Modernism Revived, Realism Reduced

41 Modernism revived, Realism reduced Terry Smith discusses Humphrey McQueen’s book The Black Swan of Trespass. Why should modern art be of interest to principle of a system of social domination communists? which justifies its dynamism and its notion of progress by repeating every day and ad Because it is a major element of bourgeois nauseam the litany of constant improvement ideology. in unlimited consumption and technological Because cultural practices under capitalism happiness. are sorted into a hierarchy in which the She went on to begin to characterise professional arts are the most celebrated, modernity as: acting as the course of the unattainable cultural tokens of the rich (both as individuals .... an ideology of constant movement and and as a class). These professional arts also progression, daily regeneration and act as laboratories of new images, forms and effervescent mutation, masking the ideas for the "lesser" productions of permanence and static quality of the advertising and amateur art. structures of the order which generated it. Our objective is to analyse the insistent Because, despite these factors, some modernity imposed upon us every day by "popular cultural practices and artists society (advertising jingles, elegant fashions, ("modernist" as well as "realist") can directly new forms, artificial atmospheres, plastics, serve the political aims of communism and, it savoir-faire,) as well as the ensemble of is often claimed, provide models of freedom images, the spiritual and motivating ("unalienated labor", for example). dimensions which assure individual and In Chile in 1971 Michele Mattelart set out a collective response to a conception of project which she described thus: development enclosed in its own determinism.1 The concept of modernity has assumed the role o f an aegis, a watchword in the "Modernity" is a key concept in imperialist production of goods and signs in capitalist domination of dependent countires. "The industrial society. A thorough inquiry into Modern" becomes the latest styling of that this concept may prove to be one of the more which the metropolitan economy produces worthwhile ways o f approaching the guiding for its privileged. It is exported as normality 42 AUSTRALIAN LEFT REVIEW No. 77 Detail from Noel Counihan's "At the start of the march, 1932 to dependent countries where it is attainable 3. What were the resistances to capitalist only by the compradores yet remains an modernity, and what forms should they take aspiration for most. A political history of now? What is to be learnt from the "modernity" in Australia has yet to be progressive aspects of modernity and of written.2 artistic modernism? What has this inquiry to It would seem, then, that a study of say to radical cultural work now? modernism in relation to the visual arts would 4. Can a study of modernity and modernism be of considerable political interest if it could throw any light on vexed issues such as the respond to questions like these: appropriate model for Australia's 1. How did the ideology of modernity take relationships to international capital? shape in Australia in the context of our The Black Swan o f Trespass as its subtitle imperialist dependence, and what were the The Emergence of Modernist Painting in particular roles of the visual arts in this Australia to 1944, indicates, focuses on the development? second of these questions and deals partially 2. How did modernism take shape within the and inadequately with the third. McQueen relatively autonomous development of does not acknowledge the economic role of Australian art itself? modernity — indeed, he curiously accepts the MODERNISM REVIVED 43 "new world" implied by scientific progress, but the ohane of emphasis in this case is sure the discovery of the unconscious, the to lead to the question being asked in others, agitation of the working classes and the which is all to the good. Many people, unfamiliarity of art. He explores the including myself, have pushed explanations responses of artists to these factors, not their in terms of provincial dependence too far. response to the reconstruction of work, (More accurately, we have pushed "leisure", everyday life, the media and the explanations appropriate for the periodin state, affected by monopoly capital in which they were developed — that is, the mid- different w ays, at different times, in different 1960s to the mid-1970s — too far back into places throughout the world. His method Australian art's history.) challenges standard histories of Australian art but, in the end, gives us lesser modernism McQueen's major methodological than they provide. And, in the course of assumption — that modernism is not merely a style of painting but rather "a range of chasing this contracting subject, he deals responses to a nexus of social-artistic- drastically with both the Communist Party scientific problems" — is a novel attempt to and socially committed artists. On first break with the inadequacies of conventional reading, one is dazzled by the frequent art history and to locate artmaking as an brilliance of the writing, the daring freshness ideological (material) practice. Specifying his of vision, the breathtaking insults. But, on "nexus" a little more closely, the key "social" reflection, the book seems to have so much problem becomes class struggle, the reduced its subjects that it becomes a route from which one can only emerge puzzled, "scientific" ones are "the unconscious" and "space-time" (relativity), and the major disappointed and sadly unconvinced. "artistic" one is landscape. The relationships These are serious reservations; they are between these problems, and the artists' based on a year's thinking with the book, responses to them, are seen as constantly teaching with it in a course on Australian art changing, producing "new movements, styles and (visual) culture, and discussing it often. I and subjects". will try to indicate what the reservations are This approach generates some startlingly based on, beginning with the book's positive new perspectives. McQueen's unrivalled achievements. ability to lay bare the contours of petty McQueen's subject — why and how bourgeois ideology is revealed in the passages modernist painting emerged in Australia in on J.S. MacDonald, and Daryl, Lionel and the period before the mid-1940s — is of Norman Lindsay. At the same time he shows pivotal importance in grasping the history of how often they grasped the situation more our art. The conventional view, most clearly than their modernist opponents. influentially promulgated by Bernard Smith Exchanges between painters and poets are in his Australian Painting 1788-1970 (Oxford explored more thoroughly than hitherto, U.P., 1971), is that modernism "arrived" here although much remains to be done. Attention via reproductions, books and other is called to the formative role of ideologues information, and that it developed through such as Sir Keith Murdoch. Relatively phases roughly consonant with the successive devalued styles such as surrealism are given phases of European modernism from Post- due emphasis, as are artists such as Elioth Impressionism onwards. McQueen ridicules Gruner, and lesser-known aspects of this as a "station-master's log-book" celebrated artists' work are highlighted (for approach to art's history and, quite properly, example, the 1920s Flinders Ranges argues that modernism arose here primarily landscapes of Hans Heysen). McQueen's "from and through identifiably local emphasis on Margaret Preston is both part of, conditions". He does not indicate the degree and a stimulus to, the positive and growing to which he would insist that this is also the upward valuation of the work of women case for other tendencies in Australian art, artists, particularly those most active in the 44 AUSTRALIAN LEFT REVIEW No. 77 1920s and 1930s. tendency have been reduced to style terms: the Yet, despite these gains, the picture of 1910s, when local artists began to explore Australian modernism with which we are left Post-Impressionist techniques, and the later is not, in the end, a clear one. Indeed, we are 1920s/early 1930s when local artists began to left wondering why so much attention was adopt/develop late Cubist, Art Deco, devoted to what ultimately emerges as a geometric abstractionist styles. Usually, only relatively insignificant development. these tow developments are labelled Style terms in art history are notoriously "Modernist" in Australian art, the former is opaque and misleading. Usually coined as devalued in comparison with the "more rule-of-thumb descriptions, they gradually advanced" (read: "up-to-date")latter, and a acquire a normative force — not only for large range of artists who were clearly historians, but for artists as well. modernists are in the general sense outlined "Modernism" has developed two usages. The above are labelled with other style terms (e.g. general one begins as synonymous with surrealists, figurative expressionists, Angry "Modern Art", picking out the tendency to Penguins, etc.). A central problem in give visual form to "the experiences of McQueen's account is that he has fallen modern life" (Baudelaire): That is, the urban, victim of this specialised (albeit confused) bohemian intelligentsia's responses to social usage: his "nexus" approach is not applied to changes effected by the (French) bourgeoisie modernism as a tendency but to modernism through the nineteenth century. Towards the as a style. The artists whose responses he end of the century, the term gradually characterses as "modernist" are only those becomes more specific and two elements already labelled as such by prior, narrow and assume priority in the aesthetic ideologies and questionable usage. He certainly treats other the work of modernist artists: personal artists, and shows them responding to the expression and formal innovation. In this same nexus, but they are said to respond sense, the "isms" of the late nineteenth and the differently. The result is a sense of analytical early twentieth centuries appear as the overkill, the emergence of one artist, "flowering" of modernism as a tendency.

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