GHOSTED!

The title of this book is an obvious provocation. ‘UnAustralian’ echoes, loudly, the conservative coinage that was used to powerful and disquieting effect by the Australian government in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As with so much in Australian public life today, it had its origins in the volatile discourse of the right-wing subcultures of the United States and in their brutal use of the term ‘unAmerican’. An unAustralian art may, then, be an art that is problematically Australian.

By proposing an unAustralian art, the authors appear intent on overturning certain well entrenched art-historical views that originate, for the most part, in Bernard Smith’s writings: his essays gathered as Taste, Place and Tradition (1945), the monumental European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768–1850 (1960), and Australian Painting: 1788-2000 (1962). The public perception of Smith’s most significant work has seldom matched its nuance, depth, and far-reaching implications. Smith himself simplified his interests as his career developed, losing sight of the profound possibilities his early interventions had suggested for Western European art history.

Writing many decades later and into what is a now well consolidated, if under-appreciated, field of study, Butler and Donaldson have a different problem, namely, how to expand and enrich the history of art associated with Australia without compounding the field’s twin limitations – the nationalism that is the foundation of Australian art, and the greater Western tradition which, for most of its history, has marked its furthermost perimeters. They hope to achieve this through the framing rhetoric of the ‘unAustralian’, and by searching very widely for artists and artworks neglected by our national art institutions and previous histories of Australian art.

Early on they present the example of the nineteenth-century painter John Russell, an inescapable figure for their argument, in that he exemplifies the kind of insider-outsider who is paradigmatic of unAustralian art. Beginning their introduction with a description of Russell’s Rough Sea, Belle-lie (1900) and the extravagant claim that they ‘can think of no comparable work made by any other artist anywhere at the time’, Butler and Donaldson go on to give a brief summary of Russell’s career, invoking in rapid succession three of the great names of that period: Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, and Vincent Van Gogh. They write: ‘Russell was, until his art-historical revival in the 1970s, our lost impressionist’. We are told that not only did he learn the art of unmixed colour from Monet, but also that he was sought out by Matisse to help him ‘break from his dull academic palette’. This, they claim, was foundational to Matisse’s famous style. Van Gogh, owing to the closeness of their friendship, once promised Russell that he would donate one of his paintings to a future Australian national art collection. These are undoubtedly exciting connections. Butler and Donaldson take them to be talismanic, believing that by fully recognising the significance of such associations the writing of an unAustralian art history may commence.

While certainly not one of the most famous Impressionists, Russell has for several decades, at least in Australia, been recognised as a significant and gifted painter. (His striking portrait of Van Gogh is reproduced in the book.) Although he was one of the period’s insiders, he and his work have usually been described as if peripheral to the metropolitan art circles with which he is associated. He is, unquestionably, of some importance, but it is the nature and the degree of importance that is at stake, both in Russell’s case and in those of all the other neglected, ostracised, undiscovered, or otherwise ‘lost’ artists of this book. The specific issue Butler and Donaldson intend to address is the absence of so many artists from conventional Australian art-historical accounts. This they do by arguing for investigation, discovery, and inclusion, thereby writing what reads like a chronicle, if swiftly breezing through places, lives and events. The authors are, as the critic Darren Jurgensen remarked in a review, ‘bibliophilic’, being very much more engaged with archives and traces of the artists and their worlds than with investigation of artworks. Little emphasis is given to close analysis of institutional histories, or to considering the perennial ambiguities of art patronage, collecting and connoisseurship.

The most appealing aspect of this book is not its reframing of the many lesser-known works and artists as significant; rather it is the extraordinary reach of Butler and Donaldson’s research. In their ambition to include as much of the globe and as many artists as possible, they have brought to our attention a vast world of art. Though an early proposed title for the book was Inside-Out,  their logic seems more a process of looking ‘inside-in’, searching out places where the artists worked unnoticed as figures who had their origins in Australia. The project, being ambitious and capacious,  is intended to recover artists who either originated from Australia, made work in Australia or, in a small number of sometimes debatable cases, made art about Australia. Occasionally this desire to include so much becomes a confusion of categories and histories, with the pseudo-nationality of the unAustralian acting as the connecting principle, supplanting what may have been more accurate designations. In Butler and Donaldson’s favour, it must be said that this never becomes a chaos that fails to provide significant insights into the art and artists. 

It may be that the central problem the authors are struggling to overcome has been implicit in art history since the field’s inception in eighteenth-century Germany, with the work of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, whose studies consolidated Classical Greek and Roman art as the origin of the Western art tradition. In the nineteenth century, rapidly developing political nationalism required the re-envisioning of a Classical past to connect the nations through a pan-European culture, while also necessitating the promotion of a cultural nativism to illustrate and affirm emerging nation-states’ authenticity. Artworks performing this authenticating function would soon be found in newly-created museums of national art, and would be most prominent in museums of the global periphery. Where European imperial powers could import or loot works from the Mediterranean, displaying them alongside European masterworks, non-hegemonic nations had to be more reliant on nativist art traditions. In the colonies of the so-called New World, this often meant the appropriation of aspects of the art of indigenous peoples. Given this disciplinary background, any study of Australian art would thus be incomplete without an initial thorough investigation of the institutions of its nationalism and their holdings, from pieces of writing, to neighbourhood war memorials, to the painting collection of – Canberra’s or Victoria’s – National Galleries.

While Butler and Donaldson have undertaken the feat of discovering and recovering what seem to be hundreds of unAustralian artists – artists who were working in almost every part of the world, not just the usual places, London and Paris, also the United States, New Zealand, Germany, various parts of Asia and, to a small extent, South America – there remains for me the question of what exactly this book is as art history. That the artists and their works have circulated beyond the confines presumed to be the limits of their origins and markets is unsurprising. That there were so many artists, some of them very good, is wonderful, and their discovery is to be celebrated. Yet does their claim to art-historical significance require this new rubric of an unAustralian – rather than a conventionally national – art? Or is the authors’ aim to challenge the norms and prospects of Australian art history?

There is a lot of pleasure to be found in reading this book, principally due to its excess. There is so much mobility, social connection and a great many links, that it was possible for me to feel, probably more usefully as a curator than as a writer on art, that every chapter contains new names and associations, each enough for several exhibition proposals. It is easy to share in the sense of exhilaration that the authors must have felt in pursuing this emancipatory research, believing that they had escaped the confines of dreary Australian art to find unAustralian artists roaming almost everywhere. But with my mind on art-historical questions, I found myself wondering whether it should not actually be considered as something much less radical than the authors would have us believe. As I read deeper, it seemed to me that Butler and Donaldson are not developing a new category for art history – not engaging with the problematics of the transnational, for instance – so much as expanding the range of conventional Australian art history by other means.

Contextualizing this venture within the trajectory of a scholarly oeuvre is made difficult by the book’s dual authorship. Being unfamiliar with ADS Donaldson’s other writing, I was seeing traces of the logic of Butler’s previous research projects. This volume could be regarded as a mirror-image of Butler’s previous book, A Secret History of Australian Art (2002), his collection of lectures and essays in which texts were paired together under different themes (for instance, ‘The Feminine’, ‘Post-Colonialism’, and ‘Aboriginality’). Despite the emphasis on history in their titles, both of these books seem closer to other genres of writing: A Secret History was an exercise in the speculative essay; and while UnAustralian Art is encyclopedic, its chapters are more akin to dossiers on yet-to-be-appreciated artists. 

A prominent Australian art historian once remarked to me that: ‘The long shadow of Bernard Smith looms over everyone in the paddock of Australian Art.’ No less than those before them, Butler and Donaldson are writing in the wake of Smith’s European Vision, its various legacies, latent and established. Their notion of an unAustralian art can be seen as a kind of transnational or globalised advance on what Smith had proposed. Instead of Smith’s account of the encounters between European explorers and the peoples and natural environments of the South Pacific shaping a protean European Romanticism, here we have the adventures of travelling artists, under an expanded nationalist concept – the unAustralian – that disrupts the cultural and national complacencies of the Anglosphere, helping to forge something internationalist and, possibly, post-Western.

Oddly, this is similar to what was argued for by Australian theorists of the 1980s and 90s. The most visible of them were Paul Taylor and the other contributors to the seminal magazine Art & Text (1981–2002). These art theorists felt that Australia, as a peripheral culture in which cultural production was mediated by the circulation of reproductions, might actually be ahead of much of the world. The future, they believed, would be one in which the artificiality and artifactuality of images would come to predominate in cultural life. They turned out to be right, in a range of ways. For Butler, given his previous engagement with Australian post-modernism and its implementation of appropriation art, this kind of ‘meta’ or distanced approach, with its dependence on secondary research materials would be very familiar. Implicit in their argument is the prospect that, just as unAustralian artists may be found roaming the world, so, too, might other transnationals – those yet-to-be acknowledged unEuropean or unAmerican artists who are in an apparently similar almost-post-imperial predicament.

More significant than their dialogue with Bernard Smith is their engagement with the work of that other Smith: Terry Smith. Smith is a prominent Australian art historian and interpreter of global art, who for decades has been visible on the international artscene and, until relatively recently, resided in the United States. Butler and Donaldson refer to his famous essay ‘The Provincialism Problem’ (1974), in which he argued that artists from peripheral countries, no matter the knowledge and experience gained in cultural centres, inevitably struggle against being considered imitative and, therefore, deficient. His essay is referenced at various points. On each occasion and despite all their efforts otherwise, Butler and Donaldson’s concept of unAustralian art struggles to overcome the inertia of Terry Smith’s assertion that artists from Australia are always likely to be condemned as provincial.

Butler and Donaldson’s choice to focus almost entirely on artists of the modern era – that is, from the nineteenth century to the postwar period of the twentieth, the era spanned by the two Smiths –  has allowed them to disengage from issues that beset contemporary Australia, a cultural predicament in which the concept of post-nationalism is increasingly useful. Under the aspect of post-nationalism, their concept of unAustralian Art comes off as an awkward designation, for in what way is the unAustralian distinguishable from a generalised globalism? What they want to describe as unAustralian art only makes sense in relation to an already somewhat anachronistic and simplified notion of what was Australian.

Equally, Butler and Donaldson assume that the individual artists they look at would have self-identified as Australian and are thereby able to be re-classified as unAustralian. Would not many of those artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century have been happy enough to be recognised as British first, and then only notionally, ideally, or incidentally as Australian? The problem that empire poses for national identity is elided by the authors in their proposing, and then ascribing to their subjects, unAustralianness without fully considering what may be appropriate to these figures, each of whom had their own unique position and articulation of the issues. As imperial subjects, travelling Australians have usually found themselves rendered invisible or, indeed, ‘ghosted’ – being regarded as neither Australian by the home audience, nor as British by those who could determine the nature and composition of proper British Imperial culture.

An awareness of the strange phantasmagoria of imperial subjecthood and its effect on these unAustralian artists was with me until half-way through the book. There I found that Butler and Donaldson do, indeed, address the subject in their chapter ‘Another Australia: British-Australian Art 1880-1970’. Reading that chapter made me recall the controversies surrounding the 2013 exhibition AUSTRALIA at London’s Royal Academy Galleries, which demonstrated that even the most straightforward Australian art history, of the kind opposed by Butler and Donaldson, can be a confusing and unsettling venture, especially when it is presented in the heart of British culture.

By chance, I was in London at the time of that exhibition and met with an Australian art historian who had admitted that he would not go to the show because he assumed it to have been poorly conceptualized (and also perhaps because its organisers had excluded him from its development). I met with a prominent British art-critic who had recently seen the show. While admitting to knowing next to nothing about Australian Art, she was able to point out to me the ways in which the show was deficient, all of them unsurprising and correct. There definitely was the impression in the media, both in the UK and in Australia, that London critics had dismissed the exhibition.

Yet I was moved by AUSTRALIA – by its evocation of Australian light and landscape, by the familiarity and boldness of some of the Indigenous works, in particular my own favourites, Emily Kame Kngwarreye and Rover Thomas, whose work I have known from well before he was on the national art scene. Entering those large galleries of the Royal Academy from London’s wintery streets, I certainly did feel the warmth of our supposedly far-flung continent. Given what is usually said about Australian art, especially after Terry Smith – about the provincial belatedness of the artists’ absorption of current international styles – I felt, seeing how stylistically current non-Indigenous artists have always been, that it may actually be the opposite. It may not be cultural distance so much as the lack of a sufficiently severe distance or rupture between those Australian artists and the outside world that was the cause of their various difficulties and alleged provincialism.

As much as Butler and Donaldson question previously articulated, yet unresolved, issues within the discourse of Australian art, they also seem drawn to the art-object itself. This may be the influence of Donaldson, who is both an art historian and practicing artist. Unlike the artist/person who may be casually called unAustralian, the art-object is ambiguous because it is an inarticulate thing circulated within networks that when displaying the work, turn it into a cultural statement. The work’s ‘meaning’, that is, arises out of the conjunction of object and institutional context. Butler and Donaldson claim, more unequivocally than is warranted, the artworks themselves for their project of unAustralian Art, yet, tellingly, they frequently refer back to the biographies of the artists to convince us of the unambiguously unAustralian pedigree of the art.

In the chapter ‘Another Australia: British-Australian Art 1880-1970’, Butler and Donaldson propose their own eccentric ‘conceptual exhibition’, an unAustralian Art alternative to the AUSTRALIA show:

Following the layout of the AUSTRALIA exhibition at the Royal Academy, the authors take us on a tour of the individual galleries and their own displays which range from the presence of unAustralians at The Royal Academy and various societies, clubs and artists’ colonies, to the striking confluence of figures in what they have called ‘Diasporic and Expatriate Modernism in 1930s London’, featuring Roy de Maistre, Francis Bacon, Douglas Cooper and Patrick White.  However, in imagining their exhibition, I failed to see how any part of it really conformed to the satirical mode. ‘Satire’ is wrongly applied here: satire is performed for the purpose of critique, while parody itself is humorously exaggerated imitation. Might not Butler and Donaldson have better termed their project a pastiche in the Francophile manner of post-modernism?

What they have proposed is foremost a series of microhistories, each presented as part of a riposte to the institutionally conformist national Australian art history project. Following this scheme, each gallery becomes a detailed presentation of the connections between the two countries. There should be no doubt that the original AUSTRALIA exhibition was a singular opportunity. According to Butler and Donaldson, the last similar national survey show in a major British gallery was held at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1963. The logistics and enormous cost of arranging anything like that again means that another such exhibition is likely decades away. It is hard to imagine that even an exhibition akin to Butler and Donaldson’s more modest project could presently be realised in Britain. As enjoyable as this strange bibliophilic – or Borgesian – attempt at an account of unAustralian art may be, the reality is that these two art historians have had to take refuge in a fantasy to escape their profound disappointment with both the past and the present.

The art-historical pitfalls of an unAustralian approach are most evident in those chapters where the authors themselves feel compelled to admit that they are pressing the limits of their rhetoric. In their chapter ‘Surrealism and Australia: Towards a World History of Surrealism’, Butler and Donaldson write that ‘no Australians were involved in the original formulation of surrealism’. Undaunted, they then recover traces of an unAustralian Surrealism in a wide range of places, from London to New Zealand, and even in South Australia, in the work of the undoubtedly very interesting Czech brothers Dušan and Voitre Marek. Butler and Donaldson’s engagement with all these figures is not unjustified, although it is extremely doubtful whether these artists alone can help prop up the claim that ‘if surrealism can be seen today from a global perspective, the very notion of globalism is surrealist.’

This chapter opens with the famous hand-drawn map of le monde au temps des surrealiste [The World at the Time of the Surrealists] (1929), a work that in recent decades has been rightly criticised for diminishing and erasing much of the world from which originated the indigenous art that inspired the group. It closes with speculation on that same map, suggesting, intriguingly, that it may have been drawn by the poet Paul Éluard after he travelled through the South Pacific and South East Asia in 1924. In their enthusiasm, Butler and Donaldson, following their modus operandi, identify relations between unAustralian artists and their internationally recognised peers, evoking contexts for the artists and then positing their significance. They fail to carefully contemplate the implicit ethical problems created by the particular phantasm of internationalism that they have designated as unAustralian. Butler and Donaldson are not enacting a retrospective analysis of forgotten artists because they are, principally, playing catch-up, calling for a recognition of their unAustralian artists’ presence in the various, already known international art scenes. Then there is the difficult issue of the Surrealists’ and, by extension, unAustralian artists’ appropriation of the artworks of indigenous peoples, which contradicts the purportedly anti-colonial aims of the international Surrealist movement. Butler and Donaldson do not question the material role of the unAustralian in the maintenance of the Surrealists’ geography. On that famous map, Australia is a shrunken island, while New Guinea is continental in size. It may be instructive to recall not only that New Guinea was an Australian colony for a time, but also that before the National Gallery in Canberra made Australian Indigenous art a major curatorial focus, they were actively collecting work from that amazing, massive island to our north.

The Surrealists’ map is striking for the boldness with which it inadvertently displays its complicities. In their enthusiastic drawing together of unAustralian art and Surrealism, Butler and Donaldson have revealed the unavoidably Western European origins of the unAustralian, unfortunately yoking the emancipatory potential of their project to the history of European imperialism. What is empire if not, in part, a cartographic sleight-of-hand?

Fifteen or twenty years ago, I would have regarded the idea of an unAustralian art as an empowering proposal, one with which to counter conventional Australian art history and facilitate a critique of the art produced in this society. In the intervening period, Indigenous assertions of sovereignty and nationhood have thwarted facile responses to our political predicament, caught as settler Australian culture is between an anti-British nationalism and the realpolitik of US-defined globalism. This is something that the authors acknowledge at the start of the book:

This is partially correct – only partially, for the reason that Indigenous artists in their practices generally affirm a particular variety of nativism, one that is not usually described as such because the conjunction of race and nation is regarded as highly problematic in most contemporary political contexts. Over recent decades Indigenous writers – Marcia Langton and Bruce Pascoe, foremost for me among them – have shown that the notion of Country allows the integration of Indigenous/nativist claims to land ownership and participation in a community with the self-assertion of cultural uniqueness. The current Australian government’s restructuring of the former Australia Council for the Arts, now Creative Australia, in such a way as to foreground Indigenous culture – ‘First Nations First’ – is a clear affirmation of Indigenous culture’s increasing priority in the nation’s public life. Paradoxically, this type of governmental recognition of Indigenous sovereignty often requires that Indigenous cultures be present in and bolster public displays of Australian nationhood, sometimes despite the ambivalence or outright hostility of Indigenous peoples who have been asked to be involved.

Of course, Australian art history may no longer possible. This is not due solely to the conceptual or historical disruption caused by Indigenous art, but actually because the terms of modern nationhood – a common language, shared politics and culture, and a self-identifying people – are, at the current governmental scale, less and less tenable for contemporary, globalising societies. Indeed, following the logic of Butler and Donaldson’s work, is it not the case that all art of immigrant-settlers could be thought of as unAustralian? Between the modern period that is the book’s focus and today, so much has changed that Butler and Donaldson’s rhetoric of a via negativa seems to have little purchase on contemporary globalised cultures. And yet, nevertheless, there are real similarities between modernism’s transnational past, even if it was largely within the Anglosphere, and our globalised present that point to the necessity of finding a new nomenclature and context for the artworks brought to our attention in this unusual book. 

What Butler and Donaldson have proposed amounts to a hopeful, inclusive historical revisionism that is necessary because in today’s institutional environment they justifiably fear the untenability of a national art history. They may also be doubting the possibility of art history itself. In their introduction they make the point that ‘the decline in the study of Australian art is mirrored in the diminution of the authority of the speciality curator of Australian art in our state and national galleries’. Their frustration is palpable. Unsympathetically heaping a significant amount of blame on senior curators and gallery and museum directors, they then diagnose this ‘diminution’ as part of a wider cultural and economic malaise, usually described in the media as a consequence of broadly implemented economic rationalism. Due to the lingering effects of a conservative white nationalism as well as the social fragmentation occasioned by increasing global mobility, hyper-capitalism, and unchecked digitalisation, art historians in the position of Butler and Donaldson may have no other possibility available to them other than a kind of desperately wide-ranging but, ultimately, ghostly alternative nationalism.

Despite the problematics of the discourse the authors have made for themselves, UnAustralian Art is the most exciting and enlivening work in the field of Australian art history to have appeared for decades, and it has no real precedent. Butler and Donaldson’s work retroactively prepares Australian art history for the absorption of the work of internationally orientated scholars of Australian modernism, such as the Sydney historian Ann Stephens, as well as for the work of a range of more recent art-historians, figures like Helen Hughes, Amelia Barikin, and Anthony Gardiner.

The Australian art historian Ian McLean, whose work of the past decade or two (seen in Double Nation and Rattling Spears), has pursued a kind of ‘two-state solution’ to manage the profound upheaval Indigenous art has caused in the paddock of Australian art. In his introduction to Double Nation, McLean touches on the coinage of the ‘unAustralian’, locating its early usage in the work of the unavoidable Bernard Smith and noting, in contradistinction and somewhat mischievously, that Butler and Donaldson use the term ‘as a nudge for the reader to ask through what exclusions the national appears in art’. McLean's characterisation understates the ambition of Butler and Donaldson’s project, especially as it manifests itself in this vivid, excessive, and fast-paced book – a book that in its polemics and contradictions will inevitably prompt the writing of more detailed and more polemical scholarship, irrespective of whether that art history is unAustralian or, less provocatively, merely Australian.