At one of the mature-age gatherings I attend, an acquaintance proudly announced that he’d just seen “The Archies”. I was a bit puzzled: our demographic will remember them as a cartoon band of the late ‘60s, and many will recall their big hit, “Sugar Sugar”. But seeing them now? Of course, the penny [pre-decimal currency] eventually dropped. He’d just been to Sydney and visited the exhibition of the finalists in the Archibald Prize, a long-established award for portraiture. As an Aussie, who knows how we shorten names, I should have picked what “The Archies” meant! Indeed I had occasion to mention on here recently (14 June) the first indigenous winner, Vincent Namatjira (2020). In any case, I had to go to Sydney in August, so took in “The Archies” as well. I turned out to be there at an interesting political juncture, and I was reminded too of earlier episodes in the Award’s history. But first, a bit of context.
The Archibald Prize is Australia’s second-richest art award at $100,000, and is offered for a portrait painted from the life (no photos!), “preferentially of some man or woman distinguished in Art, Letters, Science or Politics”. It was established from the bequest of J. F. Archibald in 1919 and was first awarded in 1921: Archibald is famous mainly for his editorship of the very popular weekly The Bulletin in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and in those early days it was known for its nationalism and its promotion of Australian writers. Hence it is appropriate that the Prize is easily the best-known art award in the country, and during its showing of the finalists every year, it has always attracted thousands of people who are not regular visitors to the Art Gallery of NSW. I was there on a weekday, after the show had already run for nearly three months, and it was packed. One reason for this would be that it’s an exhibition where the artists aim to portray well-known people. And when the competition has given rise to controversy, the debate has been high-profile.
The most famous controversy arose from the 1943 award, where the winning painting (see left) was by mid-career artist William Dobell and featured his friend and fellow-artist, Joshua Smith. Both were from local working-class backgrounds. A group of artists, however – including unsuccessful entrants – brought a court case contesting the decision, on the grounds that the painting was not a portrait but a caricature. Dobell’s view was that a portrait was not like a copy of a photograph but had to be “living in itself”, an effort to convey the “subject’s character”.
The complainants lost their case. The dispute no doubt reflected a wider division between traditionalists and Modernists in Australia’s art circles, which were at that time (belatedly) coming to terms with European Modernism. As for the public, however, they were avid to see the contentious painting, and the gallery had to extend both its opening hours and the length of the exhibition. Eventually there were about 150,000 visitors, from a then-population of around 1,700,00 Sydneysiders. The flip side of the fallout, nonetheless, destroyed the friendship between William Dobell and Joshua Smith.
Visitors to this year’s show could not complain about lack of variety or dominant aesthetic standards, as the famous people represented were painted in a very wide range of styles. But the proportion of paintings selected for display was small, as there were 1005 entries and only 57 finalists shown. A response to this recurrent problem has been the establishment of two further prizes – the People’s Choice (since 1988) and the Packing Room Prize (from 1992). The first is voted on by the public from among the finalists, while the second is determined by the staff who unload and unpack the entries, and so can be won by an artist not chosen as a finalist. What happened this year, however, brought me unexpectedly to contemporary Australian politics.
The painting that won this year’s main prize was a striking but uncontentious offering by Laura Jones, representing prominent Australian novelist Tim Winton. The winner of the People’s Choice was Angus McDonald’s painting of indigenous scholar and activist Professor Marcia Langton (see above). Langton came from a tough background, born to a single mother, and expelled from a Queensland high-school in 1968 for complaining that a set text was racist. After a varied career, she now holds a Chair as Distinguished Professor of Population and Global Health at the University of Melbourne. She has also been an indigenous rights activist for decades, and was a major advocate for the ‘yes’ side in the recent Voice referendum. Voters were asked to approve an alteration to the Australian Constitution that would recognise indigenous Australians through prescribing a body called the “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice” that would have been able to “make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples”. In this campaign, Marcia Langton locked horns especially with the Australian Opposition Leader, Peter Dutton, a leading advocate of the ‘no’ campaign. As is now well-known, the Voice referendum was lost.
I am not claiming that the People’s Choice win resulted primarily from public warmth towards Marcia Langton or her cause. Angus McDonald’s painting is for me very arresting and accomplished and, as far as I can judge, is one of the better paintings chosen as finalists. But it was interesting that the subject of the Packing Room Prize winner was also indigenous. This was Matt Adnate’s painting of young rapper Baker Boy (Danzel Baker), who raps in his ancestral language from Arnhem Land. Moreover, the 2020 competition had been suggestive in a similar way. The winner here was the first indigenous artist to win the Archibald, Vincent Namatjira, as I’ve noted, while the People’s Choice went to Angus McDonald. Here his subject was not indigenous, but, like Marcia Langton, was a figure much in the public eye. This was Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish refugee who had been held in detention on remote Manus Island for several years, in a predicament resulting from political decisions in which Peter Dutton (then in government) was prominent. You’ll recall that Boochani made it to New Zealand, where he still lives, and that is where McDonald was able to paint him.
In any case, I am heartened by the thought that there may be more sensitivity among my compatriots to the plight of indigenous people, and of asylum-seekers, than is suggested by other recent political events and tendencies. But if I’m wrong, I guess I can console myself that seeing the recent “Archies” sure beats listening to “Sugar Sugar”.
