Martin Edmond

The direction of indirection, or the discipline of indiscipline (to quote Frank Moorhouse) gives her writing a flow that is beguiling as well as relaxing. It suspends questions of interpretation and replaces them instead with interactions: the meaning of a work of art, whether from the Renaissance or from last week, is not to be written down like the answer to a question posed in an examination; it is found in our relationship to it, what we do or don’t do with or around it.

One of the pleasures of this book is that it introduces you to artists whose work you may not know very much about; another is to read Daniel Thomas on artists whose work you do know and love.

Incoherence, along with a lack of methodological rigour, is particularly apparent in most writing (not that there is much of it) about how practitioners in the visual arts in Australia and New Zealand have interacted with each other since James Cook sailed over the horizon in 1770.

Colin McCahon ceased painting in 1982. He locked his studio door and, as became apparent after his death in 1987, left his final painting, perhaps unfinished, face down on the floor. Its text, from Ecclesiastes, begins: I considered all the acts of oppression/under the sun; and ends: Here again I saw emptiness under/the Sun without son or brother/toiling endless yet never. It is unsigned and above those last words is a roughly oblong area of deep dark black.

With that a brilliant career as an artist of unstinting generosity, fierce commitment and unparalleled skill, concluded.

‘One essential insight is that the art always means something different to those who made it from what it means to those who buy it; and is understood differently again by those who curate, exhibit, collect, and write about it. Perhaps this is the case with all art, but an added complication with the art of the Western Desert is that there is a secret/sacred dimension to the imagery which may not be disclosed to those without rights to it.’

Fink is as scrupulous, in her way, as her subject was. By which I mean she is able, most of the time, to avoid comment. She doesn’t editorialise. The significance of events in Oliver’s life is allowed to emerge from contemporary testimony, perhaps, or from narrative juxtaposition, or simply because of the baleful grandeur of Oliver’s commitment to her work and the sometimes alarming consequences of her dedication.

Nothing is simple in this philosophical arena, where rattling spears and tjurunga contend with sextants and theodolites; cans of spray paint with the sepia tones of old colonial photographs. The question is how to make a future. If the Dreaming was always about eternity poured into time, the problem the Enlightenment brought with it—along with its Cartesian accoutrements—was how to protect eternity from time.

There have been many attempts to come to terms in print with the Nolan phenomenon, but only one full length biography … Now we have a second biography by art historian and curator Nancy Underhill.

I thank Paul Carter for his acute, sensitive and elegant reading of Battarbee and Namatjira. It is, as he says, a curious book; but I do not think that is a result of incuriosity on the part of its author. My overwhelming impression, when I began to research the subject, was of the weight of interpretation that had been placed upon the lives and works of these two men.

Dobell remains an enigma. Bevan says that nobody knew who he was, not even Dobell himself, but I doubt this. I think he knew himself exactly and chose not to communicate that knowledge to others, except parsimoniously in the paintings, and sometimes in life. Paradoxically, Dobell’s lifelong reticence is what makes Bill: The Life of William Dobell, although it has its faults, a valuable book.

A Bone of Fact is really memoir as a form of self-portraiture and, David Walsh being who he is, not much is held back. He is garrulous, sardonic, impudent, without shame and without inhibitions; but he also has a vein of kindness to his person that makes the encounter with him ultimately worthwhile.

Margaret Atwood, on a world tour to promote her new collection of fantastical stories, Stone Mattress: Nine Tales, when asked if she wrote climate fiction, responded thus: ‘I don’t even call it climate change, I call it “the everything change”. It’s a change of everything.’ Atwood was recently announced as the first contributor to Scottish artist Katie Paterson’s 100 year artwork, Future Library — Framtidsbiblioteket in Norwegian — for the city of Oslo. A thousand trees have been planted in a forest just outside the city, and they will supply paper for a special anthology of books to be printed in 100 years time.

Cultural diplomacy in a different form may have resolved one aspect of the Shiva issue, so called, which appears to have queered Radford’s chances of staying on in a job he had held for more than a decade. The work in question, an eleventh century Chola bronze statue of a dancing Shiva valued at $5.1 million, was among 21 items the NGA purchased from disgraced New York art dealer Subhash Kapoor, whom Interpol has called ‘the world’s biggest commodity smuggler’.

If, as Jensen suggests, Cullen was in his work a sort of shaman of suburbia, a lightning rod for its deficits and its hidden pain, this only serves to sharpen his loneliness. For shamanism was and is a communal profession, and Cullen was a deeply isolated man. His substance abuse, so called, can be seen through the same lens: a once communal act now indulged in agonised solitude.

Revisionist, indeed polemical, art histories are possible, although they tend to revise the art and its sequences – its ‘place’ in history – not the history itself. Sasha Grishin’s version, Australian Art: A History, is neither polemical nor revisionist; but it is curious. He takes what he considers to be an innovative, inclusive approach, beginning bravely with the assertion that his history is neither written piece-meal by a committee of experts, nor a frolic of his own, but combines both approaches.

Unified by the author’s fine writing and lively, non-judgemental voice, we have a narrative of transience that poses an elemental challenge to the demarcations of fiction and non-fiction and, in that way, to the politics supporting the inhumanity of the Australian migrant detention system today.

Battarbee and Namatjira remain, in their separate ways, like their beloved ghost gums, isolated in their landscapes. Their appeal is partly due to their political quietism. Their expressiveness is, in a way, like the treatment of the trees, deliberately enigmatic.