Guest Editorial: Local Modernisms

Abstract

Despite all the talk of a global art history, the history of modernism continues to be a story told in terms of Europe and the United States. In the usual version of this story, modernism is presented as something that is transmitted to the provinces from these centres – sometimes quickly, sometimes more slowly, but always arriving late and second-hand. But what if we were to see modernity differently – as a dispersed experience based on exchange rather than transmission, happening everywhere simultaneously, even if to different degrees and with different effects? How does this shift the ground of art history? Can we imagine presenting a history of modernity as a general phenomenon based on a perspective specific to the provinces? Through a discussion of so-called ‘inversion theory’ as it has been debated in Australian art circles, this essay proposes a focus on modernism as a phenomenon that is simultaneously local and global.

Keywords:

• modernism
• provincialism
• Australian art

Notes

1. It should be said that many provincial histories of modernism are content to repeat this narrative structure, even when they are aware of its problems. For example, a 2006 anthology of documents about the advent of modernism in Australia claims to dispute the ‘usual view of modernism in Australia as something received belatedly and thus forever lagging behind the times’ even while its introduction consistently describes this same modernism in terms of something ‘arriving’ or being ‘transmitted’ from elsewhere. See Stephen, McNamara, and Goad 2006, 1, 6, 4, 9, 13.

2. The complexity of provincial attitudes is evidenced by the fact that, in 2005, this same Terry Smith enthusiastically endorsed Art Since 1900, claiming in a Thames & Hudson promotional brochure that to read its account of ‘modern art, informed by the latest historical and theoretical perspectives, is an excitement and joy’.

3. Burn's writing about Australian art was in part autobiographically motivated, in that he was himself a prominent avant-garde artist, working at different times in London, New York and Australia. In many ways, then, his writing is trying to explain his own complicated subject position as an ambitious Australian artist. He and a fellow artist, Nigel Lendon, point out, for example, the ‘“illogical” stylistic shifts’ undertaken by many Australian artists in the 1960s, suggesting that this divergence from an American-mandated progression of styles is itself an indication of the Australianness of their art. Burn and Lendon speak of an enabling ‘cultural rift’: of ‘the contradiction between culturally specific and dependent factors within artistic expression in Australia. There is nothing fixed in the terms of the contradiction or their interaction. However, their continual reworking and redefinition have at some level informed all cultural production in this country, fashioning its distinctive character and even its vitality’. See Burn and Lendon 1984, 94–100.

4. Two other Australian art historians, Rex Butler and A.D.S. Donaldson, have also taken Burn's reading of Nolan's work as a prompt to consider alternative ways of thinking a history of art that is both national and international. ‘To think another history of Australian art is to think a history in which Australia is not separate, is not apart from but a part of the art of the rest of the world. It would be a history written not from the inside out but from the outside in. […] It would be an UnAustralian history, the narrative of the endless coincidence between Australia and overseas… There would be no overall world-picture here – no telos, no universal – but also no isolation, no provincialism. Only the endless story of Australia in the world and the world in Australia' (Butler and Donaldson 2009, 433–437). Endless though the story may be, in my view it will remain a provincial one as long as the relationship between inside and outside, Australia and the world, is seen as simply reversible and complementary, rather than as asymmetrical and politically fraught.