Arguments against abstraction.(modern and abstract art)

IN LAST SEPTEMBER's issue of Quadrant, Sydney lawyer Baron Alder turned his evidently energetic mind to the contentious issue of Australia's idea of itself, comparing the kind of image advanced in Russel Ward's The Australian Legend of 1958 with more contemporary--and recognisable--realities.

National characteristics are clearly a complex and controversial matter in which caricature often plays as large a part as sober analysis.

Alder singled out the sheer self-consciousness of Australians' image of themselves for particular criticism, whereas I suggest that a "sheep-in-wolf's-clothing" aspect of the current national character is more damaging and disappointing--that is, timid conformism dressed in larrikin disguise.

Some four years before I parted company with the Australian I was summoned before its then editor-in-chief David Armstrong for the supposed journalistic impropriety of describing intellectual life in Australia as "rather less than effervescent". The phrase that caused offence appeared, in fact, in a review I wrote for the Spectator (July 26, 1997) of Christopher Allen's Art in Australia: From Colonization to Postmodernism.

To my mind Allen's youthful book provided evidence of a kind of fashionable conformism to a politically correct, anti-aesthetic, left-wing interpretation of art. This deadly and stifling orthodoxy is now, if possible, even more in the ascendant in all of the arts in Australia than it was in 1997. Contrary views such as mine have been largely eliminated--outside the pages of this journal, at least.

Regular readers of Quadrant may recall an article I wrote in the April 2006 issue--"Blue Poles, Modernism and the Novelty Trap"--which challenged received wisdom not only about Blue Poles but about the core ideas of modernism itself.

Unknown to me, Baron Alder wrote a fascinating response to my claims which is now published, belatedly, in this issue. Alder presents a complex and interesting argument based largely on the spirited advocacy of modernist ideals by the Englishman T.E. Hulme. However, unfortunately for Hulme and the argument, he was killed in 1917 a mere ten years after what many understand as modernism proper first began to get into its stride.