VOST: Appropriating Antipodean Territory

Since returning to Australia I have been working toward a body of paintings to reflect upon the archetypal implications of Patrick White’s myth of Voss. White’s novel took its inspiration from the blank but haunted script, left in the colonial imagination following the disappearance of the German naturalist and explorer, Dr. Ludwig Leichhardt. In his wilful bid to cross Australia from east to west, Voss is annihilated by the mythic never-never as he unwittingly transgresses its Tjurkulpa, or law.
Where as Professor David Tacey interprets the myth of Voss, as a tale of ritual suicide and sacrificial offering, identifying an unconscious self-destructive dynamism, which underpins the Australian psyche and accords with the psychology of colonial guilt, my objective is to produce a body of paintings, which appropriate the linguistic traditions of the painterly Antipodean School to infuse this seminal Australian myth with my own insights and iconography.

The Antipodean School

The Antipodean School is a broad term embracing both the Angry Penguins of the 1940s and the Antipodeans of the 1950s. These two groups had a number of members in common and shared the similar philosophic position vis-a-vie painting.
Where the New York School was quintessentially abstract and the School of London can be seen as essentially realist, the Antipodean School represented a mytho-poetic approach to the medium where painting functioned between the realism of image and the real of the surface. An imaginative process where individual expression is voiced through the iconography of the artists own culture.
Fundamentally it is a figurative expressionist lineage, which stemmed from the Ecole de Paris and Picasso’s influence on the dissident German expressionists. The Antipodean School’s genesis was inspired by the influence of northern European refugee painters Josl Bergner and Danila Vassilieff. The mytho-poetic ethos of the Antipodeans came under threat during the late fifties when international abstraction challenged its critical stability. The Antipodeans published their manifesto in 1959. It was written in defence of image in painting. Essentially; Art for the artist is language; painting is more than just paint and culture more than decoration. The Antipodeans lost their battle, and the ensuing years witnessed the global ‘Triumph of American Painting’.

VOST : Death by Landscape

In the Antipodes, all the major movements in art have always come from offshore. In his introduction to an exhibition of Australian painting in Berlin in the 1980s, Tony Bond explains: ‘Nearly all Australians live in urban complexes along the coastal strip, their culture is largely imported...there they sit on the edge of their continent looking outwards, yet their myths and sense of persona are informed by the great interior, which most of them will never see except on television.’
Since the rise of formalism, painting has been in decline. Now with the demise of the Antipodeans, the significance of their position is in danger of becoming a cultural blind spot. While we all understand the historical significance of The Antipodean School, few see their linguistic inheritance is more profound than a period style. Globally, most significant painting today is formally positioned at either end of the semiotic spectrum; at one end abstraction, at the other realism. For the Antipodeans the real challenge of painting lay between these poles. Painting as a haptic technology, where image and surface become elements of a sumptuous language system, which the painter orchestrates in an poetic process. Its challenge is classical, that of virtuosity within the act of painting, when the painter infuses personal insight into the iconography of their own culture at large.

‘There is a toughness about painting in Australia, the ideal is when Australian painters use the rawness of their background and infuse that sense of energy with the elan of European painting.’ - Arthur Boyd (Interview with Laurie Thomas, 1968)