|
At the Art Gallery
It’s a great collection—perhaps
the finest display of Australian painting the country has. In Melbourne,
at the National Gallery of Victoria, you can see examples of the late-19th-century
work that fixed forever a vision of Australian pioneering life: Arthur
Streeton’s landscapes, Tom Roberts’ Shearing the Rams, and
Frederick McCubbin’s allegory of settlement, The Pioneer.
These paintings are dazzlingly
clear in style and meaning. Can’t the public view them in peace? Can’t
visitors be assumed to be mature? Can’t the gallery let people think for
themselves?
Not in Melbourne, where the
didactic impulse is overwhelming, and captive citizens receive uplifting
instruction the moment they step in the door. McCubbin’s triptych shows a
settler family arriving in the empty bush; carving out a homestead; and
then a distraught widower beside the grave of his wife—while the city of
Melbourne shines distantly in the background as a testament to settler
endeavour.
And the artist’s meaning is wholly
unmysterious. In a 1904 diary entry McCubbin writes that “as I was
walking to the top of the hill and went into the bush to look at the view
(I found) a pioneer grave long overgrown. Now, as people walk into the
bush, they can remember the pioneers that opened up the land”. For
McCubbin, opening up the land and building cities were things to be proud
of.
But of course none of this will
do. And McCubbin’s sentiments are downright embarrassing. In order to make
the exhibition serve a politically correct purpose, the gallery curator,
like some Soviet-era commissar, instructs his visitors how to “read”
The Pioneer, suggesting inter alia that they ask “How and for
what reasons was the land cleared and whose land was it? To what degree
did early settlers understand the harsh eco system? How can we best
balance agriculture and conservation in the future?” In short: brains
washed here.
* * *
Elsewhere in the gallery are some
early works showing encounters with native peoples. Two paintings by John
Glover and Robert Dowling
feature aborigines either individually in the landscape or as documentary
representations of a clan. Glover presents something of an indigenous New
World arcadia, and the Gallery commissariat hastens to explain that his
vision was all a fantasy—“a world far removed from the reality” of the
aboriginal experience of colonization.
Robert Dowling, in contrast,
offers a sympathetic if romanticized portrait of a Tasmanian aboriginal
family. Its members seem both noble and stoical in the face of their
encounter with the forces of colonial settlement; at worst the painting
might be seen as romanticizing the noble savage.
But no—things are far worse than
that. Settlement involved violence. Ergo, paintings like this from the era
of settlement involved violence. And presumably the luckless artist with
his brush and palette was unknowingly engaged in violence too. Attached to
Dowling’s portrait we read without comment the following quotation from
the high priest of Orientalism:
The act of representing others almost always involves
violence of some sort to the subject as well as a contrast between the act
of representing something and the calm exterior of the representation
itself.
Taken from an interview with
Edward Said titled The Shadow of the West (1990), the quotation
maintains that the very act of representation is an act of violence. But
if so, isn’t the National Gallery of Victoria in a bit of a dilemma?
Should taxpayer’s money be spent on wall after wall of representations,
some large, some small, and some much better than others, that according
to Said are essentially celebrations of violence—a macabre dancing on the
graves of the dead?
October 2005
|
