A Chain of Ponds: On German and Australian Artistic Interactions

Abstract

This essay traces the long artistic history that has existed between Germany and Australia , at least since the middle of the last century. We begin with the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf-educated Eugene von Guerard, who was the first head of an Australian art school and the first director of an Australian art gallery, and end with the Sydney artists Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley’s Freiland (1992–3), a work about the refugee Turkish population in Berlin after the fall of the Wall. What we seek to show here is that a globalised world art has always existed, and that any Australian provincialism was only the correlative of an art history conceived in terms of nation. There never really was—or was only—an Australian art. Indeed, the very idea of an Australian art was only ever possible because of Australia’s relationship to cultures like Germany’s .