“Women are a gender. Men are geniuses.” The ironic words of Swedish Film Institute CEO Anna Serner – who visited Sydney last fortnight for a film festival celebrating women directors – echoed in my mind as I watched the new Australian documentary Whiteley.
Directed by James Bogle, the film’s conceit is to use the seminal Australian artist’s own letters to tell his story, arcing from his comfy suburban childhood to death from heroin in a lonely Thirroul motel room in 1992.
An abundance of Whiteley’s paintings fill the film, reminding me that his work was indeed special, singular. Rather than transposing European ways of capturing land and light, he found a new visual language for the Australian landscape. Instead of the bush or the desert, Sydney’s Lavender Bay was Brett’s ground zero. As an urban, residential area of jacarandas and sapphire-blue water, it offered an energised vision of coastal Australia from local eyes. Fluid lines and vivid colour leap with dynamism from the canvasses. From that vantage, Brett’s ascent is righteous and his contributions to art history easy to identify.
But there is something else at play in Bogle’s documentary: I fear that it inadvertently speaks to the ongoing gender heist in Australian art.
At the film’s launch in Sydney this month, producer Sue Clothier said the question occurred to her: “What if the story of Brett is the story of Wendy? This is why it’s called ‘Whiteley’.”
It’s a perceptive observation, but in the film the story of Wendy Whiteley is, for the most part, missing: she’s portrayed merely as his teenage sweetheart, with whom he had a child, descended into heroin addiction and divorced in his 40s.
After the doco’s screening, my mum said to me: “Now Brett’s up there like a god. But Wendy’s an artist too.” She’s right. Watching promotional interviews ahead of the release last week, I read a one-word descriptor beneath Wendy’s name as she spoke: “widow”. But there’s another genius art project hiding in plain sight. Wendy’s Secret Garden in Lavender Bay, just beyond the perimeter of her home, has consumed her since Brett’s death.
Over the decades Wendy Whiteley rehabilitated a patch of landfill-shrouded wasteland, owned by the New South Wales government but open to all, into a small harbourside paradise. It is lush and emerald-green, wound with paths, hand-carved rails, stone sculptures and tiny birds popping out from the long shadows in the afternoon. Still, many Sydneysiders forget its existence.
The Secret Garden is not just “women’s work” or gardening, or even a postscript to Wendy’s life with Brett. It is a creative project the artist has spent a third of her life immersed in. And yet it’s presented only as an epilogue in the documentary, which mostly retells us what we already know about Brett. The garden joins a canon of overlooked works and women throughout Australian art history.
Documentaries and biopics are an evolving art form. Instead of creating straight portraits of their subjects, which try to control and glorify our perception of “great” figures, recent films like Jackie and Casting JonBenét expose the very process of cinematic myth-making. They turn inside-out the usual conventions of dramatisations and archival footage, showing us how cinema has helped build historical events into legends.
The Whiteley documentary, on the other hand, takes these techniques as a given; animated archival photos, re-enactments by lookalikes in wigs, voice-over readings of Brett’s letters. It’s a very conventional film for an unconventional character. There’s no inquiry about the processes that built Brett’s grand fable, let alone why he is seen as a genius and Wendy as his tragic adjunct. The film over-mythologises the man’s personality at the cost of understanding the artworks and their place in history.
The oversight of Wendy is a small part of a bigger problem. The regressive idea of the “great male genius” is still very prevalent in the national psyche. The exceedingly thin layer of Australian artists with whom the general public is acquainted are still generally white men with big personalities, self-destructive urges and muses. It’s significant that as one of the few documentaries and films about Australian art to get theatrical distribution, Whiteley animates the Big Man Art Genius myth perfectly: Brett was an addict, a painter working intuitively from the messy material of his life, massively commercially successful but always perilously close to destitution.
The mainstream press loved divining his persona like this: the Herald called him “an obsessive bohemian who took life – and art – to the extreme”; the Australian refers to his “damaged glamour ... from 1960, no one had a vaster gift, more sheer brilliance or a bigger impact on the Australian imagination”. The doco doesn’t add anything new to this story. Bogle romantically paints Brett who struggled to be a good man; someone who failed Wendy, characterised as his long-suffering muse, and their now-deceased daughter Arkie.
Perhaps this is what Wendy meant when she spoke with Guardian Australia this month about the agenda his biographers bring to the table: “It’s always about sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. That tired old story.”
Name one comparable Australian art superstar who’s a woman, who has scaled the heights of Whiteley, Nolan and Boyd, who has been eulogised so breathlessly and entered the mythical art lexicon as emphatically. Grace Cossington Smith and Margaret Olley are halfway there, perhaps – but what of the current-day stars? Tracey Moffatt this week represents Australian at the Venice Biennale with a major exhibition – an honour bestowed upon Fiona Hall two years prior. But neither women are spoken about in the same reverent, hyperbolic tones as Brett was at his peak – nor are Fiona Foley, Louise Hearman or Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Instead, it’s the eccentric, larrikin art blokes with macho or gothic subject matter or who assumed the mantel after Brett’s death – Adam Cullen, Ben Quilty and Mike Parr et al.
It’s not the art created by these women that has stopped them from forcefully entering the national imagination, but their inability to meet the criteria for male art genius. They may be out there, but our museums and galleries haven’t been looking: last year’s Countess report found that only 34% of the works in state museum collections are by women.
Wendy’s Secret Garden is not a grand statement. In its humility and its provision of a beautiful, restful space for the general public, it was 20 years ahead of today’s “space-activating” projects like Renew Newcastle, the laneways and murals in City of Sydney’s public art program, and the now-ubiquitous “pop-up” gallery, which all creatively reclaim dead spaces in order to revitalise cities. The notion that art can be available to all and threaded into environmental aims – in the public sphere, outside the hushed, rarefied walls of galleries – is palpable in the policies of many councils today. Wendy was a visionary. Towards the end of Whiteley, an overhead shot shows Wendy toiling away in her garden – but this, I think, is where the real story started.