|
May 28, 2004
These images by David Hume of the Murray Mouth are familar to those flying out of Adelaide to Canberra, Sydney or Melbourne in the eastern states and who look down on the river country they are a part of, and belong to. They belong to a region that is placed at the hinterland of the powerful metro-centres of Sydney and Melbourne. When I mention this to people in the global city of Sydney they commonly ask: Why should Sydney care about South Australian art?” Do we not need to transcend the peculiarities of place. Sydney, of course, does not understand itself to be a particular place.
David Hume, Coorong, acrylic painting on galvanised steel, 1998, from Beneath the Beyond 2, 2000 (Adelaide Festival of Arts).
Despite the abstraction and the beautiful form the image represents the particularities of place: Lake Alexandrina at the top, the Coorong wetlands on the right, the Murray Mouth in the middle, the Younghusband Peninsula on the left It's a very familar shape. We in Adelaide depend on the River Murray to keep flowing. It is an iconic image for us, as the river is our life support system. We live on the edge.
The catalogue essay talks in terms of Hume's paintings:
"suggesting tunnels or shafts with a surrounding vivid blue expanse. Here, Hume seems to be exploring the interior and the exterior strata of the land and their complex interrelationship."
What we have in this estuary is sea, sand hills and fresh water and agriculture that gives rise to a very complex hydrology. Alas, the Ramsar-listed Coorong wetlands, which are home to migratory birds from Northern Asia, are dying due to lack of water flowing down the River Murray.
It is beginning to look as if the mouth of the River Murray may close due to a lack of water flowing down from the rest of the Murray-Darling Basin---too much water has been taken out by the irrigators. Then the sandhills of the Coorong and the Younghusband Peninsula will join, and the River Murray will no longer be a river. It will then be recognized for what it actually is--a modernist engineered river to create an irrigation channel to make the desert bloom.
David Hume, Younghusband Peninsula, acrylic painting on galvanised steel, 1998, from Beneath the Beyond 2, 2000. (Adelaide Festival of Arts).
Regionalism and place are not key categories in modernist aesthetics. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, for instance, makes no mention of place or regionalism. In the old days of the 1940s the political left favored social realism, the populists promoted regionalism, aesthetic conservatives condemned every deviation from the conventions of realism while the underdog abstractionists struggled against all of these currents to establish their aesthetic truth. Regionalism is kitsch and modern art stood opposed to kitsch.
The early definitive statement on the avant-garde art and kitsch as opposites was the essay 'Avant-Garde and Kitsch' written by the New York art critic Clement Greenberg, which was published in the journal Partisan Review in 1939. Greenberg argued not only that vanguard culture had historically been opposed to ‘high’ or ‘mainstream culture’, but that it also has rejected the artificially synthesised mass culture that has been produced by the culture industry – ie., the commercial culture of popular music, Soap Opera dramas, pulp fiction, magazine-illustration, B movies and advertising. The avant-gard's job is to defend aesthetic standards from the decline of taste involved in consumer society. The New York abstract expressionists were the avant-garde for Greenberg.
Those days are well gone. Today we live in particular places and the art that represents these places can be seen as a transgression of modernist aesthetics. This art exists on the edge of modernism. However, regionalism, to date, has never been granted anything like aesthetic autonomy. Can we not think in terms of critical regionalism in a globalised world? (There is more on regionalism here.)
In In his essay "The Origin of Art", Heidegger refers to a certain combat /conflict/opposition between the world and earth played out in the concealing and unconcealing of truth ( alethea) in Van Gogh's well known painting of a pair of peasant shoes. In its ‘thereness', the painting reveals a primary connectedness to the earth as closed, as opposed to the openness of the world represented in painting itself. Instead of Van Gogh's shoes we in South Australia can think in terms of the Murray Mouth.
|
