Ian A McLean

Landscape histories: Mapping environmental and ecological change through the landscape art of the Swan River Region of Western Australia

What can works of landscape art tell us about past ecologies? This article de- scribes a pilot study in which a method for systematically recording the aesthetic, ecological and environmental content of landscape artworks was investigated. Using database software that allows for the identification and evaluation of relationships between aesthetic criteria (such as style) and environmental con- tent (such as vegetation characteristics), we surveyed landscape artworks of the Swan River region of Western Australia created between 1827 and 1950. The database was first populated with aesthetic and ecological surveys of selected artworks, then the data was analysed in order to identify patterns of ecological change that are readily amenable to historical explanation. The veracity of such explanations was supported by a more fine-grained analysis of a specific site, for which the depiction of the environment in artworks was compared with that in written and photographic sources. Collectively, the artworks appeared to reflect probable changes in the prevalence of large trees and the broad composition of flora, with the site-specific study finding more specific correspondences between artworks and other sources. Although further research is required in order to expand and verify findings, these initial results suggest that there is scope for more extensive use of fine art in the production of the environmental histories and historical ecologies that increasingly inform ecological restoration and management projects.

Postcolonial Traffic William Kentridge and Aboriginal Desert Painters

Some forty years ago Paul Ricoeur called for a new philosophy of history, because the existing ones were incapable of preparing us for the immediate future ‘of a single world civilisation’ brought about by the universalising imperatives of modernity. While foreseeing certain advantages of a fully globalised world, mainly to do with social justice, he counselled against the erosion of traditional cultures that, he said, sustained the ‘creative’, ‘ethical and mythical nucleus of mankind’. It seemed impossible to ‘become modern and to return to sources . . . to revive an old, dormant civilisation and take part in universal civilisation’.1 The rudimentary postmodern cultural forms he saw emerging on the brink of this coming global epoch offered him little hope. To him the creative powers of art were on the brink of disappearing forever. Kenneth Frampton dubbed Ricoeur’s solution to the impending death of art, ‘critical regionalism’ – an ‘arrière-garde’ that resisted the assimilation of the avant-garde into the ‘relentless onslaught of global modernisation’. With the avant-garde’s subversive practices ‘overrun by the internal rationality of instrumental reason’, wrote Frampton, critical practice today can only be sustained by ‘mediating the impact of universal civilisation’ through the regional and the autochthonous, rather than appropriating them in an eclectic revitalising of tired Eurocentric forms.2 In Ricoeur’s estimation, ‘only a living culture, at once faithful to its origins and ready for creativity on the levels of art, literature, philosophy and spirituality, is capable of sustaining the encounter of other cultures – not merely capable of sustaining but also of giving meaning to that encounter’.3 Despite Ricoeur’s warning, only with the emergence of a critical postcolonial discourse did cultural institutions show signs of seeking ways to understand what global cultures might be. For the first time in the 1980s, Western institutions changed their curatorial, critical, and

Hegel or Darwin? The Role of Tendencies in Bernard Smith’s Historiography

Tracing the relationship between Marxism and Darwinism in Bernard Smith’s writing, the article unpacks the meaning of Smith’s claim that ‘it is the business of the art historian to reveal tendencies’. While Smith tended towards Marxism his writing is not about Marxist tendencies in art. Smith was practising a type of genealogy rather than teleology, something, that is, more Darwinian than metaphysical, philosophical or ideological. I argue that Smith’s claim is more than methodological: it also shaped the content of his historiography and particularly his interpretation of Australian art.

The antipodean consciousness: renaming modernism

From French theatre scholars Agathe Torti-Alcayaga (Paris 13 University) and Christine Kiehl (Lumière University Lyon 2) comes this edited collection of sixteen papers, featuring an introduction and discussion notes, on the interaction between cinema and theatre in different historical and case specific contexts. Torti-Alcayaga and Kiehl both specialize in contemporary British theatre, publishing respectively (in French) on playwrights such as Julia Pascal and Sarah Kane, and Howard Barker and Gregory Motton. Their edited volume is one of the latest additions to a boom in francophone academic publications on the multitude of convergences between the stage and the screen. Théâtre, Destin du Cinéma – Théâtre, Levain du Cinéma translates roughly to Theatre, Cinema’s Fate – Theatre, Cinema’s Catalyst. It was published around the same time as Marguerite Chabrol and Tiphaine Karsenti co-edited the 204th issue of Théâtre/Public, entitled ‘Entre Théâtre et Cinéma: Recherches, Inventions, Expérimentations’ (‘Between Theatre and Cinema: Investigations, Inventions, Experiments’). Chabrol and Karsenti also recently co-edited the collection Théâtre et Cinéma: Le Croisement des Imaginaires (Theatre and Cinema: Crossing Imaginations). Like Torti-Alcayaga and Kiehl’s Théâtre, Destin du Cinéma – Théâtre, Levain du Cinéma, this has a wide scope. It explores intermedial correlations that extend from Émile Zola to Marguerite Duras. The breadth of these works has a lot to do with the French propensity for publishing conference proceedings as edited collections. Torti-Alcayaga and Kiehl introduce their collection of articles with two important and related observations. In their introductory chapter, they explain that there exists an ‘inexhaustible fascination’ amongst theatre and cinema scholars for each other’s field and that there is a need to create a rapport between francophone and anglophone cultures, both in theory and practice. To do this, they divide the book into four sections. The first contains their own introductory piece. The last section is a collection of round table discussion transcripts and film notes of the annual Bobigny Théâtres au Cinéma Festival. The two main sections between these opening and closing chapters are entitled: ‘Le Théâtre au Cœur de son Déni Cinématographique’ (‘The Theatre at the Heart of its Cinematographic Denial’) and ‘Le Théâtre: Ferment Idéologique du Cinéma’, (‘The Theatre: Ideological Seed of Cinema’). These sections consist of nine and six papers respectively. The content of the papers, however, make it difficult to tell what justifies this division between ‘Cinematographic Denial’ and ‘Ideological Seed’. Interestingly, eight out of the combined fifteen papers deal exclusively with British or American case studies, while only three tackle francophone examples, another three combine both, and one paper discusses the problematic properties of the designation ‘theatrical film’, or ‘filmed theatre’. While the papers’ content is varied, they generally consider cinematic adaptations of plays, films portraying the theatre world, and ‘theatricality’ on the screen.

The Australianness of the English Claude: Nation and Empire in the Art of John Glover

John Glover is credited to have earned the reputation for inaugurating two national schools of art, the British and Australian. The exhibition of John Glovers art, John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque provides an opportunity to not only revalue his art but question as to what was it about Glovers aesthetic that it gave him a place in English and Australian art.

On the Edge of Change?: Art, Globalisation and Cultural Difference

The dream of globalisation is a very old desire, as much a part of the universal ambitions of unplaced religions such as Christianity as it is of modernist and postmodernist ideologies that sought to (respectively) Europeanise and Americanise the world. But when did globalisation become a social and cultural condition? The recent visibility of contemporary art from all corners of the globe is the result of a new (postcolonial) consciousness rather than a reflection of new art practices. These apparently new practices have been ongoing in colonial cultures for hundreds of years, but were largely hidden by the nationalist, Eurocentric, and colonial consciousness of conventional criticism and histories (including postmodernist ones). Not only was modernism an international style, assiduously practised in every continent of the globe throughout the twentieth century, but so too were earlier styles – as a current exhibition in Australia attests to in its title of the ‘colonial picturesque’.1 Whenever a threshold was passed (perhaps sometime in the nineteenth century) that allows us to talk meaningfully of global cultural practices, the recent visibility of art from the Third World attests to a radical reformulation of how globalisation is imagined. Before the end of the Cold War, Western (First World) conferences and exhibitions on contemporary art had an exclusively European and US focus. However, during the previous fifteen years they have started to look like world trade fairs. Indeed what we now mean by globalisation is more or less synonymous with postcolonialism, as it signifies the integration of Third and Fourth World economies and cultures into the post-Cold War order. This postcolonial understanding of globalisation is very new. It is quite different from Marshall McLuhan’s 1960s notion of the ‘global village’, in which globalisation produced a new colonising consciousness incommensurable with the consciousness of other technologies. This view remained pervasive into the 1980s. Then, under the aegis of postmodernist theory, globalism was a concept that orientated the world towards the technological innovations and cultural traffic coming out of

Scholarly Ironies: Hassan on Smith on Modernism and New Art History

When Ihab Hassan admits to a certain irony in his attraction to the writings of the Australian octogenarian Marxist art historian Bernard Smith, he is not warming to Smith’s residual Marxisms. Instead, Hassan sides with Smith’s recent defence of art history against those younger acolytes of the discipline seduced by the ‘expanded field’ of cultural studies and postmodernist theory. Hassan’s warning that ‘only the most indolent minds will reduce’ this argument to ‘the shadow boxing of generations’ gives his game away. The real irony here is that the prophets of postmodernism (Hassan) and of postcolonialism (Smith) deny their unruly proteges. The significance of Smith’s first two books, Place, Taste and Tradition and European Vision and the South Pacific, is twofold. It shows how conventional art historiography’s deferral to the canon and the precepts of ‘high’ art is inadequate to a history of European art in colonial sites, and, secondly, that, far from being derivative, such art pre-empts the more radical moves of European art since the 18 century. Thus, Smith suggests alternative genealogies and canons of modernism to the usual Eurocentric ones. In the same spirit, his recent book, Modernism’s History attempts to write a global history of modernism. Admonishing Greenberg’s claim that the general trend of modernist painting towards the flattening of pictorial space originated with Manet, Smith traces it to the influence of non-European arts, especially decorative arts. However, in terms of the postcolonial debate conducted in journals such as Third Text for more than a decade, Smith’s achievement is disappointing. Modernism’s History remains primarily a story of European ‘Masters’, and does not escape the Eurocentrism it seeks to exceed. The ‘other’ stories of modernism, both in and outside of Europe, are neglected – although the final chapter discusses Japanese and South African art. This is not to diminish Smith’s achievements as an art historian. He always writes about European art and art historiography with a keen nose for their non-European sources. Why, we might ask, were Smith’s Antipodean instincts so dulled in the best European minds? We have to turn to a contemporary of Smith’s, Frantz Fanon, to get a sense of how this question might be answered today; and Fanon’s answer is not one Smith (or Hassan) endorse. Smith’s early books might, as Hassan says, ‘anticipate current concerns of cultural and postcolonial studies’, but they are equally grounded in a range of humanist assumptions that are antithetical to the theoretical concerns of cultural and postcolonial studies – or what, for convenience, I will call ‘new art history’. In Modernism’s History, Smith makes clear his antipathy to poststructuralist theory and, in a series of recent articles, its influence on contemporary art historians. He calls for the return to conventional empirical methodologies, and criticises the current overemphasis on interpretation for narrowing the full scope and scholarship of art history. His main complaint is the new art historians concede too much to the historicity and indeterminacy of knowledge. However, for new art historians, interpretation does not come after scholarship, but always precedes it – each is grounded in the other. This impossibility of objective scholarship rather than the allure of truth is the very reason Forum Third Text, Vol. 16, Issue 1, 2002, 79-86

The Poverty of Art Historiography

Third Text began publishing at the moment First World art institutions became interested in Third World art. Since then there has been an increasingly genuine exchange of contemporary art, artists and curators across the globe, and postcolonial art and theory has been well and truly institutionalised. It would be a mistake to think this was due to Third Text. These developments occurred at official levels and are part and parcel of the growing global economy and the opportunities being opened up by the end of the Cold War and the rapidly expanding economies of so-called Third World countries, especially in Asia. There are many positive aspects to these developments. For example, never before have there been so many opportunities for indigenous artists whose work was previously relegated to the category of ethnic craft. But these developments, welcome as they are, have only strengthened capitalism and its institutions and hierarchies of power. The exchange of artists and curators across the globe is part of a new elite. The lesson here is not to regret the conformity of much that passes for postcolonial practice, but to accept that the critical and avant-gardist cultures of modernism, postmodernism and postcolonialism have always shared a common cause with capitalism.