Wilder Times: Arthur Boyd and the Mid-1980s Landscape

It was early in 1989 when I decided to head down to the South Coast, taking the Princes Highway from Sydney to Shoalhaven, to visit the painter Gary Willis, who at the time was living in the Singleman’s Hut at Bundanon. The latter was one of two properties owned by Arthur and Yvonne Boyd; the Boyds generously gifted both Bundanon and Riversdale to the Australian people in 1993.

After a two-hour trip down the highway and another hour driving along a bone-crushing dirt road that could best be described as a forgotten fire trail, I arrived at Bundanon. There, I was greeted by Willis, who emerged from Boyd’s studio with paint brushes in hand. Willis informed me that when the Boyds were not in residence he was able to use the studio.

So, I could only experience surprise when I arrived in July of this year at the Bundanon Art Museum, my first visit to either of the Boyd properties since 1989, for the opening of Wilder Times: Arthur Boyd and the Mid-1980s Landscape. I was surprised because of the thoughtful and truly innovative environmental design of the art museum by Kerstin Thompson Architects that cleverly embeds the building into the surrounding landscape. A secondary part of the development, equally as inventive, is The Bridge (housing accommodation and a learning centre), a striking wood and steel 160-metre-long construction suspended across a flood prone gully. The whole complex opened in 2022.

Wilder Times came about because of a major refurbishment, which began in April 2024, of the Arts Centre Melbourne. The refurbishment required the removal of all artworks, and so began a conversation between O’Brien and Tonkin about the idea of showing Boyd’s fourteen paintings of the Shoalhaven River and Pulpit Rock in a museum or white cube setting. This would also allow the audience to see these paintings in the actual landscape that inspired Boyd to create them.

These paintings were originally commissioned for the Arts Centre Melbourne by designer John Truscott in 1983. Truscott’s vision was for Boyd to paint a series of allegorical works; however, only two were realised: Landscape with Dog, 1984, and The Actor, 1984, which are not included in the exhibition. I suspect this was because the theme that emerged in the other paintings had a focus on the landscape. Of course, given Boyd’s concern for the environment and his active opposition to the dredging of the Shoalhaven River these landscape paintings may be read as containing a moral or hidden story.

The suite of Boyd’s fourteen paintings in the Bundanon exhibition chart the passage of time from early morning to late into the night, particularly Shoalhaven River Bank with Star and Black Swan, 1984, and the changing weather across the landscape that so entranced the artist. These paintings range in style from the figurative to a loose, almost casual, abstract approach, and include his recurring lexicon of images, such as the swan and black cockatoo. While Midday, 1984, has a certain luminosity many of the other paintings have an undercurrent of suspense, a perennial fear of the bush that dates from the arrival of the first Europeans, with Pulpit Rock looking like an ominous shark fin in several renderings.

During the 1960s, Boyd and his brother-in-law, Sidney Nolan, had both created hugely lucrative markets for their work, particularly in London. Both painters explored the established narrative of an Australian cultural identity using an Antipodean iconography. This of course was rejected by a younger generation of painters, working in the late 1960s, that included Royston Harpur, Stanislaus Rapotec, Yvonne Audette, Peter Upward, John Olsen, and Ian Fairweather; for them, this was “branding Australian art as that of an exotic backwater.” Given these comments, it is important to pause and reflect on Boyd’s Shoalhaven River and Pulpit Rock suite of paintings through a 21st-century lens.

Two decades later there was a surge of public excitement with the election of the Hawke-Keating Labor Government in 1983, and the curators have used this as a segue, as the title implies, to the “wilder times” that feature in the second part of the exhibition. The selection of these artists, who were all working in the 1980s, is refreshingly random with a cross-section of different media, political and aesthetic positions. It was an enlightened decision to include the seminal documentary, and later, experimental filmmakers Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, together with Keith Gow, whose Women of Utopia, 1984, documents the lives of women working on Utopia Station. Then there is Serious Undertakings, 1982, a film by Helen Grace that chronicles the various political currents of the time, using a documentary format that subverts the dominate narrative of the “male” or authoritarian voice. The political theme continues with posters by Bob Clutterbuck, whose work Save the Franklin. Damn the Government, 1982, still strongly resonates today. As does Toni Robertson’s poster series Small Matters 3, 4.6 & 2, 1982‒88, which engaged with feminism, queer politics and the anti-nuclear movement. Both Clutterbuck and Robertson were involved with the Tin Sheds art workshop at the University of Sydney, where they produced much of their later prints; it’s now sadly gone.

As one would expect, painting is well represented, with three natural ochre abstract works by one of the country’s most intelligent Indigenous painters, the late Rover Joolama Thomas. These paintings reveal a powerful and moving set of images depicting sites of a historic massacre. The Papunya Tula painter Timmy Payangu Tjapangati, who was a key figure in what became known as the Western Desert art movement, is represented by Snake Dreaming, 1984. Then there is Imants Tillers’ grand painting, Pataphysical Man, 1984, which uses an appropriated image of a figure by the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico, with overlayed images from Latvian children’s books, and other motifs. Liz Coats’ and John Peart’s abstract works demonstrate a concern for the sensory experience of painting in all its mystery.

The exhibition continues with works by artists as disparate as David Aspden, Mac Betts, Vivienne Binns, Brian Blanchflower, Mike Brown, Judy Cassab, Bonita Ely, Gerrit Fokkema, Robert Jacks, Tim Johnson, Robert MacPherson, Susan Norrie, Howard Taylor, and Richard Woldendorp.

Wilder Times gives a random snapshot of the concerns of Author Boyd and of a generation of younger artists who were working in Australia at a pivotal moment in our history.

EXHIBITION
Wilder Times: Arthur Boyd and the Mid-1980s Landscape
6 July to 13 October 2024
Bundanon Art Museum

Brad Buckley was a guest of the Bundanon Art Museum