Beyond the Future: Papers from the Third Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

SESSION 8 : PARALLELS 8.3: AUSTRALIA IN CONTEXT AUSTRALIAN ART NOW Charles Green The idea of an 'Australian' art has come increasingly to look a little more than shaky. The cultural concept of a national narrative or character, despite claims to the contrary, has been under attack for some time. The reasons are twofold. First the failure to constitute something that really is Australian in a total ising sense, for there are at least on the evidence several 'nations' in this country. Second, the remarkable and profound flowering of a variety of types of art made by people belonging to the many different Ind igenous First Nations of Australia (a point emphasised by Deborah Hart). Third, there have been several developments in the late 1 990s, and the following are not even the most immediate: Differences between formalism and Modernism increased over time, but have not been understood by artists themselves . Postmodernism is already a period style, and we are already in its aftermath . Art made by people belonging to d ifferent nations within Australia must be considered in relation to the problematics of cultural convergence and the absence of societal reconciliation , but also within the categories of contemporary a rt. In Australia, for example, both postmodernist art and theory were marked through the 1 990s by political ineptitude and irrelevance, producing an inability to deal with the traumatic scandal of historical memory and repeated failures to achieve much desired pol itical and social ends. More recently, a surplus of rectitude in Australian art has overpowered any real acknowledgment of the bastard illegitimacy and flu id micronarratives on wh ich local histories have been founded. Rex Butler asked in his paper, 'Why is it writers on post-colon ial art (and , of course, Aboriginal art is now considered within the general rhetoric of post-colonialism) so often feel compelled to characterise the western art they oppose it to in such simplistic terms - unambiguous, unreflective, falsely universalist, embodying the unified Cartesian ego and believing in the myth of originality - when it is just this lack of complexity they condemn in previous understandings of post-colonial art itself?' The over-obvious Australian answer to th is l i ngering sense of absence has been the commodification by white society of Aboriginal art, whether made by urban or rural artists, which is one reason for its almost talismanic importance in Austral ian culture this decade. The benefits have been many, but the cost has been the complex prolongation of white Australians' d isavowal of their own agency and capacity for dialogue - a process of 'double-Othering'. Jeanette Hoorn noted the inconsistencies, failures of nerve and poor judgement in Australia Council choices of Ven ice Biennale representatives over recent years, linking this to the preceding point. Foregrounding Aboriginal art offers Austral ian art aud iences too easy a moral fix for their own good (indigenous people's land rights remain a reced ing mirage), and therefore the opportunity to disavow - even discount - their own h istorical position far too easily. 1 22