Mornington’s On the Beach: Meere, Foley, Ellis, Lambert and Smart

An art exhibition in Victoria explores Australians’ enduring relationship with the seaside.

Ten years ago, in December 2005, a series of ugly confrontations occurred between crowds of local youths from Sydney’s Cronulla suburb and groups of young men of so-called Middle Eastern appearance. As usual there were arguments over who started the fighting, but the actual incident that sparked the outbreak is of incidental importance compared with the reasons for the underlying tensions, and the way both new and old forms of media were used to amplify scuffles between aggressive young men into riots.

What can happen when such networks of communication break down, conversely, was the subject of a remarkable short film shown in the 2007 Tropfest, Between the Flags, which can still be seen on YouTube. And what is particularly interesting about this little film — without giving the ending away — is the role a common cultural activity may play in resolving tension.

Humans are by nature inclined both to like and dislike their fellow creatures. The urge to bond with others, the germ of the social instinct, brings us together with one group, but unfortunately the same gregarious instinct leads us to dislike outsiders. It is hard for people to experience a collective sense of identity without opposing that identity to some other, hard to feel they are good without believing someone else is bad; hard, in other words, to escape the trap that Nietzsche identified as reactive thinking.

And how do we define the antagonistic other? Visible differences, such as skin colour, are the easiest to identify from a distance, which is why racial and ethnic divisions are so common. More subtle ethnic distinctions may be revealed by language. But culture and religious beliefs, as we know too well, can be the focus of the most vicious and absurd hatred between groups; and once again, the more visible the signs of cultural belonging — such as distinctive religious costumes — the more readily they provoke hostile reactions.

Of course the tendency to hate the other is not morally justified simply because it is natural. Just as thoughtful individuals may aspire to free themselves from the tyranny of the ego, most civilised people today pay at least lip service to the idea of a common humanity and universal rights, even if they are far from consistent in their practical views and actions. The Stoics were the first to declare themselves citizens of the world, rather than of any one city or nation; but more than two millennia later that ideal remains as remote as ever.

All of us have felt moments of antagonism towards individuals or groups we see as alien — either of the two crowds that confronted each other at Cronulla could easily elicit such a response. And the seaside setting is significant, because Australians seem to be particularly sensitive to this environment. Perhaps it is because the beach is a place we associate with relaxation, where our guard is lowered and we are consequently more vulnerable to strangers.

Whatever is at the heart of Australia’s beach culture, it has developed only over the past century or so. It was not until the beginning of the 20th century that public bathing in daylight hours was permitted at Manly Beach. Before that, bathing was largely skinny-dipping by night or on secluded beaches, or else in enclosed baths, but then this inherently dionysiac and ­ecstatic experience was brought out in the open, and at the same time contained by the obligation to wear bathing costumes.

This exhibition at Mornington Peninsula, leaving aside some rather heavy-handed political elements, is most interesting for the image of the beach in the period between the wars. This was a high point of physical culture in Australia, when fitness was not just a consumer fad but began to become part of a national ideology, and the beach, with its sun and sea, was the place par excellence where the taut, brown Australian body — male or female — was shaped.

The most extraordinary images in the show, in fact, are photographs of beach acrobatic displays from the late 1930s, a date that not only draws the darkness of impending war across these cloudless beach scenes but also reminds us of the importance and ideological mobilisation of physical culture around the world between the wars, in Britain and Australia as well as in totalitarian states such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

The exhibition includes a reduced version of Australian Beach Pattern (1940) by Charles Meere, a very minor figure in Australian art who was nonetheless the author of one of the most strangely memorable images of its time. Meere was in fact English, had only been in Australia for a few years when he painted this picture, and his pupil Freda Robertshaw reported that he never went to the beach.

He was thus, as is not uncommon with artists, simply observing a sociocultural phenomenon, or rather picking it up like a radio frequency and giving voice to it through his impersonal, affectless art deco figurative style. It is this lack of feeling or even engagement that makes the picture so ambiguous, like an empty vessel that commentators could fill with their interpretations of contemporary ideology and that subsequent generations of artists could appropriate and fill with new ideological content.

The best known of these remakes is a photographic one by Anne Zahalka from 1989. Her figures are as wooden as Meere’s, but less dynamic. With the exception of the sporty girl about to hit a volleyball, they are even rather weedy, but at least they remind us that as recently as a generation ago, Australia was still a slim country. The inclusion of a fat figure would have looked pointed, even unseemly in 1989; but a walk along a beach today suggests the amorphous body has become almost normal.

Zahalka’s point was partly, perhaps, to reflect on the artificiality of the composition, its moral vacuity and the lack of any interpersonal relations in Meere’s world of mechanical anatomical forms; but she also reintroduces relatively subtle differences of age, sex and especially ethnicity, compared with the generic but ultimately north European fairness of the original.

However, in these things subtlety is all, and its abandonment makes Zahalka’s remake of the remake in 2013 sink under the weight of a political correctness that is ultimately ridiculous. One can’t help smiling at the solemn inclusion of a woman in Islamic headscarf reading a copy of The Monthly featuring the artist’s own 1989 version on the cover. Zahalka’s best picture is of a sunbathing girl reading Proust, with its delicate, even witty incongruity between the world of the book and the context of its reading.

The most incoherent variation on Meere is by Fiona Foley, a photograph of a couple of Aussie boys arguing with seven Aborigines, each group standing on a beach towel representing its respective flag. The artist, meanwhile, has apparently included herself in the centre of the composition wearing a burka, thus simultaneously endorsing this oppressive garment — the sign of a tyrannically masculinist ideology — and fallaciously implying some affinity between Aboriginal culture and Islam, two traditions that could hardly be more alien.

The trouble with this kind of work, apart from it being nonsensical, is that it is based on an immediately obvious and yet ultimately trivial play with ideological signifiers: works like this appeal to the appetite for moral indignation and self-righteousness in much the same way that the tabloid press appeals to its readers. If you like this sort of thing it makes you feel good about yourself, and of course superior to others who don’t respond in the same way — for, after all, how can you enjoy a sense of moral superiority without someone else to despise?

Ideological hectoring, for all its superficial arousal of emotion, leaves nothing behind, nothing to disturb a deeper level of sensibility. Serious art affects us at a level that is not always fully conscious and rarely entirely explicable: aesthetic meaning is elusive but capable of gnawing away at the imagination, the memory or indeed the conscience, potentially leading to some deeper modification of the mind which has nothing to do with patting oneself on the back for being a good person.

There are a number of works that affect us in this more imponderable way, including the photographs of Rennie Ellis, which always seem to evince his sense of the pathos of life registered through an awareness of physicality — whether in the immediacy of Union Jack (1968), in which the chance arrangement of figures at an instant looks almost like a montage, or from the same year, his row of sunbathers, the hardness and emptiness of the figures suggested by the merest details of pose and features.

The most beautiful and moving painting in the exhibition is George Lambert’s little study of Anzacs bathing near Gallipoli. It records a recreation that really did take place out of range of Turkish gunfire, but by the time Lambert painted this picture the full disaster of Gallipoli was known, and his image of carefree youth and joyful communing with nature could not be seen without the awareness that these youths were stalked by imminent death.

The row of figures in sunglasses by John Hopkins — inspired by a photograph of American soldiers watching a nuclear test explosion — somehow suggests menace as well as a paralysed stasis where we would expect freedom and happy movement. This, in a sense, is the real anti­thesis of Meere’s Beach Pattern.

But for a mixture of subtlety and boldness, it is the two paintings by Jeffrey Smart, both early works, that stand out. In The Bather, Bondi (1962), a woman strips off her dress to reveal a one-piece swimsuit underneath. There is a wall behind her and no one else in view, and yet the fact that her head is momentarily covered by the dress she is removing seems to leave her vulnerable to the voyeuristic gaze that turns out to be our own.

The other picture, Surfers, Bondi (1963), is from the following year and, like a number of Smart’s works of this time, before he evolved his highly impersonal manner, includes suggestions of flirtation and sexual tension. Here the boy visible on the left (the background has the same wall we saw in the previous picture) glances towards another who stands closer to us. The latter, however, is almost entirely concealed behind an outrageously phallic red surfboard. Smart has, here as elsewhere, brought out the sexual tension that is part of the beach experience, with its random, some would say promiscuous proximity of nearly naked bodies, even when such energies are ostensibly numbed by the heat of the sun or sublimated in the energy of sport or surfing.

On the beach

Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery. Until February 28.