Creativity & Cultural Production in the Hunter

An applied ethnographic study of Creativity & Cultural new entrepreneurial systems in the Production in the Hunter creative industries. �Newcastle THE UNIVER.51TY Of ""IIIIIIINow The University of Newcastle I April 20i9, ARC Grant LP i30i00348 NEWCASTLE AustralianCover11.111r.nt AUSTRALIA •Mlfiii 11. VISUAL ARTS 11.1 A Brief History of Visual Arts in Australia The visual arts in Australia have a very long history. In Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art (2016), Ian McLean indicates that Indigenous communities across the country produced symbolic work that carried meaning for its users for aeons before colonisation saw the paintbrushes of Joseph Lycett and John Glover represent the new settlements and the recent arrival of Europeans. A number of works outline the history of art in Australia (Hughes 1970, Smith 1960, 1979, 1990 and 2000, Sayers 2001, Anderson 2011, Grishin 2013). Christopher Allen in Art in Australia: From Colonization to Postmodernism (1997) sets out the stages he believes Australian Art has progressed through, from the early colonial to high colonial, the Heidelberg School, Federation, Modernism, Abstraction and Social Realism, as seen in the work of the Angry Penguins, Postmodern pluralism and more recently, contemporary art from the 1990s onward. Beginning with Joseph Banks’ illustrations of flora and fauna during Cook’s voyage to Australia, followed by George Stubbs’ ‘Kongouro’ painting in 1772, images of the flora and fauna of the continent entered the consciousness of Europeans. New settler artists, some of them convicted felons, drew and painted their new home, including its indigenous people. Joseph Lycett, for example, painted ‘Corroboree at Newcastle’ in 1818 while John Glover’s ‘Corroboree at Mills Plains’ in 1832 represented life in Van Diemen’s Land. The landscape also intrigued colonial artists, although their work is very much seen through a European lens, even including English trees: ‘European artists in the 18th and 19th centuries often saw the landscapes of Australia and other new worlds in the light of familiar places and traditions’ (Jones, Anderson & Allen 2013, online). An example is Eugene von Guerard’s ‘From the Veranda of Purrumbete’ in 1858. Von Guerard ‘made money by painting homesteads on commission, and in this picture he raises that hack work to artistic excellence’ (ibid). In the production of such art works, we can see that visual artists had become part of the small but burgeoning economy, an economy that had no welfare safety net, as yet. The Hobart Mechanics Institute was founded in 1827 and the first art gallery opened in Hobart, Tasmania in 1831. In 1839 the newly developed daguerreotype was presented to the public in Paris for the first time and the photogenic techniques of Fox Talbot and Dr Andrew Fyfe were written about in Tasmania’s Cornwall Chronicle. Then in 1841 ‘Captain Augustin Lucas produces the first daguerreotype in Australia in a demonstration on Bridge Street, Sydney’ (AGNSW 2018, online). The following year ‘Australia’s first professional photographer, George Goodman, opens a daguerreotype portrait studio on George Street, Sydney’ (ibid). During the same period The National Art School began in Sydney. It traces its origins to 1843 when the first lecture was presented at the Sydney Mechanics School of Art. In Melbourne the Fine Arts Commission was established with a prize worth £200. At this time a transitional period of ‘settlement’ painting led to the Heidelberg School in the late nineteenth century. Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin and Louis Abraham had links to the National Gallery School in Melbourne and were joined by Arthur Streeton. This so-called Heidelberg School is seen as the first artistic movement of distinction in Australia (Allen 1997, p. 58) but still they demonstrated, in their alignment with the Impressionists, that the history of art in this country is shaped by changes in art practice internationally. Art historian Terry Smith would famously write about this in 1974 as The Provincialism Problem. Unlike their European counterparts, these artists were nationalistic, emphasising the heroic masculine character of ‘the bush’. Tom Roberts’ ‘A Breakaway!’, ‘Bailed Up’ and ‘Shearing the Rams’ have become iconic, as has McCubbin’s ‘Down on his Luck’ and ‘The Pioneer’ triptych. Things evolved after the turn of the century. A 317 ‘new emotional tone can already be discerned in the paintings of Davies, Phillips Fox, Withers and Gruner’ (Allen 1997, p. 83). Elioth Gruner’s ‘Spring Frost’ is another of those highly recognisable pastoral works from the same period but it was with Hans Heysen that the next generation made their mark seeing the bush through Symbolist modes and mythologies which tended toward the neo-pagan. With this sense of place, a genius-loci took precedence (Allen 1997, pp. 82-7). This situation was reinforced by painters like Norman Lindsay. In terms of photographic art, by 1854 ‘exhibitions of works to be sent to the Universelle Exposition de Paris 1855 [were] held in Sydney, Hobart and Melbourne, creating an early showcase for photography [in Australia]’ (AGNSW 2018, online). In 1855 ‘the portable stereoscopic camera arrives in Australia [and] John Sharp and Frederick Frith take the first paper panorama using the wet-plate process in Australia, a five-part view of Hobart nearly one metre long’ (ibid). In Sydney in 1857 the Freeman Brothers were ‘the first to adopt the English practice of publishing mosaic group portraits of distinguished citizens’ and a little later in 1867 ‘Victorian government photographer RLJ Ellery begins photographing the Moon’ (ibid). The initial meeting of the Amateur Photographic Society of New South Wales took place in 1872 and ‘mugshots [were] made the standard photographic format for recording criminals and suspects in New South Wales police departments’ (ibid). Then, in a development that will eventually have massive repercussions for the livelihood of many painters, ‘the first Kodak camera, capable of taking 100 photographs before being returned to the manufacturer for processing, makes photography accessible to millions of amateurs’ (ibid). In quick succession the Pocket Kodak camera is made available in Australia and 3000 are sold within two months. In 1899 colour photography is introduced to Australia by Crown Studios in Sydney and then the first of the three-minute automatic photo booths are installed in Sydney. Following this the Kodak Brownie, the first of the mass-marketed cameras, is released in 1900 and in 1905 ‘picture postcards achieve popularity, combining photography, printing and postage’ (ibid). Frank Hurley, in 1917, is appointed Australia’s first official war photographer for the Australian Imperial Force during World War I (AGNSW 2018, online). The interwar years see the emergence of post-impressionism and modernist influences in painting. The tension between figuration and abstraction became a hallmark of Australian painting in the 20th century. Women played a leading role. The works of Grace Cossington- Smith, including ‘The Sock Knitter’ and Margaret Preston’s advocacy of Aboriginal art and modern graphic techniques exemplify this period. The ensuing years saw not only a tendency toward modernism, seen in Cossington-Smith’s paintings of Sydney, especially ‘The Bridge’, but also a return to an idealised neo-classical type seen in the stonework of Rayner Hoff’s ‘Idyll (Love and Life)’. In painting, the virility, sun and surf of works like ‘Australian Beach Pattern’ by Charles Meere were the order of the day. Photography was also developing beyond, or perhaps because of, its commercial success between the wars and Max Dupain’s ‘Sunbather’ from 1937 is a classic example of the move of subject from the bush to the coast where most settler Australians were now living. The 1930s also marks the beginning of the modern Aboriginal art movement when Albert Namatjira learned to represent his Central Australian/Arrernte country in watercolour, to wide appeal. In 1938, Pix magazine, ‘the first Australian weekly to employ North American–style presentation and photojournalism’, was launched in Sydney’ (AGNSW 2018, online) and as the Second World War developed Damien Parer, Australia’s first combat cameraman, travelled to Palestine with the Australian Imperial Force. He was later to become famous for his photographs of the troops fighting on the Kokoda trail in the Pacific theatre of the war. An Australian Academy of Art was proposed by Robert Menzies in 1935 and The Contemporary Art Society was formed in 1938 just before the start of WWII. During this period a group known as the Angry Penguins, named after the magazine of the same name, came to prominence. This group was composed of avant-garde artists like Albert Tucker and Sidney 318 Nolan. Nolan’s ‘Ned Kelly’ series saw in the bushranger the antithesis to the heroic settler, and produced a ‘strange combination of harmony and alienation’ (Allen 1997, p. 126). Arthur Boyd, also a member of this group, sought out the excesses of passion as seen most vividly in his painting ‘Melbourne Burning’. William Dobell’s painting of Joshua Smith – ‘Portrait of an Artist’ – was a controversial winner in 1943 of the Archibald Prize, ‘the most prestigious annual prize for portrait painters’ (ibid, p. 34-5). While he was not self-consciously modernist, this is where his work has been placed, much like that of Russell Drysdale. The Institute of Photographic Illustrators, which was deeply concerned with ‘raising the standard of photography, is formed in Sydney’ (AGNSW 2018, online) and in quick succession the Polaroid camera and the 35 mm Nikon were introduced to this country as the Cold War began. In 1952 the Melbourne Argus became ‘the first daily newspaper in the world to publish colour photographs’ (ibid) and from this point on photography began to build a strong relationship with both newspaper and advertising houses displacing those graphic artists who had made a living from illustrating advertisements and posters.

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