STURGEON Australianness and the New International Style. Oliver Watts ART AND JUSTIN BIEBER’S MONKEY What does a global citizen look like? Perhaps the picture of Justin Bieber sitting on a private jet the second after his pet monkey Mally is confiscated, sums it up. Bemused Bieber’s defence was that for most of the time he did not know what country he was in let alone when he crossed a border. For this citizen, the globe is what Michel Foucault called heterotopic, it is a placeless place where Jack Sparrowlike celebrities move from port to port without a care. The global artworld represents this hyper-community quite neatly: travelling from art fair to art fair; from Biennale to Biennale; from hotspot to hotspot. Larry Gagosian took this to its natural conclusion when he opened a gallery, designed by starchitect Jean Nouvel, located near Paris Le Bourget Business International Landing Strip. Against this background it is hard to think that nations, let alone a national art, exist at all. But it does persist, at least in the rhetoric of politicians and institutions, but in a way that seems like ‘the lady doth protest too much’. Gordon Bennett Explorer II 1991 (detail) Oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas 164.5 x 132.5 cm Artbank collection, purchased 1992 FOLLOWING Vincent Namatjira Cook’s Dinner Party 2015 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 94 x 126 cm Artbank collection, purchased 2015 81 AUSTRALIANNESS AND THE NEW INTERNATIONAL STYLE. STURGEON For institutions like the National Gallery of Australia (whose 2015–16 Tom Roberts exhibition claimed to be “for all Australians”) and indeed Artbank (a collecting program for exclusively Australian produced art) the issue is a pressing one. In the global economy any nod to an ‘Australian art’ seems about as stale as a lamington stuck between a strudel and a tiramisu on the cake counter at Starbucks. While recently researching a piece on Gordon Bennett, I came across a provocative throwaway line from Rex Butler. In a review of Gordon Bennett’s retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria he wrote: In fact, we might say that with the current passing away of the historical moment of reconciliation the very idea of Australia disappears as well. The problem of national identity seems less and less to interest a younger generation of Australian artists, who are more concerned with global issues... Bennett in this light can strike us as the last “Australian” artist. And this exhibition would be a retrospective not only of Bennett but of a whole tradition of art in this country. (2007) Of course it is arguable whether we have worked through these issues of reconciliation. The republic seems back on the table and the constitutional recognition is still in the offing. There is a lot of good work still going on in this area of national fantasy from Vincent Namatjira to Megan Cope, from Tim Gregory to Richard Bell. No doubt though, the difficulty maintaining the politicisation of these issues— if you believe the indifference to these issues suggested by polls—is attributable to globalisation and the general lack of interest in national identity. Indeed, I am sure Prince Harry is better equipped for global celebrity culture than republican democracy. But if you are looking at connectivity and sharing, Australian artists must respond to the challenges of the matrix of neoliberalism and the powerful infrastructure of the global art world. It is worth broadly sketching the possibilities in play from the kowtowing to the radical. Australian art has been, for the last century, very aware of what it is to make art away from the centre. Frieze and e-flux magazines have recently used Terry Smith’s 1974 Artforum article “The Provincialism Problem” as the seminal work of discussing art in the modern era. The split personality of what we now call the ‘glocal’ is at the centre of this article: the necessity to attend to the local while at the same time aspiring to be part of the centre of international taste making. It is interesting to see the 1974 Australian classic returning to the centre of contemporary art forty years after it was written. It shows that Australians have been dealing with these questions for a long time. But the article does need to be slightly adjusted for the complexity of globalism and its lack of centre. Terry Smith updated his own approach in 1988 when he wrote: “The ‘centre’ is no longer one place, it is a network of nodal points, dispersing inequalities of power at many levels”.(6) But this updating does still insist that somewhere out there is a hierarchy of collecting and taste making. In a recent article in e-flux, David Hodge and Hamed Yousefi describe what they see as the neoliberalisation of the provincialism problem and look at some of the conclusion of the new hierarchies. (2015) The global systems that now bar entry to the ‘super community’ of the art world are more invisible and undefined. Indeed, in a challenging comment they suggest that the new system of global postmodernism, which promises diversity, but delivers little, is even more disheartening than centre/ periphery debates of the 1970s. In other words, truly different voices are as peripheral as they always have been. Although there may not be ‘centres’ of the art world—like New York and Paris were in the twentieth century—we now have the unity of the art world ‘super community’, which is equally difficult to enter. Hodge and Yousefi outline how western late modernism defines the look of much contemporary art. The entry into this world is granted to those with a Masters or equivalent, and by certain powerful curatorial and institutional interests. Whether you are in Sydney, New York, Sao Paulo or Singapore you are taught this style of contemporary art, from Beuys to Baldessari, from Abramović to Bourgeois. The artist must become global and increasingly interested in international shows and residencies. But it is Hodge and Yousefi’s conclusion that is most pressing, suggesting that the homogenising effect of this global world never allows for “the formation of regional or transnational solidarities that might provide the basis for infrastructural change.”(2015) It is this sentiment that I think a lot of Australian writers have been trying to put a name to, but before I move to that maybe we should first look at less radical problems. NEO-LIBERALISM AND FOMO The classic hysterical response to the problem of our global invisibility is to call out to the masters to recognise us. This I think infantilises the Australian position but I can see why certain institutions, like the Australia Council or Screen Australia, have a thing called ‘Australian’ art and film—a cultural product that needs to be sold like any other item on the global market to the critically important ‘centres’. The power of the art world’s economic and institutional infrastructure is centred on a Euro-American axis that is hard to crack. Australia is in a particularly difficult position. Through colonial tradition and language we are considered Euro-American, but that in no way helps our entry into the art world infrastructures. Alex Gawronski, in a perverse article expands on this suggesting that our cultural similarity actually hinders our acceptance as the exoticised other.(138–50) On the other hand this means also that we perhaps do not pursue radical difference and alternative communities of the south or communities of Asia, in a way that could legitimately challenge the EuroAmerican privilege. In a 2015 Art Month event, a number of dealers, curators and collectors discussed the issue of our place in the global curatorial and commercial art world. Nina Miall, for example has noted: I want to go back to the question why Australian art hasn’t travelled more widely. As someone who spent most of my professional life in a big gallery overseas where, for the majority of our artists, had 2–3–4 galleries globally and we were obligated to work very collaboratively with those galleries for the benefit of the artist and their career...One of the things that has astonished me returning to Australia is the defensive and territorial attitude of Australian galleries... I think the attitude of Australian galleries has to change and build more strategic relationships. (Fairley, 2015) One could surely say the same for our museums, institutions and universities, who could do more to exhibit and publish Australian art in a more global context. Another point raised by this discussion, which is now becoming increasingly obvious, is the pressure the Australian art market is receiving from neighbouring global players such as Singapore and Hong Kong. Australian collectors need only fly nine hours, without jet-lag, to Hong Kong to be at a White Cube or Gagosian Gallery. As the market is directly affected by the super community for perhaps the first time, Australian art will begin to feel increasingly peripheral and fragile. 83 #AUSTRALIANART On the other hand perhaps the relationship of Australia to the global art world is not so rigid and hierarchical anyway. There has always been a reciprocal flow of influence that counters this more cynical and totalising view. Contemporary art especially is characterised by its equivalencies across space and time, its altermoderns and multiplicity of voices (often though, as I have said through the look of the centre). Rex Butler and ADS Donsaldson have undertaken work on the connections between Australia and international modernism in a manner that can show us a way forward in terms of the super community of global art. Butler, for the 2015 Sir William Dobell Annual Lecture, expressed the thesis of his much awaited book co-authored by Donaldson, UnAustralian. In a nutshell, he re-evaluated Australian art as always embedded within international modernism to an extent that Australian art history has never fully acknowledged. Tristan Zara sang Arrernte song cycles in the Cabaret Voltaire; André Breton published an essay in Art in Australia in 1941; and Roy de Maistre taught a young Francis Bacon everything he knew throughout the 1930s. Butler and Donaldson write: “We suggest that from a ‘contemporary’ perspective not only does a whole new history of Australian art come into view but we can see that the ‘provincialism problem’ never existed.” (291) The primary AUSTRALIANNESS AND THE NEW INTERNATIONAL STYLE. STURGEON Christian Thompson Hunting Ground 2007 Type C photographs, 105 x 105 cm (each) Artbank collection, purchased 2008 85 AUSTRALIANNESS AND THE NEW INTERNATIONAL STYLE. STURGEON import of this scholarship will be a shift in the way the Australian art scene has traditionally conceptualised their position as always on the periphery outside of the dialogue. For example, part of the criticism of the work shown in London in the Royal Academy’s show ‘Australia’ (2013) was that it was derivative and poor. The argument should have been put stronger curatorially and through other framing. That is, questioning what this reciprocal hybridity was, and how the peculiarities of such work can be viewed. In other words, what was the import of Australian modernism as an altermodern? This approach maintains the narrative that we are part of the international flows of art, and that our singularity is meaningful. THE RADICALITY OF DISAVOWAL But the major voice coming out of Australian criticism is to look at new solidarities and communities outside the EuroAmerican hegemony. Even here though most of the radical ideas suggest transnational and regional communities rather than merely the parochialism of the nation state. Ian McLean is magnificently hopeful. His response to provincialism, in an essay called “Provincialism Upturned”, concludes: “The negations and negotiations of globalisation are still in play and anything is possible. This is not the time for disenchantment or the return of the ‘provincialist bind’. Instead, we should extend a certain faith to the artists and empathy for their situation.” (632) This idea has a few names and approaches, but entails a configuration of the ‘Third World’, with Asia and the South—seen here as the negation of the ‘Good North’, think ‘Going South’ or the ‘Wicked Witch of South,’ or East. It is an attempt to redraw or redefine art world axes. As Nikos Papastergiadis put it bluntly: “survival requires a coordinated transnational response.” (32) Although, as Ian McLean suggests, the Third World avant garde of Rasheed Araeen’s writing in Third Text, may not be fully realisable in late capitalism, there are other radical possibilities. Anthony Gardner and Charles Green asked about the possibility of a “Global South”, a new voice or grouping that was based on alternative relationships not based solely in the Euro-American context. (422–45) For Gardner and Green the acceptance of the ‘Other’ in the mega exhibitions of Okwui Enwezor—they reference ‘Documenta 11’ (2001)— still maintain the internationalist style and are not a radical decentring. Australian art here becomes an exotic brand only, co-opted by global capital. This is the ‘local’ as global brand; it is the ‘glocal’ as pioneered by Starbucks. It has always surprised me that the all-singing and all-dancing Hugh Jackman so easily co-opted a bit of Crocodile Dundee to reframe his private school chorister as Wolverine. Although Gardner and Green warn against seeing the idea of the south as a deus ex machina against global capital and its art world infrastructure, they are hopeful that you Shaun Gladwell Colour Test: Mundi Mundi Plains (Blue) 2009 Pigment print, 166.5 x 214 cm Artbank collection, purchased 2011 87 AUSTRALIANNESS AND THE NEW INTERNATIONAL STYLE. STURGEON can at least see the idea of the South as a mode that can work against the hegemony of the new art world homogeny; they borrow this idea from Kuan-Hsing Chen and his 2010 consideration of ‘Asia as method’. That is, do they actually give a method by which to think differently and to make art differently? The idea of various relationships and ‘solidarities’ is a nice one, it is a new matrix of art based on new friendships and synergies. The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art’s ‘Asia Pacific Triennial’ in a sense pioneered this approach in 1993, and other exhibitions around the country have variously attempt to draw new partnership with Asia and the South in meaningful ways. Indeed the work might threateningly not look like ‘art’ from the centre at all, as seen recently in Grayson Perry’s comment that Aboriginal art should not be seen as contemporary art.(Totaro, 2015) Perry’s statement is correct in as much that Aboriginal art cannot be seen merely in a Kantian or even Duchampian way, it also does not have the look of late modernity; the centre does not really see it as art at all. But this only highlights the radicality of the common and important curating of Aboriginal art in Australian and other exhibitions, and that we have been doing this in Australia for decades. We should not forget how pioneering and theoretically difficult this is; and no doubt why the English critics again found this aspect of the exhibition difficult. Arguing more positively of course, and with the viewpoint of the longue durée, Aboriginal art can show that it predates western practice, predates its co-option by modernism as a primitive otherness and will undoubtedly outlast modernism on the other side. I see this issue in the global indigeneity of Christian Thompson’s work for example, and his approach to the archive where he reclaims artefacts in English posession. Or the work might come from other different traditions and forms not even available to western aesthetics (or anti-aesthetics for that matter), like calligraphy, mandals, Pacific mapping, or unexpected religious iconography and wonderful sculptural icon forms. By attending to these new voices in a way that is really open to their singularity, perhaps the art world will be awash with outré and strange objects (when seen from the global art world perspective). It always interested me for example that Japanese curators really brought out the hermetic quality in Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s work, and brought her into a dialogue with calligraphic scholar traditions (as an aside, a similar thing occurred with Jackson Pollock, highlighting the very late figurative black and white work that looks for all the world like Japanese ink work). What other new synergies and connections might we find if we actually look for them? By being wedded to the provincialism problem, we have perhaps not seen opportunities beyond the super community of ‘global art.’ REFERENCES Butler, Rex and Donaldson, ADS (lecture presented by Butler). “Un-Australian Painting in 1970”. William Dobell Annual Lecture. Australian National University School of Art, Canberra. 30 September 2015. Butler, Rex. ”The Revolutionary Colouring History”. Edited version of review for The Australian. 31 August 2014 espace.library.uq.edu.au. Butler, Rex and Donaldson, A D S. “Against Provincialism: AustralianAmerican Connections 1900–2000”. Journal of Australian Studies. 36.3, 2012. 291–307. Chen, Kuan-Hsing. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Gawronski, Alex. “No future? Considering the future of Australian art” French, Blair (ed). words and pictures. Sydney: Artspace Visual Arts Centre, 2014. 138–50. Fairley, Gina. “Is my art leaving on a jet plane?”. visual.artshub.com.au/news-article/news/visual-arts. 27 March 2015. Gardner, Anthony and Green, Charles. “Biennials of the South on the Edges of the Global”. Global Occupations of Art. 27.4, 2013. 422–45. Hodge, David and Yousefi, Hamed. “Provincialism Perfected: Global Contemporary Art and Uneven Development”. E-flux.(online) supercommunity.e-flux.com. 56, 2015. McLean, Ian. “Provincialism Upturned”. Third Text. 23.5, 2009. 625–32. Papastergiadis, Nikos. “What is the South?”. Ed. Anthony Gardner. Mapping South: Journeys in South-South Cultural Relations. Melbourne: The South Project, 2013. 32. Smith, Terry. “Provincialism Refigured,” Art Monthly Australia. 13, 1988. 6. Emily Kame Kngwarreye Anooralya – My Story 1990 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 125.5 x 95 cm Artbank collection, purchased 1991 Totaro, Paola. “British Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry questions Australian Aboriginal Painting”. The Sydney Morning Herald (online), smh.com.au. 2 October 2015. 89