Tony Albert (b1981) Girramay, Kuku Yalanji, Yidindji Peoples/ Australia
Waratahs (2021)
exhibited: Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney
Margaret Preston (1875-1963) Australian
Waratahs (1925) woodcut, printed in black ink, hand-coloured 42.6x30cm
Angela Goddard sullivanstrumpf.com …the well-known oeuvre of Australian modernist printmaker and painter Margaret Preston (1875-1963). Now acknowledged as Australia’s preeminent modernist between the wars, Preston enjoyed immense popularity in art and design communities in Australia from the 1920s for several decades, with many of her articles published in The Home magazine and Art in Australia encouraging readers to take designs and symbols from Aboriginal art to devise a uniquely Australian cultural expression. One of the most popular of these was her 1930 article ‘The Application of Aboriginal Designs’ in which she called for all Australians to ‘be Aboriginal’. However benevolent in intent, an expression of a larger interest in Aboriginal art and culture informed by her travels throughout Australia, these exhortations have since been criticised by subsequent generations for their casual lack of understanding of the appropriation of sacred designs. As curator Hetti Perkins has said of Preston’s use of Aboriginal motifs: ‘It’s like speaking in a French accent without speaking French. The accent is there, the intonation is there, but the meaning is not.’
Many contemporary Indigenous artists have since engaged with Preston’s appropriations, calling out her lack of acknowledgment of individual makers and sources, including Trevor Nickolls, Marshall Bell, Richard Bell, and perhaps most determinedly, Gordon Bennett. Bennett took motifs including the male Aboriginal figure from Preston’s ‘Expulsion’ and the black swan from a 1923 woodcut and tangled them in Piet Mondrian’s high modernist grid in his ‘Home Décor’ series (1995-2013), and directly quoted from a suite of designs Preston published in Art in Australia in 1925 and in his later series of abstract paintings ‘Home Décor: After M. Preston’ (2008-13). Albert has primarily been drawn to Preston’s hand coloured woodcut still lives of native flowers. These works were incredibly popular but often dismissed as ‘decorative’ by critics and the art establishment. Preston herself was dismissed as a mere flower painter by many powerful art world figures such as Norman Lindsay and John Reed, for her privileging the decorative and avoiding realism or literary references in her work.
[Tony] Albert’s interest lies in the consequences of Preston’s encouragements - these kitsch caricatures of Aboriginal designs and motifs still found on tea towels, tablecloths, table runners, handkerchiefs, placemats, and lengths of fabric, rather than the sophisticated abstraction she envisioned. Albert’s own relationship to these objects is affectionate - he has collected these items since childhood, tempered with a keen awareness of the cultural inappropriateness and disregard for the spiritual significance they embody…
