Seeing ourselves clearly requires an honest definition of portraiture
This exhibition of portraiture has been shaped by postcolonial ideology, but there are still gems to be found
We are assured, in the National Gallery of Victoria’s press release for this exhibition – quoting director Tony Ellwood himself – that this is “the first major partnership between the NGV and the National Portrait Gallery … combining our respective portraiture collections and curatorial expertise …” If so, this exhibition raises questions about both the curatorial expertise and the strategic direction of these two important institutions.
Even the press release leads us to fear the worst. We are told the exhibition includes, or “features” in press-release speak, “more than two hundred works by Australian artists including Patricia Piccinini, Atong Atem, Howard Arkley, Vincent Namatjira and Tracey Moffatt …”
None of these individuals, in my opinion, can be counted as ranking among Australia’s most prominent or significant portrait artists, and indeed only a couple can be considered portraitists in any sense. What they do share is some degree of topicality or notoriety.
But also, of course, three of the five are women; one is Sudanese; two are Aboriginal. Race and sex boxes are ticked; art history is ignored. And there is a lot more of that in the exhibition itself, which is heavily skewed towards female artists,but even more conspicuously to Aboriginal work, regardless of relevance, quality or interest.
This raises an interesting question, which has long been a problem in official Australian culture but seems – just like conspiracy theories and other anomalies – to have become more pressing during the last couple of years of living and working online.And that is a relentless tide of “postcolonial” ideology, starting with those curtains of contrition that you have to click past – those “acknowledgment” pages – before you enter any Australian public museum website.
It would be desirable for Aboriginal culture to have a bigger place in our minds: it would be beneficial for us to feel a deeper sense of the presence and lives of those who occupied this country before us, and of their relation to the land and the ingenious ways they managed their difficult environment.
Unfortunately there are a couple of obstacles in the way of any mature understanding of these matters. In the past, it was the denial of ugly aspects of colonial history; today it is an obsession with the wrongs of the past and an inability to see all of this within a more balanced historical perspective.
Many Australians ignore the whole question and go about their business without a thought of this country’s original peoples;our cultural institutions, however, live in a parallel universe where they vie with each other in demonstrating their postcolonial zeal.
But Aboriginal art can in no way be considered under-represented. The Indigenous population of the country is around 3 per cent. The proportion of Australians of Indian background is similar; German and Italian origins are each about 4.5 per cent; Chinese are 5.6 per cent, and so on.
Clearly the proportion of Aboriginal exhibitions in our galleries, both permanent and temporary, is vastly greater than this, and understandably so, but quality can suffer in the rush to produce and promote quantity.
But no matter how much our gallery curators satisfy their own need for self-righteousness, it will not solve the greater obstacle,which is the moribund state of popular culture in an age of mass consumerism.
Those who live in a world of literacy, of art, literature, music and ideas can easily lose touch with what goes on in the minds of people who never read books, who know nothing about history, who never look at art or listen to any but commercial music. Such people exist in a post-cultural world, bereft of the moral and symbolic systems that give meaning and value and direction to our experience, and of the traditions of representation and reflection that allow us to see our lives in perspective.
With no living culture of their own, they are not in a position to ponder the values and the different viewpoints of other cultures.
In this NGV exhibition, the selection of works at once reveals a fundamental curatorial weakness in its failure tocome to grips with the genre it is meant to be dealing with. Landscapes are not portraits, even if Lloyd Rees has referred to a work, metaphorically, as a portrait of rocks. Abstractions are not portraits either. Aboriginal dot paintings are not portraits. Gimmicky commercial objects are not portraits.
There are more subtle cases, however, which could be interesting if explored further. Pictures of models are not in themselves portraits, especially when they are life-drawings or studies for subsequent paintings; but in some cases they can also be portraits, or the gaze of the artist can in a sense intrude to the point where what is ostensibly the study of a model tips over into being a portrait.
These ambiguous boundaries are left unexplored. The curators are too busy repeating crude arguments that sound like something from a first year art theory course. Thus in A.D. Colquhoun’s Self-Portrait (c. 1938), accompanied by a model on one side and his unfinished painting of her on the other, the label tells us that the presence of these two female faces “asserts his own dominant masculinity”. Look a bit more patiently, however, and you will see how he merely glances up at us, while the girl behind him engages us with a steady and penetrating gaze.
These subtly competing subjects form the most memorable portrait in the exhibition. But others include the pairing of Janet Dawson’s early Self-portrait (c. 1951-53) and Herbert Badham’s Self-portrait With a Glove (1939). Badham’s picture is oneof the most conceptually interesting examples of the old painter’s trick that I mentioned again recently, that is exploiting the reversal of hands in a mirror.
Badham appears to be pulling a glove on to his right hand with his left; in fact what looks like his left hand is his right,and the glove, replacing the left hand with which he is really painting, is treated like a still-life object, acknowledging the near-impossibility of painting the hand that is doing the painting. Dawson, more conventionally, is holding the brush in what looks like her left hand but is really her right; like Badham, she is left-handed, and like other painters before her, lets the palette take the place of her painting hand.
There are other interesting things, like Johannes Heyer’s tiny photograph of William Barak painting in 1902 – drowned out,ironically, by the loud dot paintings and abstractions nearby.
There is one of William Dargie’s fine portraits of Albert Namatjira, part of a large wall of pictures that are insensitively assembled and include several works that are too high to be seen properly and many jarring juxtapositions. Among the important works that struggle to emerge from this cacophony are John Brack’s self-portrait shaving and an intense self-portrait drawing by Thea Proctor.
Janet Cumbrae Stewart is represented by her portrait of Jessie Traill, one of the greatest etchers in Australian art, wearing her military uniform. Robert Dowling’s group portrait of Master George, William and Miss Harriet Ware with the Aboriginal man Jamie Ware (1856) is a fine picture and at the same time a fascinating document of a moment in colonial history. Later notable pictures include Hugh Ramsay’s touching portrait of the little sister who would later nurse him until his premature death from tuberculosis and even more sadly die soon after of the same illness.
Florence Fuller’s Paper Boy (1888) is a modest picture, but affecting in the interiority it conveys in such a young boy. Longstaff’s The Young Mother (1891) represents his own wife and child in Paris, and Eric Wilson’s uncompromising full-length portrait of his mother (1944) also plays with a very old conceit in turning the frame from a window into a door.
There are a couple of sensitive sculptures too, although they are not particularly sympathetically displayed.
One is Web Gilbert’s portrait of Frederick McCubbin, with his characteristic walrus moustache, in 1905, the year after he painted his triptych The Pioneer (1904). The other is a small but full-length standing self-portrait by Lyndon Dadswell at around the age of 31 (c. 1930); the attitude is casual but the features are particularly thoughtful.
A final work that deserves mention, in a more conceptual mode, is Tracey Moffatt’s self-portrait in two versions, the first black and white and marked up for photoshop correction, and the second the finished version, retouched, polished and free of the blemishes and imperfections that are the marks of time and experience, ready for publication in the illusory world of the mass media.
The omissions in this exhibition are too numerous and flagrant to mention, and obviously it cannot in any way claim to constitute a survey of the portrait in Australia. But if you happen to be at the NGV, you may want to pick your way through the irrelevancies and the distractions to find the pieces I have mentioned here, and a few others that will repay attention.
At least they haven’t had the nerve to charge an entry fee for this incoherent confection.
Who Are You: Australian Portraiture
The Ian Potter Centre, National Gallery of Victoria
Until August 21
Add your comment to this story
Diverse portrait of key moments in time
This latest exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, named for Cezanne and Giacometti, highlights the unbreakable bond between art and history.
How to fail spectacularly at unboxing
It was four boxes, not one; the ASMR was dire; and completion took more than four hours: a shambolic unboxing.
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout