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| Australia at the Royal Academy: Ned Kelly to the rescue | Australia at the Royal Academy: Ned Kelly to the rescue |
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| The guy on the motorbike cruises down the blacktop into the red landscape, his arms outstretched. The camera follows the rider, artist Shaun Gladwell, as he passes through what a sign on the gallery wall calls a "sacred Aboriginal landscape" north-east of Adelaide, all the while maintaining his Christ-like, perilous pose. Isn't all of Australia a sacred Aboriginal landscape? The native population understood the continent in ways the settlers, colonialists, farmers and miners never have. Like Gladwell's 2007 film, Approach to Mundi Mundi, the Royal Academy's new exhibition, Australia, is a wobbly ride through the past and into the present. | The guy on the motorbike cruises down the blacktop into the red landscape, his arms outstretched. The camera follows the rider, artist Shaun Gladwell, as he passes through what a sign on the gallery wall calls a "sacred Aboriginal landscape" north-east of Adelaide, all the while maintaining his Christ-like, perilous pose. Isn't all of Australia a sacred Aboriginal landscape? The native population understood the continent in ways the settlers, colonialists, farmers and miners never have. Like Gladwell's 2007 film, Approach to Mundi Mundi, the Royal Academy's new exhibition, Australia, is a wobbly ride through the past and into the present. |
| Aboriginal paintings fill the first room of the London show. While extremely beautiful, they are also extremely difficult to read. To what degree should we see them as a kind of art, a means of communication, maps, cosmologies, ceremonial artefacts, stories, or abstract paintings to hang on a wall? Nor is Aboriginal art homogeneous from clan to clan, region to region. | Aboriginal paintings fill the first room of the London show. While extremely beautiful, they are also extremely difficult to read. To what degree should we see them as a kind of art, a means of communication, maps, cosmologies, ceremonial artefacts, stories, or abstract paintings to hang on a wall? Nor is Aboriginal art homogeneous from clan to clan, region to region. |
| Featuring work painted on bark with earth pigments, and later on board and canvas using acrylics (to which the artists were introduced in the 1970s), this room is a collision between tradition and modernity. A market grew around their works, their iconography often bowdlerised for consumption. Among the most startling is a huge horizontal canvas by Emily Kame Kngwarreye, painted when she was 85, called Big Yam Dreaming, a skein of wandering and repeated sinuous white lines on a black background. I'm tempted to think of Brice Marden and of the early paintings of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. If it feels wrong to categorise Kngwarreye's work in relation to other, antithetical traditions, it is also inevitable. A human hand is a human hand, a body is a body. We relate to signs and painted images in certain predictable ways. | Featuring work painted on bark with earth pigments, and later on board and canvas using acrylics (to which the artists were introduced in the 1970s), this room is a collision between tradition and modernity. A market grew around their works, their iconography often bowdlerised for consumption. Among the most startling is a huge horizontal canvas by Emily Kame Kngwarreye, painted when she was 85, called Big Yam Dreaming, a skein of wandering and repeated sinuous white lines on a black background. I'm tempted to think of Brice Marden and of the early paintings of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. If it feels wrong to categorise Kngwarreye's work in relation to other, antithetical traditions, it is also inevitable. A human hand is a human hand, a body is a body. We relate to signs and painted images in certain predictable ways. |
| A little later in the show is an 1803 watercolour by English artist William Westall that seems almost an abstraction. It is, in effect, a painting of a painting, depicting a rock wall in a cave where Aboriginal artists painted handprints, a kangaroo and figures. Westall's watercolour is a strange and haunting record, undertaken when he accompanied Matthew Flinder's mapping voyage that circumnavigated Australia in 1801-03. | A little later in the show is an 1803 watercolour by English artist William Westall that seems almost an abstraction. It is, in effect, a painting of a painting, depicting a rock wall in a cave where Aboriginal artists painted handprints, a kangaroo and figures. Westall's watercolour is a strange and haunting record, undertaken when he accompanied Matthew Flinder's mapping voyage that circumnavigated Australia in 1801-03. |
| But first, some ghastly 19th-century silverware: an emu-egg inkwell, some sort of arboreal trophy and a "testimonial candelabrum", all set about with silver flora, fauna and natives in decorative poses. Beyond the table ornaments are a procession of brown, European paintings in gold frames, topographic views of Sydney, coasts, mountains and hills, whale hunts and mining camps, domestic country gardens and the frightening interior of an endless, unmapped land. Bushfires wreck the horizon. Terrible deserts stretch to infinity. | But first, some ghastly 19th-century silverware: an emu-egg inkwell, some sort of arboreal trophy and a "testimonial candelabrum", all set about with silver flora, fauna and natives in decorative poses. Beyond the table ornaments are a procession of brown, European paintings in gold frames, topographic views of Sydney, coasts, mountains and hills, whale hunts and mining camps, domestic country gardens and the frightening interior of an endless, unmapped land. Bushfires wreck the horizon. Terrible deserts stretch to infinity. |
| These 19th-century painters saw Australia with European eyes. Without the emus, kangaroos and forests of giant gum trees and ferns, and without terrifying, spear-carrying locals to enliven the scene, we might be in Sussex or a German Romantic sublime. Some painted transplanted idylls; later, Australia gets painted by Barbizon-school émigrés, mediocre European impressionists and would-be symbolists. The artists had to grapple not only with an unfamiliar intensity of light, but with a nature and geography that wouldn't be domesticated. It is all fascinating, up to this point, and the exhibition contains some of Australia's best-known and iconic works. | These 19th-century painters saw Australia with European eyes. Without the emus, kangaroos and forests of giant gum trees and ferns, and without terrifying, spear-carrying locals to enliven the scene, we might be in Sussex or a German Romantic sublime. Some painted transplanted idylls; later, Australia gets painted by Barbizon-school émigrés, mediocre European impressionists and would-be symbolists. The artists had to grapple not only with an unfamiliar intensity of light, but with a nature and geography that wouldn't be domesticated. It is all fascinating, up to this point, and the exhibition contains some of Australia's best-known and iconic works. |
| From 1920 on, things get much more problematic. Sure, there are some terrific paintings here, of second world war brownouts (or power drops), the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, trams in a fogbound city (the last by the wonderful Clarice Beckett, much of whose work was consigned to an outhouse after her death and eaten by possums), body-beautiful beach life, the depression, urban and outback misery. The terrific 1946 Holiday Resort by Jeffrey Smart is a desperate, vacant scene: a man reads a newspaper in a deckchair; a child's pram (perhaps a toy) cooks in the sun. What one is really aware of is emptiness, a sort of sullen lassitude. Then come Arthur Boyd's caustic expressionist scenes and, best known of all, Sidney Nolan's 1946-7 Ned Kelly paintings, telling the story of the outlaw's flight and arrest. These sophisticated, faux-naive works are a high point of the show, as they were of Nolan's career. | From 1920 on, things get much more problematic. Sure, there are some terrific paintings here, of second world war brownouts (or power drops), the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, trams in a fogbound city (the last by the wonderful Clarice Beckett, much of whose work was consigned to an outhouse after her death and eaten by possums), body-beautiful beach life, the depression, urban and outback misery. The terrific 1946 Holiday Resort by Jeffrey Smart is a desperate, vacant scene: a man reads a newspaper in a deckchair; a child's pram (perhaps a toy) cooks in the sun. What one is really aware of is emptiness, a sort of sullen lassitude. Then come Arthur Boyd's caustic expressionist scenes and, best known of all, Sidney Nolan's 1946-7 Ned Kelly paintings, telling the story of the outlaw's flight and arrest. These sophisticated, faux-naive works are a high point of the show, as they were of Nolan's career. |
| From here on, the last 60-odd years of Australian art history are treated in a hurried, piecemeal way. I see no point in room after room filled with single works by so many artists. Fred Williams – the most innovative of Australian postwar landscape painters, whose shrivelled marks, gutteral smears and burnt fragments constitute a kind of parched language, as well as depicting a dessicated continent – is poorly represented, as is Brett Whiteley, touted as Australia's bad-boy equivalent to David Hockney in the 1970s. The show peters out in a parade of examples, a checklist of single works hung cheek by jowl with no real coherence. There is too much that feels secondary, or like retreads of flavour-of-the-month international fashions. | From here on, the last 60-odd years of Australian art history are treated in a hurried, piecemeal way. I see no point in room after room filled with single works by so many artists. Fred Williams – the most innovative of Australian postwar landscape painters, whose shrivelled marks, gutteral smears and burnt fragments constitute a kind of parched language, as well as depicting a dessicated continent – is poorly represented, as is Brett Whiteley, touted as Australia's bad-boy equivalent to David Hockney in the 1970s. The show peters out in a parade of examples, a checklist of single works hung cheek by jowl with no real coherence. There is too much that feels secondary, or like retreads of flavour-of-the-month international fashions. |
| I am certainly no expert on Australian art, but even I can tell that, however enlightening parts of the earlier sections are, the show fails to give a sense of any of the more recent art except in a tokenistic way. I am disappointed that there isn't more photography, and at the absence of almost any sculpture. Kathy Temin's lone, white, synthetic fur Tombstone Garden and Fiona Hall's sardine cans (which sprout highly crafted Australian flora and display scenes of sexual intimacy in their interiors) might be fun, but they have no context. Being Australian is not enough. What use is this to anyone? | I am certainly no expert on Australian art, but even I can tell that, however enlightening parts of the earlier sections are, the show fails to give a sense of any of the more recent art except in a tokenistic way. I am disappointed that there isn't more photography, and at the absence of almost any sculpture. Kathy Temin's lone, white, synthetic fur Tombstone Garden and Fiona Hall's sardine cans (which sprout highly crafted Australian flora and display scenes of sexual intimacy in their interiors) might be fun, but they have no context. Being Australian is not enough. What use is this to anyone? |
| That's the trouble with exhibitions whose aim is the broad sweep of a country, let alone a continent. It would have been much better to show more works by fewer artists, or to give the exhibition more of a thematic grip and focus. This is Australia, the official version – the exhibition as potted history and pop-up continent, the penal colony, the abyss. Nineteenth-century writers, quoted by Thomas Keneally in the catalogue, saw Australia as the afterbirth, the last of lands. Miserably represented and explained, and hung with so few meaningful conversations between them, the artists here might suspect a continuing plot to keep them in a similarly dystopian limbo. | That's the trouble with exhibitions whose aim is the broad sweep of a country, let alone a continent. It would have been much better to show more works by fewer artists, or to give the exhibition more of a thematic grip and focus. This is Australia, the official version – the exhibition as potted history and pop-up continent, the penal colony, the abyss. Nineteenth-century writers, quoted by Thomas Keneally in the catalogue, saw Australia as the afterbirth, the last of lands. Miserably represented and explained, and hung with so few meaningful conversations between them, the artists here might suspect a continuing plot to keep them in a similarly dystopian limbo. |
| It is a great deal easier for curators to deal with a single medium like painting, and to convey a sense of its continuity and divergences, than it is to deal with the multitude of strategies artists now work with. What we end up with is a horrible sort of group show. How might art be different in Melbourne or Sydney, Perth or Cairns? How has Australian art engaged with immigration, or tackled politics and racism? | It is a great deal easier for curators to deal with a single medium like painting, and to convey a sense of its continuity and divergences, than it is to deal with the multitude of strategies artists now work with. What we end up with is a horrible sort of group show. How might art be different in Melbourne or Sydney, Perth or Cairns? How has Australian art engaged with immigration, or tackled politics and racism? |
| Whatever artists have to say about these issues is reduced to a few one-off gestures. I want to see something tougher and more prickly, art with more bite. I am not interested in what might constitute some sort of Australian artistic identity, because I doubt there is one. The fertility of Australian art is a product of successive, unending waves of human migration, as well as part of a global dialogue. It is hard to recognise that here, bar a few isolated examples. The show signals divergence, without actually explaining or expanding on it. What about the relationship of Australian art to film? Or doesn't film count? The exhibition just sort of gives up, representing neither the artists, nor Australian art, in a meaningful way. I thought the days of shows like this were over. They ought to be. | Whatever artists have to say about these issues is reduced to a few one-off gestures. I want to see something tougher and more prickly, art with more bite. I am not interested in what might constitute some sort of Australian artistic identity, because I doubt there is one. The fertility of Australian art is a product of successive, unending waves of human migration, as well as part of a global dialogue. It is hard to recognise that here, bar a few isolated examples. The show signals divergence, without actually explaining or expanding on it. What about the relationship of Australian art to film? Or doesn't film count? The exhibition just sort of gives up, representing neither the artists, nor Australian art, in a meaningful way. I thought the days of shows like this were over. They ought to be. |
| • Follow Adrian Searle on Twitter @SearleAdrian | • Follow Adrian Searle on Twitter @SearleAdrian |
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