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AFor the casual viewer, the exhibition of landscapes, Australia, selected by the Royal Academy of Art, will be a spectacular guide through Australian art history. Included in the exhibition are a range of artists and styles, dating from the earliest days of colonial art and progressing through expressionism and modernism to the greats of the 20th century, culminating with the current generation of Australian artists. It is hardly surprising, then, that this results in a flexible, wide-ranging notion of landscape.
BBut this landmark exhibition gives rise to some questions, and perhaps problems, regarding Britain’s relationship with its former colony. By choosing a style of painting at which British artists excel, the Academy could be seen as inviting criticism that hints at a telling attitude towards Australian art by comparison. But it is the very theme of landscape that provides the strongest connection to Australian art from Britain. To consider it condescending is perhaps too strong, but for Joanna Mendelssohn, an Australian critic and Associate Professor at the University of NSW’s College of Fine Arts (COFA), there is a suggestion that British artistic values have directed this exhibition, rather than allowing Australia the freedom to demonstrate its maturity.
CWhat Mendelssohn found surprising about this exhibition was that the underlying rules for the selection of works seemed to have been so conservative. Since the landscape is a very strong British artistic theme, it appeared to her that when the British looked to the art of a former colony, there was a tendency for them to think that those colonies would continue to be like the British themselves. In reviewing Australia, the British insisted on looking at the genre of landscape painting.
DBecause of colonial ties, it was inevitable during Australian art’s formative years that it would reflect Britain’s devotion to the beloved landscape before its own character and idiosyncrasies took shape. And while Mendelssohn’s concern over the exhibition’s conventional selection is valid, the Academy is nevertheless embracing the peculiarities of Australian art from the mid-19th century onward, albeit within the boundaries of landscape.
EAustralia is curated by Kathleen Soriano, director of exhibitions at the Royal Academy. “Certainly the influence of English, French, or German art is much more evident in the early periods, in the early 1800s to mid-1800s,” she says. “What I wanted to show was how Australian art develops a real distinctiveness, associated with the landscape and the light.”
FThe fusion of tradition of the European kind with something more specifically Australian, and often personal, is crucial to the exhibition, and extends particularly to some of the more contemporary artists involved. Sydney-born video artist Shaun Gladwell is a good example of this. Gladwell’s most famous piece, which is featured in the exhibition, is Storm Sequence (2000), a video of Gladwell skateboarding on the Bondi seafront as one of Sydney’s signature brutal storms lingers offshore. It is his acknowledgment of landscape (or seascape) tradition, colored by Gladwell’s own individualism. “To exhibit my work in this show might make some sense because I was interested in Turner and the idea of atmosphere affecting vision, something I was really interested in around the time of Storm Sequence. I was thinking about this tradition of Romantic landscape, but I wanted to make it personal,” says Gladwell. But he didn’t want to just embark on borrowing imagery from elsewhere. He wanted to bring it to his experience and his world through skateboarding and beach culture.
GSo while it may seem narrow for Britain to reduce Australian art to the genre of landscape, there can be little denying that British landscape painting is still relevant to a current generation of Australian practitioners, however indirectly.
HVisitors to the exhibition encounter Australian Aboriginal art first, the idea being that these works warrant a prominent position because they were ‘first’. Over the last couple of decades, London has hosted many successful exhibitions of Aboriginal art in smaller spaces, but for Soriano, Australia represents an opportunity to place such art in a broader context, with new relationships to the art of the settlers and white Australia. ‘One of the reasons landscape makes sense as being the right theme was because Aboriginal art started in and on the landscape,’ she says. ‘[The exhibition] is a beautiful meshing of the two different kinds of art, that allowed me to bring them together comfortably and honestly within this theme. It was important for me to present Indigenous art to audiences, and I felt it was most authentic that it was seen as part of Australian art history, rather than a separate area with a world of its own.’
Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage 3?
In boxes 27–31 on your answer sheet, write
YES if the statement agrees with the views of the writer
NO if the statement contradicts the views of the writer
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
27.As expected, the artworks chosen for the exhibition reflect a narrow interpretation of landscape.
28.The Academy rejected Australian suggestions for the subject of the exhibition.
29.The colonial relationship meant that early Australian landscape painting followed the traditions of English landscape painting.
30.The exhibition reflects the fact that Australian art developed its own particular qualities.
31.Contemporary Australian artists have generally rejected British landscape traditions.
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C, or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes 32–36 on your answer sheet.
32.What is the writer’s main point in the second paragraph?
33.What does Joanna Mendelssohn find surprising?
34.Shaun Gladwell’s work is included in the exhibition because
35.What was the reason for Soriano including Aboriginal art in the exhibition
36.By referring to China, Mendelssohn is making the point that
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A–F, below.
Write the correct letter, A–F, in boxes 37–40 on your answer sheet.
37 In spite of its conservatism, the Royal Academy exhibition 37
38 Australian art of the early to mid-1800s 38
39 The modern work by Gladwell chosen for the exhibition 39
40 Including Aboriginal art in the exhibition 40
