I consider myself blessed that the little regional art gallery in my home town hosted some of the great works of Australian art. For a bus fare, I could walk the hushed galleries and be awed by the work of great Australian artists such as Arthur Streeton, Grace Cossington-Smith, Eugene von Guérard, Russel Drysdale and Rupert Bunny.
But one of my favourites was Fred McCubbin’s A Bush Burial. This monumental painting is a key work of the “Heidelberg School”, Australia’s answer to Impressionism. The simple pathos of the scene, set against a dreamy, impressionistic bush landscape, is a perfect fusion of Australian light and colour with what was then the latest in European vogue.
It was one of the first paintings acquired, by public subscription, by the newly-opened Geelong Regional Gallery.
But now the gallery is playing host to an abomination that both makes a mockery of McCubbin’s greatness and brutally exposes the shallowness, vacuity and just plain lack of talent that epitomises modern “art”.
Frederick McCubbin’s famous ‘The Pioneer’, above, needed an update, needed improving, and some bold and innovative trailblazers and radical thinkers have decided to make the necessary change to it, like so:
Yep. She rather clumsily Photoshopped out the “toxic” white male. That’s it: a few minutes faffing around with the Clone tool is all it takes to be an “artist” these days.
If you take Anna Zahalka’s ‘The Pioneer’, she is creating a new story, one based on her family, her parents being first-generation refugees coming from war-torn Europe, of being at the coalface of the assimilation process, and her growing up thinking “where does my family story fit within this Australian pioneering legacy?”
Short answer: they don’t, sweetie.
Her family and her parents’ story doesn’t fit anywhere in the Australian pioneering legacy, they just turned up after all the hard work to create one of the most prosperous and peaceful societies to ever exist in all of blood and misery soaked human existence had been done, and then mooched off it, complained about it, and tried to change it all, or their wretched children did.
But if Zahalka just does a sloppy Photoshop, at least Juan Davila tries to paint. Tries to.
“The Pioneer” is not the only McCubbin painting this exhibition is trying to ruin, but also ‘A Bush Burial’, left the original, right, some modern monstrous take on it:
Clown World Australia
Davila’s entire career has been based on shoddy draughtsmanship, desperately trite “symbolism” and cheap, juvenile attempts to shock. His paintings bear as much relation to the greatness of McCubbin as a slightly backwards teenage lout scrawling “Dick Poo Bum” on a dunny wall does to Michelangelo.
The great Australian critic Robert Hughes once said, “If you thought 80s art was bad, 90s art is worse”.
Lucky for him, Hughes didn’t live to see just how much lower “modern art” could sink.
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