Gippsland Art Gallery’s Timelapse compares prints and photographs

Gippsland Art Gallery’s new exhibition shows what is so good about Victorian regional galleries.

Rosemary Laing’s Groundspeed (Rose Petal) #17 (2001).

The regional galleries of Victoria never cease to surprise, not only with the extent of their collections but with the ambition of their exhibition programs. Among those most recently reviewed in this column, Ballarat mounted a retrospective of the paintings of Kevin Lincoln, and Geelong a monographic exhibition devoted to Arthur Streeton’s work after his return to Australia. Bendigo, Castlemaine, Mornington Peninsula, Shepparton and Mildura have also presented substantial shows reviewed here over the past couple of years.

This level of energy matches that of the National Gallery of Victoria, and both contrast strikingly with the situation in NSW, where regional galleries rarely offer exhibitions of this standard and where the Art Gallery of NSW has nothing like the NGV’s level of substantial internally generated exhibitions.

Victoria’s regional galleries grew in two phases. The first came in the second half of the 19th century, when the new prosperity generated by the gold rush encouraged civic ambition in regional cities such as Ballarat, whose gallery was founded in 1866, only five years after the NGV itself, Warrnambool (1886), Bendigo (1887), Geelong (1900) and Castlemaine (1913).

The Great War brought an end to this expansive period, and the next wave of regional galleries did not appear until well after World War II, a fact that suggests something deeper about the changes in Australian culture. Not only was there no money for art galleries during the wars and the Depression; there was some more fundamental rupture in the continuity of tradition.

Public galleries had arisen in the 19th century because of a belief in the educational and civilising role of art. At the most utilitarian level, there was the urgent need to raise standards of design in the new industrial age, which also lay behind the foundation of what became the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. But there was also a realisation of the value of drawing and painting as part of a rounded education, the new belief in the importance of history, which had developed since the romantic period, and at the highest level, a belief that art could make us better, more refined and more humane.

From this perspective, building a gallery and acquiring a collection, some of which would document the history of the area, became a civic priority for any respectable city. War and economic turmoil inflicted setbacks to such ambitions, but changes in the ethos of modern art were just as significant. Artists were less interested in representing their region or its history, less attached to the continuity of tradition and even less convinced of their civilising mission.

The early modernist painters of Australia were much less ambitious: they mainly sought to paint colourful pictures for smart modern interiors. The official narrative of modernism is all about innovation and breaking with convention, but the reality is a turn from public or civic concerns to private ones. Modern art becomes a decoration for the middle-class home, and is advertised and disseminated through a middle-class ladies’ magazine, The Home.

A more angry, desperate and expressionistic form of modernism arises during World War II and in its aftermath, but it is at once introverted in its concerns and alienated from a wider social community. Eventually some of the works produced by the artists of this time come to be seen as expressing a quintessentially Australian vision, but only because alienation and anxiety come to be accepted as part of our modern national sensibility.

The second wave of public galleries in Victoria began with Mildura Art Centre in 1956, followed by Hamilton (1961), Swan Hill (1964), Shepparton (1965), Sale (1965), Ararat (1968), Benalla (1968), Horsham (1969), Mornington Peninsula (1969), Latrobe (1971), McClelland (1971). I owe all these dates to the remarkably thorough history and catalogue of the Sale Gallery — now the Gippsland Art Gallery — produced by its curator Simon Gregg last year.

In the case of the new gallery at Sale, there was considerable support from various community leaders, as well as funding from Henry Bolte’s state government and advice from the NGV’s director, Eric Westbrook. But clearly there was neither the money nor the cultural assurance that lay behind the foundation of the earlier institutions; instead there was a more diffuse support from a wider community of arts and crafts practitioners whose work was often shown in the galleries in the early years.

The subsequent history of the gallery also reveals the difficulties of building a collection through a period of wildly alternating fashions and fluctuating aesthetic values. Nonetheless, Gregg’s publication reveals a surprisingly diverse collection, broadened and enriched in recent years by important prints and works on paper. The gallery’s building is in the process of being refurbished and enlarged, and should reopen next year. In the meantime, it is working from temporary premises next door.

The current exhibition, Timelapse, brings together prints and photographs in a way that is surprisingly effective. Partly this is because each form has such a different and yet complementary relationship to time: photography, ostensibly at least, represents an instant of time. In practice that singularity may be qualified by long or double exposures. Less obviously, but more commonly, the image is modified by treatment in the darkroom or today by digital processing and manipulation.

But if photography starts with an instant and then incorporates a subsequent and often invisible temporal dimension, printmaking is the opposite: it begins with complicated and elaborate processes of plate preparation, incision, acid biting in the case of etching and then cleaning and inking before, in the last stage, producing a single and simultaneous printed image.

The different processes lead to different qualities of density and evanescence, narrative detail and suggestiveness. There is a kind of yang and yin alternation, emphasised by the fact that all the prints are by men — from the 16th to the 19th centuries — and the photographs by contemporary women. Most of the prints are of scenes in Europe and a few in other parts of Australia — one of Timor — but most of the photographs are by artists or of locations connected with the Gippsland region, thus continuing one of the themes of the earlier regional collections.

Gregg’s juxtapositions are primarily intuitive, that is, based on an aesthetic and imaginative response to the images rather than trying, as is so often the case, to force any interpretative straitjacket on to them. Thus Pieter Brueghel’s etching of an Alpine landscape (c. 1555-56) is paired with Polixeni Papapetrou’s whimsical yet poignant photograph of a figure, high on a mountaintop, with a deer’s head. This is perhaps the riskiest pairing in the show, because the highly saturated photograph is so foreign to the linear etching, but the thematic affinity seems to make it just plausible.

Even more surprising as an instance of intuitive connection but aesthetically more harmonious is the association of George Cuitt’s The Oriel in the Queen’s Tower (1817) with Saskia Pandji Sakti’s white gladiolus on a black background (2012). Here we may wonder what the connection is until we realise it is something about the affinity between the flower and the overgrown interior, and specifically the way the bend of the flower echoes the pattern of light in the etching.

Sometimes the contrast is between historical and specific prints and timeless, universal themes in the photographs. Thus in Giuseppe Vasi’s view of the cascades at Tivoli near Rome, we see the waters of the Aniene pouring through the city and down in spectacular cascades in the foreground. They are no longer there today because after a disastrous flood in 1826, Pope Gregory XVI authorised an engineering project to redirect the river to the site of the present waterfall. Today the great body of water above the waterfall has been replaced by the dull Piazza Massimo, below which there emerges a small waterfall, a shadow of the one that had been admired since antiquity.

Vasi’s print includes fascinating details, such as the workshops of the coppersmiths on the lower right, and the channels by which they divert water, presumably to power mechanical hammers. The famous temple of the Sibyl or of Vesta is included too, though on the wrong side, as Vasi acknowledges in his annotations: it would be on the right and out of the frame from this viewpoint.

In contrast, Jane Burton’s stark black-and-white photograph of seawater rushing between bare rocks (2000) evokes a comparable force of nature, but surrounded by a complete absence of architecture, history, even humanity. We may have tamed the waters at Tivoli but humanity has had no incidence on the endless inorganic natural forces in this image.

There is more of balance between the view of the Glacier at Grindelwald from around 1770 and Lesley Duxbury’s photographic triptych of a contemporary glacier. The 18th-century print, with its two admiring viewers on the lower left, is an early example of the romantic theme of the sublime, and images such as these contributed to the growth of tourism in Switzerland. The glacier apparently reached its greatest extent in the 17th or 18th centuries, as part of the cool period sometimes known as the Little Ice Age from the early Renaissance until the mid-19th century. In the present age of increasing warming, glaciers have retreated drastically, as the unnatural pink tint of Duxbury’s glacier seems to warn us.

Another interesting pairing is between Chevalier’s print of a ferntree gully made around 1872, after his departure from Australia in 1869, but still celebrating what had become a favourite place to enjoy picturesque natural scenery in high Victorian Australia, with Rosemary Laing’s photograph of a clearing in the forest that has been covered with floral carpet (2001). Laing’s intervention may sound extreme, but in practice the carpet is so carefully laid around the plants, and the colours are so close to nature that anyone seeing the image for the first time is likely to be taken by surprise. The picture invites us to wonder about the ways in which we domesticate nature when we think we are appreciating it.

Among a number of other juxtapositions, that of the interior of Bothwell Castle, engraved by William Watts after Paul Sandby (1778), with Maxine Salvatore’s Breathless (2015) is particularly striking, but also subtly breaks the rules, since Salvatore’s image is a photogravure. Although most of the other photographs involve various forms of artifice and manipulation, this work, perhaps the most memorable in the exhibition, has actually become a print: here, the single instant of the photographer has been transformed into the flat simultaneous surface of the printmaker.

Timelapse

Gippsland Art Gallery, Victoria. Until July 24.