The impossibility of addition ever being more than tokenism seems to me to be a major theme in Sigi Gabrie’s Portrait of a young man as an artist/ Portrait of a vacuum as an artist , 1996, a piece which consists of large cut-outs of a boy artist and his Aboriginal subjects taken from Robert Dowling 's painting, Early Effort—Art in Australia . The original Dowling image was painted in London c.1860 when Dowling was capitalising on a minor reputation as a wild colonial boy whose 'innocent eye’ allowed him to see hackneyed European subjects afresh. In fact, Dowling saw nothing afresh, but such British prejudices about the antipodes were all that promised him visibility in the metropolis. It seems possible that he had never seen a Tasmanian Aborigine, and that warlike race would certainly never have dropped round to pose for the young genius in his Launceston garden. Not that the exotic black Maori/Europeans in his picture are proof of his ignorance; their total unreality was undoubtedly a deliberate choice. Dowling certainly knew what Aborigines looked like, having used a set of Thomas Bock 's 1835(?) drawings of them, owned by his brother, for his major Aboriginal subject painting, Group of Natives of Tasmania (1859). This had to be vaguely correct (although the anatomy remains unmistakeably Aryan, Bock having provided models only for heads and shoulders) as the painting was destined to return to Launceston as a thank-you present to the townsfolk who had helped finance Dowling’s London studies.
Early Effort had a different agenda. Dowling wanted to get it into the Royal Academy summer show and have it noticed as something exotic, rightly believing that this would encourage English commissions. Despite exceptionally good training in Tasmania from professional English expatriate artists, he was unable to compete with his British-trained contemporaries technically, so exotic subject matter was the only way to go. It was virtually his last chance to play the innocent colonial; he’d already been in London for approximately three years and not even Benjamin West (from the USA who became President of the Royal Academy) could or wanted to keep up the wild colonial boy act forever. Hence the sole rationale behind Dowling’s implied self-portrait as a dedicated lad painting natives in the wilds surrounded by his admiring peasant family (his father was actually editor of Launceston’s chief newspaper) was self-promotion.
Dowling’s subject is an apt symbol of the British tradition he as a colonial embraced so exclusively-one that did not allow him to depict either self or other realistically. Other artists like Harden S. Melville did the same thing, i.e. perfectly capable naturalistic sketches for one purpose (for Australian consumption, or as records of a semi-scientific exploration in Melville’s case) and farce for the RA. The message is inherent in Gabrie’s quotation too, except that the image now has quite a different resonance because the artistic ambitions it depicts are so long dead. Romantic cut-out figures of historic types have long been added to period settings in stately British homes, notably those owned by the National Trust. The implied grand setting for Gabrie’s figures is the whole British imperial past. It is the invisible tradition behind these two-dimensional antipodean figures, which are mere inventions aiming to give reassurance and a fake authenticity to a genuine but far less picturesque past.
