Cirrus@Austlit

The Recent Australian Painting show that opened at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in June 1961 is an important and much-discussed moment in Australian art history. It is the exhibition Australian art historian Bernard Smith wished he’d been able to write the catalogue for—he had earlier curated The Antipodeans in Melbourne in 1959, which he regarded as something of an inspiration for it, and helped its curator, Bryan Robertson, in 1960 when he was in Australia. Smith responded to the exhibition by delivering the famous polemic “The Myth of Isolation” as the inaugural Macrossan Lecture at the University of Queensland, which correctly diagnosed the hidden desire of English curators and art historians to understand Australian art as something exotic coming from far away with little connection to recent developments in European art. For Robertson, one of the chief English architects of this myth, Australia had a “lack of any aesthetic tradition with roots”, and in the catalogue he opined that it is “the very real isolation of many Australians [that] gives a special edge to whatever is created [there]”. Indeed, for the exhibition opening, he dressed the Whitechapel full of tropical plants and trees, a staging intended to evoke this fantasy. The other catalogue writers, Kenneth Clark and Robert Hughes, largely echoed Robertson, with Hughes, for example, speaking of “our complete isolation from the Renaissance tradition, and, parallel with that, a similar isolation from most of what happens now in world art” (Introduction)

'Bernard Smith (1916–2011) was unquestionably one of Australia’s greatest humanist scholars and its finest art historian. His European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768–1850 (1960) was a foundational text of post-colonialism, and in Australian Painting (1962) he set out the definitive history of Australian art to that time. Antipodean Perspective: The Selected Writings of Bernard Smith presents twenty-six art historians, curators, artists and critics, from Australia and overseas, who have chosen a text from Smith’s work and sought to explain its personal and broad significance. Their selections reveal Smith’s extraordinary range as a scholar, his profound grasp of this nation’s past, and the way his ideas have maintained their relevance as we face our future.'  (Publication summary)

'CityCat Project 2006–2016 is the record of an extraordinary collaboration between American artist Dave Hullfish Bailey and senior Aboriginal writer and activist Sam Watson. The collaboration is structured around Maiwar Performance, in which the CityCat ferries that ply the Brisbane River (Maiwar) execute unannounced maneuvers near a site of significance to the Aboriginal people who lived on the lands around Brisbane before British colonization in the early nineteenth century.

'After its first iteration in 2006, Watson designated the event a “Dreaming,” which meant that it should be periodically repeated. The performance has since been restaged in 2009, 2012, and 2016, with Watson seeing it as an important act of Indigenous empowerment: a way of restoring agency to the local Aboriginal people in bringing their past alive and allowing them to think that the future has not been definitively determined.

'Parallel to this recurring event is an evolving body of works in diverse media. At its core is Bailey’s lateral research-based process, which combines a highly reflexive approach to language with granular descriptions of material and cultural systems. The call-and-response collaboration between Watson and Bailey and the many irreducibilities within it, generates an articulation of place that is playfully extrapolative, yet politically and intellectually resistant.

'This publication includes an introduction by its editor, Rex Butler, and an essay and detailed timeline by CityCat Project curator, David Pestorius, which covers the activities of Bailey and Watson both before and throughout their work together. In addition, art historian Sally Butler reflects upon Watson’s literary production, while curator Michele Helmrich sheds light on the local historical context that significantly informs the collaboration.

'Copublished with Australian Fine Arts/David Pestorius, Brisbane' (Publication summary)