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Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita (review)

396 One indigenous author is included, in the context-setting “Interdisciplinary” section that opens the anthology. In 1934, Narranyeri––the inventor, writer, and activist David Unaipon––lambasted his “Fellow Australians with White Skins” for their condescension, citing a “sympathetic white man” whose picture of “my people’s achievements in depictive art, mimetic dances and social and religious ceremonies contrasted strangely with my memories of the miserable, depressed creatures who used to squat about our mission compound, making sham boomerangs and raffia-work to sell to tourists,” while the white Australian “exercise of the arts consisted mainly of waiting for the next consignment of films from America” (53). Condescension does mark many of the texts on Aboriginal art throughout the volume, but––in essays by Preston in 1925, Leonhard Adam in 1944, Karel Kupka in 1962, and Tony Tuckson in 1964––so does a remarkable, prescient effort of understanding, and a powerful advocacy that would help pave the way for the acceptance of Aboriginal art in the 1980s. How useful it is to be able to trace this growth of understanding. In the last entry, renowned architectural historian Sigfried Gideon, in an extract from the 1967 edition of his famous book Space, Time and Architecture, celebrates Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House and, in acute detail, laments the treatment accorded him by local officialdom. One of the serendipities buried throughout Modernism & Australia shows up right here. The reach towards Asia so prominent in contemporary Australia scarcely appears in the modernist period, but when it does it is very interesting, as in the extract from Hardy Wilson’s self-published Grecian and Chinese Architecture (1937), yet another of the texts in this book written against the grain of its time and place. Wilson designed some houses that sought to apply Chinese principles to local conditions, but they remained unbuilt. Chinese architecture does not reappear in Australia until Utzon draws on it in the raking roof beams and the interior designs for the Opera House. The purported unsuitability of the latter––these radical, colorful inventions, so highly developed in models in his Denmark studio––was the tipping point that led to his sacking. This was an outrage that echoes still, and has only recently begun to be put right by his re-employment, chiefly through the agency of his son, to guide the current renovation of this great building. It is another of many elements from Australia’s mid-twentieth century wrestling with the challenges of the best of modernism––to which this volume provides so many fascinating points of entry––that persist into the present, seeking some kind of resolution.