The paradox of nature and modernity down under

Last Friday I went to the Hiede Museum of Modern Art for my Art History class, "Australia: Environment and Visual Culture" to look at Sidney Nolan's collection. (I must say it is quite a trek from St. Kilda by Public Transport, but a trek well worth it). Sidney's paintings reinvented the Australian landscape; he searched for a modern language that could express the ambiguity of the Australian landscape. Up until Sidney Nolan in the 1940's, classical Hiedelberg landscapes painters borrowed art language from the European and Claudian vision of the landscape as the "picturesque." In fact, Hiedelberg artists perception of the landscape was influenced by "anti-industrial sentiments of the industralised" world. Sidney, however, was one of the first artists to realize and visualize how the colonization of Australia would not leave the landscape untouched by industralisation. Sidney's work critiques the idea of dealing with intersection of urban experience (expansion of telecommunication line and railways) and country life. Ian Burn wrote, "The landscapes continue to convey the country as an ideal and as productive, but the image is now integrated into modern urban experience." In the painting below, called Railway Guard 1943 by Sidney Nolan, symbols of transport intersect with the railway guard's head. The spatial ambiguity and mixture of flat and modelled forms create a tension in the painting- a visual paradox.

With all of this in mind, the Heide's green pastures adjacent to the Museum ), there lived two cows that belonged to Mr and Mrs Reed who were famous art collectors and founders of the Heide. As a remembrance of the Reed's beloved cows, artists have installed metal statues of cows on the green grass. I enjoyed taking pictures (see below) of the cows because I could see the telegraph lines that intersected with them. It is powerful when forms art, technology, and nature collide. It is as each of these forms merge with one another and speak to each other. This intersection also reminds me of Nolan's paintings and the way in which he internalizes the process of understanding the landscape through objective realism.

It seems that no matter where I go in Australia there is a tension between the old and the new. In the city, there are old victorian buildings next to contemporary buildings. In Tasmania, the vegetation of Mt. Wellington is embedded with telecommunication facilities. It was Sidney's art that made this paradox evident to me, a paradox that it is crucial to Australia's national Identity. Ian Burn wrote, "We are still learning to with the landscape of this country (Australia). That remains the cultural paradox, even at the end of the twentieth century" (85).