibitions, and publications have gone to great pains to demonstrate that the modern to contemporary era has been dynamically expressed through a wide range of art media and forms, beyond painting and sculpture. How refreshing then to find in a major art historical publication, prominently illustrated and interpreted examples of photography (from colonial to present day), printmaking, furniture, some ceramics and architecture. There are big gaps in this representation (such as contemporary furniture/design) and doubtless some hard editorial/design decisions needed to be made. But this writing mindset has meant that (for example) the counter-culture printmaking movement of the late 1960s–70s gets as much space as say the Art Nouveau tendencies in Australian art of the early twentieth century. As it should.

Another key element that enlivens the reading is the regular inclusion of voices in the form of extended quotes from artists and others, sometimes statements of intent but other times, extracts from letters and journals. The narrative is richer for this inclusion. This observation introduces another significant element which gives this publication a special resonance – that of context. To get the balance right between articulating the business of art and the socio-economic-political contexts that impinge on it is a challenge which Grishin has dealt with in an impressively researched but very readable style.

And lastly there is the ‘drill down’ factor, which means that the text is studded with spur trails, listing artists and events for later research. In this way the author has been able to allude to a greater body of practice that could be meaningfully discussed in the book. If Grishin revisits this text in a few years I would expect to see closer scrutiny of what’s happening and emerging in regional Australia and further commentary on new hybridities of time-based practices including sound, video and computer-mediated art. Also public art which is proving to be a circuit breaker in terms of building art audiences.

A decision might have to be made about incorporating the Canberra/modern architecture feature into an overview of modernism rather than leaving it dangling mid publication. I looked unsuccessfully for some drill down into the nexus between the Adelaide and Melbourne contemporary art ferment of the 1940s, profiling of the ‘Adelaide Angries’ brat pack and the impact of the Ern Malley factor on Adelaide-based modernism. That’s detail that can be addressed down the track.

This handsome publication with its comprehensive endnotes invites such close reading and response. It deserves it.

Other Articles You May Like

Galleries

Latest Edition

March Issue

February Issue

January Issue

Video

Twitter

Facebook