Roving Eye Exhibition Catalogue essay
by David Jaffe, Senior Curator
National Gallery, London
view full PDF catalogue here
Australian artists have always been curious about what was happening overseas. We recall John Peter russell’s famous observation to the Australian impressionists back home that in Paris “square brushwork was as common as gulls wing hats.” The hats of the 1880’s are now forgotten but the distinctive chisel-like marks of that brushwork remain. John Peter russell embedded himself with the French Impressionists, painting beside Monet and even portraying the then unknown Van Gogh. Arthur Streeton also looked towards Europe, sending his painting “Golden Summers” by sea-mail to the Paris Salon of 1890 where it won a prize. He later served as a war artist and painted misty scenes of England as well as nostalgic views of Australia.
Later in the twentieth century we saw Sydney Nolan become reclassified as a British painter and Arthur Boyd choosing to live in the sparse landscape of Suffolk (still nostalgically looking for the space of Australia?), while Jeffrey Smart abandoned Sydney for the cityscapes of Lazio near rome in Italy. How did the travel of these Australian master painters affect their art?
Certainly travel brought intellectual freedom and creative stimulus so that, for example, contact with English modern painters enabled roy de Maistre and Fred Williams to reinvent and expand, working with the likes of then-unknown Francis Bacon. Now in the age of the Internet – and I note that all the artists in this show have their own websites – does it matter so much where we come from?
John Kaldor who commissioned the Australian pavilion in the last two Venice Biennales has remarked that he was selecting good artists who happened to be Australian for that very nationalistic Olympic games of the art world. The diverse group of artists in the Roving Eye are not so much exploring regional roots, but rather their new locale. While the impetus is different each time – a generous scholarship, a job offer, a commission opportunity or just a change of scenery – their works embody the journey they’re taking and, like their predecessors, reveal the sensibilities of artists negotiating self displacement.
Barbara Knezevic uses her body as the site where cultures and politics intersect and the boundaries between the personal and physical are blurred. Pete Volich has taken on the site of Hackney Marsh and its sinister underbelly as it prepares for the Olympic Games. Jess MacNeil’s video allows fragmented images of public spaces to transform themselves within a pictorial space.
Todd McMillan and Michael Moran turn to immediate environments – Todd’s simple narratives enquire, with a certain sad humour, about the fragility of the human spirit while Michael’s fragmented texts and drawings act as vignettes and snapshots of his new (and fresh) London experience.
Leonhard Adam in his perceptively titled “Has Australian Aboriginal Art a Future?” wrote about regional Aboriginal art and its aesthetic qualities in 1944. A refugee himself, he was aware of
the effect of displacement on his painters. His pioneering essay is to be found conveniently in Ann Stephen’s Modernism and Australia (2006) which, with many other documents, shows the quest to
place art in an international context. This assembly of a heterogeneous group of Australian artists
working overseas is a good opportunity to explore such issues and to consider the wider notions of
cultural influence and identity.
David Jaffe
Senior Curator
National Gallery, London