Every brilliant eye: Australian art of the 1990s, National Gallery of Victoria

Were the 1990s as miserable and disoriented as this NGV retrospective makes them appear?

Patricia Piccinini’s The mutant genome project (1994).

One may wonder, on first venturing into the NGV’s retrospective of the art of the 1990s in Australia, whether that decade was really as miserable and as disoriented as this exhibition makes it appear. This necessarily also raises questions about the role of art in speaking of the experience of its time, about the selection of work that we are seeing in this case, and ultimately about the gallery’s purchasing policy at the time, since the exhibition is drawn from work held in the permanent collection.

Politically, the decade was heir to the great events of 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, and with it the Iron Curtain, the Soviet empire and the whole of the Western communist world. Hungary and Czechoslovakia became free nations again, along with less familiar places such as Georgia and Ukraine, and even more distant ones such as Kazakhstan. There was only one superpower left, the US.

Communism had failed spectacularly, while the free market model had itself been updated by the reforms of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, decisively breaking the power of the old union system in England and revitalising the British economy, albeit at a high human and social cost. In Australia, Paul Keating applied the best of the lessons of the 80s and reformed the Australian economy in turn.

A new threat was slowly building with fundamentalist Islam, fuelled in the previous decade by the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and manifested throughout the 90s in conflicts in Bosnia, Algeria, Somalia and Kashmir, although the problem would not really attract the attention of the world until the March 2001 dynamiting of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan and the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks in the US.

Meanwhile, the Gulf war of 1990-91 seemed like a successful example of the new world order in which 35 nations, led by the US, acted to stop Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from annexing a small neighbour, Kuwait. At the beginning of the following decade, a coalition of nations once again attacked Iraq to drive Saddam from power; we had not yet realised that the Middle East has much worse threats than vile dictators.

But the first Gulf war also had a disconcerting side. For television audiences around the world, it became a spectacle in which formidable military technology could be watched from a safe distance. If the Vietnam War was the first TV war, in that instance leading audiences to see the horror of killing at close quarters, the Gulf war was a new kind of TV war in which viewers could enjoy the pyrotechnics of killing at a distance — just as in a video game, as it has so often been pointed out.

It was worrying enough that war was turned into a game, but even more worrying that games of war, at increasingly high levels of realistic rendering, were so immensely popular. Computer games had grown enormously in sophistication and popularity during the 80s, but in the 90s they gained momentum through the most important innovation of all, the internet. Throughout the decade, online multi-player games exploded in popularity.

The internet represented a revolution in communications. Most of us probably had internet access and email accounts through a university or other corporate service by the beginning of the 90s. Working in Paris in the mid-90s, I remember that the French at first barely knew of email — there were just three or four internet cafes in Paris. They had been ahead of the world with the Minitel system used with great success throughout the 80s, but it was rendered obsolete by the internet.

Email made it possible to maintain networks of friends around the world, and at least for a time even brought back the art of letter-writing, which had been in decline for at least a generation. The internet also allowed people with specialised interests to share resources and knowledge — but as we soon discovered, this could have bad as well as good consequences.

Criminals, terrorists and pornographers were all quick to see the potential of the internet and have remained among its greatest beneficiaries. Pornography became a vast new industry, eclipsing its earlier forms in print or film, and the internet enabled virtual sexual encounters under assumed identities of the player’s choice. And all this was, physically speaking at least, a form of safe sex.

In the real world, meanwhile, the AIDS disaster, which had arisen early in the 80s, was causing new deaths year after year. The age of sexual liberation and free love had lasted about two decades, from the invention of the contraceptive pill in the early 60s to the appearance of AIDS in the early 80s. As when syphilis had come back from the New World at the very end of the 15th century and swept Europe in the 16th century, a dark cloud of fear had settled over sexuality: the joy of sex, it seemed, was over.

Dale Frank’s The artist’s fairy floss ... (1991)

A number of works in the exhibition reflect this deeply unhappy relation to sexuality. One of the first we encounter is Dale Frank’s The artist’s fairy floss… (1991): the painting is effectively a kind of congested vortex of thick paint, converging on a centre which we are explicitly told to imagine as an anus. There is no question of imagining this as some kind of vision of the sublime or a vortex of space leading towards infinity: it is, rather, a view from the inside of a turgid and incomprehensible material world hastening towards the orifice of evacuation.

The anus appears again as a focal point, this time from the outside, in David McDiarmid’s Body language (1990), an assemblage of mirrored fragments that laments the loss of friends to AIDS and simultaneously tries to suggest that the authorities are somehow to blame. In another set of mock newspaper headlines he implicitly blames the general public for not taking the AIDS epidemic seriously, and for not valuing the lives of its victims.

Sexuality hardly appears except in the form of hysteria, posturing, insatiable appetite and self-loathing — a remarkable contrast with the celebration of beauty and desire in Australian art of the 30s, directly opposite on the same floor of the gallery. A neo-puritanical hatred for the body reaches its reductio ad absurdum with Julie Rapp’s infamous cast of her vagina, which goes further in the reductive objectification of the female body than the most explicit pornographic image. The only work in which beauty, energy and something of a sense of humour make an appearance is in Tracey Moffatt’s film Heaven (1997) and even here there are uncomfortable overtones in the voyeurism of the camera and the thuggishness of its subjects. But at least there is an acknowledgment of sexual attraction as a powerful force, and an interesting tension between the preening exhibitionism of the young men and their fundamental awkwardness at being stared at by women.

Constanze Zikos’s Fake flag (1994)

Other works reflect a mood of aimless disaffection and demoralisation, like Constanze Zikos’s version of the Australian flag painted on composition board with its stars painted as the star of David, the Maltese cross and so on, or Kathy Temin’s Duck-rabbit problem (1991), in which Wittgenstein’s example of an ambiguous image is turned into an oversized fluffy toy. Provocation has been reduced here to a game that quickly runs out of its power to surprise.

Grunge was one expression of a prevalent mood of blase cynicism; the other was kitsch, which had already appeared in the postmodern style that had arisen from the early 80s, contemporaneously with AIDS. Kitsch here is represented near the beginning of the exhibition in a painting by Matthys Gerber, Still life # 2 (Jugged Hare) (1990), in which porcelain figure sculptures stand around a plate of what is presumably meant to be the dish in question, rendered by the artist with the same glossy glaze finish as the porcelain sculptures. This decade also saw the beginning of the career of the queen of hi-tech kitsch sculpture, Patricia Piccinini, represented here by a couple of fairly harmless examples of digital painting.

Various forms of rather tired abstraction are included as well, including by a number of the artists discussed a few weeks ago in the context of the constructivism exhibition at Heide. And there is of course a selection of Aboriginal work, particularly by postmodern figures of the day such as Gordon Bennett.

What is striking in the exhibition as a whole is not only that it is singularly devoid of anything like joyfulness, warmth or hope, but even more fundamentally that it leaves no space for reflection and no option for quietness. It surrounds the viewer with a constant barrage of clutter and visual noise, as though the role of art were, like that of the mass media, to maintain the viewer in a constant state of uncomfortable and distracted arousal.

Annette Bezor’s No (1991).

But is this really all there was to the art of the 90s? Or is it simply a story put together by curators, and indeed reflecting the buying decisions of contemporary art curators in the 90s, who were buying according to the current fashions, just as their predecessors some decades earlier bought abstract paintings when they were in vogue?

The 90s were a time when contemporary curators began increasingly to dominate purchases in museums and they were mostly shopping from the same list, so that the same official favourites were supported by galleries, art magazines and funding bodies. Safety in numbers was the watchword of the new arts bureaucrats, and the results speak for themselves.

It would, indeed, be possible to put together quite a different exhibition, with artists who were not convinced that art was essentially moribund, condemned either to grunge or kitsch, or to dwell on the narcissistic futility of disco culture. This was, for example, the decade when Rick Amor developed as one of our most important contemporary painters. Bill Henson is represented, but selectively and not adequately.

There were countless other important and innovative artists in media from painting and sculpture to video and ceramics, artists who were not following the curatorium’s prescriptive set of rules. A different exhibition could potentially have been as interesting as Brave New World, the survey of the 30s. But as it is, we can see all too well why the latter is a ticketed exhibition with a catalogue while this one remains unticketed.

Every brilliant eye: Australian art of the 1990s, National Gallery of Victoria, until October 1.