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Counterpunch August 08, 2012
The Boy Who Left to Grow
The Critical Life of Robert Hughes
by BINOY KAMPMARK
“Life goes on despite theory, and so does art.”
– Robert Hughes, “Jean Baudrillard: America,” New York Review of
Books, 1989
They do seem to be falling like flies, creatures who wish to flee whilst
they can – critics and practitioners of history of various persuasion,
interest and intensity. Gore Vidal, Alexander Cockburn, John Keegan and
now, wrenched from the art world, Robert Hughes, dead in a New York
hospital.
He was part of the Push, a group of Australian artists and intellectuals
that bristled with talent and verve – Germaine Greer, Clive James
amongst them, and with wanderlust, fled with them to Europe in the
1960s, where their minds were sharpened and nourished.
The usual accolades will pick up the stunners – The Shock of the New
that first aired on the BBC in 1980, engendered a broader interest in
contemporary art and made Hughes a conspicuous commentator. It could do
no other – it lowered the tone on theory while keeping the volume on
insight high and mighty. His American Visions: The Epic History of Art
in America (1997) was prodigiously expansive and produced a nervous
break down.
His art criticism always shone with courageous pugnacity, and a good
portion of it can be found in the collected volume Nothing if Not
Critical, featuring the brightest essays for such publications as Time
Magazine, a publication that sought, with foresight, to recruit him in
1970. America-bound, he left his Old World abode of steeped culture and
freelance indigence to find New World vitality. His art commentary,
sharp on the masters, proved dismissive at times. Jean-Michel Basquiat,
who died from a heroine overdose in 1988, was a pop tart, an
epiphenomenon – in fact, a “featherweight”. Celebrity did not demand
drawing skills – it merely demanded vacuous icons – “a perch in the
pantheon of the eighties does not necessarily depend on merit.”
His cultural criticism was also supreme. Sharp as a tack, he could
equally confront a culture in decay (as he did in The Culture of
Complaint: The Fraying of America, the result of lectures delivered
under the auspices of New York Public Library and Oxford University) and
theorists he found unnecessarily obtuse. Political correctness was
always given a good dressing down. Obsessions are targeted – love of
the foetus, the cult of victimhood, the adoration of television and the
aversion to public funding of art.
He issued, memorably, an assured spank to Jean Baudrillard in 1989, the
French cultural theorist who famously dismissed the technological
deceptions of the 1991 Gulf War as fantasy, as CNN’s war, and, in fact,
the “war that did not take place”. When Baudrillard chose to ponder
America in a daft meditation, Hughes jumped on it in the New York Review
of Books. America, land without truth, with polished white teeth, with
no identity, cultural bearing – at least for Baudrillard. Such
assumptions, for Hughes, were the “sumptuous poppycock in the French
manner, de haut en bas.” Confine the theorist to the flames of
indifference – art and life go on.
Then, with all encompassing power, there was history, which he finessed
into something that was not merely readable but sweetly digestible. He
cut mammoth sways in terms of cities (Barcelona in 1992, and Rome in
2011), and Australia’s then neglected convict history (The Fatal Shore
from 1987). The latter’s creation was very much an encouragement from
popular historian Alan Moorehead, and began as archival research in the
public records office. He wrote of Clio with respect and for the public
with conviction. In American Visions, he speaks of his audience warmly
– “that creature who American academics often profess to believe no
longer exists: the general intelligent reader.”
Then came his relationship with Australia, ever distant, yet tinged with
a permanent proximity. His first book, The Art of Australia (1966) was
framed as a farewell and a message. Leave Australia, and grow up, or,
to quote the exact words from an anonymous painter Hughes cites, “you
can’t begin to grow up until you’ve left the place”. Hughes, just to
prove that point, found that work undernourished, a raw working. In
Things I Didn’t Know, his 2006 autobiography, he longed for the maternal
bosom of Europe, yet was unable to escape the antipodean orbit he found
arid and constricting. Australian reference points followed his pen
with nagging persistence, a permanent shadowing. The exile, in truth,
never leaves.
As Peter Conrad, himself an Australian expatriate of cerebral clout and
imagination noted of Hughes, “Escape into the larger,
