The Representation Of The Australian Landscape In Contemporary Visual Culture - Essay Example

The Representation Of The Australian Landscape In Contemporary Visual Culture In what sense(s) can the representation of the Australian landscape in contemporary visual culture be construed as “political”? Argue with reference to examples. In the history of painting, landscape as an object of artistic representation is relatively newer at least when it is compared to the Eurocentric preoccupation with theo-centric subjects before the Renaissance and human figure in the post Renaissance period. Landscape paintings and art have been innovative in terms of their reflection especially upon the political scenario of a nation. In this context, we may argue with examples that Australian landscape in contemporary visual culture can be construed as political. The paper uses Mitchell’s arguments about the understanding of landscape art to argue on this issue. Mitchell’s opinion in his work, According to WJT Mitchell, landscape as a subject in painting has caught attention of artists in seventeenth century and reached its zenith in the nineteenth century. His essay Imperial Landscape is very argumentative where he not only describes his understanding of landscape as a medium of communication between man and nature and between self and the other but he further problematizes the concept of self questioning the assumptions related to ‘we’ as opposed to the ‘other’, the nature (Mitchell, 2002, p.6). It should be historical study of the development of landscape painting tradition that Mitchell aligned with the rise and fall of imperialism. Keeping this in mind and using appropriate examples the paper moves forward to illustrate the political undertone reflected in Australian artworks. Landscape has always been interpreted as a manifestation of the spirit of the land in the Western colonization process, be it Africa or India or China or Australia. How Nature acts as an active resisting force in the perception of colonizers is probably nowhere more clearly expressed than in Conrad’s novels like, Heart of Darkness. In case of Australia as well, the nation was perceived primarily as hostile and incomprehensible. Compared to the peace of English garden, it was considered disorderly and chaotic. It posed a serious threat to the White colonial paranoia, a destabilization of the national identity of the whites. But their presentation of Australian landscape was rather a representation—defined by their own vision and habits. Beilharz questions this phenomenon and asked why ‘representation of Australia looked like England’ (Beilharz, 2002, p. 29). To answer this, Beilharz fingers at the ‘formal qualities of landscape to which they [British] were aesthetically accustomed in England’ (Beilharz, 2002, p.29). In the Eighteenth century Britain, nature was the supreme object of beauty, an aesthetic of both social and political. Consequently they sought to portray ‘humanized foreground with water in the middle ground, set against a backdrop of sublime nature’ (National Library of Australia, n.d.). . Rare Illustrated Books, n.d. The above one is a typical Australian colonial painting that sought to describe the Australian landscape with the Western vision and therefore it was a misrepresentation of Australia. Since the settlement of the whites in Australia, Australian art was ruled by landscape artworks, which was closely linked to their sense of nationality and identity. Modernist movement in the early twentieth century displaced the landscape tradition for the time being but in the later half of the century Australian artists participated in the postmodernist movement pioneered by the European and American intellectuals and cultural thinkers. During this time many artists emerged from ‘postmodern aesthetics… to explore the themes of international contemporaneity.’ (Australian Modern/Contemporary art 2007) Postmodernism in itself was an impulse of negation at homogeneity and assertion of one’s cultural identity and this is reflected well in the contemporary artworks. It is about participation in issues that are global to make one’s presence felt. To this purpose the works of this period tried to capture the effects of globalization, decolonization, technological advancement and Mass media. The works of Rosemary Laing presents these impulses of the nation. Her landscapes have insertions of figures—figures flying in the air, over the horizon, above the clouds—that mark the transition and the taking off of a nation to reach the global arena. In her ‘Brownwork’ series she has captured the landscapes of an airport in its bare physicality with the depiction of runways, shortage facilities and architecture. A picture (below) in that series shows an aeroplane in its stripped form within where a figure of a woman is suspended from a rope amid its emptiness. The message of this painting is communicated with three suggestions that are interrelated. First it shows the plane’s giant structure as it the viewers are allowed an unusually close view. Secondly, in its bare form with the electronic fittings, which hardly people come across, it informs the plane’s functioning in the airport and lastly, the role of human beings in the operation of that giant system (Image Information: Picturing Ideas of Supermodernity, n.d.). Thus this photograph series is essentially an Australian’s perception of the advancement that his or her nation had made at length. Rosemary Laing – Brownwork #9, n.d. In the post imperialist period, the Australian national consciousness has become a debatable fact in both visual art and literature. Aborigines’ claim to land is one of the many issues that characterize the contemporary cultural discourse of Australia. Cultural representation of Australia has obvious aesthetic dimension but the beauty of the representation has political force. Landscape enables one to generate the forms of life in that country. In the context of Australia, “landscape aesthetics work toward the intensification of relationships between the subject and object, creating a sense of belongingness or homeliness approaching the Aboriginal sense of ‘spiritual attachment’” (Muecke, 2003). (Aboriginal Art Club, 2010) This painting by an Aborigine artist Perrurle, painted around 1997 seeks to narrate the attachment to his land in a familiar and yet strange manner. The hill rises towards the sky that is ominously dark and immensely brilliant tree stands above the ground and dissolves as it stretches across the murky distance. On the one hand the brightness of the tree stands at the threshold evokes the nearness to the landscape and yet the murky sky and the dissolution of the brightness questions the authenticity of the artist’s claim to his motherland—is he forced to feel himself an outsider or is it a terrific vision of the insider in which his sense of belongingness convoluted in his dreams. But this expressive painting would become a politicizing artifact the moment it is Tate Gallery or some other international exhibition house because there, as an expressive form it would articulate the experiences of an ethnic group that was once exploited (Aboriginal Art Club, 2010). Personal and cultural connection to one’s place in Australian context is getting increasingly more importance in Australian films. Since the time of Western colonization, Australian land was considered inhospitable and therefore considered no-man’s land and this attitude continued until 1992 when Mabo was passed that allotted Aborigines their legal rights to land (Jupp, 2001, p.118). Living on this land was like living in exile earlier and that is why this sense of aloofness is apparent in the works of Purrerle. But even before this moment, landscape has served as a medium for the expression of national identity and indigenousness. Presentation of landscape in Cinemas in the 1980s was also in the same vein. For example, in Gallipoli, the desert has been projected as an antagonistic force to the whites. The film is about innocence and purity of mind. In this film landscapes are presented realistically but in the scene given below, the national ideologies of Australian film industry have served to communicate their aversion to the whites because in here the characters seem to struggle with the emptiness of the land—seem to be undergoing a transition from innocence to experience (Australian Screen, 2010). (Australian Screen, 2010) Accordingly Rayner observes, “in depicting the relationship between territory and nationality within the emergent film industry, Australian film both drew upon and supported existing forms of conservative national ideology” (Rayner, 2000, p.118). Although Australian national consciousness has undergone changes through the period in history, the present advancement of the nation has been able to voice its supr5ession through various media. First in the middle of Twentieth century, the nation becomes able to express its national identity through its technological advancement and its representation in art and finally after the Mabo act, the Aborigines gets fresh lease of their land. In the context of Australia, therefore, landscape paintings in its colonized period are essentially a reflection of imperialist dialogue between Britain and Australia and discourse of cultural interactions (as Mitchell comments in his work). Mitchell refers to Clark’s Landscape into Art (1949), where the author has described landscape with difference from human world and its ability to provoke us to recreate it in our imagination whereby it becomes a medium to express our moods and reflections (Mitchell, 2002, p.6). Mitchell questions this ‘we’ who first differentiate themselves from the world of nature and then reshapes it in their imagination to wipe out the differences so that they become expressive of their moods and feelings. Clark’s observations are very naïve in this sense because they did not consider the identity of ‘we’ and sociopolitical factors that characterizes ‘we’. With time the art forms have changed along with the alterations in political conditions and have embraced technological developments to reproduce versatile art forms. References Beilharz, P. (2002), Imagining the Antipodes: Culture, Theory and the Visual in the Work of Bernard Smith, Cambridge University Press. National Library of Australia, (n.d.) ‘Country’ & ‘landscape’: physical and symbolic interpretations of Australia, available at: http://www.nla.gov.au/exhibitions/countryandlandscape/exhibition_text.html (accessed on August 31, 2010) Australian Modern/Contemporary art (2007), Oxford Art Online, available at: http://www.oxfordartonline.com/public/page/themes/australiancontemp (accessed on August 31 2010) Image Information: Picturing Ideas of Supermodernity (n.d.), available at: http://www.invisiblecity.org/essay/chap2.html (accessed on August 31, 2010) Aboriginal Art Club (2010), Heart range/ Alice Range, available at http://westerndesertart.blogspot.com/ (accessed on August 31, 2010) Jupp, J. (2001), The Australian People, Cambridge University Press Rosemary Laing – Brownwork #9, (n.d.), Communicating the Social, available at: http://www.communicatingthesocial.net/individual/laing/index.html (accessed on August 31, 2010) Muecke, S. (Jun 22, 2003), A Landscape of Variability, Kenyon Review, available at: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-109904171/landscape-variability.html (accessed on August 31, 2010) Australian Screen (2010), National Film and Sound Archive, available at: http://aso.gov.au/titles/features/gallipoli/clip1/ (accessed on August 31, 2010) Rayner, J. (2000), Contemporary Australian cinema, Manchester University Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. (2002), “Imperial Landscape”, In, Landscape and Power, University of Chicago. Rare Illustrated books, (n.d.), available at: http://www.rareillustratedbooks.com/i/book/preview/108_108_01.jpg (accessed on August 31, 2010) Read More