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

17. VISUALISING WAR:
POLITICS, AESTHETICS AND LOGISITICS
This session seeks papers that explore the various ways war has been represented through art and photography, and the diverse
motivations, conventions, organisations and limitations that have shaped images of conflict and warfare. This session also proposes to
investigate topics related to representing current or future conflicts. Papers for the session could respond to the following questions:
How has war and warfare been represented in Australia Can contemporary works of art respond effectively to current and future wars
and what is the potential value of these works
Convernors: Warwick Heywood Laura Webster
(Australian War Memorial)
1. The High Impact and Short Life of the Seditious Image
Associate Professor Ross Woodrow
(Australian War Memorial)
This paper takes an unexplored aspect of Australian involvement
in the Boer War (1899 – 1902) to demonstrate the power deployed
by a single artist to influence anti-war sentiments and the selective
erasure and reframing of the images he produced to develop an
Australian nationalism linked to Britain. Of all the Australian colonies,
Queensland was the most enthused with colonial patriotism and
bonds to Empire; so much so, that it offered troops to Britain four
months before the actual declaration of war in the Transvaal in
1899. The various Queensland Bush Contingents sent to Transvaal
hardly covered themselves with glory but it took several years before
Queenslanders or post-Federation Australians became disillusioned
with the War. The last Queensland contingent returned home in May
1902 to a less than enthusiastic welcome.
It can be argued that the only Australian artist to consistently mount
a provocative anti-war campaign in the popular press was Monte
Scott (1835 – 1909) who produced the front-page cartoon, along
with other full-page political images, for the Worker. The Bulletin was
one of the few other papers not raucously pro-war, although there
are few cartoons in that paper, or elsewhere in the Australian press
for that matter, to rival Scott’s singular venomous campaign against
the Boer War. In this paper I present a visual survey of Scott’s
neglected images, demonstrating their influence on the gradual
disillusionment with the war. I offer an explanation for the historical
erasure of Scott’s Nationalistic images and their selective absorption
into the emblematic ANZAC tradition. I argue that Scott’s images
were too stridently anti-British in their sentiments, too independently
Australian – too patriotic for the brand of Colonial Nationalism that
World War I engendered.
Ross Woodrow is Deputy Director (Research and Postgraduate)
Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. His research interest
is in the production and reception of historical and contemporary
graphic images in the popular press with a particular focus on
physiognomy and racial representation.
2. Can the Subaltern Speak Women Picturing the
1914-18 War
Professor Pamela Gerrish Nunn
The so-called Great or First World War broke out when the state of
contemporary art had been a matter of intense controversy in Britain
for several years. The debate was over modernity or avant-gardism,
variously termed Cubism, Futurism, and Post-Impressionism. This
paper looks at how the language of art was used to speak about the
War in that circumstance, specifically how the female voice spoke it.
Women were neither expected nor welcomed either as war artists or
as avant-gardists, ostensibly because on the one hand authenticity
and on the other original expression were beyond them. Thus to
examine their representations of the war delves into the fundamental
question of cultural authority, a notion crucial in the representation
of a society to itself and especially so in 1914-20 as governments
sought to mobilise but also to control the meanings given to the
conflict and its consequences.
Acknowledging the scholarship of Catherine Speck, Katy Deepwell,
Sue Malvern and Richard Cork, this paper will present an original
range of work prompted by the War that illustrates the spectrum
of language deployed by the female artist in treating this subject,
taking in Evelyn DeMorgan, Lucy Kemp-Welch, Edith Collier, Grace
Cossington Smith, Beatrice How, Ethel Walker and Flora Lion.
Pamela Gerrish Nunn was Professor of Art History at the University
of Canterbury until 2009, is an independent scholar working in
Christchurch, NZ. She is known internationally for her work on the
history of women artists in the 19th and early 20th centuries, on
which she has published widely since 1978.
3. Serve: A New Recipe for Sacrifice
Kingsley Baird
In mid-2010 visitors to New Zealand’s National Army Museum café
will be able to purchase Anzac biscuits in the shape of World War
One Diggers. The biscuits are a component of Serve, an artwork
that will be exhibited in the museum at the same time. Serve, and
other sculptures in Kingsley Baird’s exhibition, New Memorial
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