The misfit who bore witness to underworld

A NEW book on Mike Brown sheds light on the post-war avant-garde art world.

Mike Brown

RICHARD Haese is a distinguished Australian art historian, best known for his book Rebels and Precursors: The Revolutionary Years of Australian Art (1981), which remains the fundamental study on the first truly avant-garde movement in Australian painting, the so-called Angry Penguins. This rather whimsical name was borrowed from the title of a periodical, itself based on a phrase from a surrealist poem by its editor, Max Harris.

The artists dealt with in that volume included Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Arthur Boyd and Russell Drysdale, and the historical period extends from the Depression years to those immediately following World War II when Nolan painted the Ned Kelly series.

After a broad and deep study of a period of such central importance to Australian modernism, Haese may seem to have chosen a surprisingly narrow subject in devoting a substantial book to Mike Brown.

He is a figure who is relatively little known to the general art public today and whose oeuvre is so eccentric, disparate and in some ways slight that it has had little formal influence on the history of Australian art. But in reality the monograph on Brown -- Permanent Revolution: Mike Brown and the Australian Avant-Garde 1953-1997 -- is also an essay on the history of Australian art in the second half of the 20th century: a period still close to us but that we can now appreciate much more dispassionately than was possible even 10 or 20 years ago.

Haese's book thus turns out to be something of a sequel to the earlier work, following the continuing adventures of the Australian avant-garde in the post-war years.

In hindsight, an increasingly frenetic succession of art styles during this period reveals all too patently the invasion of the aesthetic realm by the logic of an expanding consumer society. From year to year, new movements were declared, followed with passionate seriousness, loudly proclaimed as the new and permanent order of things by publicists disguised as critics, only to be consigned to the rubbish heap of history a year or two later with the emergence of a new dispensation.

First abstraction staked its claim against the expressionist figuration of the Angry Penguins, who fought back at the Waterloo of the 1959 Antipodean Exhibition; gestural abstraction triumphed briefly, then by the mid-60s it was declared obsolete by the zealots of flat abstraction. Barely had this new fashion celebrated its victory with The Field show at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1968 than it, in turn, was abandoned for minimalism and conceptualism; and on it went.

This whole process, as Haese shows, was greatly accelerated by the new dealers' galleries, which produced a boom in art speculation from the early 60s and rapidly put any alternative exhibition systems, such as the old group shows, out of business.

Brown, as it turns out, is the unlikely Virgil to guide us through this underworld. He was the son of an upper-middle-class family from Chatswood in Sydney who attended the Shore school but was desperately alienated from the values of his environment, even though, ironically, his family was more intellectual and less materialistic than many others of the time.

He attended the National Art School but remained a lifelong misfit, an enigma who was barely competent to manage his own life or relationships with women, who aggravated his psychological problems with the abuse of various drugs, yet whose correspondence reveals an acute intelligence and -- no doubt the main benefit acquired from his childhood years at home -- a fluent and articulate use of language.

Brown must have been exasperating to those who tried to help him, but it is impossible not to feel the attraction of his honesty and his genuinely unconventional and spontaneous nature. He did not fall in line with any of the movements mentioned above.

He was briefly associated with Colin Lanceley and Ross Crothall in the exuberantly anarchic Annandale Imitation Realist group, which split almost immediately after its first exhibitions in 1962.

Subsequent one-man shows combined reminiscences of tribal art, cartoons, cut-outs of girlie and later pornographic magazines and words and phrases, knitted together with an obsessive proliferation of improvised patterning and doodling graffiti. The works often met with incomprehension and in 1966 Brown became the only Australian artist successfully prosecuted for obscenity.

Other contemporaries adapted to the exigencies and opportunities of the new art market and became prosperous. Brown's tragedy was to be inhibited by an acute sense of the falseness of the art world, but he remains important as the obstinate witness to a kind of cynicism and even corruption that has subsequently grown still more sophisticated.

In a work that was also a manifesto and an indictment, Kite (1964), he memorably declared that art in Sydney was like "a cancer which won't stop flourishing until it has eaten the heart out of its own futile existence". But Rudy Komon, a pioneer of the new dealer galleries in Sydney, and his stable -- Brown's immediate targets on this occasion -- were amateurs compared with today's museo-commercial art complex.

Permanent Revolution: Mike Brown and the Australian Avant-Garde 1953-1997 by Richard Haese (Melbourne University Publishing).