In Australia the experience of works of art through mechanical reproduction always precedes their direct experience…The image has become the site of a transient fascination that represents not the unity of one ego but a multiple subjective view…Australia is already the landscape of the future… Imants Tillers, “In Perpetual Mourning”1
In Australia the experience of works of art through mechanical reproduction always precedes their direct experience…The image has become the site of a transient fascination that represents not the unity of one ego but a multiple subjective view…Australia is already the landscape of the future…
Imants Tillers, “In Perpetual Mourning”1
NEGATIVE HISTORY
Drawing on analogies and models from linguistic theory and the sciences, it is possible to extend Tillers’ characterization of Australian art and its international relation as the province of the “living dead'' into a paradigm of “negative history”. The vacuity of the myth of “origins” which fixates on the landscape in Australian art is exposed in Tillers’ recent works by the overlaying of other nationalistic “earth” fetishes across the conventional Australian obsession. Most effectively Tillers cross-refers to Kiefer’s ambiguous investigations in Heart of the Wood, 1985 and in Lost, Lost, Lost, 1985. In The Decentred Self, 1985, Tillers denies the validity of the search for “difference” between the art of “centre” and “provincance” and implies, instead, that the quest is a spiral leading to a dead-end, to an irreconcilable contradiction which artis belonging to a country late in establishing a “history” within the impacted meanings and time-scales of international capitalism cannot resolve. Knowledge is no longer available. It is nailed away out of sight from the once omniscient, integrated Subject-Deity. Within Australian art no visionary possibilities exist such as the myth of exotic “otherness” would predicate of it.
it seems that at some moment each succeeding generation of artists in Australia expresses the sentiment “Australia is now part of the art-scene”, only to later recognize their hopeless invisibility and powerlessness.2
Nonetheless, official bodies relentless negotiate predetermined... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
lmants Tillers, The Decentered Self, 1985. Courtesy of Yuill/Crowley, Sydney.
Susan Norrie, Lingering Veils (part three of Triptych), 1983. Courtesy Mori Gallery
