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

Certainly the future of painting is in the tropics, either Java or Martinique, Brazil or Australia, and not here. (Van Gogh, June 1890)

Despite this claim, made by Vincent van Gogh in a letter sent to his brother Theo in Paris (http://www.vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let889/letter.html), Australia is joined by a host of other regional cultures in having no paintings or any other work by its artists reproduced in what is now the standard history of modern art, Art Since 1900 (Foster et al. 2005). Despite all the talk of a global art history, it seems that the history of modernism continues to be a story told exclusively in terms of Europe and the United States; more specifically, it is a story told about artists who have lived or exhibited in Paris, London, Berlin or New York.

Indeed, the only time when art from elsewhere on the planet is featured in this book – in a few pages on the Gutai group in Japan and the Neoconcretist movement in Brazil – it is presented as a ‘misreading’ of art that has already been made in the centre (Foster et al. 2005, 373–378). In this version of the history of art, modernism is something that has its origins in the world's financial and political centres and is then transmitted to the provinces – sometimes quickly, sometimes more slowly, but always arriving late and second-hand. The inference is that the modern art produced outside these centres is inherently unoriginal, a derivative imitation of what has already happened at the source. As a consequence, the book blithely reiterates what its authors themselves describe as a ‘mostly American order of released multinational flows of capital, culture, and information for privileged people’ (Foster et al. 2005, 617), a one-way flow of power that the narrative structure of Art Since 1900 simply replicates as a given. ¹

The book is, of course, not so much a history as a chronicle, tracking modern art in annual segments from 1900 until 2003. To tie art to chronology is to risk presenting its history as a natural process: organic, inexorable, inevitable. And indeed, Art Since 1900 is mostly content to provide a procession of what its authors like to call ‘advanced art’, in which one artist or group of artists responds creatively to the work of predecessors or competitors in a percussive, survival-of-the-fittest, evolutionary model of history. This hermetic approach disconnects modernism as an art movement from modernity as a complicated and heterogeneous economic and cultural phenomenon. It disconnects art from life. But it also allows art criticism to pose as art history. Art criticism involves aesthetic judgment and evaluation; it is about deciding what is advanced and what is not. Art history, in contrast, is about tracing what happened and why, good or bad. The recent dominance of our field by this book's authors has tended to confuse this distinction. Perhaps it is time to reassert it.

One Australian critic, Terry Smith, has written about the unfortunate consequences of this ‘transmission’ model of art history in an essay published in New York that he titled ‘The Provincialism Problem’ (1974, 56).

The cultural transmission is one-way: whereas both Jackson Pollock and Sidney Nolan are seen as ‘great artists’ by the art audience in Australia, it is inconceivable that Nolan should be so regarded in New York. And in Australia, Nolan's ‘greatness’ is of a different order from Pollock's. Nolan is admired as a great Australian artist, while Pollock is taken to be a great artist – his Americanness accepted as a secondary aspect of his achievement as an artist.

Importantly, Smith insists that provincialism is not a consequence of geographic isolation but rather ‘appears primarily as an attitude of subservience to an externally imposed hierarchy of cultural values’ (Smith 1974, 54). ² It is a consequence, therefore, of a differential of power, not simply of ignorance or lack of originality. But equally, this differential is something experienced and manifested in the provinces themselves. It is an attitude of subservience we provincials can repeat and embrace as our lot, or choose to dispute or disrupt.

Ponder this last possibility while looking at one particular painting by Sidney Nolan, titled Railway Guard, Dimboola. It was produced in 1943 when the artist was in the army and stationed in rural Australia, surrounded by wheat fields (Figure 1). A large head dominates the picture. It is the head of a railway worker, according to the title; and around him – simultaneously in front of him and behind him – there are railway signals and railway tracks, leading up to some concrete wheat silos isolated on the stark horizon line. Rural Australia is thereby presented as an industrialised landscape, not an idyllic or pastoral one. The face of this man is composed of the same colour as that landscape, with both rendered flatly, despite some efforts at modelling the contours of the man's profile.

Figure 1. Sidney Nolan, Railway Guard, Dimboola, 1943. Ripolin enamel on canvas, 77.0 × 64.0 cm. National Gallery of Victoria, Australia.

The first thing we notice, then, is that this is a version of country life in Australia that is unmistakably modern in every aspect, in both content and form. Where does this modernism come from? It would be easy to simply relate Nolan's pictorial innovations, the tensions he engineers between flat and modelled forms and his interest in depicting modern industrial workers, to his familiarity with the paintings of French artist Fernand Léger, such as The Mechanic of 1920 – works he would only have known through black-and-white reproductions. But we could equally explain Nolan's painting as a reaction to, and reworking of, an established tradition of landscape painting in Australia, a tradition represented, for example, by ‘Fire's On’, Lapstone Tunnel, a large work by Arthur Streeton from 1891. In Streeton's work, a discordant composition, in which the landscape rises almost vertically in the picture plane while figures of various sizes stand illogically upon it, is given unity – is made to seem plausible and naturalistic – by the strip of deep blue sky at the top that holds everything down and unifies the whole scene. One of the first artists working in Australia actually to have been born there, Streeton is concerned above all to capture what he sees as the specificity of Australia's foliage, earth and light – in order to present us with an overtly Australian way of seeing the world.

The point is that Nolan's painting engages all of these sources simultaneously, thereby registering the Australian landscape as an inescapable intersection of local and international forces rather than as some kind of icon of isolated nationalism. At least one Australian commentator: the conceptual artist Ian Burn, has interpreted Nolan's work as offering an ironic relation to European modernism, such that Nolan can be seen to appropriate ‘aspects of European modernism at the same time that he seemed to be calculatingly mocking the idea of dependence’ (Burn 1984, 75). According to Burn, Nolan wilfully plunders European art (much as European colonists once plundered the Australian landscape, digging up its riches and shipping them back to Britain). In an act of counter-colonialism, Nolan takes whatever he wants, with no particular subservience to chronology or style or respect for context. ³

In short, Nolan's painted bit of piracy turns out to be about Australia's dependency; that is, it represents a critical engagement with the economy of dependency rather than just a passive receiving or obedient repetition of it. On this basis, Burn proposes (1984, 69) that this painting be taken as a model that art historians working in Australia would do well to emulate:

The spatial complexity of Railway Guard – a mess by most of the standards by which modern art history has been written – is neither a mess nor confusion. Its logic resides not in the picture but in the viewer, the culturally specific spectator. Nolan has not tried to suppress or gloss over incompatible elements: different intentions, artistic conventions and even cultural needs coexist and are set side by side. The picture has a richness which allows us to relate to quite contradictory factors, with enthusiasm and self-confidence.

In Burn's view, what at first appears to be a mess to a history of modern art written from the centre – to be provincial, confused, unoriginal, second-hand and second-rate – could well be re-presented as offering visual contradictions that speak to, that exacerbate into visibility, the peculiarly uneven development of modernity across the globe. It could, in other words, be interpreted as offering a better, more accurate, more politically astute, understanding of how modernism has manifested itself globally than that given in books like Art Since 1900 or any of its many imitators. Certainly, this painting insists that the experience of modernity in Australia, and the reaction to that modernity by Australian artists, is just as valid as that found in New York or Paris; just as valid, and of absolutely central importance if we are to understand the nature of modernity itself.

To repeat: I am suggesting that much could be learned about modernism from the negotiations of centre and periphery found in an artwork like this. But to gain that benefit, one would have to develop an historical model attuned to such negotiations. In Australia, this kind of model has sometimes been referred to as ‘inversion theory’. The inversion hypothesis seeks to take an apparently fatal flaw and make it a strength; as we have seen with Burn's analysis of the Nolan painting, it argues that the apparent lack of originality that characterises provincial cultures could be precisely what is original, or at least distinctive, about them.

There is much that could be said about the limitations of this kind of interpretive model, which can easily be made to celebrate mediocrity in the guise of defending regional specificity. Another risk is to use the model to explain away the distinctiveness of regional art practices as an exotic form of isolated primitivism. Indeed, there have been various versions of the inversion hypothesis attached to Australian art over the years, each of them designed to suit the interests of the moment in which they were formulated. Some local scholars have suggested that, although inversion theories are ‘far from consistent’, they ‘all share a common desire to propound an explanation of the unique course and development of Australian art and culture’ (Stephen, McNamara, and Goad 2006, 19). According to these scholars, ‘the appeal of these inversion hypotheses is that they cut through complex histories by presenting compellingly tidy narrative threads’, and this, they say, ‘is also the source of their weakness’ (23).

Let us quickly measure this caution against one example of the inversion hypothesis in action. In 1961, the Whitechapel Gallery in London mounted an exhibition entitled Recent Australian Painting. This was accompanied by statements by its director, Bryan Robertson, and catalogue writer, Robert Hughes, in which they claimed that Australian art had developed in complete isolation from the Renaissance tradition, and ‘parallel with that, a similar isolation from most of what happens now in world art’ (Stephen, McNamara, and Goad 2006, 709). Guided by this handy promotional gambit, British critics praised the work on display for offering a home-grown alternative to a decadent European art scene, reprising what Rex Butler has described as ‘earlier arguments concerning the reinvigoration or even invention of a European modernism as a result of contact with the “primitive”’ (Butler 2013, 51). Pioneering Australian art historian Bernard Smith responded to this scenario with a lecture titled ‘The Myth of Isolation’. Keen to defend the political efficacy of Australia's figurative painters in an international context that favoured abstraction, Smith argued that ‘what appears at first sight to be isolation often turns out, it seems to me, to be a process of selection and rejection’ (51). In other words, those artists who chose to maintain a figurative art were, he claimed, doing so deliberately, as a defiant nationalist strategy, and not simply out of ignorance.

So inversion theory has a history. As a strategy it can cut both ways. At best, it is a partial mode of argument deployed in response to quite particular situations, whether in the centre or at the periphery. We should be wary of it. But, whatever its shortcomings, the inversion hypothesis at least offers a way of critically engaging the unequal encounter between metropolitan and provincial cultures. Far from being simple, it sets out to complicate the all-too-tidy narrative of one-way transmission that is repeated in both local and international histories of modernism. In particular, it focuses sceptical attention on the determining role that origins and originality play in traditional art historical discourse. In abandoning that discourse, inversion theory proposes that we choose to see modernity differently – as, for example, a dispersed experience based on exchange rather than transmission, happening everywhere at the same time, even if to different degrees and with different effects. It favours, therefore, a narrative that traces a rhizomatic flow of bodies, images and ideas, suggesting that it is this – this unpredictable yet constant flow back and forth between centre and periphery – that is what actually constitutes both modernity and modernism, wherever it is experienced.

Let me be clear: the call here is not simply for the inclusion in histories of modernism of some art from Australia or any other particular provincial culture. The call is for a history of modernism that can acknowledge and accommodate difference; that can effectively tell the story, not just of the origins of modernism, but also of its production, dissemination, transformation and rejuvenation in places other than the world's economic and political centres. But can we do it? Can we who live and work outside of those centres, or who write about regional art practices, now dare to imagine presenting a history of modernity as a whole, based on a perspective specific to the provinces? That is the challenge before us. ⁴

No doubt other regional cultures have developed inversion hypotheses of their own over the decades, or have embodied such a sensibility in their art practices. Certainly, there is widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo. The twentieth-century Australian discourse I've been discussing, for example, shares some common ground with Okwui Enwezor's call in 2009 for a ‘provincialized modernism,’ for a mode of history that can acknowledge ‘multiple centers’ and ‘local modernisms’ (Enwezor 2009). It also prefigures Nicolas Bourriaud's proposed ‘altermodernism’ and its ‘heterotemporal understanding’ of modernism's development (Bourriaud 2009). However, as other essays in this volume attest, the time has come to do more than propose; we must now write these histories and demonstrate these temporal simultaneities.

The aim is not simply to reverse the equation and present the art of elsewhere as if it represents the whole globe. No, a history informed by the logic of inversion must also address itself to the political economy of definition itself. It must therefore be a history of power, a history about history, even as it offers an account of modernism and its effects as experienced at one particular time and place. It must, in other words, produce a form of art history that represents modernity as a phenomenon that is simultaneously local and global. Only by this means can a mode of art history be implemented that is responsive to our permeable, post-colonial, global present. Overcoming any aversion to contradiction, recognising that such a history is a political as much as an art historical discourse, we must learn to speak of and about our own ‘local modernisms’ – not as an addition to the kind of account found in Art Since 1900, but as its most dangerous and challenging supplement. The essays gathered in this volume, through their analyses of local manifestations of modernism in Mexico, Nigeria, New Zealand and Egypt, all of them multicultural and transnational in outlook, collectively represent a first step in that direction.

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.