|
ART - AUSTRALIAN - PORTRAITS OF POWER - REVIEW |
|
Portraits
of power ABR
editor, Peter Rose, commissioned this essay, asking for between 2,000
and 2,500 words. For reasons of space, he cut it back to 2,000. Those
edits removed the penultimate paragraph on philanthropy. I accepted the
other cuts but requested the restoration of this paragraph and proposed
an alternative cut. Rose was not happy with this suggestion but I
believed that he would restore the section. Instead, he persisted in
what I see as censorship. Had I known of his intention, I would have
withdrawn the article. I had thought of returning the cheque to show
that not everyone can be bought. I realised that this would be to reward
the offender. Instead, I donated the dollars to the strike fund of the
Westgate workers. When
the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) opened in Canberra last December
more thoughtfulness was evident in its bookshop than the hang. The
volumes are arranged by subject and in alphabetical order: the images
accord to no principle beyond decor. Here are five writers; there, four
scientists. The randomness of the whole embodies a culture of
distraction. The root of this muddle is an evasion of whether the
Gallery is to be guided by aesthetics or museology. The want of clarity
is compounded by concern among staff not to be identified with a history
museum, thereby marring their prospects of finding positions at fine art
institutions. Beyond
these peculiarities, the objection to a Portrait Gallery for Australia
is immanent in its reason for being. The enterprise began in 1992
as a traveling exhibition of ‘Uncommon Australians’ which I
dissected in the September 1992 issue of 24
Hours under the headline ‘An Exhibition of Uncommon Snobbery’.
My summation was that the undertaking combined ‘bad history and
inadequate psychology with inferior art’. Nothing has improved. The
initial selection was allowed into State Galleries because their
Directors sought to keep sweet with its sponsors Gordon and Marilyn
Darling, since his Foundation funded other art projects. In
1994, the Darlings’ scheme came to rest in the rear of old Parliament
House, with a permanent collection, and special exhibitions of varying
merit, historically and artistically. With Janette Howard as Chief
Patron of the Portrait Gallery, the Howard government in 2004 authorised
construction as a monument to the kind of art you prefer when you
don’t much care for art, and to a version of the past which will not
challenge what you remember from school. From its inception, the Gallery
has been implicated in what became known as the history wars. The
Darlings adopted the promoting of ‘notable’ Australians in the
wash-up from the 1988 Bi-Centennial celebrations when Gordon Darling was
not the only mining company director to feel that his ilk were no longer
receiving the respect they deserved. The
NPG has ended up with neither the narrative beloved by Howard nor a
cultural studies treatment traduced by his lackeys. For example, early
nineteenth-century explorers and settlers have a room of their own for
which viewers are provided with no sense of how those figures related to
each other, let alone to the patterns of invasion. As a minimum, the
room needs a time-line of governors for a citizenry uncertain of whose
landing, and where, are commemorated on Australia Day. The
architecture bears no mark of Australianness unless concret
brut is to become our national style. If so, the newcomer keeps
company with the High Court and National Gallery but scorns the faux
Classicism of the marbled National Library and the plastic toilet block
which houses the Science and Technology Centre. The NPG’s warehouse
design and barren approaches are as antithetical to their environs of
lake, lawns and rose-gardens as they are forbidding to visitors. This
hostility will disappear behind trees, as has most of the great Canberra
ugliness. Because visitors need not pass the information desk before
entering the main display areas they are less than likely to pick up the
floor plan they will need to navigate that maze. On
entering, viewers encounter an assortment of twenty ‘Unsung Heroes’
and ten Australians in the ‘forefront of contemporary life’, as
judged by the public. A partiality is concealed in the selection because
the voting took place through the ABC. How likely is it that Bill Deane
would have made the top ten if the poll had been conducted over 2GB
Talkback? An
invitation to vote cannot disguise the undemocratic bent of the
institution’s choices. The class slant of ‘notable’ has resurfaced
with portraits of tax-cheats such as the cattle king Sidney Kidman, and
fascists such as Francis de Groot. No trade union leader is shown unless
he became prime minister, as for Hughes, Curtin and Chifley. By
abolishing organised labour, the NPG delivers the triumph that John
Howard did not get with WorkChoices. Indeed,
the images go even further by eliminating work, an erasure which is
standard operating procedure for bourgeois culture predicated on
consumption. In the special show for the launch, ‘Open Air, Portraits
in the landscape’, almost the only people working are artists, and all
but one of them are Aborigines, unless we accept Jeffrey Smart’s
‘David Malouf’ as a bowser attendant as more than a conceit. In the
main display, scientists are to be seen at their laboratory benches and
cricketers at the crease, but there is nothing like Dobell’s anonymous
cement worker of whose kind Mary Gilmore wrote: ‘I split the rock, /I
felled the tree. /The nation was/Because of me’. Far
from sampling Australia’s sprawl of occupations and types, the
portraits are so demographically askew that a Martian would report that
nearly half the Australian population has been employed in the arts.
This lopsidedness is another way for the staff to cling to fine art, as
is the special exhibition ‘Open Air’ where the quality of the
exhibits is superior to those elsewhere in the Gallery, but tangential
to portraiture. ‘Commoners’
can be glimpsed in a card photo of John and Jemima Winter from the
1890s, which reminds us that there is no family album of Box Brownie
snaps from suburbia, although those kept by the Blaxlands and the
Deakins are included; a family of Mackenzies appear in silhouette,
appropriately for their unknown lives. The tug of pathos contributed to
the inclusion of the composite portrait of three members of a family
drowned with the sinking of the Dunbar
in 1857. Uncle Tom Cobbly has filled in the cracks with the three
policemen killed by the Kelly gang, six convicts from Port Arthur, an
Aboriginal cricket team, four members of the 2nd AIF, and two
society ladies from The Home. Crowd
scenes are no guarantee of a temper democratic beyond the reach of
filthy lucre. For instance, ‘Derby Day’ (1890) by the Austrian-born
Carl Kahler, shows Melbourne parvenu, some of whom bribed the artist to place them close to the
gubernatorial party. Kahler undertook such jobs in the expectation that
those depicted would purchase photo-engravings from his paintings. No
mention of this racket appears on the wall notice. One
defence of portraiture is the artist’s ability to reveal character.
Disproof of this claim is in the hectares of horrors at the War Memorial
which commissions oils of every serviceperson above a certain rank, and
every VC winner. Portraits can be distinctive as art and perceptive in
character studies, as in ‘Manning Clark’ by Arthur Boyd - but they
had been life-long friends. In the ninety-nine other cases out a
hundred, the painter has neither the technical knack nor the
sensibilities to come within coo-ee of psychological depth. These
incapacities are blatant in the bulk of the self-portraits at the NPG.
Hence, Robert Hannaford’s 1977 ‘Dame Joan Sutherland’ surprises
with its mood of resignation verging on sadness from her career as a
Trilby, evoking her lament about Ricky Bonynge: ‘If I don’t do what
he wants, he’ll leave me. And I love him’. As
often as not, the want of quality in portraits is an accurate response
to subjects who are so one-dimensional as to defy caricature. Jiawei
Shen’s ‘Princess Mary of Denmark’ is as flat and as empty as her
claims to fame. Had she not been out clubbing during the Sydney Olympics
she would not be on magazine covers, still less snap-frozen in oil.
Perhaps Shen is mocking her lack of distinction by including the Opera
House by the Danish Architect Jorn Utzon and by adorning her with the
Order of the Elephant. The
double portrait of the Howards by Josonia Palaitis has been tut-tutted
for breaking with tradition by including the spouse in the official
portrait of a prime minister. Here too, visual falsity has secured the
painting’s purchase on truth and as an archival document. Through the
strain of trying to appear as ordinary as they are, Janette is relaxed
and comfortable while John seems absent, as if his grinning head had
been sewn on by Dr Frankenstein. His clutching her shoulder does not
speak of conjugal bliss. The background looks like a cloth in a
photographers’ studio, not the Kirribilli House harbourscape to which
it alludes. Opening
an institution calls for statements of intent, announcing how you mean
to go on. The NPG gives no hint of getting beyond shuffling its
collection. Being given a package of 500 stamps of the world does not
make a child a philatelist. I shall now suggest concepts for four
special exhibitions. That all of these suggestions need not have been
presented at the one time is no excuse for the curators’ failing to
think up at least one statement of consequence for themselves. First,
the NPG might have focused on the best-known element of face-making in
Australia - the Archibald - and the reactions to it in the Bald Archies,
a Salon des Refuses, the Doug
Moran Prize to counter Modernism, and the Portia Geach Prize for women
portrait-painters to redress the predominance of males as Archibald
winners. The NPG could have illuminated this circus through sampling one
winner per decade to track the fashion in taste, spotlighting the social
prejudice built into portraiture by the shock of giving the 1934 Prize
to a painter who had portrayed himself as a relief worker.
Alternatively, the opening might have showcased one of the regular
Archibald prize-takers by bringing together the seven winning portraits
of W B McInnes between 1921 and 1936, or the eight by William Dargie
from 1934 to 1956. Secondly,
the opening of a portrait gallery is an occasion to survey the
traditions of the genre through changes in media from oils and
miniatures to snapshots and now Face Book. Access to images spread with
developments in printing techniques from woodblocks through
photolithography to the colour covers on Who
Weekly glimpsed at supermarket checkouts. Those mass magazines
spurred on paparazzi so that full-frontal nudes, or digitalised
makeovers, of screen and sports ‘stars’, are downloadable for free.
Just as marketers transferred ‘glamour’ from Hollywood to packaged
suet, so ‘star’ is now bestowed on performers better designated as
satellite debris. Attention to how faces have come to occupy so
prominent a place in our consciousness would alert visitors to the NPG
to the prejudices lurking in oil paint and gilded frames. Thirdly,
enough family portraits are available to track the lineages of, say, the
Fairfaxes or the Wentworths, using those clusters to explore Francis
Galton’s notion of inherited genius, or Cesare Lombroso’s claims
about congenital criminality. That inquiry would reconnect portraiture
to phrenology and to the trade in skulls of primates and Aborigines used
to demonstrate evolutionary progress, as at the Australian Institute of
Anatomy. The Darwin commemorations are an added reason to include pages
from Darwin’s The Expression of
the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Fourthly,
the NPG could have set aside one of its bays for an interrogation of the
career of a prominent figure, Mary Gilmore or WM Hughes, by bringing
together artifacts and images across the decades, including film clips
and sound bites. No attempt has been made to integrate media and
materials as at the exposition of geographer Griffith Taylor in the
entrance walk to the National Library, where his publications and
equipment, voice and visage, offer a composite account. Instead,
the Dobell portrait of RG Menzies for a cover of Time
in 1960 is stuck up without reference to the contretemps it provoked,
and with none of the related visuals, not even a Time
cover. Wrenched from its circumstances, the meaning of this portrait is
distorted. The
NPG has not been able to conceal its poverty of ideas by borrowing
images that few of us would otherwise ever see. For example, the
juxtaposing of two by Tom Roberts reveal how he succeeded at positioning
heads and shoulders against striking red backgrounds with the Edward
Ogilvie but failed in Alexander Onslow. A suite of Roberts’s portraits
is offered but not written up as a group, nor are we reminded of his
distaste for face-making or his pursuit of commissions to earn a quid:
‘I’ve painted kids in every pose,/ A’kissing their mammie or
smelling a rose’, he used to sing, ‘Commissions came in by the
score,/ But I resolved to paint no more./ Kiss-Manny school was much too
low./ So in for ‘Higher Art’ I’d go’. Need
those of us who believe that the building should never have been funded
admit defeat? Lindsay Tanner’s razor-gang on the last budget found it
more expensive to suspend construction than to finish. Future rounds of
cuts will raise questions of how to make a financially responsible use
of the space. The first step will be to return the portraits to Old
Parliament. The new building should then become an annex of the National
Library so that the vastness of its visual holdings can be available to
the public while sparing its managers the embarrassment of not being
able to raise the money for their proposed Treasures Gallery. Who
is footing the bill for arts patronage generally will not be clear until
the donors’ tax returns are as publicised as their benefactions. The
funds for the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute came from a mining-share
scam managed by Lord Casey’s father. Ian Potter set up his Foundation
in the middle of his stock-price manipulation of Cox Bros, from the
consequences of which malfeasance he was protected by his links to the
Liberal Party and the Herald and Weekly Times. Dick Pratt gave away some
of the millions that he had obtained through price-fixing which
increased the cost of every packaged consumer item, making all
Australians unconscious philanthropists. The co-founder of construction
business, Transfield, and arts patron, the late Franco Belgiorno-Nettis,
admitted that to make millions, ‘[s]ometimes you need to bribe, to be
tough, even to be inhuman … We camouflage this with a veneer of
civilisation’. Charging
that a portrait gallery of ‘notables’ must be un-Australian is not
to deny that snobs and sycophants have been as commonplace among us as
those who, like Alfred Deakin and CEW Bean, spurned Imperial baubles.
‘Un-Australian’ is a value judgement, not an average. The impetus
for a National Portrait Gallery has been un-Australian in the sense of
denying Henry Lawson’s ‘They call no biped lord or “sir”’ and
depreciating the reluctance among the AIF to salute. Yet the farrago at
the NPG is now typical of that strand of Australians who are in the
death agonies of groveling towards the rich and powerful, here and
abroad. |