‘No one believes in Landscape anymore’, declares Ginger Strand at the beginning of a provocative essay in Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape, the recent exhibition catalogue from the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art¹. But I wonder if anyone ever did — unquestioningly believe in landscape art as a ‘truthful’ representation of the natural world? Commentators like Strand are quick to dismiss the 19th century tradition of landscape painting as fundamentally compromised (or to use Strand’s words, ‘downright dodgy’). However, pictures that seem to us today to be simply realistic or sentimental, were often understood by their 19th century audiences to be nuanced and complex. Two exhibitions of photography whose images borrow and manipulate many of the conventions of colonial landscape painting — Siri Hayes’ En Plein Air and Christian Thompson’s Lost Together — simultaneously remind us that the original sources could be just as allusive and multifaceted as the current works.

Siri Hayes
Plein Air Explorers 2008
chromogenic print
107 x 138 cm
edition of 6
courtesy the artist and Gallerysmith, Melbourne

Siri Hayes
Moe Madonna 2008
chromogenic print
107 x 138 cm
edition of 6
courtesy the artist and Gallerysmith, Melbourne

In her series of images, Siri Hayes has ‘focused on the parts of the Gippsland landscape that have been impacted by white settlement’, in one instance confronting the viewer with an uncompromising image of ‘before’ and ‘after’, dramatically juxtaposed in the same composition. Gunnai Man Land 2008 presents us with a remnant stand of Gippsland’s native forests, sandwiched between a blackberry-infested foreground and the rising smokestacks of the power station beyond. The single figure examining the pathway is reminiscent of those diminutive explorers inhabiting colonial paintings — but the mood has shifted from determined discovery to muted contemplation. Another work, Moe Madonna 2008, shows a tiny mother and child in a wide expanse of pasture land, with a line of gums on the horizon - and immediately brings to mind panoramic views such as von Guerard’s famous paintings of Bushy Park 1861, the Gippsland property of the Scottish squatter, Angus Macmillan. The large glossy surfaces of both the 19th century paintings and the modern chromogenic prints reinforce the seemingly scientific objectivity of the landscape’s details. In von Guerard’s paired panoramas, the first includes Aboriginal people traversing the property, while in the second, they have vanished and only the cattle remain. Hayes’ image eerily completes this progression — the farmland is now devoid of animals, while the encroaching urban sprawl is ominously signaled by the distant electricity pylons.

Christian Thompson
Isaac-1 2008
C-type print
100 x 100 cm
courtesy the artist and Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne

Christian Thompson
Dead as a Door Nail 2008
C-type print
100 x 100 cm
courtesy the artist and Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne

The gradual disappearance of Aboriginal figures and culture from the colonial landscape is one of the great tragic themes of Australia art. The reinsertion of that Indigenous presence into our history and the questioning of the idea of a shared national identity have underpinned the work of many contemporary Indigenous artists, including the photographer, performance and video artist, Christian Thompson. The images in the exhibition, Lost Together, emerge from his current two-year residency in The Netherlands, and reflect his ‘need to imbue a sense of Australia into the world’². This series of large C-type ‘portraits in the landscape’ again evoke echoes of the colonial landscape — but one transformed into a quirky almost phantasmagorical afterimage. In some works, the fictional-cum-autobiographical character appears within a dark, northern wooded scene, dressed in vivid exotic costume and brandishing an orange ‘Flowering Spear’ — a curious role-reversal of the early European settlers to Australia who planted the Union Jack in the New World. More puzzling and even more entertaining is the bearded tartan-clad character, again posed within the dense European landscape, who appears in a number of works such as Isaac-1 2008 and Dead as a Door Nail 2008. The beard and axe, and woodland setting trigger in any Australian onlooker memories of colonial icons such as Tom Robert’s The Wood Splitters 1886 and Fred McCubbin’s The Pioneer 1904. Is the tartan an oblique reference to Scottish sounding McCubbin, you can’t help thinking? Of course, the fact that the character is wearing a tartan dress rather than a tartan kilt tends to prevent one from applying too portentous an interpretation to such absurdly anarchic images. The artist’s delight in playing with Australia’s cultural history is tempered by his parallel desire to ‘portray identity (be it cultural, sexual, racial) in a constant state of flux’³. In both these exhibitions, nevertheless, the ability of colonial landscape painting to inspire and challenge contemporary photographers is certainly reaffirmed.

Siri Hayes
En Plein Air
March 12 - April 18 2009
Gallerysmith, Melbourne

Christian Thompson
Lost Together
10 March - 11 April 2009
Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne

¹ Ginger Strand, ‘At the Limits: Landschaft, Landscape and the Land’, in D. Markonish (ed.) Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape, Mass MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts, 2008, pp.81-88.
² Richard Hylton, ‘Christian Thompson, LOST TOGETHER’, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne, 10 March – 11 April 2009.
³ Richard Hylton, ‘Christian Thompson, LOST TOGETHER’, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne, 10 March – 11 April 2009.