Search for truth and beauty

FOR some artists, truth may be found in great general themes, for others it's in the minutiae of the everyday or in nuances of intimate experience.

ARTISTS look for truth in different places. For some, it may be found in great general themes and conceptions, for others in the minutiae of the everyday or in nuances of intimate experience.

Such is the difference, for example, between the grand poetic vision of history painting or classical landscape and the impressionist emphasis on the passing moment. Other things being equal, the first approach has more scope than the second, and the greatest art encompasses both general and particular. But in art, conception without execution counts for little: the academies were right to declare that figure painting is superior to still life in general, but a good still life is better than a bad figure composition.

On a more modest level, the two exhibitions at the State Library illustrate both these principles. There could hardly be a better demonstration of the difference between a general and a particular focus than the contrast between the visionary and metaphysical paintings of Kahlil Gibran and the documentary photographs of Jeff Carter; and yet although Carter's scope is relatively limited, the works are more successful than Gibran's rather insubstantial and underpainted images.

Carter, who passed away shortly before the opening of this exhibition, was a great chronicler of life in the Australian outback during the middle of the 20th century, and his photographs were published in a series of popular and successful books. He was unusual among documentary photographers for the depth of his immersion in and affinity with the world he recorded. He adopted a nomadic way of life as a very young man, and later sometimes worked and lived with the men and women who were his subjects.

The result is a particularly close and sympathetic view of these people and their often remote lives.

There are fine pictures of the city and the beach as well, but the best are of drovers and their families or other people who live in the vast and barely inhabitable interior of the continent. The sense of space is naturally suggested in many of the photographs by the distance within the picture itself: thus in Yarning mode (1996), two men sit on their haunches in the foreground while the house in which they live is far away across flat land, on the horizon. Similarly, the portrait of Snowy Gash (1955) fills the left foreground of the composition, while on the right there is once again nothing to detain our attention before the horizon; visually, it's like being sucked into a vortex of emptiness.

I have driven through this sort of country on a couple of occasions -- once from Sydney to Broken Hill via Nyngan and Wilcannia, and once from Townsville to Mount Isa -- and the experience is entirely different from flying over the same desolate land. The bleak flatness of the terrain makes the horizon a perfect circle; the road becomes a diameter stretching forward and backwards as far as you can see. There are no landmarks, nothing of note to measure movement or progress, so time seems suspended, the car forever at the centre of its diameter, going nowhere.

It is an experience of the peculiar sublime of Australia: not the terrifying might of mountain peaks, of volcanoes, of deep ravines or of waterfalls, but the impassive and silent gulf of absence. In the 19th century, it was the sort of country that brave or foolish explorers traversed and in which they sometimes perished. Hans Heysen had first painted the Flinders Ranges before the war, but it was only in the postwar years that Nolan and Drysdale discovered the outback as a metaphor of the Australian experience, replacing the earlier pastoral model of the Heidelberg painters.

Drysdale's painting The Drover's Wife (1945) and later works evoked the mystery, even the paradox, of living in this desperately inhospitable environment. The most memorable of Carter's photographs are also from the postwar decades, especially the 1950s and 60s, recording a life that has partly disappeared today.

He has his own Drover's wife (1958), in which a 17-year old mother holds her very new baby; beside her, her husband is a burly young man, only in his 20s, but already middle-aged.

The bloom of youth doesn't last long in this harsh world: men and women seem to age prematurely and then go on little changed for decades. The girl's father, also a drover, is seen sitting on a rail fence in another picture, ancient or just ageless, dragging on a cigarette.

There is not much room for romance or feminine graces out in the bush, which is perhaps why country women are or were so particular about fine tea services and the ceremony of afternoon tea, when circumstances made such luxuries possible. In Carter's Charcoal Burner (1957), we see a solid young woman in overalls loading heavy logs on to the back of an old truck. This is not a life a city girl would choose, but this woman, like the drover's daughter, has undoubtedly been bred to such a masculine existence.

It is a solitary world in many ways, although human connections, hospitality and mutual aid are fundamental to survival in the bush. Passing drivers wave to each other; other cars are not traffic, they are potential help if you break down, and witnesses to location if you go missing. Sometimes the solitude is shared, as in the case of the nomadic tinker who lives in his extraordinary mobile workshop and home, a motorised version of the tinkers of past centuries, with his wife and daughter (1955).

At other times the solitude is unmitigated. There is a touching sequence of pictures of a very old professional river fisherman -- probably an extinct occupation today -- with the rather grandiose name David Napoleon Rolton. In one he is seen holding a huge freshwater crayfish (1956), in another climbing up a hill with a catch of small river fish, some of which he will sell. Rolton, we learn, could have moved into a house in town, but preferred to spend his last years camping by the river with his dogs.

There is something dramatic but understandable about such an existential choice. Living in the way you want to until you die is surely preferable to the doldrums of retirement, although even retirement in those days was not yet lulled into systematic mindlessness by television, which began in Australia at this very moment, in 1956, and rapidly devastated social life, conversation, and home music-making.

Nonetheless, the lives of Carter's subjects are in many respects extraordinarily circumscribed. These drovers, rabbiters, boundary-riders, loggers, bullockies, tinkers, professional shooters and others are isolated on the fringe of civilisation. Their education is of the most rudimentary kind, they have little contact with literature, music and art in any form, no opportunity to be involved in the world of ideas, barely even a connection to social or political institutions.

It is not just that they are poor, it is that they have virtually no access to those aspects of culture that open the mind and refine the spirit. This should certainly not be confused with the superficial sophistication of the urban consumer class, from which it is a blessing to be free. But it is a loss to be severed from literature and philosophy, from the great ideas and supreme works of the imagination which constitute the highest expressions of human self-consciousness.

An existence without self-reflection is an impoverished one. The unexamined life, as Socrates said in the Apology, is not worth living -- or translated more exactly, it is unliveable. If one can argue that human life has any purpose, it can only be in the development of intellectual, moral and spiritual understanding. But the lives of these rural people cannot be defined solely by their alienation from culture, for they have in partial compensation at least a visceral connection to nature. They live in intimate involvement with the environment and the cycles of the seasons. They follow flocks of sheep, herds of cattle or seasonal work in a nomadic manner, eating under the stars and sleeping in tents or caravans.

Their work is physically involving, too: exhausting, demanding, but also presupposing and fostering attunement to the natural environment in which it takes place: the weather, the seasons, the nature of trees or animals are all understood in an intimate and intuitive rather than logical and theoretical manner.

When we consider, in contrast, the proletarian impoverishment of the consumer masses today -- fed on commercial entertainment and without either culture or nature -- we cannot but acknowledge the solid moral reality of the lives evoked in Carter's photographs.

The drawings and paintings of Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) in the adjacent gallery form, as I observed, a striking contrast with this world. Most people will know the name; his book The Prophet (1923) was taken up as a sort of New Age gospel in the 60s, and has always seemed to me like a refuge for amorphous spiritual longings that do not run very deep. Not having looked at the book for many years, I shall abstain from discussing it here. Gibran was born into a Christian Maronite family in what is now Lebanon -- then still part of the Ottoman Empire -- and emigrated to America as a child. There his undoubted gifts were recognised when he was very young and he had the opportunity to travel to Europe, including a period in Paris (1908-10). He initially thought of himself as a painter as much as a writer, but after experiencing a lukewarm response to his works decided to concentrate on writing.

The paintings and drawings here reveal a talent and sensibility, but one that is lacking in proper formation, and has been allowed to meander off in its own eccentric direction. The influence of Blake, and through him, of Michelangelo, is unmistakeable. A number of mystical spirit-figures float in midair or descend from the spiritual empyrean. There are dreamy imaginary heads too which rely too much on shading and stumping, as well as competent portrait drawings of illustrious acquaintances such as Debussy and Jung as well as George Russell, the Irish mystic.

The oil paintings look entirely self-taught. It is incredible to think that a picture as poorly painted as L'automne could have been hung in the 1910 Salon. The paint texture is thin and lacking body and the colours are simplistic. Among modern painters, it was Eugene Carriere, the French symbolist, whose misty monochrome figures gave him a licence to be vague. But you cannot be vague when evoking the boundless, any more than you can be incoherent when describing the absurd. And as I observed earlier, high ambitions cannot go far when they are inadequately supported by execution.