National Portrait Gallery’s Arcadia celebrates surfing and the sea

THE culture of surfing, particularly in the early 1970s is celebrated in an engaging exhibition at Canberra’s National Portrait Gallery.

Nigel Coates and Murray Smith, Smiths Beach WA (1972) by John Witzig. From the exhibition Arcadia: Sound of the Sea, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, to October 19.

THE first literary description we have of swimming is in Homer, when Odysseus, leaving the island of Calypso on his makeshift boat, is wrecked by a vengeful Poseidon. The kindly sea goddess Leucothea lends him a magic girdle that will save him from drowning and advises him to swim for the shore. Characteristically, Odysseus chooses instead to stay with the shell of his craft until it is smashed by an enormous wave, when he strips off, ties the girdle around his chest and strikes out for land.

It is there that Homer has him recount his most famous adventures, in an extended flashback and vivid first-person narration, inserted into the third-person of the rest of the epic. And now he tells of another shipwreck, after his departure from Sicily. His men are doomed to death for slaying and eating the oxen of the sun, so the ship is smashed in a terrifying storm. Odysseus himself, once again clinging to wreckage, is dragged north by the current towards the straits of Scylla and Charybdis, where he is nearly sucked down into the whirpool.

A day at the beach was probably not anyone’s idea of a holiday in Homeric times, or even for most of the next 2½ and more millennia, although bathing became an important part of classical culture. Certainly from the Middle Ages on, the sea was terrifying and most people could not swim. Seafaring was a dangerous adventure and sailors would tell of the wondrous and terrible things they had seen. When the sea was celebrated in art and in literature it was as an incarnation of the sublime force of nature.

The idea of the seaside as a bourgeois holiday destination arose only in the second half of the 19th century, and hotels sprang up in new seaside resorts.

Such splendid establishments, as we see in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, were ­places where the wealthy could relax in luxurious comfort on the margins of the sublime — meditating on the immensity of the ocean but seldom doing much more than paddling on its lapping edges. Actual swimming as a physical exercise began to develop, but doing it in public and in daylight hours was still hampered by Victorian conceptions of decorum.

On the other hand, the restrictions on mixed bathing and the regulation of bathing costumes also point to part of the attraction of the seaside. Communion with the sublime is appealing in part because it represents an escape from the routines and boundaries of normal urban life, and freedom can be transcendence or transgression. Freed from the constraints of normal life, as we see in Death in Venice, the mind can lose itself in an ecstasy that may also be its undoing.

Closer to home, Charles Conder’s Holiday at Mentone (c. 1888) gives an idea of the Victorian conception of a day at the seaside. The young man in that painting who is incongruously attempting to sunbathe in a linen suit epitomises the difficulty of enjoying the sea within the bounds of propriety, while Tom Roberts’s The Sunny South (1887) shows the other side of the coin, the private pleasure of a group of boys skinny-dipping at Ricketts Point, Beaumaris.

A number of other Heidelberg pictures show men and women bathing naked, although not in mixed groups, none more delightful than Conder’s The Yarra, Heidelberg (1890), in which one of the girls still wears a broad-brimmed hat. In contrast to this spontaneity, Charles Meere’s Australian Beach Pattern (1940) shows men, women and children all bathing and disporting themselves on the beach together, but without a hint of transgression: this is bathing as a healthy, hygienic and cheerfully sexless activity.

Meere’s group is composed around a game with a beach ball, which has always seemed to me a rather silly thing to do on a beach — though it must be acknowledged that the first literary account of a ball game is also in The Odyssey, and it is played at the seaside. But surely the most appropriate beach activities, apart from walking in winter or in the evening and fishing, are swimming, preferably in the surf, and lying in the sun afterwards.

The most intimate relationship one can have with the sea is undoubtedly in surfing, a sport that came to Australia between the wars, both in the form of body-surfing and board-surfing, and flourished in the postwar years. And it is the culture of surfing, particularly in the early 1970s when it was in its golden age as a way of life, that is celebrated in a particularly engaging exhibition at Canberra’s National Portrait Gallery.

The show, curated by Sarah Engledow, is almost entirely based on the photographs of John Witzig, founder of surfing magazine Tracks, reproduced on a large scale and pinned to the walls in a deliberately casual manner. The pictures are full of spontaneous energy and life and accompanied by some of the best explanatory labels I can recall seeing in an exhibition — well-informed, intimately attuned to the ­images, erudite when appropriate, witty and above all warm and personal in tone.

Unexpectedly, perhaps, the photos are matched with large and powerful drawings of coastal scrub by Nicholas Harding — but the juxtaposition turns out to be very effective. This is partly because drawings and photographic prints are mostly in black and white, so no dissonance arises between chromatic and tonal imagery, but it is above all because of the curious sympathy between the two sets of works: as though Witzig’s photographs restore the specific context of Harding’s subjects, while Harding makes us see and attend to the qualities of the landscapes.

These figures are mostly young men and even boys, friends and surfing companions of the artist, although only a few are shown actually riding waves. More often they are seen at or near the beach, lying in a tent, sitting near a van, standing on the veranda of an old house. Another group clusters around a water tank, all smiling. There is a pervasive feeling of youthful happiness, innocence and joy, occasionally punctuated by pensiveness.

A few compositions are more deliberately planned. In one a boy, stripped to the waist and seen from the back, sits gazing into a pool of water. One thinks of course of Narcissus or, as the caption suggests, a faun that one has surprised and who would flee in a moment if he knew we were there.

In another picture we watch two boys, again shirtless, picking their way across stepping-stones in swampy terrain. Arms in the air, they reach out to keep their balance, so that the image evokes at once the lightness and vitality of their young bodies and somehow also the precariousness of our balance in this world. Intuitively, Engledow sees in this an evocation of Arcadia — the imaginary land invented by bucolic poetry, where men still live in harmony with nature, although she also recalls Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego, the reminder that even this idyll is shadowed by mortality.

This work gives the exhibition its title too, and it is a suggestive one, for Arcadia was conceived as something like a surviving backwater of the golden age, a mythical time of innocence and non-violence, the classical equivalent of Paradise before the Fall. And even the Jews and the Christians, for all their taboos about the body, admitted that the prelapsarian body, as it was first produced by the hand of God, was innocent and beautiful; it was only after dis­obeying his commands that Adam and Eve felt suddenly ashamed of their nakedness.

Arcadia, then, implies not only intimacy with nature — the subject, too, of several excerpts from Alby Falzon and David Elfick’s lyrical film Morning of the Earth (1971) — but the beauty and joy of the youthful body. Youth, strength, vitality and happiness are all related, parallel, almost co-extensive. Whenever subjects face the camera they seem to break into a spontaneous smile; occasionally, as in Poussin’s painting, thoughtfulness or reflection comes over the features like a cloud and they grow melancholy. But there is none of the fear, shame and self-loathing that overwhelm Adam and Eve after the Fall.

This celebration of beauty is focused on the young male body, partly no doubt because surf culture was essentially a male affair; girls, if present, would be hangers-on rather than participants. Even today few girls surf. It’s unclear how many shots in the archive from which the selection was made may have included girls, but in any case Engledow’s choice to concentrate on the male figure undoubtedly gives the exhibition a sharper focus.

There is another interesting consequence of this choice. Surfie culture, in its less attractive aspects, could involve promiscuity and using and discarding girls. Omitting this seedier side of surf life is what makes possible the evocation of joyful youth and beauty, but given the character of Witzig’s photographs, one doesn’t come away with the sense that anything has been censored, or the truth repressed.

It feels, rather, as though the curator has concentrated on the images that are most quintessentially expressive of the artist’s vision, which was itself idealistic and joyful. Nor does the concentration on young male bodies mean that sexuality is absent as a theme. On the contrary, it is pervasive but latent, or more exactly potential. Perhaps above all the sexual energy of these young bodies is sublimated in the act of surfing itself, in this activity that involves enormous physical exertion, consuming the raw energy of the body and converting it into the ecstatic union with nature that is evoked in a shot of Mark Richards riding a wave in Hawaii.

Of course this Arcadia cannot last forever; marriage, children, work, middle age will follow in due course. But here, for a moment, we are suspended in a dream of youth, freedom and spontaneity. Tennyson imagined his Lotos-eaters as inhabiting “a land in which it seemed always afternoon”; Witzig’s young men dwell in a land in which it seems always summer.

Arcadia: Sound of the Sea

National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, to October 19