Noted in Memory Lane

Peter Cochrane ‘Gallery head attacks bullies of avant-garde’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 28.10.99

The National Gallery of Australia’s new head of Australian art, former Herald critic Mr John McDonald, fired a fresh broadside at the contemporary art scene last night in his first major public address.

Giving his inaugural public lecture at the NGA, to an audience that included gallery trustees, Mr McDonald painted a picture of a community where the avant-garde had become the establishment and “in which conformity is the ruling passion”.

Mr McDonald took up his position as head of Australian art on September 6, after the NGA weathered an outcry from some sections of the contemporary art world, angered in part by the appointment of “a journalist” with “a record of consistent confrontation and divisive abuse”.

Presenting an historical overview of the rise of modernism last night, Mr McDonald said its legacy was that “the maintenance of the entire, vast machinery of contemporary art is dependent on the sense of an adversary, because it is condemned to the pretence of perpetual revolution. Those artists and curators who are best able to maintain this pretence are those who rise to the top of the heap.

“Although it is a ferocious-looking beast, the avant-garde enterprise tends to dissolve at the first drop of humour, satire or self-doubt. This is the reason why so much cutting-edge art is so utterly lacking in wit, so obsessed with spelling out its credentials and pedigree, devoid of any sense of its own pretentiousness, and - despite the many frantic nods in the direction of spiritual and political goals - completely self-contained.”

Since an avant-garde required an adversary, it was a fertile breeding ground for paranoid and totalitarian attitudes, Mr McDonald said.

“An artist announces that he is subverting oppressive social norms and all those who find the work uninteresting automatically become oppressors.”

It was an avant-garde which measured its success by its “failure to convince an audience”, he said.

“Indeed, the smaller the audience for avant-garde art, the more successful it may be judged. In this respect, one can only see Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art as an outstanding success, in the way it managed to alienate a large audience and leave itself a million dollars in the red.”