i Table of Contents Introduction..........................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: The Text............................................................................................................4 Works of art may be read as Text........................................................................................4 The Text is always present but not always obvious. ...........................................................6 The viewer completes the work...........................................................................................7 All cultural products may be read as texts...........................................................................9 Readings of Text in representation may uncover structures of power. ...............................9 The work of art is ‘unmade’ by the author and the artists.................................................10 Chapter 2: The local landscape as subject ........................................................................15 Landscape develops identity..............................................................................................15 Mildura’s history is written on the landscape....................................................................17 The artists interpret the Text of the local landscape..........................................................21 Text ‘leaps’ into the topic at the moment of choosing. .....................................................30 The artists make both considered and unforeseen choices of topic...................................33 The artists create metaphors for the Australian ethos........................................................40 Chapter 3: The artists’ engagement in artmaking.............................................................42 ‘Excellence’ is an important Text in artmaking. ...............................................................42 Engagement with art is a reward in itself. .........................................................................46 Artmaking takes time.........................................................................................................49 The artists’ lives contain a Text of artmaking. ..................................................................52 Art is one Text in an integrated life...................................................................................53 Chapter 4: Artists and their context..................................................................................56 Artists work in a con-text. .................................................................................................56 The artists make use of the exhibition to see their work anew..........................................61 The venue affects the interaction between artists and viewers..........................................62 Chapter 5: The artists in the art.........................................................................................66 The art reflects personal characteristics.............................................................................66 The artists reflect on the link between person and painting. .............................................67 The artists’ style is composed of subject, materials, and traditions...................................76 Chapter 6: The artists and the elements of art ..................................................................81 The artists abstract in various degrees from reality...........................................................81 Format affects style and composition................................................................................83 Perspective is a strategy to represent natural space...........................................................85 The two-dimensional surface is the ‘field of action’.........................................................87 Line is ‘a force borrowed from the energy of the one who drew it’..................................88 Colour is a mixed blessing.................................................................................................89 ii Chapter 7: Cultural capital ............................................................................................... 96 A stock of visual conventions is built up as ‘cultural capital’. ......................................... 96 Artists aim to create original art-cultural capital............................................................. 100 Originality is a paradox................................................................................................... 104 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 108 Bibliography.................................................................................................................... 111 Appendix 1: The artists in the project............................................................................ 114 The artists’ histories ........................................................................................................ 114 Interviewing the five artists............................................................................................. 123 Plain Language Statement............................................................................................... 125 Appendix 2: Exhibition and publicity: On Our Own Ground ........................................ 127 Appendix 3: Interviews with Yvonne Beyer................................................................... 132 Appendix 4: Interviews with Stephen Hederics.............................................................. 142 Appendix 5: Interviews with Peter Peterson................................................................... 164 Appendix 6: Interviews with André Schmidt.................................................................. 174 Appendix 7: Interviews with Joyce Smith ...................................................................... 189 1 Introduction The three-part project of interviews, an exhibition: On Our Own Ground, and the paper: Our Ground: Artmaking and Landscape in Mildura, was researched, curated, and written at Mildura during 1996 - 1999. The five artists taking part in the project are Yvonne Beyer, Stephen Hederics, Peter Peterson, André Schmidt, and Joyce Smith. The artists’ histories, and descriptions of selection and interviewing, are outlined in Appendix 1: The artists in the project. (The appendices contain much information pertinent to the thesis, for example some fascinating stories about the artists’ lives.) The artists’ own words and works are placed into discursive frameworks of recent theories, in particular the conceptual category of the Text1 as explained by Roland Barthes. The concept of Text emerges throughout the paper in discussions as various as the meaning of a gum tree and the effects of the size of a canvas. Chapter 1: The Text analyses Barthes’ concept of the Text, and discusses some of what may be uncovered by textual readings of representation. The history of Mildura’s cultivated landscape, and the landscape as subject and as Text, is described in Chapter 2: The local landscape as subject. In Chapter 3: The artists’ engagement with artmaking, the efforts and rewards of artmaking are discussed. The artists also define their social roles and the bearing these have on their role of artist. In Chapter 4: Artists and their context, the artists speak about responses to their art, and about the physical context in which art is shown. The exhibition is described in Appendix 2: Exhibition and publicity: On Our Own Ground. The art as expression of the individual person is the subject of Chapter 5: The artists in the art. How the artists make use of the elements of art is discussed in Chapter 6: The artists and the elements of art. The artists take what they need for their artmaking from the stock of art styles, and return their innovations to this ‘cultural capital’; this is discussed in Chapter 7: Cultural capital. The interaction between originality and cultural capital is also discussed in this chapter. The proposal of the paper is that the conditions of artmaking are not inherently beyond the reach of anyone - child or adult - who has a fair share of visual vitality and 1 The capital letter reflects Roland Barthes’ use of ‘the Text’ to distinguish it from the normal use of ‘text’. 2 enthusiasm about extending experience into visual representation. Art is not the sanctuary of gods and masters, it has potential far beyond what many art-history books would lead us to think. Art is always socially constructed interpretation and practice; it is a result of many histories; it is incomplete and partial by nature, many-faceted and always changing within and across groups, individuals and situations; and it is always political, tempered with particular interests even, or particularly, in everyday life which seemingly is the individual’s preserve, but into which encroach the interests of others.2 The energy for this project flows from enthusiasm for the marvellous visible world and its many fabulous manifestations in art, painting especially: ‘… as the Byzantine Church understood, the painted image (whether of floating buttocks or Pantocrator) has enormous power to hold the mind in a benumbed thrall,’ writes the artist Ailsa O’Connor.3 The Mildura artists too are enthralled with the power of artmaking. That does not make the artists