Museum of Contemporary Art Australia/Tate Project

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The Australian artist has a hard time overseas. Especially in the ‘Mother country’, England. It is OK if s/he actually moves there like Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd or Shaun Gladwell; for then they can be taken for a Brit even if their art is set in the Wimmera, the Shoalhaven or Bondi. But turn up at the Royal Academy with an Australian passport and show off an iconic landscape, and Waldemar Januszczak of the Sunday Times (twice critic of the year in Britain) will thunder, ‘John Olsen’s Sydney Sun, a giant panel of art installed above your head, successfully evokes the sensation of standing under a cascade of diarrhoea’. Clearly our landscape should still treasure its origins in John Glover’s Britain.

Should you see that landscape through Indigenous eyes, then uninformed critics will offer even fainter praise. Back in 1993, the Aratjara show at the Hayward Gallery inspired yawns from Tom Lubbock in the Independent: ‘To be honest, I find them a bit boring—which is the most difficult kind of response to articulate properly. But panning the mind superficially over all the art I’ve ever seen, it strikes me that the art represented in Aratjara is perhaps the most boring art in the world. Well, something has to be’!

And the Indigenous aspect of the Royal Academy’s survey, Australia, enjoyed Brian Sewell’s vituperation in the Evening Standard: ‘These examples of contemporary aboriginal work are so obviously the stale rejiggings of a half-remembered heritage wrecked by the European alcohol, religion and servitude that have rendered purposeless all relics of their ancient and mysterious past. Swamped by Western influences, corrupted by a commercial art market as exploitative as... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Gordon Bennett, Possession Island (Abstraction), 1991. Tate and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, purchased jointly with funds provided by the Qantas Foundation, 2016. Image courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and Milani Gallery, Brisbane. © Gordon Bennett Estate 2016. Photograph Carl Warner.

Gordon Bennett, Number Nine, 2008. Tate and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, purchased jointly with funds provided by the Qantas Foundation 2016. Image courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and Milani Gallery, Brisbane. © Gordon Bennett Estate 2016. Photograph Carl Warner.