art history's blindness

I've started reading Jane Hylton's The Painted Coast: Views of the Fleurieu Peninsula in order to gain a sense of the visual history of this part of South Australia from the 1840s to the present. It's a catalogue of an exhibition of 200 images held at the Art Gallery of the South Australia in Adelaide  in the 1990s.

The strength of this text is that it  is an archive of our cultural memory of this region in a global world.  The art gallery is functioning both as a temple and as an educational institution in representing the region to itself and others. 

Artists in the text are reduced to painters and there is no exploration of the interrelationship between photography and painting or painting and film. Painting exists in its own universe, even though most of the images produced of the Fleurieu Peninsula in our image based culture would now be digital photographs.

The art historical curator's argument is that the movement of this local landscape  tradition comes from genius  painters influencing other painters to produce their masterpieces.The art gallery is a refuge of a hermetically sealed art,  and the criterion for determining the order of aesthetic objects throughout the modernist era was the "self-evident" quality of masterpieces.  

This erasure of photography is ironic given the demise of painting arguments about painting's exhaustion that were circulating through the art institution in the 1980s. Painting as a central mode of modernist practice was also radically displaced in the 1960s by what has come to be called conceptual art, and also by the increasing engagement with lens-based media, photography video, and ultimately digital technologies.One of the things that Conceptual Art in the 1960s attempted was the dismantling of the hierarchy of media according to which painting (sculpture trailing slightly behind) is assumed inherently superior to, most notably, photography.   

Even though Hylton was a curator of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia photography and film play no role  in this art history of the Fleurieu Peninsula. It's only the work of the  painters that matter,  and it is assumed that the other visual media had no influence on what and how they painted. Or if it did it is insignificant.

This is art history narrowly defined and behind it sits the institutional authority of the  art gallery.This holds that painting estsblishes the visual and intellectual  visual frame and that photography can be respectable only insofar as it repeats or rehearses the pictorial strategies of painting. 

This traditional art history of pictures reduces our visual culture to painting,  and it rejects the idea that in the late 20th centry painting has become one kind of image amongst many including prints, photography, film, video, and television or televisuality.  There is a sense that art history has to keep at bay the new media to defend its traditional terrain and  to protect its boundaries. It is defensive because there is no re-thinking of the traditional frame of art history that is being deployed by Hylton.

I appreciate that there was a return to expressionist painting in the 1980s but this post conceptual-period also witnessed the emergence of photographic works of large scale and in colour (eg., Jeff Wall, Andreas Gurskey, Thomas Ruff, Gregory Crewdson)  in the art institution. The shift is towards producing big pictures whether in photography or paint and it places the viewer in front of a single large, recognizable  picture that is intelligible at first glance. The big picture has visual authority.  

Hence there are  good grounds to talk in terms of the crisis of the art gallery and to  call into question  the powerful fiction that presents art as a coherent system and art history as its ideal order. Photography disrupted modernism's discourse on originality and the irreducibility --the aura ---of the unique object, forming a faultline along which the sensibility of postmodernism began to coalesce. 

However, the modernist fetsh of art has, to a large extent, transformed photography from a subversive element within modernism to yet another avante-garde strategy in the art institution.  

photographic histories

In her Other histories: photography and Australia essay Helen Ennis says that up to the late 1960s a strict hierarchy operated  in art history in Australia. In this  hierarchy the traditional art forms of painting, and to a lesser degree sculpture, were regarded as most important, followed by drawing and printmaking. Art photography was mostly confined to a medium specific realm, rarely penetrating the larger art world. It occupied a peripheral position in relation to mainstream art practice in the art institution. 

Moreover, as Geoffrey Batchen, points in his essay  ‘Australian made’,  in  his Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History, Australia's photographic history is:

positioned, when it is thought of it all, as no more than a supplement to The History of Photography as we have come to know it through Helmut Gersheim and Beaumont Newhall  and all their more recent followers. This establishment history, already circumscribed by its monotonous quest for orginality, priority, and the heights of artistic sensibilty, has by and large confined its attention to developments in France and Britain in the nineteenth century and the United States in the twentieth.  As a consequence, no photographs from Australia are featured in its hallowed lineup of masterworks.   

Since the scholarly  history of Australian photographic tradition was only constructed in the 1980s Australian art photographers (photography as 'self-expression')  took their bearings from American art photography in the 1960 and 1970s. 

The regional or Australian history of art photographic that emerged late in the 1980s was premised on the modernist, essentialist approach championed by Szarkowski and others with its conventions and categories  of artistic genius, an oeuvre, innovation, technical excellence, period style and rarity. Modernist formalism ruled.  

 Gael Newton in her  Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1839-1988 was  an attempt to establish some sort of local artistic tradition for the medium.  The above  categories were simplified into ‘pictorial power’ and ‘artistic merit’  and the  text was premised on the  search for exceptional images produced by a few clebrated photographers. It was organized into photographic art history's  stylistic categories of pictorialism, modernism, documentary and  postmodernism.  

Given this history of our visual culture both the representation of the landscape in Australian  visual culture and the  visual language  of that tradition have been established by painting  and the  books on painting by art historians. In order to see how the Fleurieu Peninsula has been visually represented in the past we need to turn to the modernist painters of the 1940s-1960s, such as  Dorrit Black, James CantKathleen Sauerbier and Dora Chapman.

The painter that is the most significant for me is James Cant's representations of the local  bush and scrub around Aldinga and Willunga. Less important is  Lee Friedlander's  interesting photographs of  trees and shrubs in the US are not as crucial, as these do not refer to this particular place. Nor did I know about  the colonial photography produced in  the nineteenth century as the first South Australian survey history of photography, A Century in Focus: South Australian Photography 1840s-1940s by  Julie Robertson and Maria Zaagla,  was not produced until  2007.