Rex Butler and A.D.S. Donaldson’s UnAustralian Art takes the phenomenon of Australian artists working overseas as central rather than peripheral to Australia’s art history, overturning the assumption that Australian art takes Australia as its subject. Artists are instead cosmopolitans of the modern era, seeing Australia as only one part of identities that stretch across the world’s cities and towns. The book pays bibliophilic attention to the lives of hundreds of artists, many of them women, overturning the historical fiction by which artist heroes drive the story of modern Australian painting forward, from impressionism to colour fields, Heidelberg to the Central Desert. UnAustralian Art fragments this familiar story that has driven numerous monographs and undergraduate courses, as well as the curatorial structures of state galleries with their division between the national and international, Aboriginal and Australian. Rather than a heroic historical fiction, Butler and Donaldson construct a metafiction through which they are able to comment upon the coming into being of the idea of an art history that is not national, but still Australian.

Butler and Donaldson have been publishing essays on the UnAustralian since the culture wars of the early twenty-first century, when the term was used to prop up an exclusive notion of Australian identity. The use of UnAustralian in UnAustralian Art resembles the political era that preceded these culture wars, however, in the image of Australia promoted by Prime Minister Paul Keating (1991-1996) rather than Prime Minister John Howard (1996-2007). Keating did not lose sight of the way in which Australians were a part of a larger world, “bit players on a very large stage.” (Keating in Keating and O’Brien, 2013). The straw man around which they construct their argument is the influence of the idea of provincialism upon Australian art’s histories. Terry Smith, whose 1974 essay on provincialism has since guided the interpretation of not only Australian but Asian, Oceanic and South American art, maintains that the problem it described remains in the artworld today (Smith, 1974: 549). Hierarchies of money and power still determine the way the artworld functions, in a structural provincialism as economic as it is geographic (Smith, 2017: 31). This is visible most recently in the investment that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have put into the visual arts, their super-rich elites capturing cultural power through collections and exhibitions. Smith is critical of the horizontality of the UnAustralian argument, the way that its inclusivity tends to unfocus art history upon structural inequalities. For their part, Butler and Donaldson write that Smith’s argument that provincialism remains a structural problem elides the potential to rewrite modern art history from a cosmopolitan point of view, to achieve horizontality in a world tending to the vertical.

Crucial to both arguments is the fracture between the modern and contemporary, and between the way the artworld operated before and after 1970 or thereabouts. The implication of UnAustralian Art, that mostly focuses upon art made before 1970, is that the two periods are not necessarily as distinct as they may have once appeared, and that it is the way that they are written that makes the distinction in the first place (Butler and Donaldson, 2017). Butler and Donaldson turn the modern period, and by implication modernism itself, into a contemporary art history, pushing a dissensus with the methods by which modernism has been understood. French philosopher Jacques Ranciere deployed his trademark concept of dissensus in a speech on the UnAustralian when he visited Australia at the height of the culture wars in 2006, distinguishing its radicalism from the simple redistribution of national identity (Ranciere, 2007). For the UnAustralian to be revolutionary, and here Ranciere compares the term to anti-Nazi slogans from occupied France, it needs to both deconstruct the order against which it protests and anticipate a new aesthetic and political sensibility.

This is one reason that Butler and Donaldson turn from the monographic format that has defined Australian art history to a more discursive form. UnAustralian Art is not chronological, nor does it tell the one story. Its chapters mostly focus upon geographies, from Asia to America and Europe, and are taken from papers delivered or published elsewhere. There are also papers not included in UnAustralian Art, including the inspired “French, Floral and Female: A History of UnAustralian Art” that theorises Australian art in France (Butler and Donaldson, 2010). Presumably there is a second volume of such essays in the planning. The use of the occasional paper, the intervention and speculation, also allows them to be generous with their predecessors. Rather than beginning Australian art history with the 1934 publication of William Moore’s The Story of Australian Art (1934), they turn instead to the writings of Edith Fry, whose writings on expatriate Australian artists in London date back to 1914. The experience of reading such writings is not so different to the experience of the art history monograph in any case, that typically strings together biographies and descriptions of artworks.

The text stops short of interrogating the motivation of artists who left the country, and here Butler and Donaldson lose something of the dissatisfaction that drove many Australian artists overseas. Kathleen O’Connor, for example despised Australia for driving her father to suicide. Engineer C.Y. O’Connor had been harassed by naysayers during the building of a water pipeline to Kalgoorlie. The pipeline was such a stressful process to organise and defend that he ended his life on a West Australian beach. Impoverished Kathleen was forced to come home in old age, and in arriving by boat at the Port of Fremantle, in a final tragedy she was forced to throw her paintings into the ocean because she could not afford the taxes being charged to import them. Kathleen’s is a more dramatic example of the ways in which provincialism not only describes the attraction of cities like Paris, London and New York, but the way Australia was an unattractive proposition for those who wanted to make modern art.

UnAustralian Art also loses the ways in which the avant-garde have driven histories of modernism, politicising these histories. So much wonderful scholarship has been preoccupied with the revolutionary possibilities of modern art, from the dalliance of surrealism with communism to the situationist agitations and student uprisings of May 1968. In Australia, the Aboriginal art movement has played this role of the avant-garde in art histories that necessarily deal with the politics of race and national violence. By comparison the artists of UnAustralian Art appear like Sunday painters, packing and unpacking their easels between ocean liners. The UnAustralian does allow a return to older art historical problems, however, including the appearance of abstraction in different places at the same time (in Australia, New Zealand, Taos and Arnhem land), the role of the unconscious in artists who are making Australian art in other countries (John Russell), or who make UnAustralian art in Australia (Juan Davila, the authors argue, makes South American art in Australia). There are also newer questions that increasingly preoccupy both art historians and curators of contemporary art, central to these the transnational, that is internationalist without having the hubris of the global. For the art historians of modernism there are also questions around cosmopolitanism and influence (including the influence of the impressionist John Russell upon the fauvist Henri Matisse, and printmaker Martin Lewis upon painter Edward Hopper).

It is possible to read UnAustralian Art as symptomatic of newer ways of thinking about the art history discipline in Australia. If Ian McLean’s Double Nation (2023) marks the beginning of thinking about Australian art history as doubled by Aboriginal art, and in which non-Indigenous and Indigenous art echo and shadow each other, UnAustralian Art marks the maturity of a parallel Australian art history (McLean, 2023; Beard, Jorgensen, McLean and Smith, 2023). I take the term parallel from Neil Howe’s Parallel Realities: The Development of Performance Art in Australia (2017) that, like UnAustralian Art, is inclusive rather than exclusive in its descriptions of the work of little documented artists overlooked by the national story (Howe, 2017). Another parallel history is Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond (2019), in which a team of art and architectural historians track the influence of refugee artists bringing Bauhaus ideas into Australia (Goad, Stephen, Edquist and Wunsche, 2019). This parallelism might also include catalogues for exhibitions tracking the influence of constructivism, cubism and symbolism upon artists in Australia (Cramer and Harding, 2009; Cramer and Harding, 2017; Mimmocchi, 2012). By comparison, a doubled art history that integrates both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal art, or at least Aboriginal perspectives upon Australian art are represented by new histories of Australian photography. Helen Ennis’s Photography and Australia (2017) and Melissa Miles’s Language of Light and Dark (2015) use metaphors of light and dark to describe the exposure of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australia to each other (Ennis, 2017; Miles, 2015). The distinction between the double and the parallel is of course not as clear as all that, since the parallel is itself a double, and the double a parallel. The difference is that the double is a history of the Other, those othered by the national (Beard, Jorgensen, McLean and Smith, 2023), while the parallel is a history of those who have simply been forgotten or overlooked by a parochial art history. The one is always imbricated by the other, and they overlap too with anachronistic art histories of the national, for example John McDonald’s massive The Art of Australia Volume One: Exploration to Federation (McDonald, 2008).[1] That McDonald’s second volume has not yet appeared may well be a sign that even he has realised that we may not need another recount of the old, national story of Australian art and its familiar figures.

It may be no coincidence that these new art histories are being produced in what has been called a post-truth era, in which the authority of older modes of discourse have been rendered out of date by the multiplicities of the internet. Typically post-truth has been cast disparagingly, but an reading of UnAustralian Art as a form of post-truth makes the received story of Australian art less easy to accept as the truth of a nation. UnAustralian Art’s implication is this truth never really existed, and that the experiences of most artists through the modern period were of mobility and artistic exchange. The difference to books like Parallel Reality and Bauhaus Disapora is to make a general case for Australian art, rather than to track a particular artistic community. There is no doubt that a case could also be made for an UnAmerican art, or an UnFrench art, as the restlessness of artists translates into a cosmopolitan modernism. Australia is in this sense offers a laboratory for thinking about the post-national or transnational modernisms of the world, with cosmopolitanism becoming the condition for modern art, rather than the avant-garde or the simply national.

References

Keating P and K O’Brien (2013) Keating: The Interviews. Television program. Sydney: ABC TV.

Smith T (1974) The Provincialism Problem. Artforum XIII (1): 54-59.

Smith T (2017) The Provincialism Problem: Then and Now. Art Margins 6(1): 6-32.

Butler R and ADS Donaldson (2017) Was Australian Art ever Provincial? A Response to Terry Smith’s ‘The Provincialism Problem: Then and Now’. Art Margins 6(1): 6-32.

Ranciere J (2007) What does it mean to be Un? Continuum 21(4): 559-569.

Butler R and ADS Donaldson (2010) French, Floral and Female: A History of UnAustralian Art 1900-1930 e-maj 5 (2010), https://index-journal.org/emaj/issue-5/french-floral-and-female-by-rex-butler-and-ads-donaldson

McLean I (2023) Double Nation: A History of Australian Art. London: Reaktion.

Beard S, D Jorgensen, I McLean and T Smith (2023) Doubled Histories: The Futures of Australian Art Dispatch Review 21 December, https://dispatchreview.info/Double-Histories-Special-Issue

Howe N (2017) Parallel Realities: The Development of Performance Art in Australia. Melbourne: Thames and Hudson.

Goad P, A Stephen, A McNamara, H Edquist and I Wunsche (2019) Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond. Sydney: Power.

Cramer S and L Harding eds (2017) Call of the Avant-garde: Constructivism and Australian Art. Melbourne: Heide Museum of Modern Art.

Cramer S and L Harding eds (2009) Cubism and Australian Art. Melbourne: Miegunyah.

Mimmocchi D (2012) Australian Symbolism: The Art of Dreams. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Ennis H (2007) Photography and Australia. London: Reaktion.

Miles M (2015) The Language of Light and Dark: Light and Place in Australian Photography. Sydney: Power Publications.

McLean I (2023) Double Nation: A History of Australian Art. London: Reaktion.

McDonald J (2008) Art of Australia: Volume 1: Exploration to Federation. Sydney: Pan Macmillan.

Smith B (1945) Place, Taste and Tradition: A Study of Australian Art since 1788. Sydney: Ure Smith.

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[1] McDonald writes that Charles Conder “effectively ceases to be an Australian artist when he leaves for Europe,” while bookending more than six hundred pages with fourteen pages on work by Aboriginal artists (p. 13, pp. 16-21 and 624-631). Art of Australia does include paintings and photographs of Aboriginal people, but these types of representation were always included as a part of imagining continent in older works of art history, dating from Bernard Smith’s Place, Taste and Tradition (1945).