2009 AAANZ Conference Abstracts - The Art Association of Australia ...

10. LEGACIES OF SURREALISM
Although the Second World War is often taken to signal the decline of surrealism as an avant-garde movement, surrealism continued to exist after
the war not only as an organized movement but also as a historically decisive experience. It has continued to influence a broad range of endeavours
from critical theory and psychoanalysis to contemporary art and gender studies. This session addresses the contemporaneity of surrealism and invites
contributions focused on surrealism’s legacy of as an aspect of our modernity. Topics range from surrealism’s influence on contemporary art and theory,
surrealism as an interlocutor in cultural dialogue, surrealism and the question of gender, to the re-reading of surrealism after modernism, etc.
Convenor:
1. Bernard Smith’s Brave New World
Dr Sheridan Palmer
Raymond Spiteri
(Victoria University of Wellington)
Bernard Smith was briefly seduced by Surrealism in 1939-1940,
before rejecting it and committing himself to Social Realism, which
he saw as a superior visual language with which to support socialist
doctrines and contest the pessimism of “war-time defeatism”. This
paper considers certain literature, political and cultural events that
influenced Bernard Smith during this extraordinary period of flux
prior to and during the initial phase of World War Two.
Fertile modernist philosophies, art and cultural reverberations were
flowing into Australia from Europe and the threat of totalitarian
regimes made any formation, either artistic or political more urgent
and exciting. Surrealism, in Smith’s view, was “the last wave of
the romantic vibration”, and appeared to answer a number of his
emotional tendencies at a critical time in his life. He had joined the
Communist Party, which he considered a ‘secular religion’, and
had encountered the 1939 Herald Exhibition of French and British
Contemporary Art. Surrealism’s revolutionary values challenged
the old world and the “bankruptcy of art-criticism … Cézannism,
neo-academism, or machinism”, and embraced the psychoanalytical
processes of Freud, as well as deriving its philosophical justifications
from Hegel. Aesthetically, Surrealism was an extension of the
knowledge of human consciousness as well as the ‘fringes of
the subconscious’ and from this period of personal, political
and intellectual change Smith produced a number of surreal,
expressionist paintings, (recently acquired by the National Gallery of
Australia) before abdicating his role as an artist and emerging as one
of Australia’s most serious, progressive and aggressive intellectuals.
Sheridan Palmer is professional art curator and an Honorary
Fellow of the Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne. She
is currently writing the biography of Professor Bernard Smith and
her book Centre of the Periphery. Three European Art Historians in
Melbourne, 2008, documents the establishment of art history as an
academic discipline in Australia.
2. Dusan Marek, Gibraltar
Dr Zoja Bojic
The painting Gibraltar by the Czech émigré artist Dusan Marek was
created on board the ship, SS Charleton Sovereign, headed for
Australia, in August 1948. Upon his arrival in Australia, Dusan Marek
first settled in Adelaide from where he moved to Tasmania, then
Sydney in 1951, and further afield in 1954. In Adelaide, Dusan and
his brother Voitre worked and exhibited together with several of their
fellow émigré artists such as Ludwig and Wladyslav Dutkiewicz from
Poland and Stanislav Rapotec from Yugoslavia, thus forming the
Adelaide cluster of émigré artists of Slav cultural background.
Dusan Marek’s Gibraltar, as well as several other works he created
on route to Australia and immediately upon arriving, is perhaps
best described as a surrealistic work that blends the European and
Prague surrealist iconography with the elements of Czechoslovakian
visual arts traditions, folklore and mythology. It is representative of
Dusan Marek’s unique visual language imbued in the artist’s cultural
memory.
This paper contextualises the work of Dusan Marek with that of
émigré artists from Europe working in Adelaide in the late 1940s
and early 1950s and also touches on the impact these artists’
presence has had on the evolution of art practices in Australia.
However, the primary focus of this examination is the significance
for Dusan Marek – and his fellow émigré artists – of experiencing the
very process of migration, belonging and re-territorialisation. This
examination of the question of cultural transition allows for a deeper
understanding of Dusan Marek’s work and the possibility of crosscultural
readings of previously unexplored elements of his work.
Zoja Bojic is a Visiting Fellow, Art History, The Australian National
University, and a Lecturer, COFA Online, College of Fine Arts,
UNSW. Zoja’s books include: Stanislav Rapotec, a Barbarogenius in
Australian art, Andrejevic Endowment, Belgrade, 2007; Imaginary
homelands, the art of Danila Vassilieff, Andrejevic Endowment,
Belgrade, 2007; and Sunce juznog neba, pogled na umetnost u
Australiji danas, Srpska knjiga, Ruma, 2003.
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