Gumtree Diplomats
In 1958, under the watchful aesthetic eye of Prime Minister Robert Menzies, Australian government representatives selected the nation’s artistic emissaries for the Venice Biennale. This was a fair at which the uncompromising avant garde innovations of the post-war artworld were clear. Startling works by Mark Rothko, Mark Tobey, David Smith and Seymour Lipton proclaimed the new international supremacy of American abstraction. Britain too excelled in its own way, sending the tortured sculptures of Kenneth Armitage, upholding the country’s period repute for ‘geometry of fear’ sculpture, and building on the visceral figuration of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud it had sent in previous years.
Amid such luminaries of the international avant garde, Australia was represented by the landscape painter Arthur Streeton. For sophisticated mid-century art viewers, it must have felt like a time warp. Painted in a polished impressionist style, his idyllic pastoral scenes (that had barely raised an eyebrow at the Royal Academy in 1900) celebrated the natural bounty of an increasingly irrelevant empire. The contemporary art scene in Australia was outraged. “We are to appear, it seems,” complained one critic, “like a geographical magazine, as propagandists of our native scenery.”i At least one Australian diplomat concurred, reporting back to the Australian government that “the exclusion of avant- garde artists gave an impression of backwardness and unflattering comparisons were made between Australian and the Soviet pavilions.”ii
Complaints that Australia’s artistic exports did not properly reflect the vitality of the local art scene were hardly new. Landscape had consistently served as Australia’s artistic ambassador abroad, and Australia’s various modernists had long riled at the conservatism of this gumtree diplomacy. “It is a great pity”, commented one such painter in 1938, “that at World’s Fair Exhibitions and the like, Australia usually exhibits paintings which seem to be mainly devoted to gum trees, sheep, koalas, misty impressionistic seascapes and supposedly academic color photography.”iii For Australia’s progressive cultural elite, images of the landscape and its requisite animals seemed to be a wholly insufficient representation of twentieth century Australia.
The latter complaint was penned by Mary Alice Evatt, who had just returned to Australia from a period of international study, including stints in the studios of André Lhote in Paris and Hans Hofmann in New York. Evatt’s concern that our cultural exports should reflect a more contemporary sensibility was not simply motivated by personal taste. As the wife of a prominent parliamentarian and later judge, Evatt’s ambition for “Australia to find a worthy place on the art map of the world” was also underscored by her proximity to the political elite, recognizing the role that culture could play in bolstering the international standing of a geographically isolated nation.
It was in Washington that this combination of modern taste and political imperative would soon align. When Richard Casey became Australia’s first Minister to the United States in 1940, his ardently modernist wife Maie Casey set about presenting a more progressive cultural image for the nation. The Australian press reported that she “plans to show them that Australia is a country with its arts and civilization highly developed.”iv Chief among her tools in this long-distance civilising mission was a collection of modern Australian art.
The cosmopolitan implications of the modernist styles they favored seem to have had the desired effect. One visiting journalist admitted that “like most Americans I know little about Australia”, but that while they “didn’t expect to see him [Casey]... carrying a wallaby pickaback or leading a koala on a leash” they seemed to still be surprised by the modern refinement on display at the legation.v Such efforts to alter American perceptions were part of a broader effort to counter wartime isolationism. As the foreign correspondent of the New York Times admitted in 1940, after a press tour of various heavy industries that Australia could contribute to the war effort, “Most Americans think of Australia as a country solely engage in growing wheat and raising sheep.”vi
Modern internationalist tastes supported the construction of a modern industrial Australia. But the persuasive power of Australian nature proved to be symbols that were difficult to leave behind. In fact, the subject matter of the Casey’s pictures remained closely tied to the landscape. Rural and outback scenes dominated. Kangaroos may almost have outnumbered people. Australian native timbers and textile designs that showcased Australian native plants were Maie’s choice of decorations. Richard Casey’s other cultural activities equally capitalized on the cliches: teaching the American Vice President to throw a boomerang, seeking Australian animals for the New York Zoo, and even lobbying Walt Disney to develop new a new koala cartoon character.vii
Similar contradictions were evident in Art of Australia 1788-1941, the exhibition in which the Casey’s played a central role, which opened at the new National Gallery of Art in Washington, and whose subsequent tour across the country was managed by the Museum of Modern Art. The express goal of the exhibition was to “present as complete a picture of Australian life as possible”, but again, and even with a significant contingent of modern works, including some from the Casey collection, the novelty of Australian nature dominated.viii Whether it was oriented to the old world of colonial views, or the new world of modernism, the international presentation of Australian art might have been anxious to demonstrate cultural sophistication, but it was also addicted to the allure of the Australian landscape.
As Australia prepared to send Arthur Streeton to the Venice Biennale, a travel writer from The New York Times reported on Australia’s paradoxical attitudes to nature with some accuracy. “It is an old story for travellers coming to this continent for the first time to inquire immediately about kangaroos, koala bears and emus”, they reported. “Australians both at home and abroad have long since learned to take such queries in stride. Much as they prefer to think of their country in terms of its thriving cities, its commercial, industrial and agricultural development, they are resigned to the perennial fascination which the local wildlife holds for strangers.”ix
Such ambivalences were hardly limited to the sphere of tourism. Modern civilisation and ancient geography, urban sophistication and barren landscape, nature and culture: such paradoxes remain the source of deep-seated tensions in Australia’s self representations. Here, again, the perennial fascination that Australia’s landscape, with “the pungent flavour of the Australian bush” and all its rather “strange and rather grim beauty” as Richard Casey described the 1941 exhibition, provides the subject matter for another exhibition of Australian art in Washington.x
It is possible to read many of these pictures on this basis alone. But for the artists in this exhibition, the anxieties and contradictions inscribed in the landscape provides the conceptual issues with which their art grapples – complexities which often lie just beneath the surface of their picture perfect depictions of natural beauty. As these diplomatic forays suggest, Australians experience a variety of ambivalences towards the landscape. It has been the locus of our international reputation, but has long seemed an insufficient reflection of our cultural maturity. For almost as long as it has provided much of the nation’s material wealth, it has also been the focus of growing concerns about environmental destruction.
For artists, the rich history of landscape painting – the site on which much of Australian art history has been played out – provides a range of aesthetic baggage for the representation of the natural world. But there are other reasons why landscapes can be troubling. Idyllic images of the landscape present a picture of timeless harmony that can mask the persistent echoes of Australia’s colonial history, and the diversity and complexity of contemporary Australia. The history of landscape art in Australia is closely connected with the goals of the European settlement. From the mapping of the country’s coastline and topography to the description of its peculiar plants and animals, early landscapes may have had aesthetic ambitions, but they also supported the broader goals of colonisation.
The demonstration of Australia’s desolate expanses in visual form served specifically ideological functions. Because the occupation of Australia was to be justified according to the legal dictates of terra nullius – literally, a ‘land belonging to no one’ – the production of landscape paintings depicting vast emptiness upheld this fiction. And as Australians have grappled with the environmental impacts of their occupation of the land – by no means a recent concern, either – these too find unavoidable traces in the landscape paintings that depict our intervention, and preservation, of the natural environment.
The artists in this exhibition address these histories in their work, and collectively, their practice represents a critical reengagement with a fraught genre. Their works give lie to the myth that landscapes are neutral – by manipulating the representational strategies of the genre, complicating its traditions and intervening in its mythologies. Although many of the artists in Lie of the Land are informed by all manner of historical modes – from the scientific modes of cartography and botany, to the artistic conventions of the sublime and the picturesque – their works share a deliberate desire to expose the constructed quality of landscape that, traditionally, its language has assiduously sought to conceal.
Landscapes are, of course, always something more than just land. Whether painted or real nature, they are always already mediated, filtered through a range of rhetorical and symbolic conventions by which its forms produce meaning. The works of David Keeling has explored the representational strategies of the landscape genre, framing and isolating the pictorial effects on which it relies. In his ‘Ghost Gum’ series of paintings and sculptures, small tondo landscapes are attached to the trunks and boughs of the creamy-barked native. In their sculptural incarnation he reconstitutes found timber into a carefully fabricated miniature forest. The painted cameos on the trees suspend reflected moments of nature passed, like views caught in the rear view mirror of a car. Or, in more art historical terms, their reflections might be in a Claude Glass, the small portable mirrors made famous by French landscapist Claude Lorrain as a tool for capturing nature. Keeling’s miniaturised souvenirs reflect nature at the same time as abstracting it from its surroundings, turning the landscape into amber jewels of the picturesque.
Glass also provides the representational filter in many of Keeling’s most recent works, in which the landscape is explicitly viewed through a window – the framing device so often implied by traditional landscape paintings. In the foreground, the hard planes and sharp shadows of modern architecture are as conventionalised as the soft vista beyond the implied threshold of the glass frame. Both may be emptied of human occupants, but human presence remains implied, with computers and designer chairs registering human occupation no less than the clearings and paths in the landscape beyond. In some works, steeply receding hardwood floors and stone feature walls literally show the products of nature forced into domestic submission. Landscape may provide us with pleasure, but in these works, the borders between the indoors and the outdoors are assiduously policed, allowing nature to be viewed at the very safe distance that the art of landscape painting ensures.
The artificial isolation of nature takes on a more surreal tone in the recent paintings of Juan Ford. In these extraordinary pictures, the painterly mark of the botanical artist is literalised by the artist’s rendering of blooms and foliage smothered in viscous paint. This eccentric intervention serves to literalise the layer of representation that coats botanical art. But the superficial abstraction of Ford’s synthetic drips and smears is, of course, a ruse – his painting of paint is no less breathtaking than his meticulous rendering of the crenulated stamen of native flowers, a splashy gesture of technical bravado that turns the ordinarily effortless action of dripped paint into a triumph of trompe-l’oeil illusionism.
Suspended against the void of a blue sky, Ford’s hyper-real paintings isolate Australian native plants in a timeless no-space, removing plants from the landscapes in which they originate. His quite literal painting of the landscape also suggests its destruction. In other recent works, the brutality of the botanical vision – implicit here in the unseen cuts with which his specimens have been excised from nature – is made even more palpable by the aggressive entanglement of gum leaves in plastic industrial tapes, or the fixing of blooms to a raw timber beam by a perforated metal plate. Like the strange clues of an inexplicable crime, Ford’s paintings are at once beautiful and disturbing, an image of blood on the wattle that brutally aestheticizes the natural beauty of Australia’s native flora.
The aesthetic acquisition of nature is taken to its industrial extreme in the ‘logging truck’ works of Dale Cox. Mass-produced plastic rigs haul heavy loads of timber, their trees bound in rope and laid on their side. But instead of raw lumber, the cargo takes the form of tied-up bundles of colonial landscape painting. With their serpentine branches and shaded daubs of foliage, Cox’s painted cargo resembles the style of early Australian landscapists such as John Glover, the English émigré artist who is often credited as the first Australian landscape painter for his adaption of European techniques to the less verdant realities of his adopted home. In these painted timber sculptures, the artistic exploitation of Australian nature is brought into stark contact with another export industry, the big business of logging. Cox’s recent paintings also render human intervention in the landscape precariously on deep-time cross- sections of the earth, bringing the conflicts between modern life and the environment into relief.
The tensions between the nature and civilisation are dramatized in more social terms in the paintings of Tom Alberts. The domestication of the landscape is the particular focus for two works in this exhibition: Study for Pad II (2011), in which two kangaroos hop into a minimalist interior, a ridiculous scene literalizing foreign fantasies of Australian pets, and Study for Bedlands (2011), in which the landscape has morphed into a verdant bedroom suite, complete with topiaried bedside lamps. Across Alberts’ works, the landscape serves as the scenic background for his studies of the consumer gaze. Holding mobile phones and listening to iPods, his disconnected spectators seem entirely apathetic towards the scenes they view.
Transformed into variously aestheticised abstractions – boldly abstracted horizontal bands, blurry from a speeding car, fuzzy from an out-of-focus photograph – the varied landscapes of Alberts’ highly-staged scenes are each surveyed with equal tedium. Alberts’ formal decisions intensify the disjunctions between the figures and their context. The impersonal, almost mechanistic opticality of his technique – reminiscent of the effects produced by the camera obscura – create an all-over effect the which the figures become frozen, discontinuous with the landscape backdrop, wrested from the flux of life in an unfathomable foreground. Boughs and bodies are rendered with equally minimal affect. As in the work of Vermeer, a subtle halo around many of the figures exacerbates their estrangement from their context. When set outdoors, the scenes in which they stand are imitations of works by Australian painters including Eugene Von Guerard and Hans Heysen. In this sense, his figures are as much viewing art – somewhat like the jaded gallery viewers in the photographs of Thomas Struth – as they are immersed in and alienated from the landscape.
The traditional techniques of Alberts pictures should not distract from the fact that his realism is consistently used to observe the very contemporary dynamics of consumer spectacle. Alberts’ style follows the techniques propagated, in Australia, by early twentieth century Australian painter Max Meldrum, whose influential tonal realism aspired to a modern scientism that privileged the truth of vision – but was long dismissed by the Australian art scene as conservative and doctrinaire. But the out- of-focus flatness of Meldrum’s tonal style is, in this sense, the ideal vehicle for Alberts’ capricious scenes of modern touristic distraction: registering the central importance of photography in our image of the landscape, and enabling the stage-flat like planes on which the figures appear to float, self-absorbed and wholly unmoved by the theatre of nature that unfolds behind them.
In the collages of Sherry Paddon, by contrast, the human figure becomes integral to the landscape itself. Here, the body seems to merge with the land, forming rugged fantasies that blur the lines between earth and flesh. Paddon’s images play with the persistent and complex gendering of the landscape, bringing together the raw beauty of nature with a quite different raw beauty cut from vintage Playboy magazines. With their shared honey hues, bodies and rocks merge in a tumble of crevices and ravines, alluding to the visual regimes of possession common to both the landscape and nude traditions. At once suggesting seduction and danger, Paddon’s cryptic visual combinations invite the viewer to construct narratives that explain these scenes of earthly eroticism. And while the tableaux remain resolutely slippery, they consistently revel in the most hyperbolic gender clichés: at once the embrace of Mother Nature, and the ‘no-place-for-a-lady’ site for all- conquering male labour.
Paddon’s sculptural practice continues her use of rock formations as a bodily equivalent – an association that brings to mind the simultaneously maternal and erotic bodies of Henry Moore. Her sculptural constructions are also collages of sorts, combining a variety of found materials to construct undulating forms evoking the dramatic rock forms that provide Australia with some of its most famous landmarks. Among her landforms constructed in this way are several large installations of plush toys, and for this exhibition, Paddon has constructed a new landform from native Australian animals, evoking the carnivalesque toy orgies of Mike Kelley. Turning the stereotypical novelty of Australian nature into a dramatic abstraction of a monolithic terrain, Paddon’s sculpture, no less than her collages, creates a voluptuous and corporeal body that blurs the boundaries between the body and the landscape.
Collage is also used in the work of Rebecca Ross to reconsider the visual culture of another crucial sphere of landscape representation – the map. Her diverse practice has spanned a variety of site-specific explorations of space, place and location, but her most recent work combines fragments from Australian maps into dramatic abstractions. These marvellous forms that sprawl like richly variegated lichen or foliage, or perhaps even camouflage, transform the monolithic perspective of the cartographer into fascinating evocations of the detail of the landscape that, strangely, effect a naturalism that is at once more abstract and more convincingly natural.
In works where Ross uses outdated atlases, the shifting borders and place names of a politically tumultuous twentieth century continue to slide across her picture plane, like continental shift on fast forward. Map pins punctuate these images, literally holding them together, and forming an actual topographical relief from the conventions of contour lines. In effect, Ross’s artful interventions strip the map of its authority – revealing its conventionalised contours and colours as artifice, no less abstract than the wild gestural painting whose appearance is suggested by her intricately marbleized constructions.
In the work of Megan Cope, by contrast, maps are used to make more pointed historical observations concerning the Indigenous history of Australia. While it is an over-simplification to conceive of traditional Indigenous painting as any straightforward equivalent to mapmaking, or for that matter to landscape painting, Cope’s layering of multiple sign systems makes suggestive connections between differing ways of representing place.
Her visual investigations of toponymy (the study of place names) brings Indigenous and European modes of representation into contact, registering the geographical and linguistic fractures of colonization. ‘Hope Valley Mission – Abandoned’, reads one map, and in another, more disturbingly, ‘Dead Man’s Gully’. Swimming amid the richly patterned blue and green ground of her works, such textual evidence reasserts the violence of history in startlingly plain and specific terms.
If Cope’s layered paintings serve as vehicles for the decolonisation of the Australian landscape, they also make prescient observations about the impact of the last two centuries of development on Australia’s terrestrial ecosystems. Cope’s focus on rivers and coastlines mark the impacts of changing water levels, and the increased vulnerability to flooding that has seen such dramatic effects in Australia in recent years. In addition to her overt use of cartographic materials, Cope’s painterly repertoire ranges effortlessly across a wide range of art historical references. Within the historical tondo format, she layers the abstractions of Indigenous painting with waves of modernist veils of green and blue, punctuated by textual forms, and subsumed by the gridded visual plane common to both the mapmaker and the minimalist.
Archie Moore’s work also engages Indigenous culture and history, excavating the legacy of violence and racism coded in a variety of visual and textual sources. Continuing his ongoing series of sculptures made from books, Moore’s work for Lie of the Land alters the Lilliput Aboriginal Place Names, a dictionary consolidating Indigenous words from dozens of distinct language families into one mythic totality. Opened on to a page headed by the word ‘Sauming’ – translated as a ‘place where a battle was fought’ – Moore violently tears the page to form the timeless sculptural sign of military imperialism, an obelisk. In an earlier book intervention, a meticulously folded church emerges from the Hermannsburg landscape made famous by Albert Namatjira, referencing the religious presence of the Lutheran missionaries in the Western Arrente town. In both instances, Western architectural signifiers of power materialise the multifarious means by which European dominion over Australian land has been secured.
Moore explores the status of landscape and language in the histories of Australian art and colonisation in another work made for Lie of the Land. Again slicing into the reproduction of an icon of Australian art – this time Tom Roberts’ The Splitters (1886) – the hewn trees of the original faded imaged are repeated in the artist’s slashes into the surface of the print, revealing the woody-hued fibreboard beneath the reproduction. The geometrical carving initially resembles an Indigenous dendroglyph, the ceremonial tree carvings used by some Indigenous groups to mark sacred sites, but on closer inspection, its primitivised patterns spell ‘Batman’, a reference to the infamous 1835 ‘treaty’ between John Batman and a group of Wurundejri elders that “acquired” the land that became Melbourne.
Moore’s work intervenes in a deeply contentious and symbolic moment in the history of diplomacy between European settlers and Indigenous Australians. Even apart from the manifold misunderstandings likely in such a cross- cultural communication, accounts suggest that Batman used forged Indigenous dendroglyphs in his contract with the elders to serve as their signatures – possibly mimicking the distant style of Aboriginals near his home in Sydney. In any case, the dubious accord was quickly declared void by Sydney officials, who recognised that the event, by acknowledging prior occupation, represented a significant slip in the dictates of terra nullius. The carving of this primitivised signature into a painting of the Heidelberg School, whose name derives from by-then suburban bushland near which Batman’s treaty was probably signed, reinscribes the contested histories of occupation into a classic image of national life and landscape. With one of the more famous later illustrations of the event depicting the signing of the accord as occurring on a felled tree, Moore’s combination powerfully suggests the repetitions and reverberations of colonial history.
In the work of Gary Carsley, the representation of nature registers not only the impact of imperial expansion, but also the broader histories of globalisation that leave their mark on the land. Carsley composes digital marquetry landscapes from a palette of scanned faux woodgrain – imitations of pine, birch, teak, mahogany and other internationally ubiquitous timber finishes. Carsley’s prints themselves also often bring together scenes from wholly different locations, destabilising the authenticity of nature, and evoking the interconnectedness of distant landscapes – around the country and around the world. In one recent work, for instance, he brings together imagery from Botany Bay National Park, near the site of Captain Cook’s 1770 landing, with another image of gumtrees London’s Hyde Park, planted from seeds collected by Sir Joseph Banks on Cook’s journey. By depicting the variously fabricated nature of parks, Carsley’s landscapes are even further removed from the natural sources they mimic. Across Carsley’s practice, the real is thus always elusive: not only is his timber a copy of a copy, but so too is the garden landscape, itself a frozen representation of nature.
Carsley’s names his prints ‘Draguerreotypes’ – a reference not only to the suspended appearance of the early photographic methods of Louis Daguerre, but also a suggestion that his made-up natural world, radiant in its synthetic beauty, might just seek to out-do the mythic originals it imitates. The application of nature-by-the- metre prints to flat-pack Ikea furniture, themselves globally ubiquitous designs clad in the thinnest layer of veneer, further exposes the ersatz quality of Carsley’s glowing scenes. In one print, a plywood chair merges with its theatrical backdrop, as much a cunning nod to the conceptual chairs of Joseph Kosuth and Gilbert and George, as a mass-produced modern echo of the florid Victorian garden bench camouflaged into its artfully natural background. In his
most recent works, Carsley applies a high- gloss black silhouette of a figure to his prints. These disordered Roman statues, themselves speculatively composed from exhumed fragments of Greek figures, are also ghosts of forever absent originals. Placed in front of the Australian landscape, the figures stand as improbable translations of European civilisation that cut against the grain of the ‘Australian’ landscapes – like a triumphantly imperial colonnade, they serve as an awkward and unsettling Black Athena, trespassing on alien land.
The cultivated image of the European landscape and the impossibility of escaping its influence plays an even more dominant role in the work of Sam Leach. Drawing particularly on seventeenth Dutch landscape painting, Leach’s polished historicism remains strangely placeless, just as easily appearing like details from Claude Lorrain as from John Constable, or, for that matter, one of their countless American and Australian imitators. On closer inspection, all is not as it seems: the very ground of Leach’s landscapes seem to have ruptured into geometrical shards, unable, perhaps, to withstand the pressures of history. In some works, these angular fragments seem like ruins of a post-apocalyptic future. In others, the crystalline forms appear to grow from the earth, like deep geological forces that have broken through the crust of the landscape. These geometries suggest the rigid ordering of the enlightenment landscape, by which the viewing of nature was pervasively structured by scientific inquiry. Further, the titles of Leach’s pictures indicate his interest in epistemological and ontological questions considering the nature of knowledge and being, concerns that are registered in the spatial and temporal paradoxes of the sublime scenes he constructs, both natural and technological, glorious and tragic.
If these landscapes are international in their placelessness, they are also a sort of Australian landscape; or, at least, they imagine the landscape through the same European vision that dominated much colonial painting. Questions concerning the Australian-ness of Leach’s work were thrust into the public eye when his Proposal For Landscaped Cosmos (2010) won a major prize for “the best landscape painting of Australian scenery” for a picture closely based on Adam Pynacker’s Boatmen Moored on a Lake Shore (1668). Though largely ignoring Leach’s substantial elision of the central allegorical figures and animals in the picture, the resulting media furore grappled with questions of artistic originality. What the press failed to point out is that Pynacker’s work is itself known to be a simulation of sorts: an idealized representation of a sunny Italian landscape that the Dutch artist had probably never visited.
Like so many representations of nature, in Australia and elsewhere, the questioning of the authenticity of Leach’s landscapes opens questions about the relation of pictures to place that lie at the very heart of his practice. In the work of Jake Walker, the burden of the immense accumulation of existing landscapes becomes quite literally the material from which he makes his art. The reworking of landscapes purchased from thrift stores and Ebay is central to his practice, and the New Zealand-born Walker builds many of his works from pictures found on both sides of the Tasman. In many works, geologically inflected abstract and architectural forms interact with their natural backgrounds, sometimes floating above the scene like dreamlike structures, elsewhere compounding into muddy concatinations that resemble a muddy artist’s palette. In others, boldly cut-in planes of unmodulated colour recast the sky of other pictures, creating new spatial relations between figure and ground.
Walker’s interventions in these amateur scenes often seem generated from the pictures themselves, whose mildly decorative and picturesque views serve as the ground for a new layer of painterly struggle – as though the artist is unmaking these banal views in order to excavate their faulty foundations. Indeed, it is often unclear which of his works represent physical interventions on found paintings, and which are direct copies or pastiches from them. Intervening in the traditions of the vernacular landscape, Walker’s richly idiosyncratic practice combines intuitive formal techniques with conceptual methods that serve to undermine the authenticity and originality of landscape painting.
Also based on ‘found’ landscapes, an entirely balder strategy of unoriginality pervades the landscapes of Michael Lindeman, whose recent paintings are based on classified newspaper advertisements for paintings. Many come from the Trading Post, a national newsprint publication comprised entirely of classified advertisements, much- loved by Australian bargain hunters – most famously, the Kerrigan family in Australian film comedy The Castle. Reproduced at an enormous scale, Lindeman’s text paintings become panoramic landscapes comprised entirely of textual description. Mimicking the awkward layout of the newspaper column, and the various attention-getting design features in which these amateur art dealers invest, the resulting paintings follow in the wry art-about-art traditions of John Baldessari and Lawrence Weiner, or even more relevantly, the home grown conceptual landscape interventions of Ian Burn and Robert Macpherson.
Lindeman’s conceptual turn not only requires the viewer to complete the forever- unseen landscape in their own mind, but adds an additional layer of place by reference to the particular suburbs where these paintings can be found. Using the same space-saving acronyms as car advertisements, and including all manner of home-spun sales pitches, dubious connoisseurial insights, and vulgar installation suggestions, the result is occasionally hilarious, but Lindeman’s tone should not be mistaken for mockery. Lindeman’s deadpan repetition of the advertisements, serves as an irreverent means to destabilize the equally insular jargon and pretences of taste that dominate the contemporary art gallery, wryly addressing issues surrounding commodification of art, and baldly exposing many of the myths on which Australia’s collective obsession with landscape rests.
As with many of the other artists in Lie of the Land, Lindeman’s pictures flatly confirm the inherently mediated nature of the landscape – and engage historical anxieties about the status of the historically ‘low’ landscape genre. Whether by textual description, or pictorial convention, many of the works in this exhibition foreground their relation to rhetorical and symbolic conventions. Nor are those based on actual landscapes any less filtered: we view them too through the frames of artistic production to which they themselves are often cultivated to confirm. The works in this exhibition pay attention to these codes, miming and undermining the traditions on which the landscape genre is founded.
Taking the central role of landscape imagery in the construction of Australia, the presentation of these works outside national borders renders the international repercussions of local myths especially legible – from the colonial traffic of natural plunder, to the more recent promotional kitsch of tourism advertisements and souvenir scenery. In many cases, the works disclose the ecological and economic systems in which the landscape is involved. Gumtrees and kangaroos might abound here, but the wholly more complex and contested picture of the landscape that these artists construct make these works decidedly troublesome cultural diplomats.
. Alan McCulloch quoted in Stephen Naylor, ‘Australian Space from the Outside In: Australia’s Representation at the Venice Biennale 1954-2005’, Halfway Houses: the poetics of Australian spaces, Crawley, WA: UWA Press. pp. 320-332. This appearance was hardly improved by the addition of more contemporary landscapes by Arthur Boyd.
ii. E. J. Bunting quoted in Sarah Scott, ‘Imaging a Nation: Australia’s Representation at the Venice Biennale, 1958’, in Richard Nile (ed.), Grit: Journal of Australian Studies, 78 (2003), p. 60.
iii. Mary Alice Evatt, ‘Colorful Glimpses of Life Among Art Students: Mrs. Evatt Says “Modern” Art Will Replace Former Styles, The Australian Woman’s Weekly, 28 January 1939, p. 24.
iv. ‘Ambassadress to U.S.A’, The Advertiser, 23 January 1940, p. 16.
v. James Montgomery Flagg, ‘Halifax Busy, Gives Flagg 15 Minutes for Painting’, Jefferson City Post-Tribune, 16 May 1941, p. 6.
vi. Harold Callender quotes in ‘Journalists Visit: Much Information Gained’, The West Australian, 24 August 1940, p. 12.
vii. Carl Bridge (ed.), A Delicate Mission: The Washington Diaries of R.G. Casey, 1940-42, Canberra, National Library of Australia, 2008, p. 8.
viii. ‘Gathers Australian Art’, New York Times, 8 February 1941, p. 18. See also Louise Ryan, ‘Forging Diplomacy: the Carnegie Corporation and the ‘Art of Australia’ Exhibition’, AARE Conference Paper, 2002.
ix. Renate O’Connell, ‘Visiting the Emu at Home’, New York Times, 24 November 1957, p. 169.
x. Richard Casey, ‘Foreword’, Art of Australia 1788-1941: An Exhibition of Australian Art Held in the United States of America and the Dominion of Canada under the Auspices of the Carnegie C
In 1958, under the watchful aesthetic eye of Prime Minister Robert Menzies, Australian government representatives selected the nation’s artistic emissaries for the Venice Biennale. This was a fair at which the uncompromising avant garde innovations of the post-war artworld were clear. Startling works by Mark Rothko, Mark Tobey, David Smith and Seymour Lipton proclaimed the new international supremacy of American abstraction. Britain too excelled in its own way, sending the tortured sculptures of Kenneth Armitage, upholding the country’s period repute for ‘geometry of fear’ sculpture, and building on the visceral figuration of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud it had sent in previous years.
Amid such luminaries of the international avant garde, Australia was represented by the landscape painter Arthur Streeton. For sophisticated mid-century art viewers, it must have felt like a time warp. Painted in a polished impressionist style, his idyllic pastoral scenes (that had barely raised an eyebrow at the Royal Academy in 1900) celebrated the natural bounty of an increasingly irrelevant empire. The contemporary art scene in Australia was outraged. “We are to appear, it seems,” complained one critic, “like a geographical magazine, as propagandists of our native scenery.”i At least one Australian diplomat concurred, reporting back to the Australian government that “the exclusion of avant- garde artists gave an impression of backwardness and unflattering comparisons were made between Australian and the Soviet pavilions.”ii
Complaints that Australia’s artistic exports did not properly reflect the vitality of the local art scene were hardly new. Landscape had consistently served as Australia’s artistic ambassador abroad, and Australia’s various modernists had long riled at the conservatism of this gumtree diplomacy. “It is a great pity”, commented one such painter in 1938, “that at World’s Fair Exhibitions and the like, Australia usually exhibits paintings which seem to be mainly devoted to gum trees, sheep, koalas, misty impressionistic seascapes and supposedly academic color photography.”iii For Australia’s progressive cultural elite, images of the landscape and its requisite animals seemed to be a wholly insufficient representation of twentieth century Australia.
The latter complaint was penned by Mary Alice Evatt, who had just returned to Australia from a period of international study, including stints in the studios of André Lhote in Paris and Hans Hofmann in New York. Evatt’s concern that our cultural exports should reflect a more contemporary sensibility was not simply motivated by personal taste. As the wife of a prominent parliamentarian and later judge, Evatt’s ambition for “Australia to find a worthy place on the art map of the world” was also underscored by her proximity to the political elite, recognizing the role that culture could play in bolstering the international standing of a geographically isolated nation.
It was in Washington that this combination of modern taste and political imperative would soon align. When Richard Casey became Australia’s first Minister to the United States in 1940, his ardently modernist wife Maie Casey set about presenting a more progressive cultural image for the nation. The Australian press reported that she “plans to show them that Australia is a country with its arts and civilization highly developed.”iv Chief among her tools in this long-distance civilising mission was a collection of modern Australian art.
The cosmopolitan implications of the modernist styles they favored seem to have had the desired effect. One visiting journalist admitted that “like most Americans I know little about Australia”, but that while they “didn’t expect to see him [Casey]... carrying a wallaby pickaback or leading a koala on a leash” they seemed to still be surprised by the modern refinement on display at the legation.v Such efforts to alter American perceptions were part of a broader effort to counter wartime isolationism. As the foreign correspondent of the New York Times admitted in 1940, after a press tour of various heavy industries that Australia could contribute to the war effort, “Most Americans think of Australia as a country solely engage in growing wheat and raising sheep.”vi
Modern internationalist tastes supported the construction of a modern industrial Australia. But the persuasive power of Australian nature proved to be symbols that were difficult to leave behind. In fact, the subject matter of the Casey’s pictures remained closely tied to the landscape. Rural and outback scenes dominated. Kangaroos may almost have outnumbered people. Australian native timbers and textile designs that showcased Australian native plants were Maie’s choice of decorations. Richard Casey’s other cultural activities equally capitalized on the cliches: teaching the American Vice President to throw a boomerang, seeking Australian animals for the New York Zoo, and even lobbying Walt Disney to develop new a new koala cartoon character.vii
Similar contradictions were evident in Art of Australia 1788-1941, the exhibition in which the Casey’s played a central role, which opened at the new National Gallery of Art in Washington, and whose subsequent tour across the country was managed by the Museum of Modern Art. The express goal of the exhibition was to “present as complete a picture of Australian life as possible”, but again, and even with a significant contingent of modern works, including some from the Casey collection, the novelty of Australian nature dominated.viii Whether it was oriented to the old world of colonial views, or the new world of modernism, the international presentation of Australian art might have been anxious to demonstrate cultural sophistication, but it was also addicted to the allure of the Australian landscape.
As Australia prepared to send Arthur Streeton to the Venice Biennale, a travel writer from The New York Times reported on Australia’s paradoxical attitudes to nature with some accuracy. “It is an old story for travellers coming to this continent for the first time to inquire immediately about kangaroos, koala bears and emus”, they reported. “Australians both at home and abroad have long since learned to take such queries in stride. Much as they prefer to think of their country in terms of its thriving cities, its commercial, industrial and agricultural development, they are resigned to the perennial fascination which the local wildlife holds for strangers.”ix
Such ambivalences were hardly limited to the sphere of tourism. Modern civilisation and ancient geography, urban sophistication and barren landscape, nature and culture: such paradoxes remain the source of deep-seated tensions in Australia’s self representations. Here, again, the perennial fascination that Australia’s landscape, with “the pungent flavour of the Australian bush” and all its rather “strange and rather grim beauty” as Richard Casey described the 1941 exhibition, provides the subject matter for another exhibition of Australian art in Washington.x
It is possible to read many of these pictures on this basis alone. But for the artists in this exhibition, the anxieties and contradictions inscribed in the landscape provides the conceptual issues with which their art grapples – complexities which often lie just beneath the surface of their picture perfect depictions of natural beauty. As these diplomatic forays suggest, Australians experience a variety of ambivalences towards the landscape. It has been the locus of our international reputation, but has long seemed an insufficient reflection of our cultural maturity. For almost as long as it has provided much of the nation’s material wealth, it has also been the focus of growing concerns about environmental destruction.
For artists, the rich history of landscape painting – the site on which much of Australian art history has been played out – provides a range of aesthetic baggage for the representation of the natural world. But there are other reasons why landscapes can be troubling. Idyllic images of the landscape present a picture of timeless harmony that can mask the persistent echoes of Australia’s colonial history, and the diversity and complexity of contemporary Australia. The history of landscape art in Australia is closely connected with the goals of the European settlement. From the mapping of the country’s coastline and topography to the description of its peculiar plants and animals, early landscapes may have had aesthetic ambitions, but they also supported the broader goals of colonisation.
The demonstration of Australia’s desolate expanses in visual form served specifically ideological functions. Because the occupation of Australia was to be justified according to the legal dictates of terra nullius – literally, a ‘land belonging to no one’ – the production of landscape paintings depicting vast emptiness upheld this fiction. And as Australians have grappled with the environmental impacts of their occupation of the land – by no means a recent concern, either – these too find unavoidable traces in the landscape paintings that depict our intervention, and preservation, of the natural environment.
The artists in this exhibition address these histories in their work, and collectively, their practice represents a critical reengagement with a fraught genre. Their works give lie to the myth that landscapes are neutral – by manipulating the representational strategies of the genre, complicating its traditions and intervening in its mythologies. Although many of the artists in Lie of the Land are informed by all manner of historical modes – from the scientific modes of cartography and botany, to the artistic conventions of the sublime and the picturesque – their works share a deliberate desire to expose the constructed quality of landscape that, traditionally, its language has assiduously sought to conceal.
Landscapes are, of course, always something more than just land. Whether painted or real nature, they are always already mediated, filtered through a range of rhetorical and symbolic conventions by which its forms produce meaning. The works of David Keeling has explored the representational strategies of the landscape genre, framing and isolating the pictorial effects on which it relies. In his ‘Ghost Gum’ series of paintings and sculptures, small tondo landscapes are attached to the trunks and boughs of the creamy-barked native. In their sculptural incarnation he reconstitutes found timber into a carefully fabricated miniature forest. The painted cameos on the trees suspend reflected moments of nature passed, like views caught in the rear view mirror of a car. Or, in more art historical terms, their reflections might be in a Claude Glass, the small portable mirrors made famous by French landscapist Claude Lorrain as a tool for capturing nature. Keeling’s miniaturised souvenirs reflect nature at the same time as abstracting it from its surroundings, turning the landscape into amber jewels of the picturesque.
Glass also provides the representational filter in many of Keeling’s most recent works, in which the landscape is explicitly viewed through a window – the framing device so often implied by traditional landscape paintings. In the foreground, the hard planes and sharp shadows of modern architecture are as conventionalised as the soft vista beyond the implied threshold of the glass frame. Both may be emptied of human occupants, but human presence remains implied, with computers and designer chairs registering human occupation no less than the clearings and paths in the landscape beyond. In some works, steeply receding hardwood floors and stone feature walls literally show the products of nature forced into domestic submission. Landscape may provide us with pleasure, but in these works, the borders between the indoors and the outdoors are assiduously policed, allowing nature to be viewed at the very safe distance that the art of landscape painting ensures.
The artificial isolation of nature takes on a more surreal tone in the recent paintings of Juan Ford. In these extraordinary pictures, the painterly mark of the botanical artist is literalised by the artist’s rendering of blooms and foliage smothered in viscous paint. This eccentric intervention serves to literalise the layer of representation that coats botanical art. But the superficial abstraction of Ford’s synthetic drips and smears is, of course, a ruse – his painting of paint is no less breathtaking than his meticulous rendering of the crenulated stamen of native flowers, a splashy gesture of technical bravado that turns the ordinarily effortless action of dripped paint into a triumph of trompe-l’oeil illusionism.
Suspended against the void of a blue sky, Ford’s hyper-real paintings isolate Australian native plants in a timeless no-space, removing plants from the landscapes in which they originate. His quite literal painting of the landscape also suggests its destruction. In other recent works, the brutality of the botanical vision – implicit here in the unseen cuts with which his specimens have been excised from nature – is made even more palpable by the aggressive entanglement of gum leaves in plastic industrial tapes, or the fixing of blooms to a raw timber beam by a perforated metal plate. Like the strange clues of an inexplicable crime, Ford’s paintings are at once beautiful and disturbing, an image of blood on the wattle that brutally aestheticizes the natural beauty of Australia’s native flora.
The aesthetic acquisition of nature is taken to its industrial extreme in the ‘logging truck’ works of Dale Cox. Mass-produced plastic rigs haul heavy loads of timber, their trees bound in rope and laid on their side. But instead of raw lumber, the cargo takes the form of tied-up bundles of colonial landscape painting. With their serpentine branches and shaded daubs of foliage, Cox’s painted cargo resembles the style of early Australian landscapists such as John Glover, the English émigré artist who is often credited as the first Australian landscape painter for his adaption of European techniques to the less verdant realities of his adopted home. In these painted timber sculptures, the artistic exploitation of Australian nature is brought into stark contact with another export industry, the big business of logging. Cox’s recent paintings also render human intervention in the landscape precariously on deep-time cross- sections of the earth, bringing the conflicts between modern life and the environment into relief.
The tensions between the nature and civilisation are dramatized in more social terms in the paintings of Tom Alberts. The domestication of the landscape is the particular focus for two works in this exhibition: Study for Pad II (2011), in which two kangaroos hop into a minimalist interior, a ridiculous scene literalizing foreign fantasies of Australian pets, and Study for Bedlands (2011), in which the landscape has morphed into a verdant bedroom suite, complete with topiaried bedside lamps. Across Alberts’ works, the landscape serves as the scenic background for his studies of the consumer gaze. Holding mobile phones and listening to iPods, his disconnected spectators seem entirely apathetic towards the scenes they view.
Transformed into variously aestheticised abstractions – boldly abstracted horizontal bands, blurry from a speeding car, fuzzy from an out-of-focus photograph – the varied landscapes of Alberts’ highly-staged scenes are each surveyed with equal tedium. Alberts’ formal decisions intensify the disjunctions between the figures and their context. The impersonal, almost mechanistic opticality of his technique – reminiscent of the effects produced by the camera obscura – create an all-over effect the which the figures become frozen, discontinuous with the landscape backdrop, wrested from the flux of life in an unfathomable foreground. Boughs and bodies are rendered with equally minimal affect. As in the work of Vermeer, a subtle halo around many of the figures exacerbates their estrangement from their context. When set outdoors, the scenes in which they stand are imitations of works by Australian painters including Eugene Von Guerard and Hans Heysen. In this sense, his figures are as much viewing art – somewhat like the jaded gallery viewers in the photographs of Thomas Struth – as they are immersed in and alienated from the landscape.
The traditional techniques of Alberts pictures should not distract from the fact that his realism is consistently used to observe the very contemporary dynamics of consumer spectacle. Alberts’ style follows the techniques propagated, in Australia, by early twentieth century Australian painter Max Meldrum, whose influential tonal realism aspired to a modern scientism that privileged the truth of vision – but was long dismissed by the Australian art scene as conservative and doctrinaire. But the out- of-focus flatness of Meldrum’s tonal style is, in this sense, the ideal vehicle for Alberts’ capricious scenes of modern touristic distraction: registering the central importance of photography in our image of the landscape, and enabling the stage-flat like planes on which the figures appear to float, self-absorbed and wholly unmoved by the theatre of nature that unfolds behind them.
In the collages of Sherry Paddon, by contrast, the human figure becomes integral to the landscape itself. Here, the body seems to merge with the land, forming rugged fantasies that blur the lines between earth and flesh. Paddon’s images play with the persistent and complex gendering of the landscape, bringing together the raw beauty of nature with a quite different raw beauty cut from vintage Playboy magazines. With their shared honey hues, bodies and rocks merge in a tumble of crevices and ravines, alluding to the visual regimes of possession common to both the landscape and nude traditions. At once suggesting seduction and danger, Paddon’s cryptic visual combinations invite the viewer to construct narratives that explain these scenes of earthly eroticism. And while the tableaux remain resolutely slippery, they consistently revel in the most hyperbolic gender clichés: at once the embrace of Mother Nature, and the ‘no-place-for-a-lady’ site for all- conquering male labour.
Paddon’s sculptural practice continues her use of rock formations as a bodily equivalent – an association that brings to mind the simultaneously maternal and erotic bodies of Henry Moore. Her sculptural constructions are also collages of sorts, combining a variety of found materials to construct undulating forms evoking the dramatic rock forms that provide Australia with some of its most famous landmarks. Among her landforms constructed in this way are several large installations of plush toys, and for this exhibition, Paddon has constructed a new landform from native Australian animals, evoking the carnivalesque toy orgies of Mike Kelley. Turning the stereotypical novelty of Australian nature into a dramatic abstraction of a monolithic terrain, Paddon’s sculpture, no less than her collages, creates a voluptuous and corporeal body that blurs the boundaries between the body and the landscape.
Collage is also used in the work of Rebecca Ross to reconsider the visual culture of another crucial sphere of landscape representation – the map. Her diverse practice has spanned a variety of site-specific explorations of space, place and location, but her most recent work combines fragments from Australian maps into dramatic abstractions. These marvellous forms that sprawl like richly variegated lichen or foliage, or perhaps even camouflage, transform the monolithic perspective of the cartographer into fascinating evocations of the detail of the landscape that, strangely, effect a naturalism that is at once more abstract and more convincingly natural.
In works where Ross uses outdated atlases, the shifting borders and place names of a politically tumultuous twentieth century continue to slide across her picture plane, like continental shift on fast forward. Map pins punctuate these images, literally holding them together, and forming an actual topographical relief from the conventions of contour lines. In effect, Ross’s artful interventions strip the map of its authority – revealing its conventionalised contours and colours as artifice, no less abstract than the wild gestural painting whose appearance is suggested by her intricately marbleized constructions.
In the work of Megan Cope, by contrast, maps are used to make more pointed historical observations concerning the Indigenous history of Australia. While it is an over-simplification to conceive of traditional Indigenous painting as any straightforward equivalent to mapmaking, or for that matter to landscape painting, Cope’s layering of multiple sign systems makes suggestive connections between differing ways of representing place.
Her visual investigations of toponymy (the study of place names) brings Indigenous and European modes of representation into contact, registering the geographical and linguistic fractures of colonization. ‘Hope Valley Mission – Abandoned’, reads one map, and in another, more disturbingly, ‘Dead Man’s Gully’. Swimming amid the richly patterned blue and green ground of her works, such textual evidence reasserts the violence of history in startlingly plain and specific terms.
If Cope’s layered paintings serve as vehicles for the decolonisation of the Australian landscape, they also make prescient observations about the impact of the last two centuries of development on Australia’s terrestrial ecosystems. Cope’s focus on rivers and coastlines mark the impacts of changing water levels, and the increased vulnerability to flooding that has seen such dramatic effects in Australia in recent years. In addition to her overt use of cartographic materials, Cope’s painterly repertoire ranges effortlessly across a wide range of art historical references. Within the historical tondo format, she layers the abstractions of Indigenous painting with waves of modernist veils of green and blue, punctuated by textual forms, and subsumed by the gridded visual plane common to both the mapmaker and the minimalist.
Archie Moore’s work also engages Indigenous culture and history, excavating the legacy of violence and racism coded in a variety of visual and textual sources. Continuing his ongoing series of sculptures made from books, Moore’s work for Lie of the Land alters the Lilliput Aboriginal Place Names, a dictionary consolidating Indigenous words from dozens of distinct language families into one mythic totality. Opened on to a page headed by the word ‘Sauming’ – translated as a ‘place where a battle was fought’ – Moore violently tears the page to form the timeless sculptural sign of military imperialism, an obelisk. In an earlier book intervention, a meticulously folded church emerges from the Hermannsburg landscape made famous by Albert Namatjira, referencing the religious presence of the Lutheran missionaries in the Western Arrente town. In both instances, Western architectural signifiers of power materialise the multifarious means by which European dominion over Australian land has been secured.
Moore explores the status of landscape and language in the histories of Australian art and colonisation in another work made for Lie of the Land. Again slicing into the reproduction of an icon of Australian art – this time Tom Roberts’ The Splitters (1886) – the hewn trees of the original faded imaged are repeated in the artist’s slashes into the surface of the print, revealing the woody-hued fibreboard beneath the reproduction. The geometrical carving initially resembles an Indigenous dendroglyph, the ceremonial tree carvings used by some Indigenous groups to mark sacred sites, but on closer inspection, its primitivised patterns spell ‘Batman’, a reference to the infamous 1835 ‘treaty’ between John Batman and a group of Wurundejri elders that “acquired” the land that became Melbourne.
Moore’s work intervenes in a deeply contentious and symbolic moment in the history of diplomacy between European settlers and Indigenous Australians. Even apart from the manifold misunderstandings likely in such a cross- cultural communication, accounts suggest that Batman used forged Indigenous dendroglyphs in his contract with the elders to serve as their signatures – possibly mimicking the distant style of Aboriginals near his home in Sydney. In any case, the dubious accord was quickly declared void by Sydney officials, who recognised that the event, by acknowledging prior occupation, represented a significant slip in the dictates of terra nullius. The carving of this primitivised signature into a painting of the Heidelberg School, whose name derives from by-then suburban bushland near which Batman’s treaty was probably signed, reinscribes the contested histories of occupation into a classic image of national life and landscape. With one of the more famous later illustrations of the event depicting the signing of the accord as occurring on a felled tree, Moore’s combination powerfully suggests the repetitions and reverberations of colonial history.
In the work of Gary Carsley, the representation of nature registers not only the impact of imperial expansion, but also the broader histories of globalisation that leave their mark on the land. Carsley composes digital marquetry landscapes from a palette of scanned faux woodgrain – imitations of pine, birch, teak, mahogany and other internationally ubiquitous timber finishes. Carsley’s prints themselves also often bring together scenes from wholly different locations, destabilising the authenticity of nature, and evoking the interconnectedness of distant landscapes – around the country and around the world. In one recent work, for instance, he brings together imagery from Botany Bay National Park, near the site of Captain Cook’s 1770 landing, with another image of gumtrees London’s Hyde Park, planted from seeds collected by Sir Joseph Banks on Cook’s journey. By depicting the variously fabricated nature of parks, Carsley’s landscapes are even further removed from the natural sources they mimic. Across Carsley’s practice, the real is thus always elusive: not only is his timber a copy of a copy, but so too is the garden landscape, itself a frozen representation of nature.
Carsley’s names his prints ‘Draguerreotypes’ – a reference not only to the suspended appearance of the early photographic methods of Louis Daguerre, but also a suggestion that his made-up natural world, radiant in its synthetic beauty, might just seek to out-do the mythic originals it imitates. The application of nature-by-the- metre prints to flat-pack Ikea furniture, themselves globally ubiquitous designs clad in the thinnest layer of veneer, further exposes the ersatz quality of Carsley’s glowing scenes. In one print, a plywood chair merges with its theatrical backdrop, as much a cunning nod to the conceptual chairs of Joseph Kosuth and Gilbert and George, as a mass-produced modern echo of the florid Victorian garden bench camouflaged into its artfully natural background. In his
most recent works, Carsley applies a high- gloss black silhouette of a figure to his prints. These disordered Roman statues, themselves speculatively composed from exhumed fragments of Greek figures, are also ghosts of forever absent originals. Placed in front of the Australian landscape, the figures stand as improbable translations of European civilisation that cut against the grain of the ‘Australian’ landscapes – like a triumphantly imperial colonnade, they serve as an awkward and unsettling Black Athena, trespassing on alien land.
The cultivated image of the European landscape and the impossibility of escaping its influence plays an even more dominant role in the work of Sam Leach. Drawing particularly on seventeenth Dutch landscape painting, Leach’s polished historicism remains strangely placeless, just as easily appearing like details from Claude Lorrain as from John Constable, or, for that matter, one of their countless American and Australian imitators. On closer inspection, all is not as it seems: the very ground of Leach’s landscapes seem to have ruptured into geometrical shards, unable, perhaps, to withstand the pressures of history. In some works, these angular fragments seem like ruins of a post-apocalyptic future. In others, the crystalline forms appear to grow from the earth, like deep geological forces that have broken through the crust of the landscape. These geometries suggest the rigid ordering of the enlightenment landscape, by which the viewing of nature was pervasively structured by scientific inquiry. Further, the titles of Leach’s pictures indicate his interest in epistemological and ontological questions considering the nature of knowledge and being, concerns that are registered in the spatial and temporal paradoxes of the sublime scenes he constructs, both natural and technological, glorious and tragic.
If these landscapes are international in their placelessness, they are also a sort of Australian landscape; or, at least, they imagine the landscape through the same European vision that dominated much colonial painting. Questions concerning the Australian-ness of Leach’s work were thrust into the public eye when his Proposal For Landscaped Cosmos (2010) won a major prize for “the best landscape painting of Australian scenery” for a picture closely based on Adam Pynacker’s Boatmen Moored on a Lake Shore (1668). Though largely ignoring Leach’s substantial elision of the central allegorical figures and animals in the picture, the resulting media furore grappled with questions of artistic originality. What the press failed to point out is that Pynacker’s work is itself known to be a simulation of sorts: an idealized representation of a sunny Italian landscape that the Dutch artist had probably never visited.
Like so many representations of nature, in Australia and elsewhere, the questioning of the authenticity of Leach’s landscapes opens questions about the relation of pictures to place that lie at the very heart of his practice. In the work of Jake Walker, the burden of the immense accumulation of existing landscapes becomes quite literally the material from which he makes his art. The reworking of landscapes purchased from thrift stores and Ebay is central to his practice, and the New Zealand-born Walker builds many of his works from pictures found on both sides of the Tasman. In many works, geologically inflected abstract and architectural forms interact with their natural backgrounds, sometimes floating above the scene like dreamlike structures, elsewhere compounding into muddy concatinations that resemble a muddy artist’s palette. In others, boldly cut-in planes of unmodulated colour recast the sky of other pictures, creating new spatial relations between figure and ground.
Walker’s interventions in these amateur scenes often seem generated from the pictures themselves, whose mildly decorative and picturesque views serve as the ground for a new layer of painterly struggle – as though the artist is unmaking these banal views in order to excavate their faulty foundations. Indeed, it is often unclear which of his works represent physical interventions on found paintings, and which are direct copies or pastiches from them. Intervening in the traditions of the vernacular landscape, Walker’s richly idiosyncratic practice combines intuitive formal techniques with conceptual methods that serve to undermine the authenticity and originality of landscape painting.
Also based on ‘found’ landscapes, an entirely balder strategy of unoriginality pervades the landscapes of Michael Lindeman, whose recent paintings are based on classified newspaper advertisements for paintings. Many come from the Trading Post, a national newsprint publication comprised entirely of classified advertisements, much- loved by Australian bargain hunters – most famously, the Kerrigan family in Australian film comedy The Castle. Reproduced at an enormous scale, Lindeman’s text paintings become panoramic landscapes comprised entirely of textual description. Mimicking the awkward layout of the newspaper column, and the various attention-getting design features in which these amateur art dealers invest, the resulting paintings follow in the wry art-about-art traditions of John Baldessari and Lawrence Weiner, or even more relevantly, the home grown conceptual landscape interventions of Ian Burn and Robert Macpherson.
Lindeman’s conceptual turn not only requires the viewer to complete the forever- unseen landscape in their own mind, but adds an additional layer of place by reference to the particular suburbs where these paintings can be found. Using the same space-saving acronyms as car advertisements, and including all manner of home-spun sales pitches, dubious connoisseurial insights, and vulgar installation suggestions, the result is occasionally hilarious, but Lindeman’s tone should not be mistaken for mockery. Lindeman’s deadpan repetition of the advertisements, serves as an irreverent means to destabilize the equally insular jargon and pretences of taste that dominate the contemporary art gallery, wryly addressing issues surrounding commodification of art, and baldly exposing many of the myths on which Australia’s collective obsession with landscape rests.
As with many of the other artists in Lie of the Land, Lindeman’s pictures flatly confirm the inherently mediated nature of the landscape – and engage historical anxieties about the status of the historically ‘low’ landscape genre. Whether by textual description, or pictorial convention, many of the works in this exhibition foreground their relation to rhetorical and symbolic conventions. Nor are those based on actual landscapes any less filtered: we view them too through the frames of artistic production to which they themselves are often cultivated to confirm. The works in this exhibition pay attention to these codes, miming and undermining the traditions on which the landscape genre is founded.
Taking the central role of landscape imagery in the construction of Australia, the presentation of these works outside national borders renders the international repercussions of local myths especially legible – from the colonial traffic of natural plunder, to the more recent promotional kitsch of tourism advertisements and souvenir scenery. In many cases, the works disclose the ecological and economic systems in which the landscape is involved. Gumtrees and kangaroos might abound here, but the wholly more complex and contested picture of the landscape that these artists construct make these works decidedly troublesome cultural diplomats.
. Alan McCulloch quoted in Stephen Naylor, ‘Australian Space from the Outside In: Australia’s Representation at the Venice Biennale 1954-2005’, Halfway Houses: the poetics of Australian spaces, Crawley, WA: UWA Press. pp. 320-332. This appearance was hardly improved by the addition of more contemporary landscapes by Arthur Boyd.
ii. E. J. Bunting quoted in Sarah Scott, ‘Imaging a Nation: Australia’s Representation at the Venice Biennale, 1958’, in Richard Nile (ed.), Grit: Journal of Australian Studies, 78 (2003), p. 60.
iii. Mary Alice Evatt, ‘Colorful Glimpses of Life Among Art Students: Mrs. Evatt Says “Modern” Art Will Replace Former Styles, The Australian Woman’s Weekly, 28 January 1939, p. 24.
iv. ‘Ambassadress to U.S.A’, The Advertiser, 23 January 1940, p. 16.
v. James Montgomery Flagg, ‘Halifax Busy, Gives Flagg 15 Minutes for Painting’, Jefferson City Post-Tribune, 16 May 1941, p. 6.
vi. Harold Callender quotes in ‘Journalists Visit: Much Information Gained’, The West Australian, 24 August 1940, p. 12.
vii. Carl Bridge (ed.), A Delicate Mission: The Washington Diaries of R.G. Casey, 1940-42, Canberra, National Library of Australia, 2008, p. 8.
viii. ‘Gathers Australian Art’, New York Times, 8 February 1941, p. 18. See also Louise Ryan, ‘Forging Diplomacy: the Carnegie Corporation and the ‘Art of Australia’ Exhibition’, AARE Conference Paper, 2002.
ix. Renate O’Connell, ‘Visiting the Emu at Home’, New York Times, 24 November 1957, p. 169.
x. Richard Casey, ‘Foreword’, Art of Australia 1788-1941: An Exhibition of Australian Art Held in the United States of America and the Dominion of Canada under the Auspices of the Carnegie C