Imagining the Antipodes: Culture, Theory and the Visual in the Work of Bernard Smith

IMAGINING TH E A N T I P O D E S

IMAGINING THE A N T I P O D E S

C U L T U R E , T H E O R Y A N DT H E V I S U A L T H E W O R K O F B E R N A R D S M I T H

P e t e r B e i I h a rz School of Sociology, Politics and Anthropology La Trobe University

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

I N

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcon 13,28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © Peter Beilharz 1997 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1997 First paperback edition 2002 Typeface Palatino 10/13 pt. A catalogue recordfor this book is available from the British Library National Library of Australia Cataloguing in Publication data Beilharz, Peter. Imagining the Antipodes: culture, theory, and the visual in the work of Bernard Smith. Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 0 521 58355 1. 1. Smith, Bernard, 1916- . 2. Art criticisms - Australia. 3. Art critics - Australia. 4. Authors, Australian - 20th century. 5. Painting, Australian. I. Title. 709.2 Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Beilharz, Peter. Imagining the antipodes: culture, theory, and the visual in the work of Bernard Smith/Peter Beilharz. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0 52158355 1 (hardback) 1. Smith, Bernard, 1916- - Criticism and interpretation. I. Smith, Bernard, 1916- . II. Title. N7483.S55B45 1997 709/.2-dc21 96-52054 ISBN 0 52158355 1 hardback ISBN 0 521 52434 2 paperback

CONTENTS

Preface vii Introduction xi 1

Beginnings 1

2

Encountering Australian Painting 27

3

Imagining the Pacific 63

4

The Antipodean Manifesto 97

5

Death of the Hero as Artist 127

6

Modernity, History and Postmodernity

7

Conclusions - Imagining the Antipodes 183 Notes 194 Index 206

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PREFACE

In the autumn of 1992 I visited a friend of mine, Peter Gathercole, in Cambridge. I was bleary; a car alarm had been triggered in the middle of the night in London, where I'd been staying, so the night was sleepless, but the trip was pacific and I was pleased to catch up with Peter. We had met in 1990 in Brisbane at a conference on the work of the Australian Marxist archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe, and hit it off immediately, even though Peter was a specialist in anthropology and I was a refugee in sociology; he'd been a Marxist as well, indeed had been taught by Gordon Childe. In Cambridge we walked together and talked, took tea back at his flat. We'd spoken about Cambridge and communism, about my ongoing work on Australian intellectuals, and about his own acquaintance with Bernard Smith over the years. At 4 p.m. Peter took a nap, leaving me sitting at his desk downstairs with the various copies of Smith's books that Bernard had given him over the years. It dawned on me. I became convinced that I must write about Bernard Smith. Somehow his work spoke directly to me, across all those cleavages claimed to divide the generations. Imagining the Pacific was a strikingly contemporary way of seeing. The idea of European vision was brilliant. Bernard had left his umbrella with Peter on a previous visit. Could I perhaps return it? Finally I declined, because it was a real one, no foldups here and I was already overweight with books and things, though I knew I was passing up on an obvious excuse to call on Smith: 'Here, best wishes from Peter Gathercole, is your umbrella, my calling card.. / So I got back on to the train without the umbrella, but with a commitment. I should write an essay at least - maybe a book? - on Smith's work. Of vii

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course I'd known of Smith before, as a Communist and art historian, and my friend Martha Macintyre seemed very often to have European Vision and the South Pacific on her desk.

I managed to find a copy in a London second-hand shop before I got on the plane. Back in Melbourne, I read his autobiography, The Boy Adeodatus, with intrigue, and the essays, began to gather other writings, and I wrote Bernard Smith a letter, introducing myself and stating my intentions. We made contact. I felt a strong attraction to Bernard Smith - a lovely man, as everyone said, someone who defended the locals but without the poisonous taint of chauvinism, saw that we were always ever cosmopolitan. We had both been schoolteachers, both been Marxists, had both slipped in the backdoor of the academy (though Bernard also went in the front door of the Warburg Institute). He confirmed his readiness to cooperate. We agreed that I should work through his papers, meticulously ordered and largely still in his possession. I planned to spend six months visiting his house, Jeansville, in Nicholson Street near the Exhibition Gardens, mainly on Fridays; but Bernard Smith was such a pleasure, and his work so intriguing, that it took another year again. For there were other connections for me as well. I realised that Smith's home was in exactly the same area of Fitzroy that my parents and in-laws had inhabited on arrival as aliens in Melbourne. Bell Street and Johnston Street were what they called 'the old stamping ground'. There were other echoes. From Bernard's upstairs room, where I worked, I could see the Women's Hospital, where my wife and later our children were born. I watched the seasons change and imagined my folks on the street. I came upon odd memories of my own discovery of the world of art, and I remembered my friends who tried to break in to the art scene. So I sat and pondered Bernard's books and paintings, files, papers, reviews and manuscripts, letters and passports, itineraries and postcards. But best of all, this was the first living archive I'd had the privilege of working with, so we'd talk of many things, share a meal, wash up, and when my children came to visit they were not only encouraged to use the banisters, things unknown to them, but given clues on how aerodynamically to maximise acceleration. When the time came to write, to stay home at my own desk, I felt sad, but here, nevertheless, is the result. As I explain later, this is not a biography, though Bernard Smith certainly deserves one. Nor is it a work in art history or criticism. This

PREFACE

may surprise some, but it ought not, for my purpose is to defend a way of thinking about the world we inhabit. This is an argumentative essay, which seeks both to establish and to defend the content of Smith's work. Smith's work is useful in the best possible sense; it is good to think with. So there are parts of the argument which follow which may be mine more than his, and the other way around. Finally, this is a book about identity and being in the world system, based on a sequential reading of Smith's published works and on a careful reading of his private papers, which remain largely in his possession but will later find a home in the collections of the Mitchell and the Australian National Library. My thanks, first of all, go to Bernard. I am grateful for the help of Peter Gathercole, Terry Smith, Martha Macintyre, Stuart Macintyre, Ian McLean, Beryl Langer and Ian Britain. Terry and Stuart offered abundant and thoughtful criticism of the penultimate draft. To Stuart I owe an especial word of thanks; for years now he has supported me in everything I have done, for no apparent reason other than that I have chosen to do it. Chris Wallace-Crabbe's generosity of spirit has been unbroken; it is more than I deserve. Robert Dessaix and Peter Timms gave me encouragement and their wisdom and wit. My friend and colleague Trevor Hogan manages still to find the patience to read everything I write, and to help me improve it. Fuyuki Kurasawa read the final draft for me. My own final reading of the manuscript reminded me how much I owe to Cornelius Castoriadis. John Iremonger and Humphrey McQueen helped me to clarify what the book was not. Phillipa McGuinness helped me confirm what it was. Ruth Fincher and David Goodman of the Australian Centre at Melbourne University and Barry Hindess at the Research School, Australian National University, gave me space to think. I am grateful, as ever, for the help of the archivists at the Mitchell Library and the endless kindness of the Sociology support staff at La Trobe. The manuscript was typed by Bronwyn Bardsley, Beth Robertson, Elaine Young and Merle Parker. Maggi and Kate gave me friendship I had no right to expect. That this book is for Bernard will be obvious; between the lines, it is for Judy Robinson. Let it also be for Rhea and Nikolai, Moni and Dor. Peter Beilharz

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INTRODUCTION

Who is Bernard Smith? Now eighty, with more than a dozen books to his credit, Bernard Smith is most widely known as an art historian and critic. Others will know a different, related Smith - as anthropologist this time for his work on the Pacific and the West. These are probably his two most obvious audiences, those who read Australian Painting and those who read European Vision and the South Pacific respectively, and usually in isolation. Other readers will know another Smith; those who work in literature or biography or who work in Australian Studies will likely identify him with his autobiography, The Boy Adeodatus. He has done more, however, than work with words. Others yet again will know him as local activist and educator, teacher and founder of the Power Institute in Sydney, art critic for the Melbourne Age, 1940s Communist, lifelong Marxist. According to Humphrey McQueen, Smith is Australia's greatest living historian; as Smith himself put it, his work is in cultural history with a primary interest in the visual.1 Yet students of Australian history probably barely consider his work, and social theorists have their heads in other places. Certainly, as you read through reviews and papers Smith's work is credited with being visionary; a copy of European Vision seems to sit on every obvious anthropologist's desk. Most recently, for example, the extraordinary work of Nicholas Thomas takes up its own orientation via Smith.2 Now there is even an undeclared struggle of sorts over the legacy; for it is the anthropologists who seek more actively to follow Smith, perhaps, than the art historians, and it is not too much of a provocation to say that Smith's greatest impact has been in European Vision rather than Australian Painting.

INTRODUCTION

Who, then, reads Bernard Smith? Apparently anthropologists and art historians, though they do not obviously read the same books, and readers of biography, whose curiosity imaginably does not extend to the more scholarly works. And this would be the obvious place for a newcomer to start. I'd say, if asked: 'Read the autobiography first, then European Vision and the South Pacific. Or else try this book, or seek out

the essay penned by Bernard Smith in 1950 where the ideas which coordinate European Vision were first spelled out, before my time. In any case, read Smith'. There is an irony, then, in the reception of Smith's work. Some people will know it very well, but partially, and this often in both senses. This book is partly for them, for its argument is that there is an extraordinary integrity in Smith's work; it needs, really, to be read or considered all together for its splendour and impact to become fully apparent. But this book is also for those who have never read Smith, those in sociology or politics, philosophy or cultural studies to whom the name may mean nothing on first contact. My claim is that Smith is best read, in fact, as a social theorist, a theorist of peripheral vision. His is a project of profound insight, not least of all into what hitherto has been called 'national character', matters to do with cultures local and imperial, central and peripheral. So the imaginary audience for this book is those who already know Smith's work, but partially, and also those who will not know his work at all, but whose time is ripe. Is this a book for art historians? I can only honestly answer this question by saying that I do not know. Likely some in that field will view me as a poacher, and fail to recognise the Smith they were brought up with in these pages. To them, and others, I could only say: sit down with the works, and read them serially, inquire for yourself into the conceptual constellations that hold Smith's thinking together. For the argument that I put here is that Bernard Smith's work is perhaps the most significant social theory yet generated by an Australian. This is not a biography, though it includes an attempt to place Smith in context; its larger aspiration is to place Smith's work in intellectual context, both with reference to his other writings and with reference to the cultures which created his work. It is an attempt at an integral reading of his work; and it is a proposal that his work is good to think with, capable of extension. Indeed, my own sense is that Smith's work, often misunderstood and sometimes maligned in its own time, was so

I NTRODUCTION

far ahead of its time that it can only now be understood, when the rest of us have caught up. It may be the case that it is only now that we can read his work properly, or in such a manner as to address openly those questions summarised by Gauguin: where have we come from? who are we? where are we going? For Bernard Smith is a major thinker in the history of European consciousness, as well as a central source for imagining the antipodes. Imagining the Antipodes then involves a thinking through of the work of Bernard Smith. The meaning of the title will become more apparent as the argument of this book unfolds. The idea of interpretation plays on both meanings of 'thinking', thinking through, with, the work, working it through and viewing through it, using it, viewing it as a living legacy rather than an authorial voice or claim to authority. The first chapter of this book begins with Smith's autobiography, partly as context, partly to set out some themes, sources, in order to establish some issues of identity and naming. Like Antonio Gramsci, Smith came to know both centre and periphery, and came to problematise the complex processes of cultural power and exchange between them. He came, in particular, to think about politics and art civilisationally, in terms of a notional sensibility that history seems always to repeat itself but never in exactly the same form, especially into the phase after the Renaissance which we call modernity. The second chapter then describes and discusses Smith's two texts on Australian painting, Place, Taste and Tradition and Australian Painting. My reading of these books

suggests that Smith early establishes basic themes about cultural imperialism as a necessarily unequal but nevertheless generative process; the subordinate, or colonial partners in the global relation of master and slave also affect the dominant culture, however opaquely. Culture, like power, never follows absolutely unilateral circuits or flows; this is one reason why, or one sense in which, progress occurs at the same time as does cultural decay or retrogression. In the third chapter we shift into what, arguably, is the centre of Smith's work: the corpus of his work on imperialism, the Pacific and ways of seeing. Smith's writing on Australian art needs to be read in this context, against the backdrop of his work on the Pacific; for the analysis of the Pacific runs into Europe just as that on Australian painting leads to the centres of Europe and America and back. To put this in different terms, Smith is always working on the axis which we call the antipodes; but

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the antipodes must be understood as a relation, not a place. Neither Australia, nor Argentina, nor New Zealand constitute essentialist places where the antipodes is found in the soil or inscribed into the landscape; being antipodean necessarily means being constructed into a relationship of subordination which is usually called colonial, or postcolonial. Chapter 4 expands on this theme of being antipodean, as it shifts directly into The Antipodean Manifesto drafted by Smith, and the controversy which still surrounds it. The fifth chapter then turns to the discussion of Australian painters, especially those who might be significant for Smith. Smith's own lapse from the medium of paint, his choice of the word, helps to explain his biographical work on Noel Counihan; Counihan in a way is Smith's alter ego, at least in the sense that he followed a path open to Smith but which Smith chose to close. Counihan stayed with paint and more conventionally with communism; Smith's journey took him elsewhere. Smith's work on Jack Lindsay, similarly, represents a kind of homage to a thinker at once inspirational and embodying a different path. I call this chapter 'Death of the Hero as Artist' as a way to include Smith's views on 'The Death of the Artist as Hero', and to discuss his particular views of significant others, such as John Brack, Fred Williams and Francis Lymburner and critics like Robert Hughes and Peter Fuller. Chapter 6 then takes up Smith's arguments concerning modernism, modernity and postmodernity. The conclusion returns to and extends the major organising theme, that of imagining the antipodes. It seeks further to clarify the nature of Smith's work as social theory, as an historicism which enables theory to happen. Smith's project is one characterised by a remarkable theoretical consistency, within which changes and developments have more to do with shifting substantive concerns than with changes of mind or heart. Smith's orienting themes animate all his work, right across a fifty-year writing period. These arguments both reach back to the war period and extend into his critical response to our century and, in a way, anticipate the questions of the philosophy of history with which the study opens. For it is with history that Bernard Smith's work begins and ends, and in this and much else we follow him. This book, then, is both an integral reading of Smith's work, and a specifically located interpretation of its theoretical impact. Yet Smith defines his own work as cultural history, not as social theory. What

INTRODUCTION

might it mean to speak of culture, theory and the visual as ways in which to read Smith? Why read his work in these terms, and not, say, as art history, given his chosen field of profession? Certainly it is customary to describe Bernard Smith as Australia's leading art historian, though there are now more competitors for that role than there were thirty years ago, and the younger people he often taught might be inclined to question the judgement, view themselves as leaders instead. Smith's self-definition is indeed as an historian of art, only he diverges from the stricter sensibilities concerning art in order to define it broadly as well as narrowly. He employs both an anthropological as well as an aesthetic sense of art. On the one hand, art is defined as high culture, in particular established genres, and judged by Kantian criteria of taste. On the other, it encompasses virtually everything we make or do, from children's papier-mache forms to visual design, tables and chairs, crafts as well as high art. Bernard Smith actually persists with this dual vision, for it indicates both professional and democratic or popular sensibilities. For Smith, there will always be at least two meanings of art.3 These tensions work through history or civilisations. Smith's project is an historicism, consistently guided by the sense that style or meaning is historical. It is anthropological, in the sense that it offers ways of thinking which draw upon practical culture as well as on exemplary works or styles of art. All this is to say that Smith's project is also theoretical, in an historical way, using the visual as its customary subject matter, whether artwork or artifact. To speak of Imagining the Antipodes, then, is to evoke not fantasy but the anticipation of activity and its mental shadowing, for as we are, so do we imagine. And we imagine within flows of culture and history which are beyond our choosing. We create, but not ex nihilo, not exactly as we please. We work in and through a plurality of traditions, and imaginably the quality of the results of these processes depends upon the consciousness we have of these flows and not only upon our talents. The enormity of Bernard Smith's scholarly achievement is matched only by the modesty of his methodological approach to making sense of the world. For as we interpret, so do we use what is given us, so does our work return into the streams of history which make us.

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CHAPTER 1

BEGINNINGS

THE BOY ADEODATUS Who is Bernard Smith? We do not need to accept his version of the story, but he has left us one. In 1984 Bernard Smith published his autobiography. Just this side of seventy, his life's achievements were already remarkable. Smith had written the two most significant works of Australian art history, and had travelled to London to work at the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes on the thesis that became one of the most respected in the field, European Vision and the South Pacific. He had

coordinated the controversial Antipodean Exhibition in Melbourne in 1959 and had established the Power Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Sydney. He had taught at a bush school, painted and stopped painting, walked up the hill between Potts Point and the Gallery of New South Wales, promoted public art education, had a family, served as art critic for the Age and he had loved his first wife, Kate - not bad for a ward of the state, a bastard for whom things might have turned out differently. Yet none of this triumphal public path, so much itself the stuff of conventional biography, was to figure in The Boy Adeodatus - The Portrait of a Lucky Young Bastard. Indeed, the charm of

the book has to do with its focus upon that with which we empathise youth, suburbs, kitchens with fresh linen and Vacola jars, fences to be climbed, worlds to be discovered or constructed, childhood, not the success of adults; the city, the bush, the self, new worlds, rather than suits and grave men and seriosity. The charm of Smith's approach in The Boy Adeodatus is also disarming; he knew that there were things about which we should

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remain silent. The Boy stops in 1940, when Smith was twenty-four. As he tells, this was a moment of transition. He had made three momentous decisions - to stop painting and to begin writing about art, to join the Communist Party, and to marry Kate Challis. Already we sense something powerful about Smith's modesty, about the unspoken, even as we are also reminded of the significance of childhood and youth, before it all gets bitter and jaded as we discover ourselves to be surrounded by schemers or idiots. And he wrote it in third person, a difficult strategy, suggesting as it does somehow a divine interpreter who looks over the shoulder or a neutral voice of documentary, as in Trotsky's attempt at an autobiography. But through Smith's pen the strategy works, and brilliantly; together, perhaps, with Drusilla Modjeska's Poppy and Robert Dessaix's A Mother's Despair, The Boy is a work as evocative as Australian autobiography gets (though it also connects back, given Smith's duration, to other works like Jack Lindsay's Life Rarely Tells and Donald Home's Education of Young Donald). Perhaps the difference, more than any, is that Smith was writing as an historian, as an act of memory; later he was to describe himself not as an art historian but as a cultural historian with a primary interest in the visual. The Boy is certainly an act that Ruskin would recognise as word painting; but it is more than that, for it is anthropology as well as aesthetics. The book follows the traces of the women who made his life, his natural mother and his foster-mum, the first who gave him life by following the unexpected pregnancy through rather than terminating it, the second who raised little Bennie in the Sydney suburb of Burwood until teaching and art drew him to the city of Sydney. The Boy is a kind of personal memoir to the social, it is a hymn to dependence, to the others who helped make Bernard Smith. The implication about meaning and context would not be lost, for like Marx and Freud, Smith knew that history's tales were not self-evident, that you had to look sideways and back to see or at least to understand what was apparently in front of your face. This is one implication of The Boy Adeodatus, that vision needs to be lateral if it is to connect. Another message was that of happy complexity, together with the usages of naming. Bernard Smith had two mothers, and a father who walked, who disappeared. His book manages to pass over the latter with grace, but to celebrate both mothers rather than mourn the loss of the original and bemoan or

BEGINNINGS

belittle the substitute he ended up with. What this suggests is that already Smith as a boy was made aware that we each possess significant others who persist in seeing us individually in different ways. Even as children, before we are inserted into social divisions of labour, our friends and relatives construct us as possessing different personas, or pick up on different aspects of our personalities. Young Ben already had more than one context or family; and in connection with this he had various different names. Bernard William Smith - he copped his father's name, even in his father's absence; Joseph, in parentheses, was added to the baptismal certificate. To some he was Ben, Little Ben, Bennie - later, always Bernard, momentarily, in the Communist Party, Bernie; his mum was Rose Anne Tierney, his minder Mum Keen. When he painted in the 1940s and again briefly in the 1980s, he used the name Joseph Tierney, as a sign to his other mother, so he could be all these things to all these people, and carry all these names. Thinking back on his past, in writing The Boy Adeodatus, Smith came to encounter the same theme which in a sense animates European Vision and his books on Australian painting. Perspective, experience make for difference; naming is but the act of mortals striving to capture momentarily the ephemeral and the fugitive of life's meaning. We see what we know as well as what seems to present itself to us; and we name things differently, depending on where we stand, from whence we come, which side of the blanket, antipodes or centre, margin or metropolis. The Boy Adeodatus plays on its connection with Augustine, and his unwanted son, but it works more powerfully on the theme of the enclosed garden, the suburban paradise of childhood lost. The book opens with Little Ben in the garden; it is somewhere around the end of the Great War, though the image could just as easily be in the 1950s or 60s. Mum Keen minds him; Dad Keen insists he read the Bible, and it is the Bible and Marx, he says in later life, which become the major texts for his life. The optic of Bernard Smith's life opens thus, in the backyard, but then the narrative steps back, to cover the lives of his mothers and their people. He finetools the opening, for words are important. Addressing the National Book Council on its award for 1984, Smith indicated that he wanted to avoid stereotypes of success or failure, of triumphalism or the god or gods that failed. 'Disillusion is a variety of self-pity and I wanted to avoid all forms of self-pity. Because for bastards self-pity is fatal; our natural strength lies in a kind of

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T H E ANTIPODES

detachment', which in turn explains the reliance on third persona. The images were carefully tuned: 'He would remember the garden', the opening line, evoking the backyard, and Eden, and the pastoral in William Morris' News from Nowhere; the second sentence, the Japanese plum in the garden indicating the thing itself, the symbol of his St Theresa in Rome, and his mother's bridal photo; the green and yellow loquats symbolising again the setting, but also Bernard and Valerie Welsh, the two state wards growing up together in the house called Braeside at Burwood.1 Little Ben was nine months old when he arrived there. The household became his world, Mum Keen at its centre, Dad Keen marginal, his natural mother nearby, up the road, trying to make ends meet. But there is little blame, or cause for blame in the narrative; reflecting back upon the story Smith knows that Rose Anne suffers, and suffers more than he does for her inability to provide. When later his mother married and changed name, she wrote to the boy, addressing the letter to the new name, to Bennie Kahl. 'She hoped it would help him to realise that he was one of the family . . . But when he received it he did not like that name at all. His name was Smith. He knew who his real father was. He had gone away. So he sat down, and with Bertha's help, wrote his first letter', signed it Bennie Smith xxxxxx.2 His new lot were Congregationalists, read Charles Kingsley, so Bernard attended the Salvation Army Sunday School, learned about the importance of service, and independence. Bernard encountered some good schoolteachers and initiated a lifelong relationship with libraries. Already discussion became serious, socialism, religion, Douglas Credit, communism, fascism, the New Guard, almost anything in the papers. He read Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy, Darwin, Huxley, Haeckel, did well, won a teacher's scholarship, was disappointed in turn with those who taught teachers, but met May Marsden, an inspiring teacher of art, met the images of Cezanne, the Dutch genre painters who somehow reminded him of home, the household and its matriarch. He visited Queensland, where his natural mother now worked the land and lived in rural poverty, and he learned something of the difference between the European garden within which he grew and the Australian garden in which he found himself, tonally, texturally different, different in density and (as everyone came to say) in colour. Then Smith's story leads to his bush school in Murraguldrie, outback of Wagga in New

BEGINNINGS

South Wales, where he painted landscape, read again Ruskin's Elements of Drawing as he sketched and pondered the difference between vision and nature and struggled with the will-to-power of his hormones. Now he discovered surrealism. Protected from the Great War by his years in Mumma Keen's backyard garden, he knew nothing yet of its roots, in arguments about crisis and decay, Dada and futurism. Still in the sticks, now schoolteaching, he read Herbert Read's Art Now, and Andre Breton's What is Surrealism? Surrealism was a rupture, a symbol of movement and a sign of the times, of the realms of imagination and politics. He wrote in his diary in November 1938: 'I look at the world with greater confidence and with less desire to compromise with it. Surrealism recently has pointed out a new path to me in art. It is the thing for which I have been unconsciously waiting'. 3 Did Smith then become a surrealist? Not quite, for that was an honour to be carried in Australia very largely by the lonely figure of James Gleeson. For Bernard it worked more like a can-opener, and certainly he painted in its shadow, as of the darkness of the impending war. But for Smith the attraction was somehow more to political dissidence than to the aesthetics of dissonance alone. He read Joseph Freeman's American Testament, subscribed to the realist New Masses which Freeman came to edit. Now he struck up a relationship with Lindsay Gordon. Parts of their correspondence appear in The Boy Adeodatus; the originals are in the Mitchell Library where Bernard liked to work in those years. Gordon works as an irritant; his letters to Smith are often inflammatory, he helps goad Smith out of his still too-innocent respect for art. The global situation was one of decline, and Gordon was one who spoke his mind; jaded, indeed bitter, he helped Bernard to realise that the conventional, Clive Bell distinction between art and society was becoming increasingly irrelevant. Poets and artists were already dying, in Spain. But Australians still largely felt too far away from this. In Sydney they were too smug, in Melbourne too dull. Smith visited Melbourne for the first time in Easter 1938, to look at the holdings of the Felton Bequest in the Gallery and to visit Heidelberg; but the canvas of the local impressionists had already given way to asphalt. He had read William Moore's two-volume catalogue Story of Australian Art, and was depressed that no audience existed for the book; it was remaindered, he picked it up cheap at Dymocks in Sydney. He read another big book which appeared in two volumes and sold well to the

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faithful, Soviet Communism by Beatrice and Sidney Webb. Like Spengler's Decline of the West, these were two volumes given to civilisational analysis. He felt compelled to choose. And so, on returning to Sydney he joined the Teachers' Branch of the Communist Party of Australia, for communism was a bastard tradition; somehow it called to him, though the attraction did not outlast the war. The others in the branch called him Bernie; this time the habit of naming generated some confusion, at least for the secret police, whose file blurred Bernard with another Bernie Smith, known to frequent bars with young seamen at Circular Quay. Now came the famous Herald Art Show organised by Keith Murdoch. Modernism arrived in Australia, or at least its European precedents were aired locally, Gauguin, Dali. There was even a painting in the collection by a lapsed Australian called John Power. Bernard read one of the few available keyholes into the European situation, in Peter Thoene's blue Pelican book Modern German Art (1938). No sooner had the optic of modernism opened than its enemies sought to close it down. Thoene's was a response, a cry of anguish among other things against the 1937 Nazi anti-art exhibition of 'degenerate' work in Munich; Thoene was a pseudonym for Oto Bihalji-Merin, who lived under this other name to tell the story. Yet for Smith the situation was different to Gleeson, perhaps more like Thoene; you needed to write, to educate, to contribute to some kind of critical culture which might help to resist the barbarians. And then there came his third big event, Kate. But there The Boy Adeodatus stops. Why would a writer of distinction exercise such discretion as this, and stop now? As I have suggested, Smith's work is dynamic, personal and personable, but it is also modest in scope; he knows when to remain silent. His purpose in The Boy Adeodatus is not to present the tortured soul of romantic biography but to indicate something about common experience as well as different. For the kinds of difference or dissent with which Smith aligned himself, in aesthetics or in politics, were also obviously shared by others in Melbourne and Sydney, Madrid and Berlin. Smith was attracted neither to romanticism nor to the idea of the avant-garde, though of course the Communist Party veered between popular front and vanguard politics. As he wrote in a manuscript on 'This Culture Stuff in 1939, against the cult of the avant-garde: 'Small groups of individuals cannot hope to make any appreciable difference to a

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change in the cultural standards of any country, unless they are in harmony with these determinates of change'.4 He had not yet joined the Communist Party, but the thinking was pre-eminently Marxist context rules, as Marx had put it in the 1859 Preface, people make their own history but not as they please in The Eighteenth Brumaire. What was true of history was also true of art history. Discussing the 'poets of decadence', he wrote a year later that 'no form of art can, I believe, maintain itself solely by the continual refinement of its own conventions'.5 Lindsay Gordon had relieved Smith of any final sense that art was, or could be, autonomous. Of course, it had its own institutional life and logic, galleries and dealers; but its autonomy was nevertheless illusory, not least of all in periods of social decay and crisis. This did not mean, however, that art was merely an aesthetic level corresponding to the pertinent stage of capitalist development. As Smith put it much later, in his inaugural lecture for the Power Institute in 1968: 'If you will permit me a high level of generalization I think it is broadly true to say that over the past two hundred years the artistic tradition has been consistently antagonistic to the values and structure of modern industrial society'.6 Capitalist society and economy, ironically, had been unable to generate its own autochthonous cultural forms. The new society was industrial, consumerist and passive; art in general remained romantic, even to the extent later that postmodernism also replayed vital themes of romanticism via surrealism. Art, in other words, was as often inclined to negation as to affirmation, and this especially in periods of decline. As Smith read Thoene's text he marked the passage in the margin: 'An atmosphere of catastrophe in the social sphere, the division of the ego in the private sphere; brooding revolt against fate, narrow morality and an ecstatic, almost religious individualism; these are the essential marks of German expressionism'.7 Yet Smith resisted the apocalyptic, partly because he was already drawn to the idea that history is patterned, however differently. Surrealism attracted him more as an aesthetic than as a politics. Its politics could be suitably radical, but already he encountered the awkwardness that some artists seemed to have with politics; they wanted to preserve the image of their autonomy against the stain. It was a problem he was to encounter again, later when it came to the controversies surrounding the politics of art in The Antipodean Manifesto.

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On 16 October 1940 Smith gave a paper on surrealism to the Teachers' Federation Art Society. He argued that surrealism was a comet, but a significant one. It represented the new, and as such was bound to be rubbished by those who knew better. It was received as rubbish in the same way that impressionism had been in the 1890s, new, therefore not art. For Smith, such developments begged questions about the nature of modernity and of history; they needed to be viewed globally or civilisationally. 'Being a world phenomenon it can only be considered by taking a world view. At this point I shall state definitely that to my mind western civilization has experienced a breakdown and is now undergoing a process of degeneration'.8 Smith's view was personal, but it was not only that. He summoned three varied but representative thinkers to make the case. Marx, Spengler and Toynbee all pointed this way, representing respectively the viewpoint of history according to communism, fascism and democracy. To introduce the theme of decadence, however, was not to await the apocalypse. If there was decadence now, in the midst of war, then the theme raised the issue of previous periods of decadence. Decadence implied resurgence, not the end of the world. Speaking trans-historically, Smith argued that decadent periods were typically marked by paintings possessing surrealist qualities; the paintings of Bosch, in this regard, anticipated the work of Dada. Decadence called out a new spirit, was positive in this way; and the innovative turn often involved a new source or point of perspective: 'the new art forms which arise after a period of Surrealism generally flourish upon new soil away from the older cultures which originally fertilised them'.9 Surrealism, for Smith, was then like modernism, nothing new, at least not in the sense that Dada supposed. Surrealism was a generic phenomenon, a cyclical trend which became manifest trans-historically. Or to put it more precisely, surrealism, like romanticism, was part of a great cultural repertoire which humans in different places periodically felt compelled to draw upon. Smith was suggesting that a general theory of history, in the manner of Marx, Spengler or Toynbee also indicated something about art; decadence returned, and so did surrealism. The conclusion was obvious: faced by the experience of the world wars and the interwar years, 'we have to realise that we are either witnessing the birth of a new social order or the end of civilization as we know it'.10 Sensitive critics of the period often observed that somehow the old was dying, but the new was not

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born yet; still, as Smith insisted, this scenario involved the end of civilisation as we know it. All the same, surrealism was about endings rather than beginnings. And it internalised the world, by insisting that the problems before us were in the mind more than the world. Smith's conclusion was different. The dream world was fascinating but it was not primary. The social was primary; in the beginning was us, not me. More, if surrealism was cyclical, so then must realism be. Modern realism or social realism also had its antecedents - in Swift, Voltaire, Milton and Goya. Somehow Smith had managed already to think of the long run of civilisations, rise and decline, and to grasp the dominant frames of the twentieth century, those two world wars which brought with them communism and fascism. Fascism, communism, crisis, decadence, the possibility of renewal hang over his thinking as they still do. Surely it was his intimate childhood contact with the Bible that helped to plant this sense of history as the long run. But then came Marx and Spengler and Toynbee, and others. Bernard Smith read voraciously into the 1940s - Eliot, Nordau, Daiches, Sir James Frazer, Freud, Christopher Caudwell, Herbert Read, Fry, Ruskin, William Morris, Jack Lindsay, Joseph Freeman; and he talked. He talked with Dale Trendall, the classicist, and with Tom Rose, his philosophical connection to John Anderson, the libertarian philosopher at Sydney University. He argued with Lindsay Gordon. He read classics, Aristotle, Lessing, Longinus. Obviously these things were encountered in different ways, for insight can be as accidental as it is systemic in arrival. Lindsay Gordon pushed Smith hard about materialism; 'truth can only be realised through practical activity'.11 He harangued Smith on what today we would call philosophical anthropology, using terms of reference reminiscent of Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, where labour and creation are the context of art and culture.12 Smith wrote to Lindsay on the eve of his first departure from Australia, 10 May 1948, from Potts Point: 1 shall always remember your letters to me at Murraguldrie, precious things they were to me . . . they meant more to me than anything I have read since'.13 In the meantime he did the hard graft. He read Marx and Engels' The German Ideology, Marx's Theses on Feuerbach and Engels' Origin of the Family, the

State and Private Property. The works of the young Marx, the famous Paris Manuscripts were unavailable to him. He found some good theoretical support amongst the flotsam of authorised Dialectical

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Materialism in the superior work of Max Eastman and Sidney Hook, especially Hook's Hegel to Marx, which focused on the young Marx and the young Hegelians, Ruge, Bauer and Feuerbach. He read Marx's throwaway lines about the appeal of Greek art and sat through Capital. He persevered with Spengler's massive two-volume study, Decline of the West and the slighter book on Man and Technics. And he worked through Toynbee's A Study of History, especially volumes four to six (picked them up at David Jones' Book Corner in 1942). He read Sorokin's fat volumes on civilisation in the Mitchell Library. What was the substance of all this, where did it point, the content and message of all these big books? Spengler became, as Smith had observed, complicit with Nazism; but he had a theory of history that was worth taking seriously. Spengler's message, in this way like Smith's, was that decline meant something else as well; his theory of history was not one of unilateral demise, but of cyclical return and reformation. Toynbee's optic was structurally similar to Spengler's; civilisations rise and fall, reach peaks and collapse; in this there should be no surprises. The more interesting question becomes that of how change occurs, whether it is internal or externally triggered. Toynbee was bound to appeal more to Smith, for even though Toynbee spat at Marx at the same time he drew on his thinking. Toynbee took on the language of class as an analytic device. It was simple: the breakdown of civilisation involved class war, even if this did not lead, as Marx sometimes imagined, to socialism or the end of history. Class war, for Toynbee, works as the trigger of history: thus the breakdown of a civilization gives rise to a class-war within the body social of a society which was neither divided against itself by hard-and-fast divisions nor sundered from its neighbours by unbridgeable gulfs so long as it was in growth . . . [therefore] the nature of the breakdowns of civilization can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of nemesis [following] on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole.14

Toynbee's lines were first published in 1939; during 1942 Smith took them in. In 1937 there was the Munich Degenerate Art Exhibit, in 1939 the 'phoney war': plainly Toynbee spoke to Smith and to his moment.

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But Toynbee was also sharp, and critical of Spengler as well as Marx. Spengler was too mythological, too organic, Marx too technological; Smith noted in the margin Toynbee7 s claim that technique and economy were not the same.15 You needed to look hard to find the social actors among these conceptual abstractions. Toynbee's cultural universe was rich and expansive, taking in democracy, education, creativity, the Greeks, moderns, Nazis, communists, nationalism, slavery, the American Civil War, Hellenism, Judaism and Christianity. He spoke with ease of proletarian revolution, a dominant minority (in decline) and a creative majority (in growth). He referred to ours as a 'Post-Modern' Age, just as Smith was soon to characterise contemporary Australian art as post-modern, after modernism.16 Finally, Toynbee suggested that societies in transition often seize upon images of future or past in order to legitimate themselves; he invented two types, futurism and archaism, to evoke this possibility.17 Still Smith wanted to use Marx, for Toynbee's system was clever and suggestive but somehow too modular and sealed (and smug?). In his papers a two-page fragment from 1941-2 spells out 'Some problems connected with the Marxist approach to art criticism'. Smith opens his reflections with the observation that there is a methodological tension in Marx's work, between the systems-logic of Capital and the historicist narrative of The Civil War in France. Marx is torn between historical and analytical ways of thinking. Those who follow Marx are in a way obliged to live with the tension; they can work from history or from first principles. The choice is ultimately unsatisfactory, for like materialism and idealism these are names for ways of prioritising which are not mutually exclusive. Smith elects on this occasion to follow first principles and to use history as a check. The primary concern of his reflection is the question of the autonomy of art. Marx's defence of the Greeks implies that while successive modes of production indicate progress, art does not progress in the same way; it is culturally framed, not technologically given. So, for example, the Greek epic was only possible when the Greeks believed in their gods, not when they had developed a position of scepticism.18 Parts of Smith's argument, then, are sympathetic with Marx, parts with Toynbee. The vital point of sympathy between Smith, Marx and Toynbee and even Spengler is the necessity of historicism. The point for art history is that modernism (or

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surrealism) has to age; therefore it must be placed, and it can be expected to recycle in some form or other. To talk about art, in particular, was necessarily to talk about the long view, to speak of civilisations in the plural, Egypt, Persia, China and the West. Smith had become a civilisational thinker, and therefore a pluralist. Smith's teacher's thesis of November 1940 is similarly suggestive of the synthesis. Tendencies in modern English verse' centres upon the work of T. S. Eliot. Eliot's major poem 'The Waste Land' had first been published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf in 1922; but somehow it, too, seemed to speak directly to the thirties. Smith's judgement was consistent with his earlier views on surrealism and decadence: T. S. Eliot made the fatal mistake of imagining that our present civilization is a 'Waste Land' because of its present religious impotence and sterility ... He has forgotten, too, that the decay of a particular set of social relationships is not to be equated with the decay of civilization itself.. .19 As you look at Smith's own paintings of the 1940s you can see the presence of Eliot, all the same; for part of him was enchanted, overruled by the urgent period sense of decline. Yet he strove for the balance, and eschewed pessimism in his prose. In discussion of Eliot he summoned up Toynbee as the thinker of the idea that 'the poets of disintegrating cultures tend toward an "archaism" of symbolism, in a futile attempt to recapture the unified "style" of that same culture's growth period'.20 The synthesis in Bernard Smith's own mind was not unlike that constructed by Melvin Rader in his important 1939 study No Compromise: The Conflict Between Two Worlds.™ Smith read the book closely

and carefully annotated it. The two worlds between which citizens had to choose were not communism and fascism but democracy and fascism. Rader explains and contextualises Spengler's work and its relation to fascism; then he discusses philosophy of history, explicitly with reference to Spengler, Sorokin and Toynbee. As in Smith's reading, Toynbee comes out best, Marx in the shadows. Like Smith in this setting, Rader makes the choice that between democracy and fascism, but he aligns socialism and the Soviet Union with democracy. Fascism

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offends worst of all because it is publicly reactionary, it is the explicit attempt to reverse the revolutionary and humanist currents of 1789. But the bind is also apparent. Fascism seems more barbaric because it is openly antihumanist, publicly anti-universal. Can fascism be more dangerous because it is publicly contemptuous of democracy? Or is communism not worse, finally, because it masks its contempt? The choice between democracy and fascism was not as simple as it seemed. With wicked wit, the brilliant Viennese satirist, Karl Kraus, is reputed to have said: If you ask me to choose between two evils I choose neither'. This is not, however, the way citizens encountered the world in the 1930s, because individual integrity then had to be weighed against the pragmatics of commitment. The intellectual attraction to the work of Marx was one thing, for Bernard Smith. The politics of opposition to fascism and of commitment to the culture of pedagogy in the Teachers' Branch of the Communist Party was another. He signed up; yet his was ultimately a cultural Marxism. So after a decade his membership lapsed. The benevolent Marxist state in the east was more restrictive of art and freedom than the parallel market institutions of the west. Fascism gone with war's end at the level of state power in Germany and Italy, his choice could finally be with Karl Kraus. For contrary to the abstract Marxist proposition that history represented a linear sequence of unfolding modes of production, Smith knew history to be a mess, an ordered chaos of conflicting wills and actors, agents and institutions, who made their world but not just as they chose. As he was to put it later, this also meant that culture was always already mixed: Some kind of classicism or primitivism seems to be invariably present in all radical ideology . . . Classicism, medievalism and primitivism are the principal means by which radicals have attacked the conservative art values of the present, including the innovating present.. ,22

Socialists, too, on this basis could conjure up all kinds of ghosts from the past and chimeras for the future, all of which they did to a frenzy in the Soviet crucible, in art and in politics alike. As for Karl Kraus, when his moment came in the 1930s the satirist also had to make a choice, this time between social democracy and the Austrian state. He chose the state.

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WORDS AND IMAGES By the time of Bernard Smith's inaugural Power Lecture in 1968, and given the reflective space which the occasion offered, Australia's leading art historian was in a position to offer some powerfully insightful comments on words and things. It was almost thirty years since he had stopped working in paint, and chosen instead to paint in words. The power of western mythologies, of number and word now presented itself to Smith as a civilisational sign. Science is dominated by number, arts by the word; yet Smith simultaneously worries that the larger problem might be elsewhere, in the power of the image. This was a way to raise again his ongoing concerns, from European Vision to Imagining the Pacific, with the idea that imaging and imagining somewhere run together, even as they also represent different orders of seeing. On the occasion of his inaugural lecture Smith's particular interest was less with number or word than with the mixture of words and images which we are now accustomed to calling mass media. So he argued that: If the liberal tradition is to be sustained in these powerful new areas of mass-communication, critical modes of procedure will have to be developed appropriate to the mixed media. We need an etymology and semantics of the visual image as vigorous as that of the word: to grasp the role of the mixed image in conveying information, in rhetoric, in persuasion, in the expression of feelings and the ways in which images may be conjoined with words.23 For Smith, such a need was consonant with the logic and intention of the Power Bequest; the Power Institute ought, in his eyes, to work as a kind of institutionalisation of restlessness, the gift of an alienated man for the promotion of change as well as its location in tradition. Change, like tradition, was a basic feature of the human condition. But how are we to judge or to discern? Smith's thinking typically works out of both the Kantian legacy and the tradition of historicism. At the same time he advocates and recognises the importance of a separation of spheres, forms of practices and ways of thinking of them and recognises that all these things, from art to politics and life, are actually mixed media. The connection between art and politics was to shadow his path. The crossover alluded

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to in the inaugural lecture also reflected Smith's civilisational sensibilities. One aspect of Smith's work concerns the way in which art history, among other things, reflects general societal trends towards secularisation, powerful though necessarily ever incomplete. The rise of modern painting, in this view, involves its relocation, from the church to the gallery; the shift in institutional location also indicates a shift of the kind of politics involved. To modify Hegel's throwaway that moderns read the morning newspaper as a ritual to replace church or confession - Smith's sense is that moderns, among other things, offer secular praise to the collections now held in galleries; secularisation, therefore, never quite means what it implies, for it indicates not the death of god but the retranslation of belief patterns into modernised forms of ritual. To worry about the especially modern combination of word and image in mass media as a rhetoric, as Smith did in his inaugural lecture, was therefore to anticipate the cultural forms now often called postmodern, and to call for a certain form of cultural studies to read them. Smith's historicism and his residual Marxism, however, always insist on what cultural studies today too easily overlook: power, context, history, violence. The themes were among some which Smith returned to later, in a seminar on the 1890s at the Humanities Research Centre in Canberra. Word and number matter, for Smith, indeed they are the gods of our modern lives. But they are not only to be invoked cosmologically, filmically, as symbols without substance. In his comments on the 1890s Smith developed a different line of argument. When it came to art, art history and criticism had been transformed not by the cult of the visual which has so taken French theory in particular, so much as by the fetish of writing.24 It is the act of writing, not seeing, which has transformed the nature of art criticism, for hitherto the social practice we now call 'art criticism' was primarily verbal; it grew out of the churches, not out of the print medium. Before the modern, art response was essentially verbal, and its concern was with a non-verbal, that is, visual experience. Painting, for example, used to be outside verbal communication, sacred rather than pedestrian or profane. But now: All this has changed. With the ascendancy of reproduction has come also the ascendancy of verbal commentary - so that we only see what we read we are seeing, and not what our eyes would by their own

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intuitive visual explorations of visual reality presented to us if unaided by art-critical verbal diktats.23 Like Kant, Smith is attracted to distinction, and to the exercise of the appropriate form of judgement. Difference matters; everything is not everything else. Never innocent or primal, the visual experience is nevertheless transformed by the endless palaver of acceptable interpretation. As Smith was to argue later, this was nowhere more evident than in the rampant inflation of the idea of reading, which today works as an equivalent for interpreting or explaining. We no longer look at a painting or a street scene, we read it. The hegemonic claims of the text, the word, therefore jostle with what the French tend to view as the terror of the eye or the gaze.26 To use a more concrete example, as much as we can delight in the viewing of Australian landscape by Fred Williams, there comes a point where we seem to see Fred Williams' paintings in nature, no longer nature in Williams' representations. Of course, it can be objected that we only inhabit a chaotic world in which there is an endless proliferation or traffic of signs, and we never know what came first, never are innocent or capable of an innocence in interpretation. The implication of Smith's argument, however, is that it is no longer the case, as we imagine, that the artist leads and the critic follows. In effect, the critic leads; the critic authorises and allocates value. The guidebooks we carry as we wander through galleries are no longer what they seem; they are authorised by Deleuze and Guattari. Every other art catalogue opens with a quotation from Michel Foucault. Our encounter with the visuals of art are thus framed by the texts which license particular locations of them. Theory here leads, or at least philosophers do; whereas for Smith understanding follows history, arrives late if at all.27 As Robert Nelson puts it, the reception of works of art somehow becomes theoretically overdetermined to the point that the discredited avant-garde, having left by the front door, return now through the rear entrance in the varying roles of cultural advisers.28 We all need philosophers by our elbows to explain everyday life. Smith's relation to art was more public and democratic, even if this meant dropping the more severe kind of authority which would allow professors to divide the world into those who know (can paint or speak of painting) and those who can't. His earliest endeavours in the

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art world had been public, working on the promotion of art holdings in borrowing libraries, travelling exhibits especially beyond the cities, judging in local and children's shows, doing the rounds of the community. Let us remember, Smith was a teacher, and a deeply committed educator who understood the difference between teaching and learning but knew also that the processes involved, opaque as they are, warrant enthusiasm and passion as well as information and repetition. There were other connections, of a theoretical kind. Working with children called out the sympathy of surrealism and psychoanalysis; child painting, primitivism, naive art, raised obvious questions about how we come to see, hear and speak in particular ways. Arts, in short, were also like crafts, just as images shaded into imaginings. But not all Smith's practical efforts in art education had these loftier connections. Largely they involved the politics of persuasion, borrowing the paintings and getting them safely transported across the countryside on trains, locating half-suitable venues, beating up some support for publicity and so on - work more like that of a road manager than a leading light of the local art scene. Smith, by now, had escaped from the classroom and was working for the Gallery of New South Wales, seeking to connect life in the Gallery with that in the New South Wales Department of Education. He had done his time at Murraguldrie, was happy to have known the country but also to have moved on, though still feeling connected to it in some ways. A manuscript in Smith's personal papers looks back over the experience; it bears the title Taking art to the country: how it began'. On 10 October 1944 an exhibition, the first of its kind of any distinction, opened in Wagga. It was entitled One Hundred and Fifty Years of Australian Painting, and it had been organised by a Smith who was also immersed in the creation of his first book on Australian painting, Place, Taste and Tradition. It was an amazing feat; the exhibition included works from Conrad Martens to Thea Proctor, William Dobell, Noel Counihan, James Gleeson, Russell Drysdale and Margaret Preston. After Wagga the show went to Newcastle, Gosford, Goulburn, Lithgow, Bathurst, Orange, Wellington and Mudgee, ending in Dubbo on 4 July 1945. It was followed in December 1944 by a second travelling exhibition entitled Some Recent Australian Painting in Canberra, then classified still as a country town, where works by Jean Bellette, Grace Crowley, Ralph Balson and Frank Hinder among a hundred others

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were shown for the first time. There were no galleries in the national capital then, as Smith observed, but there was a Scout troop, so the exhibition was held in the Scout Hall.29 He organised it all. Smith's sense, in retrospect, was that this new opening was part of the spirit of the times, anticipating postwar reconstruction. It was also reflective of what committed actors could achieve in a situation where the Gallery's administration was almost non-existent. Smith worked for the Gallery as a seconded teacher, discovering among his obligations the staging of the 1944 Archibald Prize and the highly popular American War Art Show of 1944-5, as well as controlling the movements of five different exhibitions then circulating simultaneously around New South Wales. This kind of activity was consistent with Smith's other commitments, to the Teachers' Federation Art Society and the Studio of Realist Artists, organising with May Marsden's other students public lectures by Sali Herman and James Gleeson, Smith himself speaking on topics ranging from Egyptian art to surrealism. At a later moment in his life he viewed the use of Power Institute funds for visitors similarly as part of a public responsibility, for example, he took Power Lectures to every major city and territory in Australia. In the period 1943 to 1945 Smith also collaborated with Katharine Susannah Prichard and George Farwell (and later Ken Levis and Rod Shaw) on Australian New Writing, another one of those little magazines that have contributed so substantially to Australian culture. Smith wrote for it, as did Lindsay Gordon, Vic O'Connor and Miles Franklin. The focus was often on everyday life, art and the working class. The theme of decadence figured with some prominence. In the third issue Smith penned a piece on the 'Encouragement of art', again arguing for the kind of localism which he practised. The point was a common one: war had cut barriers between masses and elites, opening new possibilities such as factory or workshop art.30 In later years this kind of sentiment was still evident, for example, in Smith's weekly articles as the art critic of the Melbourne Age between 1963 and 1966. Here the democratic or civic impulse which motivated the New South Wales travelling exhibits was still at work, for Smith as popular critic strives to give everyone a guernsey; in the Age columns he covers all artists exhibiting in Melbourne each week, even when their work is ordinary or plain, and he avoids editorialising or character assassination, referring only intermittently and sotto voce to the

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Antipodeans, the hegemony of abstraction and the decline of figuration as a lost cause. Pro-Labor into the 1970s, Smith was also critical of Gough Whitlam's art policies - put simply, they were elitist, which was a limit because they would generate nothing new. Whitlam's policies failed to develop local strength, confirming or extending already recognised talent rather than cultivating it from below. This was an error of imaginative omission rather than commission. Unfortunately the Whitlam Government began to provide generous support for the arts without any well thought-out policy as to its purposes or those of art. Smith used an historic parallel which at least would make sense to the Great Man. Louis XIV had used the talents of Colbert to encourage the social development of art from below; Catherine the Great had followed a different strategy in arts policy, which involved buying the art of others for the Hermitage, which resulted in a wonderful collection with no apparent connection to a local art scene - art in Russia therefore remained provincial. In 1933, Smith's story went on, Whitlam's hero Franklin Roosevelt had followed the Louis/Colbert strategy rather than Catherine's - he established the Public Works of Art Project, a mysteriously Soviet-sounding organisation with substantial results. The Project hired 3749 artists who created 15 633 works of art for public institutions (in the America Of the 1930s, as in Smith's New South Wales of the 1940s, art display was, by definition, a metropolitan experience). Whitlam's error, in Smith's eyes, was to follow Catherine's policy, buying up significant works such as Pollock's Blue Poles but behaving as though the collection of art was more closely connected to the realm of consumption than of production. The strategy largely supported already established artists at the expense of the new.31 The echoes of the Catherine/Whitlam story reach back into Smith's earlier beliefs and practices. Australian New Writing could be sneered at by superior minds as the mock proletarian outcome of popular front strategies, or as populism outright. Yet some of its writers wrote powerfully and movingly. The art of children can be notoriously amateurish, but the mind of the child in league with the hand can also generate insight and difference sufficient to astonish. The potters and Sunday Masonite painters whose work Smith reviewed in the art pages of the Age deserved better than to be sneered at; like the work of children or of craftworkers, theirs was an autonomous expression of

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creativity; it told us something about who we were, even if it was not beautiful or harmonious in proportion as were the classics of the Renaissance. The students of fine arts attracted by the Power Institute were also encouraged to get paint under their skin at the art studios in the Tin Sheds off campus where Smith again arranged for the possible contact, at least, between realms of art production and consumption. For art, now, was work as well as creation or aura, it was pedestrian as well as sacred or divine; it lived in the streets, for the modern world after Kant was all mixed up, to the extent that we might now observe more beauty in the construction or fitting of Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art than in its hangings, or contemplate balance more happily looking out the windows of the Louvre than staring at the objects on its walls. Smith's critique of Whitlam's policy ended with an advocacy of the idea of the neighbourhood workshop. His specific allusion was to recent experience on the east side of Manhattan. Again, the echo in Smith's earlier view was familiar. He had long advocated community workshops, though the enthusiasm was revived with the sense of cultural opening attendant on Whitlam's election in 1972. Into the middle of the 1970s Smith advanced the argument that academic art had not been replaced by industry, rather the two coincided, they mixed forms. Industry had not killed art any more than photography shot portraiture; the much-announced death of art emerged merely as a new way of behaving.32 Dada, now, is always with us. The cornmodification of the art scene had always been a more substantial problem. Small, decentralised workshops were necessary to help others get around the art boom and its negative effects. In art, as increasingly in critical theory, performance, fashion and television threatened to freeze movement by legitimating and authorising a handful of talents and ignoring the rest.33 Smith was not a romantic. He was attracted to the precedents established by John Ruskin and William Morris, for whom the practice of drawing was a necessary part of appreciating art, for whom furniture and the art and craft of the vernacular were as important as great works of art in their different spheres of existence. But Smith was no medievalist; his desire was not to return to some imaginary past but to work with the tensions within which we find ourselves. This was a modernist attitude, for better and worse, because it presumes that we are stuck within both. So he argued that:

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Technological evolution, like organic evolution is not linear; where over-specialised forms have had their run, more primitive but more flexible forms gain a kind of second wind. This is the point to remember about the present growth of decentralised workshops throughout the country; though they may look as though they are imitating oldfashioned even medieval forms, they are in fact a response to urgent contemporary needs which centralised structures of industrialism can now no longer successfully cope with.34

Such was Smith's world-view already into the 1940s, after encountering Marx and Toynbee and Spengler. Progress was never linear, nor was there merely a clear and devastating descent into barbarism; the new was never simply that for it recycled parts of the old, some of which would be recognisable to us, while others were transformed in the process. So as much as we need the familiar, we need the other, and our desires for the new and different and the routine always play upon us. Being moderns we are restless, restless even for a moment's peace or rest. But we live with speed as well as tedium, with repetition as well as novelty; we live with the ambivalence of modernity, so much torn between past and future as to eclipse the present. IMAGES AND WORDS Smith's defence of community art as well as fine art obviously reflects a sense of community, again a highly contested value these days, championed by some as conferring place and meaning, spurned by others as too grimly compulsory and traditionalistic. It is consistent with Smith's position to feel torn or compromised over these matters; we can expect Smith to argue that we need city and community alike, even though they do not come together. Famously a citizen of Fitzroy as well as earlier of Potts Point, a state ward in suburban Burwood, only partly at home in Murraguldrie, Smith was also an active citizen of Glebe. The city neighbourhoods he has lived in actually sound like those enthused about in Adelaide by Hugh Stretton, peculiarly Australian as Australian city and suburban forms do not readily follow European or American paths where the choice is arguably clearer. Smith defends urbanism, but also warms to proximity. In the context of the struggle to save Glebe from overdevelopment, Smith began from the period and strategic observation that 'a real university is one that you can walk to'. 'Suburban romanticism' he found dangerous, setting

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as it did work (bad) against leisure (good) and therefore centre against suburb: 'According to this burdensome [cultural] legacy work is a grind which exhausts and debilitates; vitality is restored by sport, recreation and leisure in a non-urban setting'. His stronger claim was that the university needs really to be part of a community, in this case that of Glebe.35 The echoes in his case are with the views of someone like the New Yorker of the 1950s, Jane Jacobs, for whom urban is good because or to the extent that it is mixed. Place matters; this is a major motif in the work of Bernard Smith, though it also works in an interrogative as well as assertive way. So what, then, do we mean by place? space? and how much of its meaning is mobile, transformative, negotiated? These are some of the kinds of questions raised even by the thematic titles of Smith's great work Place, Taste and Tradition, European Vision and the South Pacific, Imagining the Pacific, The Antipodean Manifesto - all of which are as suggestive of a

sense of question as of a sense of answer. Smith's work emerges as a dialogue between word and image where the tension shifts with the course of time. For young Bernard, Bennie, perhaps it is the visual which dominates; Smith paints into the 1940s, spends another four decades struggling with words and their relations to the visual, then himself paints again early into the 1980s before returning again to words, and to more words about those who chose to stay with paint, like Counihan. Moving closer to his eightieth year, his work turned towards something like a Sumtna, a reconsideration of all he had done and of its century, the century of modernism, of wars and surrealism, fascism and communism, abstraction and postmodernism. Smith's debut as a modern painter is exemplified in two works both of which appeared most recently in the Surrealism - Revolution by Night exhibition of 1993. The Advance of Lot and his Brethren was first

exhibited in the National Gallery of Victoria in 1940; Pompeii was first shown in the Federation Art Society in Sydney. While neither work is surrealist in the sense exemplified by Gleeson, both fit under the aegis of the collection gathered for Revolution By Night. Both are apocalyptic, civilisational canvases, peopled by casts of thousands. In Lot there is the image of decline and fall of archaic civilisations which have ridden on the backs of the suffering masses. As Smith put it, in self-analysis, the 'monuments of Greece, Rome, Byzantium and the Gothic world are shaken by the wrath of God as the people pass through vast seas of

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blood struggling towards the Promised Land'.36 This was an optimistic apocalypse, then; the masses were down but not out, a sense of turbulence, of movement persisted. Lot is a painting as much shadowed by images of Eliot's Waste Land as it is by surrealism and German expressionism. Surrealism in the manner of Dali was, in any case, the effective monopoly of Gleeson. But if Lot indicates against Eliot that movement persists over decline, Pompeii indicates the dominance, or negative prospect of decline as the Second War unfolds. If Lot is influenced by Picasso's Guernica and El Greco, Pompeii is haunted by Bosch. Smith's reflections on these early paintings published in 1982 in Art and Text are more confessional than this, offering senses of explanation to do with communism, guilt and the personal traumas of emotional entanglement. What is most captivating about the piece, like his autobiography, is the happy modesty of its conclusion. Having now given up painting, I destroyed all my other paintings except Pompeii, and left Lot with a picture framer in George Street, Sydney, where it was deposited for collection at the end of the Sydney showing of the Contemporary Art Society Exhibition, late in October 1940. It was in any case a painting that disturbed me and I did not want to see it again. I thought they had destroyed it. But thirty years later I got a ring from the same framer to say that it was still there. It must have been 1974 or 1975. They were very kind about the storage. On seeing it again it seemed to me to be quite a good painting. So I took it home.37

Like a long-lost friend he took it home; they did not talk. But later Smith's desire to paint revived. In May 1985 there opened at the University Gallery, University of Melbourne, an exhibit by one Joseph Tierney. His mother's second name, a given name he might have had but eventually didn't. He began to paint again in May 1984; he used a studio in the Trades Hall 1984-5. He wrote around the time to Jack Lindsay, apprehensive but excited at the prospect of returning to the visual image. His autobiography was completed; it was an obvious occasion to revisit, to reconsider, however fleetingly, the choice he had made at age twenty-four not to paint, but to write and educate about the visual. Lindsay caught on to the awkwardness of revisiting. He wrote to Smith: 'Your decision to turn to artwork emerges quite logically and yet at the same time is strange for someone clearly so absorbed

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in artistic practice as well as theory .. Z38 Smith had mentioned to Lindsay his subject matter, everyday more than surreal this time: 'People in Melbourne streets .. .perhaps a bit naive in places'.39 'Three men in a Melbourne Park' up the road from Nicholson Street; more symbolically, mocking Disney: 'His Australian Highness Mickey OA meets his people'. Twenty-six new paintings went on display, together with two from 1940, Lot and Pompeii. There is some continuity in style across the paintings; as with his writing it is the subject matter which shifts, from the apocalypse of war and fascism to the Sunday paintings of carnivals and demonstrations, Moomba, Labour Day, Palm Sunday in Melbourne in the eighties, the new Labor regime barely established, no talk here of Roosevelt or Louis XIV. Where Pompeii and Lot had both worked on a massive scale, structured archaeologically into levels above ground and under, layered into a multiplicity of levels and potential meanings, the 1980s' paintings were almost documentary, moments of lives, more figurative and direct in representation. But Smith was not to become a painter again, any more than he had been in the 1940s. The ghosts of his past had been settled by the revisitation, which had served its purpose. His own purpose was still to work upon that larger canvas of words and images, words about images and as images. For his purpose was not to offer the definitive grid through which art, or the pacific or the antipodes could be screened; it was more radical than that, for it was (among other things) to direct attention precisely to the existence of grids and their usages, not to construct a metatheory of reception or interpretation but to encourage the activity of criticism while establishing its conditions of existence between the eye, head and heart, the imagination and memory and the artwork. As he had put it in a talk on the ABC in 1964, his own shift from painting to writing, from the artwork to criticism had been a philosophical or anthropological one: T had become more interested in painting than ever but not my own. Who were we? Were we Australian artists? Where had we come from? What were we trying to do?'40 The questions were like those used by Gauguin to frame his triptych: 'who are we? where have we come from? where are we going?'. Smith had come to the conclusion that criticism was an integral part of the mechanism or psychology of creation. He had also come to understand the profound local ignorance of Australian art; so he began to write books about it. He became an historian, in this particular sense,

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an historian of visual culture whose curiosities were framed by the sense that history was best understood civilisationally. In 1984 Bernard Smith published his autobiography, hanging on the discretion, the unsaid of later life. He had planned a second volume, and actually began to draft it; but it became unravelled. There is a folder in his papers entitled 'Personal project for the continuation of Autobiography. The 1940's in Sydney'. It sketches out a kind of historical sociology of art in Sydney, the art establishment, the outsiders; it charts out a chronology month by month from 1939 to 1952, which becomes more skeletal as it proceeds. It is, that is to say, no longer an autobiography; it commences on the level of autobiography, but it progressively turns into a sociology or history of the institutions of Australian or Sydney art. Smith was writing himself out of the script, partly in discretion and in modesty, partly because the nature of the story seemed to shift so much further away from the closed suburban garden of childhood in Burwood. This was not for want of trying. Another document in Smith's papers bears the title 'Among the others'; it is an early draft for the planned sequel to The Boy Adeodatus. Again, its content concerns context, mainly the Sydney art scene into the 1940s, its implied extent and duration. Smith tucks away a great period vignette of Sali Herman in the manuscript. The voice sounds to contemporary ears like Flacco: Tve no trouble with Australians at all', he would say in his rather throaty continental accent. 'I go to a pub with a friend and when I get too many curious looks I wait for a break in the noise, then I stare at my friend and say in a loud voice, 'The real trouble with this bloody country is that there are too many fucking foreigners in it". He would then turn and greet everyone in the bar with a disarming grin. It never failed to work.41

So Smith weaves together personal and social, discussing in detail, for example, the 1940s controversies over art shows in Sydney, the modernist phantoms locked up in the cellars for safe keeping, the moderns cast disarmingly, for example, by Julian Ashton as degenerate, an extraordinary indiscretion in the shadow of the 1937 Munich Display. It was all of a piece. For his own shift out of painting was also political in part, a response to these times, a response more directly to

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Lionel Lindsay's chauvinistic attack on modernism and the Jews. Perhaps writing was a better field in which to work on the art of persuasion. The second volume of Smith's autobiography disappeared into silence, together with his history of Australian architecture. There were other matters more urgent and enduring on which Smith would raise his voice.

CHAPTER 2

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PLACE, TASTE AND TRADITION 'In 1940 no one in Sydney took any real interest in Australian art/ 1 Thus wrote Smith in the opening lines of the Second Preface to his first history of Australian art. Written into 1944, it was first published by Sidney Ure Smith in 1945. Out of print for years, it was finally reprinted by Oxford University Press in 1979. In the 1979 Preface Smith surveyed the interim period. Looking back, the indifference about Australian work is difficult to imagine. By our own times, of course, Tom Roberts jostled with Ken Done in postcard racks, and Fred Williams had joined Sidney Nolan as a national iconographer; even Juan Davila might periodically show up in public places. The situation Smith entered was a silence unto death. William Moore's Story of Australian Art of 1934 had been remaindered two years after publication. Smith viewed it as a fairly important achievement in its context; he blamed the soil on which it fell. These were not good times. Along with Lot and Pompeii Smith had completed in 1940 another painting, Drought, which also showed up in the 1993 Surrealism show. It was an Australian landscape executed perhaps under the influence of Eliot's Waste Land. While the Nazis were destroying art by fire in Germany, meantime, the philistines and phoneys in Australia always looked elsewhere when they heard the word 'art'. The Sydney scene was a waste land as well. All the same, Moore's book made clear to Smith his own ignorance. He threw himself into educational activities, seeking to substitute the spoken word for the written in its absence. He was reading Marx and Toynbee, visiting Melbourne. So he wrote his book in the shadow of Guernica. He had 27

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come to the conclusion that if Marx wrote about historical and dialectical materialism, as radical wisdom received them, then the history bit was worth pursuing. Dialectics worked more as a cruel joke than as an imperative to social change. At best, dialectics meant process; at worst, mumbo-jumbo, a magic wand. And though European art had often been viewed in Australia in the form of paler reproductions, the local works were there to be discovered. Smith made a commitment to the archive, and put to good use its capacity to compel thought anew. He was an historian, after all. The leap from Moore's book to Smith's own is extraordinary. For Smith's achievement in Place, Taste and Tradition was not only to establish some clearer lines of narrative, but also to frame his concerns in such a way as make them deeply provocative in an intellectual sense. Reading through these pages we already detect a number of the vital curiosities which were to inform his later work, especially European Vision and the South Pacific. Place, Taste and Tradition is already an

evocative enough title, the kind that fifty years later still (or more) gets you wondering, thinking about associations and distinctions: place, space, culture, context, taste, high, low, forms of judgement, tradition, frame, grids, ways of seeing. Smith conceived the title after reading a book by Samuel Alexander, Space, Time and Deity. The words were mimetic, thematic, inviting. The opening lines of Smith's text already indicated its purpose beyond the narrative: 'This study is concerned with the relation between the course art has taken in Australia and the concurrent European tendencies from which art here has drawn so largely. Australian art comment has presented a distorted view of Australian art by paying little attention to this relation'. 2 Already, in opening the optic Smith was raising questions about the nature of colonial and postcolonial art reception, the image of empire and the theme of cultural exchange so central to this work. The issue of determining the 'cultural cringe' was already in the air, but it was not only a question of the extent to which, say, painting in Australia was derivative or not. Smith was suggesting, rather, a different way of thinking these relations. Smith saw it as his business to historically reveal tendencies, to mark out contours in time which would render the structure of the present intellectual and aesthetic landscape intelligible; the challenge was as much to do with how we think as it was with what we think. To do this, he would discuss Johann

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Winckelmann's Germanic Hellenism in the same breath as he would Brian Fitzpatrick's study of British imperialism in Australia. So what was the story of Australian art per Smith? The white invaders of Australia brought much with them in material form, but they also brought a cultural repertoire; they brought with them not only a desire to dominate or a curiosity about the great south land, but they also brought something stronger, a homesickness for the old. They carried a nostalgia of vision; the human habit of recycling wisdoms from previous epochs was accentuated by the contact between new world cultures and the old. Smith's concern was, therefore, directly with the reception of art, and not only with the artifacts themselves. Smith was, in effect, bringing the eyes of a stranger, an outsider, to the inside. All phenomena, especially those we think we know, can be treated as though they are exotic. Why should Australian painting often resemble the English, and representations of Australia look like England? The answer was to be found in the fact that the viewers and painters brought certain habits of vision with them, which endowed natural scenes with the forms and residues of memory, of the other: 'This is what Paul Nash meant by saying that "nature is what the artists of the day before yesterday made people believe in"'. 3 This is to say that the early colonists saw Australian landscape with English eyes, that they endowed that landscape with the formal qualities of landscapes to which they were aesthetically accustomed in England. To put it in a blunter vernacular, the colonists could not see what was in front of their faces, so much did they live in the life of the mind; but nobody can, or does, this was a common problem, not a unique one. Vision Smith quoted Wolfflin - vision then had a history.4 The component parts of this local history included some significant themes, like melancholy, romanticism, primitivism. More generally, Smith's guiding curiosity was in the sense that cultural forms like art would always be hybrid, but even more emphatically in the framework of imperialism. Tradition was not flat; it rested on assimilation, on processes of unequal but significant cultural exchange between metropolis and periphery. As Toynbee had indicated, historically cultures are given to recycling, and the outcome is never entirely predictable. A purely Australian modern art was therefore impossible; even as a reactionary strategy of self-defence, it could only make sense as an archaistic revivalism staking itself against

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the dominant historical movement. Not that there was a shortage of sources for those who might choose to argue for the antipodean as a peculiarity of essence, of primordial time and space. Smith uses Marcus Clarke as an epigram for his opening chapter on the beginnings of colonial art: 'In Australia alone is to be found the grotesque, the weird, the strange scribblings of Nature learning how to write'.5 European romanticism had sought the Gothic and the sublime in northern nature; only the southern experience suggested better. The flora, the fauna, the landscape, the natives were all constructed by Europeans as exotic if repugnant and grotesque. So the first chapter of Place, Taste and Tradition opens already with more questions, puzzles about intellectual framing and perception, reception. Smith begins with a discussion, not of gum-trees and paint, but of scientific recording and romanticism. Like Freud, he presumes that the story he is tracing will not carry its truth openly; we will always need to be prepared to look elsewhere to explain what is before us, in this case to the global experience of imperialism. Art, as Smith argues, is often attendant upon religion; in Australia it came together with science. Cook's expedition brought much else, but it also brought Banks and botany. Over a thousand surviving works of botanical and zoological value were produced before 1800, a veritable catalogue of ways of seeing, as well as objects seen. The black swan, the kangaroo were nothing if not exotic. As Smith observes, the arrival of the first kangaroo in England created a furore. All that was categorically solid melted into air; for unlike faked mermaids this was live, it moved, was publicly displayed, admittance one shilling per person. Thus the curious, the strange, the odd, the mysterious helped to build associations that were growing around the word 'romantic'.6 Anticipating Edward Said's work on Orientalism by thirty years, Smith linked this enthusiasm for the creation of exotica with the cult of Chinoiserie. The semantic connection was important, for however complex it was, the distinction between China and Chinoiserie was of the same order as the difference between the primitive and the cult of primitivism. The historical connection is also powerful, for romanticism was fed at the source by commercial imperialism.7 The earliest white representations of Aborigines were, therefore, less an accurate statement about experience than an illustration of the hypothetical 'noble savage' associated with Rousseau. Early topo-

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graphical paintings were also presented with a romantic aura. But this could not last, for art is never independent of its place, and it takes on the features of its locality as surely as it takes on the features of its time: Through the broken image of the English tradition the contours of a new continent were visible, and those contours were to bend and distort the European vision to the ways of a new country, with a different environment and other ways of living'.8 More than Edward Said let on or his followers cared to acknowledge, the subordinate partner or place in the relationship of domination would also affect the superior culture. Europe would never be the same after its contacts with the antipodes, even if Europeans themselves would be slow to concede this formally. Into the nineteenth century, however, the balance was still predominantly English. Artists searched for and concocted the picturesque, the sublime, the romantic, even as they complained that the landscape was too alien, unlike home; they endeavoured to transform Australian landscape into English, shifting from topography to country houses in the process. Even some of the best early painting, like that of Conrad Martens, suffered from, or was characterised by, a need for Anglicising nostalgia.9 A discernible shift came mid-century, together with changes in political economy: gold. Australian art now began more obviously to assume national characteristics, as in the photographic tableau-work by S. T. Gill. But there was still not, indeed for Smith there never could be, an essentially Australian art. As he wrote: There can be no such thing as an Australian art-form. Lines and colours of themselves have no nationality. It is only after certain combinations of form and colour have become associated with a race or nation over a long period that structural art-forms may be said to have a racial or national quality.10

What is a nation, in any case, or a culture? Among other things, these are ex post facto categories which effectively take on lives of their own; but when we call them to analysis, all we see is the sum of their collected parts, and pasts. Fin-de-siecle fears may have been less heightened in Australia than in Europe, if only because the scars of the Industrial Revolution were yet barely perceptible. Mechanics' Institutes prospered,

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encouraging amateur art and criticism, and the emerging middle class was keen to develop art as evangelism, both as a moral code of human development and as a commercial advocate. By Federation, of course, art became connected to nation-building, though again this is probably something which is more apparent in retrospect. Perhaps more significant for the self-consciousness of Australian art in the making was the experience of impressionism. The result, in Smith's estimation, was clear. For its first century of white civilisation, Australian art had been English. Then it took a French turn, where the visual was now valued over the conceptual. Such was the achievement of the Heidelberg School, though as Smith noted, painters like Tom Roberts were basically realist in manner.11 The Heidelberg painters were not, however, overtly nationalist; they may have viewed themselves as contributing to, or even crystallising, a culture, but they did not see their work as nation-building. The French were not the only influence, nor by virtue of Smith's logic could they have been; for Smith's work is always governed by the sensibility that the categories come after the event and that they - we use them unfairly to screen out manifold diversities. Modern art is always mixed, it is never like Johann Gottfried von Herder's concept of a unified and unifying language, it is always plural. Alongside the impressionism of Phillips Fox there was the mysticism of Sydney Long and the more widely Anglo enthusiasm for Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Hans Heysen and Charles Conder and the indulgent fleshy decadence of Norman Lindsay; and these were those who were recognised, for there were always parallel paths without written history or critical recognition. With Lindsay and Bernard O'Dowd national mythmaking came closer; the image of a healthy national vision became more formally aligned with the pastoral and primitive, with images of nature set against images of the evils of cities. As in America, but even more powerfully, romanticism outshone modernism as the new world experiences grasped for the symbols of the old, green, pleasant land which still dominated memory. In Australia archaism could reach directly for Aboriginal culture and idealise it at the very same time as extermination was taking place. In 1944 Smith was to anticipate contemporary argument and allusion to the possibility that white Australian civilisation has an

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empty heart.12 We moderns live on the edges of the continent, looking out and away from the red centre and heart, missing something peculiarly Aboriginal about our identity, therefore feeling hopelessly homeless - or so the story goes. It is as though the culture of domination has to elevate the symbolic image of the other at the same time as it tramples its bearers or their descendants, as though whites are compelled perversely to tell the truth while we live a lie. But the representation of the Aboriginal as primitive is a very particular kind of projection more than it is a 'truth'. As Smith argues, there are few other instances so powerful of the way in which an occupying culture projects archaism into the centre of its nationalism. The Americans may have done it in film, but their art forms became more conventionally modernist. Smith compares the Australian experience to the Mexican, where imperialism of the deed, despite enslavement, brought some more significant kind of cultural exchange: The colonization of Mexico, in spite of the enslavement of the native Mexicans, during the beginnings of settlement, is an example of the development of a vigorous living art with its own distinctive qualities from the blending of two ethnic types. But such a growth results only from a two-way development, the mutual contribution of two living traditions that eventually intermingle as they continue their adaptation to a common environment.13 This was not an argument for cultural assimilation, but rather for what Smith was later to identify as cultural convergence. In the Mexican case its achievement was already evident in the 1930s, say, in the work of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Moments of exchange occurred in Australia, between say Heysen and Albert Namatjira, or in Margaret Preston's borrowings of Aboriginal motifs, as Smith indicated; the problem was that extermination first had to stop for any kind of progress to occur. Thus Smith spoke harshly of cultural nationalism, the Jindyworobaks movement with the phoney naturalism of its claims to return to pure singular culture - as though the French or English influences on Australian painting could be reversed by fiat.14 The Jindyworobaks were in pursuit of something completely elusive, something like the image of 'authenticity', a free Australia without any

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outside influences. As Smith replied, no cultural development had ever followed this path, for culture itself was a process of absorption and adaptation, of change rather than eternity. The idea of a pure or original 'national culture', by comparison, had awful resonances in the setting of the Second World War. And in Australia, in any case, the Americans had arrived anyway; and they were not only woman-stealers, the butt of Albert Tucker's symbolic wrath in Victory Girls, they were also part of the audience for Place, Taste and Tradition. Smith had spent time with his copy of Jack Lindsay's Short History of Culture, spent time working with Toynbee and Marx, and had come to the conclusion that we lived always in change, even if not with change of our own choosing. Change, traffic, contact, difference were the kinds of processes that made up culture. The purists and nativists were reactionary, for they sought to identify national art and national character with landscape. But culture, as we know it, springs not from the soil or even from beautiful if paradoxical mirage-representations of it. Culture, like identity is human and therefore transient. Authenticity is a redundant, indeed a dangerous notion. ART, WAR AND MODERNISM Then was war. Modernism preceded the Great War, but it was the experience of war which manoeuvred its reception. Smith writes as though the two world wars make modernity completely different, and dominate the twentieth century ever after. I think he is right. As Pitirim Sorokin observed, the twentieth century achieved more mass slaughter than any other even in its first quarter. Smith read Sorokin, and read about him in Rader's No Compromise. Sorokin, I think, was also right. Looking back on the twentieth century the significance of the wars becomes even more powerful; as Trotsky liked to observe, ours was the epoch of wars and revolutions. The rise of communism and fascism only make sense in the context of the Great War; those regimes then set into motion the processes which generate the Second World War, establish the postwar division of the globe, and then reconstruction in the west alongside postcolonialism elsewhere. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the unification of Germany and the collapse of the old Soviet Union into the nineties we are now only just able to glimpse the idea of a world after the Great War, and in this sense after modernism.

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Modernism, in the form of postimpressionism, emerged as a movement in Anglo art, according to received wisdom, in 1910 with the controversial Impressionist Exhibition organised by Roger Fry in London. Modernism was also, among other things a feminist movement, so it comes as no surprise to us today that the most striking of early Australian women artists appear at this time. Grace Cossington Smith, Thea Proctor, Margaret Preston, Aletta Lewis, Grace Crowley this was work which we would view as having a strong European feel, even as (in the case of, say, Preston and Lewis) connections into the Aboriginal and Pacific are reminiscent of Gauguin as well as Picasso. By this point Smith's narrative had almost caught up to his own direct experience. For it was around 1936 that surrealism, already in its old age on the continent, arrived in the antipodes. Surrealism itself was also caught up with the war. The Italian Futurists, such as Filippo Marinetti had, like German writers such as Ernst Jiinger, sung in praise of war; war, it appeared, was good for you, at least from a distance. The apocalyptic experience of the trenches somehow failed to live up to these exuberant hopes. War, apocalypse, decadence and decay became more powerful symbols than the progress of man and machine which Futurists and fascists alike had banked on. Australia was only notionally on the edge of all this; the tyranny of distance was lost at Gallipoli. Into the thirties fascism in Europe was closer than it may at first have seemed. Surrealism in the strong sense depicted the apocalypse, but also the other, the inner, the dreamworlds which at least momentarily aligned Trotsky with Freud and Breton with Marx. In some hands this ended in the playful silliness of Dali, already hinted at by Duchamp; in others, including those of James Gleeson, the message was more frightening and sombre, about the wolf in man, the sewers below the cities of the mind. Dropping its prefix, surrealism also led in moments to realism. Now realism was to become something of an encumbrance to Bernard Smith, who is often identified with it. This would not be so bad, perhaps, if it were self-evident what realism means. Given the extremes of heat generated by arguments around issues of realism, figuration and abstraction, it is unfortunate that we cannot simply define realism as the other of surrealism rather than the other way around. For surrealism also obviously addresses the real, in different ways; dreams, for example, we encounter as real and yet somehow as less than

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immediately real. The core values of Smith's commitment to realism are social and historical as much as they are aesthetic. Surrealism, on this account, looks perhaps too much to the inner, to the private mind, whereas what makes us truly human is the fact that we share space and time, place and tradition with others. We are, for Smith as for Marx, pre-eminently social individuals who create as well as suffer, who are imprinted as well as imprinting, who make and make what we call craft as well as art. Realism might, then, for Smith, be defined with reference to context or history. It should not be confused with naturalism, which in any case is artificial, a way of seeing which seeks to elude its own existence. Smith's attraction is to the kind of realism we encounter in painters like Breughel, Daumier, Courbet and Goya.15 In Australia, at the moment in which Smith was writing, the interesting painters seemed to be political radicals with social commitment. After William Dobell and Russell Drysdale, there were Noel Counihan, Victor O'Connor, Josl Bergner. As Smith put it when writing in 1944, these were postmodernist painters.16 The use of terminology followed Toynbee but had a logic of its own; just as postimpressionism followed impressionism, so could it be expected that postmodernism would follow modernism, for the whole point about modernity was transience; what was called modern, experienced as modern in one epoch, would look passe in another. Modernism by definition would, therefore, be obliged to be obsolete, while the modern impulse would continue. What was modern, or at least contemporary for Smith and for the readers of Place, Taste and Tradition, was the Second World War. Modernism by the 1940s could be viewed as tried, or tired, though fascism could also be encountered as antimodern, even though it was not only that. Fascism and communism were both highly stylised in romantic and reactionary terms, and yet were also movements which were staking a claim to an alternative modernity. In this context Smith's first history of Australian painting had achieved a great deal. Viewed most minimally, Place, Taste and Tradition had forced the issue of recognising Australian art by establishing something of its narrative. The point of radical novelty in Smith's text was that it had also problematised its object. It had achieved this by placing the nature of white Australian culture and history under question: Who were we? where had we come from? where were we going? Located in the

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antipodes half-way through the century we could and ought to ask the same questions as had Gauguin, but we would not come up with the same answers. White Australian civilisation was obviously introduced to the south land so it already involved, at the very least, a dialogue of conflict and tension between space and vision, place and imagination or memory. Further, it involved sequences of European influence, from English botany to landscape to French impressionism, glimmerings of German expressionism, cosmopolitan surrealism, realism, vorticism. A new world experience, it grasped for archaic roots, looking for soul in all the wrong places. And it had been dragged through the valley of the shadow of death now in the devastating European wars and the Asian-Pacific theatre as well. All this makes it apparent that there was a social theory emerging out of Smith's history, even if it was only to be elucidated more fully later, especially in European Vision and the South Pacific. Perhaps it was the case that Smith's thinking, already so powerfully suggestive, needed time to settle and stretch, and the benefit of a different location more fully to fill out. Perhaps the situation was simpler, for Smith's overwhelming concern was with the politics of the moment. Much to the displeasure of his various well-heeled reviewers, he ended Place, Taste and Tradition with politics, so much so that Sid Ure Smith prevailed upon him to leave some of it out. Bernard Smith's claim was obvious. There was a war going on, and art was part of this whether we chose to like it or not. He recoiled from the bizarre traditionalism of the salon-types, for whom the world could collapse about our ears if only art could be protected, a kind of Peter Pan fantasy of eternal youth.17 Consistent with his own intellectual culture, Smith was not simply warning of the apocalypse. Notwithstanding the paternalistic endeavours of its self-appointed minders, art would continue to change. Already the once-radical innovations of Cezanne and Picasso had been passed on; it was this sense of movement which led Smith to anticipate postmodernism. Smith now anticipated a resurgence of realism, which had already presented itself in the work of Henry Moore, Eric Gill, Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco, locally, Counihan and his mates. Smith anticipated, and hoped for, a flight from abstraction. Realism was aligned with radicalism in politics and so Smith broke aesthetic etiquette by closing his book in the discussion of politics. Bear in mind that the barbarism of the Second World War was only now becoming fully evident, into its

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closing phase. Smith was writing at the same moment as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno penned their elegaic text, Dialectic of Enlightenment. The conclusions were similar; Smith, for his part, wrote that we 'have been witnesses to the calculated destruction of Western European culture'.18 The difference between the view of Horkheimer and Adorno and his own position was significant. The German philosophers implied powerfully that decline was final and irreversible; we could continue to inhabit the rubble, but the idea of progress was over. Smith's dismay at the extent of destruction was abundant; fascism had been an experience without precedent (communism, behind that, even more so). Fascism was also, however, a phenomenon which drew upon romanticism and archaism, seeking to hold back modernity by traditional means at the very same time as it relied on modern means of destruction and propaganda to defend reactionary goals of iron and blood. As far as Smith could see, part of the problem was to be located in modernism's own necessary contradictions - for modernism was not ever fully modern, nor could it be. Modernism remained at heart deeply romantic; as recent works by Christopher Lasch and John Carey remind us, heroism and the cult of the creative individual remain powerfully nostalgic presences in modernity.19 As Smith put it: Modernism, here, as elsewhere, although famous for its many palace revolutions in the sphere of technique took over from the nineteenth century the tenets of aestheticism - the unique nature of the artist's personality, the 'prophetic role' of the artist, the philistinism of the multitude - completely without question.20

For Smith's generation, the difference between then and now was expressed by the pathetic distance between the stance of Julian Bell and that of his father. Clive Bell, Bloomsbury connoisseur, doyen of English aesthetes, wrote that the 'one good thing society can do for the artist is leave him alone'. Julian Bell, himself a writer and poet, died fighting with the International Brigade in Spain.21 Luckily for us, today, the choices are less immediately brutal; sometimes, today, they are not clear at all. Perhaps there are none that really matter, and if today everything goes then nothing really matters - the denizens of postmodernity feel at home with the wisdom of Karl Kraus. Smith's

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sensibilities in closing Place, Taste and Tradition remained closer to the crisis, and to Jack Lindsay's own conclusion in his Short History of Culture, that to make no decision was the worst decision of all.22 Smith ended his first book in sympathy with Rader's advocacy of a potentially democratic art, which together with Rader he associated with Ruskin, Morris, Wright, Gropius and Mumford.23 Sid Ure Smith advised Bernard Smith, and the two were friends; but Sid's publishing sense indicated against the inclusion of Bernard's further conclusions. Perhaps it was just as well; already the reviewers were complaining about the intrusion of politics into the placid theatre of art. The difficult section was expelled from Place, Taste and Tradition and ended up in Communist Review for June and July 1946. It appeared under the title The fascist mentality in Australian art and criticism'. Perhaps it was simply the problem that you could criticise German fascists but not the local currents. In any case, the whole business was more than a little risky, so that Smith wrote here under an apt pseudonym, 'Goya'. Goya again recommended Rader's book to his readers. He proceeded to associate fascism generically with the cultic praise of rural life, irrationalism, the paternalism of race-breeding, and antimodernism. He probed the inner connection within fascist thinking between antisemitism and antibolshevism. Fascism's praise of the imagined purer past went together with and fuelled its antimodernism.24 Modernists we remained, however, for better and for worse. Already into the 1940s, then, Bernard Smith had managed to achieved a modicum of recognition for art history and a degree of notoriety for introducing into it the stain of politics. As dutiful young Bennie had finally lapsed from his Salvation Army classes, 'never absent never late', so he finally escaped the Education Department. Without a complete BA degree, he managed to secure a scholarship from the British Council to work on the project that became European Vision. The rupture, leaving Australia, also helped to clarify what it meant to be antipodean from the other end. He left behind the Communist Party. Anthony Blunt at the Courtauld Institute indulged Smith neither as aesthete nor as a fellow communist; he effectively dismissed Smith, sniffily, from whence the local lad travelled further, took up with Charles Mitchell and Rudolf Wittkower at the Warburg. In 1949 Smith addressed the British Council on the topic 'Australian Art and the English Tradition'. It was a delicate brief, educating one's

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superiors, but it was handled with clarity and tact, irony abundant. As Smith now put it: It is difficult, of course, to talk about English qualities in Australian art without starting a quarrel... How often have we read accounts of Australian art that might be summarised thus: for a hundred years after Australia was settled [they] painted in an English manner, and they couldn't - poor devils - paint gum trees, and this art was very bad, then along came a man called Streeton who could paint the sky and draw gum trees. After that Art was Australian and it was good .. .25 Good or bad, better or worse, these were the dominant terms of reference and judgement - English culture and Australian landscape were folded together, a kind of maturation process emerging in which Australian painting together with national culture came of age. Smith's concern, by comparison, was to multiply the factors and to set their interaction into motion. As he wrote for the British Council: I think we can say that there are three primary elements in Australian art. The English influence, the French influence, and the influence of our own environment. I would not like to say which of them is the most important. I do not think we can do without any of them.26 The real twist in Smith's thinking was that he was also thinking about thinking. So, in a BBC talk for the Third Program on 'The Australian landscape' broadcast on 17 November 1950, he made it clear that this was not some kind of cookshop or cultural alchemy which simply mixed different components of national cultures. Rather, the imagination had a primary significance in these processes. Australian landscape, Smith argued, began as a dream, and this not only in the Aboriginal sense; for the image of the 'antipodes' also had a dream past in the European imagination. The antipodes was all that the English made it out to be: the other, the subordinate, the bodily and vulgar; below the equator was below the belt. Europe was like the proverbial satyr, mind in England or on the continent, body and bodily functions elsewhere. It was the evil of the underground, but at the same time it was an imaginary fantasia, cornucopia, a land of wonders, monsters, the great Southern Land of abundance in the imagination of the Spanish explorers. Plainly Smith's thinking for European Vision and the

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South Pacific had spread into and out of his work on Australian art. In the BBC broadcast he referred to colonial painters like Thomas Watling, with their capacity to combine the visual and the mythical; and he spoke about Marcus Clarke's reaction to our 'melancholy landscape', a theme already posited in Place, Taste and Tradition and subsequently amplified in Australian Painting. On this occasion Smith worked the point that this melancholy is ours, not its; we projected it upon a vista which refused to be properly English. Darwin, on his visit was to see it better, Smith claimed; Louis Buvelot was the first more adequately to capture it in paint.27 Yet Smith's concern with Australian painting was never just symbolic or limited to internal matters of interpretation. He was a Marxist; he was interested in history, context, power, money, classes and institutions. Art was also mediated through this social fabric, even after fascism had collapsed and perhaps loosened again the claims of period demand between the wars to connect up politics and art. In the first edition of Place, Taste and Tradition Smith had come closer, perhaps, to the idea that because it was decadent, modernity corrupted art, for in a note to the second edition he added the following afterthought: I no longer believe that a general decline in taste may be attributed to the effects of industrialism, rather the reverse. Industrialism made good art available to a far larger number of people than hitherto. On the other hand industrialism does seem to have brought with it a slow but steady decline in the quality of those fine arts that are based, as painting and sculpture still largely are, upon handcraft.28 The contradiction was clear, and it was us. Modernity cut both ways; yet Smith still adhered to that partial wisdom and insight of Marxism and the English romantics, for which decline was never just circular or recurring. There were also ways in which modernity did it worse than hitherto preceding civilisations. There remained ways in which it was meaningful to say that Australian art had lost opportunities. Thus Smith wrote in a scanner, 'Fifty years of Australian painting' for Meanjin that: the great promise that gleamed for a moment in the late eighties and early nineties [of the nineteenth century] was not realised; within a decade the painters of the Australian school were mainly concerned

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with gaining recognition at the Royal Academy and the Paris Salon, more than in producing original art.29 This was the same kind of irritation as that which Smith had turned against Whitlam's art policies. Art was so much governed by markets that it was hard to see how either aesthetic judgement or the craft movement could really survive. Bernard Smith's concerns in this regard were to parallel those of a critic like Pierre Bourdieu, whose work would become known in Australia only thirty years later. Bourdieu's project rests on the sense that language, the vision and power are all implicated together; this means, for example, that academic authority is governed by a star system which is deeply implicated with the media, and that art is necessarily formed by its institutions - such as galleries - and the social institutions of class and the authorised culture which, in turn, form them.30 The cluster of concerns connecting vision and experience with the antipodes and the world system were thus one major global axis for Smith; the local specificities of power and authority in the art market were another. If language, vision and power were actually always mixed up, it nevertheless remained the case that art should have criteria of its own, different to those of the market. Aesthetic transactions did not belong in the temples or on the stock exchange; but with ongoing commodification, of course, they did. Since Ruskin, at least, radicals and critics had fumed about the meaning of beauty and its value on the market; in the midst of the unfolding postwar boom these kinds of distinctions increasingly failed to make sufficient sense. Economic value came also to swallow up matters of aesthetic value. As Smith spat at the process, in his speech opening an exhibition by Charles Doutney in Sydney in the 1950s: in this connection - while I do not wish to sound anything that savours of a patronising note, I think I should point out a danger that the artist who becomes well known is likely to be exposed to - particularly in this city, where again and again, it has been possible to witness how quickly an artist's work deteriorates after a certain measure of success .. .3I Smith's own work and life have been remarkable not least in this regard: that he has resisted the corruption of power, and that his own

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work has been consistently insightful and provocative. He has neither sold out, nor have his ideas evaporated with the passing of time, even if they have sometimes been passed over. Indeed, his whole project is animated by a consistent ethical sensibility coupled to a remarkable ongoing curiosity about the world as it transforms before us, we with it. AUSTRALIAN PAINTING Place, Taste and Tradition had served its purposes. Smith had established some new lines of historical thinking about Australian culture and had argued for a politics of art. He had also identified some ongoing puzzles about the antipodes and questions of vision. In 1962 he published his second history, Australian Painting; the version we know today is supplemented by three additional chapters on Australian painting since 1970 written by his student, Terry Smith.32 Perhaps Bernard had to leave Sydney to escape from all the other Smiths. The focus was thus expanded at the same time as it was narrowed from 'art' to 'painting'. Australian Painting is a book of a different moment. Its setting lacks the political urgency of Place, Taste and Tradition. Its prose is more relaxed and more detailed, its paragraphing lengthy and more leisured, its personnel fuller and more inclusive. Australian Painting opens with material that could just as well have appeared in European Vision and the South Pacific - Cook and Banks, the 'grand tour' of the globe, imperialism and science, representation in art. Smith's first issue, of course, is the image of the 'noble savage' and the Anglicisation of landscape. The theme of the antipodes and its representation was increasingly prominent. How did the English, in particular, deal with the apparent inversion of the proper order of things, with freak forms like the black swan - hitherto imagined to be a logical fantasy in classical philosophy - and even stranger, the kangaroo and platypus? In his connection Smith also discussed a theme which increasingly came to be associated with the work of Michel Foucault in the seventies in its enthusiastic Englishlanguage reception. Only for so long could oddities like the platypus be treated as anomalies, as violations of the order of things. After the shock, the new freaks had also to be classified, assimilated not only into conventional patterns of distinction but also located in the systems and family trees of species and things. In Smith's analysis, here and elsewhere, practices such as botany were to become especially fascinating,

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as they worked across a whole series of axes, aesthetics and science, nature and Enlightenment, similarity and difference. Smith was writing Australian Painting before the English-language celebration of structuralism or the arrival of Marxist-structuralism; the latter, in the hands of a thinker like Louis Althusser, he found arid and unedifying. Yet the curiosities which animate his work here are nevertheless in some ways like those of a thinker such as Claude Levi-Strauss, questions of how different groups of humans in different locations of place and time categorise and classify other inhabitants of their worlds. The predictable result in early Australian art was the generation of hybrid forms, so that, for example, early engravings representing Australian scenery often resemble an English park, though tropical plants such as palm and the grass tree are usually added for local flavour.33 The difference, in Smith's eye, was that this kind of phenomenon was taken to be significant, symbolic of elementary forms of cultural exchange rather than of simple cultural arrogance and distortion. The process of representation would shift: the subject matter of Australian painting would become what we would call more recognisably Australian, and at some point on the long scales of civilisational time the subordinate culture would also begin to affect the superior culture of the haughty metropolis. Human nature, in other words, might or might not be more or less fixed, but culture was always shifting, never was essential or final. The conquerors of world history inevitably took on the effects of their new world settings; they all went 'native', but in ways so subtle and various as often to be almost imperceptible. The subsequent paths of development sketched out in Australian Painting do not diverge notably from those indicated in Place, Taste and Tradition. At the same time they tend to be more powerfully thematised so that, for example, the second chapter has more to say about the themes of pastoral and the 'frontier'. When landscape shifts to figurative painting the 'ignoble savage' replaces the noble savage, a symbolic concurrence which runs together with the extermination of Aborigines. Now there appears the figure of the noble frontiersman to take the savage's place, as indeed he was actually doing. Similarly Smith extends his discussion on the theme of melancholy. The representation of the noble savage had inhabited a romantic wilderness; the noble frontiersman entered into a land of sweet pastures.34 As the

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invaders transformed the land, so they imagined the landscape anew. Institutional transformations were also underway; until the end of the 1820s colonial art in Australia was produced almost entirely for an English audience, but now a small local market was confirmed. Portraiture and country-house painting were expanded by peripatetic artists such as Conrad Martens. But the painters of the 1860s and 1870s found Australia no paradise of sunshine and adventure; to their eyes, it was a weird, melancholy land, and as Smith observes, this sensibility came to characterise both art and writing. What was the meaning of this melancholy? Given Smith's sense that misrecognition resulted not from error or simple arrogance but from the interreaction between ways of thinking and location, he now chose to probe melancholy as a similarly mixed phenomenon. As Smith argued, it was not to be presumed (as it typically was) that the expression of melancholy about the alien nature of the land was purely external. Returning to Marcus Clarke, Smith argued that the sense of melancholy in art was not only negative or superior; the best artists tended, rather, to identify with the weirdness and melancholy which they found in or projected upon the landscape. Clarke had indeed written of the sense that Australia was grotesque, weird, had invoked the imagery of primitivism, musing on what he called the strange scribblings of nature learning how to write. But alongside trees without shade, flowers without perfume, flightless birds and upright animals there was a sense of wonder and beauty in the place itself; only it possessed a different hieroglyphics, as Clarke put it, so you needed also to see what was in front of your face as well as use whatever was between your ears.35 Habits of study abroad brought new eyes again to Australian vision, implicating Australian painting more extensively into English and French practices and institutions. Thus Heidelberg, and Sydney Long and Norman Lindsay follow a similar trajectory into the new century, which Smith had portrayed from closer proximity in Place, Taste and Tradition. But what can be said about the painting of the 1950s? It is not as though these times were any less controversial than those before. Indeed, in Melbourne at least they led up to the display of the Antipodeans and the publication of The Antipodean Manifesto in 1959. The work of John Brack in Melbourne, Ian Fairweather in Brisbane, the religious painting of Justin O'Brien indicated flourishings of various different kinds. The 1950s were, nevertheless, received or remembered

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as the period of high cultural cringe, in part because, as Smith complained, there was a distorted process whereby the British applauded those who like Barry Humphries and then Robert Hughes told them what they wanted to hear: sorry (or not), no high culture downunder. As the 1950s drifted into the 1960s the results of postwar developments emerged more clearly. Smith opened his chapter on the 1960s with an epigraph from his old friend and colleague at the University of Melbourne, Franz Philipp, an Austrian expatriate: 'There are two types of cultural provincialism: unawareness and overawareness of the "centre", a hedged complacent identity and a loss of it in a desperate chase to keep up with the Joneses of the international art scene'.36 Smith's sense of the 1960s agrees with the one more widely held: that there was some sort of arrival after the postwar boom, an increased sense of contestation and heightened senses of conflict as well as consolidation. Smith's argument began by stepping back, in order to restate his sense that modern Australian civilisation had been built upon the process of cultural traffic. Cultural flows between centre and periphery had always been mutual as well as unequal. White Australian culture was never simply derivative because no culture could be; cultures were not unpacked like tins of Andy Warhol's soup from British or American boxes, for even their uses and applications would vary with place and time, habit and initiative. In other words, Smith's sense of culture is always anthropological or civilisational; inasmuch as he avoids identifying art exclusively with high art, he also eschews the circumstantial elitism which privileges metropolitan centres over peripheries and therefore, mistakenly, constructs art as some select liquid or potion which never flows uphill. In his immediate setting, Smith was jousting inter alia with Robert Hughes, the brilliant young critic in a hurry from Sydney. Hughes, like other expatriates of that period, had argued publicly that to stay in Australia was to die for want of air, or proper cultural fluid. Smith, by contrast, had always rejected the idea that Australian art was foreshortened by the tyranny of distance or the fact of isolation. In fact, we were never isolated, but to the contrary all too often struck up poses towards the centres that were nothing short of obsequious. Distance might cause a time-lag, but it did not itself induce dependency. Provincialism was a problem, but like melancholy it was less than completely straightforward. In sympathy with his cue from Franz

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Philipp, Smith argued that provincialism cut both ways. Provincialism could either fawn over the alleged achievements of the centres, or else it could deny them and become chauvinistic and know-nothing about the outside, stupidly praising only the local. To remember Karl Kraus, now in a different setting, this was not exactly a terrific choice. It could be aligned, for sake of elucidation, with the respective claims of high art and populism; the former sought to look out, never in, the latter the opposite, celebrating the vernacular for its own sake. This is not to say that provincialism was not a problem, only that it was not a simple or singular one. Into the 1960s, the indications were that Australia's provincial situation was being transformed. Smith was anticipating processes of change later to be associated with ideas like modernisation and globalisation. Culture was becoming more mixed, and cultural traffic increasing. By 1970, as he put it, there were indications that Australia was beginning to create nascent metropolitan situations of its own in its main capital cities.37 Increasingly this would mean that Australia would be regarded, however opaquely, as a cultural producer and not only as a cultural consumer of gleaming cosmopolitan products from New York or Hollywood. According to Smith the sense of emerging metropolitanism was caught up with three main factors: first, the migration policy inaugurated at the end of the Second World War had begun the creation, slowly at first and now at an increasing rate, of cosmopolitan communities in the main capital cities of the country; second, improved travel facilities, especially by air, increased the movement of artists, critics and information between countries; and third, the emergence of provincial communities and popular tastes within the country that looked to the metropolis for standards and styles, on the one hand, but also made use of art, to a greater extent than the metropolis, as a means towards regional and national self-identification.38 It was a long way from Murraguldrie, a few books in the mail with black and white reproductions and sketching in the foothills while reading Ruskin. Yet Smith's response to what we now call globalisation, modernisation, or urbanisation was as sensibly mixed and circumspect as ever; he did not expect these processes to result in an homogenised global culture, even though that was part of the story; he expected the local to persist, take its own path, transform but not disappear. The hegemony of abstract art in international guise remained a concern for Smith, for he understood that

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abstract internationalism in art, as in politics, usually meant some particularism smuggled in surreptitiously. Abstract expressionist painting into the 1960s contained an American heart, the pulse of Manhattan in particular, just as the abstract political internationalism of mid-century communism had a Soviet core. Having taken in Marx's German Ideology in the forties, Bernard Smith was suspicious of the particularity concealed in claims to universality even as he remained committed to other universals, like freedom and dignity. The 1960s in Australia was a period of fresh contestation when it came to matters of national identity. Within the Marxist traditions the Communist Party of Australia had begun to shift from its high national populism in the 1940s towards its shortlived Eurocommunist or social democratic phase. Trotskyism revived around the struggles against the Vietnam War, and Maoism did its best to develop a new populism, setting the local icon of Blinky Bill against the rapacious symbols of Hollywood's cultural imperialism (like Mickey Mouse OA). Smith's analysis in Australian Painting gave the sense that while the artistic sphere and those of radical politics were certainly not identical, some similarities were emerging through such differences. These kinds of differences were never neat, for again we organise them mentally in retrospect with the use of categories which imply logical division at the expense of historical crossover. Nevertheless, those differences, inward and outward in orientation, towards the red heart or towards Europe, are real. As Smith observed the art scene in the 1960s he saw the difference as between one group dedicated to experiment, internationalism, a metropolitan-type culture, and another group seeking national identity through art. Both responses, he stressed, were real; indeed the situation could hardly be other, for this storm and stress reflected the consistent pressure established since the days of European vision, between place and mind, location and mentality, antipodes and cultural centres. But if, for Smith, this difference was the necessary consequence of modern Australian history, it was also and again asymmetrical in nature. Though both groups were good at making noise, one set spoke a language which would more readily be heard in the centres. Smith was thinking about mobility, traffic, the allure of international circuit; he was reading David Riesman's modern classic The Lonely Crowd. So these groups were also generational, in a way, though they were not only that:

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The one based upon a young, urbanised and - in Riesman's phrase other-directed, highly mobile elite group, the other upon older, suburban and rural groups, the members of which expect to live out their lives in Australia, draw some cultural sustenance and a sense of identity from its legends and history and make, at most, one visit overseas during a lifetime. The emergence of these two kinds of art, reflecting two kinds of life .. . testifies both to the growth of civilization in Australia and to a stratification of the artistic culture grounded in different living conditions and different cultural expectations.39

Globalisation meant that while Australian culture had always been part of an imperialist world-system, there was also now an increasing chance that it would gain some place or exposure in that system. Australians very slowly became interesting to the inhabitants of the centres, even if they were also to be exoticised in the process. But increasingly it seemed possible for Australian intellectuals and artists to make it overseas, and not only as expatriates. Now they would have to choose: was it better to stay in Australia or to follow the sun? What were their responsibilities and obligations, and what were the powers of insight generated by living on the margins which might be lost (or caricatured) in the centres? At least since Goethe and Carlyle writers and artists had viewed themselves as participating in a European world literature or discourse. At the same time, most defences of European art reduced at some point to the less secret championing of work in Germany or France. White Australians, in any case, had always been European; in Murraguldrie too they spoke of fascism and the European theatre of war. And then there were painters like John Brack, imagists of flat suburban lives that could have been lived anywhere in the west, and yet whose cultural experience was overwhelmingly antipodean; for Brack was a European stylist who only travelled to Europe late, after Whitlam. In other words, it was no massive challenge to find reclusive local Europeans living and working in Australia, or to locate noisy Australians in New York or London. Yet given the ongoing obsession of antipodeans, as subordinate partners in the imperialist system, with questions of national identity these issues continued to matter, and they still do. Viewed more universally, if that is possible, they were also the questions put earlier by Gauguin, concerning who we were, where we had come from, and now, towards the new millennium, where we might be going.

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To begin even to take in questions about national identity is incredibly complicating, for it is also to open questions of recognition and the identities of individuals. To be recognised locally by the Archibald Prize is one thing; to be told you count in New York is another. And obviously all the institutions of influence in art and ideas are made manifest in some ways by the acts of individual couriers or messengers who break through the media cordons. Some of this can be dealt with as a matter of choice, yet as Smith concluded, it was also a matter of power and influence which corrupt or, at best, lead away from the projects which individuals or groups might otherwise set themselves. Recognition was a cleft stick, institutionalisation a mixed blessing. The results of Australian painting were uneven. What can we say about the status of Smith's art history in Australian Painting? Let me be provocative and assert that art historians, like others, would find themselves more sparked by European Vision or by Place, Taste and Tradition than by Australian Painting.

The political edge, and the raw energy of Place, Taste make it a remarkable text. European Vision more than any of Smith's texts stretches the reader, taking the subject places we ought to recognise easily but do not: the rough tensions of enlightenment, imperialism, art and colonialism, natural and cultural history all entwined. Australian Painting, by comparison, instructs patiently as it explains, seeking to elevate context beyond the often-encountered conventional pattern where art is represented through the analysis of single exemplary works by leading painters of romantic genius. In the 1945 book it narrows down from 'taste' to painting. As Terry Smith has observed, Bernard Smith's strategy in Australian Painting is to introduce art historical categories, ideas, and then encapsulated life-and-work summaries of Australian artists. The logic of the argument in Australian Painting indicates four main periods or phases of development, in summary form: colonial, the Heidelberg School, the rise of modernism, and the tensions between the Antipodeans and the (Sydney) abstractionists. Further sketches of developments into the 1960s and 1970s were later added by Bernard Smith to the 1971 edition and by Terry Smith to their coauthored version.40 Given the arriviste sensibilities of postmoderns, we ought not to be surprised that later analyses could be taken to mean that Bernard Smith had missed the boat, had stopped Australian Painting just when the story got interesting. Certainly it is tempting to

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share the sense that history begins with us, now, and that more recent work has seen the fuller blossoming of Australian art. Charles Green's book, Peripheral Vision, for example, is plainly a book of its time, as Australian Painting was for its own. Even so, the idea of peripheral vision is one already implicit at least in work like Gramsci's and latent in European Vision and The Antipodean Manifesto. So much is apparent; some books carry their period-marking and contexts more visibly than others, yet others again speak across moments. This is one other factor which explains the remarkable ongoing resonance provided by European Vision and the South Pacific. The theses of European Vision

manoeuvre the most significant concerns of Smith's project; it is here, rather than in Australian Painting, that the brilliance of Smith's insight resides, and it is here that art historians and anthropologists alike ought to begin, and return to. Of course there are other interpretations of Australian Painting, such as Humphrey McQueen's punt that Smith's prose had become tight and his own vision constricted by its moment, jammed up against the wall of the Cold War. McQueen's case, respectful yet critical, seems to be that Smith's generation lost the sense of fire in the belly because of McCarthyism or its local strains.41 Looking back, it seems to me that if Australian Painting is a relatively sober book this is because of its brief and its moment in Smith's life. Bernard Smith has acquired various identities in his journey through cultural history; thus, for example, one sometimes encounters those for whom it is by Cook's voyages, or Baudin's, catalogues and maritime artifacts that Smith is known. Australian Painting comes out of the period in which Smith's professional influence was consolidating, as the practice of art history arguably was too. The critical trajectory of European Vision dates back to 1950; anticipated in his earlier writings in the 1940s, Smith was still following through its consequences in Australian Painting, though he was doing other things as well. European Vision may be the central work in his project, but it does not anticipate or hold together everything else that he did, or thinks. Around 1960 Smith was polishing up European Vision and drafting Australian Painting; he was teaching, administering, on the path to the Power Institute. In this setting it is hardly surprising that Smith should have been worrying more about taste or judgement, in the conventional sense, even at the same time as he continued to review for the Age and encourage art for craft's sake. Into the sixties, in

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other words, Smith was engaged in institution-building. He was moving into his fifties, consolidating, teaching, watching art history shift into the newer universities, active in the Academy of the Humanities, promoting art as he was earlier, in the years of those travelling exhibitions. For if art, too, is an institution, then those who are committed to it will also necessarily be institution-builders, even if they are outsiders or rebels at the same time. Smith was publishing European Vision, pushing the Antipodeans, and working on Australian Painting all at the same time, but the image of the outsider besuited, bespectacled, lantern slides under the arm was only one of his identities. 'Taste' or 'Tradition' in any case gives way to Australian 'Painting', a focusing of vision which again opens further, later. INTERPRETING ART IN AUSTRALIA Plainly, Smith was also a part of the story of Australian painting, not just an outsider claiming to explain it more independently. For his own part, I think it is fair to say that he pursued the most honourable yet politically astute path. Smith sought influence but not power. His own frames of meaning, Burwood to the bush, Sydney Teachers College and the University, the Communist Party and its Teachers' Branch led to London first of all, the Institutes of Art at the University of London, the puzzle of the reciprocal and mixed gaze from London to the antipodes and back, from Cook and Banks to Bernard Smith following their voyage in reverse - and yet not. Mild-mannered though he is, Smith was also bound to speak his piece, and he did, whether against European fascism or local antisemitism, in Place, Taste and Tradition or later, against abstraction in The Antipodean Manifesto. At the same time there is a tension in Smith's work between personal preference, political judgement and cultural tolerance which has not always been recognised or understood. To say that Smith advocated the idea of an Australian art through The Antipodean Manifesto is true, but then begs the question of what exactly we mean (or he or his mates meant) by Australian. Evidently not insular, internal, primitivist; that would go against the logic of all his work: that Australian was antipodean, an identity and an art constructed in traffic between centre and periphery, across imperialism and place. Viewed theoretically, the problem might still be seen as one regarding the combination of modern life and the distinction of spheres

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of activity and judgement; and it may well be that this is an escapable bind. On the one hand, we know that politics and art and society are all mixed up, that these are artificial categories introduced after life in order to make it meaningful by breaking it up artificially into bits we can analyse. On the other, we also know that differences are worth defending and preserving; the market has its logic, which is not the same as that of the state or the university (look what happens when they get mixed up); art has criteria, say, of beauty which are not the same as those of politics even though both work in realms caught up with notions of representation. Having spoken out against the increasing hegemony of abstract international painting, Smith was consequently imagined by some to be a nativist; yet he has always appreciated and promoted art of all kinds, from Cezanne to Christo, and is deeply attracted to work like that of Brett Whiteley and Mike Brown (the latter not least of all for its politics - and its cheek). For there was also a politics of art, as Brown consistently made apparent in his visual attacks on galleries, critics and the money-power mafia that both held the institution together and to ransom. But if there was a politics of art, in this way, then art also necessarily called out anti-art, from Duchamp to Warhol; yet anti-art was also art, was sold and interpreted as art. Only above and beyond the politics of art, there was the political art of visual fascism, antifascism, socialist realism, celebratory forms of national art, the implication of art with nation-building. Smith was bound anyway to the notion that all art was civilisational, recycled, plural; the world of art would always be a Babel of styles and voices. Civilisations, for Smith, also raised questions of actors, subjects, groups and classes of men and women, art as craft; in other words, civilisations had to be conceived anthropologically, and to think anthropologically is to think of the figure of the human being. Smith's commitment to figuration was anthropological, or cosmological; we were, and are, of the world, therefore of and in its art. Antihumanists might recoil, but then Smith never accepted theoretical or political antihumanism. For Smith, to be a modern, to belong to the epoch after the Renaissance, was to be humanist whether we liked it or not; though when the argument comes this far it is also time to remember the arbitrary nature of the sign called 'humanism', for very many of Smith's most powerful insights echo through the vocabularies of the traditions we now call structuralism and poststructuralism.

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In a perverse way art history had turned a kind of cycle as Smith sat staring. Its origins in landscape painting had been abstract, nonfigurative, privileging notions of place even as it distorted them through the refracting lenses of prejudice and taste. By the 1970s abstract painting, colour painting like that by Mark Rothko had replaced senses of place by no-place, yet still in the absence of the human hands and faces which assembled paint and canvas. Not that Smith did not admire either Thomas Watling or Rothko; the reservation he had was more one of mistaken or misplaced identity about the anthropology of art. If art said something about us, both these admitted extremes of naturalism and abstraction told us that we were not present; the earliest work denied the finger that pressed the photographic shutter even while it confessed to human presence in its detail, the colour painters elevating paint as a medium but opening the question about nihilism, whether we as actors existed at all (or even deserved to). The appeal of work like Rothko's is powerful, not least of all in moments of increasing uncertainty; and there are always sound philosophical reasons for wondering what humans are, and what they have made themselves out to be. Self-doubt is the alter ego of the modern subject; impossibilism or nihilism always shadows the confident faustian desire for development at any cost. This may well be something that marks modernity out against other periods in civilisation; nihilism coincides with periods of decline, but it is also the perpetual stranger in the doorway. Nihilism also comes together with the melancholy of narcissism, the obsessive innerness of modern anxiety; and while it is quite real for those who choose or are chosen by it, it might also be viewed as the kind of luxury indulged by decadence. Most of the global population at any one moment is probably caught up with more pedestrian problems of holding life together in the material world. In Australia, this suggests perhaps, among other things, taking the conditions of everyday life more seriously than the frames or buzzwords of 'French philosophy' or 'literary texts'. The latter, of course, have their place, but so do the former, more predominantly in terms of what Marx called the dull compulsions of everyday life, as well as its rituals and pleasures/For Smith, then, the earlier problem of the hegemony of gum-tree painting did not reflect badly on gum-trees so much as on the social reception of their portrayal. As he wrote:

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This preoccupation with landscape has been largely responsible for the creation and maintenance of a false consciousness of what it is to be Australian. For most Australians, including Australian artists, are born and reared in the suburbs. The suburb is their environmental reality; a reality which few, if any, have chosen to describe.42

Abstract expressionism was too far away from this, in Smith's judgement. Pop art had more powerful potential, perhaps, as it pointed away from landscape and towards the city and city life. This indeed was part of Smith's own conclusion about white Australian art, that it fascinated precisely to the extent that it combined European vision and technologies in different ways with the peculiarities of place. Yet he also suggested that the best art, at least occasionally, was also provocative, challenging the dominant values of Australian society in the way, for example, that Mike Brown's catcalls did. The achievement of Australian art was asymmetrical; it owed more to Europe than to local craft or art tradition: Lacking a folk-tradition of long standing from one section of society, or a well-informed aristocratic patronage of the arts from the other, Australian artists have constructed what is national and distinctive in their art in the face of the anti-art values of their society. That is why good Australian art is so often tough-minded and sardonic: not because of the desert but because of the people.43

Feminists might disagree with the implicit class analysis, and advocates of Aboriginal art could now anticipate its increasing projection on to a world screen. Smith's claim, however, was that art and identity result from the negotiation of traditions and locations; they come of culture, of cultivation, of activity and shifting pressure and not of the soil. As Smith put it later: 'Art in Australia is a lazy dialectic between a slow moving colonial and post-colonial tradition and its continuous assimilation of northern hemisphere innovations introduced by successive waves of messengers .. Z44 Like culture, art was always already mixed. In Australia, it had often been caught up with radicalism of some sort. But radicalism was also always already mixed; as Smith observed 'Some kind of classicism or primitivism seems to be invariably present in all radical ideology'. Classicism, medievalism and

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primitivism are the principal ideologies by means of which radicals have attacked conservative art values of the present, including the innovating present.43 Thus art, like politics, was always in a state of contestation and pluralism, even though art was by no means inevitably radical, any more than values like classicism, medievalism or primitivism were. CONTROVERSIES OVER AUSTRALIAN ART Bernard Smith's work in Australian art history has been pioneering. He wrote two of its pathbreaking texts, and worked through institutions like the Power Institute to cultivate a second generation of Australian art historians and critics. How was this work received? By virtue of its priority and its nature such work is bound to generate controversy and critique, some of it caught up with the Oedipal crises of fathers and academic children; some to do with the necessary changes in cycles of interpretation and theoretical fashion, others to do with matters of perspective, inclusion and exclusion. Was Smith's art history genderblind? This is one question bound to be raised by the rising feminist presence within art history. It is certainly not fair to claim that Smith ignores the classic work of women such as Cossington Smith, Preston or Crowley, though it is indeed entirely reasonable to observe that until fairly recently painting in Australia was a boys' club, a fact which, in turn, inevitably influences the reception or construction of art history.46 Certainly Smith's art history opened a challenge for feminist historians to do better than he had at theorising the connection between women painters and modernism. Alongside charges of omission, however, go charges of commission. Two such stand out. Had Smith got it wrong? The first such charge came from Richard Haese, in his 1981 book Rebels and Precursors - The Revolutionary Years of Australian Art. Haese works

from the premise that the effect of communism in Australian art and art writing was negative and constricting. My own sense is that Haese makes the mistake of stigmatising a category, 'communism', as though this were the beginning and end of Smith's Marxism or his thinking. As I have shown, Smith's thinking was Marxist in the best sense, historically curious and oriented to notions of activity, suffering, anthropology and culture, and it was interpreted through a complex web of personal experience and reading, from Toynbee to Jack Lindsay. Haese argues fairly consistently that Smith's writing and practice were interesting

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but marked down by the stain of communist politics. In one way the charge is less than fully surprising, given Haese's own purpose: he is concerned with trying to make sense of his own theme, radicalism, art and its Australian setting, not with pursuing the nuance of individual positions. Smith's Marxism could be claimed to be exceptional in its breadth and depth. Conversely, it could also be argued that Haese misses the point, that he has not portrayed sufficient historical understanding of communist experience transnationally or in Australia where, exactly as Smith would say in European Vision or his books on Australian art, the culture of Soviet communism had first to be mediated by local cultures. Communism in Australia was deeply Australian, as the 'ordinary Stalinism' of the French was substantially local; cultural exchange was never equal, but it did occur, and the power of vernacular or indigenous cultures of communism is something to be reckoned with, not least of all in far-flung countries like Australia, where the only real Soviet contacts were not in the Communist Party rooms but hidden darkly in the Embassies. More perhaps than any other, Australian communists created the Soviet experience in their own image. If it is fair to claim that Haese failed sufficiently to understand the culture of global or Australian communism, however, it could also be argued by extension that his book shows no sufficient appreciation of communism in Sydney, where it is widely recognised that one most substantial authority was always a renegade - John Anderson. Smith's thinking was not directly influenced by Anderson but indirectly through Smith's friend, Tom Rose. Rose, one of his closest friends into the 1940s, studied with Anderson while Smith studied with Dale Trendall. In any case, Smith's thinking was already pluralistic in the forties, influenced like Anderson by the aesthetic writing of Samuel Alexander, and consonant with Anderson's thinking in that it was attracted to ideas of production or creation as well as others of consumption and taste. The spirit of Sydney leftism, it might be said, was libertarian and pluralist, closer to decadence than to discipline. Thus Smith was unconvinced by Haese. He responded to Haese's argument in a talk, 'Reflections on the forties' in 1986. According to Smith, Haese essentialises communism as Sovietism and socialist realism as though, once defined or thus established, this not only places the object but also resolves problems of interpretation, or resolves them by virtue of

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placing them in a binary constellation or grid. The analytical bind is evident: a binary grid cannot account for pluralism or for density of context, with the particulars and differences that make up what we call history. Haese presumed that, being a communist, Smith himself divided the world into two, and therefore placed Smith emphatically into one of two compulsory categories, this to the extent that he misquoted Smith in terms of his imputed divide.47 An erratum slip was inserted into Haese's book correcting the misrepresentation of Smith's views, but it is unlikely that this did much to moderate the effect of the charge that Smith was a dogmatic Marxist. Smith emerges from the pages of Rebels and Precursors as neither rebel nor precursor. Rather, he appears dressed as a circumstantial yet grim communist on the road to good sense, nevertheless for the moment a social realist and thereby implicitly a socialist realist, a Marxist and thereby secretly a Stalinist, or else publicly a communist and privately a pragmatist because nobody could really have been stupid enough to be a communist, not least of all if they really knew anything about art. The democratic impulse of his work in education and in the travelling exhibitions was overlooked. The 'stain of politics' cliche was thus stapled together with another, which Trotsky sneered at as 'Marxism as measles', something adolescent which intelligence or maturity is bound to substitute for as one grows up, sooner or later. The logic of Haese's critique of Place, Taste and Tradition is really that it was anachronistic rather than pioneering, the implication being that it might best be forgotten. A different reading, such as that offered in these pages, suggests that, read in context, it is the first instalment of a social theory or a way of thinking about being antipodean that is without parallel and deserves extending. Smith acted with characteristic generosity towards Haese's book, which he recommended and even launched notwithstanding the jaundiced view of his own work and the hostile tenor of particular claims, for example, that he had identified surrealism with fascism or had rejected romanticism as beyond reason and reality.48 As I have indicated above, Smith, in fact, empathised with surrealism, and he viewed romanticism as the constant voice responding to classicism as the various streams flowed together or separately in differing phases of history as civilisation. Rebels and Precursors was an important book, as Smith publicly recognised. Yet as he remarked on another occasion, its author

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projected the Cold War dichotomies with which he grew up back on to the experience of the forties, when, as Rader implied, there were rather at least three competing forces - communism, fascism and democracy.49 As Smith now put it, in retrospect, 'My encounter with Haese's book must have been one of the reasons why I decided to write my autobiography', not to refute Haese's particular story so much as to suggest a different one.50 Haese's final judgement was that in Place, Taste and Tradition Smith had, in fact, written two books: one about politics and one, perhaps with a legacy, about art.51 Amusingly, by the time the second major volley against Smith's work on art had occurred the charge, in effect, was that when it came to Australian Painting he had left out the politics. In 1988 Ian Burn, Nigel Lendon, Charles Merewether and Ann Stephen published a new radical manifesto, The Necessity of Australian Art. An Essay about Interpretation.52 It was not simply an attack on Smith, but among other things it was an attempt to revise the received view of Australian art by putting Smith in his place, opening the way for the next generation and its superior achievement and insight. Obviously Smith had made it, for this was to make of his work a new orthodoxy which periodically would need tearing down. What was Smith's crime? The Necessity of Art is an intriguing document, for it seems to accuse Smith of actually perpetuating that which he himself sought to bring down, the myth of cultural dependency. As Terry Smith pointed out in the supplementary chapters to the third edition of Australian Painting, the theoretical efflorescence of especially French structuralist and poststructuralist and subsequently postmodern intellectual debate in Australia into the 1980s powerfully influenced art as well as theory circles. Just as earlier generations had devoured Baudelaire and Breton, the rising generation ate up works by Jean Baudrillard, sometimes Barthes, Althusser leading into Foucault and perhaps most fashionably, Deleuze and Guattari. To have read or sighted these kinds of books was now the minimum entrance requirement in properly critical circles. Increasingly, art criticism became discourse about words rather than looking at pictures. The Necessity of Australian Art is not especially overburdened by theoretical dress, but it is nevertheless part of a moment of theoretical rejuvenation. In one regard it represents an attempt to align art more closely to phases in the development of political economy, for example the pastoral with

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pastoralism. The book also develops claims, common to thinkers such as Smith and Bourdieu, that modern art always needs to be located within the context of the market institutions which form it. Althusserian Marxism, which Smith had rejected, however, formed the general framework of the critique, with especial reference to influential period work by Arghiri Emmanuel and Samir Amin on unequal exchange and unequal development on a world scale. Burn and his colleagues used these newer arguments - extensions, in fact, of the classical Marxist critique of imperialism which developed it into the language of centre and periphery - to charge Smith with becoming an apologist for American cultural imperialism.53 The first thing to say about this charge is simply that it dismays. Smith had, after all, coauthored among other things The Antipodean Manifesto in 1959, which was largely, if inaccurately, received as a nationalist manifesto. In Place, Taste and Tradition, and then more emphatically in European Vision and

the South Pacific he had argued against the idea of one-way cultural flows or domination, suggesting rather a theory of unequal cultural exchange - apparently the understanding which Burn and his friends thought they had themselves invented. More generally, it was Smith's scepticism about the dominance of the metropolitan centres and especially New York in making the art scene which informed his own criticism of abstract impressionism. Smith's discussion of cultural imperialism in Place, Taste and Tradition becomes, in the view of his critics, an endorsement of dependency as the most dominant or significant aspect of art in Australia.54 It is as though Smith's discussion of unequal cultural exchange is taken as an apology for it. But this is to miss the point about the antipodes, and doubly so, for Smith's concern is with cultural traffic more than its unilateral imposition by great powers on to their colonies. The point about the Heidelberg School, then, is not that it was imitation French but that it represented a specifically local negotiation between cultures, techniques and environments. It is not fair to accuse Smith of centring his analysis on dependency; if it has a pivot it is rather in something like asymmetrical negotiation, which helps to explain not only culture but also imperialism and even national class relations. Smith's critics seem to presume a zero-sum theory of power, in which the centre holds everything and the periphery has no power at all. Smith's premise is quite different, as his anthropology suggests. All subjects are actors,

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whatever their constraints; the subordinated always have some room to move, to create their own meaning. This is a different way of thinking about power and creation to the kind of political nihilism which informs the work of the early Foucault and underwrites widely influential unilateralist texts like Edward Said's Orientalism. It is a view of the world which is far closer to that of the Sardinian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, where politics and culture are structured but uncertain and indeterminate realms of manoeuvre.55 Where will we end up? - it all depends. When it comes to the critique of Australian Painting, Burn and his colleagues argue, like Haese, that by the second text Smith had become more scholarly. The claim that 'Smith's views over those intervening years had undergone significant changes' since Place, Taste and Tradition is not demonstrated because, I suggest, it cannot be.561 shall attempt in this book to show the contrary, that to read Smith's work carefully in sequence is to be struck precisely by its consistency. The objects of Smith's concern shift, of course, and he develops more detailed hypotheses and lines of inquiry as he proceeds, otherwise his work would not possess its fascination. But the basis of his project is already clearly laid into the 1940s, when he had already understood a great deal more about social theory than contemporary fashion these days still sets up as radical insight. At least Richard Haese had offered an alternative view; what the authors of The Necessity of Australian Art left on the table was a manifesto containing a series of imperative demands as to what a proper explanation would look like, a list of proclaimed absences, together with a striking incapacity to locate Smith's thinking across Australia and the Pacific. Indeed, there is no single reference in their critique to European Vision and the South Pacific, the work almost universally acclaimed as the acme of Smith's achievement and the text which establishes the centrality not of dependency but of unequal cultural exchange. Having received Smith as an art historian they also constructed him as one, narrowly. Killing the father, however, meant trampling on him as well, as when Burn and his colleagues accused Smith of devaluing Australian art.37 This is absurd as well as hurtful, for Smith had given much of his life to promoting it. Smith's own response to The Necessity of Australian Art, unpublished among his papers, unsurprisingly lacks the generosity of his response to Haese. Smith protested that the text ideologised

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art and overinterpreted art writing. He was not altogether hostile to their purpose, however; it follows from his own sense of philosophy of history that progress and retrogression must occur, that nothing civilisationally now stays the same. He wrote: I am much in favour of what lies apparently at the heart of our authors' endeavours: a history of Australian art that reveals its increasing independence from European and North American sources. I have thought that that is what I had given most of my life to.58

The logic of Smith's conclusion was impeccable - he recognised that his work needed to be replaced, but by fresh research and argument, not an immense theoretical revolution. All things would perish, and it was not to be presumed that knowledge would ever just accumulate in volume until enlightenment arrived. Such progress as might occur, however, needs to seize the wisdom already available to us, and to locate it transculturally as well as at home. If we are to be disappointed by the aporias of theory, then at least we never confront a poverty of cultures.

CHAPTER 3

IMAGINING TH E PACI FIC

THE POLITICS OF VISION How do we see? What do we see? The centrality of vision in social theory and thinking has only more recently been fully registered, not least of all in Martin Jay's magisterial survey, Downcast Eyes and, differently, in Terry Smith's extraordinary study, Making the Modern.1 Light, vision, the obscure and dark, these kinds of image have characterised human consciousness in the west since the Bible (one of Smith's major formative texts) and even more emphatically since the Enlightenment. The hegemony of vision should not be overstated; the eye has always had to compete with the word and deed, and as we have had cause to observe above, the visual appreciation of art has certainly been dominated to some extent by the power of the word, as though art were an illustration of some philosophy or text rather than a realm of its own. Alongside the intellectual analysis of the respective merits or powers of word, eye, and deed, there are the more ubiquitous ordinary usages of vision which crowd everyday life. We use seeing as a synonym for understanding ('can't you see?'), we readily manipulate images of blindness and insight, and so on. The problem of vision in the work of Bernard Smith shifts across these two usages, theoretical and everyday. Smith does not develop a theory of vision or optics so much as a theory of culture which, given his interest in art, is primarily visual. Thus, 'seeing' in Smith's work acts exactly as a limited metaphor for understanding. The field he labours in is that of reception, why some can see more or less than others, why and how 63

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some see their imaginary templates so clearly that fresh experiences replicate the frame rather than modifying it. Why, for example, or how, have the critics of Smith's work on Australian painting seen something different in them than I have, whether it be imported proAmericanism or alleged Soviet dualisms? One way to follow the argument would be to enter the realms of psychoanalysis; at the very least we project as well as receive. We see what we want, or what the psyche or the situation will allow us to. For Smith, however, it is the dynamics of the latter process which captivate: seeing is a creative process as well as a receptive one, and this is how culture is formed and re-formed. All this is already evoked in the titles Smith constructed for his books - European Vision and the South Pacific and

Imagining the Pacific - both referring to the space between or the process across hitherto existing cultures as they are brought into contact by modernity. As I have argued above, these concerns were already evident in Smith's work on Australian art; they already establish the orientation of Place, Taste and Tradition, which Smith wrote in 1944. My sense is that Smith's work acts as a kind of shifting project, which was anticipated early in terms of sensibilities about an always existing world-system of cultures and civilisations, and then expands into different fields like a patchwork quilt. European Vision does not capture all of this, but it condenses some of it. European Vision and the South Pacific is widely recognised as a

pioneering work; published in 1960, it anticipates themes in social theory and the liberal arts which have only now come more fully into focus. But Smith had also anticipated his own themes in the first version of 'European vision', which appeared a decade earlier in the journal of Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, the editors of which included

Anthony Blunt and E. H. Gombrich. Smith, however, had in turn anticipated at least some of its themes ten years earlier again, in a paper he wrote in 1940. He called it 'Reversion and growth in art', the civilisational thinking again indicated in the title, Marx and Toynbee in the shadows. Together with a later document on 'Art and imperialism', and an earlier lecture on surrealism, it is highly suggestive of Smith's earlier thinking on these matters. 'Reversion and growth in art' crosses over the kinds of concerns which dominated Smith's thinking into the forties, fascism in the more immediate sense, the vicissitudes of European civilisation more

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globally. One connecting theme was the idea of primitivism. Primitivism, Smith knew, was to primitive as was Chinoiserie to China or Orientalism to Orient: it named the discourse about the phenomenon, said more about us than it. Yet in terms of aesthetics and culture, primitivism was a different order of discourse; it was also cultural, but more so, it represented a particular politics of culture. In the first version of his manuscript, Smith began with a discussion of the May 1940 issue of Art and Australia. The theme was the proposition that Aboriginal culture represented the 'missing foundation' of white Australian civilisation. Smith mentally strung together a number of related yet distinct developments - the nativism of the Jindyworobaks in Australia, the work of Gauguin and the Fauves, the phenomenon of negritude. The questions in his own mind were apparent: why do civilisations refer back? Why can they not produce their self-understanding sufficiently out of a contemporary or modern cultural repertoire? Smith's response here was like Toynbee's, only a little less certain, more curious. Forms of cultural reversion had no obvious or simple explanation, but they seemed to correspond with periods of acute social instability.2 When a strong culture is challenged it pushes back; when a culture lacking in self-confidence is stressed it can resort to or draw upon nostalgia or decadence. The second and third versions of the manuscript work over this terrain, pursuing further the question why moderns (in particular) should be so obsessed with the past, in art or in life. After all, moderns might be supposed to be self-obsessed, enchanted by the new, the self. Part of the answer is obvious, for those who follow these paths - modernity generates a great deal but it erodes meaning, it destroys God, the individual, community, and so on. Modernity is the culture of speed, of endless change; moderns inevitably reach back, or outward, for sources of meaning. It is this sense of emptiness which ultimately explains, or at least contextualises, primitivism as the need for the other. All the echoes were there, in Smith's immediate setting in the 1940s: the art of Rivera and Orozco, the New Masses, the significance of surrealism, Freud, dreaming, the classicism of Marx's own views on art, expressionism, naive art, the paintings of children. The argument about primitivism anticipates by fifty years Smith's recent writing on postmodernism, not least in the sensibility that cultures revive the exotic and the archaic in order to legitimate themselves and confer meaning.1

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'Reversion and growth' was never published; a later version of it was given to the Teachers' Federation Art Society on 16 September 1942. Two years earlier, Smith gave another paper to that Art Society, of which he was organiser. On 16 October 1940 he read a paper on surrealism. This was the context in which Smith had used the views of Marx, Spengler and Toynbee to sketch out a general theory of decadence. Decadence meant revival, just as reversion and growth went together. History did not repeat, it reformed old and new. Smith now went on, in effect, to propose a general theory of surrealism, of which the twentieth-century experience was only one example. Surrealism, in other words, was nothing new; look again at Hieronymus Bosch.4 The decadence of surrealism, therefore, simultaneously opened the way for the new; surrealism was a cyclical, transhistorical trend, not just a phenomenon unique to the European context of the Great War. Civilisations came and went, and with them surrealisms. Decadent periods, then, were marked by paintings possessing surrealist qualities, which could be interpreted either positively, as signs of movement and renewal, or negatively, as terminal, of closure. There was a global or regional factor as well: the new art forms which arose after a period of surrealism generally flourished upon new soil, away from the older cultures which had fertilised them originally.5 Yet the assessment of these developments was always bound to be irredeemably perspectival: 'We have to realise that we are either witnessing the birth of a new social order or the end of civilization as we know i t . . .'6 - as we know it. Smith entertained the period sense that the old was dying, the new not yet being born, but he insisted on holding the two in tension rather than opting for optimism of the intellect or pessimism of the will. Smith worried about the waste land of modernity into the forties, but his view of history seems to have prevented him from the grim alternatives of depression or apocalyptics. He knew that to summon up the past was not to return to it; it was only to behave as humans would. This he had learned from Marx, with his notion of progress in history occurring even as its actors call up the ghosts of the past, as from Toynbee, with his more formal sense that disintegrating cultures fell back on an archaism of symbols in a futile attempt to recreate the apparent unity of style and purpose of more stable times.7 Smith was able to think about modernity because he worried about history and thought civilisationally; he was able to think about the

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Pacific, about Europe and the region, because he had thought about imperialism. In the early 1940s he gave a lecture on 'Art and imperialism'. There he wrote that: Australian art is a colonial a r t . . . Colonial art has certain characteristics. If we would understand our own art we should have some knowledge of the nature of art in colonies ancient and modern . . . a study of the art of colonies would lead one to suppose that they receive a diffused and weakened form of the dominant art style of Imperialism . . . This dominant art style breaks down the national culture of the colonies. The result of this tendency may be either 1. The extermination of the colonial culture 2. The 'renaissance' upon a higher plane of the culture of the colony by investing the technical form of imperialism with a contemporary] attitude and intensity 3. the borrowing of the 'forms' of colonial art by the highbrows of imperialism, and the development of an eclectic pseudo-international art that appeals to the dilettantes in capital cities of the Empire, and leaves the people of the Empire unaffected . . . The culture of Australia in common with the culture of other countries has experienced in a certain degree all of these tendencies.8

Note the patterns of thought. Smith shifts promptly from particular to general, not through abstraction but by comparison and context. Colonies are constructed by empires; ours is a colonial experience of a particular kind, therefore it will be an occurrence with precedents. Imperialism, like surrealism, is a general phenomenon. Smith always sees us and our experience as a moment; he always works through the context of the long view. Thus he observes the massive silence on the relationship between imperialism and art, with the odd exception, referring as locals might say to Australian dependence on America, but missing the global and transhistorical (Greek, Roman, Egyptian) nature of the problem. No wonder Smith was unpopular with those who wanted to keep art discussion safe and sacred. In connecting art to civilisation he also connects it to history, to violence and to militarism, and at the same time, he brings its eternity into question, for as he suggests, the diffusion of a style also leads to its end.9 For Smith, then: 'As far as art is concerned . . . the development of an imperialism is attended by the diffusion of the culture of the imperial power and a contrary

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development of national culture and forms upon the fringes of the Empire'.10 Imperialism also generates reaction, not simply diffusion or transference; it leads to national resurgence, or else to cultural devastation. The former, Smith connects here again to Central American experience after Cortes and Pizarro; the latter, he associates with the experience of Australia.11 Imperialism therefore works by its own means, but it is always cultural in form; indeed, one can imagine Smith arguing that inasmuch as culture is also about power, imperialism itself is pre-eminently cultural. But as he was to confirm, cultural imperialism also has an inbuilt feedback mechanism, the master also becomes more like the slave, whether via the cult of primitivism or some other means. The colonisers always go native, even if in subtle and varied ways that they cannot grasp or name, for this is the way that culture flows. As Smith quoted from William James, while reading Samuel Alexander's Beauty and Other Forms of Value: 'half comes from the object and half from the observer's mind'.12 The halves, of course, depend on perspective, are never neat mathematical percentages; environment and consciousness interact more than the actors themselves ever understand. It was this interaction which Smith drew out in the 1950 essay version of European Vision. Smith's frame here is basically the same as that which holds the book of the same name together. We turn in detail to the more extensive version in the next section. For the moment it will suffice simply to observe the precedents in his thinking. Smith's concern in the first version of his argument is with the eyes that the explorers brought to the antipodes; he sets out to read their records, to examine their use of distinction and classification, their discovery of novelty and their assimilation of it into their own precedents where vision violated their own cultural horizons too much. James Cook's brief was to inquire into the world of the South Land, to examine and record nature, flora, fauna and peoples. Cook was a scientist, but he was also an anthropologist of sorts. Joseph Banks was on a different expedition, in a way, for his was a grand European tour with a difference, in that it went right around the globe. Art was central to this experience, for its occurrence preceded photography; the visual record depended exclusively on art work. This expedition then represents, for Smith, something like a crucible of Enlightenment; and Enlightenment, like humanism, is not something Smith rejects, so much as worries

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over, for it cuts both ways. It cuts both ways in the Pacific, as well, for it generates both positive and negative effects, and it draws together an array of fascinations which we now analytically separate, such as nature and intellect, botany and science, culture and classification.13 For any readers who still harbour fantasies about the alleged certainty of the western project, Smith also reminds them of the role of the accidental and arbitrary. Banks, in particular, carries two personal agendas, one more like work or science, the other closer to life. The expeditionary artists are instructed to fit in with this dichotomy: to paint more accurately, for the scientific purposes of the trip, and also to use more license in the pictures done for Banks' circle, who seek entertainment and thrill. Accident intervenes; one of the two key artists (Alexander Buchan) dies, leaving the other (Sydney Parkinson) to pick up both jobs. The in-principle distinction between entertainment and documentary is lost; Banks to his chagrin is stuck with Parkinson, left with art as entertainment. All the same, the empirical, experimental curiosity of Enlightenment is intact; the explorers do travel in order to discover, it is only that they assimilate the new into the comfort of the established ways of seeing which they carry with them as reliably as they carry syphilis, alcohol and the Bible. The results of the art vary. Flora is probably most accurately rendered; the artists did not yet carry Ruskin in their pockets, but they worked in anticipation of his exhortation to draw from nature each fibre or tendril. Coastal views, then significantly known as 'perspectives', also needed to be unambiguous, as they were a practical aid to navigation. Yet sometimes the artists could not help themselves; they projected romantic or gothic senses on to mountains and grottoes in period style, which meant that they were painting English picturesque landscape in the antipodes. As James had remarked in Smith's reading of Alexander, they were combining half the object and half the observers' mind or culture. Cook's artists thus had a choice of sorts; they could paint analytically or picture the picturesque. William Hodges became the painter who most strikingly combined the two. If landscape (or animal life) could quite readily if awkwardly be rendered into English, the power of cultural imagination was even more perceptible when it came to the portrayal of local peoples. Aesthetic romanticism and primitivism now came into their own. Initially the inhabitants of the Pacific were personified as the noble

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savage. They were Hellenised, dressed like Greek heroes or like Scots highlanders, dressed up as gods or goddesses, painted into backgrounds of arcadia, abundance, paradise. The horror of this depiction was less in its portrayal than in its consequence. Innocence turned into original sin. Having made them gods, the white men then made them devils; the fall arrived, and (as Smith put it) there now arrived a new human type, the ignoble savage, and his arrival was coterminous with extermination. The noble savage of the romantic imagination was always precariously superior to us, having escaped the poison and corruptions of industry and the modern city; but this could not last or outlast the fall. The image of the noble savage was doomed and so were the peoples it had been projected upon. Or that, again, was where state power and the legal fiction of terra nullius led. The emergence of painterly melancholy in nineteenth-century Australian art was somehow an appropriate note on which to conclude this story. For Smith's part, the connections were now more apparent. In order to speak or to write about Australian art, he had to make sense of 'Australia', its implication in Empire, upon power through culture. To explain the 'us' of European Australia would also mean seeking to explain Europe and its institutional and visionary arrival in the antipodes, which it constructed as other, as subordinate and as echo. To make sense of culture it was necessary to enter realms of imagination, vision and civilisation across time and place. It would be necessary to think both our own subordination to the centres and our subordination, in turn, of those who came before us. The Pacific thus nestles in the very centre of Smith's world, and work; it points back, to Toynbee, Marx and civilisation, to England and the profound ambivalence of Enlightenment, to the local, the antipodean; it connects forward, textually, to the Antipodean Manifesto, to the Boyer Lectures on Truganini, laterally to Place, Taste and Australian Painting and to the shadow of the new, American Pacific hegemony across the water. It pointed, finally, to the cultural mix which some would celebrate as the postmodern, or postcolonial. In the most direct sense, it would point to his central text. EUROPEAN VISION AND THE SOUTH PACIFIC European Vision and the South Pacific first appeared in 1960, the text followed by black and white reproductions carried together at the end of the book. The pleasure of the book was increased enormously in the

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second edition, quarto format, with colour reproductions inserted throughout the text. In the Preface to the Second Edition (1984) Smith opened up a number of problems to do both with the idea of reception and with the particular reception of his own book. Smith begins by observing that the twenty-year interval between editions witnesses something of a sea change in the writing of cultural history. It was a change which his own work had helped to bring on; the purview of history and the definition of art had expanded, while the social sciences had begun to renegotiate their artificially severed relationship with history. Smith did not here use the word 'perspective', but he imparted the sense that his own book had participated in and further encouraged a repositioning and revaluing of perspective. The idea of perspective, vision, position, experience was now both seen more as a theoretical or epistemological problem and as a fact of location for scholars. As Smith put it, the rediscovery of perception (in this case European perception) encouraged the rediscovery (especially among the rising generation of anthropologists and ethnohistorians) of the inescapable relativity of their own perceptions: The use of the term "European Vision" declared a belief in a cognitive theory of perception: that seeing is conditioned by knowing'.14 Recognition, however, brought with it misrecognition; Smith had now to deal with the fact that while his own work had attracted some attention, it had not been read with care (or else, like other great books, had not been read at all). Some among its readers, or receivers, imagined Smith to be claiming that English idiots could see nothing, so powerful was the dominant European ideology in their heads: But the book nowhere suggested that Europeans (or for that matter the members of any other ethnic or cultural grouping) are incapable as individuals of seeing what is actually before them, or that they are incapable of knowing that they are in the presence of the (for them) new, though they may well find, and usually do find, difficulty in assembling appropriate words, images, symbols and ideas to describe accurately their experience . . . The book was not written as an apologia for an extreme cultural relativism.15

When it came to knowledge or values, Smith was not a nihilist; as we have seen, he viewed nihilism as a cultural phase rather than as a terminal world-condition or dreary personal choice.

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In Smith's perception, the problem of reception was fairly straightforward. Frequently read or cited, the book was also frequently misread or manipulated. Some at least of his readers had read out or projected upon his argument that which most attracted them - the noble savage: The most common reading was that eighteenth-century Europeans saw Pacific peoples as "noble savages'".16 As we have seen even from the outline sketch of the early essay version, however, this issue nestles among others about the ambiguity of Enlightenment, and it positions the aura of the 'noble savage' against that of the impending 'ignoble savage'. Another misreading of, or projection upon, European Vision concerned the romantic commonsense that the impact of Europe on the island societies was fatal. Just as the 'noble savage' was one of a number of competing and conflicting stereotypes which Europeans manoeuvred in order to make sense of the Pacific, so was the 'fatal impact' only part of the story. In any case, as Smith responded, the focus of his book was less on the impact of Europe on the Pacific than on the impact of the imagined and experienced Pacific upon European cultures.17 In elevating or selecting these kinds of radically chic themes, the reception of Smith's book had managed to miss part of his purpose. He chose to emphasise two neglected themes in return. Both were, in a certain sense, epistemological, to do with ways of seeing and thinking in the Enlightenment context in the margin of modernity and on the edge of the world-system. The first was to do with the significance of the Pacific as a kind of countercase to European sensibility. European experience of the Pacific was one of cultural exchange. The Pacific region provided a challenging new field of experience for Europeans, for it was one which placed unprecedented pressure on the biblical theory of creation and simultaneously provided a wealth of new evidence which pointed towards evolution. This was to remind readers that, like other Enlighteners, the English had strong empirical curiosities as well as rational claims. They may have created a composite image of the Pacific and a barrage of tropes to help explain it, but they also discovered the Pacific, as a field of difference and differences, other things, people, other worlds.18 As Smith suggested, in period terms this aligned the 1960 text of European Vision with the 1962 publication of Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The two books together belonged to something like a sociology of science, beginning to place its practices within institutions, politics, vision and social

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context - power. The later reception of ideas like these, however, was lost in the enthusiasm for arguments concerning genealogy, archaeology and power/knowledge; Foucault now ruled. The second theme which Smith sought to recentre concerned art, though it also, thereby, concerned thinking. According to Smith, the second theme of the book was that the predominant mode in nineteenth-century landscape painting arose from the need to discover and evoke what was typical. The mode of art history which Smith had been subjected to worked on premises of individual genius and great masterpieces which were linked together serially by means of stylistic and iconographic analysis. The result was an art history at once too exclusively European and ahistorical. As Smith wrote, like Pacific art itself: Within that practice this book was something of an anomaly since its main concerns lay not with art masterpieces but with visual images produced primarily for the purposes of information, and devoted itself not so much to explicating the creative role of artists in their societies (the central myth of art history) but to the use of visual documents for a clearer understanding of the European penetration of the Pacific.19

That Smith was a typological thinker is already evident in his views on civilisations, imperialisms and surrealisms. His is not the compulsory or brutal typology of some heavy-handed model-building sociology; he associates, and cross-refers, thinks through similarity and difference, sympathy and conflict. The types at work in Smith's thinking are not the schematic two-by-two boxes which force all history into preexisting schemata; they are the looser types of precedent, of deja-vu, of recycling, return, re-formation, transformation, of context rather than abstract logic. The point about landscape painting, then, was that like life in Kuhn's portrayal of science, there emerge and pass different ways of seeing or classification which rise to dominance and then move on. The European project of controlling the world required a landscape practice that could first survey and describe, then evoke in the new settlers an emotional engagement with the land that they had alienated from its Aboriginal inhabitants.20 In other words, landscape painting was part of a technology or will-to-power, but it was also part of a cultural cosmos of symbols which would include the new by

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conferring meaning upon the old. Landscape had a place in the world, not only in the gallery or textbook. To argue in this way, as Smith did, was to draw together in one optic, or way of seeing, the human sciences and the natural sciences. Botany, zoology, geology, geography, meteorology, anthropology, symbolism, art, culture all came together; the point was not that each needed to be mastered or known in its integrity, so much as that the ontological connections between them be recognised, that nature, culture and their classification be reviewed as the arc which forms and fractures the human condition. Moving closer to the text, in the Preface to the First Edition Smith located his project against that of Place, Taste and Tradition. The point of their connection has been made already, but it bears emphasis, not least of all against those readings of Smith's work which would appropriate it partially, anthropologists to the left, art historians to the right (or whichever). The origin of European Vision is plainly apparent in the framing of Place, Taste and Tradition; from whence did we come? White Australian culture, perhaps more conspicuously than others of its type, was not indigenous or implanted, but the result of traffic. To inquire into the 'origins' of contact and traffic was also, as Smith understood, to pursue the interrelation between the history of art and the history of science, or the history of the politics which held them together.21 Here the unity of purpose between Place, Taste and Tradition and European Vision is apparent; both seek, in different ways, to view art in its social or institutional setting within the framework of imperial culture. Each is defined by the other, Europe by the Pacific, Australia by Europe. It is this sense of context and reciprocity which holds together the elongated version of Smith's narrative. He lets it fall into place deliberately, distinction leading to explanation. In our own moment, when Cook, like Columbus, has become an item of ridicule and vilification, modernist as fascist, the invading white barbarian in pursuit of state power, British imperialism personified, Smith's book opens as follows: Tn the year 1768 the Royal Academy was established and the Royal Society promoted Cook's first voyage to the South Seas'.22 Science and art are aligned but not explained by reduction; the will to power and the will to know are connected, not collapsed into each other. All these, like Smith's major categories - vision and experience - are held together in tension. The wisdom of the Royal

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Academy, its way of seeing, was to represent nature not with its accidental accretions but in its perfect forms, knowledge of which came not from nature directly but from the history of art. The Royal Society, by contrast, appealed to nature, to a different audience, to notions of technical accuracy and experiment. It was the empirical approach of the Society and not the neo-classicism of the Academy which flourished under the impact of the new knowledge won from the Pacific.23 But the tensions remained and they also flourished, in the discovery of paradise and men like Greek gods in the Pacific. As those illusions crumbled, so did the stature of neo-classicism erode: The opening of the Pacific is therefore to be numbered among those factors contributing to the triumph of romanticism and science in the nineteenth-century world of values'.24 Note the inflexion of Smith's argument, holding together the tensions; it is not Enlightenment and Science which conquer all in the usual triumphalist or plague-on-allyour-houses view of modern history, rather romanticism and science which, as unruly partners, ex post facto categories, reign together, the old and new clipped together in tension more than harmony. As Smith suggests, it is not fatal impact which raises his curiosity so much as Pacific stimulation of the dominant imagination. With Smith we are looking into the optics of what we call romanticism and science in order to observe how the world of the Pacific stimulated European thinking concerning the world of nature as a whole; in the case of the former, as the subject of imitation and expression, in the latter, as the object of philosophical speculation.25 If Cook then symbolises the Empire in contemporary mythology, Smith's purpose is also to relocate the institutions which hold the two symbolic abstractions of individual and power together. Cook's voyage was the first large scientific maritime expedition in whose promotion the Royal Society played a major role; by way of parallel, the Society is the equivalent of a university or research institute today, and it has a similar kind of significance. Thus the connection with Kuhn. Cook's voyage is mediated through specific institutions which reinforce the senses of purpose he carries. Cook's mission was not only actively oppressive; it was part of that same moment as was inhabited by Montesquieu, Bougainville, De Brosses, and the Forsters. Cook was to set out to discover Europe's other, to inquire into its environment and difference in geography, society and botany. The logic of discovery,

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or seeing afresh is, however, one of disruption as well as of confirmation. People see what they want, but partially rather than absolutely As Kuhn put it, dominant discourses within science assimilate anomalies but there are some such which so violate the orthodoxy that it has to shift. And the Pacific was full of anomaly when it came to continental commonsense about animals and plants, people and the proper order of things. Not that the emerging Enlightenment optic was discarded, for we still inhabit it. Yet its empirical axis had to throw back the deductive sensibilities which presumed that it was Europe which was facing the right way up, closest both to God and to Reason. The point about perception in all this becomes plain. As we encounter the unfamiliar we (any such we) are bound to translate it. Smith's thinking rests on the idea that while difference is fundamental, humans think through similarity. This is what makes us humans, anthropologically speaking. In order to explain the new (or anomalous) we say that it is like something; we think through metaphor. The problem for us (in this case, Europeans) is that the process risks ending here, where it should begin. Metaphorical thinking risks assimilation, or abstract violence towards difference as it identifies through association. We slip easily from a is like b to a is b, and then we learn nothing, or at least we learn nothing new. The problem for the voyagers, then, is not that they fail to see but that they engage in forms of recognition which conceal as much as they reveal. At the same time, the point of Smith's argument is precisely that perception and culture shift. They move, both forward and cyclically, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, sometimes in regress. Neo-classical attitudes to landscape are undermined by the realisation that the perfection of forms is a philosophical aspiration more than it is a natural one. The cult of the noble savage gives way to the social Darwinism of the ignoble savage; this is also part of the cruel game we call civilisation. One fascinating undercurrent in Smith's European Vision is that the gaze of the outsider is also unwittingly reversed. As the Europeans come to stare at the natives so we, now, stare at the Europeans staring. The anthropologists, as it were, become visible to us as observers and observed. Smith opens his second chapter, on Cook's First Voyage, with a quotation from Francis Bacon, On Travel: Tt is a strange thing that in sea-voyages, where there is nothing to be seen but sea and sky, men should make diaries, but in land travel wherein so much is to be

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observed, for the most part they omit it' - thus Bacon.26 Western men are animals who write, who keep diaries, this says to us, but they are also terrified by death; they write so much because they are confronted by what they encounter as nothingness. And by other criteria, more temporal, they behave without any logic at all, less exotic than idiotic; they are as strange to us as the natives were to them and they to the natives. Sometimes the results of these encounters are marvellously comic, as in the kangaroo painted for Banks by George Stubbs. The painting is beguiling, especially as the incredulity wears off; Stubbs' kangaroo is not what we know as a kangaroo, rather it resembles a cross between a mouse and a fox. But then the kangaroo is an icon for us, as well as an animal we know by acquaintance; Stubbs instead assimilated it into the forms already known to him (and to his audience). Little wonder that, as with mermaids, there was some imperial concern that these antipodean animals had been made up, literally sewn together in mischief to upset the authorities; indeed, had they not existed there is a good local case that they should have been invented. Thus did the exotic and the scientific run together, this to the extent that controversy broke out concerning the possibility that the bizarre nature and variety of antipodean wildlife clearly indicated the occurrence of promiscuous intercourse among types of animals. Perhaps Stubbs' kangaroo really was the result of illicit relations between mice and foxes. This was indeed a world that seemed to those from above to be upside down. At the same time there were those in the metropolis who took advantage of the wisdom of the explorers into satire; for the wisdom of the north could be inverted there, as well, jeered at there as pompous and ridiculous or even made risque. So it is that to our eyes, today, the oddity is in the reception of the explorers as much as they saw it in culture and environment. Viewing some of the pictures in European Vision in a detached way, especially the engravings which follow but embellish on earlier versions, is a bit like contemplating the duck-rabbit device or pondering interpretations of ink blots. The artists certainly took their license, whether reviewing New Zealand grottoes in rococo style or casting Tahitians as Greeks. Such imaginary assimilation consistently reinstates the tension which, Smith argues, characterises the period. Classicism and romanticism constantly vie with more literal or realist interpretations. As Marx and Toynbee had it, later civilisations were perpetually given to calling up

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ghosts of the past, recycling arcadian and archaic motifs; this was primitivism in early modern art, primitivism well before Picasso, but it was also perhaps more than that, as the classical echoes hit foundational mythic themes for the Enlightenment, Greece and Rome as imagined origins for London or Weimar or Paris. As we see Fred Williams when we walk in the bush, so Bougainville wrote that when he walked on Tahiti he felt as though he were transported to the Garden of Eden.27 This was the other, the euphoric end of the emotion which Bacon named without commenting on, the fear of the sea as the unknown, death, oblivion. But like the momentary idyll constructed around the romantic aura of the noble savage, this stillness could not last. Modernity accentuated the impulse to change, in culture and in fact; and the empirical aspect of Enlightenment would ever struggle against the cerebral. No matter how much they enthused for Tahiti, the experience also cut both ways. There were two sides to Tahiti or its image, a light side and a dark side. Tahiti proved that there was once a Golden Age; Tahiti also proved that it had long since passed away. The island's symbolic impact was as much in terms of its transience as in its apparent claim to happiness untrammelled by western civilisation. Like civilisation and arcadia, the idea of the antipodes cut both ways. The image of antipodes as hell, topsy-turvy, the absurd other could be used by the English to fix in place both the hard primitives like Aborigines and the mediocre mixed white stock after invasion and immigration; as Bernard Smith discovered when he took his curiosity regarding the Pacific to the Courtauld Institute, in superior eyes there was no such thing as art in Australia or any other place outside the centres. But the antipodes could also upset the stability of hitherto existing cultural hegemonies. Sooner or later the antipodeans would reflux from below and return to haunt the metropolitan consciousness. Even in their own time, the antipodes would not be still. As Smith noted: 'The idea of an antipodean inversion of natural laws was not an easy one to reconcile with the idea of a carefully ordered hierarchy both physical and moral which was securely held together by the laws of nature'.28 The bottom end upset the proper order of things, morality, sexuality, belief - nothing was spared. The consequence was like that set into motion by Montesquieu in The Persian Letters, for the realisation of the other was subversive. The discovery that others lived differently could be used to stigmatise them, but the process of comparison was

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more dangerous than that. Maybe the Persians or the Tahitians were right. Before we knew it, the whole world could be turned upside down. Cook's second voyage saw the establishment of William Hodges as Cook's painter. The Forsters, father and son, served as naturalists. Georg Forster, the younger, even then took umbrage against Hodges' artistic subjection of nature to artifice. Forster's argument was significant, not least of all because it is illustrative of the way in which some participants on the voyages were themselves already aware of the difficulties of vision and reception which the painters were engaged in. Smith quotes a passage from Forster's Voyage Round the World, 1777: it concerns Hodges' classical representation of Cook's Landing at Middleburgh (Eua). Forster wrote that Hodges was guilty of playing to the gallery: Mr Hodges designed this memorable interview in an elegant picture, which has been engraved for captain Cook's account of this voyage. The same candour with which I have made it a rule to commend the performance of this ingenious artist, whenever they are characteristic of the objects, which he meant to represent, obliges me to mention, that this piece, in which the execution of [by] Mr Sherwin cannot be too much admired, does not convey any adequate idea of the natives of Eaoowhe or Tonga Tabbo. The plates which ornamented the history of captain Cook's former voyage, have been justly criticised, because they exhibited to our eyes the pleasing forms of antique figures and draperies, instead of those Indians of which we wished to form some idea. But it is also greatly to be feared, that Mr Hodges has lost the sketches and drawings which he made from NATURE in the course of the voyage, and supplied the deficiency in this case, from his own elegant ideas. The connoisseur will find Greek contours and features in this picture, which have never existed in the South Sea. He will admire an elegant flowing robe which involves the whole head and body, in an island where the women very rarely cover the shoulders and breast; and he will be struck with awe and delight by the figure of a divine old man, with a long white beard, though all the people of Ea-oowhe shave themselves with muscle-shells.29 Forster's appeal to NATURE against the imposition of artifice may rankle with us today, reminiscent as it is of Locke's attack on the opacity of

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metaphor as ornament. Plain speaking, or painting, will not always do. The power of Forster's insight is nevertheless striking; it makes it clear that the contemporary participant could also understand the problem of romanticising the other. Indeed, Smith's use of the passage from Forster makes the critical point even more powerfully than Smith himself can, as interpreter after the fact. Forster's witness makes us recognise that some of the participants, at least, in Cook's voyages knew what was happening, understood that representation (and misrepresentation) of culture was also at stake here. This was indeed a period of projection, of the European cult of the exotic and primitive. The visit of the first kangaroo to England caused an uproar. Then the arrival of Omai, a native of Huahine, created another English sensation. No less prestigious a figure than Sir Joshua Reynolds painted a full-length portrait of Omai in full classical splendour, barefoot like Christ but otherwise dressed to kill. The noble savage had been let into the parlour. Hodges, for his part, on this occasion portrayed Omai more realistically. Once again, however, the results were mixed and unpredictable. The local satirists turned insult into injury: Omai became a stock-figure of great use in the attack on the morals and manners of contemporary English society.30 The intruders in paradise were being filmed, as it were, even as they filmed the exotic, and they made themselves look ridiculous in the process. As Smith repeatedly observes, this difference in response serves to remind that there is no such thing as romanticism, only romanticisms, harder or softer. Both the satirists and the ladies and gentlemen in Banks' parlour project romantic sensibilities on to Omai, but of different kinds. In other words, the category of romanticism, like primitivism (or more recently Orientalism) has to be handled with care; it needs to be remembered that it is an ex post facto category, which we allow too easily to freeze and fix that which moves {a is not like b, it is b). The critical point remains, however, that even a stigmatic category such as the 'noble savage' could cut both ways. Smith quotes John Scott's 'Cook cycle' poem of 1775, where Scott has Omai turn on his oppressors, and say: Can Europe boast, with all her pilfer'd wealth, A larger store of happiness, or health? What then avail her thousand arts to gain

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The store of every land and every main; Whilst we, whom love's more grateful joys enthral, Profess one art - to live without them all.31 Smith's view cuts hard - it was a short step from the use of Tahitian life to criticise the shortcomings of English society, to the claim that European civilisation would corrupt life in the Pacific Islands. This is exactly the logic of Smith's argument about cultural exchange, that however unequal and saturated with power it may be, the flows go unpredictably, the traffic feeds back, reverses, crosses over, culture and politics flow subliminally uphill. Yet even these flows refused to conform to expectation. Thus, Smith notes that, ironically for art historians, European thought was so preoccupied with philosophy of nature during the eighteenth century that Pacific arts and crafts hardly made the impression which the peoples themselves did. The problem was all of a piece. The idea of art, itself implying industry, was not easily to be incorporated within the arcadian dream of islanders who gained their bread and milk 'without toil from the trees'.32 The idea of Pacific art had to precede its discovery. If history was visual, then vision had its historicity. In a particular sense, politics meantime reigned. An anonymous English pamphlet of 1780, A Letter from Omai to the Right Honourable . . .

read like a postcard from the visiting Persian, or child/savage: And after thanking you for the powder, shot, gun, crackers, sword, feathers and watch, let me thank you also for my conversion to Christianity: I ought perhaps have mentioned this before the sword and crackers, but as the fire and the sword have commonly taken the lead, I will not dispute their title to it.33

It was less and less clear who the barbarians were, or who possessed better vision. Perhaps realising that this uncertainty was amongst them, the colonisers then recast the savages as ignoble. The focus of European Vision now turns to Australian settlement, and the hard primitivism of the portrayal of Aborigines. The local people could be assimilated into the category of primitives; anomalies like the kangaroo caused bigger headaches for systems of classification, and they, in turn, could be partly assimilated into various different categories but finally

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warranted the construction of a category of their own. Neither would go away. This was, indeed, one reason why the intruders spoke of a 'new world', for it violated the order of things in the 'old' world, and yet it was there. So the pre-existing European categories were fudged together, resulting in makeshift hypotheses such as those which suggested that aberrant forms resulted from promiscuous intercourse among animals. The local peoples would more readily be placed, but they were also viewed differently. Dampier constructed them as repulsive miserables; Cook viewed their lives rather as simple and austere.34 Australian natives were viewed as hard primitives, spartans rather than arcadians. Classical antiquity was ever in these margins. Smith notes that these kinds of divergence in view remind that there were two quite contradictory attitudes to nature in what we know of eighteenthcentury thought. On the one hand, it was claimed that all our misfortunes are due to our departure from nature's laws, while on the other, it was claimed that man could only raise himself above the brute creation by improving on nature.35 Late moderns share with their predecessors this fundamental ambivalence about civilisation; we adore it, but it makes us mad. And in our madness we lust after the past, youth, childhood, innocence, the other, the sublime. Thus, the adventurers of the eighteenth century waxed lyrical about the antipodes, where they saw Rome and Athens all over again. Australia was not an English garden, but it could be. Then the projection of desire turns nasty, as fantasy refuses to materialise and the landscape refuses to behave as it is bid by foreign command. The local peoples, similarly, refused to behave by disappearing; so they were turned by artists into grotesque caricatures and in the landscape paintings were replaced by sheep, as they were shot or poisoned offstage, expelled from the pastoral in image and deed alike. The Anglicisation of the pictorial landscape was no longer an aesthetic projection; the topographical landscape itself was increasingly Europeanised.36 So sheep eat men and women in the antipodes as well, more readily even because they are primitives. Life followed art, even as art worked in the interests of empire. In Smith's trajectory, the story now pointed to Australian Painting as a consolidation of Place, Taste and Tradition; and it indicated the later line of thought on Truganini for his Boyer Lectures. In the context of his own writing, however, there is nothing as fascinating as

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European Vision. The concerns signalled in it, he extended in Imagining the Pacific. IMAGINING THE PACIFIC

Imagining the Pacific appeared thirty years later, in 1992, bringing together various essays in the wake of European Vision. It is, in a way, a kind of second-order discourse around the themes of the earlier study. Imagining the Pacific begins with an epigram from Wordsworth's Prelude: 'imagination, which, in truth is but another name for absolute power and clearest insight'. The implication of this choice of orientation is approving and curious about romanticism and its effects; for it follows from Smith's view of history that romanticism is perpetually part of us as well as a dominant phase of a cyclical kind which can be identified as such after the fact. The tension is a constant one in Smith's thought, and in modern culture: his anthropological inclination and his aesthetic criticism deserve to be described as materialist, but his fascination with symbol and meaning forever throw focus back on the ideal. We do not only imagine the Pacific, our forebears invade it, and we inhabit it; yet the imagination also has what might be called material effects, as when Europeans actually bring antipodean landscape into line with their images of it. We imagine the Pacific and the antipodes, and we also make them. What might it mean, then, to imagine? Smith suggests that, as we think it, 'imagination' consists of two major components, imaging and imagining. Imaging involves the construction of an image in the presence of its object; imagining is a more abstract process, where an image is constructed in the absence of the direct sensory contact with the field from which the imagery of the imagining is constructed. Between imaging and imagining there are discontinuities, but continuity is also apparent; the relation between the two is like a spectrum, for they alike constitute an activity. Imaging involves not only sensation and perception but also reconstructive skills and memory. Memory itself also works through imagination. As for imagination, it also refers back necessarily to perception of experience.37 Thus, to refer to example, we might say that Kafka's Amerika is more strictly a work of the imagination than D. H. Lawrence's Kangaroo, for Lawrence experienced something of Australia whereas Kafka did not visit America at all. Nevertheless, Kafka also knew something about America, just as all

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Australian children who watch television know it and know it well. With a similar sense of complexity, in this kind of comparison, Lawrence knew Australia better than Kafka knew America, and it was this knowledge which led him more fully (and more fancifully) to imagine it. Somewhat later Jean Baudrillard, more like Lawrence, visits America but then also imagines or constructs it as the misplaced, the cultural rather than geographical antipodes of Europe. These kinds of experience tell us a great deal about human thinking, even if they are impossible to codify. Knowing and imagining, image and imagination are all mixed together in Smith's understanding, not least of all because the image also appears vitally in art, whereas imagination acts in and beyond art. To think the Pacific, or the antipodes, for Smith, is to do more than to think about thinking or to interpret representations. There is the world, or worlds, and there are its texts; but the world does not end with its texts. If we are to begin to understand, say, the Pacific, we must also accept the reality of the objects and the historicity of those processes out of which 'the Pacific' was constructed together with the habits of those European minds out of which the concept of the Pacific was constructed, and those Pacific minds that found themselves at once the objects and victims of that 'understanding'. In imagining the Pacific, Europeans imagined a reality that they had to come to terms with, not a fancy or fantasy that might eventually disappear.38 The echoes of this are in Toynbee, as usual, for Smith seeks here (among other things) to probe the source of Europe's own need to imagine the Pacific in a particular way in its original 'primitivism', the civilisation of ancient Greece and the enduring cultural model which that civilisation produced and which we have since reproduced.39 There are also some echoes of the kind of argument found in Collingwood's Idea of History, that the historian's task is to rethink past thinking, to enter into dialogue with the past from present horizons as hermeneutics would recommend. The themes of Imagining the Pacific are as varied as are the papers in the collection. Smith now pursues, for example, the earlier theme that art is always institutionally embodied and socially embedded. In the Pacific, art works in the service of science and travel. That art is sacred in its origins is widely acknowledged, and so is its relation to the church. Smith aligns it with other forces as well, the educated class and

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its grand tours and scientific aspirations. The exotic was discovered not only in the antipodes, but in new worlds like America and in older, more proximate strange worlds within Europe. Europeans may henceforth have stigmatised the other, but at least they recognised its existence, and thereby acknowledged the relativity of their own existence. As Smith expressed it in a different chapter, art also worked as information; Cook was less an invader or conqueror than an inquirer (the invaders came later). Then there was the related story in which Cook himself was pictorially depicted as hero (the revisionists also came later). Vision itself has a history. Where white men travelled, self-doubt went with them. The invaders behaved like barbarians, but some of them knew it. Thus Parkinson, after an affray with Tahitians in which one of them had seized a musket from a sentinel: A boy, a midshipman, was the commanding officer, and giving orders to fire, they obeyed with the greatest glee imaginable, as if they had been shooting wild ducks, killed one stout man, and wounded many others. What a pity, that such brutality should be exercised by civilized people upon unarmed ignorant Indians.40 Young Georg Forster was more direct: If the knowledge of a few individuals can only be acquired at such a price as the happiness of nations, it were better for the discoverers and the discovered, that the South Sea had still remained unknown to Europe and its restless inhabitants'.41 Where Parkinson worries in terms of pity, brutality and ignorance, Forster, closer in spirit to Smith, views the situation as one expressive both of the desire for liberty and of the modern imperative seen in its eternal restlessness. Europeans after the Enlightenment could not help but explore the planet; their own restlessness led them in turn to idealise the apparent rest of the South Seas. These European inconsistencies also underpin Smith's criticism of Edward Said in the chapter in Imagining the Pacific on 'Style, information and image in the art of Cook's voyages'. It is worry enough that something newly set, tough-cast and ruthlessly hegemonic called Orientalism emerges from Said's writing. Smith's disagreement with the neatness of this unilateral flow can be read between the lines: Said, he says, 'concludes that these views, which he describes as Orientalist, are consistent and

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relatively unchanging, and present a view of the East from Egypt to China that is addressed to the past and achieves a kind of timeless quality'.42 Said claims to construct Orientalism upon a theoretical position which runs between Foucault and Gramsci. The power ontology of the early Foucault swallows up the sense of transaction and process in Gramsci in no time. Romanticism and primitivism, Smith argues, are always mixed and variable; on this basis, a larger discursive field, like Orientalism, could only be more so. This is not for a moment to deny the stigmatic power of othering; it is only to inquire as to how best it might be explained. For if Europeans did not see the same thing in the Pacific or, for that matter, the Indian Ocean, then neither did the French, English, Dutch or Spanish. And if there is no such thing as a single occidental vision, then there can hardly be any unified or essential discourse of Orientalism, either. The victims or their representatives also universalise, falsely. Smith's judgement of Said in his own sphere of competence follows directly from his premises: 'it would be false, surely, to conclude that the early visual imagery of the Pacific issuing from Cook's voyages is internally consistent in the way that characterises the orientalist imagery described by Said'. For Pacific peoples are rendered in sequence according to Oriental, classical and mannerist imagery and the beginnings of racialist-type imagery into the nineteenth century. But at the very least these portrayals alternate between images of bliss and purgatory and characterise local peoples accordingly. 'European imagery of the Pacific does possess a durable though contradictory inner consistency'.43 The truth is elusive and it is never simple. In this argument, as elsewhere in Smith's work, we sense an attraction to something like naturalism, or a certain kind of realism which resurfaces, especially in The Antipodean Manifesto. If for Smith, as for Forster, one of the weaknesses of moderns is their restlessness, so too then is their need for, or attraction to, abstraction. Modern culture, as Marx and later Simmel argued, is too abstract and cerebral. We think too much and we thus overinterpret that which may be less complex than it appears; we search endlessly for hidden meanings which may not be there, at least until they are projected out by us. Our weakness for grand explanatory categories or spray-ons like 'capitalism' or 'Orientalism' means that we eschew contradiction and obscure the patterns of contestation which often hold up these categorical hypostatisations. In other words,

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abstraction eats up content, universalises falsely, and finally disables us. The truth, such as it is, is local and highly variable, specific to place, taste and circumstance, and then still is dependent on perspective. If we contest big bad categories we lose the game by submitting to its rules. We need to resist this will to power, both in intellectual and in institutional terms if we seek to tell the truth. To tell the truth, in turn, means owning up to contradiction and ambivalence. To argue in this way is also to indicate that morality is never straightforward. That was Karl Kraus' mistake; to stigmatise the two dominant evils as identical and juxtapose them to a third, imaginary option is to substitute wit for ethics and to reinsinuate the dualities which he originally set out to oppose. Thus Smith's final, personal judgement on Cook. Should we be for Cook, or against? or both? Cook, in his lifetime, had absorbed enough of the hopes and expectancies of the Enlightenment to become aware by his third voyage that his mission to the Pacific involved him in a profound and unresolvable contradiction. In order to treat native peoples in the enlightened way ... and in order to survive, he had to establish markets among people who possessed little if any notions of a market economy. The alternative was to use force from the beginning as the Spaniards and Portuguese had . . * Cook began contacts by gifting; but the year he sailed on his last voyage (1776) was also the year in which Adam Smith symbolically pitched the flag of free trade in The Wealth of Nations. So in the Pacific, for Smith, Cook had to play as best he could at being Adam Smith's god, acting out his hidden hand: 'The third voyage records not only his death but, before that, his loss of hope'.45 Cook was no hero, at least; Smith has no time for pretenders to the role, and nor, arguably, should we. For heroes, like gods or emperors, end up showing naked torsos, or frailties or feet of clay before the procession moves on. Nor can appeals to history save us, for they are appeals to misleading senses of certainty; we may perceive history as repetition, but it is always more than that, and the similarities we detect between our own moment and others are also inevitably imaginary.46 As I have suggested, Smith's work in the field of vision no more indicates the presence of a theory of vision than his enthusiasm for

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history indicates a philosophy of history in the conventional sense. That kind of theory, implicitly or explicitly, works typically at the kind of level of a priori abstraction which Smith rejects. The point of his own analyses is rather that the nuance of difference emerges in particular stories, though they also combine or are associated by us when we think typically. In order to make sense of a general proposition, such as unequal cultural exchange, we need to enter a particular historical labyrinth. Smith is an historicist; his social theory only makes sense within the idea of history as particular moments in the larger civilisational flow. Seeing, then, is like naming, a way of organising the social world which obscures at the same time as it enables. Naming, classifying symbolically, organising the world by thinking is not, as some imagine, a mentality peculiar to moderns or a consequence of the Enlightenment. There is a good anthropological case to the contrary, as exemplified in the work of Levi-Strauss, that human beings cannot survive without classifying. As Levi-Strauss shows, most famously in his book on 'savage thinking', what looks illogical to European eyes is the result of the application of a different system of knowledge. Bees and pythons, for example, are placed by us into quite distinct classificatory categories, but other people associate them on the basis of colour.47 It was this kind of positive insight (as well as some more dubious attractions of rationalist prowess) that brought structuralism into prominence in France and then in English-speaking intellectual cultures. Signs, as Ferdinand de Saussure had suggested, were arbitrary; dogs barked with different voices in different European cultures. Names were, therefore, also arbitrary if symbolic of local context and meaning. History, then, as Smith understands it, has to be transcultural, and in this sense it is anthropological or civilisational. It cannot be internal to national culture because finally there is no such thing, except as an analytical convenience or an annexe of state power and its attendant projects of nation-building. As Freud had it, not least of all in his structuralist appropriation, this sense of the transcultural was vital because you could never presume that the truth of an object was in it, or nearby; it could be elsewhere, or meaning could emerge accidentally, arbitrarily, in sign or symptom as much as in deep analysis. Yet if we are historical beings, this also means that we are unmistakably modern, driven by modern obsessions as well as by the impulses of the human

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condition. We learn in the process, even if the substance of our knowing remains opaque. As Smith put it in a lecture given in 1954, western art was characterised increasingly by its celebration of transience, its uncertainty, by doubt rather than absolutes; like much else in modern history it was Janus-faced, its claim to certainty also revealing its very fragility in transience. 'Western art', he wrote, 'has tended to be expressive and restless rather than harmonious and peaceful and in these conditions its greatest masterpieces have not only recognised but also celebrated the transience of man and nature'.48 Western art thus constantly reverts, returns to the theme of restlessness; but this also marks its achievement: 'It has been in the recognition, the artistic acceptance and the celebration of the insubstantial pageant [of modern life] that the central achievement of western art lies'.49 IMAGINING THE OTHER Cook was no hero but a significant actor in the insubstantial pageant of modern history. Smith did not take sides with Cook, or with the British against the Aborigine. The purpose of his work on Cook is to seek better to place and provisionally to explain him. For Smith at the same time sought to place and explain the oppression and survival of Australian Aborigines. His most important text here is the public lecture series of 1980, the ABC Boyer Lectures which he entitled The Spectre of Truganini. Cook had imagined or envisioned the Tahitians as soft primitives, primitives of ease and abundance. Cook more admired the people he cast as hard primitives, those living the apparently austere lives of the Australian Aborigines. The extermination and brutalisation of these peoples resulted less from his own initiative than it flowed from the efforts of Banks; it was Banks who had argued in London for colonisation. The results of the process of occupation were undeniable, and much denied. This was the terrain upon which Smith's Boyer Lectures worked. They anticipated the discourse of reconciliation, not least of all in their call not for cultural assimilation but cultural convergence. They anticipate something of the spirit of the debate after Mabo. Smith set out to ask the same kinds of questions as he had in European Vision: not only how did European civilisation impact upon Aborigines, but also, how did their culture affect that of the invaders? What effects would the answers to questions such as these have upon

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the received images of Australian cultural history? Smith slid into the problem through Marx's metaphor of ghosting, this time in the Communist Manifesto: 'It seems to me that a spectre has haunted Australian culture, the spectre of Truganini'. The cliche of modern nation-building is that nations are founded in blood, in war, revolution in 1789 or 1917, Gallipoli in 1915. Smith reminds us that in 1876 there ended another Australian war; it was the only war that, unaided, white Australians could claim, one-sidedly, to have won completely. It was the war against Tasmanian Aborigines.50 Culture rests on power, increasingly with the passing of modern time on the violence of state power. Civilisations rise and fall, transhistorically, but some are pushed. State power rests on violence, and not only on claims to culture or legitimacy. Imperialism cannot exist without violence. This was the moment in which modern Australia was founded, from 1788 to 1876. Bad enough that it should happen, but then to deny it? For what Aboriginal peoples have had to remember, white Australians have tried to forget: Indeed at times it would seem as if all the culture of old Europe were being brought to bear upon our writers and artists in order to blot from their memories the crimes perpetrated upon Australia's first inhabitants. In recent years, however, both sides, black and white alike, have become increasingly aware of the continuing colonial crime, the locked cupboard of our history. It is this new awareness of what actually occurred that, it seems to me, constitutes a central problem for the integrity and authenticity of Australian culture today.31

The locked cupboard of our history - the awful secret that we know about but which we render invisible, so that it comes back to haunt us - this metaphor points to a possible resolution, and not only to the horrible deed of matricide. As Smith suggests in his lectures, a possible way forward is to begin to again link arguments concerning culture, place and morality. Post-Christian though we may be, notions of ethics and morality nevertheless persist in underpinning our ways of life. The foundational myths for white Australians may be Federation or Gallipoli, but they are also formed by images which come from classical Greece and from the Bible. They refer not only to ideas of unity or dedication, but also to values such as democracy and justice. Thus,

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Smith uses civilisational categories to indicate that whatever has been, once recognised, can also be improved upon by us. Marxism, with which Smith publicly identified as Boyer lecturer, of course, partakes of both those earlier European points of orientation, biblical and Hellenic. Whatever weight we ascribe to forces of an economic or technological kind, then, Smith nevertheless wants to insist that it is nevertheless primarily culture which holds us together. Ethical systems, in particular, play this kind of role, generating solidarity over conflict.52 Apart from the Aboriginal component, which developed its own ethical systems from an intimate association with the environment over thirty thousand years or more, ours is an ethically dependent culture as well as an aesthetically dependent one: 'We brought our moral values with us in, so to speak, our travelling trunks; but when tested at the frontiers of Australian experience . . . they have become more often than not seriously affected. Australian morality is a history of damaged goods'53 says Smith, quoting Margaret Kiddle. The metaphors twist and turn, the damaged goods of universalistic humanist ethics applied selectively to white men only, the travelling trunks and cupboards locked, holding ghosts and secrets that take their revenge on us as well. Smith suggests in his lectures that white Australians did generate at least one peculiar or notable ethical sensibility, that which we refer to as mateship. A radical mythology, begot of rural nomadology, the aura of bush workers and the Bulletin, the local ethic of mateship is, like egalitarianism, selective in its application. You couldn't, in that period, have a Chinaman or a woman for a mate. As always, Smith's interpretation of white Australian civilisation seeks out the balance; what we today inherit from the struggles of the previous fin-de-siecle is irreversibly mixed, a source simultaneously of pride and shame. Inclusive in some ways, it was, and is still, also exclusive. The themes Smith labours here are reminiscent of a pathbreaking book like Humphrey McQueen's seventies missile A New Britannia, but they also extend on the sense of discomfort and ambivalence characteristic of an earlier benchmark work such as Donald Home's The Lucky Country. The whole point about white Australian civilisation, in this account, is that whatever its claims to being exceptional it also embodies the story of modernity and perhaps something of that of the human condition more generally. Its achievements are deeply and irredeemably

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ambivalent; every achievement won in the social laboratory seems to carry with it some other affront or brutality. Smith's conclusion is blunt: The greatest weakness of the mateship ethic' in the context of his discussion 'was that it did not include the Australian Aborigine'.54 The earlier myth of the noble savage was supplanted by the aesthetic and ethical image of the ignoble savage; ignobility carried with it, by extension, the licence to kill, for these were allegedly now a doomed people, doomed because thought to be captured within primitivity, incapable of innovation, caught in their own unchangeable rituals and myths. This kind of social Darwinism dominated cultural attitudes from around 1870 into the 1920s and beyond. Difference, here, was made into something pernicious, punishable by death. Social Darwinism erected an almost impenetrable barrier between the deep spirituality of Aboriginal culture and the materialism of white Australian culture. The problem was less in the idea of a universalistic western humanism than its partial and violent application. None of this, however, could even begin to be registered in a dominant culture based upon denial. In this regard, at least, Smith drew a parallel between the formation of individual subjects and the path of national development. Genocide, for most white Australians, was a nightmare to be thrust out of the foreground of the mind. Yet like most traumatic experiences of childhood it persists, in some form or another. He quoted Freud: It is universally admitted that in the origin of the traditions and folklore of a people, care must be taken to eliminate from the memory such a motive as would be painful to the national feeling'.55 Smith's analysis thus anticipated the increasing western intellectual fascination with problems of memory and forgetting; but his precedents were older, because the ideas were. Freud, and in different ways other thinkers like Durkheim and Renan, had already puzzled over these questions of constructing meaning out of tradition, including and excluding symbols from an already existing cultural repertoire. Our fate, in Australia, was to cop events like Federation or Gallipoli as national monuments; other local traditions such as wifebeating or shooting Aborigines were spirited away symbolically, at least within the field established by the national super-ego. Then Smith turned to Cook; he keeps returning in Smith's work on the Pacific. Cook was possessed of the humanist ethics of the Enlightenment; if this were insufficient, he had detailed advice from

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the President of the Royal Society to go placidly amongst Pacific peoples. Cook was advised that: shedding the blood of these people is a crime of the highest nature. They are the natural, and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several Regions they inhabit. No European Nation has a right to occupy any part of their country, or settle among them without their voluntary consent. Conquest over such people can give no just title; because they can never be Aggressors.56 Cook transgressed; he took visitation for possession. Smith's point was simple but powerful. It was not in the centre but on the periphery that the Enlightenment began its local process of degeneration. The wisdom of the centre came unravelled on its edge; cultural traffic ran uphill. This was an issue of frontiers, understood as confronting cultural horizons rather than as geographical fictions. Cook chose to force the issue, to take the law into his own hands when he thought that he could get away with it. In Australia, at least, he took no lives; as Smith reminds, Cook held, or claims to have held, Aborigines in high esteem. Cook viewed Aborigines as noble savages indeed, with both terms under emphasis; they were free of the pestilential breath of western civilisation and of all its encumbrances. They lived in perpetual peace (so far) and without the blight of inequality: until Cook's followers arrived to construct them out of the landscape, aesthetically and practically. The new, local Utopia emerged together with the work of the Heidelberg School and its sun-kissed arcadia relieved of Aboriginal blemish. Smith traces in pencil sketch the period significance of Nietzsche, not least of all via Norman Lindsay. Lindsay's influence took in the idea of mental, rather than physiological evolution; survival of the fittest led to the creation of mental supermen, a mateship of the elect which could claim a certain kind of white primitivism at the expense of Aboriginal Australians. Yet at the same moment that some leading white Australian intellectuals were avoiding the issue, the centres were returning to it, in the work of Engels, Spencer and Gillen, Frazer, Freud and Durkheim. Not that the curiosity coming out of the centres was innocent, either; but at the very least it was timely. As Smith understood, moderns would become romantics, seize at their

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own notion of the primitive when threatened or ill-at-ease with their world; and so the new moderns, entering the twentieth century, would also discover the other from their own points of vantage and advantage. He did not name it here, or refer to the text, but Smith seems to be writing out of Hegel's image in The Phenomenology of Mind: master and slave, how they entrap each other in evanescent bonds of mental and firmer kind, how it is that culture also works as a form of power which holds together asymmetrical relations of domination. To hold another in subjugation, the logic implies, it is not enough to compel them; their minds must also be involved, they must love big brother after any fashion which is possible. Relations of domination, in other words, are always constructed through the psyche as well as through the hand or gun; and while these dramas are played out daily on the personal level, they also manifest themselves at the level, say, of national culture, where the celebration of some groups and their identities or values is constructed at the expense of those of others. As Smith points out, these kinds of relations, individual and collective, cross over at least at the sexual level; white men like to place themselves on top in both spheres, for theirs is a culture of conquest. The significance of the image of master and slave, however, is that it is also dynamic; we may be stuck with unequal relations, but they shift. They are negotiated, unevenly, and they are processual. This is the logic of Smith's lifelong interest in unequal cultural exchange; worldly wise and sober, it nevertheless seeks out the room for manoeuvre which we used to call progress. The last of his Boyer Lectures then took up the theme, 'a cultural convergence?' Smith was never an advocate of what others called cultural assimilation, the fit-in-or-shut-up common orthodoxy of postwar Australia. His claim was different. Once the guilt was named, the other aspect of Enlightenment might come into play, empiricism versus rationalism, curiosity and willingness to learn over certainty and involution. Cultural convergence might then replace cultural collision. European vision, earlier on, had, after all, been as curious as it was censorious or obstructive. Could the past then be redressed? Probably not, but it could be addressed, declared, and talk of convergence might then look less than tokenistic, though inasmuch as culture rests on power more positive and substantial gestures would still be necessary even for the process to begin.57

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Viewed theoretically or ethically, the question here is whether the human need to 'other' is inevitably stigma tic and based on oppression. As with Levi-Strauss, it could be agreed that all humans classify and have a need to classify. Whether we need always to valorise our own kind and stigmatise the other is less obvious. At least into our own times the idea that we all carry multiple identities brings with it the sense that we identify with different people at different times; same/difference splits fail to help much here. In different terms, we are all others and not just in the eyes of strangers; we are all aliens in some sense or another, place, birth, taste, tradition, language or accent or inflection, body shape or markings or sexual orientation. For modernity accommodates difference, indeed actively seeks it out, even at the same time as the modernist project sought out uniformity and values which were actually more traditionalistic than not. As Smith concluded: Such potential convergences should serve to remind us of one of the greatest achievements of modernism, its capacity to erode the narrow Europeanism which has dominated western art and its appendages. Modernism revealed that an art could emerge which was in the best sense international, drawing upon the sources of all the arts of mankind.38 Civilisation always returns to its roots, even if it defines them too narrowly and locally. Smith quoted Peter Berger's Pyramids of Sacrifice to argue, as had Walter Benjamin in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, that all civilisation rested on barbarism, both in the sense of foundation and in the sense of sacrifice without answer. And Smith closed, forty years later, returning to Toynbee and the expectation that the victims of local history finally had to win, or else we would all lose.59 Eight years later Smith offered a postscript in a further, single Boyer Lecture. It followed the logic or imperative of cultural convergence with a new connection, Lemontey's prophecy. In 1792, at the height of the French Revolution, Lemontey offered a remarkable prophecy regarding Australia's future. The position of New Holland, he wrote, would make it the meeting place of the world. As Smith said: 'What is remarkable about this prophecy is that Lemontey predicted the emergence of a multicultural, Eurasian society in Australia,

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stimulated by European science and technology, at the very time that the First Fleet was sailing to Botany Bay'.60 Lemontey had stumbled upon the paradox of the antipodes: to be on the periphery was also, ironically, to be of the centre, as the very category 'antipodean' suggests. Imagining the other, recognising Aboriginal Australians should, by rights, come easily to white Australians; we do not have our feet elsewhere, but in the same place. The fact that we, as white Australians or Australians of colour are stigmatised by the centres for our alleged provincialism and mediocrity should naturally align us with the others who have felt the sting of these insults and know innerly of their irrelevance. If we have two feet to stand upon, as Smith now argued was possible, one of them will be local.

CHAPTER 4

THE ANTIPODEAN MANIFESTO

LOCATING THE ANTIPODES What might it mean, then, to be antipodean? To be other, displaced, a reflex of metropolitan culture, and yet part of it, elsewhere. In Smith's way of thinking, to be antipodean is to be constructed into a relationship; the antipodes is not a place, though its image is often projected upon a place away from Europe, like that which we inhabit. Being antipodean, within the British frame of reference, was like a punishment of some kind or another, to do with the place felons were sent, or idiotic cousins or reprobates. Yet Australians were also exiles, in some way or another, as well as invaders. The antipodes are invented by imperialism. But they, or we, are not just 'down there', the dirty bits down below, the oddities of platypus and Aborigine, topsy-turvy. The antipodes are not nowhere, they are at the other pole, the other end, connected vitally to the centre because imagined and held by it. Our antipodes, our Australia is not just anywhere invisible 'down there', they are specifically Europe's antipodes, unspeakable European embarrassments or else laughable local oddities. In sympathy with Mikhail Bakhtin, and the idea of carnival which Smith had read of in Lindsay's work on culture, the antipodes could also be turned against the centres; we are the rude bits, the bits that talk back, behave as though they are autonomous even when instructed to the contrary. So being antipodean is another kind of master-slave relationship, unequal by nature but given to a great deal more fluidity than those formally in control could themselves imagine. The themes were already central to Smith's project, both within Australia and across the Pacific. Unequal cultural 97

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exchange already meant that the subordinates influenced their local masters, and through them those who thought they were in control in the centres. Cultural influence was reciprocal, however unfair or asymmetrical. In Australia it was complicated by the historic fact that there were two distinct levels of subordinates. Smith wrote in 1947 on the theme of the red heart and its external influence, revisiting the theme in 1961: Although it is unknown, the hot dry centre is nevertheless the heart of the country. And it is an unknown heart to the majority of the inhabitants. This mysterious unknown heart provides those elements of fear and wonder, together with a sense of belonging - a kind of national pathetic fallacy - that are the natural elements of romanticism. Where national romanticism develops in Australian literature and art it usually draws in no small degree for its imagery and concepts upon the unknown heart, and the aboriginal of the unknown heart.1 Thus the appeal to Australians and their superiors of work such as Drysdale's, or in a different way, Namatjira's. Albert Namatjira, like Margaret Preston, combined motifs and techniques across the two experiences. As for Namatjira, his landscape paintings were technically in the tradition of British watercolour landscape painting as it developed in Australia. We must not forget that Namatjira was not only an Aranda man he was also a man of the twentieth century . . . Actually the work of the Papunya Tula artists of the western desert has much in common with that of Namatjira. Whereas he worked in a style of painting that possessed an Australian market in the 1930's, they work in a style of late modernism, that today possesses a ready international market. But the big difference is that their art provides them with a better access to their own traditional culture than did Namatjira's. That is one of the great achievements of the modernist aesthetic practice - it does provide a path back to not only the European past of Greece and Rome, but a path back to the traditional and spiritual values of indigenous, non-European people.2 The bind becomes more evident as we contemplate it. The point is not that Australians do not matter, but that they do not matter for much.

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They have lives of influence by virtue of living downstairs, but the attendant risk is apparent, being subject to patronising, paternalism, condescension. To be put in our place, in the antipodes, is to be put down, to be made subaltern. We can always say to ourselves that we know better, are quietly confident, but the extent of the masters' recognition does not go this far. At the same time, this exilic condition is always mixed; and in any case, it is the fate of all moderns to feel exiled, because restless; antipodeans may be more exilic than others, and in this sense, when it comes to living with modernity, they are more at home. Being antipodean, or what some these days might call postcolonial, means of necessity carrying peripheral vision, and dual vision, mixed identity and citizenship or lineage. Smith puzzled over this dual status on the occasion of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, for which he wrote the entry on art in the Olympic Civic Committee's celebratory publication: The Australian artist, we might say, is a migratory bird who owns not one home but two - the new world of Australia and the old world of Europe. The attempt to live entirely in either world is for him a spiritual death, and he draws his strength and whatever wisdom he has from a kind of perpetual flight. He is a permanently displaced person whether he sits under the gum tree or walks upon the Pont Neuf. And his dilemma is no passing phase3 although his inevitable masculinity thankfully has been. Being Australian, then, whether artist or nay, inevitably meant drawing from and across cultures. But for Smith, and today for us, this condition, which could be cast as a loss, a source of sadness and nostalgia, is a source of advantage and strength. We are of the centre, but not in it; we are on the margin, at the same time, perpetual outsiders as well. But this is nothing to weep over, except from the imagined position of those superiors who would cry for imagined loss, or else from the perspective of the misty past where identity was fixed by place and community, was the same as imagined nation. For distance is also enabling; it offers detachment and perspective, the view of the outsider which we couple with sense of insider or metropolitan. This is the way that global culture works, and it is nothing new. The problems about being antipodean are to do with recognition and with power. Those

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who are subaltern in these relations have to accept that they change slowly, if at all, and that their own perspective is at least as enabling as the view of those on top. Where then is the top? The top end of imperialist relations also moves; it is less a place than a relationship, but when it comes to the idea of the centre, the imagery of place is also highly visual and auratic. London, Paris and New York still count when they have less claim to, when Tokyo is the new centre of economic power in the world system. Europe, to use other terms, is also not entirely a place; it is an idea, and since the end of the nineteenth century 'Europe' has included 'America'. The categories shift and fuse, as Americanism becomes the symbol of modernity and continental Europe gives way to America in matters of art and economics; they become even more blurred, then, to the extent that we in the Australian antipodes can veritably be described as Americans, culturally, even though most of us have never been there. America is in our loungerooms, and it has been since the 1950s; nothing new. Therein lies a task for us who follow Smith; to begin to make sense of American vision in the antipodes, for like European vision in the South Pacific it is surely mixed and vernacular as well as foreign and imposed. So if our masters then were British, today they are American, or else Japanese with American university educations. But we cannot deduce intellectual domination from economic rule. The extent to which the world-system becomes dominated by Japan is no reliable indicator of where cultural influence will go. Economy and technology do not govern culture, at least not in any simple or direct way. America will likely continue for the foreseeable future to dominate the culture industry, especially for English speakers, and more so given the expansion of English as modernity's lingua franca. Language still carries culture, together with the icons and logos that crowd out the culture of consumption. In Australia, as commonsense indicates, this has been the case at least since the Second World War; Australian culture has been modernised, Americanising, ever since, with typically mixed results. The image of the Pont Neuf or of Trafalgar Square now gives way to Disneyland, this even for the French. Political radicals and populists in Australia have not been upset about British imperialism since Brian Fitzpatrick wrote, though British bomb tests indicated otherwise. But we know who dominates our world, our televisions and our future,

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and the fact that American civilisation is in discernible decay does little to undermine this; economically alienated by the Japanese miracle, the Americans still have their own antipodes, here and there. Bernard Smith grew up in this world. His path of research took him to London, for that was where his own curiosity about the local variant of European vision pointed, where it had lived and where it held its pictures and papers. But he knew about American art, displayed American war art in the Gallery of New South Wales, and could discern how it might be that New York, in particular, would establish itself as the global centre of the international art scene. What this meant, practically, was that Australia was now doubly antipodean, annexed by relations of subordination both to the United Kingdom and the United States. However, the logic of Smith's argument concerning unequal cultural exchange itself indicated that whatever anomalies it generated, there was no known civilisational alternative. Much of what was gained in the process, in addition, was to be embraced, an argument which resonates for people of my generation when it comes, for example, to rock and roll or blues and jazz. Smith's work is therefore no more anti-American than it is anti-British; yet it is nothing if not critical. If the British, perhaps too often, were too romantic for their own good, then the Americans, in turn, were not always able to balance boosterism with memory rather than nostalgia. In both national experiences the commodification of art was deeply bound up with the problem of its value and direction. It was the power of money, rather than of something shifty like 'national character' which helped to explain the narrowing of the aesthetic dimension. In this context, it is even more difficult to see the logic behind the charge, mentioned above in chapter 2, that Smith was somehow an apologist for American art. Certainly he acknowledged its centrality, its innovation and its economic mystique. But he also viewed art and culture as matters of flow rather than as the set products of national blocs. And when he objected to particular cases of domination his complaints were more often in terms of style or type than of place of origin. He came to criticise abstract expressionism because of its abstraction but also because of its excessive promotion; it seemed to crowd out other forms and aspirations. He had aesthetic reservations about abstraction as well, though as he made plain in response to later criticism, he did, in fact, also enjoy and appreciate it. To contemplate Smith's art criticism is

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to come to realise that there are at least two different types of recommendation in it - there is a democratic impulse, within which all works in art and craft are to be tolerated and celebrated as manifestations of the human spirit, and there is alongside this a critical spirit, which values some works or types over others and especially criticises particular aspects of aesthetic dominance within the field. Modernity generates a cultural world that is highly abstract and cerebral. Smith's anthropological sensibilities, among other things, lead him to value the particular within the general. Humans are active, suffering animals who give particular meanings to the world and strike up particular identities within them. This kind of attitude in Smith is reminiscent of Marx's in The German Ideology. Marx worries about the propensity of humans to project their own capacities upon gods, or later, upon the world of commodities which they themselves create. But he also puzzles over their capacity to reify or hypostatise that which they make, or which they contemplate. Marx's concern is, in part, that moderns have to struggle consistently with empirical reality, but become lost rather in worlds of the ghosts which they themselves conjure up. Then they generate ideologies which claim to be universal - like the rights of man and citizen - but are specific. The tension between history and theory in Marxism is one with which Smith was well familiar, and like most other Marxists of interest Smith deals with that tension by juggling rather than by arbitrarily opting for one or the other. In seeking to explain his position in this book I have described it as historicist; but by this I mean to refer also to a theoretical position, for which what approximates to the truth is perspectival, always necessarily to be located and contextualised within history. I have also endeavoured to explain the extent to which Smith develops a social theory or a theory of history in his arguments concerning culture and civilisations. Smith is keen to discern types, but he does not proceed from type to history or detail; his thought is too empirical for that. Patterns, associations or connections seem, or are seen, to emerge as we fuse cultural horizons; they result from thinking or interpretation, they do not precede understanding but come with it. It is this which explains Smith's hostility to inappropriate abstraction, for it erodes context, substitutes typology for nuance in the way that bad sociology or vulgar Marxism does, moving from the necessity of typology to force historical detail into models. In order to think we always abstract,

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or proceed analytically, by reduction; yet this is but part of an ongoing process through which we work between abstract and concrete which, like imaging and imagining, are not as distinct as their names might make them seem. Naming, Smith recognises, is part of the problem of understanding as well as of its solution; we think we have explained when we have named, but that is only a beginning, in which a becomes b rather than a way of encountering b. One limit of abstraction, then, is that it points towards thin culture rather than thick explanation. So Smith wrote, in 1964: One of my reservations about abstract art is its tendency, it is I believe an inherent tendency to decline into decoration . . . Clearly decoration is an important aspect of art, but in an age of affluence it is easy to fall into the belief that art is a kind of decorative enrichment of the material surface.4

But abstraction was on the march, from Kasimir Malevich's massive conception of paint around the Great War to Rothko and Pollock after the Second World War. The turn was obvious, away from representation, in the wake of Dada and surrealism, against the idea of interpretation, into the medium of paint, beyond the creative subject if not the viewing subject of the myth of romantic genius. READING THE MANIFESTO Bernard Smith found these turns disturbing, not because of a principled hostility to abstraction so much as due to a caution about its nature and a sense of dismay about its increasing dominance. He discovered, more or less by accident, that there were others, mainly painters in the antipodes, who shared his unease. They met together, established themselves as a group with letterhead and subscriptions and the clear hand of John Brack as secretary, keeping minutes. Some echoes of their identity arched back medievally to the Pre-Raphaelites. Their choice of medium, the manifesto, was a form suggestive of strident early modernism. Bernard Smith assembled and rewrote the piece which, perhaps to their mutual surprise, helped generate both a controversy and an attendant cloud of nastiness, accusation and recrimination. The Antipodeans dissolved almost as quickly as they had been established. The Manifesto remained; it was not communist, futurist or surrealist, but antipodean.

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The Antipodean Manifesto Let it be said in the first place that we have all played a part in that movement which has sought for a better understanding of the work of contemporary artists both here and abroad. Indeed, we are, in no uncertain sense, members of the modern movement in art. We take cognisance of all that has happened in art during the past fifty years not to do so would be folly. But today we believe, like many others, that the existence of painting as an independent art is in danger. Today tachistes, action painters, geometric abstractionists, abstract expressionists and their innumerable band of camp followers threaten to benumb the intellect and wit of art with their bland and pretentious mysteries. The art which they champion is not art sufficient for our time; it is not an art for living men. It reveals, it seems to us, a death of the mind and spirit. And yet wherever we look, New York, Paris, London, San Francisco or Sydney, we see young artists dazzled by the luxurious pageantry and colour of non-figuration. It has become necessary therefore for us to point out, as clearly and as unmistakably as we can, that the great Tachiste Emperor has no clothes - nor has he a body. He is only a blot - a most colourful, elegant and shapely blot. Modern art has liberated the artist from his bondage to the world of natural appearances, it has not imposed upon him the need to withdraw from life. The widespread desire, as it is claimed, to 'purify' painting has led many artists to claim that they have invented a new language. We see no evidence at all of the emergence of such a new language nor any likelihood of its appearance. Painting for us is more than paint. Certainly the non-figurative arts can express moods and attitudes, but they are not capable of producing a new artistic language. We are not, it seems to us, witnessing in non-figuration the emergence of an utterly new form of art. We are witnessing yet another attempt by puritan and iconoclast to reduce the living speech of art to the silence of decoration. Art is, for the artist, his speech, his way of communication. And the image, the recognizable shape, the meaningful symbol, is the basic unit of his language. Lines, shapes and colours though they may be beautiful and expressive are by no means images. For us the image is a figured shape or symbol fashioned by the artist from his perceptions and imaginative experience. It is born of past experience and refers back to past experience - and it communicates. It communicates because it has the capacity to refer to experiences the artist shares with his audience.

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Art is willed. No matter how much the artist may draw upon the instinctive and unconscious levels of his experience a work of art remains a purposive act, a humanization of nature. The artist's purpose achieves vitality and power in his images. Take the great black bull of Lascaux, for example, an old beast and a powerful one, who has watched over the birth of many arts and many mythologies. He is endowed with a vitality which is an emblem of life itself. Destroy the living power of the image and you have humbled and humiliated the artist, have made him a blind and powerless Samson fit only to grind the corn of Philistines. As Antipodeans we accept the image as representing some form of acceptance of, and involvement in life. For the image has always been concerned with life, whether of the flesh or of the spirit. Art cannot live much longer feeding upon the disillusions of the generation of 1914. Today Dada is as dead as the dodo and it is time we buried this antique hobby-horse of our fathers. When we look about us there still seems much to be done in art worth doing. People, their surroundings and the past that made them are still subjects, we should like to point out, worthy of the consideration of the artist. We are not, of course, seeking to create a national style. But we do seek to draw inspiration from our own lives and the lives of those about us. Life here in this country has similarities to life elsewhere and also significant differences. Our experience of this life must be our material. We believe that we have both a right and a duty to draw upon our experience both of society and nature in Australia for the materials of our art. For Europeans this country has always been a primordial and curious land. To the ancients the antipodes was a kind of nether world, to the peoples of the Middle Ages its forms of life were monstrous, and for us, Europeans by heritage (but not by birth) much of this strangeness lingers. It is natural therefore that we should see and experience nature differently in some degree from the artists of the northern hemisphere. We live in a young society still making its myths. The emergence of myth is a continuous social activity. In the growth and transformation of its myths a society achieves its own sense of identity. In this process the artist may play a creative and liberating role. The ways in which a society images its own feelings and attitudes in myth provides him with one of the deepest sources or art. Nevertheless our final obligation is neither to place nor nation. So far as we are concerned the society of man is indivisible and we are in it. When we think of all that has happened to people like ourselves

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during the last fifty years we know that we do not fully understand them - and we want to. How can they bear living? But they do. So we want to ask questions. If such an aim is impure then we would say that purism leads to puritanism, puritanism to image-smashing, and imagesmashing, after an Indian summer of decorative luxury, to the death of art. If the triumph of non-figurative art in the West fills us with concern so, too, does the dominance of socialist realism in the East. Socialist realism, as we understand it, places too many restraints upon the independent creative activity of the artist for it to produce work of vitality and power. We wish to stress that in defending the image we are not seeking to return to naturalistic forms of painting and sculpture but are defending something which is vital to the life of art itself. We want to say, finally, that we are more directly concerned with our art, more involved in it, than in anything else. This is not escapism. It is simply a recognition that the first loyalty of an artist is to his art. Today that loyalty requires, beyond all else, the defence of the image.5 The Manifesto was signed by Charles Blackman, Arthur Boyd, David Boyd, John Brack, Bob Dickerson, John Perceval, Clifton Pugh and Bernard Smith, the only non-practising artist in the group. Its visuals were constructed by Charles Blackman; the main image portrays the Antipodean image, the feet elsewhere. Let us consider the document, for it subsequently generated a controversy of a kind which was hard to anticipate, and as I have mentioned, the whole experience was over as quickly as it began, but not without leaving a sense of awkwardness and hostility in the air, most of it directed at Bernard Smith, who held the pen. Whence the controversy? Manifestos are intended to provoke, and apparently this one was successful. Its reception was compromised, it seemed, by the notion that politics had no proper place in matters of art. The imaginary audiences of other manifestos by surrealists and futurists probably already accepted in different ways the proposition that art was caught up with politics, or else at least that it had a politics of its own. Manifestos also take stands against, as well as for; in the hands of Marx, or Marinetti manifestos work, perhaps by necessity, on planes of simplicity, contrasting in strong colours the old and the anticipated new; they are, after all, proclamations of what is claimed to be emergent against painted, constructed backdrops of generalised decay

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and obsolescence in the status quo. The Antipodean Manifesto was different in this regard, for it was fighting a rearguard action, attacking a newly emerging hegemony of abstraction. Its premises were, in theoretical terms, humanist rather than structuralist; it claimed to defend living people, active humans represented figuratively against their eclipse in blots and flat panels of abstract expressionism. Abstraction, as the fourth paragraph makes clear, is an ambivalent sign of release from the canons of painterly tradition. In freeing artists from stronger claims to naturalism or representation it runs the risk of substituting paint for painting. Tainting for us is more than paint/ The claim about language is less apparent. The Manifesto acknowledges that non-figurative arts can express new moods and attitudes but insists that they are incapable of producing a new artistic language. Whether or not non-figuration is new is partly a matter of definition, and within Smith's theory of history, as we have seen, the new does occur, even if it has a relation of formal dependence on precedents which come from a past or pasts more or less real or imagined. In any case, the Manifesto took its stance against the possibility of complete novelty and took a stand against what it viewed as the silence of art as decoration, this because an image was more a figure than a crossing of mechanical form, line, shape or colour: 'Lines, shapes, and colours though they may be beautiful and expressive are by no means images'. By no means images, at least, of other things, referents or symbols. If we look at the flat art, say, in work by Malevich or Rothko, against a flat paper cut by Matisse, the Matisse seems to convey more. A symbolist work like Malevich's Suprematism (1915) is certainly art, as antiart is art, dada is art, as the attack on 'history' is itself part of an historical discourse and so on. For the writers of The Antipodean Manifesto, however, art was somehow closer still to artists: 'the image is a figured shape or symbol fashioned by the artist from perception and imaginative experience'. Art, as Smith wrote in Imagining the Pacific, worked somewhere between imaging and imagining. But the claim was also being made here that communicative art had some kind of cultural referent or connection in experience. And note, it was presumed that the purpose, or one purpose, of art was to communicate, not simply to be, to stand alone or defiant but to connect in some kind of process of cycles or circles binding art and society, artist and observer. The image of life, in turn, somehow underpins the value of

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art; there is some kind of vitalist impulse in the basis of the argument, connecting life and vitality through symbol. Dada, in this kind of context, remained clever but stressed negation over affirmation; artists also lived, however, in this world. The significance of 1914 was powerful, still, in 1959 as it is or ought to be today; its awkwardness was that it originally elicited martial enthusiasms from parts of the avant-garde, who were prepared to idealise the abstract image of war until their vision, too, became obscured by the rising piles of corpses and the living dead. Perhaps Smith's wit got the better of him with the line about Dada being as 'deaddead' as the dodo; his theory of history would lead us to expect that it or its forms would recycle then disappear. Dada, we might rather say, in sympathy with Freud, would only go 'fortfort' to be Dada once again. At least Dada contained figuration, in any case. Evidently The Antipodean Manifesto was concerned to attack fad as well as fashion. The haughty superiority of the self-styled avantgarde was always worthy of a kick; the problem of surplus expressionism was, however, more central. But if it was the major new force, and if it elbowed out figuration, what then should go in its stead? Not a national style, a gum-tree, Ned Kelly populism: 'We are not, of course, seeking to create a national style'. Yet this was to play into a strategic risk of misinterpretation when it came even to naming the 'antipodes'. For this, after all, was a manifesto shot into an art scene whose values were imperial and metropolitan. The word 'antipodean' was dangerous, and probably it alone elicited a great deal of the difficulty and hostility associated with Manifesto and its attendant exhibition in the Victorian Artists Society Gallery (though perhaps the text alternatively should be viewed as the pendant of the exhibition, for the controversy was also about the respective claims of images and words). The idea of the antipodes, we need to remember, is in the Australian case the idea of the victor, the imperial centre, its way of placing Australia and its inhabitants, of placing those who belong yet do not belong by recognising them (us) at an arm's length, the underside; not the head or heart of empire but its appendages, extremities, the bits not proper to the discussion of polite society. If we, now, with Smith and in league with other thinkers such as Bakhtin, can celebrate our detachment we need also to bear in mind that other ears will still hear the insult in the image which we now choose to claim and proclaim.

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There is, then, probably quite a good chance that The Antipodean Manifesto had more enemies than it ever had readers. Those who saw the exhibition probably liked what they saw, and some surely will have wondered what all the fuss was about. For neither the artworks nor the Manifesto was stridently nationalistic. The Manifesto was really an attempt, among other things, to place art activity within national and global culture. 'We are not, of course, seeking to create a national style'; Smith had already criticised such ambitions anyway in Place, Taste and Tradition. 'But', and there was a but, 'we do seek to draw inspiration from our own lives and the lives of those about us. Life here in this country has similarities to life elsewhere and also significant differences'. Again, these themes were consonant with Smith's work on Australian painting and on the Pacific. We were at home or not, in Melbourne or the metropolis; we carry all kinds of cultural baggage, today, English by precedent, American by media, Australian by place, multicultural by circumstance; we are Lemontey's people, the absent centre of a universe without centres, everything and nothing all at once, similar, yet different. In all this we can see Smith's hand in The Antipodean Manifesto, though it was not the only one; but words, after all, were now his medium, while all the others worked primarily through the media of the artist. To paint in Australia, or to write in other words, was also an inescapably Australian experience, with all the complexities that involved - being local, being antipodean, being European, British and American. The idea of Australian art meant something more than art in Australia; this was not, emphatically, a matter of national character or national style, but a question of similarity and difference, of the cultural traffic that this experience confers and marks upon us. We are Australian, antipodean, whether we like it or not; we can flee from the fact, to the centres or elsewhere, but it will follow us. Smith's claim, in The Antipodean Manifesto and elsewhere, however, was more than this, that our stigmata were more than this, to be worn with pride or at least acceptance. We are what we are. What we are, among other things, is permanently displaced Europeans who take our sense of place with us, which is exactly the theme (one theme) of European Vision and the South Pacific. We need, in this view, to refer to our sense of geographical place or environment as well as to our sense of cultural place, or ways of thinking and seeing: 'we have both a right and a duty to draw upon our experience both of society and nature in Australia for

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the materials of our art'. But we cannot even be parochial in this because we are not a provincial people; our province is also European: 'For Europeans this country has always been a primordial and curious land' - thus continues The Antipodean Manifesto. But we are Europeans, as well as antipodeans, so the reference is not to 'them' and how 'they' see 'us', it is also to how we see ourselves, for we also feel ill-at-home here, as we do elsewhere. This apparently dual, but actually multiform identity is something which we cannot escape - nor should we, though it confuses us, makes us feel uncertain and obliged to adopt identities that fit too neatly, feel too snug. Further, by virtue of being Europeans, we also partake of ancient significations and mythologies which reach back to antiquity. We are also, in this sense, ancients. 'To the ancients the antipodes was a kind of nether world, to the peoples of the Middle Ages its forms were monstrous, and for us, Europeans by heritage (but not by birth) much of this strangeness lingers.' We see differently, to some extent, and always will. Yet we 'live in a young society still making its myths'. Myths have to do with foundation and identity; as Smith was to argue later, in his Boyer Lectures, white Australian myth-makers could learn from the Aborigines, but not if this meant using the image of the red heart to fill the black hole opened up by white guilt. Art is also part of that process, but not in the sense given it by the social engineers of nation-building or the advertising whiz-kids of Paul Keating's Creative Nation. On this the Manifesto's position was clear: 'our final obligation is neither to place nor nation'. Humanism, not nationalism was its impulse. So this meant taking a stand against both American abstraction and Soviet realism in art; here, indeed, was a job for Karl Kraus, for to choose between these was an unhappy predicament. The Manifesto alludes to but does not develop the distinction between social realism or naturalism and socialist realism, art in the service of the Soviet state. But it makes its rejection plain. The reception of Smith's work, as I have suggested in this book, has been highly uneven. His books on Australian painting were widely recognised, then spurned by some members of a rising generation who took Smith's views for those of an establishment. European Vision and the South Pacific gained nothing but applause, if only in a different sector, closer to anthropology than art history. The Antipodean Manifesto attracted little sympathy at all, even though the exhibition was an

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event, and a great success. Smith was, apparently, quite widely viewed in the art scene as a wicked seducer who had put words into the mouths of those who would otherwise have sucked on their brushes. The Manifesto was, however, the collective product of a social process, as I shall show later. But even those who engaged with the phenomenon after the fact seem to miss the point. Thus, for example, Gary Catalano misreads the Antipodeans in his 1981 study, The Years of Hope. Australian Art and Criticism 1959-68. Catalano claims that the image of myth in the Manifesto jars because it is caught up with the Italian elitist, Vilfredo Pareto, whom he connects to fascism; in the shadows are the French syndicalist, Georges Sorel, and the spirits of neo-classical economics. Certainly the figure of Sorel is caught up with the imagery of myth and revolution into the twentieth century; but it is not obvious that this is the sense of myth which is evoked in the Manifesto. It is far more consistent with Smith's own path to read this usage as beyond fascism and firmly located within the anthropological sense of culture. In short, everyone has myths, not just fascists or communists. Catalano's next charge is that the document is monocultural, nationalist, as it were, despite itself.6 As I have suggested above, this is plausible misreading, but it is a misreading nevertheless, for it presumes what Smith rejects: that there are only two positions, cosmopolitan or central, and nationalist or antipodean. Smith's position is that we are by circumstance all of these things, which brings the distinctions themselves into question; we can choose to be Anglophiles or ockers if we please, but this is to turn away from our inheritance and our experience. Finally, Catalano argues that the paintings shown in the Antipodean exhibit are guilty of romanticism, with specific reference to the dominant imagery of childhood and children in them. As with the Sorel charge, the association is possible but lacks persuasion. The voice of the child could just as well be connected with the image of antipodean as outsider; but this would not be to infantilise the participants or their painting, so much as to open the question of how figuration is possibly to be interpreted. In any case, The Antipodean Manifesto emerges from Catalano's pages as though it were an aberrant dogma, something come perhaps of too many drinks too late at night.7 Driven to respond, Smith was duty bound to reply that it all happened in good faith and conscience, over tea and chocolate cake at a respectable hour in the suburbs.

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LOCATING THE ANTIPODEANS The Antipodeans exhibition had at least two forms of reprise in other exhibitions, first in 1976 as The Antipodeans Revisited', and then as 'The Antipodeans - Another Chapter' in 1989. The resonances of the art works persisted. So did the echoes of the controversy. Smith subsequently wrote several papers seeking to put the record straight; I shall consider them first, and then turn to the archives. Smith wrote 'The truth about the Antipodeans' in 1984, twenty-five years after the fact. He began by recalling the setting and the participants. The Antipodeans exhibition had opened in August 1959 at the galleries of the Victorian Artists Society in Albert Street, East Melbourne. All of the artists except one, Dickerson, were from Melbourne, as then was Smith, the scribe. Smith reminds inter alia that the original purpose and ambition of the group was, in fact, not local but imperial: they wanted to promote their cause in London, and saw the Melbourne show as a preliminary to that goal. This is an important theme to add to the reception which the Antipodeans received, for it opens the possible interpretation that the Manifesto was not primarily intended for a local audience. The Antipodeans' imperial strategy, however, was sideswiped by Bryan Robertson's more conventional initiative, which culminated in the Australian exhibit at Whitechapel in London in 1961, where Antipodean painters figured sans Manifesto. Aimed as a broadside at the English in 1959, then, The Antipodean Manifesto fell short of its mark; recognition was to come more slowly, and later. As Smith tells the story, and as David Boyd told it in his own unpublished memoir of 1967, the Antipodeans, like many other such events, was an accident. It was the accidental result of two separate paths of confluence, one of which involved Perceval, Blackman, Pugh and David Boyd, the other which brought together Smith and Brack. The idea of a group was not Smith's alone, but he did try it out on David Boyd and then on Brack. There was some vague agreement that figuration was under siege from abstraction. Smith suggested the Antipodean Brotherhood as a name for the group; the latter term was accurate, this being a conspiracy of boys, and the connection with the Pre-Raphaelites was there (Smith had recently been lecturing on their work) but the adjective was better than the noun, so it became one. The membership of the group was accidental, as was its occurrence. Indeed, Fred Williams could just as well have been included for his

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Australianism and portraiture, and Brack the European excluded; Counihan could have been in, but his views on the Soviet Union would have caused difficulties, and Leonard French and Fred Williams could also be received as abstractionists. In any case, as those who have participated in small groups will know, perhaps too much of this dynamic of membership is accidental, depending on proximity and expectation as much as notions of suitability or the elect. And as Smith observed, there needed to be some limits to numbers, for this was not a party and it would likely generate enough internal capacity for conflict even with a handful of participants.8 The Manifesto was forged by Smith out of statements from Brack, David Boyd, Pugh and Blackman. Tim Burstall was involved peripherally, after the fact, and later planned a documentary on the story. Already Smith was worrying about the thing blowing out; the intention had been to publish the manifesto in the exhibition catalogue and not before. The result, according to Smith, was at best a syncretic document drawn together over the cracks between Brack and David Boyd: But I also saw the manifesto as my special contribution to the show; my work of art if you like. And I was aware of it as a literary form, and as having the stridency and assertion of the classics of the genre, the Communist Manifesto and the futurist manifestos much in mind.9 The issue of literary form and the element of humour and self-parody were overlooked in the reception of the Manifesto. Robert Hughes, for example, acted like a schoolmaster in complaining about the absence of proper definitions therein. Smith was unmoved. The explicit reservation about 'national style' in the Manifesto, together with the significance of life and experience, came from Brack. Pugh's orientation was, predictably, more to the local; the still and austere beauty of Brack's painting is more universal, at least in its echoes through European and American suburbia. Certainly in places, such as the background in The Car (1955), Brack offers a glimpse of the landscape style we now associate with the work of Fred Williams. Clif Pugh's work, like his words, were stronger on the sense of the indigenous which we now perhaps identify with the cultural nationalism of the Whitlam years. But Pugh's sense of nationalism was also complex, just as Brack's suburbanism could as easily be there or here. Pugh

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wrote to Smith that 'art must be indigenous . . . arising out of the environment and background of a particular place and time. This could be nationalistic but I prefer to call it geographical art'.10 Art, for Pugh, is particular as well as or even because it is universal. This way of thinking is not the same as Smith's, even if it is nuanced in its own way. In Smith's view, place was as much inscribed as prescribed; but you could hardly get the logic of a life's work, or even the central theses of European Vision, into a thousand words of a manifesto that claimed to represent a collective view. The collective was fragile and fickle, and seemed to contain but momentarily all kinds of individualisms that people might associate more readily with the art world than with politics but which actually saturate both equally. The Antipodeans did not paint collectively and their capacity to adhere collectively to a written text was minimal. Smith relayed the way in which Barbara Blackman had captured the bizarre sense of falling out, on opening: The art was done and there on the walls to be judged, the Manifesto was there in print to be preyed on by the press then and thereafter... this was the trauma. The group now took on the character of a gang who, having planned a raid and concentrated the preparations on the mechanics of tool, timing and terrain, suddenly at a report stand back to find that the watchman has been shot and lies dead at their feet. The printed Manifesto lay there like a corpus delicti. Each recoiled, retreated in guilt and confusion, and has ever afterwards sought to find extenuating circumstances for his regrettable irresponsibility.11 T h e last sentence is somewhat overstated', added Smith. Blackman's story captivates, not least of all, the period catburglar imagery. But one might as well have said that the Manifesto hung like an albatross. Why should there be guilt or confusion? What, indeed, was the offence, and how could words about art cause such terrible affront? Had they done more than blow raspberries in the cathedrals of art? David Boyd wrote, and again Smith quotes: That many admirers of Arthur, Charles, John Perceval, John Brack, Clif and Bob, who were displeased with the artists' part in the affair, and wishing to keep unvarnished their admiration, solved their problem by placing the entire blame on Bernard's and my shoulders. The others were forgiven and we two likened to evil persuaders who led gentle souls like Arthur and Charles away.12

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But blame for what? The imagery suggested here is more that of schoolchildren than of burglars. How had they managed to offend so? By naming their sensibility, and naming it thus? By speaking, and claiming the name antipodean? As Smith observed, Kenneth Clark, the leading English art writer, had liked the Manifesto, even if his enthusiasms had not come to much when it came to pushing for the exhibition in London. Bryan Robertson, however, did his best to avoid Smith and to duck the initiatives recommended by Kenneth Clark. Robertson did not pick up the Antipodean exhibition for Whitechapel, though he did eventually organise a show of his own which included paintings by all the Antipodeans. Robertson took up a young man called Robert Hughes to write his catalogue, and together they took advantage of the opportunity to present Australian art in a very different manner to what the Antipodeans might have imagined. Hughes used the catalogue to put the novel proposition that Australian art was newer than new, an art which had been developed in total ignorance of the Renaissance tradition. As Smith put it, it was 'of course the most utter nonsense but the kind of nonsense Europeans would love to hear': Australian art, Robertson explained, possessed the uncouth vitality of innocence; it was adorable exotica, the art of noble savages. I knew the symptoms well enough. I had been studying the ways eighteenthcentury Europeans viewed art from the Pacific in some detail. Robertson convinced me that there had been no substantial change in two centuries. They saw what they wanted to see.13 Robertson was big on primitivism. Modern Australian painting, also, was read by him in this way and presented at Whitechapel through this grid. The painters calling themselves the Antipodeans had been recognised, as had the noble savages before them, but only at the cost of being represented in a particular kind of way. Unable to represent themselves, they nevertheless had to be represented. The problem for Smith, then, was less in the local controversy than in the international misfire. 'So the Antipodeans lost the opportunity that, so far as I was concerned, was their central object: of carrying to Europe a critique of modernism generated by the kind of art that developed in Australia during the Second World War/14 Instead, he mused, it was our fate to

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be packaged as exotica; we became, like Omai the Tahitian, high fashion for a season and then discarded. Being antipodean, in the centres, may have meant more than it did before, maybe not; Australians of note still ran the risk of being taken up as pet antipodeans, remarkable not because they could dance well but because they could dance at all. Bernard Smith revisited the Antipodeans again more recently, in 1993, when he was asked to speak at the exhibition Clifton Pugh and Friends at Dunmoochin held at La Trobe University. In this context, Smith recalled Pugh's gregarious nature, his nationalism being part of it. His was a personality and a politics at odds, say, with those of John Brack. Smith remembered, on this occasion, that the relative stridency of Pugh's view was something he had to ease into the Manifesto: 'because I have always distrusted the assertion of an overt nationalism even when it is as carefully phrased as Clif's'.15 Smith claims, and his archives confirm that Brack put the substance of the matter better, so that he used his formulation rather than Pugh's. As Smith now stated in retrospect: It is difficult to express in words the desire for an art that personally, regionally and nationally, possesses a high degree of independence while accepting that good art, in the last analysis, must possess a universal appeal that in the end is irrelevant to legion, nation, or to the individual artist herself.16

As Smith now put it, the Antipodean affair had become such only through too much gossip and an insufficiency of argument and publicity. 'The central position is to admire the artists and feel embarrassed about the Manifesto', this notwithstanding the fact that nationalisms, even when espoused, themselves vary with initiative and impact with time and place. My own view is that Smith's presentation of the Manifesto as less than nationalist is entirely reasonable; I would only add emphasis to the observation that what we call 'nationalisms' varies, as any theory of civilisations or imperialisms would imply. Nationalisms are dangerous, but like socialisms they are also the cry of the oppressed. They need to be viewed and located contextually even as they are criticised; to ask this much would only be consistent with the historicism which Smith asks us at least to contemplate. It was as

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though Smith's sin rested in his encouragements that his friends should say or name what they were doing, as well as doing it. Viewed internationally rather than parochially, The Antipodean Manifesto was indeed intended to offend. What else? For abstract internationalism, the hegemonic art whether that of Pax Americana or the Soviet Empire, was empty, or more literally, it was deeply particularistic. If it was the case that to admire art was to follow New York, or to be a socialist was to kowtow to Moscow, then in both cases these logical substitutions indicated that there was something seriously wrong, in art and politics alike. To talk about nationalism, then, is also necessarily to invite argument about internationalism and its content and orientation. For in a strategic sense, even fifteen or thirty years after the war Australians found themselves in a world divided by two great powers, with Whitechapel's influence a third force in the margin. Plainly, Soviet art offered little inspiration, except by the powerful negative example of the Gulag. Socialist realism, so called, was a statesponsored apology for a regime of corruption and terror. Thus received, Smith's sense of the Manifesto was increasingly influenced by global events; as, of course, life in Australia always had been, ever since Cook and Banks. So he wrote, in retrospect: 'It is not at bottom an attack on abstract art; it is an attack on the policy of the State Department of the USA to use abstract art as a political instrument in opposition to the Soviet Union's use of socialist realism as a political instrument'. 17 The Antipodean Manifesto was certainly a call for recognition, a call for voice in the metropolitan world with its self-confidence and conceit that if it happened, it happened here (or for us, there). And increasingly, states had, without doubt, become more powerfully involved in art and cultural policy; art was not only a political weapon for outsiders. For Smith, at least, the Manifesto and its exhibit represented the claim of a right to be different but also to be heard. The point was not to deny abstraction its power or place, so much as to contest what appeared to be its hegemony. As Smith indicated, the power of American art in the global system had since been registered by leading works such as Serge Guilbaut's How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art and Michael Leja's Reframing Abstract Expressionism. As Smith saw it, what Guilbaut asserted in 1983 the Antipodean Manifesto had asserted in 1959. His own conclusions were consistent with the views that run back to European Vision and the South Pacific. It was high time, indeed overdue, that

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Australian art historians drop their binaries. For the antipodes was, by definition, the kind of locale where binary pairs could work least of all. Our cultures were always already mixed, combined unevenly, inevitably plural. It was high time, then, that Australian art writers began to cease thinking in terms of simplistic polarities such as the abstract versus figurative, national versus international, and lifted their eyes above the local horizon. But the condition of this kind of shift would be the possibility of also helping to expand Eurocentric vision. All of which serves to make it even more extraordinary that Smith's critics in The Necessity of Australian Art could have constructed him as an apologist for American art. Not only does the logic of European Vision point in a very different direction; The Antipodean Manifesto suggests something quite distinct as well. But such are the difficulties of intellectual exchange; we can never presume that people actually read what they attack or, for that matter, the tablets of the gods they create and idolise. Smith's own inclination was rather to seek to locate abstraction and to examine its nuances and forms. In 1983 he wrote a paper called 'Notes on abstract act'. Here he reflected that abstraction in art was never a strong personal favourite; abstraction in poetry, music or architecture was more profound. Abstraction was not merely a modern or modernist form; classicism employs it, too. This is not, however, to place a prohibition on wholly abstract art, rather it is to call for its recognition and placement. But just as systems of analytical distinction and taste come unstuck in the ordinary chaos of everyday life, so do larger forces impact upon them, whether in the form of the institutions of the art world or the initiatives of state power.18 Expressionism, like surrealism, was best imagined as a precedent, a type which was recalled from time to time when the human need arose. Around the time of The Antipodean Manifesto Smith had been lecturing on the Pre-Raphaelites, but also on the modern movement in art. His undergraduate lecture on expressionism insisted that it be viewed in context, rather than as the final new wisdom: if we take the art of all peoples and all times in view classicism has been the exception, expressionism is the rule. Primitive art, barbaric art, all arts containing a mystical or ecstatically religious character are either expressionistic or at least have a strong element of expressionism in them ... wherever men confront nature or their own human nature, in

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a condition of fear, anxiety and terror, then their art is likely to be expressionistic. Wherever art is grounded on proportion, upon control and restraint, upon the humanist belief that man is the measure of all things, then art is likely to be classical.19 Smith here characterised these views as Dionysian and Apollonian; but he also insisted that neither mood nor moment generated art which was better than the other. Any random case of figurative painting would not be more striking than, say, Mondrian or Delaunay, Klee or Kandinsky. It did follow, however, that expressionism was an extension in space, time and personality of the romantic principle, coinciding in our own times with other movements such as psychoanalysis and cultural pessimism, as in Oskar Kokoschka's images of shock and despair. At the same time, the transhistorical shift from sacred art to secular had recognised humans as actors, however flawed; and in this context, abstraction was both somehow too mystical and yet too secular. Culture meant, rather, that humans had continually to wrestle with the sacred, even as they themselves created it. For their part, the Antipodeans kept coming back; the passing of time has not dispersed the atmosphere of controversy, but the novice who comes now to the text will likely wonder what the fuss was about. Smith observed the irony in his 'Notes on abstract art', when he wrote: 'Most of our so-called critics went soundly to sleep again until the same questions began to be asked in New York itself. Then, provincial to the backbone, they began to sit up and take notice'.20 Not the message but the aura matters; not the insight so much as the position of the speaker. Nevertheless, Antipodeans persist. In 1976 the National Gallery of Victoria put on a travelling exhibition, the medium dear to Smith's young heart. It was entitled The Antipodeans Revisited, and it brought back the confusion as well as the art and its manifesto. John Guy wrote in the catalogue that 'as Barbara Blackman was to reflect ten years later, the exhibition was not the beginning of an enterprise which failed (although they had hoped to exhibit in London and Europe, a hope dissolved by the dispersal of the group) but rather the end of a relationship'.21 Blackman's insight, again, was acute; though it was hardly the case that relationships ended, and the London strategy was thwarted by separate developments at Whitechapel rather than by the path of personal

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dynamics. In any case, the relations between the Antipodeans were fraternal as well as fratricidal. Brack writes in the minutes, for example, for the fourth meeting on 3 May 1959, that there was 'A good deal of fratricidal argument... A great deal of argument. Manifesto passed!'22 after Smith had spliced together their thoughts with his own. Minutes for the last meeting on 29 January 1960, show that members discussed new potential brothers, John Molvig, Albert Tucker, Sidney Nolan: 'discussion about E W. - decision deferred. F. W. eventually accepted'. But by that moment Fred Williams was too distant, too hurt. There is nothing in the papers of the Antipodeans which violates Smith's interpretation of the story, though there are a number of documents which help to fill it out. In 1959, for example, he wrote a kind of background paper entitled The Antipodeans - A New Art Group'. Here again the point was made that the Antipodeans were not concerned with the creation of a national style; Brack's own style, for example, was as suburban as it was Australian: The Antipodeans are not attempting to create a national style. The name has been chosen because it does help to explain, in a word, their position both in place and in time. Australia is not in the centre of the civilized world. It is way down on the southern edge of it - that is the way the rest of the world sees us, and it is about time that we ourselves became more aware of our position. We are whether we like it or not a fragment of the European civilisation which has grown up as part of a world which Europeans have always thought of as the Antipodes. To be Antipodeans is to accept the challenge both of our place and time . . . To be an Antipodean is to accept the continuity of Australian and European culture. The word avoids the isolationism of a nationalistic position. It does not see the Australian artist as the centre of his universe, but rather as an outsider, upon the edge of it. That does not mean that he is in no position to contribute to the world of art as a whole. Indeed it may give him certain advantages. It is perhaps an advantage today to lie so far away from those places where the central dogmas of art in our time have been fashioned. We at least inhabit a part of the world where the pressure to conform to non-figurative art on the one hand and socialist realism on the other has not become so great as to remove all sense of individual personality from art.23 As Smith had argued before, provincialism took at least two forms: that which fawned before the centre and that which, alternatively, denied it

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and turned inwards into local chauvinism. Neither really are options for us, for the way in which culture flows around us works both in local and other registers. Yet we also remain different, which is not to say that others are not also distinct in their attributes. But we know we are marginal; we are told we are too far away; and we sense, perhaps, that the moment of detachment does offer some advantage in perspective, even if those in the centre will not see or hear us until it suits. In 1989 the Antipodeans had another reprise, this time in the exhibit The Antipodeans - Another Chapter; there was not, of course, another manifesto. It had all come unstuck, the Brotherhood and its idea, back into the 1960s. Smith wrote to Kenneth Clark, an early supporter, on 28 February 1959 that 'They [we] do not see themselves as nationalists seeking to create a national style. But, to my mind, they do represent what is most characteristic of Australian art at the present moment and not only figural'.24 It was as though Smith anticipated even then the slings and arrows. The Antipodean exhibition of 1959 served its purpose all the same; it advanced the reception of its painters, perhaps especially Blackman, whose recognition increased thereafter. Brack quit in a letter to Smith of 18 July 1960. Dear Bernard, I don't know whether you think of the Antipodeans as a going concern; with Arthur in London and Charles planning to be there next year, I imagine it would be difficult to put on a show. But in any case I've come to the conclusion that I'd better take no more part in it.. ,25 Fred Williams had formally declined an invitation to join on 3 February 1960; he wrote to Bernard Smith: 'Thank you for your invitation to join the Antipodean Group . . . It is therefore with very considerable regret that I must refuse your invitation, at this time' bearing in mind his already existing commitments.26 David Boyd generated the most passion about the affair, particularly in his 'Notes on the Antipodeans', a document dated 14 February 1967 in London. Wrote Boyd: 'I can remember feeling very high-minded with a passionate crusader spirit, convinced that obscurantist doctrines from Europe and America had enslaved Sydney and were already bombarding the outer defences of Melbourne: the last bastion of the romantic spirit and the human image in the western world'.27 Little wonder that Smith lamented the

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obscuring of the parody in the whole affair. Boyd also observes, more historically than figuratively, that he and Pugh had already together decided on an exhibition and a manifesto before they came together with Brack and Smith. The two pairs of men, as it were, had come upon similar ideas (though it is in general difficult to imagine a man like Brack working up a great deal of enthusiasm for manifestos of any kind at all). They joined forces, and Brack acted as secretary and treasurer and contributed in due course to the Manifesto. The four of them initiated further contact, Smith acting as organiser. Thus Boyd: Bernard wrote to Tucker and Nolan and they refused. There was a sad sequence involving Fred Williams. He was seriously considered and a very close friend of John Brack. I can't remember exactly why he wasn't invited. It transpired that he was offended at being left out, and later after the exhibition when he was asked to join the Antipodeans for possible future shows he refused to have anything to do with us.28 The last note is accurate, as we have seen, even if the terms of Williams' letter of decline were more complex. As for the Manifesto, it was Boyd's sense that it was mainly Smith's work, though explicitly as the result of their collective deliberations. David Boyd's document was never published; Barbara Blackman's account had some influence, probably more significant than the later essay by Deborah Haycraft. Haycraft argued in her 1988 'Making of a manifesto' that Smith effectively verbalised the Manifesto and organised the others29 - none of which should startle us, for these were things Smith was good at, word and deed, in the service of image. Later correspondence between Brack and Smith in 1984 gives the sense that Brack would rather the whole affair had never happened.30 As for Smith, it is difficult to imagine that he could have any regrets, for you do not speak publicly in anything more than the hope that you will be understood. Communication is always a risky activity, but it is a need for those who live with the word; speak, and be damned. AFTER THE ANTIPODES We are now after the Antipodeans; it is less clear whether we can ever leave the antipodes. As Smith had observed, cultured Australians seemed to be embarrassed by the suggestion that they (and we) stood together on their heads at the bottom of the world. Of course, the world

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also seems right way up from where we stand; had we sufficient arrogance, we could reverse the imaginary relation and call Britain or Europe the antipodes.31 As has been suggested, however, having the feet elsewhere might be an advantage, in terms of perspective. Certainly some painters, Fred Williams included, used to up-end their canvases in order to interpret the form of their painting differently or laterally. So we have our feet opposite or elsewhere, and this arguably gives Australians (alongside others) a kind of plural perspective or peripheral vision. For Smith, tongue partly in cheek, this was the case more so from Melbourne than Sydney; by extension, we could add, more so from Hobart than Melbourne: one of the great points about Melbourne is that it is right down at the end of the section, a metropolis at the bottom of the world. It was Einstein who first impressed upon the world the fact that the truth of a scientific observation could not be separated from the position of the observer. This is equally true of artistic observation of whatever kind it may be.32 This was not, Smith repeated, any kind of advocacy of cultural isolation; the point was that our own cultures resulted from cultural traffic, but also that the outcome was different. The painting associated with the Antipodeans remained European and humanist in tradition. Dickerson, for example, was preoccupied with the image of loneliness in cities, more existential in a way than angry. Brack's painting cut across that urban/suburban divide which is, in places like Australia, more than a little fictive anyway; his work is sober and modernist, but it need not be seen (as it sometimes is) as depressive or condescending to its pedestrian subjects. While these perspectives might therefore differ, as do their cities and movements, they also speak to the human condition where we are all made today to feel outsiders (though some, still, more so than others). Three years after The Antipodean Manifesto Smith's path crossed these kinds of concern again. The final version of the Macrossan Lectures, given at the University of Queensland in 1961, was entitled 'The myth of isolation'. We antipodeans were outside, in some ways, distant or detached in others, yet never completely overlooked. That, indeed, is the auratic effect of master-slave relations, to offer the

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subordinate partner recognition only of a peculiar and limiting kind. Smith's paper was part of the backwash against the failure of the Antipodean show to make it to London, and the consequences of the Whitechapel show organised by Bryan Robertson instead. Smith did not begrudge Robertson, rather admiring his role in promoting Australian art. The question which followed was, what kind of recognition were we now gaining? And the general theme with which Smith was working was the idea that Australians were still being 'othered', constructed as exotic or viewed (reluctantly) as (growing) children. The background was the geographical sense - so widely spread in that postwar period - that our primary disadvantage, viewed optimistically, was distance from the real centres of life. The tyranny of distance, in this commonsense view, brought with it an isolation of culture. Readers of this book, into the 1990s, will be less familiar with this sense because of the way their lives are structured by telecommunications and international air travel; the trip to London or New York still leaves you bleary but it's not especially long in itself, and our media images are received (and emitted) instantaneously, thanks to globalisation. Australian readers and writers of the 1890s or 1930s, however, were also distinctly cosmopolitan in their tastes, and it is extremely important in historical and political terms both to remember and to emphasise that their cultures, back then, were also cosmopolitan. That they were not taken seriously as writers in the centres is true, unless they decamped, took on the status of expatriates in the north. So the myth of isolation has always been exaggerated. Even social theory, in Australia, has a long, rich and plural legacy which is simply ignored because Australians themselves, like the English in the sixties, are too proud to admit their limits and too provincial to register their achievements.33 Thus, Perry Anderson, himself a subtle and brilliant thinker, famously denounced his own English culture as philistine because not continental.34 The English looked as hopefully across the Channel as we looked with subservience up at them, waiting for theoretical scraps of wisdom. To view this phenomenon in terms of types or patterns, as Smith's thinking would invite, is a gesture as fascinating as it is suggestive. Bernard Smith and I discussed the issue more than once while I was researching this book. Why should it be that the English coveted the French, or occasionally the Italian? French philosophy, for

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the New Left Review generation, Hegelianism for the Oxford idealists, Venice for Ruskin: they always looked elsewhere; but yet there is more scholarly interest in Carlyle in America than in England, and Australians certainly sometimes feel compelled to leave because, on occasion, their talents will be more readily recognised away from home. Smith's view is consistent with that aspect of Toynbee's work or Marx's, for which cultures lust after what they most lack. There is a pattern in all this. Sometimes the lack is constructed as exotic, primitive, childlike, naive, romantic; at others, the sense of absence is less archaic and more governed by a felt need for progress, advance, therefore the influence of futurism in Italy or constructivism in Russia. Parts of American high culture are therefore Anglophilic, while English hearts roam to Tuscan hills or Paris cafes, or at least to their imaginary realms. Foundational myths, on this account, then also influence views of culture, and not only modern accounts of nation-building. To follow this clue, Australians, like others, have senses of lack both in past and future. The lack in sense of past encourages inter alia romanticism of the Aboriginal past and of landscape, dead heart, red heart; the sense of backwardness like living in Iowa brings out the New Yorker or booster in us. In terms of the art scene, we worry more about being behind, catching up. This was Smith's view in 1962, caught up again with the hegemony of the New York art scene and abstract impressionism. As he wrote: This desire to keep up at all costs with the international Joneses of the art of the moment is in my view an infallible sign of the provincial mind, of artists and critics uncertain of what they are doing or where they are going'.35 Gauguin's themes recur; from whence do we come, who are we, where are we going; but there is also apparent here a suggestion of Luther: here I stand, I can do no other; go your own way, do your own thing (but in the meantime that, too, has become an Americanist cliche). For Smith, the 1961 Whitechapel exhibition still infantilised Australians through the positioning of their painting as nativist. Robert Hughes' preface to the catalogue stood in prestigious company, alongside companion prefaces by Kenneth Clark and Robertson himself. Though Smith was indulgent to Hughes, always a man of outstanding if precocious talent, he also thought that Hughes could have done better, as he at least should know better than to connive with or approve of this reinforcement of antipodeanism as exotica. The irony

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was that in taking Australian art fully seriously, Hughes also trivialised it. In asking what was peculiar to it, Hughes seized on its alleged isolation from the Renaissance tradition and, parallel with that, he claimed that Australian art remained in a similar isolation from most of what happened today in world art.36 Robertson then built his own catalogue entry upon this assertion, so that by the time the Whitechapel views were thus assembled the critics had persuaded both themselves and potentially their audience of the rectitude of this view, one at odds with everything Smith had written about cultural traffic. The critics were constructing an authorised local version of Australian art for the English to swallow whole. The word was forming the image, again. They managed to miss the extent to which Australian art would always be European, in part, for better or for worse. The antipodeans were also Greeks; and the antipodes of the south land were established by Europe. To begin to tell the local story it would always be necessary also to gesture at least towards the other stories which helped to form it. Truth may always remain elusive, even if it is still an orienting point for human pursuit; the point, however, is that it may also be peripheral and call upon peripheral vision to discern its attributes. Europe, on this understanding, would always be part of the periphery in modernity, even if the influence of the periphery that is refracted back into the centres remained broken and patchy. In Hughes' judgement, it is the place where we live, here and there at the same time. Somehow it is transitional in both time and space; transitional, shifting yet fixed between past and future, the present is almost no more than the terrain upon which images of the archaic and futuristic clash, transitional between those cultures of place, European and other all at once, yet none of these alone. Little wonder that those in the centres have difficulty recognising us. In order to resist the fixity, however, we need to be nothing other than what we are.

CHAPTER 5

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ARTISTS AS HEROES We live today in a world after heroes, inasmuch as that is possible. Our lives are prosaic, consistent with the patterns of centuries and civilisations; we seek to make a living, to put food on the table, to keep relationships intact, to care for others. There may, on these levels of everyday life, be ordinary heroes, or ordinary acts of heroism; heroes in the romantic sense are less evident, though our culture still seeks them out and beats them up, in sport or film. As moderns, as Smith claims, we are also ever romantics at the same time; we long for the past, or at least for our roseate images of it, of ways of life suggestive of innocence, simplicity, or the exotic. 'Hero': the word, like the image of the antipodes itself, is Greek; and we still live, as westerners, in the shadow of the Greeks, even though the lives of our cities differ so radically from theirs that it is hard to enclose both types of experiences under one word. Yet we still generate myths, and our local white myths still resound back through the western foundational myths of the Greeks and the Bible. All these themes resonate through the work of Bernard Smith. In one essay, he chose explicitly to address some of them. He called it The Death of the Artist as Hero'; it was published in 1976. Here I use it as a way in to discussion of these ideas, but also to draw together various other writings by Smith on heroes and their mixed contemporary fortunes. For Smith, Jack Lindsay and Noel Counihan were both modest heroes, of a particular kind, or at the least they continued to fascinate him because their own projects could have been paths he had taken. Then there were other artists he admired, like 127

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Francis Lymburner, and less marginal figures, like Williams and Brack, and those critics like Robert Hughes and Peter Fuller, mavericks who could have been heroes, perhaps, for others. Smith's essay on The Death of the Artist as Hero' worked the image of mythology in the stronger sense. Since modernity, or at least since industrialism, the artist in particular had been presented as hero; this, Smith sensed, was now changing. As Smith thought it through, the artist as hero was a version of a more general trend of culture-hero. Culture-heroes emerged together with social ruptures or transitions. Culture-heroes, in general, are venerated not only for their actions but also for their capacity to invent. Three major instances could be discerned. The first, and perhaps the most famous in western mythology, was the moment of Prometheus, the rebel, the humanist and technologist. Prometheus was a culture-hero when art had not yet been separated from craft and trade. The second occasion upon which artists came to assume the role of hero is associated with this separation of what later came to be called the fine or polite arts from the crafts and trades. It occurred, broadly speaking, between 1425 and 1525, and is associated with names such as Alberti, Ghiberti and Brunelleschi. This is the face of the Renaissance artist as hero, where Prometheus struggles against Nature or the gods, where the Renaissance heroes struggle against tradition, human artifact, the guilds and their routines and practices.1 This was the moment of the birth of humanism, and of perspective; the individual now emerged as author, for better and worse. It was, as Smith would say later, the imaginary birth of modernity. The story of art became viewed as the story of the unfolding both of styles and of individuals; the notion of individual genius led to the later obsession of art history with the single masterpiece and the consequent exile of the social. Consistent with the patterns of his own thinking, Smith also relates heroes to their worshippers. The dialectics of master and slave depend on a mutual gaze, even if its relations are asymmetrical. The worship of heroes is clearly not itself heroic. The relations between heroes and worshippers are mimetic but fixed.2 They become routinised through ritual, which gives the subordinate party the illusion that they somehow partake of the greatness of the superior party. The artist nevertheless became more like the god, for he became the creative individual par excellence, the being who could by his own choosing

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become like the gods or descend into bestiality. Then comes the third occasion, which coincides with industrialism. The first two moments, Promethean and Renaissance, actually confirm the artist as progressive technologist. On the third, industrial occasion technology becomes instrumentalised and turns, in effect, against the artist, as manufacture is usurped by machinofacture.3 The artist again appears as hero, but now as tragic hero, elegaic, pointing backward rather than forward; and the power of romanticism points us all backward, in admiration of the imagined past and unease about a future which seems to know no present. Henceforth the hero stands against technology. Modernity, in short, rests on an onslaught against the artisan in every respect, practical and ideal. The artist is the last of the surviving craftsmen. Capitalist industry, division of labour, Manchester and Birmingham: all stand to execute the romantic soul; he persists, however (and is typically a he). Artists, as Smith puts it, began to draw their strength from a moral flaw at the heart of industrial society: its excessive division of labour.4 It is this which means that, contrary to Marxist and other orthodoxies, capitalist culture is never quite fully capitalist. The culture of capitalist society is both modern and premodern, futurist and romantic or archaic. It is not only that moderns generate a strong need for nostalgia in order to cope with the speed of their everyday lives and the constant presence of meaningless and the threat of the void. More generally, modern culture also carries with it the archaism of romance; its Utopias are as often green and idyllic as they are concrete, Gotham City. Most notably in England, but even in America, the cult of the pastoral weighs heavily; and in this regard, white Australian civilisation owes more to its English past than to its American future.5 In our own case, the romanticism of bush mediated by garden city reaches back to those earlier, constructed notions of an Aboriginal dreaming. However, what kind of mythology this leaves us with, and how well it might actually sustain us seems open to question. Against the technologist, now, against the image of James Watt, we favour William Blake or Jacques Louis David, revolutionaries of a symbolic kind. The figure of David becomes significant, according to Smith, because he brings the artist closer to power and state power; and this is to become an ongoing contradiction in modern art, its relationship to success, to the patronage of established wealth, power and influence. Artists became lapdogs or animals in a zoo. Into the

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twentieth century, the heroes made final bids for notice as selfpresented avant-gardes, bohemians and bad boys who finally would take the money, smash up the hotel room and run. Not that individual frailty could really begin even to explain this, for it was a social and historical process, caught up among other things, with specific institutional forms of activity. There were, after all, what Smith described as art-systems, associated groups of professional people concerned with the production, interpretation and distribution of works of art. As Smith observed in 1976, it was not only critics who led their audiences by the nose. Dealers were no better: All that matters, we are constantly told in their endeavour to dampen debate and discussion is the artistic quality of the work which, translated into dealers' terms, means the cash nexus, what the work can fetch on the market... The dealer becomes the hidden arbiter of all aesthetic values ... reducing all values to market values.6 Value became identified with notions of economic value in art, as in life. So Smith argues, like Ruskin before him, that young artists, for example, make it 'only at great cost' - in both senses. It is too late to drive the dealers or critics out of the temple. To do art, to aspire to be an artist, would inevitably lead one through or up to these systems. To refuse these imperatives might leave artists outside, or as part of the community movement for which Smith enthused; amateurish it might be, but the fact cut both ways. Smith's commitment to community art was therefore at least dual in motivation. Community art was democratic in fact, even if it failed always to reach Renaissance standards in aesthetic values. But it was also important in principle, for it kept open the line between art and craft, respecting a hitherto well-trod path across various civilisations until the arrival of our own. The pertinence of Smith's position in this is striking. His writing constantly returns to the observation that we travel always with the past in our pockets and between our ears. The point follows: that we should seek to the greatest extent possible to open and to clarify this relationship to the past, in order at least perhaps to seek to place it, purge it of the more ridiculous or unhelpful. Living in the past, with this view, is no offence; we can do no other. But we should also contemplate on and choose from the repertoires offered us by the past.

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This would be to make ourselves historical actors and not only creatures placed in history. It would be to take history seriously as the ether or culture within which we move. To put this in different terms, to think historically or civilisationally is to seek to become more fully aware of the extent to which we also inhabit the past. We can carry the weight of tradition, feel the attraction of romanticism and so on without having the kind of need for heroes which subordinates us to them. We make our heroes as we make our gods; Smith agrees, still, with Feuerbach that we need to avoid subordinating ourselves and our capacities in that process. Did Smith, then, have no heroes himself? His mothers would be good candidates for the award, or Kate. There are none that I can locate; nor would it be consistent to expect to find them, except perhaps in the sense that we all fall back into the errors we can identify more readily in others. Most of the artists in Smith's life are not heroes in any recognisable sense. But there are some, like Counihan, who seem to work as alter egos of a kind, following paths that were, in principle, open to someone like Smith yet not followed. And there are others, like Jack Lindsay, who inspire perhaps to the very extent that they are of Promethean stature or Renaissance breadth. If there are heroes in Smith's writing they are ordinary types, people like Sali Herman or perhaps like Francis Lymburner, people who persist and eschew the pursuit of recognition or perhaps never quite make it, people who know better, who inhabit the margin; for needless to say, the margin also has its margins. Marginal by virtue of being antipodean, there were further margins within the margin. There were the political margins of the left, which Smith had chosen, and the senses of marginality with which he had grown up as a bastard. Then there were other margins, on the edge of the art world, below it in community art, outside it for those whose skill marked them out but who also refused to play the game. Smith wrote profiles on the work of many artists he admired; many of them are collected together in the second volume of his essays, The Critic as Advocate. Smith wrote about Lymburner's work in the Age in 1963 and 1964. They had been associated earlier. In 1963, for example, Lymburner wrote to Smith from London on 16 October: T was touched by your review of my exhibition . . . I feel in your phrase (and I thought the article beautifully written) "caught on the very wings of their existence" says in words what I am

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trying to do in paint'.7 Smith had spoken, subsequently, at the launch of Lymburner's posthumous exhibit in February 1987, characterising Lymburner precisely as a brilliant outsider. He reworked the notes for the launch into 'Francis Lymburner - A Personal Memoir' for the 1992 catalogue by Hendrik Kolenberg and Barry Pearce published by the Gallery of New South Wales. The particular story he told on both occasions was painful. The recollection went back to the middle of the 1960s, when the two bumped into each other accidentally; Smith had just recently been appointed Power Professor at the University of Sydney: after opening the Rodin show I did take the opportunity to look around Two Decades of American Art' and there seated alone I found Francis looking haggard and desperate. He looked at me with contempt, and then said 'Judas', and repeated it. It wasn't the happiest moment of my life; but not one to forget. And there was nothing I could say. Francis was convinced that in accepting the Power Chair I had in some way betrayed my own sense of aesthetic value. But it made me realise acutely the difference between the sensibilities of a practising artist and the sensibilities of an historian. The historian is in a position, given a normal lifespan, to live it out. The tougher the time the deeper one's burrow; not only to hide in but to see what is going on beneath the surface of life. Artists act in the full gaze of their time and in a directly personal way, and in difficult times, often tragically.8

Smith's position in the academy was a privilege; the outsider was an insider as well, as probably most of us are, excluded and insignificant in some settings, with some modicum of recognition in others. For his part Smith had not sold out, had not lost the plot. His convictions, and his politics were intact. His politics remained those of the outside, especially to the extent that he insisted on his Marxism. Left liberalism, it could be argued, became at this time the confirmed or accepted culture of the academy; universities became almost natural constituencies for that peculiarly Australian confluence of liberalism and labourist values. Marxism remained beyond the pale. So Smith remained a political marginal in the antipodes, at the same time as his work on Australian painting became part of the local canon. He wrote for the Age and he had become a professor at the establishment university; at the same time he was marginal in a sense, taking on

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the legacy of John Power, himself both peculiarly marginal and establishment, but restless. Smith's reputation in Sydney, however, was of a professor not of the professoriate. Not that all thought so highly of Smith as professorial material; Robert Hughes, indeed, had completely overlooked him when he surveyed the Power legacy situation in 1962. Hughes then wrote that: No Australian has the knowledge of overseas art to administer the collection's polity, neither is there anyone here capable of running . . . the Faculty of Fine Arts on their proper levels . . . the right man must be imported . . . Dr. Power did not found his bequest to build comfortable kennels for the flagged-out greyhounds of Australian art.9

Smith's star at this time was still ascendant, yet his profile was not so prominent as to suggest him to Hughes as the obvious person. He did not, in fact, apply initially for the position, but was offered it. Thankfully for us he accepted it, though he was also evidently relieved when he retired; and this, of course, in the age before Labor under Keating and Dawkins had set about annexing education to training and subsuming both more fully to the state. When he retired he did not give in to Vaselined-photographs of happy varsity days. His parting salvo was published as 'Old boys with fingers in dykes', in the University of Sydney News. He retired, he said, 'with no great affection for the prevailing intellectual tone of the University of Sydney' for in his eyes, smugness prevailed: most 'teaching, research and respect [are given] to those who dedicate their lives to making our lives longer, more comfortable, and more adjustable'.10 A little comfort would go a long way, in Glebe or in Fitzroy; but to be antipodean was necessarily to be marginal and to remain also ill-at-ease with the world. He reflected when interviewed that there 'was a considerable period of development there but I don't think of those ten years as the happiest years of my life'.11 The moment of the Power Institute indeed represented a remarkable constellation of forces. The lapsed Australian but European painter, medico in exile in the Channel Islands, John Power was a friend of Courtauld and had himself, as a modernist, presented a painting in the European Herald Exhibit of 1939. Influenced by Picasso, among others, Power had published a book in 1934 entitled Elements de la Construction Pictorale. In other words, Power was just one other antipodean,

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indirectly enabling Smith and others to develop connections in European and American dimensions of the art world and to encourage the locals, institutionalising the restlessness of alienation into a cultural form without a greyhound in sight. If they were not Smith's happiest years, they were nevertheless among his most institutionally productive. Speechless before the bitterness of Francis Lymburner, his own record speaks for itself. For if Lymburner was living out the tragic aspect of the modern artist as hero, Smith had chosen a different way of life and a distinct form of being, both inside facing out and yet outside looking in. SOCIALISTS: JACK LINDSAY AND NOEL COUNIHAN Jack Lindsay was one intellectual prominent on Smith's map of the antipodes, not least of all because he was assimilated vaguely into British radical thinking but largely overlooked there, and effectively forgotten here; an outsider of sorts in both places. The obvious source of the initial attraction was his Short History of Culture, still a remarkable book today. Lindsay also came from a famous family, caught up with the art scene and with the cult of Nietzsche in Australia. Norman Lindsay, in particular, had a significant place in Smith's survey of the Australian intellectual landscape, if a largely negative one. In one place he had characterised Norman Lindsay's stance with acuity as 'a kind of white primitivism in which the noble frontiersman seeks redemption from philistinism by ritual acts of love and sex upon the white mothergoddess of Australo-European nature'.12 Perhaps Bernard Smith was attracted to Jack Lindsay in the first place because he knew how to rebel against his father's wisdom. Nietzsche in Australia was replaced with Marx. Lindsay's reading of Marx was idiosyncratic (are not they all?) but humanist, like Smith's. He wrote several essays on Lindsay's work before organising the Festschrift for Lindsay which was published in 1984. In 'Jack Lindsay', 1983, Smith began from the obvious point of departure: that it is difficult to know where to start with Lindsay. Lindsay wrote about everything under the sun, and some beside: alchemy, astrology, science, classical, medieval and modern literature, in poetry, novel, drama, biography and criticism. He had already published at least 174 items, books, poems and articles by the time he left Australia at the age of twenty-six in 1926. Lindsay, unlike Smith,

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never returned, not even to look. Eventually he was to write something more like 200 books, an eminent candidate for the category of graphomaniac. He certainly overwrote; as one critic put it, he thought on paper, but he also developed the habit of always writing, regardless of recognition, as a way to make a living.13 As Smith added, however, it was as though the more he wrote, the less he was noticed.14 Lindsay followed a Promethean ethic; his residual Nietzscheanism saw him opposing modernism, but agreeing with his father that there was nothing historically absurd in the proposal that the values of the edge might overturn the values of the province.15 Lindsay wrote three or four books a year for fifty years. He read voraciously, took in and handed on Bergson and Bakhtin long before they became fashionable. He had been mates with Gordon Childe, and shared his enthusiasms. His work was recognised by some metropolitan individuals, such as Christopher Hill, but largely went unnoticed. He wrote some splendid biographies of artists, Turner, Cezanne, Courbet, Morris, Hogarth, Blake and Gainsborough. The first art biography to appear was to be called, significantly Death of the Hero; it was a life of Jacques Louis David. Yet Jack Lindsay's fate was to become a kind of family bookend, a kind of youthful support figure for the cultural and aesthetic values of Norman. To say that he was overlooked at 'home' was one thing; to notice how his contribution was effectively painted out of English Marxism was another, for the parallels, say, between his own work and Edward Thompson's are striking. Certainly Lindsay was a cultural Marxist; only to talk of culture was also to talk of economy, of commodification and the collapse of aesthetic value into economic value. Lindsay's subject, then, was cultural production.16 Perhaps this helps to explain the awkwardness of his reception; like Smith, he came from the wrong place and was of the wrong time. He contradicted commonsense and intellectual fashion. Life, for Lindsay, is vitalistic but it is also contradictory. Indeed, Lindsay claims that it is only in biography that dramatic contradictions, which lie at the root of such situations as the painter David's conversion to neo-classicism, can adequately be considered and explored.17 At the same time it is Morris or Blake who Lindsay writes best about, perhaps because he stands closest to them.18 Given all these echoes, and Jack Lindsay's neglect, it came as no surprise that Smith should choose to edit a volume of essays for him.

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Culture and History - Essays Presented to Jack Lindsay was finally

published in 1984.19 It brought together writers like John Arnold, Craig Munro, Laurie Hergenhan, the Englishman Don Watson, Michael Wilding, Christopher Hill, Stephen Knight, Robert Smith and Humphrey McQueen, as well as two Soviet writers, Nikolai Lopyrev and V. S. Vakrushev. Like Counihan, Lindsay had remained closer than Smith to the Soviet orbit, still associating the October Revolution with the French Revolution as a rupture of great potential and symbolic significance. Smith was younger than Lindsay; the October Revolution was closer to Lindsay's adulthood than to Smith's own birth. For Smith, the formative experience (if there was one) was the atmosphere of the 1930s when he was in his early twenties, Spain from 1936, the Munich Degenerate Art fiasco in 1937; the Soviet Union was an actor in this, but more an actor than an ethical commitment for all time. Yet Smith's admiration of those who remained communists was high, at least in these cases, for he knew them to be good men. Smith's own communist commitment, after all, was of the 1940s, against fascism, for the politics of the popular front; against fascism communism was by then a rear guard, but it was also a movement of some optimism, more so, in all likelihood, than what the Party could muster in the years of the depression, when its politics were more defensive. Did Smith admire men like Lindsay and Counihan, because of their commitment to communism? It is difficult not to suspect that he did admire their persistence, even though it was a path he could not share himself. The echoes of Lymburner's charge ring in the ears, that Smith had somehow betrayed his cause. His own cause, however, was plural and shifting; to politics, to art, art history, art education. He was committed to the sense of being antipodean, as well as to radicalism in politics and to the exercise of judgement or distinction in art. I do not think that it would be fair to charge Smith with betrayal of either his politics or his views on art. Politics and art both shift, notoriously; to be a Marxist in one decade may make a great deal more sense than to be one in the next, or at least will mean something different. This line of thinking could only then go on to inquire into the relationship between Marxism, communism and socialism with an eye to disentangling what history seems to fuse. He remained committed to Marxism because it was a critical position, whereas communism became identified with state power; Marxism had its own independent coordinates in thinking

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about culture, anthropology, production and creation. Then there was the alternate fiasco of socialist realism, which could be understood in the same way. Social realism inhabited the realm of opposition or critique; in the form of painting, prints, photography or text it took a critical stance against the existing world. It did not apologise for an allegedly new world order which itself reproduced the worst barbarism of the old, combined more maliciously with some of the technological forms of the new. But even to put it this way was insufficient, as Smith knew; for the point was not to divide paintings, say, into two categories in terms of their political affiliations and damn or praise them on that basis. To talk about realism or naturalism at all was to do nothing more than to evoke a style, to say potentially the first word rather than the last; then the discussion (or argument) could begin, by entering the world of the particular work of art and exercising judgement upon it. Smith had always admired Counihan. Counihan had figured as the rising hope of the new wave in Place, Taste and Tradition. He wrote a separate article on his work in 1945. Here his defence is simple and straightforward. Counihan's work matters because he chooses to centre it upon suffering, an anthropological universal which again comes into prominence through the depression and into the 1940s. As Smith observes, there are some good precedents for the art of suffering names such as Breughel, Caravaggio, Goya, Daumier, Barlach, and Grosz come to mind. To paint suffering is a difficult choice, for it hardly conforms to the aesthetic vision of beauty; and this is to raise in passing a significant point of interpretation, that realism needs also to avoid stigmatising the people and the conditions it portrays. It is not easy to transform the squalid and repulsive aspects of everyday life into something aesthetically valid, yet not heroic in any stylised proletarian sense. The gesture toward the social is also itself uplifting, for it shifts focus away from the image of the suffering artist as romantic genius or hero. In this way, Smith's enthusiasm for the early work of Counihan was as much contextual as it was symbolic. As he then wrote: Few Australian artists have been inspired for long by politics or suffering; their achievements have been won in other fields. The poets and the novelists have spoken for the common man. But it is of the greatest importance for the maturity and diversity of our art that we can number one unflinching critic of society among our best painters.20

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Smith's edited collection for Jack Lindsay appeared in the same year as The Boy Adeodatus. The coincidences were not entirely accidental, any more than were the coincidences between lecturing on the PreRaphaelites and thinking The Antipodean Manifesto. Smith's correspondence held in the Mitchell Library makes it clear that the genesis of Culture and History was slow, so that the book's coming to fruition together with his own autobiography was partly accidental. At the same time, the thought processes clearly overlap and intersect. Smith had written to Lindsay about the Festschrift, and about his own momentary return to painting. Turning to Lindsay was, then, for Smith, a kind of return to his own past; this is perhaps more emphatically the case with his return to the work of Counihan, which culminated in the publication of the major biography Noel Counihan - Artist and Revolutionary in 1993.21 More explicitly than Lindsay, Counihan had followed a path which Smith as a youth had contemplated, and had held to the communist commitment which, for Smith, was too compromised. The period of writing the book on Counihan was also a protracted and emotionally painful one for Smith; it coincided with the illness and death of his first wife, Kate, and so it became some kind of a life-line to the immediate past, an anchor point in a personal world which had been turned upside-down. It was the only biography he was to write apart from his own. The beginning and end of the book are more strongly interpretative or theoretical; as in The Boy Adeodatus the strongest part of the narrative is the story of youth. More than Smith ever did, Counihan had a vision of socialism caught up with the Soviet experience. As Smith put it, succinctly, Counihan was a depression communist whereas he, Smith, was a communist of the Second World War. There was a bigger difference than those few years difference ought allow. Counihan's communism came out of a black decade, where the Soviet Union appeared to leap forward industrially under its first Five Year Plan at the same time as the capitalist world was shaken by the Great Depression.22 Little wonder that some of Counihan's most powerful works were the black and white prints representing the poverty and anxiety of working-class life. Smith recognised that issues of vision came into play here, too, in the field of tensions which lie between biography and autobiography. The most significant connection between Smith and Counihan, however, is indicated by the choice, and by the length and detail in the

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work. Counihan was not one of the participants in the Antipodeans. Part of Smith's gesture towards him needs also to be seen in this light; the biography is also a kind of personal recompense. It took a long time for Counihan to hit the big time; most of his period recognition was as an icon on the left. Social realism - here Smith was bound to return to the problem - was often aligned with socialist politics; but contrary to the popular elision of the categories, social realism and socialist realism needed to be kept separate. As Smith explained, the distinction became more apparent in retrospect, once, especially, the nature of the Soviet Union had become more evident. Having championed (some would now say, stolen) the socialist ideal since 1917, socialist realism shifted very quickly from a critical or external position to an apologetic or internal one. Socialist realism, therefore, is not a realism at all, nor for that matter is it conspicuously socialist; it is, as Smith put it, 'an instrumental art addressed to winning and maintaining political power'. 23 Thinking in precedent, as Smith was wont to, he added a proviso; it was not impossible, therefore, to produce socialist realist art of high aesthetic quality, for far more good art has been produced through history in the service of power than as a voice of liberation (perhaps that explains Karl Kraus' final choice to align with power rather than dissent). Smith's real concern, however, was less with categories than with frames of seeing. The real problem for the reception of Counihan's work was that audiences liked or hated it in terms of the service they saw it paying to these categories. Yet again, argument or judgement took place at the level of words more than images, categories rather than the artworks.24 Counihan's graphic art was more conspicuously political in its use of image; the result, to Smith's disappointment, was that Counihan in the long run was received as a propagandist more than as a painter. Yet Counihan was important, not least of all because he encountered Marxism and modernism simultaneously; and whatever else could be said about the communist milieu into the forties, there were many interesting souls in it, and Europeanists at that. So Counihan became friends with people, for example, like Judah Waten, as well as locals like Brian Fitzpatrick. But then Fitzpatrick chose always to maintain his independence, which for Counihan would not do. Counihan kept the same kind of bargain as Kraus, only his was with the Russian

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Revolution and he was prepared and happy to justify it, even after the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. Jack Lindsay, now a member of the British Communist Party, had at least protested, much to Counihan's dismay. Bernard Smith, for his part, no longer had any obligation to the Party. Perhaps the problem for Counihan truly was that he came to art and Marxism at the same time, and finally could not separate the two at all. For Smith, by comparison, art like culture was of the long duration, whereas Marxism was part of the movement called modernity, always a cultural echo but not inevitably an institutional presence within its forms. Still, as Counihan wrote later in life: 'you cannot be satisfied with the simple black and white answers to questions which satisfied you earlier'.25 The hard, black and white edges of the earlier graphics fade into the 1980s as Counihan, like Smith, saw the Janus face of capitalism but still viewed it differently. Smith was perhaps more powerfully struck by its fundamental ambivalence, which meant, in turn, that he could only ever really be ambivalent about communist claims to up-end the earth. Culture works by recycling, reforming and innovating out of cultural stock, not by revolution. When it came, finally, to locating Counihan Smith understandably returns to more general questions of genre and the moment we inhabit in civilisation. With reference to that overused enthusiasm 'postmodern', he now implies that perhaps 'postcolonial' manages at least to catch something of the global dynamics or historicity involved in this new struggle over naming. He wrote: Precursors of postmodernism are to be found in every part of the postcolonial world, wherever artists of European descent or culture found themselves sandwiched between the European art of their own ethnicity and the indigenous art of the peoples whose lands their colonial ancestors had appropriated and whose art they had sought to destroy.26 The colonials feel postcolonialism more directly than the inhabitants of the centres, but not indefinitely. The antipodean voice, in this regard, is like primitivism striking back. SUBURBANS: FRED WILLIAMS AND JOHN BRACK Smith had written about many painters; some of his articles, perhaps, are more sympathetic or indicative of deeper affinities than others. Smith made no heroes. His ordinary writing was often about people he

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found interesting, or marginal, like Mike Brown or Lymburner. In the context of the present study, there are some particular connections which are suggestive. Counihan is obvious, as is Lindsay, as worldpainter, Lymburner as a kind of displaced conscience. Even though Smith did not write extensively about them, my own sense is that Fred Williams and John Brack are also usefully viewed as significant others, personally and in paint. What follows may, like other pages of this book, involve some amplification, some shifting between absence and presence. Counihan finally was not invited to join the Antipodeans; it is hard to imagine that his inclusion would have favoured their cause or his. Certainly Counihan was widely recognised as a figurative artist, but as we have seen, in his eyes social realism and socialist realism took on a closer association. Fred Williams represented a similar source of anguish in this setting; a brilliant painter of abstract and figurative art and a friend of Brack's to boot, Williams was nevertheless at this moment, into the sixties, more given to abstraction than not. Still the awkwardness remains; for where an earlier generation would mentally connect, say, the work of Sidney Nolan with the idea of 'Australia' or the antipodes, for people of my generation it would probably be Williams who would be the symbol of modern Australian painting. It was art, and he was a painter we grew up viewing as central, representative, even iconic, like football, something you knew about even if you didn't. If you come from Melbourne, perhaps, in particular, then you might also have feelings like this about the work of John Brack. It feels like Melbourne, but not only that; the tones, the subject matter, somehow seem to be expressive of a moment of our culture, The Car no less than 5 o'clock Collins Street. The latter was so much part of my own upbringing that as I recollect it appeared 'Please Discuss' on our Sixth Form English Expression paper in 1971. So the concatenation of forces in all this takes on an unpredictable configuration; for the Antipodeans, it meant Brack in, Williams marginal and then out, Counihan out. Evidently these kinds of contingencies reflect circumstances as much as spirit or temper, and have to do with the politics of organisation as much as those of art. For Bernard Smith, as for all of us, there was a perpetual tension between tolerance and judgement. The art world is a moving carnival, in principle open to all, Sunday painters and those

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who model in clay at home before driving off to the local kiln. At the same time it is conspicuously closed, as is the world, say, of literature, where, in smaller cities as well as larger ones there are favourites and darlings, people whose work will be noisily applauded regardless of its quality, and outsiders whose work will never be recognised except by friends, residing in those private chapels and galleries that we call homes. This kind of tension between pluralism and judgement, compounded by problems of the institutions of the art world, is almost certainly beyond resolution. Smith's own writing continuously works across these fields. Some particular texts, such as The Antipodean Manifesto itself, are characterised by a kind of circumstantial stridency which elevates judgement over pluralism, partly on this very basis, that pluralist dispersions of power and recognition are always highly uneven. To say, 'let the field decide what is good taste and what is not' is, in this sense, the height of naivety, an innocence so extraordinary that it could only be said in deceit. The result of these kinds of tensions, then, is that Smith's work remains stretched over modern antinomies such as democracy, on the one hand, and judgement, on the other. And then there remain other tensions, such as those between the public defence of art as such and the more personal question of taste. One can value the work of Jimi Hendrix or Miles Davis without personally endorsing it. It is consistent with Smith's anthropology that he is personally attracted to the figure of the subject, the agent, the actor, in the plural. The enthusiasm for figuration is consonant with Smith's view of history and culture of how the world works. Landscape is part of culture in this way of thinking, indeed it is itself cultivated, generating the metaphor of culture as the cultivation of endowments or potentials within which we find ourselves. Representations of landscape without people, in this sense, make us wonder about the cameraclaim of the painter; for as we watch the explorers watching the natives, so we also watch the painter painting, revealing or concealing the self in particular kinds of ways. Smith makes his own appreciation of landscape abundantly clear in his books on Australian painting, though he also puts its sense of pastorale under question. There is something about us, in the nineteenth century or now, which leads us to desire the image of nature as raging surf or torrent or dawn or dusk without actors present; this is

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one of the reasons why we travel, go on holiday. As Smith would say, we are all still romantics in a piece of our heart, desperately seeking the sublime, hunting for authenticity, for nature or cultures never experienced by others, or at least not by ourselves. The work of Fred Williams fails to fit neatly into this kind of desire, however; probably the closest connection would be in the Pilbara paintings. Much of Williams' landscape is, in fact, not romantic in the conventional sense at all, precisely because it is suburban, in that elongated sense in which Australian suburbs crawl. What delights about some of Williams' canvases is precisely that they are local, in Upwey, Lilydale near the cement works, the Yarra in the city (or is it the suburbs?); Williams discreetly leaves out the trash, the rusty tins and cigarette packaging, but we can nevertheless see the antipodeans in his painting of landscape, for we know it, and know that like all 'nature' known to us it is inhabited. The moment we enter it, even thinking with the camera's apparently passive eye as our own, we are in it as well. To put it in different terms, our own presence is as evident in Williams' suburban landscapes as is the presence of the hewers and their culture in the so-called gum-tree landscapes of the previous century. Williams created a new vision of Australian landscapes. Figures are an absent presence in Williams' work, which makes it in this way dramatically different in effect to abstract expressionism in the manner of Pollock and Rothko. In Blue Poles, for example, we might only ever see Pollock himself standing Atlas-like over the material, fully revealed yet at the same time selfconcealed, the artist as hero. As Smith suggested in the survey of Williams' work which he wrote for Modern Painters, Williams' achievement also begins (like Smith's own work) to look different when you consider it contextually. Williams created some superb portraits; they ghost his other work, once you become familiar with them.27 His truncation of landscape to the earth itself necessarily makes us ask what place we ourselves have in this order of things. Out went horizons and skies, as though the focus was aerial, or standing looking down so to say at the feet. Which is to say, without turning Williams into a deep ecologist, that culturally speaking the earth exists through us as much as we exist through it. Probably it is this sense of connection which explains how it is that the suburban landscapes work so much more evocatively than Williams' desert paintings, at least for suburbans.28

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The work of John Brack, by comparison, seems typically to start with people more directly than with place; the sense of locality or place is conveyed more subtly, by context or (as in Williams) by its absence. Brack's most striking works could be located almost anywhere in the west. Brack's painting was suburban because he was a realist of a particular kind. Children in the schoolyard, the Balwyn tram, his own daughters, these are the things of everyday life, ordinary, other than heroic, though they also have their moment (as when the ordinary strengths of children show us how arbitrary are the distinctions between heroes and pedestrians, sacred and profane). Brack, of course, was the odd man out in the Antipodeans; not because he did not belong in some sense, but because of a kind of nonchalance which is evident in his art as in his contribution to the 1959 proceedings. As organiser of the Manifesto Smith had asked all participants to contribute in writing, in advance, to the process of drafting. Among other things, Brack in this register wrote that: There still seems much to be done, the people, their surroundings, the past that made them. The painter may ask questions, and there seem many to ask. We do not of course have any aspirations to create a national style - such things are now, in any case, an anachronism - but we do draw inspiration from our own life and the life we see about us. It has similarities to life elsewhere and also significant differences. Our experience must be our material.29

Being antipodean, on this account, was merely a matter of facing up to experience, similarity and difference. Brack's arguments and his paintings were cosmopolitan even before he left home, not least of all because we were, too, even then. Often thought to be condescending, tired of life in the way that existentialists might claim to be, somewhere between melancholy and mordant, Brack's work, I think, points in various different ways. There is something in the work which cries out about grey suburbia, about the routine and tedium of everyday life. But his characters also seem often to contain or to conceal smirk as well as sneer. We do, in fact, live ordinary lives; only some of us have the capacity to discern the wonder within the days. If our experience must be our material, then routines should also be a part of the art work as well as their creation. We do

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create; but most of the time we work, we seek to hold life and love, past and future together. None of this is easy; yet the romantic within the modern subject looks elsewhere, to more empyrean heights, seeking out other kinds of heroes, heroes without laundry and late-night wrong numbers to deal with. Again, it seems to me that part of the attraction between Smith's work and Brack's is this engagement with, or relocation of, the romantic. It is part of us, we need it, but it is no substitute for the ordinary patterns and pathways of everyday life. Modern culture devalues everyday life at the same time as it elevates the cerebral, the special, the celebrity of word or image. The two processes are invariably connected, as the antipodes themselves are; the promotion of one rests upon the devaluing of the other. To make of the artist or writer a hero is by the very same act to make the audience supplicant, idols and the idolatrous bound together by the same fantasy in which they share, unequally. Such are the macabre dances of modern culture. The ordinary in Brack's work also strikes more personal chords, and much like Smith's writing it is ahead of its time. A painting such as Still Life with Self Portrait (1963) features neither of these genres, traditionally defined. No apples, no faces or silhouettes appear. Body parts or prostheses are there, severed from the torso and soul, and surgical bits and pieces, scissors, lots of scissors, across a kind of window-like frame, itself framed and with more scissors. Life is certainly still, in this painting, and the self of the portrait is absent or fragmented, pluralised in the way that all our identities are. But more so, the self is powerfully present in the whole project, its imaginary conception and its execution, in its evoking of illness, health, the hospital as an institution within which a good part of the human condition is carried out or acted upon. So do we draw inspiration from our own lives and the life we see around us. The art work tells us as much about culture as the critic does, even perhaps more evocatively. CRITICS: ROBERT HUGHES AND PETER FULLER But then there were critics, Smith among them too. Some cultivated the persona more emphatically. In this regard we cannot help but be fascinated by the mobile figure of Robert Hughes. Enfant terrible and establishment maverick, younger man in a hurry and older man in a limo, antipodean of the establishment and outsider in the heart of

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Gotham City, Hughes cuts a mean figure and probably always has. His personality appeals; like C. Wright Mills in American sociology, he looks a bit like a cowboy but speaks with a tongue of silver and purple. Together with Germaine Greer and Clive James, he may be our most illustrious contemporary expatriate.30 But there's a difference; where Clive James apparently cannot resist making fun of the world and especially of his own role in it, Hughes, more like Greer, makes his fortune out of complaining, even as he chastises others who, he claims, are guilty of a culture of complaint, or as he uses television to bucket television. Why should all this matter? Plainly the man is brilliant and he is a star. Hughes presents and is received as the authority in his field; this has served to keep Smith's work in the margin, though it is also marginal for other reasons, including choice as well as circumstance. Smith's own books on Australian art were not eclipsed by Hughes' The Art of Australia, but Hughes certainly claimed some limelight at Smith's expense, in more ways than one. As Smith complained, in turn, Hughes' history of Australian art reproduced much of the ground already covered by Smith; this in itself was not so bad, culture recycles, except that its limits are evident in the sense that the apparent absence of fresh research meant a concomitant lack of fresh results.31 Smith published several papers on Hughes' work, progressively more positive in their appraisal of his contribution. In 1973 he reviewed The Art of Australia in its second edition. Or was it the first? The book had a strange record. It was first published in 1965, but for reasons never fully explained, disappeared as soon as it appeared, suppressed by the author and publisher after a few hundred copies had been released for review. The two 'first' versions, 1965 and 1970, differ variously in smaller ways, indicating nothing especially powerful or obvious which might explain the false start. As Smith wrote, the book was a tour de force: 'Hughes writes with confidence and perception, already the master of a wayward, uneasy, critical brilliance'.32 In Smith's judgement, however, the book lacked a clear organising argument. Several themes rested together, not always convincingly. First, Hughes developed that 1961 Whitechapel proposition that Australian art was different because new or naive. The period Australian artist appears again, then, as a white noble savage. Hughes argued, in a manner reminiscent of Perry Anderson's dismissal of his own local culture, that

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neither myth nor history was a vital part of Australian awareness yet.33 It was as though white civilisation had been assimilated into Aboriginal history, both now constructed as peoples without history. We were lacking in history, in experience and in genius. As Anderson had lamented that the English could produce no Durkheim or Weber, so Hughes here pined the absence of a David, a Goya or a Delacroix.34 All of this suggests to the contemporary eye that Hughes was looking for the wrong thing, consequently he did not find it. In Smith's view, the argument was simply too unilateral in its Europeanism. In any case, all cultures possess both myths and history. Hughes' second theme, in Smith's reading, concerned not cultural rupture but the tyranny of distance. We in Australia could not know European art because we could not see it, except in washed-out reproductions. This was, for Smith, only partly true, and then it was misleading, not least of all inasmuch as it uncritically reproduced the myths of the Great Tradition and the Artist as Hero. Smith also now detected a third position, this time slipped into the Preface of the book. There Hughes mused that the most interesting aspect of Australian painting was the 'complex, partly sociological, issue of its pendant relationship to the European Tradition both old and new'.35 Smith's sense was that an unpredictable circle had been turned, from an innocent art without prototypes to a kind of provincial art which needed to be located against metropolitan sources. The latter, of course, was coming closer to the argument which Smith had been putting for thirty years, with the qualification that, in his view, the image of unequal traffic stood in for that of pendant suspension. The image of the pendant became even more strained when Smith pondered the apparent relation of dependency between Hughes' text and his own. Smith's own sense was that it was perhaps the case that too much borrowing had reinforced the weaker architectonic of Hughes' book. Finally, he seemed pleased to respond to Hughes' particular charge that he was a wicked Marxist. T am delighted to plead guilty', he wrote in reply; Marxism, indeed, had held together his work from Place, Taste and Tradition through the scandalous Antipodean Manifesto. Marxism provided me with the broad base of a system by means of which I have tried in my own work to bring my material into both a

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historical and an aesthetic focus. I have no doubt that there have been other and modifying, influences as well, but Marxism has, I suspect (for who can know in such matters), been the major influence upon my writing of history.36 Marxism, modifying influences - for who can know? - history, culture more than 'art'; the key motifs of Smith's thinking here are manoeuvred together. While Smith was happy to applaud Hughes' work as 'serious' and 'highly committed', these others were not obvious characteristics of The Art of Australia.

But if Robert Hughes was a young man in a hurry, he was not always so. Certainly Smith seems to have viewed Hughes' work early on as deeply contradictory in its effects. If on the one hand he was brilliant, on the other he played into the problem; like Barry Humphries, he was heard by the English because he told them something they wanted to hear. The expatriates were still compelled to behave like Omai. Nor should the severity of these problems of reception in the postwar period be underestimated; it is not the case that expatriates simply sold out. As late as 1988 Smith was to write a paper entitled 'Australian art and British arrogance', where he noted that the British (or some of them) still took us for hicks. One British reviewer, Smith noted, could still write in the 1980s that '"Australian intellectual is an oxymoron"', adding for good measure a line Smith heard before, in the England of the 1950s, 'there is no Australian art'.37 To be Australian in some quarters apparently meant that we still had to be told. Into the 1980s Robert Hughes' canvas had expanded and perhaps his shift from a British colonial axis to New York is one of the factors which explains his intellectual expansion. Hughes now put together the brilliant television series and then book, The Shock of the New. Even the title was arresting; and if Hughes had now shifted from mother to mammon, the vibrancy and speed of Manhattan now rippled through his work. Smith reviewed The Shock of the New on ABC radio; in 1981 media pathways in Australia were still more like the BBC than Hollywood, or Entertainment Tonight. It was a great book, as Smith said: The book works by an elaborate interlace of metaphor, anecdote, wit and suggestive allusion, and indeed it works very well, for Hughes is the master of a flexible and sensitive prose style'.38 Radical Tory though he be, Hughes was also an aesthetic democrat; writing for Time

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magazine, performing on and with The Shockof the New gave art a much more directly human context than the straitjacket of formalism into which New York critics like Clement Greenberg confined it. Yet Hughes was still too much in a hurry for Smith, playing fast and loose with historical context in his presentation of art. A more serious criticism, Smith ventured, was the extent to which the book remained an Establishment text. Modernism simply rules; there is no attempt on Hughes' part to revalue the avant-garde canon. More wickedly Smith wrote that in Hughes' hands 'all the grand old chestnuts of the first-year course in modernism pass through the projector once again, but now with all the authority of the BBC and the art critic of Time magazine'.39 Smith could serve it up as well as Hughes did. On a note more of lament, however, Smith observed the impasse of modernism itself: art traditionally acts as a socializing, bonding process... in our time the social space once occupied by the sacred is now being increasingly occupied by the political; the spiritual itself is becoming an aesthetic metaphor. Modernism is not dead. But its heroic days are over and we live on in the twilight of its trivialities. Hughes has nothing new to tell us about this decline from heroism to triviality.40

Nor, in The Shock of the New, did he convey any conspicuous sense of his own roots; provincialism reigned in reverse. The phrase 'cultural cringe' was the only Australian thing to appear in the book. Perhaps it all really revolved around the shock of New York. Further into the 1980s, Robert Hughes was to expand, to return more explicitly to Australia in order to settle accounts in his bestselling book The Fatal Shore. It was a work of history, however controversial, and it indirectly complemented Smith's historical work by picking up on the fatality of civilisational contact for convicts as well as Aborigines. Smith applauded it; it was, he said, a book as important as Michelet's history of the French Revolution.41 But more emphatically, as I have indicated, The Fatal Shore represented a symbolic homecoming of sorts, a tacit acknowledgement of the antipodean feet upon which Robert Hughes also stands, whether in the Mitchell Library or on Rockefeller Plaza. If Smith's lifework was so far ahead of us in European Vision and elsewhere that we have only caught up, then Hughes keeps spiriting ahead. Fast and loose, we seem fated ever only to see his back.

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His work seems to invest with new meaning Montaigne's wisdom: that not the arrival but the journey matters. Perhaps there is little that should surprise in all this. Robert Hughes and Bernard Smith chose different paths and were made by very different circumstances, even if in the same Australian city on a roughly continuous plane of time. In a certain practical sense they are bound to be viewed as competitors, even despite this difference, and the generational differences are bound to count. Then there are distinct views over what it means to be cosmopolitan. Australian art historians and critics after Smith are bound, I suppose, either to be for or against his work, to view it as a legacy or as a new tradition against which to set their hearts or careers. The frustration in this, which is the rationale for the book you are holding, is that Bernard Smith has written theoretical works which have received little theoretical discussion. Critics such as Ian Burn set themselves against Smith's work; others, like Hughes, effectively work alongside it, sprinting. Today's self-styled theorists, meanwhile, huddle over their coffee seriously reading Zizek. As a reader of theory and a cultural sociologist, my purpose in this book is both to explain and to contextualise and extend what I see as Smith's project. Smith's project needs first to be established, allowed to breathe. But given that so much other response to Smith, especially within art criticism, is working positively or negatively against his work, it should perhaps be no surprise either that only an outsider would meet Smith on his own terms. The outsider, also emphatically in the centre an insider, was Peter Fuller. Viewed biographically, Fuller's path is as absolutely extraordinary as is Hughes'. Young, precocious, self-certain and fluent, Fuller leapt to celebrity status within English radical circles and then also took off at such speed that each next book was as though written by another. The difference between Hughes and Fuller in one sense was perhaps ironical, in another entirely consistent with the problem of the antipodes. Precisely because he was an outsider, Fuller was able to discern that there was indeed such a thing as Australian art. He liked it; he may have patronised us, but he recognised it. And there emerged some kinds of affinities or sympathies between Fuller and Smith at least momentarily, into the 1980s. Mutuality of recognition laid the basis of this. Fuller was interested in the antipodes, as place and as relationship. When he assembled some critical essays, calling them The

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Australian Scapegoat - Towards an Antipodean Aesthetic in 1986, Smith

wrote the Foreword. The connections were various. The Scapegoat Arthur Boyd's Scapegoat - had appeared on the cover of the third edition of Smith's Australian Painting. Fuller's own collection of visuals used an Arthur Boyd with suggestions of Fred Williams, Crucifixion and Rose, signalling inter alia the return of God to his personal universe after the expulsion of Marx. Smith, by comparison, never felt the need to expel Marx, not least of all because Marx ghosts us, keeps returning. In the particular context of art history and civilisational analysis, more generally, Smith was inclined to align Ruskin and Morris with Marx rather than to counterpose them. Fuller, in contrast, was to go through them and cast them out, Marx, Morris in turn, Ruskin only finally remaining. Smith's Foreword to The Australian Scapegoat was to offer some sense of locating Fuller's work, though the differences between them were only to become more apparent later, when Fuller began serially to eliminate his intellectual fathers. Smith first of all put Fuller in place in the imperial relation. Fuller followed Kenneth Clark, who visited Australia in 1947, Sir Herbert Read in 1963 and Clement Greenberg in 1968. Of these only Clark and Fuller took notice of Australian art; only Fuller, however, was concerned with Australian art as a cultural development with its own history. Until Fuller, then, these prestigious imperial visitors were all too unilaterally European. Like Greenberg, Fuller was a Power Institute lecturer; only Fuller's career was ascendant, still, when he visited Australia first in 1982, whereas Greenberg's was largely played out. Like Carlyle before him, Fuller was grumpy; indeed, most of his writing is fundamentally given to complaint about modernity and the mess we congratulate ourselves on achieving. Yet he complained clearly, as the British romantics often did, from the position that things were indeed getting worse rather than better. So he had an outsider's sympathy for The Antipodean Manifesto, as had Kenneth Clark before him. He knew what he didn't like, and said so, loudly. He upset most Australians who listened, for they felt patronised, again. Smith's response was different. He observed this peculiar sense of convergence between them: As I read Fuller I gain the impression frequently that I am traversing my own past, the same involvement with the work of Marx, Ruskin and

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Morris, a similar attraction to theological parallels in the search for aesthetic solutions, the same delight that I found in reading Marcuse's book on art, the same sense of moral repugnance before the solipsism of structural theory and Althusserian marxism. So that he either echoes my past or indicates positions I might well have adopted, or come to adopt, had I thought the issues through as thoroughly as he has done. Need I say that I also frequently find myself in disagreement .. .42 The terms of correspondence were almost endearing; and yet as the last line anticipates, this travelling of fellows was not to last. Smith indicated some of these disagreements; they included Fuller's period turn to biologism via the work of the New Left Review's momentary guru, Sebastiano Timpanaro. Smith did not accept the proposition that art appeals to us in a biological way, so much as in a social or cultural manner. More specifically, Smith was also concerned that Fuller's curiosity about Australian art seemed to issue most directly in a concern with landscape. Smith rather agreed with Jill Bradshaw, whose brilliant essay on the French discovery of Australia in 1983 was included in The Australian Scapegoat. Bradshaw had written that the concentration upon landscape painting in Australia represented a refusal to come to terms with the environment which European society has constructed within it; the artifact also becomes naturalised, part of 'nature' itself as we encounter it. Smith's twist on this was simple: it led him to the conclusion there was undoubtedly a negative as well as a positive aspect to the long dominance of landscape in the Australian tradition.43 For Smith, however, this meant that it was necessary to return to the themes of his Boyer Lectures. Land-escapism might, at its worst, be viewed as an appropriation at the spiritual level of a process that began with white possession of the land. On this basis, Australian artists should perhaps turn more to their own, predominantly urban existence. But he would not accept the view of Fuller (or Bradshaw) that preoccupation with ancient Aboriginal art might prove to be another form of escapism.44 To feign romanticism was one thing; to give the past its due recognition and bear witness to new forms of culture contact another. These were anticipations of the falling out which occurred more graphically into 1989, after the publication of Fuller's Ruskin book, Theoria. Fuller was changing his position fairly rapidly, by instalments;

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as I have tried to show in this book, Smith's positions are more enduring, perhaps because (contrary to his own genuflection to Fuller in Australian Scapegoat) they are better thought out, more elastic. Smith appreciated Theoria, unsurprisingly; he admired both the author and the subject. At the same time he detected in the book a kind of backpedalling. It was as though Fuller was heading as rapidly backward as Hughes was off and running forward. Smith's conclusion was that, notwithstanding his long period of commitment to psychoanalysis, Fuller was obsessively given to attacking fathers - his own, his analyst, then his teacher, John Berger, then Marx, then Morris - when would Ruskin fall? Fuller drove a wedge between Morris (bad) and Ruskin (good) on the grounds of the spirituality of art. He attacked Smith in response, in passing, if without animus, for Smith was also old enough to be his father; but then Fuller, the younger man, died in a car accident. Fuller had in his own lifetime shifted from Marxism to the critique of postmodernism and then modernity. Smith's response was predictably ambivalent. He experienced sharply divided personal responses to Fuller's text, partly because Fuller was a wilfully moving target. He wrote on his feet, like Hughes, and also in this regard like Jack Lindsay. More, Fuller would not fall for that idiotic modernism which rested on the cult of the new. He believed, as did Smith, that we always are bound to work through traditions and that to be radical meant returning to roots. Now, however, Fuller seemed in retreat to identify socialism also with modernism, to narrow it technically to moments such as constructivism and laugh or spit after the fact.45 Sensing the power of the Oedipal response, Smith takes his distance from the critic armed with the still-smoking revolver. Alone, perhaps, among Fuller's critics, who otherwise spurned him for turning, Smith located the pattern within Fuller's own entrancing but largely overlooked autobiography, Marches Past. Like much other work in autobiography, Fuller's text is deeply confessional. The archaic turn in his art criticism only really makes sense considered within this context. Then he was dead. Smith joined the assembled obituarists of Modern Painters, the magazine Fuller had initiated on his road back to Ruskin. Yet again, Smith wrote into the context. For Smith, Fuller was: the most original British art critic since Herbert Read . . . I see him as a great regionalist constantly reminding his fellow countrymen that

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Britain possesses a tradition in art theory and art practice that should be respected and reworked to face current problems. Fuller was also an intelligent and sensitive critic of Australian art, the first British critic to take its traditions seriously, not patronisingly Regrettably, most Australian critics resented his fishing in their private pond. They might have extended their own limited vision had they addressed the issues he raised, instead of attacking his presence and person.46

In the period leading up to his death, however, it was clear that Fuller was becoming a born-again nativist. As Smith's theory of culture would have it, this archaic turn involved turning back into tradition rather than moving into the recognition of it. In this context, Fuller's appreciation of Australian art contains elements both positive and negative; part of the attraction to the other seemed to be that Australia was somehow like a tentacle of Britain. At the same time, Fuller's readiness to recognise the antipodes meant that the dynamic evoked by Smith in European Vision was still active, however transformed it may have been by two centuries of occupation. Longing for the past could take on all kinds of forms, lusting after heroes, after Empire or the lost gossamer web of community. Smith's theoretical claim in all this was to observe and emphasise the patterning; civilisations in crisis often reached back. This is one reason why even modernity can never be fully modern; cultures recycle, but not just as they please.

CHAPTER 6

MODERNITY, AND

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DISTANCING THE MODERN The more things change the more they stay the same. Or do they still? Debates continue endlessly regarding the question whether the substance of our lives is new, or whether we just recreate the old in new combinations and forms. Within a frame of thinking such as Bernard Smith's, the provisional conclusion on these matters is likely to be that our world is all of these things. On the one hand, we remain connected back to generations and centuries of activity seeking to hold life together, endeavouring to reproduce and maintain ourselves and our families. On the other, as Marx expressed it, after industrialism all that is solid melts into air. That line appears in The Communist Manifesto, a text which also has a certain stridency about it. It is not as though the world melts; Marx is telling us that it does melt, all around us. He borrows from precedents for the idea; the image can be found in the work of Carlyle, and more opaquely in Shakespeare. So perhaps even this idea about the new is not new. Moderns, in short, have to learn to live within paradox. In Smith's thinking, as we have seen, civilisations recycle, recall, summon up archaic sensibilities or else borrow them from elsewhere, from other times or places; or they push forward in the collective imagination, into frames like those called futurism. Modernity, however, cannot generate its own meaning out of itself. The image of the modern which breaks out with the Renaissance becomes more widely influential and coarse after the French and Industrial Revolutions; only the idea of the modern is, of course, itself ancient. This is one reason 1 55

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why some of us feel dubious about the proclaimed extent of the rupture which some people associate with the idea of the 'postmodern'. 1 What this suggests is that the 'modern' is typically used in at least two quite distinct ways; one, if you like, referring to an attitude or process, the other to a period, the period we inhabit, that inaugurated by the great Revolutions. To focus on this sense of alleged rupture between modern and postmodern is, in a strong sense, to fall into a culture of narcissism - as though our world has changed, as though the big marker is ours, as though the 'premodern' was merely a prelude to the subsequent prelude of modernity, after which comes us and the postmodern. Viewed civilisationally, however, modernity is a mere blip on a very long line or trajectory. Modernity and modernism may have changed the world, but their impact on the long duration of civilisations is a flea bite. The analytical problem remains. If we are prepared to view history as a process of recycling, are there not still points of rupture which cannot be neatly accommodated into or anticipated by this way of thinking? Certainly the discovery or construction of the modern subject and of perspective in the Renaissance suggests something more radically new, as do the slowly emerging patterns of geographical and social mobility which we associate with the age of Revolutions. As the sociological cliche has it, the way that many of us live has changed more dramatically in the last two hundred years than in the millennia preceding it. Yet propositions like this return us to the kinds of concerns we started with - change in form, or substance? Sense of change, or fact? and so on. Talk about the modern and postmodern is complicated because of the multiplicity of systems of reference brought to bear upon it. The idea of postmodernism is usually identified in its origin with architecture. Modern or modernist architecture seeks out simplicity, function, elegance; the austere and beautiful Bauhaus School. Postmodern architecture is cheeky, mixes styles and confuses; the visually striking but practically unworkable Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. The use of the terms 'modern' and 'postmodern' precede these developments. Modernism was and is a period referent in art history; as surely as postimpressionism followed 'impressionism' so could 'postmodernism' be expected to chase away 'modernism'. Smith himself had anticipated the shift in category or style into the 1940s. Toynbee, one major intellectual source of Smith's thinking, was also

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able to imagine something emerging which was civilisationally distinct to the modernism which arguably peaked and broke in 1914. In the last twenty years talk about postmodernism has proliferated through the academic disciplines and popular culture. Confusion has become especially evident in the liberal arts where sociologists historically have defined their discipline as the discourse of modernity, drawing the line with the sense of structural change at 1789 rather than placing it in the Renaissance. In all this the elementary distinctions between period and attitude nevertheless remain useful. To be modern is to believe in change, to be modernist is to identify with the kind of change which dominated the first half of the twentieth century. To be modern is to live with change (though as Smith reminds us, it is also to remain romantic); to be modernist is, in a word, to be Americanist. To be postmodern, to extend the account, is to be committed to a certain kind of view which, among other things, is critical of modernism; whereas postmodernism is something perhaps more like modernism, a style which lacks a sufficient sense of its own historicity. The pertinence of Bernard Smith's work in this field is not simply to do with precedent or anticipation, however. The point, rather, is that Smith is uniquely placed to think these matters through because his art history is located within the sense of civilisational history. This enables Smith to think modern and postmodern in both contexts simultaneously, to connect two of the most significant aspects of modernism, the aesthetic and the sociological, for if modernity has a history, it also needs to be located as a project; and it is arguably in this crossover, between the modern project and the visual regime, that its real significance lies. Smith's work has always been aminated by the sense of the optic; his is pre-eminently an historical concern with vision. This is even more powerful than it seems at first, however, given the implication of the modern and the visual. The themes are, in fact, ubiquitous in his work. In 1991, for example, Smith gave a paper on 'Intellectual currents in Australia 1930-1949' at the Australian National University. He argued that there were at least three such major currents, with a fourth becoming more apparent. Each called out a counter current. The first was bound up with imperialism and its response, nationalism. The second was to do with religion, and its secular counter current. The third current was elitism, which called out populism. The fourth, less fully evident stream, was modernism,

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evoking postmodernism. Modernism had to be separated from modernity; the two were connected, but not identical: Modernism is an essentially European cultural phenomenon that arose around the turn of the century as a critique of modern European civilisation. But modernism's originating drive and energy was drawn from the so-called primitive, that is to say, non-European arts of Africa, America, the Pacific and elsewhere and the non-European religions of India and the East. Modernism is predicated upon the primitive and the occult. There was only one fundamental European source of modernism: the psychoanalysis of Freud. Freud's revelation of the unconscious as the source of irrational behaviour reinforced the primitive and the occult as the two basic drives behind modernism. Modernism is not a reflection of modernity. Instead it set up a penetrating critique of modernity. Modernism is the dialectical twin of modernity.2 Smith's argument itself was Freudian in its critical orientation, for he was prepared to argue that the definition of modernism was that it was not modern, or at least that it was not modern in any predictable or derivative way. To be modern was also to be not-modern. This was an argument he expanded in a paper for Modern Painters, 'Modernism: that is to say, geniusism'.3 Primitivism at the same time revered nonwestern artifacts and separated art from craft. It relocated authorship more firmly with the artist rather than viewing the artist as the bearer of the gift of God. Humanism worked its own excesses; recognition of the subject led also to the cult of individualism and reformed the image of the artist as romantic hero. More explicitly, Smith argued that it had become increasingly clear that most of the pioneers of cubism, vorticism and abstract art were deeply involved with the occult: with spiritualism, theosophy, anthroposophy and so on. Among them were Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich, Kupka, Duchamp and Wyndham Lewis. Primitivism and the occult were thus interwoven components of modernism by which it launched its challenge to classical naturalism and Christian spirituality. A new variety of modernism then emerged with Italian futurism and Russian constructivism; these movements in art and politics were more ruptural, modern in their postmodernism as primitivism had been modernist in its premodernism. Futurism and constructivism do not

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criticise the spirit of modernity, they celebrate it, urge it to go faster. Only the Dadaists and surrealists continued to use modernism as a critique of modernity, and this is why those movements today look postmodern, or at least work as precedents for postmodernism. To talk about the modern was also necessarily to talk about mythology, and the long view. Smith returned to the theme of 'Modernism as a late nineteenth century style' in a paper given to the Australian Art Association Conference in 1990. Here he began by stepping back, by returning to context and history. Smith now argued that 'modern' should be defended semantically as an attitude or process rather than as a fixed period: 'Modern is not a word that is likely to become obsolete in the near future. Since the third century AD it's possessed a meaning something like this: that of the present time to which is attached a more or less large slice of past time'. The modern seemed to follow us, like the tail we have lost but still carry: The modern is like a kite; and like all kites it needs a tail, but it's not a word likely to cease denoting the present time, nor will 'modernist' cease to denote 'a supporter of the modern', nor 'modernism' cease to denote 'that which is characteristic of modern times'.4

Those coming two or three generations after Smith may not share this semantic confidence; if the modern is like a kite, then in these times it seems as though the postmodern is perhaps the tail that wags the dog. The point of Smith's perspective on semantics is to take the longer view, in which the apparent urgency of the debates of the moment again take on different profile. Smith is also concerned to signal the way in which the idea of the modern is caught up with senses of rebirth, rediscovery or reinvention. Giorgio Vasari saw the modern as the rebirth and perfecting of the arts of the ancients after their degeneration during a dark age; Johann Joachim Winckelmann saw the modern as the rebirth and perfecting of the art of ancient Greece; Ruskin, in turn, as the rebirth and perfection of medieval art. Then, during the later nineteenth century the modern came to be seen as the rebirthing of the primitive. All these views were primitivisms of a sort, references to a claimed original condition of a normative kind. Classicism and medievalism were also literally primitivisms of a kind.5

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Smith's position is plain, and it has been anticipated repeatedly throughout his own work and in this book. Modernity always evokes the other as its heart or claim to legitimation; the present is governed by senses of the past, as are individuals shadowed by their biographies and fantasies. Modernising, in Smith's way of thinking, involves, among other things, selecting and treating some aspect of the past as value as well as event.6 The impending arrival of the end of the twentieth century brings with it a re-evaluation of signifiers past and present. Modernism in the period sense - locate it, say between the Great War and the Vietnam War - is over, that is to say, is felt no longer to be of our time or of our sense of time (arguably it is still very much our time, and our burden; ask the Vietnamese). Modernism in art, however, effectively involved something like the displacement of classicism by exoticism. Modernity held on to its founding sense of alterity and identity in Rome and Athens and in the Bible, but it also reached outwards geographically, colonially, across space and not only across its own sense of time. The emergence of photography helped to release painting from the responsibilities of mimesis and the commitment to naturalism. Gauguin, Cezanne, Picasso marked the line: Modernism then developed into an avant garde world art on the aesthetic premise that in all good art form prevailed over meaning. However, the role of the European avant-garde was not so much to invent the new as to appropriate and europeanise the indigenous art of the colonies in a modernist project that on the one hand subverted outdated modes of classicism, such as academic art, while creating a new universalist version of classicism by welding the 'primitive' with refurbished concepts of antiquity.7 Smith's claim was that all this had been set in place or in motion by 1914. The point was to locate what we called 'modernism', in order to situate it and move on. Like romanticism, modernism returned in different forms; there was no point in hypostatising it, except perhaps to sate our self-obsession. If this logic was acceptable, then we could recognise that now it was possible also to historicise the modernism of the early twentieth century, just as earlier modernisms had been historicised: Vasari, Winckelmann, Ruskin and so on, for they were also moderns. Having thrown out the line of geniusism, Smith now

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suggested that this recent 'modernism' be located as the formalesque. Geniusism, after all, also had various precedents from the Renaissance on, in a bizarre line that runs, say, from Botticelli to Duchamp and Warhol. Smith's approach to art history, however, has been to eschew the cult of the master, to seek to socialise the creation of art. This would mean dropping the format of teaching only selected masterworks, turning off the projector momentarily and talking about types or genres of art. Recent modernism, in this setting, could be characterised as dominated by form and by formal aesthetics: it stressed the value of formal qualities in art above all others.8 Content was dissolved into art; art moved in on itself. Importantly, this suggested semantic shift to speaking of the 'formalesque' might also then free up again the use of the idea of the modern for the present. After all, there was a kind of absurdity in the logic which would say that we are indeed truly postmodern, as though we could be after ourselves. In a different register, and returning to Smith's civilisational sensibility, the best we could say in other words about the human condition today is that we combine vital ingredients of the modern, and thereby premodern and postmodern, archaism and futurism together with the present. Toynbee and Marx were still significant presences in the orbit of Smith's thinking, this both implicitly and explicitly. In 1994 Smith gave a lecture in Tokyo, which he entitled 'Distancing modernism'. Here he proposed that there were at least three long-term trends which could be used to help explain and distance modernism. The three trends were archaism, exoticism and futurism. Archaism referred to the imaginary classicism of antiquity, most manifest in Europe's attachment to its image of Greece. This trend depended on the discontinuity between the two civilisations, yet it nevertheless invoked the lineage as legitimation. Exoticism encapsulated the process in which one culture borrowed from another in its own image - Orientalism, Chinoiserie, Japonisme, Uart negre, in our own case, Aboriginalism. Futurism was, in a sense, a tighter genre, best known to us in the movements which carried it - the Italian movement with its trajectory into fascism, the German in the Third Reich, and the Soviet in the form of socialist realism. The movements later combined various features, but key among them was that they all desperately sought more modernity, at speed; they were emphatically modernising movements, but they each all the same drew upon a melange of

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contrived romantic or archaic associations as well. Smith's claim, in this setting, speaking as an antipodean in Japan, was that twentieth-century modernism combines these trends in different ways into cultures which were also formed at a deeper geographical or regional level. Thinking through categories of archaism, exoticism and futurism, Toynbee still in the edge of his vision, he went on to suggest that what we too easily bundle together as modernism in art actually contains at least two discernible phases of considerable distinction. The painterly modernism which we associate with Matisse, Mondrian and Kandinsky still held on to a stronger arcadian sense; spiritually it was closer to the nineteenth century, or the cusp. The modernism which we associate with Dada, the Neue Sachlichkeit and surrealism pointed elsewhere; it was part of a culture of shock, and this is why we encounter it now as postmodern or as anticipating the postmodern.9 FOLLOWING THE POSTMODERN If the modern is fundamentally bound together with the visual, then it should come as no surprise that the postmodern will contest the visual as part of its regime. Certainly the French critique of 'scopic regimes' has been a primary concern in recent critical theory, as Martin Jay has shown.10 Ultimately the limit of this kind of argument is that it singles out a particular theme, in this case vision or the gaze, and then foregrounds it as the modern problem. But we are beset by many and various problems, awash in irony and paradox, and in addition, after the modern, many would say, the sense of the problem keeps shifting anyway. Sight, at the very least, needs to be appraised as ambivalent in its effects and it needs to be located within the matrix of the other senses which together make us up. The single-minded identification of Sight with Power is doubly disabling; for we also engage in the pleasure of the eye, and we grapple with smell, taste, touch, and sound at the same time. Viewed more generally, as I have suggested elsewhere in this book, the hegemonic claims of eye and voice need to be counterbalanced and kept somehow distinct. Everything may well be caught up with everything else, but humans still have a need for difference. Bernard Smith had already contemplated these kinds of issues when it was announced that the postmodern arrived. He had indeed anticipated these developments. Here I have argued that Smith also possessed the theoretical means to place them within a larger sense of

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the order of things. Into the nineties the cult of the postmodern has settled, in both senses; it generates a little less frenzied passion, and it is also now part of the intellectual furniture. Smith continued to engage with the phenomenon in further forays. In 1993 he gave a paper on 'Modernism and postmodernism' to the Department of Visual Arts at Monash. Smith shares the critical view that, even if the idea of the postmodern had been an advertising fiction, it nevertheless had the virtue of calling modernism to account. His argument is thus broadly sympathetic with the work of those who view postmodernism as a kind of feedback or critical reflex within the field of modernity itself.11 This is less to say that postmodernism is unoriginal than it is to indicate that it also has a history. For modernism, whether viewed as a cultural dominant in art or as a social regime, clearly became hegemonic after the Second World War; a momentary sense of balance was achieved which has been crumbling ever since. Modernism imagined itself, in this way, precisely as the new tradition, the new norm, global and universalisable through the processes of modernisation and the cordon sanitaire of Pax Americana. And the postmodern critique bites precisely to the extent that it registers this, that it attacks this mental freeze which accompanied that new modern world order. Even if they made a fetish of change, the postmoderns reintroduced it as a central fact of modern living. The old module of the new would not last. To talk about the postmodern, then, necessarily means to speak of the modern. This meant that it was incumbent on us to engage in definition, which in turn meant engaging with history. What was modernism? Here Smith defined it for convenience as a crossphenomenon style. It emerged together with newer fields during the 1890s, became dominant subsequent to the Second World War after a first blast around the Great War, and it collapsed in the 1960s and 1970s. Viewed historically, then, modernism could be identified as a relatively fixed style or period with a history. But this historical judgement then led to a semantic clash. Smith did not discuss Marx's methodology here, mercifully, but the tension which could be observed in his discussion of modernity was the same one he had probed fifty years earlier in his fragment on Marx. Without disappearing into the black hole called epistemology, the elementary question which keeps returning is simply put but impossible to answer. How do we best understand the world? In terms of logic or reason, or in terms of the empirical

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and historical? It was the same tension, again, which animated European Vision and the South Pacific and which held together the Enlightenment and its mentality. We postmoderns still today inhabit the same mental space: we seek ever to understand by reason and by experience, by deduction and induction, and we are bound to generate at least as much confusion as clarity in this process. Torn as we are, then, between philosophy and history, or if you like between thinner and thicker views of the world, we might choose intellectually to follow one path or the other; the other always shadows us. Thus Marx's work, as Smith understood, shifts deliberately from empirical to rational groundings, from history, say, in The German Ideology to structure and the logic of Capital. We admire the second, great book, but we probably enjoy Marx's early writings more. For we are also historical animals. Historical modernism now looks like high Americanism, the '57 Chevrolet, neat but gone, hip but also retro. It is in this semantic register, then, that postmodernism attracts those who are content to view history as fashion and asfixative.Smith's life-work is dedicated to the idea of historicising culture; but it is not an absolute historicism. It does not finally issue in a massive smorgasbord of endless difference beyond recognition or registering; it presumes that this is an ordered chaos which can (and ought to) be patterned by us. We are historical animals, on this account, but we also make patterns, impose notions of intelligibility on history, even as we recognise their limits and revise them or adjust them. The semantic clash between historical modernism and the logic of modernism, then, reflects that between the methodology of periodisation and that of logic. While the modern denotes a period and its associated styles and specific cultures, it also denotes in common usage the idea of the present time, which carries with it its immediate past; the present does not begin just now, but also yesterday or the day before that. Then there occur the predictable disputes about origins; for some the modern world begins with the Christians or Greeks, for others with the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment, or industrialism, or the French Revolution, or the election of the Labor Government in 1983.12 But if 'modernism', like most other things, can be defined or located both historically and logically, it can also be claimed differently by distinct disciplinary practices. 'History' and 'philosophy', as I have

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crudely cast them here, are by no means exhaustive of the present field of intellectual endeavour in the liberal arts or social sciences. If postmodernism grows out of art and architecture, it nevertheless today also has a primary presence in literary or cultural studies, where its capacity to headbutt overdue loans of tradition is unparalleled. If 'modernism' is typically understood in these kinds of circles as a matter of style in paint or word, then the situation in sociology is different, for here modernism is the second term to modernity. Given the legitimate and illegitimate tribalisms that go together with the modern disciplines, we ought not to be surprised that in literary circles style rules, at the expense of context. Smith, by comparison, is interested in both style and history. So at this point he turns to the work of one leading sociologist, Jiirgen Habermas. Smith offers a gentle critique of Habermas, largely on aesthetic grounds, that Habermas conflates the different meanings given to classicism and tends to collapse modernity and modernism. He also applauds Habermas, not least of all inasmuch as he ties classicism back into modernism. For Smith, nothing can be viewed as self-sufficient, modernism included. More generally, he also endorses Habermas' view of modernity as an unfulfilled project.13 Unfulfilled, Smith would likely say, because unfulfillable. Smith's work complements Habermas' project, but it is also distinct from it. Habermas makes the mistake of reducing postmodernism to its precedents, as though the 'new conservatism' of French critical theory is but a replay of the position of Nietzsche. This is to miss what is new about the postmodern, and to simplify philosophy too much into political terms (who is the radical, these days?). More generally, however, the emphases at work in the projects of Smith and Habermas are also at variance in methodology or mentality. Habermas' project shifts, like Marx's, from a concern with historicity to a primary concern with systems and their logic. Like Marx, we probably encounter the work of the early Habermas (for example, on the public sphere) as both more pleasurable and more stimulating than his later work. The more systemic (and philosophical) Habermas' work becomes, the less historical - less persuasive? - it is. One result of this is that his project becomes progressively more abstract, less historical and sociological. We miss the sense of contingency, struggle, of violence, of the imperialist world-system. In this way it could be said that Habermas' project is too European or unilateral, at least when it is viewed from the antipodes.14

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Smith shares with Habermas the sense that modernity is the field within which we continue. They are both Marxists, but in rather different ways. Viewed theoretically, I would say that the major difference between the two projects is in the status of history given in them; viewed biographically, Habermas' project is more shifting, while Smith's is, as I have shown in this book, more consistent. The point is not necessarily to congratulate consistency in itself, however, so much as it is to appreciate the nuance and insight of the earlier views which are then projected out as Smith's work flourishes. Smith uses a peripheral vision which, once named or identified, then frames all his subsequent work. In other words, Smith never loses sight of power or violence when he discusses culture; he consistently maintains an antipodean perspective, European but not, Australian but not. It is this sense of unease or tension, of belonging and not-belonging, which both holds Smith's work together and enables its extension. Smith's work is the work of an outsider, politically and geographically speaking; only the outside is also inside, for the social world is not divided into sectors by a clear black line, and cultures always fuse. Beyond this, all intellectual work remains irredeemably perspectival; notions of inside and outside, centre and margin are largely determined by other kinds of location. While these matters cannot, therefore, be finally fixed in any way, the point about the power of Smith's insight is that they are part of his optic. The challenge of distancing modernism becomes, for Smith, part of the process of situating it. So here he renews his suggestion that the period category of modernism be replaced by that of the formalesque. Tost', the signifier which indicates sense of being 'after', is legitimate but limited in its purchase, necessarily limited to those who have this sense of the new as the old. The categories cross over from art into social criticism. Thus, postmodernism fancies itself as the new order which replaces the modern. Earlier, similar processes occurred in the art world. Postimpressionism came after impressionism; only impressionism persisted. Postmodernism, similarly, announces its arrival as the new model but it is only the new model of the modern, that is, it is the modern itself, not as period but as attitude. Yet modernity continues. There could be no other way than this for cultures are internally pluralised. Regardless of the legitimacy of its claims to originality, whatever is new has to take its place in the context of

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everything which goes before. Abba is dead, the Beatles no more; next minute, they are back with a vengeance. If all civilisations recycle, then modernity or postmodernity recycle more than most; there is an increasing proliferation of available styles, images, and ideas upon which they draw. Cultural traffic becomes more dense; and the permanent pluralism of all cultures becomes more entrenched. There will always be competing gods; now there are more than ever. In this sense the phenomenon of postmodernism is entirely predictable within Smith's way of thinking. There is nothing new under the sun. What he now calls the formalesque is essentially a nineteenth-century style which continues to live through the twentieth century: It was a European style inspired by non-European arts of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Pacific at a time when Europe was the colonial master of the world ... The history of the formalesque is the history of the transformation of primitivism into a twentieth century legitimating classicism.15 To locate modernism in this way is also to establish something of the perspective within which postmodernism can be placed. Postmodernism, then, is more accurately identified as twentieth-century modernism, connected into that stream which has its origins in the period of the Great War, Dada, surrealism, the Neue Sachlichkeit. Postmodernism, for Smith, is an inherently paradoxical notion, reflecting perhaps the sense that ours is the moment of high paradox: it is 'the modernism of the present'.16 Historically speaking, the postmodern will also pass; and it will then return, in different ways. Can the idea of the formalesque be expected to catch on? It is difficult to say, though I suspect not. Of course, we do not control the use of language, though we do exercise choice within it. Smith's own path shows the power of influence; as one of the first, in another moment, to coin the notion of postmodernism, he has also introduced other now standard terms into discussion and criticism. He named the Port Jackson Painter, Federation style, and suggested the image of the ignoble savage as well as naming the idea of European vision itself. The critical power of the idea of formalesque is, I think, considerable; it orients concern towards the dominance of form over content, a modern attribute which arguably parallels its cerebral turn, the hegemony of the abstract and

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so on. Smith's usage of the 'formalesque' seeks to locate aesthetic modernism as a style or genus; in this it is consistent with his sense that types organise things better than image of authorship or the masterwork. More basically, the image of the formalesque seeks to remind that the image of forms ought not to be constructed as though it were exhaustive of the world; we form, and transform, but we also exist in other ways or upon other levels. And it is in these that we connect back to those endless generations that came before us. We will always remain creatures of the long past, as well as inhabitants of the new. RETHINKING THE COLONIAL We live today, however, amidst the sense of 'post', after, exhaustion, the need for more novelty rather than less; this much in the west, or the more affluent parts of it anyway. Certainly postmodernism is a European, and a Eurocentric worldview; many of the more suffering peoples on the globe would doubtless enjoy a little more modernity. The proliferation of 'posts', however, has also had its effect outside the centres, or especially within the diasporic movements between the peripheries and centres, as evidenced in the rise of subaltern studies. These are other kinds of antipodean voices, containing some of the viewpoints, for example, of privileged outcasts, inhabitants of the old colonies such as India who have gone to Oxford and learned about deconstruction. It is not yet apparent precisely whose voices these are; when postcolonialism speaks from the centre, those remaining in the periphery have cause to wonder who is speaking for whom, and about what. Nevertheless, postcolonialism can mean something more situated or self-conscious than postmodern sometimes does; unfortunately talk of the postmodern often seems to work at such a level of abstraction as to appear fully modernist in the extent of its will-to-power. Postcolonialism, by comparison, has an obvious historical referent; it is caught up with what historically comes after the end of the formal period of colonialism in the wake of the Second World War. Postcolonialism is a kind of cultural consequence of decolonisation and its own contradictions. Bernard Smith addresses some of these kinds of concerns in a paper entitled 'Modernism and post-modernism: neo-colonial viewpoint - concerning the sources of modernism and post-modernism in the visual arts'.17 Smith's orienting device on this occasion is less to

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think the long, than perhaps the wide, view. His perspective here is less that of all hitherto preceding civilisations, than it is of those which presently jostle for notice across the global screen. Smith departs from the observation that the discourse concerning modernism and postmodernism is far too conventionally European in its inflexion. An important if troubling book, such as Said's Orientalism, begins to break into this kind of sphere, but it also needs to be located. Orientalism is too big a category for its own good; within disciplines such as sociology people have been known to use 'Orientalism' locally as a synonym for 'alterity', but it is the other way around; 'Orientalism' is a kind of othering. In the context of Smith's concern, here, more specifically with the visual arts, Orientalism needs rather to be located as a subclass of the exotic. To locate Orientalism generically, as a mode of perception, we must come to terms with the exotic as a way of seeing.18 Smith offers a shorthand definition: the exotic involves the aestheticisation of the strange and of the stranger. All the hallmarks of Smith's thinking are evident here; the phenomena presented to us as absolute need to be historicised for they have precedents; nothing under the sun is completely new. To historicise, however, is not only a gesture internal to a stream of culture; it is also to historicise externally or comparatively. The exotic is a worldly phenomenon, not only an aesthetic gesture. Historically, economically, the exotic emerges out of the carnage and spoils of war. God! war, violence: there it is again, framing the civilisation and high culture which rests so heavily upon it. History sticks its ugly head in the gallery door: After the subjugation of the defeated, what were spoils are, by agreed processes such as gifting, exchange and marketing, transformed into trade. Human societies have the choice of dominating other societies or of being dominated by them; no societies, historically, have ever existed in complete isolation from others.19

Trade follows conquest; it is built upon the pursuit of desire for what we lack, the other, the exotic. The process, however, is time-bound; the exotic comes with a use-by date. When the exotic is assimilated into the lifestyle of the dominant community its exotic appeal diminishes, and may even become archaic. Cultures, thus, are built in traffic and in conquest; they are consumptive, as well as productive in nature.

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The aesthetic appeal of the exotic and the archaic need to be distinguished, in Smith's thinking. The archaic, when appropriated as tradition, legitimates; the exotic, by comparison, revivifies.20 Modernism can be considered in this light as an expression of the twentiethcentury exotic. The European colonisation of the world inspired three major European cultural aspirations: the desire to create a universal art, a universal religion and a universal politic. Europe was, after all, both an imperial power and the avant-garde of modernism. To push the argument this far, Smith also needs to reinsinuate the distinction between modernity and modernism. He defines them here with immaculate precision: By modernity I refer to the condition of European civilisation after it had assimilated the lessons of the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and their consequences. Early modernism emerges around the turn of the century as a critique of that modernity, and ends around 1960 as the accepted cultural expression of it.21 European visual culture sought to assimilate the exotic in order both to revive itself internally and to project itself globally as an international form. In this regard, it is Gauguin rather than Cezanne or even Picasso who is the archetypical modernist in art. Early modernist painting and sculpture is therefore predicated almost entirely upon the exotic, upon non-European rather than European sources; here Picasso follows Gauguin. But again, within art this originally occurs on the level of formal mimesis rather than convergence of styles or cultures. Nevertheless, the recognition of other is there, even conspicuously. Primitivism appears more directly in these mimetic forms, as in the African images in Picasso's work, but it also takes some more radically distinct forms. Eventually, according to the formalist aesthetic, a blank canvas became acceptable as a painting, or the artist might simply name the work, as in the case of Duchamp's ready-mades like the famous urinal.22 Smith described this latter process as geniusism, the primitivising of originality, the cult of genius dissociated from craft skill. 'Ready-mades', of course, were not ready-made at all, except in the sense that, like clothing, they were already there, on the rack; somebody did actually make Duchamp's urinal first, and their hand would remain as invisible as was the hand which carved out the landscape. Surrealism then helped to confirm this primitivisation of modernism,

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and Freud helped to primitivise the European mind at the same time as Lucien Levy-Bruhl Europeanised the primitive mind. The result was that by the end of the nineteenth century the primitive exotic was thoroughly Europeanised. In any case, styles find authors rather than authors creating styles. What we call originality resides not in the component parts, but in the mix; ergo Marx. Postmodernism, then, needs to be located as postformalism; it is a response to this style of formalism. Postmodernism is therefore the modernism of its own time. Postmodernism is late twentieth-century modernism. Formalism collapses partly under pressure from the rediscovery and reassertion of difference which coincides with the Vietnam War and the 1960s revival of social movements. Yet postmodernism often also extends formalism or else appropriates from it selectively. Classical motifs tend more often to be viewed now as moribund; a new romanticism feels much more attracted to the exotic, to the primitivism of Africa and Asia, even sometimes of Australia. This process goes together with the reconstruction of cultural tourism, so that what seemed 'old' in European cathedrals and medieval cities has now been outdone by even older civilisations such as the Aboriginal. Modernity remains, then, ever deeply entranced by traditions, especially by those of other peoples. All this argument could be viewed as an extension of the logic of European Vision and the South Pacific, but that

would also be to misplace in priority the significance of author and style. Smith came to think this way as a part of the process which he also set out to explain. The originality of insight was not in the components but in the mix, in this case in the perspective afforded by peripheral vision or by being antipodean, hooked ever into several systems at least. The neo-colonial avant-garde faced a choice: to work largely in the centres and to accommodate their views into the dominant culture, or else to remain in their own neo-colonial societies and seek to create an art in the spatial interstices that were opening out in the spheres established by European vision. They would behave as displaced Europeans or else as antipodeans; they could open up more fully to European trends, or they could work the tension. As in art, so in social theory. Smith's work is part of the trajectory that he traces. Its acuity rests precisely in its tension between Europe and periphery, reason and experience. Like master and slave, these are tensions without end.

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In the history of art reception, however, these differences are even finer. As Smith observes, the European powers took in the art of their direct colonies fairly directly, even if they then primitivised it, made it exotic as a condition of entry into the pantheon of real art. The tribal art of Europe's former colonies has become well known and widely collected by European public and private collectors. The situation in antipodean locations such as Australia is different. Australia, of course, was not physically colonised in the same way as was India or Sri Lanka or those various parts of Africa which became known to us as British, French, Belgian or German. Countries like Australia were, for this reason, better described as neo-colonial rather than postcolonial; they had not been colonies so much as they had been dominions, exploiters of the local peoples as well as victims of the centres, political intermediaries in the global relations of masters and slaves, historic middlemen of the civilising process on the edge of the planet. For most of the twentieth century, the art of the settler peoples of South America, Asia, Africa, Australia and New Zealand remained marginal. In the margin, they were somehow nevertheless not of it, in the tribal sense. The antipodes was visited less by art collectors than by ethnologists, who heaped their booty into the colonial museums where it now lies in decay. Fifty years after the publication of Place, Taste and Tradition, Smith's example of the positive test-case of this view remains the Mexican experience, where five centuries of Spanish domination had created something much more like cultural convergence than Australia had yet been able to manage. Mexico returned, as did Toynbee and Marx, to ghost us. The greatest modern Mexican artists, Juan Posada, Orozco, Rivera, David Siqueros and Frida Kahlo, all sought to express their modernity, their own individuality and a sense of national identity through artwork that continues to fascinate us precisely because of its combination of forms and techniques, the portrait, the surreal, the public mural.23 Smith's strong concern in this argument, then, is to emphasise the extent to which modernism's aesthetic romanticism was also its culture of colonialism. To locate modernism in the twentieth century, approaching the Great War, is also, necessarily, to locate it within the context of a world-system where colonialism ruled, not as an accident or residual presence but as a vital and formative motif. Modernism was also a colonialism. This was not to spit at it, so much as to seek to laugh,

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cry and understand. Modernism as a period style, modernism as formalism, was as Smith argued, the child of the nineteenth rather than the twentieth century; this meant that it was as bound into the ethos of the old world as of the new. Its universalist aspirations, then, emerged at the very same time when Europe was at the height of its colonial power. Hence modernism could never really be properly understood if it were separated as a discrete aesthetic or as a modular form of society. Neither such thing ever existed anyway. But this was also to raise other questions, among them the query whether the idea of period style which had been suggested by Winckelmann still worked. Smith picked up this issue in a paper given to the Power Institute in Sydney in October 1994 - 'Modernity and the formalesque', for evidently the whole idea of period style had been upset by the antinomies of speaking about the modern, as attitude and as period style. Smith began, as so often, by talking about history and words. Modernity had to be distinguished from modernism. Modernity was singular, modernisms plural. Modernity was the field, modernisms the fabric. During the last five centuries there has been but one modernity, from which have issued several modernisms. Smith here defines modernity as coextensive with the period from the Renaissance on. Historically speaking, modernity is a mode of social life and organisation which emerges first in Europe from about the sixteenth century on. The Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment, the Industrial, American, French, Russian and Chinese Revolutions are significant moments in its history.24 It is, however, less than helpful to argue that we have now entered postmodernism. Postmodernism is perhaps best understood as the neurosis of fin de siecle. Smith's sustaining sensibility is that we remain more fully creatures of past than of the future: 'No doubt there is a real cause for anxiety', he says, *but I see no reason to conceptualise the present in terms of the future'.25 We can anticipate the future, but we live in a present that is past. Moderns may well be future-oriented, more than inhabitants of other civilisations have been, but however fragile our capacity to read the past, definition by the future is too astrological, too infinitely speculative and open-ended. Futurism, of course, is also an archaism of a sort; there are no pure styles or cultures and there never will be. Modernity in its contemporary form is, for Smith, best understood as the age of global capitalism. Capitalism provides the foundation for European power

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and the motive force for its globalisation. The precedent for globalisation is imperialism; but there are also some different and interesting changes now going on. Modernity was no longer Eurocentric in the way in which it originally was. It now had at least three major geographical centres: Europe proper, North America, Japan and Southeast Asia. What earlier used to be called 'organised capitalism' was now more than ever a series of forces which were out of control. The unpredictable relationship between the productive and destructive dynamics of capital, the driving power behind modernity, was increasingly more haphazard and dangerous.26 This much on modernity. On modernisms, Smith wants to insist that there are several. Modernisms are not reflections of modernity; they begin life as artistic and aesthetic critiques of the ideologies of modernity but they are then usually folded over in the course of their own history into complicit expressions of the bourgeois values that together constitute the ethics of modernity.27 The first modernism is neo-classicism. Neo-classicism both pioneered primitivism and twisted it in a futurist direction, for it revived primitivism and at the same time it launched Europe's first avant-garde. It was Claude-Henri SaintSimon who had coined the phrase in 1802, bringing together Utopian and classical themes with those of technocracy and militarism. Pushing forward, the avant-garde nevertheless looked back. Other modernisms followed: a neo-classical modernism, a medievalising modernism, an impressionist modernism. As Smith puts it, each succeeded in revising, rather than erasing, Europe's embattled classical tradition. So it was that Winckelmann's History of the Art of Antiquity (1764) paradoxically became the bible of modern art.28 This was a central gesture in the modern process of inventing tradition or establishing (or renewing) modern mythologies of foundation. When it comes to matters of period style, however, the pluralisation of art and social forms makes things more difficult. Forms or parts of romantic, surreal or primitive styles recycle unpredictably. Certainly the currency of the idea of the postmodern is caught up with this sense that anything goes, the logic of which would suggest that the idea of period style is over. It is as though kitsch rules, and is new. Only period styles have also been plural; modernisms are also mixed. To refer back to Kuhn's classic on The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, whatever the case in natural sciences may be, social sciences or liberal arts are always characterised by

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competing perspectives. The normal state of play in social sciences is that no one paradigm rules absolutely; there may be dominant or fashionable trends, but there is also traffic and contest. In this context, the idea of period style is probably best defended as a means to historicise; postmodernism, too, can and ought to be located within history. For Smith the point of this argument is to return, again, to the question of naming. How might we best characterise the dominance of form in modernism? Smith returns, now, to the idea of formalism and (to set it apart) offers the idea of formalesque as a way to place aesthetic modernism. Cubism still, in a certain way, looks back, Dada staggers forward. This is to align modernism, again, more firmly with the closing century, with the work of Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and to view the figurative more than formalesque style of Dada as a move to open up the sense of the new which the postmodern now arrogates to itself. Not that any of Smith's critique of the postmodern cult is angry; it is not even conspicuously weary. In fact, what surprises and refreshes the reader of Smith's work (more so those who meet him) is the sense of ongoing curiosity and youth of the thinking. This leaves us midstream, in a sense, rather than within glimpse-distance of the abyss. His is a project driven by curiosity more than anxiety, even as we approach the millennium; for there are others, also, behind us. MODERN ART AND CULTURAL IMPERIALISM Bernard Smith is still writing; at the time of writing he was working on a book, at that point entitled 'Modern Art and Cultural Imperialism'. This is a kind of Summa of his life's work, though I do not think he sees it in that way; it is a reconsideration of very many of the themes which have guided his work, as they face the new century. Here we find the most sustained of his encounters with the postmodern. Smith's anticipated conclusion is that by the year 2000 postmodern talk will have had its day. Post-mode (the idea that something is chronologically after a fashion), after all, is a style, and styles are not eternal. His strategy in the manuscript is to be more provocative up front, then, predictably, to step back and sketch out the context. Smith's way in to the discussion of postmodernism here is through the associated, but in a way prior, phenomenon of postindustrialism. In principle, we can anticipate Smith's response to any such apocalyptic indication that 'the world changed' at such and such a time and place. Propositions like

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this are necessarily hyperbolic; they can only be answered at the same time with a 'yes' and a 'no'. Senses of recent change indeed seem dramatic. Yet for the majority of the inhabitants of the globe it is industrialisation which is the dominant fact or imperative of life. The postindustrial perspective, in other words, is short on history and too thoroughly Eurocentric or, more literally, Euruscentric, driven by the east wind and animated by different centres in the Americas, Europe and Asia.29 All the same, these are the kinds of problems which lead others to endorse so readily categories such as the postindustrial and the postmodern. For the feelings and associations evoked by those terms are apparent; we are, or we should be, after modular modernism and modernisation theory. It remains rather less clear that we can meaningfully anticipate being after industry or beyond modernity. From where Smith stands, the postindustrial view errs in the same way as some postmoderns do - it shifts the interpretative balance from past to future, without confessing how much more contingent the latter actually is. More, in the end theories of postindustrialism, like Daniel Bell's in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, reveal themselves finally as nostalgic, archaic in their desires if not in their expectations. As with the medieval archaism of Ruskin, this nostalgia may be in some ways attractive but in others is not; and in any case it is not a serious option. Smith aligns Bell's nostalgia with that of the Guild Socialist A. J. Penty, who was apparently the first to use the word 'postindustrial' in 1917.30 The year 1917 was a less than sympathetic choice in time; the Russian Revolution opened another attempt at modernisation. What Penty meant by postindustrialism, then, apparently lay closer to preindustrialism: the way forward was the way back. Only Penty owned up to this, whereas Bell did not; perhaps it was much more difficult to do so in the heartlands of modernism in Pax Americana. None of this discussion bodes well for the status of postmodernism. If postindustrialism manages to miss the point, what then of postmodernism? In this text, as elsewhere, Smith turns back initially from talk of the postmodern to the discussion of modernity. Now he engages with the work of Anthony Giddens, seeking to push back Giddens' periodisation a century - modernity opens with the sixteenth, not the seventeenth century. Capitalism and the nation-state, Smith suggests, were already underway then; industrialism, a third indicator, ought not to be

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too readily privileged over capitalism and nation-state as markers. So here, again, Smith is also concerned with thinking about thinking. The interpretative challenge for those who wish seriously to discuss modernity lies in trying to get an accurate sense of the constellation of forces at work. The idea of indicating that modernity 'began', say, with Descartes, is in principle no more ridiculous than saying that the world changed with an impressionist exhibition or the dynamiting of a modernist tower block. It is not only the mentality of rupture which is misleading, implying as it does closure, the end of influence, traditions, of the past. This way of thinking also tends to be unilinear, onedimensional. To select, say, Descartes as the marker of the break, is to privilege one discourse (in this case, philosophy) as a metonym for general history. It is to seek to represent a complex constellation of forces by a single appellant part. Smith's sense of knowledge is different - it is an invitation to a conversation, not a demand for singlefactor solutions to complex and ultimately unanswerable problems. Within this broader matrix, Smith suggests, modernity might then be defined as the combination of its generative components: capitalism, industrialism and the nation-state (and thereby, the global system which combines nation-states). Modernism, in this rendition, might then be viewed as one aspect of the culture of modernity.31 The qualification inserted by Smith is small but significant: modernism might then be one aspect of the culture of modernity. Smith remains resistant to the modular logic of mainstream sociology or of historical materialism, where successive modes of production each have their own cultural, ideological and political modules or packages. It follows from the logic of Smith's civilisational thinking that conventional historical materialism is a convenient fiction. No economy could consist of a single mode of production, any more than any particular culture could be purely 'modern' or 'romantic' or 'medieval'. This is not the way the world works, neatly or compartmentally, simply given to the canon of the Bolshevik or boosterist mind. Yet the sensibility jars, if we are to determine that Smith's position is not one of affinity with the idea of historical materialism, for as I hope to have shown in this study it is simultaneously both historical and materialist. The echoes, I have suggested, are however with the practice of the earlier Marx, say in The German Ideology, more than with the structural architectonic of Capital; and it belongs to a different level of sophistication (and a

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different type of historicism) to that of communist orthodoxy. If there is a sense in which Smith's work could be described as historical materialism, then it would still be necessary to insist, clumsily, that it is a project of historical materialism in history or in culture. For what marks out historical materialism after Marx is exactly its indifference to history. Smith is more interested in cultural production than in the idea of modes of production - modes, styles, fashions, these are significant but need not be fetishised. Production, in any case, also involves reproduction and consumption. These are all moments in a life process which is ontologically bound. To separate them might be analytically legitimate, but only within that process of ongoing conversation which we call interpretation or seeking to understand. As I have indicated, patterning or the use of types is one constituent part of this process called thinking; and the point about it is not that it is for good or evil, but how it is engaged. Some typologies freeze; others work in a more contingent manner. At the same time, as Smith makes plain especially after European Vision and the South Pacific, thinking is a negotiative process which works between senses of origin and sensibilities about where we find ourselves. Understanding, however thorough or partial, issues from the field of tensions between reason and experience. To put it bluntly, you know what you know, but you must also be open to whatever is happening in the market place and in the public arenas. Smith, therefore, always has a sense of precedent for thinking about postmodernism, but he also engages with its literatures. At this point he turns to the work of Ihab Hassan. Hassan mixes his own approaches to the phenomenon called postmodern. He defines it against the modern, but he also indicates that the two coexist. Certainly the latter approach is closer in sympathy to Smith's; the problem is not to establish whether the postmodern exists, on this account, so much as it is to locate it. But to define the postmodern against the modern as binary options is to give the game away, for binary pairs are supposed to be characteristically modernist blinkers. The idea of setting modern and postmodern against each other, in this manner, collapses in on itself, helping to reinforce instead the civilisational point that forms combine.32 Same /difference gives way to a plurality of forms. Next Smith turns to the work of Charles Jencks, the leading postmodern in architecture. Jencks is important not least of all in his

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exuberance. A brilliant photographer, his texts combine visuals and text in a highly celebrative response to built environment. Jencks seems to believe that we (he) live(s) in a world which progressively becomes better and better, at least after the death of modernism. The things a new architecture could do! Smith concludes that whatever else Jencks has achieved, some more modest progress at least could be registered. As a result of Jencks' persistent advocacy a clear divergence began to emerge between the way in which the term 'postmodern' was used in literary criticism (and then philosophy) and the way it was used in architecture. In literary criticism and philosophy it was conducted usually as a form of deconstruction; in architectural criticism it was conducted taxonomically and empirically, supplemented by semiotics. By their practice we could know them.33 The sense of difference is one motif which holds Smith's work together. Distinct practices occur on different sites or locations; environments and legacies differ. The most striking claim Smith was to make against Jencks here - and against the general French terror of the gaze - was to argue that he projected the image of language beyond its proper realm. Smith thus reminds us, indirectly, that there are at least two main symbolic bids for intellectual power in our century: those of the eye and of the word. It has become fashionable to single out the eye as the dominant symbol of a will-to-power; but as Smith says of Descartes and the definition of modernity, we must beware of the fallacy of metonym, of mistaking part for whole and thereby misunderstanding both. At least since the Second World War it has also been fashionable (if increasingly less fashionable) to identify (and identify with) the linguistic turn. In Smith's view, these are both illegitimate, because they represent partial attempts to foreclose on knowledge by circumscribing it. In one register, the eye becomes everything; in the other, the word. But we only ever see, or speak or hear, within a thick context of other activity. Jencks, for his part, gets the emphasis awry by treating architecture as if it were a language. It is not a language but an art, an art of construction. Jencks, in other words, makes buildings speak . . . but they do not.34 To think in the register which would ask: 'what does this building say to you?', is to get back the other side of Feuerbach, to ascribe meaning to things rather than to the symbolic interpretations which we put upon them. But moderns, it seems, cannot live without fetish. In fact, Smith would probably say, it

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is the other way round; however modern or post, we ever still need ghosts and fetishes, intellectuals as much as others (maybe more so). At various points in his life's work Smith posits and puzzles with that aphorism of Schopenhauer, that all of the arts aspire to the condition of music. The most sublime, music is also the most opaque, the least visual of arts. In his manuscript on modern art and cultural imperialism Smith returns to Schopenhauer again. This time he observes that many modernists, in fact, believed Schopenhauer, took him at his word. All things could perish, but music would live, and we would survive with it.35 Even Adorno had chosen poetry as the expressive art which would not survive the Holocaust; the status of music in his diagnosis was unspoken. As Smith laments, the musicalisation of art took some time to wear off; and then it passed, only to be replaced by the logic of semiotic theory which indicated that visual arts could be treated as if they were languages. As if; a is like b, a is b. Intellectuals seem always to have their work cut out; so soon as one phantasm is driven away, another is constructed to take its place. If we are obliged to take on both a visual and a linguistic turn into the twentieth century, then the very least we ought to do is seek to hold them together. 'Reading' and 'seeing' can both quite readily become inflationary categories, not least of all because of the human propensity to project which so often seems to underwrite them. We seem ever bound to be anthropomorphic and fetishistic in the ways we think, seeing ourselves everywhere and yet, for this very same reason, failing to identify human authorship when we see it. When it comes to architecture, anyway, there is no accounting for taste, so that Smith finds himself somewhat dismayed by Jencks' pursuit of certainty via a fixed syntax of categorical forms. This is, tongue-in-cheek, far too serious a kind of modernism for a postmodernism within which anything goes. A critic like Fred Jameson arguably has a more detached position than Jencks; and so Smith's narrative takes him on through discussion of Jameson, Rosalind Krauss, Jean-Frangois Lyotard. We can intuit some possible affinities between Smith and Jameson; both are Marxists and yet not, and both know that culture is prior. Jameson, however, has a well-publicised relationship of dependency on the periodisation indicated by the Belgian Trotskyist Ernest Mandel in his Late Capitalism (1975). Mandel attempts (among other things) to weld together the idea of economic

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long-waves and the more conventional of historical materialisms. In Jameson's work, the relation between economy and culture becomes paradoxical. Unlike many advocates of the postmodern, Jameson does not seek to replace 'economy' with 'culture'. Yet in relating the two back together in more orthodox Marxist manner, culture again begins to look like a correspondence to or expression of economy. For a way of thinking like Smith's, this is all too disturbingly neat; it looks good on a blackboard, but it closes off at least as much as it reveals. Smith remains unconvinced by this kind of schematism, as by the strictures of the hard periodisation which indicates that we now inhabit 'late' capitalism. 'Late' is a bit like 'post'; it makes sense in an immediate way, but on reflection you wonder.36 Smith has a similar response to the work of Lyotard. For Lyotard, too, takes with one hand what he gives away with the other. So we receive a serious missal called The Postmodern Condition which finally admits that the 'condition' is a moment of the modern; but people don't read past the Preface, or the Afterword. The illusions that intellectuals have about books are even more astral than those that they have about the way the world works. Not that Smith is dismissive of Lyotard; on the contrary, he reads the text, and reads it primarily as a book about science rather than as a compendium of cliches regarding allegedly obsolete metanarratives. Lyotard's text was supposed to be a report on knowledge; Smith takes him at his word. His response can be anticipated, Lyotard sets modern times too much against the past. He exoticises the 'past'. He opposes modernity to the classical age which for him is a kind of timeless time. Knowledge itself seems to be some kind of impossibility; stoicism, incommensurability are all that we have to shield us against a new frozen age. Obviously Lyotard is on to something; senses of knowability, attitudes toward time change dramatically under modernity. And at the same time, or moment, they do not, except for the consciousness of those who are caught in the vortex, or leap into it. In any case, Lyotard is also a modern; why else would he discuss the sublime, or Kant? As Smith puts it, Lyotard is a modernist, but a modernist in fear and trembling.37 Lyotard's work invites a civilisational analysis of thinking, not least of all with reference to French favourite narratives, existentialism alongside psychoanalysis and the sublime. But this is to ask for context, and that's asking a lot.

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Having suggested the idea of the formalesque as a category for 'modernism7, Smith now adds a new suggestion: 'postmode' for postmodern. The idea of mode, of course, stresses the significance of style, both in the aesthetic sense and as an historic phase which passes and recycles. The focus of his manuscript on culture and imperialism then turns again, to modernity and its modernisms, back to go forward rather than forward to refer back to the present. So his manuscript turns through older times and new, fascism and the New Deal and Soviets, the twentieth century as a frame and that which frames it in turn. As I hope to have shown, the concerns of Smith's text are both old and new; his theoretical position is both historically grounded and yet reactive to what appear as new modes. Nowhere is this more evident than in the orientation. Smith's study of modern art and cultural imperialism echoes all the way back to his 1942 lecture on 'Art and imperialism'. Art comes first, is the substantive term in both cases; imperialism is more of a Marxian indicator, but it also shows context, historicity, it echoes back into civilisational thinking, thinking about empires, power and culture comparatively and on the long scale of time. Bernard Smith's work lives knowingly with the ghosts of its past. This may help to explain the integrity of the project; it may also gesture towards its modesty. If individuals choose styles, the styles nevertheless speak through them. If we choose the vocabulary, then we also will the consequences. Thinking, in other words, is a serious business, too serious to leave to those without a sense of humour. For if speaking, and writing are acts of consequence, then we also need to contemplate the fact that these consequences are beyond us. To know the repertoire is one cause we ought to be committed to if we seek, like Smith, to think back but to wander forward. At least, in this way, those ghosts of the past might be behind us, not leading.

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What might it mean to imagine the antipodes? Where have we come from, and where are we going? What provisional conclusions might then be drawn from this study? There are many, for Smith's is a rich body of work. There are some that concern social theory in Australia, and which affect the conduct of theory more generally. My claim in this book is that Bernard Smith's work adds up to the most sophisticated social theory which has yet been developed in Australia; and given that antipodean means European as well as Australian, this argument means that I am valuing his work very highly. But how might the project be characterised? I have suggested Smith's project is a peculiar kind of Marxism which works like a sponge or net; what is striking about Smith's Marxism is that/like Marx's, it is filled up with other things and ways of thinking rather than with authorised Bolshevik canon and the routine list of compulsory categories. Je ne suis pas marxiste is a description which fits Smith's work as well as it does that of Karl Marx. Yet to view Smith's work as social theory is also to open some obvious but protected questions as to the nature of theory. I have suggested that Smith's work has several more or less distinct audiences among anthropologists, art historians and those perhaps interested in biography or in Australian studies. My sense is that Smith's readers have often failed fully to register the significance of his work because, by virtue of being his contemporaries, they have received his books and essays sporadically, often as they have been created or produced. This is the particular justification for the procedure followed in this book, of seeking to establish the lineages in Smith's patchwork quilt, thoughts 183

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leading to others, images and puzzles resurfacing later. But the argument of this book is that there are also some larger concerns and coordinates which animate Smith's project and hold it together over fifty years. My purpose here, then, has been to profile Smith's work as social theory, to sort out how his way of thinking works, to tease out the larger social theoretical contours in his work as against the authorised, compulsory French and canonic claims about what counts as social theory. Indeed, one purpose of this book is to work against the image of authorised theory. As Smith argues in the context of art history, it is useful to shift from arguments concerning heroic authors and exemplary masterworks towards more expansive sensibilities regarding types of art (or theory) which then recycle in different ways. What really counts as theory may not always present itself as such. However, this is only one line of possible explanation of such problems in constructing or receiving knowledge. In social theory, as in art history, it is necessary to eschew the bad alternatives of nationalism and internationalism. If being antipodean means, among other things, being both European and Australian, then the defence of this kind of positioning is not that it sets the local against the global but rather that it seeks to re-present the local as the global. If, as Smith argues, the problem with internationalism is its false universalism, abstract claims with a Soviet or American heart, then the nature of the global also has to be problematised in its specificity. What we call the local is never just local, least of all in the antipodes. Yet the global might also, in this context, be imagined as the sum of its parts and not only as a new Americanism or as a new kind of virtual identity or corporate simulacra. What, then, ought to count as theory? As Smith observes, the nature of power and its implication through the world system means that theory is valorised in the centres, even if it does not originate there. What we say in the antipodes might count for us, but it will really count for us if someone significant elsewhere adopts it, borrows it and tells us it back. This is exactly the process which helps explain the rise of postcolonialism. If the victims of colonial culture proclaim their talents or protest their suffering in the peripheries, the centres will not listen until the echo is redistributed through the centres by those who are authorised to speak. Fanon's complaint about power is relatively unheard until Foucault speaks it, or Derrida adopts something like it. Such are the oddities of how culture works, from Picasso's adoption of African motifs through to the rise of postcolonial theory.

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Smith's thinking, then, among other things is concerned with the tyrannies of the mind or of received patterns of thinking which indicate set circuits of thought that must be obeyed. The key message of European Vision and the South Pacific concerns just this process, the way in which (as with postcolonialism) the peripheries affect the centres, and the way in which the inhabitants of the centres project their templates elsewhere. This latter trend has, arguably, been a major problem in the contemporary conduct of social theory. When Perry Anderson lamented the absence of a Durkheim or a Weber from the English intellectual scene in the 1960s he himself was acting out the kind of cultural predicament which Smith set out to explain. For the phenomenon works both ways: we see what we are looking for, and identify what differs in terms of deficiency or lack (no English Weber, no Australian Foucault), and at the very same time we fail to register what is present, but differs, fails to profile in or complement the authorised template. Problems to do with reception and perspective are thus central for Smith. Ironically, this also helps to explain how badly Smith could be misunderstood or misrepresented. If the thought processes of recognition and misrecognition which Smith established in European Vision and the South Pacific are at all generalisable, then the misreading of Smith's work is part of the same kind of monologue. Viewed in this way, some of the misrepresentations of Smith as too communist, too American, or of European Vision as a book about European impact on the Pacific and not the contrary, make more sense. In anticipating misrepresentation as an activity Smith also anticipates the possible misrepresentation of his own work. For all the complexity of contemporary social theory, it is as though anything other than a simple proposition will not be heard. LOCATING SMITH'S THEORY Bernard Smith was told several times by important persons over the years that there was no such thing as Australian art. Those who know, or claim to know, seem to work on similar premises about social theory; no such thing, obvious. It should be easy to imagine the response from Smith, or in his way of thinking: depends on what you are looking for. Doing theory is not a matter of sticking our antipodean heads through the cutout holes in plywood profiles of Foucault or Habermas; there are more sensible things that Australians choose to do at the beach. But the self-appellation or self-valorisation of our activities here will not

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necessarily register elsewhere. Like the platypus/mermaid, our profiles elsewhere may be cast as silly, fraudulent. To be antipodean is to be told who or what you are. The irritation of such circumstances is abundant, not least of all because of the extent to which being antipodean involves also being other. Smith's generation, his mates in Sydney, were more upset by the Spanish Civil War than by flat surfing conditions at Bondi Beach/For Smith, the antipodean moment of his formation was primarily the result of other, global forces, fascism and communism. The most prominent event of that moment for Smith was the 1937 Munich Anti-Degenerate Art Exhibit. Politics and art ran together; teaching, pedagogy, democratic activity and joining the Communist Party through its Teachers' Branch all came together. Like other inhabitants of the thirties, Bernard Smith encountered his world as contingent, in decline, degenerative. This was the context of his turn to civilisational thinking. He read Marx and Toynbee, Sorokin and Spengler, Nordau and Freud and Eliot. He encountered surrealism, painted Lot and Pompeii at the edge of its influence, lectured about surrealism, picked up its civilisational aspects in manuscripts such as 'Reversion and growth in art'. Place, Taste and Tradition was the first public occasion on which these things were collected together. The significance of Place, Taste and Tradition ought not to be overshadowed by the later achievement of Australian Painting, for Place, Taste, among other things, fed directly into European Vision; the themes of the latter, pathbreaking work are already apparent in the opening of the former. But such controversy as met Place, Taste responded not to its opening but to its closing, to Smith's wicked insistence on discussing fascism and communism in 1944. As though they affected art. Australian Painting elaborated on various themes posited in Place, Taste: pastoral, melancholy, the arcadian, and it surveyed various modernist trends into the sixties. Imagining the Pacific embellished in similar ways on the theses of European Vision. European Vision, as I have emphasised, worked at least two related axes, one concerning the fact of cultural traffic even uphill, in asymmetrical relations of power, the other working on a theme which Smith shared with Gombrich in Art and Illusion, that between what we know and what we see.1 The empire always bites back; no matter how much our superiors deny us influence, their worlds are also constructed through and influenced by relations with the extremities. Reading The Antipodean Manifesto in

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this context then clarifies the extent to which it is not nationalist but antipodean. If abstraction and internationalism are prone to problems of false universalism, so then is nationalism. The vital point for identity in this is that the antipodes is not a place so much as it is a relation, one not of our own choosing but one which also enables us. Yet while some civilisational thinkers, or theorists such as Marx and Toynbee, concern themselves with origins, Smith's work treats the question of origins as largely indeterminate. Against Said in Orientalism Smith refuses the idea that culture like power flows unilaterally, from the centre out onto the peripheries or colonies. In positive moments, Smith argues, different cultures converge; the argument here is closer to that of Nick Thomas, that cultures become entangled.2 There is a strong sense of caution in this way of thinking against overinterpretation or reliance on dubious notions of origin such as authenticity. In this view of the world, as always already mixed, it never becomes clear exactly what or who came first. We only ever know cultures in traffic. Living, with Smith, after heroes is nevertheless still to live with them; heroes represent an archaic need which moderns are unable to dispense with. Arguments about origins are similarly persistent. We cannot resolve them, so we engage in making or remaking myths of origins instead. In the beginning were the mythmakers. Smith, for his own part, lives with thinkers more as stimulants than as heroes or substitutes. Jack Lindsay plays an important part here, for although older than Smith he also puzzles over very many of the same concerns to do with cultures and civilisations, carnivals and saturnalia. Smith's other elective affinities are varied, the ubiquitous Ruskin, contemporaries like Gombrich, Meyer Schapiro, Arthur Lovejoy. Like Smith, Schapiro probes kindred issues of abstraction, romanticism, primitivism, futurism, especially in his great 1937 essay 'The nature of abstract art'.3 With Lovejoy, Smith thinks about the history of ideas or tropes, about soft and hard primitivism and about primitivism itself as a name for a way of thinking.4 In these regards, as elsewhere, Smith's thinking complements his own argument, in that it combines classical elements with contemporary, together with curiosity about the future from Dada to postmodernism. As cultures can be said to recycle, so does Smith's activity recycle arguments in social theory. Smith's more recent arguments placing postmodernism are consistent with his much earlier

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anticipation of postmodernist Australian painting in 1944. Postmodernism, that is to say, has happened before and it has happened here. Smith therefore achieves a rare sense of balance in his capacity to place the postmodern, theoretically and historically; he is neither hostile nor subservient to the great postmodern wave of publication and argument which rises into the 1980s. But this is not only an aesthetic acceptance or valuing of what actually happens culturally; it also reflects the democratic current in his life and work. Smith's writing lives on a tension between aesthetic norms of value and the need to valorise the work of the amateur. Professionalism, in this way of thinking, cuts both ways; art belongs in everyday life, like craft in the household, and not only in cathedrals of capitalism or authorised good taste. As Smith shows in The Boy Adeodatus, while we need to acknowledge the priority of suffering in the world we also ought to celebrate everyday life and those who hold it up. DISTANCING SMITH'S PROJECT How, then, might we position Smith's project, place it at a distance in order to clarify its contours? Viewed in profile, Smith's work is remarkable in its consistency. This itself is an uncommon attribute to make praiseworthy; after all, many theorists are entirely consistent and consistently tedious. It is probably better to say that it is Smith's thinking which is consistent, not his theory. The theory or its substantive concerns also shift; one project anticipates the next, as Place, Taste calls out European Vision, or the most recent essays return to the earlier concerns about rise, decline and regeneration. What holds the project together is Smith's commitment to civilisational analysis. Civilisational thinking in this regard has at least two defining characteristics - it is transhistorical and it is comparative, it thinks against precedents both historical and geographical, contemporary but elsewhere. As we read Smith's work we can almost feel the pulse - whatever happens now, and here, has happened somehow before, and elsewhere, for that is the way in which cultures manoeuvre and negotiate into what we call civilisations, formations of culture based on power. The methodological core of this thinking, however, is also ethical and political. The logic of comparison is a pluralist logic; there are only ever cultures and civilisations, plural. So the logic in Smith's thinking is non-identitarian. Everything is not the same as everything else, even though we need, or

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choose, to compare forms or phenomena. But for Smith's way of thinking, the postmodern distinction between 'same' and 'different' remains a binary distinction. It is not good enough to claim that some ways of thinking (like modernism) only conflate, whereas others (allegedly postmodernism) only register difference, for modernism also contains difference, and at the same time, postmodernism works with stigmata like the 'same'. Smith's thought-patterns are pluralist, because comparative, and then typological in the historical rather than conventionally sociological sense. The arguments seem to emerge from the culture of tradition, the theory to enable its interpretation. Cultures are mobile, then, for Smith, even within the context of asymmetrical power relations; culture works as assemblage. Culture is relational, as is identity; neither is usefully viewed as essential, emanating from spirit, place, land, language or race. To imagine the antipodes is to imagine the relations upon which identity rests and changes. To claim that being antipodean is more to do with relation, with the world system or at least with a plurality of cultures, is therefore to seek also to place geography. Place is important, in this view, but it is not so absolutely formative, as say, Montesquieu may have thought. The capacity for despotism, for example, is also a modern and Caucasian tendency; precisely because cultures mix, because modernity is antimodern or non-modern as well as 'modern' and postmodern, on which basis the Soviet and Nazi experiences need also to be thought through as alternative modernities. Modernity lives upon what we blithely call throwbacks. At the least, then, it is important to argue that we value place in different ways; we make place, rather than it making us. If the conventional distinctions between nature and culture thus emerge as problematical, so then do others like those between space and place. There are various contemporary echoes in thinking like this. The senses of civilisation echo with the better known works of, especially, Fernand Braudel and Norbert Elias; the thinking about culture reminds of Bourdieu, and especially Gramsci, the subaltern, the peripheral, multiple identities, the presence of Vico. But a is like b, a is not b itself. Smith's work is only like Bourdieu's or Gramsci's; it is also distinct. So what kind of theory is Smith's, finally? Perhaps definitions really are notes provisionally to conclude upon, not to begin with. Let me define Smith's work in closing these pages first negatively, then positively.

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The social theory which holds up Bernard Smith's writing is not a general theory like, say, that of Louis Althusser. It does not consist of a constellation of concepts to be applied mechanically by various followers. Smith's books lack authorised glossaries of concepts. His is not a general theory which needs only to be applied to particular cases, nor is it a theory of perception or a psychology. As Freud says, theory is good but it doesn't prevent things from existing. Smith's interest is in what we do, how we live more than how we perceive. Smith's vision reaches out rather than in, out towards culture more than inwards towards mind. Viewed positively, the social theory which animates Smith's writing is an historicism. To speak of theory, for Smith, is to speak towards culture and in history, and history is a necessarily theoretical practice. Marxism, contrary to Althusser's dispensation, is an historicism. But historicism is often taken to be less the sign of a sensitivity to the historicity of things or actors than a philosophy of history, as in Popper's Poverty of Historicism. Smith's is less a philosophy of history and more a theory of history, in Agnes Heller's sense. In her Theory of History, Heller identifies three more common philosophies of history.5 Schematically, they indicate that history works unilinearly as progress (as in Marx), as decline (Rousseau) or in repetition (Nietzsche). Smith, you can sense, if asked the path of history would answer with a smirk - all of the above. All of the above, and therefore none of them. For history contains elements of progress but also of decline, and repetition can be found in human strategies of recycling; but none of these manages to capture it all. To explain further, let me return, again, to some larger influences, Sorokin and Spengler, Toynbee and Marx, and return again to Smith's twist on these optics. CIVILISATIONAL THINKING: NEW BEGINNINGS Sorokin and Spengler, Toynbee and Marx: all four theories can be viewed as civilisational analyses. Sorokin is the least apparent of the civilisational thinkers in Smith's work; his presence is marginal, but the sensibilities are there. In his major work of synthesis, Social and Cultural Dynamics, Sorokin offers a general theory of cycles and civilisations. His work is radical in insight, for as he puts it on the opening page of his treatise, the choice is clear: either culture is immanent or else it is historical and plural. It has to be the latter. More, he proceeds to argue

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that comparison is necessarily pluralising; if we are to compare civilisations then we can only speak of systems of truth and knowledge in the plural. Indeed, Sorokin goes on to imply, as does Smith or Freud, that the truth of a may be not in b but in z - elsewhere, in another time or place.6 Spengler's Decline of the West is, like Smith's work, somewhat misunderstood, only notoriously so. Spengler's image of decline has led to his reception as a philosopher of history in the above-mentioned manner of Rousseau - history, in Spengler's view, is imagined to be one of unilinear decline, downhill all the way. In fact, the content of his massive study points in a different direction, closer if anything to repetition than to decline. History for Spengler is cyclical, seasonal, but his great work is also marked by the period despair of German cultural pessimism. In mordant times, Spengler bemoans the decline of (German) community as the end of the world. He is closer in spirit to Johann Gottfried von Herder, with his identification of place, land, language and culture, or in a local register Spengler's sense of anotnie from modernity reminds of Lawrence's Kangaroo. So while there are some sympathies between part of Spengler's fabric and Smith's project, there are also some radical sources of dissonance. Smith here is closer to Sorokin in spirit; culture is about traffic, not place and Smith is a modernist, at home in this world, or as much as he can be; for Spengler, in comparison, cosmopolitanism is death, traffic is decadence.7 Toynbee's world seems more contemplative than this. The canvas he works upon is even more expansive than that worked by Spengler or Sorokin. The larger motifs recur through the work of Bernard Smith; civilisations recycle, but especially with reference to images of past and future. Particular cultures call up or imagine aspects of archaism or futurism; the argument is especially sympathetic to that modern manipulation of the past which is known as primitivism. In the terms used more often lately, communities lay claim to myths of foundation, nations imagine themselves via nation-builders as communities, culture-makers imagine forwards through boosterism, myths of progress or futures to be fulfilled. As in Smith, and by comparison to philosophies of history as repetition, however, the recycling of cultures is viewed as transformative and not only additive. Thus, Toynbee anticipates the postmodern in historic register in 1939, just as Smith anticipates it in painting five years later. The elective affinity between Smith and Toynbee is strong, for neither seems to believe that anything under

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the sun is entirely new but nor does either imagine that what passes dies altogether. Just as categories like ideal and material cross and fuse in the path of what we know as history, and space and place blur, so does the linear sense of time here dissolve, past and future into present. Now comes the last man, or the first, Karl Marx. Marx is the absent presence in all this. The sympathies are there in Smith's work and they are powerful, even if the textual references or genuflections are sparse. Like Marx, Smith thinks of civilisations as modes of production, but in the more open, pre-Althusserian sense. The strongest textual affinity in Smith's work is with The German Ideology, Smith's project is to seek to criticise or at least to place illusion as a human activity. Like Marx, he thinks of mode of production literally as a fashion or mode, a way of production or creation as a culture or a way of living. Althusserian Marxism schematised the notion of modes of production, as though all human societies could be imagined as conforming to set models of different set variants, feudal or capitalist or socialist. This was also a philosophy of history as progress, rather than a theory of history or historicity. But this is not at all what Marx meant by a mode of production, Produktionsweise, as a far more elastic way of conceiving human history. To put it bluntly, a mode of production is not a thing but a combination of relations which have to be established in their contingency, and in this kind of story ideas such as activity, suffering and anthropology are definitive and not accidental accretions. Neither the Grundrisse nor Capital are at all obviously central to Smith's thinking, though particular images such as the fetishism of commodities and the necessity of viewing art as an institution with economic intent certainly circulate through Smith's writings. Next to The German Ideology, the strongest Marxian affinity in Smith's work is in the figure of ghosting, calling up the past in the present in texts such as The Eighteenth Brumaire. Given his biographical location and formation into the forties, Smith effectively missed out on Marx's Paris Manuscripts, which only became readily available into the 1960s. The image of alienation, the key theme within the Manuscripts was, in any case, a reworking of earlier romantic anti-capitalist claims in Rousseau and Schiller, whom Smith read independently.8 Bernard Smith, then, is a civilisational thinker with a difference: there is no system in his work. Sorokin, Spengler, Toynbee and Marx all together laboured on massive multi-volume projects of majestic synthesis. Smith read all these tomes, but chose instead to write mono-

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graphs on aspects as they summoned him. The logic of this work by instalments, if it needs a parallel, is more like the work of Weber than that of Marx, or more like what Marx did before Capital than the theoretical heights which he dreamed of abseiling into the 1850s. All these other civilisational thinkers were maniacal multivolumists, rationalists who thought that you could actually get it all down on paper. Smith's theoretical attitude is more detached and curious, more conversational and hermeneutical; for individuals mesh horizons just as civilisations do. Smith builds no complete system, aspires to no synthesis other than the artifacts, the pile of books which he has given us. He tells stories, rather, about exemplary instances of the worldsystem at work. System, in Smith's thinking, is always world-system, always an historical process which necessarily eludes geometrical patterns of reproduction. Particular historical paths, then, always refer outside of themselves, to precedents within and across civilisations. Modernity, for Smith, always involves different elements of what we call non-modern, modern and postmodern, and this by historical definition, for civilisations are transcultural. Modernity brings together what we construct analytically as distinct moments, modernist, archaic and futuristic. Romanticism, then, is a core value for modernity and so, differently, is modernism, a movement once radical now folded into modernity's flow. Being antipodean has to be thought of within this context. This is the purpose of my endeavour in this book - to ask what it means to imagine the antipodes through the work of Bernard Smith, to think through his work, in both senses. The argument involves a loop, as well a line of argument. For this book is a Smithian reading of Smith, who is an interesting thinker to think with, to use, to extend, to recycle. And what I have written? Does it not over-interpret or overextend Smith's work to my own purpose? The answer to this question, as to most interesting or important questions, is 'yes' and 'no'. This text follows Smith's own in inviting interpretation, extension, contestation and dispute, recognition and misrecognition. This is a challenge to readers of his books or mine, for this is a first book on Smith, not the last word. This is a call for noise, not silence, for more traffic rather than mere assent, for the revisiting and travel afar, for the introspection and extrapolation which makes us what we are: antipodean, here and always elsewhere, more than we can know.

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INTRODUCTION 1 N. Cass, 'Profile: Bernard Smith', University of Melbourne Magazine November 1994, p. 12; H. McQueen, 'Still lives', 24 Hours December 1993, pp. 14-17, and in review of Imagining the Pacific, Independent Monthly, August 1992, p. 33. 2 N. Thomas, Entangled Objects. Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge Mass., Harvard University Press, 1991), Colonialism's Culture. Anthropology, Travel and Government (Cambridge, Polity, 1994); J. Mulvaney, European Vision and Australia's Heritage (Canberra, Australian Academy of Humanities, 12 July 1980); R. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1976) pp. 215-19; C. Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art (London, Thames and Hudson, 1994) pp. 75-6; J. Lloyd, German Expressionism. Primitivism and Modernity (New Haven, Yale, 1991) pp. 227, 230; W. Eisler, The Furthest Shore (Melbourne, Cambridge University Press, 1995). More generally, see J. Anderson, 'Smith of the Antipodes', Modern Painters 1,3,1988; A. Bradley and T. Smith Australian Art and Architecture. Essays Presented to Bernard Smith (Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1980); M. Thomas, 'Bernard Smith', Australia in Mind (Sydney, Hale and Iremonger, 1989); P. Beilharz, 'Bernard Smith - imagining the antipodes', Thesis Eleven 38,1994. 3 B. Smith, 'Two meanings of art', Thesis Eleven 44,1996. 1 BEGINNINGS 1 B. Smith, The Boy Adeodatus — Portrait of a Lucky Young Bastard (Ringwood, Penguin, 1984) ch. 1; B. Smith, speech to National Book Council luncheon, 13 August 1984 (Smith Papers; held in Smith's possession). 2 Smith, The Boy Adeodatus, p. 122. 194

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3 Ibid., p. 243. 4 Smith This culture stuff, c. 1939, p. 1 (Smith Papers). 5 Smith, Tendencies in modern English verse', November 1940 (Smith Papers). 6 Smith, The role of an Institute of Fine Arts in the University of Sydney', Arts 6,1969 (Sydney, Sydney University Arts Association) p. 14. 7 P. Thoene, Modern German Art (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1938). (Smith's copy in Smith's possession.) 8 Smith, paper on Surrealism, Federation Art Society, Sydney, 16 October 1940, p. 3 (Smith Papers). 9 Ibid., p. 8. 10 Ibid. 11 L. Gordon to Smith, September 1939, Mitchell Library, Smith Papers. 12 Gordon to Smith, ?? 1939, Mitchell Library, Smith Papers. 13 Smith to Gordon, 10 May 1948, Mitchell Library, Smith Papers 2/9. 14 A. Toynbee, A Study of History (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1939), Vol. IV, p. 6 (Smith's copy in Smith's possession). 15 Toynbee, AStudy of History, Vol. IV, pp. 40-1. 16 Toynbee, A Study of History (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1940), Vol. V, p. 48. 17 Ibid., Vol. VI. 18 B. Smith, 'Some problems connected with the Marxist approach to art criticism' (Smith Papers, 1941-42) p. 2. 19 Smith, Tendencies in modern English verse' final version, submitted to Education Department, November 1940, p. 44 (Smith Papers). 20 Smith, Tendencies in Modern English Verse', final version, p. 43. 21 M. Rader, No Compromise. The Conflict Between Two Worlds (London, Gollancz, 1939). (Smith's copy in Smith's possession.) 22 Smith, 'Is there a radical tradition in Australian art?' Canberra School of Art, 4 April 1984, p. 81 (Smith Papers). 23 Smith, The role of an Institute of Fine Arts in the University of Sydney', p. 17. 24 Smith, The critics of the 1890's', Humanities Research Centre seminar on the 1890s, n.d. (Smith Papers). 25 Ibid. 26 M. Jay, Downcast Eyes - The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993). 27 Smith, The critics of the 1890's'; J. Kahn, Culture, Multiculture, Postculture (London, Sage, 1995). 28 R. Nelson, Theory as virgin in the avant garde', Art Monthly Australia, March 1995, pp. 10-12.

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29 B. Smith, Taking art to the country - how it began', Regional Galleries Association, 1988 (Smith Papers). 30 Smith, 'Encouragement of art', Australian New Writing 3,1945. 31 Smith, 'Kicking the avant-garde can', Australian 22 February 1975. 32 Smith, 'Making the future', Spode House Review 10, 111, January 1974. 33 Smith, 'Art, craft and community', in Smith, The Death of the Artist as Hero (Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 51-2. 34 Smith, 'Artist, craftsman and community', c. 1974, p. 23 (Smith Papers). 35 Smith, The University and its neighbourhood', May 1971 (Smith Papers). 36 Smith 'Lot and Pompeii - two paintings from 1940', Art and Text 7, 1982, p. 39. 37 Smith, 'Lot and Pompeii'', p. 47. 38 J. Lindsay to Smith, 18 November 1984, Mitchell Library, Smith Papers. 39 Smith to Lindsay, 3 October 1984, Mitchell Library, Smith Papers. 40 Smith, 'Art criticism', ABC Radio Talk, 16 July 1964 (Smith Papers). 41 Smith, 'Among the others', p. 4 (Smith Papers). 2 ENCOUNTERING AUSTRALIAN PAINTING 1 Smith, Place, Taste and Tradition (Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1979), p.15. 2 Ibid., p. 23. 3 Ibid., p. 28. 4 Ibid., p. 29. 5 Ibid., p. 33. 6 Ibid.,ch.l. 7 Ibid., p. 37. 8 Ibid., p. 36. 9 Ibid., p. 65. 10 Ibid., p. 78. 11 Ibid., p. 125. 12 Ibid., pp. 174-6. 13 Ibid., p. 176. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., p. 240. 16 Ibid,p.255. 17 Ibid., p. 269. 18 Ibid., p. 275. 19 C. Lasch, The True and Only Heaven (New York, Norton, 1991); J. Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses (London, Faber, 1992). 20 Smith, Place, Taste and Tradition, p. 279. 21 Smith, The Boy Adeodatus, pp. 240,260; Place, Taste and Tradition, pp. 279-80.

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22 Smith, Place, Taste and Tradition, p. 280. 23 Ibid., p. 281. 24 'Goya' (B. Smith), 'The fascist mentality in Australian art and criticism', Communist Review, June 1946, July 1946. 25 Smith, 'Australian art and the English tradition', British Council, 1949, p. 1 (Smith Papers). 26 Smith, 'Australian art and the English tradition', p. 12. 27 Smith, 'The Australian landscape', BBC Radio, Third Program, 17 November 1959, pp. 6-7 (Smith Papers). 28 Smith, Place, Taste and Tradition, p. 282. 29 Smith, 'Fifty years of Australian painting' Meanjin 10,4,1951, p. 358. 30 P. Bourdieu, Distinction - A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London, Routledge, 1984); Homo Academicus (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1988). 31 B. Smith, Opening notes for Charles Doutney Exhibition, 1953(?) (Smith Papers). 32 B. Smith and T. Smith, Australian Painting 1988-1990 (Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1991), third edition. 33 Ibid., p. 11. 34 Ibid., p. 28. 35 M. Clark, Preface to The Poems of the late Adam Lindsay Gordon (London, n.d.), pp. v-vi, quoted in Smith and Smith, Australian Painting, p. 56. 36 R Philipp, Preface to Arthur Boyd (London, Thames and Hudson, 1967), quoted in Smith and Smith, Australian Painting, p. 333. 37 Smith and Smith, Australian Painting, p. 334. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., p. 352. 40 T. Smith, 'Writing the history of Australian arf, Australian Journal of Art 3, 1983, p. 16. 41 H. McQueen, 'Critic and Community: some recent writings of Bernard Smith', Meanjin 36,1,1977. 42 Smith, 'On perceiving the Australian suburb', c. 1974, p. 5 (Smith Papers). 43 Smith and Smith, Australian Painting, p. 450. 44 Smith, 'Is there a radical tradition in Australian art?', Canberra School of Art, 4 April 1984, p. 6 (Smith Papers). 45 Ibid., p. 8. 46 J. Burke, Australian Women Artists 1840-1940 (Melbourne, Greenhouse, 1988); J. Hoorn (ed.), Strange Women. Essays in Art and Gender (Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1994); H. Topliss, Modernism and Feminism (Sydney, Craftsman, 1996); J. Williams, The Quarantined Culture (Melbourne, Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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47 R. Haese, Rebels and Precursors - The Revolutionary Years of Australian Art (Ringwood, Penguin, 1988) pp. 151-2; Smith, 'Reflections on the forties', talk to Friends of Heide, 13 July 1986 (Smith Papers). 48 Haese, Rebels and Precursors, p. 155. 49 Smith, 'Personality cult: biography and autobiography', Spoleto Writers Festival, September 1987, p. 3 (Smith Papers). 50 Ibid. 51 Haese, Rebels and Precursors, p. 153. 52 I. Burn, N. Lendon, C. Merewether, A. Stephen, The Necessity of Australian Art. An Essay About Interpretation (Sydney, Power Institute, 1988). 53 Burn et al., The Necessity of Australian Art, pp. 41,104-5. 54 Ibid., ch. 3. 55 E. Said, Orientalism (London, Routledge, 1978); M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish (London, Allen Lane, 1977); A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York, International, 1971); A. Davidson, Antonio Gramsci Towards an Intellectual Biography (London, Merlin, 1977). 56 Burn et al., The Necessity of Australian Art, p. 63. 57 Ibid., p. 105. 58 Smith, 'A reply to my critics', p. 11 (Smith Papers). 3 IMAGINING THE PACIFIC 1 M. Jay, Downcast Eyes; D. Levine (ed.), Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (Berkeley, University of California, 1993); T. Smith, Making the Modern (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1994). 2 Smith, 'Reversion and Growth in Art', 1940, p. 13 (Smith Papers). 3 Ibid., p. 22. 4 Smith, paper on surrealism, p. 8. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Smith, Tendencies in modern English verse', final version, p. 43. 8 Smith, 'Art and imperialism', 1945, n.p. (Smith Papers).

9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid.

12 Smith, reading notes 1941^8 (Smith Papers). 13 Smith, 'European vision and the South Pacific', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13,1-2,1950. 14 Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific (New Haven, Yale, 1985) p. vii. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid.

NOTES

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

(PAGES

72-87)

1 99

Ibid., p. viii. Ibid., pp. viii-ix. Ibid.,p.ix. Ibid., p. xi. Ibid., pp. xi-xii. Ibid., p. 1. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.,ch. 1. F. Bacon, Essays (London, Everyman, n.d.), p. 54, quoted in Smith, European Vision, p. 8. Bougainville, tr. Forster, A Voyage Around the World, quoted in Smith, European Vision, p. 42. Smith, European Vision, p. 51. J. G. A. Forster, A Voyage Round the World (London, 1777), vol. 1, p. 889, quoted in Smith, European Vision, pp. 74-5. Smith, European Vision, pp. 82-3. J. Scott, An Historic Epistle, from Omiah to the Queen of Otaheite; being His Remarks on the English Nation (London, 1775), quoted in Smith, European Vision, p. 83. Smith, European Vision, p. 123. Anon, A Letter from Omai to the Right Honourable ... (London, 1780), quoted in Smith, European Vision, p. 143. W. Dampier, New Voyage, ed. Masefield (London, 1927), vol. 1, p. 453 and J. Cook, Journals, ed. J. C. Beaglehole (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1955), p. 399, quoted in Smith, European Vision, p. 169. Smith, European Vision, p. 177. Ibid., pp. 268-9. Smith, Imagining the Pacific (Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1993) pp. ix-xi. Ibid., p. ix. Ibid., p. xi. Ibid., p. 93. S. Parkinson, A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas (London, 1773), pp. 17-18 and J. G. A. Forster, A Voyage Round the World, quoted in Smith, Imagining the Pacific, p. 100. Smith, Imagining the Pacific, p. 173. Ibid., p. 190. Ibid., p. 208. Ibid., p. 209. Ibid., p. 213.

200

NOTES

(PAGES

8 8 - 1 15 )

47 C. Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1966) ch.2. 48 Smith, The celebration of transience', lecture to University of Sydney, 7 April 1954, p. 1 (Smith Papers). 49 Ibid. 50 Smith, The Spectre ofTruganini. 1980 Boyer Lectures (Sydney, ABC, 1980) p. 9. 51 Ibid., p. 10. 52 Ibid., p. 13. 53 Ibid., p. 14. 54 Ibid., p. 15. 55 Ibid., p. 17. 56 Cook, Journals, p. 514, quoted in Smith, The Spectre of Truganini, p. 18. 57 Smith, The Spectre of Truganini, p. 52. 58 Ibid., p. 51. 59 Ibid., p. 52. 60 Smith, 'Lemontey's prophecy', in M. Long (ed.), Postscripts. 1988 Boyer Lectures (Sydney, ABC, 1988) p. 62. 4 THE ANTIPODEAN MANIFESTO 1 Smith, 'Art and environment in Australia', Geographical Magazine 19, January 1947; quoted here from the 1961 MS. version, pp. 11-12 (Smith Papers). 2 Smith, comments on Namatjira, Open University, ABC, 19 September 1991, n.p. (Smith Papers). 3 Smith, 'The arts', Arts Festival of the Olympic Games Committee (Melbourne, Olympic Committee, 1956) p. 18. 4 Smith, 'Survey of the year's art', Gallery Society - Victoria 11,1964, p. 16. 5 B. Smith et al., The Antipodean Manifesto, 1959; reprinted in Smith, The Death of the Artist as Hero, pp. 194-7. 6 G. Catalano, The Years of Hope, Australian Art and Criticism 1959-68, (Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1981) p. 43. 7 Ibid., p. 58; Smith, 'Gary Catalano on the 1950s', in Smith, The Critic as Advocate. Selected Essays 1948-1988 (Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1989) pp. 322-7. 8 Smith, The truth about the Antipodeans', in Smith, The Death of the Artist as Hero, p. 202. 9 Ibid., p. 204. 10 D. Haycraft, The making of a manifesto', MS. in Mitchell Library, Smith Papers, Antipodean Correspondence, p. 4. 11 B. Blackman, quoted in Smith, The truth about the Antipodeans', p. 208. 12 Ibid., pp. 208-9. 13 Smith, The truth about the Antipodeans', p. 211. 14 Ibid., p. 212.

NOTES

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36

(PAGES

11 6 - 2 8 )

Smith, 'How to read the Antipodean Manifesto', Meridian 13,1,1994, p. 62. Ibid., p. 62. Ibid., p. 63. Smith, 'Notes on abstract art', Death of the Artist, pp. 192-3. Smith, 'The modern movement in art', Lectures, 9 (Smith Papers). Smith, 'Notes on abstract art', p. 193. J. Guy, 'Introduction'; The Antipodeans Revisited (Melbourne, NGV Travelling Art Exhibition, 1976), p. 2. J. Brack, Secretary, Antipodean Minutes and Catalogs, Fourth Meeting, 3 May 1959 (Smith Papers). Smith, The Antipodeans - a new art group' (Antipodean Minutes and Catalogs, Smith Papers). Smith to K. Clark, 28 February 1959, Antipodean Correspondence, Mitchell Library, Smith Papers. J. Brack to Smith, 18 July 1960, Antipodean Correspondence, Mitchell Library, Smith Papers. F. Williams to Smith, 3 February 1960, Antipodean Correspondence, Mitchell Library, Smith Papers. D. Boyd, 'Notes on the Antipodeans', London, 14 February 1967, Antipodean Correspondence, Mitchell Library, Smith Papers, p. 1. Ibid., p. 1. Haycraft, 'The making of a manifesto'. Brack and Smith in Antipodean Correspondence, 1984, Mitchell Library, Smith Papers. Smith, The Antipodean intervention', The Critic as Advocate, p. 137. Smith, The Antipodean artists', in ibid., p. 141. J. Docker, Australian Cultural Elites: Intellectual Traditions in Sydney and Melbourne (Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1974); D. Walker, Dream and Disillusion (Canberra, ANU, 1976); T. Rowse, Australian Liberalism and National Character (Malmsbury, Kibble, 1978); M. Roe, Nine Australian Progressives: Vitalism in Bourgeois Social Thought 1890-1960 (St Lucia, Queensland University Press, 1984); G. Melleuish, Cultural Liberalism in Australia (Melbourne, Cambridge University Press, 1995). P. Anderson, 'Components of the national culture', A. Cockburn and R. Blackburn, Student Power, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1969). Smith, The myth of isolation', Death of the Artist, p. 218. Ibid., p. 220.

5 DEATH OF THE HERO AS ARTIST 1 Smith, 'The Death of the artist as hero', The Death of the Artist as Hero, pp. 13-14. 2 Ibid., p. 17.

201

202

NOTES

(PAGES

1 29-43)

3 Ibid., p. 19. 4 Ibid., pp. 21-2. 5 See Beilharz, Transforming Labor - Labour Tradition and the Labor Decade in Australia (Melbourne, Cambridge University Press, 1994); L. Marx, The Machine in the Garden - Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York, Oxford University Press, 1964); Lasch, The True and Only Heaven; M. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985). 6 Smith, MS., review of Bonython, Modern Australian Painting 1970-1975 (Smith Papers). 7 E Lymburner to Smith, 16 October 1963 (Smith Papers). 8 Smith, 'Francis Lymburner - a personal memoir', H. Kolenberg and B. Pearce (eds), Francis Lymburner (Sydney, Art Gallery of NSW, 1992) pp. 19-20. 9 R. Hughes, 'Bequest and behest', Nation, 28 July 1962, quoted in D. Brien, 'Bernard Smith and the Power Institute', BA Fine Arts Honours thesis, University of Sydney 1988, p. 18. 10 Smith, 'Old boys with fingers in dykes', University of Sydney News 1977, quoted in Brien, 'Bernard Smith and the Power Institute', p. 50. 11 Brien, 'Interviews with Bernard Smith, 29 August 1988', in 'Bernard Smith and the Power Institute', p. 70. 12 Smith, review of D. Stewart, Norman Lindsay, in Times Literary Supplement, 9 April 1976, p. 423. 13 G. Windsor in the Bulletin, 12 February 1985. 14 Smith, 'Jack Lindsay', Death of the Artist, p. 103. 15 Smith, Death of the Artist, p. 107. 16 Smith, 'Jack Lindsay's Marxism', Death of the Artist, p. 125. 17 Smith, 'Jack Lindsay's biographies of artists', Death of the Artist, p. 135. 18 Ibid., p. 144. 19 Smith (ed.) Culture and History - Essays Presented to Jack Lindsay (Sydney, Hale and Iremonger, 1984). 20 Smith, 'Noel Counihan', The Critic as Advocate, p. 57. 21 Smith, Noel Counihan - Artist and Revolutionary (Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1993). 22 Ibid., p. 3. 23 Ibid., p. 5. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., p. 513. 26 Ibid., p. 546. 27 Smith, 'Fred Williams', The Critic as Advocate, pp. 352-4. 28 Ibid., p. 357.

NOTES

(PAGES

144-62)

203

29 J. Brack, memo for Antipodean Manifesto (Antipodean Minutes and Catalogs, Smith Papers). 30 I. Britain, The nostalgia of the critic: postmodernism and the unbalancing of Robert Hughes', Thesis Eleven 34,1993. 31 Smith, 'Robert Hughes on Australian art', The Critic as Advocate, pp. 277-81; Smith, 'Robert Hughes. Notes on Australian art', talk notes (Smith Papers). 32 Smith, 'Robert Hughes on Australian art', p. 277. 33 Ibid., p. 278. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., p. 280. 36 Ibid. 37 Smith, 'Australian art and British arrogance', MS. for Modern Painters (Smith Papers); Smith, 'Australian art in England', Modern Painters 1987, pp. 86-9. 38 Smith, 'Robert Hughes on modern painting', The Critic as Advocate, p. 305. 39 Ibid., p. 306. 40 Ibid., p. 307. 41 Smith, review of Hughes, The Fatal Shore, Scripsi, April 1987. 42 Smith, Foreword to P. Fuller, The Australian Scapegoat - Towards an Antipodean Aesthetic (Nedlands, University of Western Australia Press, 1986) p. xiii. 43 Smith, Foreword to The Australian Scapegoat, p. xv. 44 Ibid. 45 Smith, review of P. Fuller, Theoria, Australian Society, January 1989. 46 Smith, obituary for Peter Fuller, Modern Painters 3,2 (1990), p. 9. 6 MODERNITY, HISTORY, POSTMODERNITY 1 Beilharz, Postmodern Socialism - Romanticism, City and State (Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1994). 2 Smith, 'Intellectual currents in Australia 1930-1949', paper to History Department, ANU, 17 May 1991, p. 4 (Smith Papers). 3 Smith, 'Modernism: that is to say, geniusism', Modern Painters 3,2,1990. 4 'Modernism as a late nineteenth century style', Australian Art Association Conference, La Trobe University 14 November 1990, p. 1. 5 Ibid., pp. 1-2. 6 Ibid., p. 2. 7 Ibid., p. 7. 8 Ibid., p. 8. 9 Smith, 'Distancing modernism', paper to Gakushuin University, Tokyo, 14 May 1994 (Smith Papers). 10 Jay, Downcast Eyes', Levine (ed.), Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision.

204

NOTES

(PAGES

1 63-87)

11 Smith, 'Modernism and postmodernism', paper to Visual Arts Department, Monash University, 13 October 1993 (Smith Papers). 12 Ibid., p. 2; Beilharz, Transforming Labor. 13 Smith, 'Modernism and postmodernism', p. 3. 14 Beilharz, 'Critical Theory - Jurgen Habermas', D. Roberts (ed.), Reconstructing Theory - Gadamer, Habermas, Luhmann (Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1995). 15 Smith, 'Modernism and postmodernism', p. 13. 16 Ibid., p. 16. 17 Smith, 'Modernism and post-modernism: neo-colonial viewpoint - concerning the sources of modernism and post-modernism in the visual arts', Thesis Eleven 38,1994. 18 Ibid., p. 104. 19 Ibid., p. 105. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., p. 108. 23 Ibid., pp. 113-14. 24 Smith, 'Modernity and the formalesque', paper to Power Institute, October 1994, p. 2 (MS., Smith Papers). 25 Ibid., p. 2. 26 Ibid., p. 3. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., p. 5. 29 Smith, Modern Art and Cultural Imperialism, MS., ch. 12 (Smith Papers). 30 Ibid., p. 9. 31 Ibid., p. 21. 32 Ibid., p. 27. 33 Ibid., p. 32. 34 Ibid., pp. 37,40. 35 Ibid., p. 38. 36 Ibid., p. 49. 37 Ibid., pp. 61-2. 7 CONCLUSIONS-IMAGINING THE ANTIPODES 1 E. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (London, Phaidon, 1960). 2 See N. Thomas, Entangled Objects and Colonialism's Culture. 3 M. Schapiro, Modern Art (New York, Braziller, 1978); and see the special issue of Oxford Journal on Schapiro, 17,1 (1994). 4 A. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1936); Lovejoy and G. Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (New York, Johns Hopkins/Octagon, 1935) pp. 1,70-2.

NOTES

(PAGES

190-2)

205

5 A. Heller, A Theory of History (London, Routledge, 1982), pp. 228-31. 6 P. Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics (Boston, Porter Sargent, 1957), p. 1; ch. 1, ch. 13. 7 O. Spengler, The Decline of the West (London, Allen and Unwin, 1926,1928); Beilharz, Postmodern Socialism, ch. 5. 8 Beilharz, 'Karl Marx', in Beilharz (ed.), Social Theory - A Guide to Central Thinkers (Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1992).

INDEX

Aborigines see also Boyer lectures; noble savage as anomalies 81-2 and archaism in painting 32 artists' exchanges 33 assimilation 94 and Australia's foundational myths 90 complication in Arcadia 82-3 Cook's instructions, views 81,89,93 Dampier's opinion 82 early representations 30-1 effect on Europeans 89-90 as foundation of white culture 65 genocide 92 Hegel, on master and slave 94 Norman Lindsay and Nietzsche 93 noble savage 44 white people forget 90 abstract art its American heart 48 as decoration 103 its hegemony 107,117 as political instrument 117 its profundity 118 promoted excessively 101 MarkRothko 54 Smith on abstract expressionism 118-19 reservations 102,103 suspicion of 47-8,53 Sydney abstractionists 50 abstract expressionism see abstract art Adorno, Theodor 38,180 Age, The see also art criticism; art history; media Smith's column 18,19-20

Alexander, Samuel 68 Althusser, Louis 190 Amir, Samin 60 Anderson, John 9,57 Anderson, Perry 124,185 Antipodean Exhibition, 1 see also Antipodean Manifesto; Antipodeans; antipodes; Robert Hughes; Whitechapel Antipodeans: Another Chapter 112,121 Antipodeans Revisited, 1976 112,119 Barbara Blackman's comments 114 criticised as romantic 111-12 Robert Hughes on 113 Melbourne artists 112 Antipodean Manifesto, The xiv, 103-18, 186-7 see also Antipodean Exhibition; Antipodeans; antipodes; Robert Hughes; Whitechapel Smith writes 103-4 text in full 104-6 Antipodeans 103 see also Antipodean Exhibition; Antipodean Manifesto; antipodes; Robert Hughes; Whitechapel artists' displeasure 114-15 background by Smith 119 Barbara Blackman on exhibition 114,119 Charles Blackman 106,112,113 Arthur Boyd 106 David Boyd 106,112,113,121,122 John Brack 103,106,112,113,116,121 writes for 144 TimBurstall 113 call for recognition 117 206

INDEX

and [Sir] Kenneth Clark 115,121 Noel Counihan 113,140 Bob [Robert] Dickerson 106,112,123 Leonard French 113 Robert Hughes 113,115-16 international strategy thwarted 112, 119 meetings 103,119 and national style 113,119,121 origins 103,107,112-13 John Perceval 106,112 Clifton Pugh 106,112,113,114,116 defines 114 Smith accused 111,114 Fred Williams 113,121 antipodes see also Antipodean Exhibition; Antipodean Manifesto; Antipodeans; Robert Hughes; Whitechapel adventurers wax lyrical 82 and constraints 184,186 definition 97,186 downstairs upstairs 99 England's first kangaroo 80 European notwithstanding 126 and the exotic 85 and Peter Fuller 150-4 Robert Hughes on 125-6 and inversion of nature 78-9 and isolation 123-4 master-slave relationship 97 and neocolonialism 172 Olympic Games art show 99 peripheral or central? 96 standing on our heads 122-3 where they are 187 which way is up? 100 archaism 161,170 art in Australia see also art criticism; art history Anglicised nostalgia 31,44 colonial painters 41,44,45 colonial perceptions 29 its constructed values 55 cultural nationalism 33 derivative? 28 and European influence 28 its European roots 30,31,32,37 exotica 31 and Peter Fuller 150-4 gold rush 31 gum-tree painting 54 Heidelberg painters 32,60 Hughes and Whitechapel 146

indifference of public (1940) 27 influences 40 and internationalism 48 landscapes and taste 142,152 Mechanics7 Institutes 32 melancholy 45 and national identity 48 nature without actors 142-3 and noble savage 70 non-existent 185 phoney nationalism 33-4 and radicalism 55-6 Robert Hughes trivialises 126 and science 30 self-consciousness 32 Smith in Olympic catalogue 99-100 social commitment painters 36 suburbs environmental reality 55 three-way influences 117 women artists 35 art criticism see also art in Australia; art history; Peter Fuller; Robert Hughes academic art or workshops? 20 Julian Ashton on moderns 25 ascendancy of reproduction 15 critic as authority 16 Robert Hughes on Antipodean show 113 on Whitechapel 115-16,125-6 integral to creation 24 masses and elites 18,20 its nature 15 Olympic art catalogue 99 response to art 15-16 Smith in Age 18,19-20 on Australian artist 99-100 writing not seeing 15 art history see also art in Australia; art criticism Australian Painting xi, 43-62,186 freak forms in Australia 43 Richard Haese 56-9 Barry Humphries 46 landscapes and imperialism 73-4 Necessity of Australian Art attacks Smith 59-61 replacing ideas 62 Smith assessed 56-9 Smith and typology 73 Story of Australian Art 5, 27 art institutions see institutions

207

208

INDEX

art market see commodification Ashton, Julian 25 Australian art see art in Australia Australian Painting xi, 43-62,186 context not exemplars 50 Australian New Writing 18,19 Bacon, [Sir] Francis 76-7 Bakhtin, Mikhail 97 Banks, Joseph 68-9 see also Cook Baudrillard, Jean 84 Bell, Clive 38 Bell, Daniel 176 Bell, Julian 38 Benjamin, Walter 95 Berger,John 153 Berger, Peter 95 Bergner, Vladimir [Josl] 37 Bihalji-Merin, Oto (Peter Thoene) see Modern German Art Blackman, Charles 106,112,113 Blackman, Barbara 114,119 Blake, William 129 Blunt, Anthony 39,64 Bosch, [Hieronymus] 8,23,66 Bougainville, Louis 75, 78 Bourdieu, Pierre 42, 60,189 Boy Adeodatus, The xi, 1-25 scope 2,6,7 sequel planned 25-6 themes 1-2, 7 Boyd, Arthur 106,151 Boyd, David 106,112,113,121,122 Boyer lectures 82,89-% ambivalent social achievements 91-2 assimilation 94 and Australia's foundational myths 90 Cook and Royal Society 92-3 culture and power 90 Enlightenment unravels 93 ethical systems 90-1 genocide 92 history's locked cupboard 90 Lemontey on multicultural Australia 95-6 mateship 91 national symbols 92 reconciliation anticipated 89 Brack, John 45,128,141 and Antipodeans 103,106,112,113, 116,121,122 European stylist 49 and Melbourne 141

people not place 144 style and evocations 144-5 writes on Antipodeans 144 Bradley, [Andrew Cecil! 4 Bradshaw,Jill 152 Breton, Andre 5 Brown, Mike 53, 55 Burn, Ian see Necessity of Australian Art Burstall,Tim 113 Buvelot, Louis 41 capitalism advantages to art 41 and culture 7 foundation of European power 173-4 and quality of art 41 and romantic art 129 its society 129 Catalano, Gary 111 categorisation see classification Challis [Smith], Kate 2,138 Childe, Gordon [Vere] 135 Christo, [Javacheff] 53 Clark [Sir] Kenneth 115,121,125,151 Clarke, Marcus 30,41,45 classification of art Aborigines anomalous 81-2 Australians packaged as primitive 115-16 children 124 Counihan categorised 139-40 English on Australians 148 exotic category 170-1 expatriates and cringe 148 Levi-Strauss on urge to classify 88,95 modern and postmodern 156-170 modernism as culture of modernity 177 modes 88 naming 103 nationalism and Antipodeans 111 Orientalism as category 169 overinterpretation 86-7 patterns from understanding 102-3 postmodernism and postindustrialism 176 romanticism and Omai 80-1 science and art connect 74 Smith on nationalism 116 and social realism 137 structuralism 88 colonialism see also antipodean; art in

INDEX

colonialism cont. Australia; cultural cringe; cultural flows; cultural imperialism and Aborigines 30,31,32, 33 and antipodes 172 Australia cf. Mexico 33 Australian exotica 30, 31,43 English eyes, Australian landscape 29,31,37,40 European art and Australian 28, 30, 31,32,37 and exoticism 172 going native 44 imperialism is cultural 68 landscapes and imperialism 73-4 local culture inside empires 68 neocolonial avant-garde 171 new world culture and old 28,29,31 postcolonialism 140,168-9 Smith on characteristics 67 subordinate Australians 49 tradition and cultural exchange 29 commercialisation see commodification commodih'cation of art 15,20 abstract promoted excessively 101 in America 101 art boom and negative effects 20 art-systems 130 in Britain 101 and community workshops 20,21, 42 dealers as arbiters 130 governs taste 42 and state power 129 communism see also Communist Party; Marx; marxism John Anderson, renegade 57 art stylised 36 Noel Counihan and 1956 138,140 and democracy 12 its effect in Australian art 56 and Fascism in Rader 12-13 Richard Haese on 56-7 Jack Lindsay and 1956 140 Rader on socialism 12 and Smith's works 56-8 Smith and 1956 138,140 Communist Party of Australia see also communism; Marx; marxism and avant-garde 6 Eurocommunist phase 48 and security service 6

Smith's membership 6,13 Teachers' Branch 6,13

Communist Review 39

community art

see also craft

and commodification 20,21,42 links art to craft 130 Mechanics' Institutes 32 Conder, Charles 32 Cook, James see also Banks

on Aborigines 81, 82,89, 92 contacts with native peoples 86 Forsterjnr on artifice 79-80 an inquirer 85 in modern eyes 74 Parkinson on murder of Tahitians 85 purpose of voyages 68, 75 Royal Society commission 74r-5 on Pacific peoples 92-3 Smith's purpose 87,89 Cossington Smith, Grace 35,56 Counihan, Noel 17,36,37,113,131 and Antipodeans 141 biographical studies of xiv biography published 138 categorised 139-40 his communism xiv depression communist 138 and Hungary 1956 140 icon of left 139 Smith alter ego xiv, 131 his socialism 138 suffering in his work 137 his work and communism 138,140 Courtauld Institute 39, 78 craft see also community art and art and technology 128,129 Crowley, Grace 35,56 cultural cringe 46,148 see also classification; cultural flows; cultural imperialism cultural exchange see classification; cultural flows cultural flows and traffic see also classification; colonialism; cultural imperialism; perception; provincialism Aborigines remember, whites forget 90 their effect on Europeans 89-90 abstract excessively promoted 101-2 and America 83-4,100-1 Antipodeans and Europe 119

209

210

INDEX

cultural flows and traffic cont. antipodes invert nature 78-9 peripheral or central? 96 Australia, and antipodes 109 distant from 'real' centres 124 national identity 50 Blinky Bill vs Hollywood 48 challenged culture 65 change and human condition 14 civilisation 65, 95 colonisers go native 68 convergence of cultures 187 downstairs upstairs 99 English; disdain for Australians 148-9 and Europe 124 Enlightenment unravels 93 European heritage 110 earliest contrasts 4 vision and Australian place 55 evolution; not linear 21 Hegel, on master and slave 94 Robert Hughes on Antipodean show 113 on Europe and Australia 147-8 onWhitechapel 115-16,125-6 imperialism is cultural 68 intellectual domination, economic rule 100 knowing Australia 83-4 living with the past 130-1 modernism erodes narrowness 95 Omai 80-1 Pacific impact on Europe's cultures 72 postmodernism and postindustrialism 176 power and culture 70 Power Institute and change 14 reciprocal influences 98 restlessness of Western art 88-9 reversion and social instability 65 romanticism and science 75 Royal Academy and Royal Society 74r-5 Tahiti, its impact 77, 78, 81 transculturalism 88 trends, traffic and contest 175 unequal exchange 97-8 white Australia, its origins 74 cultural imperialism see also colonialism; cultural cringe; cultural flows art's ties to history 67-8 Central American experience 68 colonisers go native 68

conspiracy of silence 67 culture and power 90 of Hollywood 48 and landscapes 73-4 Omai and England's response 80-1 and reaction to 68 Smith accused of cultural dependency 60-2 will to power, will to know 74 Dada 20,159,167 see also modernism; surrealism deaddead as the dodo 108 as emblem of decadence 8 and Hieronymus Bosch 8 Dali, [Salvador] 6,35 Dampier, William 82 Darwin, [Charles] 41 David, Jacques Louis 129,135,147 decadence 8, 66 Decline of the West, The see Spengler Derrida, Jacques 184 Descartes, [Rene] 177,179 Dickerson, Bob 106,112,123 Dobell, William 17,36 Done, Ken 27 Doutney, Charles 42 Durkheim, [Emile] 92,93,147 Drysdale, Russell 17,36 economics see commodifkation El Greco 23 Eliot, T.S. 12,23,27 Emmanuel, Arghiri 60 empire see colonialism; cultural flows; cultural imperialism Engels, [Friedrich] 9 European Vision and the South Pacific xi, 64, 70-83,185 exoticism as category 170-1 and colonialism 172 Europe assimilates 170 and modernism 161 self-renewal 170 expressionism see abstract Fairweather, Ian 45 Farwell, George 18 fascism 36,38,39 see also Munich Degenerate Art Exhibit; Nazi art Feuerbach, [Ludwig] 179 Fitzpatrick, Brian 29,100,139 Forster, Georg Snr and Jnr 79-80, 85

INDEX

Foucault, Michel 16,43,86 Fox, [Emanuel] Phillips 32 Franklin, Miles 18 Freeman, Joseph 5 French, Leonard 113 Fuller, Peter 150-4 futurism 35,161 Gauguin, Paul 35,36,160,170,175 in Herald Art Show 6 his questions 24,37,49,125 geniusism 158,161,170 Giddens, Anthony 176 Gill, Eric 37 Gill, S. T. 31 Gleeson, James 17,18 and surrealism in Smith's life 5 wolf in man 35 global culture see globalisation globalisation see also cultural flows; cultural imperialism capitalism and imperialism 174 causes 47 and homogeneity 47 internationalism in Australian art 48 opportunity for Australian art 49 works from outside in 99-100 Gombrich, E. H. 64,186,187 Gordon, Lindsay and Australian New Writing 18 his letters to Murraguldrie 9 on materialism 9 scepticism 5, 7 government arts policies 19,20 'Goya', Smith's pen name 39 Gramsci, [Antonio] 51,61,86,189 Green, Charles 51 Greenberg, Clement 149,151 Guilbaut, Serge 117 Habermas, Jiirgen 165-6 Haese, Richard 56-9 Hassan, Ihab 178 Haycraft, Deborah 122 Hegel, Georg 15,94 Heidelberg in Australian Painting 50 School 32,60 Heller, Agnes 190 Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art (1939) (Herald Art Show) 6 Herman, Sali 18,25,131 Heysen, Hans 32,33 History of the Art of Antiquity, The 174

Hodges, William 79 Horkheimer, Max 38 Hughes, Robert 46,145-50 on Antipodean exhibition 113 Art of Australia, The 146,148 on Australian art 115-16 Australian curatorial shortcomings 133 Fatal Shore, The 149 links with Smith 150 naive Australians 146 to New York 148 Shock of the New, The 148,149 Smith's opinions 146-9 a star 146 television series 148-9 Time 149 upstages Smith 146 on Whitechapel exhibition 115-16, 125-6 Humphries, Barry replacing ideas 62 and obsequiousness 46 cultural cringe and Omai of Tahiti 148 image see imagination; perception imagination see also perception elements described 83 knowing or imagining 84 Pacific in European minds 84 Edward Said on Pacific 86 Smith rejects abstraction 88 Imagining the Pacific 83-9,186 imperialism see colonialism; cultural flows; cultural imperialism industrial society see capitalism institutions 42,53 American art's power 117-18 defined 42 govern taste 42 and recognition of individuals 50 state power and artist 129-30 systems 130 James, Clive 146 Jameson, Fred 180-1 Jay, Martin 63 Jencks, Charles 178-9,180 Jindyworobaks 33-4,65 Jiinger, Ernst 35 Kafka, Franz 83, 84 Kahlo, Frida 33,172 Keating, Paul 110,133

21 1

212

INDEX

Kiddle, Margaret 91 Kokoschka, Oscar 119 Kraus, Karl 13,38,47, 87,110,139 Kuhn, Thomas 72, 73, 75, 76,174 Lawrence, D. H. 83,84 left see communism; Communist Party; Marx; marxism Lendon, Nigel see Necessity of Australian Art Levy-Bruhl, Lucien 171 libertarian spirit, Sydney 57 Leja, Michael 117 Lemontey 95-6 Levi-Strauss, Claude 44,88,95 Lewis, Aletta 35 Lindsay, Lionel 25 Lindsay, Jack 2,9 on carnival 97 Festschrift 134,135-6,138 graphomaniac 134-5 influences Smith 138 his life and writings 134-6 neglect in Australia 135 and Norman Lindsay 134 on Smith resuming painting, 1984 23-4 Renaissance breadth 131 Short History of Culture 34,39,134 Smith's feelings for 134,136 thinking stimulates Smith 187 Lindsay, Norman 32,93,134 Lonely Crowd, The 48-9 Lovejoy, Arthur 187 Lymburner, Francis 128,131-2,134 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 180,181 McQueen, Humphrey 91,136 on Smith's generation 51 and Smith as historian xi Mandel, Ernest 180-1 Marinetti, Filippo 35 markets and art see commodification Marsden, May 4 Martens, Conrad 17,44,45 Anglicised nostalgia 31 Marx, Karl 3, 7, 8 see also communism; marxism contrast with Toynbee 11-12 as influence 190,191,192-3 methodological tension between works 11 on modern culture 86 moderns and empirical reality 102 and modes of production 192

and paradox 155 and progress 66 Raderon 12 shifting grounds 164 Smith first reads 9,10 his commitment 13,132,136-7, 147-8 his strongest affinity 192 marxism see also communism; Marx and Boyer lectures 90 Noel Counihan's cf. Smith's 136 dialectics dubious remedy 27 Eurocommunism 48 and Jiirgen Habermas 166 and historicism 190 Hughes accuses 147-8 je ne suis pas marxiste 183 Jack Lindsay's cf. Smith's 136 and modernism and Smith 177 and modernity 41 and opposition to fascism 13 Smith's commitment 13,132,136-7, 147-8 his cultural marxism 13 and modernism 177 his version 56 mateship, an Australian ethical system 91 Matisse, Henri 107 media 14-15 Merewether, Charles see Necessity of Australian Art metropolitanism 47 modern see modernism; modernity Modern German Art 6,7 modernism see also modernity and archaism 161 arrival in Australia 6 its artists and occult 158 Julian Ashton on moderns 25 in Australia 29 Australian modern art 29 and avant garde 160 Bauhaus 156 Bonaventure Hotel 156 and colonialism 172-3 commodification of painting 20 critique of European civilisation 158 culture of modernity 177 currents in Australia 157-8 definitions 159-60 distinct from modernity 173 enables international art 95

INDEX

and exoticism 161 exotic category 170-1 as feminism 35 Formalesque 167-8, 170,173,175, 182 Peter Fuller on 151 and futurism 161 and geniusism 158,161,170 and Habermas 165-7 and Herald Art Show 6 historicism 164 Robert Hughes, unquestioning 149 and indigenes' values 98 Charles Jencks 179 Kraus, Karl 13,38,47,87,110,139 Lionel Lindsay on moderns 5 multiple forms 174-5 neo-classicism 174 whether modern? 38 photography and mimesis 160 as postimpressionism 35 and postmodern 162 restlessness of 21 rise, in Australian Painting 50 romanticism of 38 secularisation of painting 15 and sources of meaning 65 timeframe 160,177 its twilight of trivialities 149 and wars 34,36 modernity see also modernism architecture 156 and birth of humanism 128 its cultural world 102 distinct from modernism 173 its evolution 155-6 Japan symbolises 100 and romanticism 193 Smith defines 170,193 timeframe 156-7 Molvig, John 120 Montesquieu, [Charles] 78-9 Moore, Henry 37 Moore, William see Story of Australian Art Morris, William 4,20 multiculturalism Lemontey predicts 95-6 Munich Degenerate Art Exhibit 6,10, 136,186 Murdoch, Keith (Sir) see Herald Art Show Namatjira, Albert 33, 98 national identity see art in Australia;

classification; colonialism; cultural flows; cultural imperialism National Book Council 3 nationalism 111, 116 Nazi art beliefs 27 see also fascism; Munich Degenerate Art Exhibit Necessity of Australian Art, The alleges dependency 59 call of new generation 59-61 in error on Smith 118 Smith rejects attack 61-2 nihilism 54 No Compromise: The Conflict Between Two Worlds see Rader, Melvin noble savage see also Aborigines; Boyer lectures; Omai consequences 70 of Cook's voyages 69-70 Cook on Aborigines 93 onTahitians 89 in European perception 72 and social Darwinism 76 Tahiti 77,78 Noel Counihan - Artist and Revolutionary 138 Nolan, Sidney 27,120 O'Brien, Justin 45 O'Connor, Victor 36 O'Dowd, Bernard 32 Olympic Games art show, Melbourne 99 Omai 80-1 see also noble savage Orientalism 169 see also Said, Edward Orozco, Jose Clemente 37,65,172 Parkinson, Sydney 69,85 parochialism see provincialism Penty,A.J. 176 perception see also imagination Aborigines' anomalousness 81-2,3 and aspiration 76 [Sir] Francis Bacon on travel 77 Cook's artists 77-8 and metaphor 76 nature and artifice 79-80 Orientalism as category 169 Pacific in European minds 84 place defined 22 relativities 71

213

214

INDEX

perception cont. restless Western art 88-9 Edward Said on Pacific 86 Smith rejects abstraction 88 Stubbs's kangaroo 77-8 suburbs: Smith, environmental reality 21-2, 55 Tahiti, its impact 77,78 viewer's response to art 15-16 Perceval, John 106,112 Philipp, Franz 45,46 Picasso, [Pablo] 23, 37,133,160,170,184 Place, Taste and Tradition xiii, 27-43,186 political content 37-40 politics and art 7,53 Posada, Juan 172 postindustrialism 175-7 postmodernism 70 see also modernism; modernity anticipated 15 in architecture 156,178,179,180 and Australian Painting 50 defined 163-4 its end 175-6 its Eurocentrism 168,176 Ihab Hassan on 178 in history 175 and Charles Jencks 178-9,180 Jean-Francois Lyotard on 180,181 and modernism 162-3 modernism of its own time 171 neurosis of fin de siecle 173 periodisation 162-3 and postindustrialism 176 Smith anticipates 187-8 early writing 65-6 as 20th century modernism 167 poststructuralists 59 Power, John 6,133 see also Power Institute Power Institute see also John Power founding of xi, 1 Robert Hughes on possible curators 133 its role 14,18 Smith's 1968 inaugural lecture 7,14-15 Preston, Margaret 17,33,35,56,98 press see Age', art criticism; art history; media Prichard, Katharine Susannah 18 primitivism and cultural politics 65 mixed with romanticism 86

pioneered by neo-classicism 174 Smith's definition 65 its sources 65-6 and Whitechapel exhibition 115,124 Proctor, Thea 17,35 provincialism defined 45, 46,47,120-21 Smith on local critics 119 Pugh, Clifton 106,112,113,114,116 Rader, Melvin 34,39 fascism or democracy? 12-13 Read, Sir Herbert 5,151 realism and Smith 35-6 see also social realism Rebels and Precursors see Haese, Richard Revolution by Night surrealist exhibition 22-3,27 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 80 Riesman, David 48-9 Rivera, Diego 33,37,65,172 Roberts, Tom 27,32 Robertson, Bryan see Whitechapel romanticism and bush 129 mixed with primitivism 86,94 and modernity 193 nature and artifice 79-80 Omai 80-1 and science in the Pacific 75 Rose, Tom 57 Rothko, Mark 54 Rousseau, [Jean-Jacques] 31 Royal Society see Bank; Cook Ruskin, John 2, 5, 20,42,47,130,153, 159 Said, Edward 31,61,169 see also Orientalism Foucault and Gramsci 86 oversimplifies cultural flows 85-6 Smith anticipates Orientalism 30 Saint-Simon, [Claude-Henri] 174 Schapiro, Meyer 187 Schopenhauer, [Arthur] 180 Scott, John 80-1 Shakespearean Tragedy 4 Siqueros, David 172 Smith, Adam 87 SMITH, BERNARD, BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

art and early influences 4 Challis, Kate 2, 6 her death 138 childhood with Keens 4

INDEX

Courtauld Institute 39 early criticism 18 Europe contra Australia 4 father disappears 1-2 Gallery of NSW administrator 18 goes to England 39 Heidelberg impressionists 5 illegitimate birth 2 Keen, Mum 3 Melbourne visit 5 mother in rural Queensland 4 mothers' names 3,4 Murraguldrie bush school 4 his names 3,4, 6,39 his politics and Place, Taste 37-40 and Power chair 133 his reading 9,10,27-8,56-7,63,186 religions of carers 4 resumes painting, 1984 23 scholarship 39 state ward 4 stops painting, 1940 23,24 his suburbs 21-2 his teacher of art 4,18 Tierney, Rose Anne 3 travelling exhibition organiser 17-18 Warburg Institute 39,40 writes as 'Goya' 39 SMITH, BERNARD, AS PAINTER

influences 23,27 Jack Lindsay's reaction 23-4 Melbourne University gallery 23 National Gallery of Victoria exhibit 22-3 resumes painting, 1984 23 Revolution by Night surrealist exhibition 22-3,27 self-assessment 22,23 stops painting, 1940 23, 24 style 24 and surrealism 22 Tierney, Joseph 3 SMITH, BERNARD, AS SOCIAL THEORIST

antipodean and constraints 184, 186 civilisations recycle 191 how culture works 184 cultural predicament 185 defined 189-90 false universalism 184 internationalism and Jack Lindsay 187 logic 188-9 and post-moderns 184 Smith and history 88

and synthesis 192 and systems 192 thinking consistent 188-9 validising theory 184 Weber and Marx 193 Smith, Terry 42, 50, 59, 63 social realism its antecedents 9 contra existing world 137 distinct from socialist realism 139 and Noel Counihan 139-40,141 and notion of style 137 as political instrument 117 social theory see Smith as social theorist socialism see communism; Marx; marxism socialist realism see social realism Sorel, Georges 111 Sorokin Pitirim 10,12, 34,186,192 theory of cycles 190-1 Space, Time and Deity 28 Spectre ofTruganini see Boyer lectures Spengler, Oswald 6, 8,10,186,190,191, 192 his message 10 misunderstood 191 and Nazism 10 pessimism 191 Raderon 12-13 Stephen, Ann see Necessity of Australian Art Story of Australian Art 5,27 structuralists 59 Structure of Scientific Revolutions see Kuhn, Thomas Stubbs, George 77-8 Study of History, A see Toynbee suburbs: their reality 21-2,55 surrealism 167 see also Dada; modernism; postmodernism art or not? 8 and decadence 66 attraction for Smith 7 Australian arrival 35 defined 8 earliest encounter 5 influence on Smith 5 nothing new 66 primitivisation of modernism 170-1 Revolution by Night exhibition, Canberra 22-3,27 Surrealism - Revolution by Night exhibition, Canberra, 1993 22-3, 27

21 5

216

INDEX

Tahiti Cook's views on people 89 its impact 77,78 Parkinson on murder of people 85 Teachers' Federation Art Society 8,18, 66

Thoene, Peter see Modern German Art Thomas, Nicholas xi Tierney, Joseph 3,23 see also Smith, biographical information Tierney, Rose Anne 2 see also Smith, biographical information Tlmpanaro, Sebastiano 152 Toynbee, Arnold 8,190,191 and archaic symbolism 12, 66 anticipates postmodern 191-2 on class war 10 his cultural universe 11 on Marx 11 Pacific in European minds 84 Raderon 12-13 Smith reads A Study of History 10 onSpengler 11 Truganini see Boyer lectures Tucker, Albert 34,120 Ure Smith, Sydney 27,37-40 Vasari, Giorgio 159,160 von Herder, Johann Gottfried 32,191 voyages of Cook see Cook Waste Land, The 12

Waten,Judah 139 Watling, Thomas 54 Webb, Sidney and Beatrice 6 Whitechapel exhibition see also Antipodeans; art in Australia; art criticism; Robert Hughes and Antipodeans' Melbourne exhibition 112-13,115 Australians packaged as primitives 115-16 Robert Hughes on Australian difference 146 and catalogue 115-16 infantilises Australians 125-6 promotes Australian art 124 Whiteley, Brett 53 Whitlam government 19,20 Williams, Fred 16,27, 78,128,143 and Antipodeans 113,119,120,121, 141 and antipodes 123 and Arthur Boyd 151 focus of work 143 paintings and nature 16 and romanticism 143 Smith's opinion 143 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 159,160, 173,174 women artists in Australia 35 see also Antipodeans; art in Australia; art criticism Woolf, Leonard and Virginia 12 Wordsworth, William 83