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May 20, 2009
Bernard Smith in European Vision and the South Pacific (1960), argued that the evolution of ideas and culture in Australia is essentially dialectical: externally generated concepts are not simply imported and assimilated but are also transformed by the experience of the locality into a hybrid form, which in turn informs the national tradition.
The local culture, despite its dependence and isolation, is given agency, hence opening the door to the possibility of an ‘original’ Australian culture. This originality is located in ‘Australia’s’ interpretation of influences and concepts, particularly as manifest in the work produced here.
An example from an German-Australian photographer:
Wolfgang Sievers, Aerial view of solar salt fields near Dampier, Western Australia 1971, National Library of Australia
Over the past several decades, this contingent relationship has come to delineate the ‘antipodean’ identity, which is,“constructed between centre and periphery, across imperialism and place.” In Wolfgang Sievers and the Revisionism of Australian Migrant Art in the Melbourne Electronic Art Journal Dunja Unjarmandic developes this idea.
She says that:
there is an element of distancing and division that underlies his [Siever] images that is generated from the friction between his New Photography aesthetic and Australian subject matter. This element forms the ‘connotative’ message of Sievers’ images: the distancing effect presents the viewer with an alternative meaning of the subject matter and image construction, one that is more reflective of the locality’s influence on image production than an institutional analysis of Sievers’ work would allow.
For Barthes, the connotative message is a photograph’s ‘second’ meaning (the first being denotative, or “the necessarily real thing” in front of the camera), which emerges with the ‘coding’ of a photograph. The crux of Barthes’ argument is that ‘connotation’ is historical: it is defined by the spatio-temporal context in which it is
created.
This context is a juxtaposition of the European, and more generally Western, manifestation of modernity and its Australian counterpart that implies the time lag to which Australia is inevitably subjected. The social, cultural, and class-based predicaments that Europe faced during the intense industrialisation of Lang’s era could not be felt in their entirety in Australia.
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