This picture was made whilst walking along  Baum Rd, Waitpinga,  on an afternoon poodle walk in 2012:

It is a pink gum. Waitpinga is in  the Fleurieu Peninsula, South Australia.

A tree in the agricultural landscape of the Midlands in Tasmania:

The photo was made in 2011. It started raining soon after the photo was made.

 

This  picture was made at Safety Beach on the Mornington Peninsula in Melbourne, Victoria  in 2010:

It was an overcast afternoon and IU was walking along the path along the foreshore. 

This is another  local tree. It is  on the roadside of a country road in Waitpinga, South Australia that I often walk down.   The road is Baum Rd. 

The  picture was made in 2016 whilst I was on an early  morning  poodlewalk.

I discovered last night that Sophie Cunningham  has a tree of the day Instagram account.  Mary Macpherson   has a book of trees in New Zealand called Bent.  I am sure that there are other photographers photographing tree apart from Beth Moon.   

Arboraphobia”, the fear of trees  makes sense given the massacre of trees that is our revenge on the choking bush. 

The pioneer settlers  possessed a “psychopathic fear of the gum or the wattle”. Then there is  the zeal with which bulldozers levelled the ground before  post-war suburbs were built; and  Tasmania’s continuing determination to churn up ancient forests and sift them into woodchip? 

Trees are associated with darkness and anxiety specific to the Australian colonial experience of  the Australian bush. The Australian landscape must be stripped of its trees--along with  the Aboriginal presence--- if room is to be made for its colonisers. This  was so even though settler Australia's  vision of the landscape as empty, unwelcoming bush or desert.

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This blog has transformed into a photoblog  about trees including what happens to trees once they have been cut down.   

These photographs are not of  trees in the wilderness.  I live in a place where there are trees,  and I  frequently  photograph them a lot whilst I am on my poodle walks.  This  photographing of  trees  then extends  to  my road trips.  These are mostly trees in agricultural landscapes.  

A picture of four trees on local  country road--Baum Rd-- which were  photographed on a  late afternoon walk on an overcast day. The  rain was coming in from the south-west. 

Robin Boyd, a critic of suburban sprawl, coined the term "arboraphobia," or white Australia's fear of trees, that led to massive razing of land to create a paved suburban landscape.  A suburbia  that is a wasteland,  a dry, ugly cement landscape of the suburbs; mangy backyards with pathetic garden plots and dark, claustrophobic interiors with cracked walls and ceilings and, ironically, floral carpets. These images are linked to moral aridity, sexual dysfunction, the sterile suffocation of suburban living, and the dread of natural growth invading the house.   

The traditional interpretation of the Australian landscape is one of majestic gums and sunlight plains--exemplified by Hans Heysen---  rather than the  sublime's darker twilight landscape that evokes a sense of eeriness and unease; or  the landscape as transformed by human beings through farming. 

This landscape has been carved up for family-style farming and it has become private property.  All that is left as a public space are  the roads between the boundaries of the private property.   A  dirt road, a fence,  and remnant roadside vegetation. 

The subject matter of this  conceptual photographic project --pink gum and Xanthorrhoea---means that it is a particular representation of part of the Australian landscape. It works within the Australian landscape tradition that aimed to reveal to Australians the landscape of their country in their own place and time. 

This is a tradition in which the landscape is the dominant image of Australia--eg., Arthur Streeton's The Land of the Golden Fleece (1926)---and whose imagery has been reworked and undergone regeneration and redefinition. Examples include John Glover,  Eugene von Guerard, the  Heidleberg School, Hans Heysen, Albert Namatjira,  Russell Drysdale etc.  The imagery was usually interpreted  in terms of a concern for a national identity,  Australian dependency and isolation, and the creation of a national style.   

Modernism was defined both in terms of and against the hegemony  of this regional tradition in which artists were seen to do little more than represent nature. It was naturalism. Bernard Smith in Australian Painting argued that after 1945 modernist imagery gradually supplanted  traditional and conservative imagery of a regional naturalism.

The latter was deemed to be provincal and resistant to nonfiguration, whilst modernist abstraction  was deemed to be international, innovative and avant gardist.  International was actually New York as the dominant centre of modernist art,   American abstraction and Clement Greenberg.

The latter failed to see that  abstraction was a tradition whose imagery has been reworked and undergone regeneration and redefinition and that the images in both  the abstraction and naturalist traditions  emerge from, and are an expression of, the place in which we live. This gives rise to  a regional art in a global world.  

In  the 'Anti-Photography’ exhibition,  curated by Duncan Wooldridge at the Focal Point Gallery, we find an account of conceptual photography as ‘anti-aesthetic’ or ‘deskilled’ photography that refers back to, and reworks,  Nancy Foote’s 1976 Artforum text ‘The Anti-Photographers’.

This text  refers to an anti-aesthetic’ or ‘deskilled’ photography (ie., Ed Ruscha and the Bechers) that is  outside the orthodoxy of conventional photography, by which Foote means Stieglitz’s conception of modernist photography, namely the focus on ‘the unique photographic print’ and ‘abstract formal values’.    The anti-photographers set themselves 'apart from this so-called serious modernist photography through  a snapshot-like amateurism and nonchalance that would raise the hackles of any earnest professional.'

One of the defining features of the ‘anti-photographers’, argued Foote, was  the Duchampian underpinnings strip the photograph of its artistic pretensions.   Their utilitarian approach is a kind of anti-aesthetic that wrenches itself purposefully away from the glossy, good-looking gallery print, with the aim, in her words, of transforming the photograph from ‘a mirror to a window. What it reveals becomes important, not what it is.’

The Becher’s typologies are a window with  Duchampian underpinnings that have little photographic self-consciousness? The Duchampianlink is there as their  first monograph  Anonyme Skulpturen (Anonymous Sculptures),  made an implicit nod to the legacy of Duchamp’s readymade.   Surely, they are making photographic forms---typologies, series and grids-- that extend beyond documentation.  

They engaged  with the language of photography as  their work invoolved frontal views of industrial architectural forms seen from fixed vantage points against a cloudless sky and without expressive effects. this linked back to  the  German tradition  of  the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) and  the photography of August Sander, Karl Blossfeldt, and Albert Renger-Patzsch. The Bechers work was initially dismissed as completely  inartistic.  

During this period debates around the photographic, and the relation of the history of photography to the history of art intersect with the dematerialisation of the art object.  The photograph was seen to be  a way to subvert the notion of an art object by operating in the margins of documentation.

That was then. Now we can have photographers  for whom ‘what it is’ is extremely important and who also create glossy, good-looking (conceptual) work. This suggests that contemporary art photography that could be called conceptual is unlike the conceptualist photography of the 60s and 70s.

Today conceptual art  is more  about images that are preconceived and explore a pre-existing idea or plan than snapshot-like amateurism

The cosmopolitan culture  of the global economy has challenged the Eurocentric focus of metropolitan modernism, revealing the parochial concerns of earlier debates on modernism. AS Terry Smith observes in Inside out, outside in: changing perspectives in Australian art historiography

 

When you are located at a cultural periphery, you become aware that the definitive interpretations of whatever is most valuable to you originate at centers some distance from where you live and work, and that they are subject to change, often radical change, for reasons that seem arbitrary. Yet you must learn to fathom them, and quickly, because they impact on your capacity to participate in the discourse as a whole.

An overemphasis on locality can lead to a provincialism that then edges into a conservative nationalism. It did in Australia,  in the sense that a conservative vision of art has ruled state galleries for a long time. 

The heritage of the 1960s and 1970s is a large one. That was the period when Australian's assumed that the centre of world art was  New York,  and it lead to the Australian preoccupation with nation, national identity and the position—and therefore the category—of Australian art.

This sought to locate Australian art (Arthur Boyd, Charles Blackman, John Brack, John Olsen and John Perceval) in relation to international (largely American) art,  was concerned to build a  strong national culture and to identify a local avant garde by identifying a new style of painting.  

That was then.  Today modernism—no matter how often and subtly it is remodernized—is seen to be past its use-by date. “Postmodern” is an outmoded term, a temporary placeholder that is no longer adequate to describe conditions that have changed fundamentally. These conditions or currents are globalization and transnationality and giove rise to the emergence of   being a  part of a broader international contemporary art, no matter how apparently local the signifiers.