I. Archivo Histórico del Poder Ejecutivo de Nuevo León
25. Fondo Correspondencia con el Ministerio de Guerra y
I begin by examining the staged documentary portraits by Anne Zahalka. Her photographs of everyday Australians in domestic and iconic settings with an assemblage of symbolism are a modern portrayal of nationhood. Her portraits are less about mimesis and more about what they represent, as she questions dominant cultural myths about what constitutes Australian identity. Informed by postmodern notions, Zahalka appropriates familiar images from the past and re-stages them with new meanings in present. She does this by using both conventional photographic approaches and digital imaging to enhance the composition and theatrical artifice of her photographs.
Zahalka believes our historical understanding of Australian nationhood came from how the early Australian painters of British and European decent perceived and portrayed the Australian landscape. She remarks:
… exploring Australian identity and looking at the mythology and the stereotypes that have been produced has come really from how the early Australian impressionists carved out a sort of new
landscape for Australia that differed to that of England. At the same time, the style of painting had come from a knowledge of European painting tradition. And within that, there were the figures of the heroic pioneers, bushmen and new settlers, and so on.123
Although they were impressionist works, Zahalka feels that these images of the Australian landscape were important because they shaped a new nation.124 She
123 Interview with the artist, Appendix Eleven, 381.
124 Australian impressionism was a combination of observation of real life and pictorial
convention. In his work “City Bushmen: the Heidelberg School and the Rural Mythology, 1985 Leigh Astbury highlights how a circle of artists in nineteenth century Australia examined art in a social and cultural context. These impressionist artists helped to develop the rural mythology extant in Australia—the bush landscape, spirit of the pioneer, masculine labour that became distinguished by characteristics of hardship, resilience, heroism and romantised in the psyche of the nation.
88 says this has informed her thinking about the images she recreates and meanings behind her work. She references well-known paintings and photographs and substitutes modern people and objects into a contemporary frame and narrative. She says “I like to work with familiar images that people immediately know and then somehow twist them to get people to question what they’re thinking and represent them with a new meaning, So I appropriate familiar images from the past and reconstruct them to tell another part of the story”.125
Figure 10: Max Dupain, The Sunbaker, 1937 (1970) Figure 11: Anne Zahalka, The Sunbather, 1989
In her early work, she harked back to how a nation immortalised the beachscape as the embodiment of the Australian way of life in the twentieth century. In 1989, Zahalka restaged Max Dupain’s iconic image Sunbaker (1937) (figure 10) with her image The Sunbather (1989) (figure 11). She transformed the iconic sun bronzed Australian male of pure physical form with his muscular shoulders and arms into a thinner pale skinned red haired ‘anybody’ using heightened colour over black and white film with its play of shadows. The work arouses feelings of nostalgia by returning to an earlier period in Australian history of a young nation and the glorification of a healthy, leisurely lifestyle, however, Zahalka disrupts these feelings by reinventing the scene with a less than heroic image of an ordinary person lying on the sand in the Australian sun.126
125 Interview with the artist, Appendix Eleven, 386.
89 By contrast, the portrait of actor David Gulpilil as The Movie Star (1985) (figure 12) photographed by Tracey Moffatt four years earlier than Zahalka
unashamedly makes reference to Australia’s colonial past and the dispossession of Aboriginal people against the recurring presence of the beach as a lexicon of Australian visual culture. The actor who is shown with traditional Aboriginal ‘dot’ markings on his face instead of the ubiquitous zinc sun cream for fair skinned beach goers, reclines casually on a yellow car bonnet wearing multicoloured ‘boardies’, listens to music on a ‘boom box’, holds a ‘tinny’ of Fosters beer, the famous Bondi Beach with its luminous blue water and white sand in the background. The photograph of Gulpilil seeks to challenge
established notions about the place of Aboriginal people in Australian society by replacing the sun–bronzed white European beach goer with an Indigenous man. It could be said the image had unintended negative connotations because of the association of the beer can with alcohol dependence in Aboriginal communities.
Figure 12: Tracey Moffatt, The Movie Star, 1985
As a signature piece of her oeuvre, Zahalka portrays the changing demographic of Australian society in her parody of Charles Meere’s painting Australian Beach Pattern (1940) (figure 13) as the The Bathers (figure 15) in 1989 and again twenty-three years later in The New Bathers (figure 16) in 2012. Zahalka is contesting both long-held notions of Australian national pride and meanings of identity by re-imaging the beach scene in these portraits. Importantly, her photographs depict a notable change in the composition of Australia’s cultural
90 identity from one of Anglo-Celtic mono-culture to the inclusion of migrants from Southern and Eastern Europe (1989), and Asia, Middle Eastern and African countries (2012) as an image of multicultural Australia. Her understanding of cultural difference may reflect her own lived experience as the daughter of European immigrants. By doing so, Zahalka reflects on the composition of modern Australian society, with its many ethnic groups and cultures, using Australian beach culture. In her portraits, ordinary people have different body shapes and sizes as a reflection of the population, unlike Meere’s beach goers.
Figure 13: Charles Meere Australian Beach Pattern, 1940 Figure 14, Freda Robertshaw, Australian Beach Scene, c1940
Conversely, Meere’s work depicts an allusion of a heroic, optimistic Anglo-Celtic society during the inter-war period in a tableau of idealised beach goers painted in a neo-Classical style to emulate classical ideals of body perfection and heroic symbolism. His painting of Bondi Beach in 1940 “encapsulates the myth of a fit healthy young nation symbolised by the tanned, god-like bodies of the
sunbathers … as a still-life of suspended strength”.127 Meere’s representation of
nationhood privileges the white Australian male and heightened masculinity as the focal point of the image, favouring one male standing proud drying himself with a towel and another carrying a child on his shoulders. Women are seen as carers of children and subordinate to men. Exceptions are the young women who like young men, are body conscious and active. The young women at the top
91 right of the painting playing ball on the beach—one woman is shown about to hit a large beach ball away from other young women. Surprising is an image of the iconic ‘Mickey Mouse’ Disney character on the child’s bucket in the left
foreground as a subtle marker of the growing influence of American culture in Australia.
Interestingly, around the same time, his apprentice Freda Robertshaw painted a distinct version of the beach scene with women and girls as the central focus of the work Australian Beach Scene (c1940) (figure 14).128 In her portrait, the
physical female form and motherhood are celebrated offering a more familial view of the beach scene. There is, however, an underlying story of the absence or loss of men due to war, notably the call for young Australian men to
contribute to the British war effort in Europe during the Second World War. This is evidenced in the foreground with the representation of a mother and baby, evoking The Pieta, the sadness of maternal loss.129 A woman clothed and seated
in the centre of the frame surrounded by children also signifies the fecundity of human life. A male carrying a child on his back is also seen in this image but on the periphery which could be seen as symbolising young men going off to war but life still continues at home.
While Zahalka looks to the original composition of figures, gestures and symbols of Australian beach culture in recreating an evocative image of national identity, she places her two portraits into a contemporary frame. First, she chooses subjects that more accurately reflect the ethnic make-up of contemporary
Australian society in 1989.130 “Less British and more European with Italians and
Greeks and also Japanese. I ended up just inviting different groups of peoples and trying to give a sense of the diversity of Bondi and the different communities that lived there”.131 She invited real people from Bondi to participate—surfers,
128 Currently on loan to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. 129Portrait 50, (2015), 31.
130 At the 1986 Census, European born migrants and settlers (UK/Eire 7.2%, Italy 1.7%, Greece 0.9%, Yugoslavia 1.0%, Germany 0.7, other 1.4%) represented 20% of the total population of over 15 million. The Asian population began to increase during the late 1970s representing 3.4% of the population as the European migration declined in 1986. Census Year Book (1986),
Australian Bureau of Statistics.
92 lifesavers, council workers and families. Second, instead of the more muted palette seen in Meere’s and Robertshaw’s paintings, Zahalka recreates the scenes reminiscent of the famous Bondi Beach with its colours of brilliant yellow sand, luminous blue water and blue sky. A key to these works is the observation that they were not composed on the beach but staged in her studio at the back of the Bondi Pavilion against a painted backdrop, with imported sand, furniture and beach paraphernalia.132 This would be immediately obvious to the viewer, as the
edges of the scene are clearly visible in the earlier of the two photographs. Third, she replaces the old with the new—her beach goers have modern colourful swimwear, towels, a deck chair, beach ball, bucket and spade, and the large li-lo mat is substituted for a smaller ‘boogie’ surfboard. Furthermore, in what could be regarded as an everyday happy beach scene, oddly none of the people are smiling or engaging directly with each other. Unlike Meere’s painting, one women is seen about to hit a beach ball to people outside of the picture frame in Zahalka’s photographs. A noticeable absence in these two works are lifeguards with their ever present red and yellow caps.
Figure 15: Anne Zahalka, The Bathers, 1989 Figure 16: Anne Zahalka, The New Bathers, 2012
132 Daniel Palmer, ‘The Art of Self Display: on Anne Zahalka’s Portraiture’, in Hall of Mirrors:
93 Zahalka created The New Bathers in response to a request by Edmund Capon to participate in a documentary about Australian art called ‘The Art of Australia’. She says:
I didn’t want to do the same, I wanted to reinterpret the image and update it. I worked with another backdrop that had been produced for an outdoor event down at Bondi where we had people coming and standing in front of it and being photographed as part of the festival. We then placed it back into the same pavilion space as before and invited new people to occupy that space.133
The updated work is a reflection of both Meere’s painting and that of Fred Robertshaw. There are some notable additions to the 2012 portrait—the Australian flag, a unifying symbol of a multicultural nation, and a cricket bat, a symbol of Australia as a sporting nation. What is also apparent is the inclusion of a woman reading seated in a canvas Director’s chair wearing a modern version of traditional Muslim clothing, the burkini.134 In Eastern cultures, the veil and
head scarf embody an historical ideal of respect and belonging to the Muslim faith. The presence and representation of Islamic women behind a veil, however, remains a contention in modern Western cultures as it can be considered an artifact of women’s oppression. It may also highlight the exclusion of belonging in which a dominant culture seeks to repress cultural difference. I contend the current debate in the media about Islamic veiling is less about religion and more about fear or perhaps curiosity of a lesser known culture and traditional dress in which women hide their identity and right to choose that is no longer a feature of Western societies. Contemporary artists like Zahalka seek to counter such views by representing proud, confident Muslim women wearing traditional clothing in her photographs.
133 Interview with the artist, Appendix Eleven, 387.
134 At the 2011 Census, overseas born migrants and settlers represented 26% of the population of over 22 million. Asian and Middle-Eastern born migration increased from 24% in 2001 to 33% in 2011 and European migration declined from 52% to 40% over the same period. Reflecting a Nation: stories from the 2011 Census (2012-13), Australian Bureau of Statistics.
94
Figure 17: Anne Zahalka, The Girls #2 Cronulla Beach, 2007
This can be seen in her photographic portrait The Girls #2 Cronulla Beach (2007) (figure 17) which further questions the dominant construct of Anglo-Celtic culture as Australia’s national identity. The photograph offers a different perspective of our beach culture. In these images Zahalka emphasises the underlying angst about acceptance of different cultures and religious faiths. Figure 17 shows three Muslim women paradoxically as lifeguards standing proud and strong in an almost masculine pose on Cronulla Beach, each wearing a brightly coloured ‘burqini’ as a modern symbol of their faith and gender,
inscribed with motifs and Arabic lettering.135 (The burkini of the woman in the
middle displays the brandname of Aheda Zanetti ahilda in Arabic.) This photograph is staged on Cronulla Beach with beachgoers visible in the surf behind the women and not set against an artificial backdrop. Zahalka made the work in response to interracial tensions and clashes between young people of Anglo-Celtic background and those of Lebanese and Middle Eastern descent in Sydney about beach access and ownership that culminated in the December 2005 Cronulla riots. Indigenous artist Fiona Foley also makes reference to the interracial tensions in multicultural Australia and the marginalisation of
Aboriginal people in society in her photographic series titled Nulla (2009) about the Cronulla riots. Her photographs portray people from different cultures,
135 The ‘Burkini’ was created by Australian woman Aheda Zanetti in Sydney the early 2000s. Zanetti refined the burkini for women life guards in 2007, as shown in figure 17.
95 including Aboriginal and Muslim, on the sands at Cronulla beach dressed in a cultural mix of contemporary and traditional clothing. While the beach has long held a privileged place in the Australian psyche, Zahalka shows that Dupain’s iconic photographs of beach culture are now a relic of past ideals of nationhood and different to present day reality, especially after Cronulla.