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ART - AUSTRALIAN - IAN BURN - REVIEW |
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Ian
Burn, Dialogue Writings in Art History, (Allen & Unwin) – a book review By reading Ian Burn’s
selected essays in the order of their first publication, I perceived a
strand through his thinking which may not be so clear if you accept the
author’s arrangement, which begins in 1985, goes back to 1968 and
concludes with 1988. Since the seventeen essays are not grouped, any
rationale for Burn’s pattern was not obvious enough to convince me to
follow it. What I discovered
instead is that one way by which semiotics entered the domains of art
criticism and art history had been through reactions against
Greenberg’s Formalism, and a simultaneous extension of this doctrine
into Conceptual Art. In a 1975 account of “The art market: Affluence
and degradation”, Burn writes of artists confronted with “the
impossibility of content, of saying anything whatsoever.” In the
1960s, part of that void was filled by criticism, though less from
Greenberg than from his parochial epigones, such as Patrick McCaughey. Ian Burn and his
colleagues took one step further when they promoted Art & Language
in which artists wrote and spoke instead of pursuing the material
practices of painting or moulding. In reaction against not being
supposed to say anything, Burn and friends fell victim to logorrhea. As
first cousins to the Art & Language crowd, the Conceptualists
collapsed into a more extreme philosophical Idealism by implying
(‘saying” what they meant would have been self-contradictory) that
it was enough for the artist to think an idea/image for the effort of
creation to be complete. Thus had god made the world out of nothing.
Artists were back to playing god. Burn did not tumble
down the bunny-hole of semi-idiotics. Anti-imperialist politics turned
him along a tracks towards cultural regionalism, even nationalism. His
commentaries on landscapes by Nolan and Williams are a way of bonding
himself to Australia. Burn criticises Dorothea Mackellar’s claim that
those who do not love Australia cannot understand why she preferred a
sunburnt country. He has failed to appreciate that her intuition grew
not from mystical contemplation but from the labours of changing the
environment. [I would now rephrase that sentence: He has failed to
appreciate that such intuition could grow from the labours of changing
the environment, and not from mystical contemplation.] Is that why I cannot
recognise the imagery of Fred Williams in Burn’s claim that
“Williams excluded virtually all explicit reference to the impact of
modernization, or even human presence I the landscape”? To my mind’s
eye, the reverse is true. Williams’s iconic canvases are constructed
around tree stumps, fences, clear-felling, roads and power lines as the
funeral posts in our national development. A friend’s
Introduction extols Burn’s “pictography”m in other words, his
attention to recurrent devices in paintings. The essays display less of
this knack than that praise promises. When Burn does interrogate the
internal workings of a canvas, his interpretations are a good more
intrusive than historians allow ourselves. The title of the
opening essay asks the important question: “Is Art History Any Use to
Artists?”, which Burn made no attempt to answer, though a companion
piece “Artists in the Labour Movement” provides handy tips. One aspect of that
question deserving our notice is the extent to which an art
history-theory curriculum which takes painting as its reference point is
useful students of ceramics, or the other crafts. There are a priori
reasons for suspecting that such a pedagogy must alienate those
conscripts. One solution is to make art history a workshop practice, in
which silversmiths, sculptors or photographers – as well as painters
and print-makers – impart their skills in alliance with a conceptual,
not just a chronological, history of their art form. Art historians, as much
as artists, need to learn how to see the present as history by
considering its dynamics. Dates and slide tests about Rubens or Marion
Mahony are of limited worth. Burn’s question is
worth inverting: “Are artists any us to Art History?” Since most of
our leading artists and craftspeople have been eager for historical
information, reading widely and looking hard, being fine pictographers,
they are as likely to talk as knowledgeably about Mannerism or the
interchange between Bernard Leach and Hamada Shoji as is any tenured
academic. Whether they are better able to convey their knowledge through
tutorials or conference papers will be a matter of temperament and
experience, as it is for the amateur pedagogues tethered to our tertiary
classrooms. Where the artists’ contribution to art historical
knowledge is disputable is in regard to their own times and practices.
Scholars should interview artists only after they have worked through
all the other sources. Better than most of us, artists create legends
along with their other works. The least convincing explanation is “But
that is what the painter said himself.” Even when artists can
find no factual errors in an account of their working lives, they will
respond to texts about themselves by muttering: “Well, it didn’t
feel like that at the time!” I never does. What they felt at the time
were a thousand-and-one daily tasks. Painters can remain convinced of
their genius without appreciating how the grind of stretching, priming,
dining out, scrimping money and squandering Chinese White are proof of
their talent, or more. Retrospectives unnerve artists, which goes to
explain why Burn has not presented his writing in their order of
composition. Burn’s writings
present a different difficulty because he is the artist presenting
himself as car critic/historian. Just as every work of art is a critique
of previous art, so analysis by an artist manqué can become a way of
painting with words instead of by numbers. Burn’s practical experience
of making art allows him to see some aspect more readily than I, who has
not drawn since primary school. James MacDonald growled in the 1930s
that the scholars knew everything about Art with a capital-A, but
nothing about the techniques of painting. True. But Burn’s hand-on
expertise brings its own impediments. He is reluctant to keep his hands
off other people’s canvases, just as I am always tempted to edit any
text as if it were one of my own drafts. Hence, the “Dialogue” in
Burn’s title is often little more than a debate between his
achievements and his ambitions. Confronted with the
task of writing a catalogue essay about a collection of inter-war
Australian paintings by nonentities such as William Rowell and W. D.
Knox, Burn attempted to compensate for their insipidness with his own
ideas. The result is a pale reflection of Greenberg’s achievement for
the Formalists, for whom he supplied a flattened history and a
philosophy in depth. As the man said: if you stare at a blank wall long
enough, you will begin to see patterns, go mad, or both. That there was more to
our Aryan Pastoralism that the mechanical reproduction of gum trees can
be seen from Gruner and Heysen. Yet Burn mentions Heysen only in a
quotation and Gruner not at all, although one of his paintings has
managed to get itself reproduced. Would one by W, B. McInnes have been
too appalling? Or had Bur thought up these notions in relation to Gruner
and varnished them over Rowell, Knox and co.? The question that Burn
wanted to explore is far more significant than the artists about who he
had been asked to write. Even with Heysen, Meldrum and Gruner as your
case studies, a Chinese wall exists between informed taste and any
upward re-evaluation of non-Modernist Australian art from the first
quarter of the twentieth century. In the draft of The
Black Swan of Trespass, I referred to Heysen as a Modernist because
he reacted to the same set of political and cultural problems as did
Preston when she applied Cubism to our landscape. That late Graeme
Sturgeon advised me to delete that appellation because to call Heysen a
Modernist would so confuse most readers that they would not be able to
deal withy the rest of the book. I followed that suggestion and still
think it was the right course to take, at that time. Alvin Toffler
observed that if a book contains more than 20 per cent new information
it cannot expect a readership. When Burn does write
about artists who are accepted as significant his use of evidence is as
troubling as are his aesthetic judgements about Rowell or Knox. For
example, to support his claim that Heidelberg School painters shared the
mentality of “urban upper mille class “visitors” towards the bush,
he quoted the caption to an illustration from Federated
Australia – its Sceneries and Splendours. The first problem is
that this source appeared in 1901, fifteen years after what he
identifies as the two “key” works for his case were painted. Between
1886 and 1900, big changes overtook Victorian life with the boom, the
crash, strikes and drought. After those experiences, the passage cited
could be more idealizing of the bush than would have been common opinion
in the mid-Eighties. Enough 1880s tourist guides are available for
citation if you ask the reader’s advisor. More disconcerting is
Burn’s failure to transcribe a crucial qualifier – “Tasmanian”:
in the caption. Although photograph and caption are reproduced over the
page, Burn’s analysis never adverted to the specific locale being
described. Late last century, Tasmania (like New Zealand) was the summer
retreat for Vice-Regals and those who could afford not to work for
several weeks. Turn-of-the-century attitudes towards Tasmania’s
splendid scenery can no more be taken as typical for colonial Victoria
than a 1991 commentary about honeymooning at Port Douglas would give a
fair representation of environmental consciousness in suburban Kew. Burn begins his
argument in “Beating about the Bush” by excluding images that do not
fit. Thus, we are told that the key early examples were Roberts’s The
Artists’ Camp (1886) and McCubbin’s Lost
(1886). Burn cannot avoid
seeing that Streeton’s Fire’s
On! “includes a scene showing the body of a worker killed by an
explosion.” The convolution in his treatment of this painting suggest
that he has not been able to convince even himself of the admission
rules he has laid down. Relations between
working life and the Heidelberg men and women were more fluid than Burn
allows. At McCubbin’s prompting, the Australian Artists’ Association
donated paintings to be sold on behalf of the 83 coalminers killed in
the 1887 disaster at Bulli (NSW). That attempt cannot transform the
Heidelberg school into proletarians, but it complicated Burn’s
placement of them at so great a distance from working lives. The way forward
requires not only “a closer analysis of the pictures” (pictography),
but also strenuous archival research located within wider and deeper
historical sensibilities shaped by a view of the relations between
intellectuals and social classes such as the one proposed by Marx: What
makes them representatives … is the fact that in their minds they do
not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life,
that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same problems
and solutions to which material interest and social position drive the
latter practically. (“The Eighteenth Brumaire”) Social theory,
historical scholarship and visual acuity are equal partners in the
difficult business of seeing what is in front of our eyes. The absence of this
combination, especially a want of evidence, corners Burn into a
rhetorical device which becomes more transparent at each repetition. A
paragraph will open typically with a negative suggestion: Nolan
seems to have learned much from Fernand Leger … Before closing, without
benefit of evidence, upon the assertion that This
and other aspects of Leger’s cubism made their appearance in a number
of works by Nolan in the 1940s. (p. 68) If they did, we await
proof that Nolan thought about Leger in these ways. Nolan’s pastel
sketches from that period seem to incline as often towards Klee as
Leger. Burn might reply that
his evidence is in the structure of the paintings, which pictography
makes accessible. Even if we accept that Burn has identified parallels
between Leger and Nolan, that correspondence need not depend on direct
influence. (If Burn is anxious to find a Leger influence, he might
compare Nolan with Michael Shannon who studied with Leger in 1949.) In an attempt to find
implements of modernisation in Nolan’s landscape equivalent to the ballet
mechanique in Leger’s art, Burn fell back on the train – that
nineteenth-century means for tethering our bush to a wider world. At one
point he even manages to imagine one of those stream trains
“speeding” – something never achieved by any train I have waited
for at a level crossing in the country. He makes a better case for the
modernity of silos, the shape of which carry over into the Kelly
helmets. [Building silos was also the way that engineers learnt to use
the reinforced concrete that became the material for Modernist urban
architecture.] When Burn does attend
to a painting, he is often telling us what it would have meant if only
he had got around to painting it himself- a restatement of Art/Language?
He informs us that Nolan’s Wimmera landscapes confronted
me with some of my own sources of ideas and intuition about art here and
about the relations of a certain kind of image-making to a particular
intellectual and geographical environment. (p. 10) Did the pictures
“confront” Burn? Or did he attach them to his own
pre-existing concerns, allowing what he supposes to be art
history to replace art criticism as a new way of performing his
threadbare Conceptual games? |