Ready for the Marvellous

That we’re living in decadent times is evident. Every day, it seems like any semblance of shared reality is sagging and splintering at the seams. The Australian dream of private property and wealth, now elevated to the sanctity of official religion, keeps widening the abyss between the haves and have-nots. Waves of mental illness keep rising and soaring all over. Fires, floods, and earthquakes unfold with uncanny rhythm. And in the tiny little province of art institutions, amidst pronouncements of safe and accepting new happenings, too often, there’s this sense of being plunged into a whirlpool of glittery monotony. It’s all a bit bizarre.

Art museums, no surprise, are also caught in this spin. Pushed and pulled in dizzying directions, they exhibit a range of contradictory impulses as they seek to value, collect, and display art and its vexed histories [1]. Criticisms, often warranted, are hurled their way; that they need more diverse curatorial staff, that they need to find more inclusive ways of bringing in people other than as mzungus, that they need to disentangle themselves from insidious structures of power etc., etc. [2]

In response, a curious phenomenon has started to blossom. Art museums have become sites of struggle, locations of a recovering public sphere where critiques can be voiced amid a surrounding madness and alternative formations given a stage to experiment on. That’s what makes them interesting.

Riding on the coattails of this development, this essay will dwell inside the New England Regional Art Museum (NERAM). And for reasons which will soon become apparent, its collections will take centre stage.

Wedged at the top of this essay is an Akan proverb. Rendered visually, it depicts a bird with its feet planted forward while its head twists back to retrieve a precious egg. With compressed simplicity, this Adinkra symbol offers a pearl of West African insight—if we’re to move forward or even understand why and how we’ve come to be where we’re at, we’ve got to reach into the past and find some of that gold.

When applied in waking life, such an orientation lends itself to a backwards type of grappling. Choices are necessary. What’s not useful must be shed, for inheritances are chosen as much as they are passed on. Uncertainty must be embraced. The past is always open to reinterpretation. Such an orientation also hints at possibilities. For it suggests that if we turn attention to the past and grapple with it, we could, perhaps, open up a different future.

When applied to art museums, such an orientation takes on some allure, for museums are saddled with the past. Their collections contain a smorgasbord of stories. Stories about artworks and those who made them, and stories of how and why these artworks came to be collected. What’s more, such an orientation has the potential to open, at the very least, an adventure of experimentation and debate. Because of this potential, this allure, dwelling inside NERAM, will proceed with a narrowed focus on its collections.

If you’re cocooned in the city or the country, the invisible interrelations that tie the city and the country together may bypass you. They are, after all, easy to overlook. Namely, those social relations, fed by capital’s unquenchable thirst for growth and profit, have altered and continue to change the countryside and have transformed and continue to transform the city [3].

In Australia, such social relations have been formative. Indeed, nowhere was this more evident than in New England, a region taking in a broad swathe of north-eastern New South Wales, which the settler-colonial project, directed from London, deemed as a desirable location to practice some wicked voodoo magic. To realise this project, it conjured up a web of stations, heralding a period of intense and racialised frontier violence, the effects of which still linger [4].

Driving up the New England Highway from Sydney a couple of full moons ago, twisting and turning past the fenced-in fields speckled with cattle, some of these effects had settled into the landscape.

NERAM sits perched on the outer edge of Armidale’s town centre. Opening its doors in 1983, its birth was the culmination of a tenacious fundraising effort by the local Armidale community, aided, in no small part, by matching support from the New South Wales government. According to the promotional material in the bookshop just inside the front entrance, it’s “the jewel in the crown of New England’s cultural heritage.” It proudly and unselfconsciously boasts of having one of the “largest and highest quality collections of art in regional Australia,” throwing shade, it would seem, at the widespread assumption of the countryside as a culturally stagnant wasteland. It offers “a range of exhibitions, public programs, art classes, workshops, and social events” each year. When I paid a visit, the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s travelling Archibald prize exhibition had rolled into town and set up shop. Community outreach appeared to be more than an afterthought. A local artist’s black and white photos suggestive of a New England gothic noir were neatly hung in a vestibule abutting the main cavern of a display room. Standing from the outside looking in, NERAM seemed to be trying hard to hustle a slice of relevance like many other museums I’ve set foot in. My initial impressions veered between a kind of curiosity and a creeping indifference. The hustling was a bit hit-and-miss. It was only when I caught wind of its collections that things turned interesting.

Let me quickly paint a picture. The Hinton collection looms large past the helpful ladies operating the front desk. You can’t miss it. A jumble of smallish paintings hung French salon-style, parts of it permanently filling the ample walls of one of NERAM’s main display rooms. The brainchild of Howard Hinton, an art collector and benefactor, he saw it as his vehicle “to provide a complete collection illustrating the development of Australian art from 1880 onwards.” Less grandiose and more noble intentions also played a part. In Hinton’s own words, his collection, prompted by his professed interest in education, was to be “made available in perpetuity for the benefit of succeeding generations.” It takes pride of place, and I soon clocked onto why. NERAM was founded with the express aim of preserving Hinton’s legacy.

It’s almost too easy to throw shade at this legacy from the present vantage. Hinton was a mzungu of means, and his collection reflects the tastes and interests of a man born over a hundred and fifty years ago. You can kind of tell he spent most of his working life managing a shipping company. The preponderance of still lifes, landscapes, and flower arrangements mark the collection with a middlebrow bougie sensibility. Moreover, Hinton’s distaste for modernism and preference for traditional forms makes his talk of providing “a complete collection” reek of hubris.

But issues of legacy aside, the Hinton collection masks a paradox. For since art is part of society, and society is marked by class, gender, race and plenty more divisions, these will also affect the character of any collection, even when guided by the best of intentions. This is a paradox that NERAM is fated to tease through. It’s baked into the fabric of the joint. You can tell by the stories it spins around the Hinton collection, constantly riffing on how it serves a cultural benefit to the public. This is hard to do with a straight face in a country where the previously presumed status quo, Anglo-Saxon and assimilationist, has unravelled. For my part, I guess I got a cultural benefit. Arthur Streeton’s The Wharf, Mosman’s Bay (1907), an attempt at capturing the truthful essence of the landscape, got me thinking. The white man’s yearning was palpable. So naïve and tender-hearted. Looking at it and other landscape paintings on display, I swear I slipped into a daydream. I spent too much time pondering my imagined relationship with the enigma of the Australian landscape.

I didn’t see the Chandler Coventry collection in the flesh. But I had the helpful ladies at the front desk to thank for pointing me in the right direction. Their guidance led me back to the bookshop, where I discovered another eccentric mzungu and his art collection.

Chandler Coventry was his name, and he was born in the mid-1920s. He came from conservative New England roots. The kind that for generations had run a station and earned a living capitalising off the land and its original inhabitants. The young Chandler tried his hand at this game. However, some spark got lit, and in the 1960s, he left the grazier life and moved to Sydney. He threw himself into its art scene. With little prior experience, by the 70s and 80s, he had morphed into a gallerist, dealer, and collector about town. Along the way, he found the time to play a significant role in establishing NERAM.

What he bestowed was refreshing when considered alongside the more staid offerings of the Hinton collection. From between the book covers, there was weirdness, breadth, and no fixation on a singular collecting logic. In that way, it offered a representative slice of the contemporary. It was also revealing. Because it also opened up a window through which a story about art can be told. Like Hinton before him, here was another mzungu of means foisting his tastes onto the public. Like magic, he also got a museum to help spread his values. And got me wondering about power and who gets to use it to sway artistic imaginations.

The tricky task of fostering a healthy society relies on a baseline of shared meaning and understanding. Also crucial for fostering health is active debate and reflection in social spaces where cultures can meet, clash, and grapple. Art museums, as self-conceived sites of authority, as far from ideal gatekeepers and sanctifiers of cultural values, are one such contact zone. And with First Nations art and culture increasingly coming to occupy a symbolic place of necessity within the Australian landscape, such museums have become the location of an elaborate Anglo-First Nations dance, a pas de deux with so much clashing and grappling that it warrants talking about. Significantly when, like forty per cent of the Australian population, you don’t fall into the Anglo-First Nations binary.

First up, it’s undeniable how baffling and beguiling this dance is. It’s the source of so much progressive solace. It allows half-baked dreams of diversity and inclusion to sour the air. It’s so damn good at hiding class conflict, rage, and impotence. So often, watching on, you can see the dance casting a spell. There’s so much self-congratulation. Significant practices get depoliticised and aestheticised [5]. Too often, you’re reminded of the limited understanding of the relationship between First Nations art histories and global regimes of control and assimilation.

At NERAM, this dance was only warming up. When I asked about the relations with the Aboriginal Cultural Centre and Keeping Place next door, the ladies at the front desk were honest. Ties weren’t close. However, they were eager to speak about NERAM’s most recent First Nation art exhibition.

Juncture (2021-2022) was the name of that exhibition. It took place from the 5th of November 2021 till the 30th of Jan 2022. I missed it. It allegedly shone a light on the Aboriginal art in the NERAM’s collections, most of which was donated by Howard Renshaw. A Sydney-based barrister, his interest in First Nation’s art was brief and, by his admission, ad-hoc [6]. His generosity, as myth would have it, grew from a pressing concern that artworks end up in places where they could be cared for and valued. He nobly shouldered the white man’s burden. Accordingly, between 1984 and 1994, he gifted a series of bark paintings, burial poles, didjeridus, and sculptures to NERAM. These objects hailed from as far and wide as the East Kimberley, the Tiwi Islands, the Western Desert, the Central Desert, Arnhem Land, and the Gulf of Carpentaria. The exhibition catalogue declared that none of the bark paintings were accompanied by explanations of the stories they depicted. Visitors were instead implored “to enjoy the aesthetics of the work and imagine the potential meaning without the story.” The catalogue also thanked the Armidale and Region Aboriginal Cultural Centre and Keeping Place for their participation and support. I was a bit surprised (given what the ladies at the reception had told me).

The Anglo dance around its settler-colonial histories in Australia doesn’t show any sign of letting up any time soon. Other institutions, such as the National Museum of Australia, which supports the Indigenous collections at NERAM as part of their outreach policy to acknowledge Indigenous art and culture in the regions, are on board. What NERAM’s dance will look like as ongoing historical, political, and moral relationships shift, as a power-charged set of exchanges, of push and pull, continues is anyone’s guess.

When I left NERAM, I checked out the town centre. I got a bite to eat. I lingered in a couple of bookshops. I had a mad chat with the owner of one, and she introduced me to Callum Clayton-Dixon, a historian. I bought his book Surviving New England: A History of Aboriginal Resistance & Resilience Through the First For Forty Years of the Colonial Apocalypse (2020). I walked past Barnaby Joyce’s electoral office. Late on a mid-week afternoon, the streets were quiet. I didn’t know it then, but Armidale was selected as a regional resettlement site by the Turnbull government in 2017. It was now home to a growing population of Yazidi refugees (there were no signs of this community in the museum). Cars and trucks hummed by. The wind had a bit of a bite. And the dark was coming on quickly in Anewan Country.

Driving up to NERAM, I thought I wanted to discuss Afro-Surrealism in this text. I’d been reading poetry, watching movies, and listening to Hugh Masakela blow his horn. Surrealism with an Afro tinge was pressed on my mind. I was caught in a spin by Suzanne Césaire in particular. Her insistence that surrealism was a state of mind, “a permanent readiness for the marvellous,” resonated. I, too, wanted to embrace the domain of the strange, the marvellous, and the fantastic. I thought I’d somehow weave Afro-Surrealism into my encounter with NERAM. Use it to hunt down clues for the world beyond this visible world, an invisible world striving to manifest.