| August 20 2000 www.the-times.co.uk/news
Robert Hughes returned to Oz, had a near-fatal car crash, laid into his countrymen for failing to ditch the monarchy and was savaged by the press for his pains. Has the experience changed him? Has it hell, he tells BRYAN APPLEYARD
Robert Hughes: 'I'm a provincial, and I see things from the eyeline of a provincial'
The cause of his rage was his treatment at the hands of the Australian press after an appalling car accident. The accident - it happened soon after he started filming his new series - involved a head-on collision on a remote road near Broome, on the Indian Ocean. It would have killed Hughes but for the fact that he was found by an aborigine named Charlie Fishhook, who in turn found Hughes's fishing pal Danny O'Sullivan, who summoned the emergency services to cut him out of the wreck and get him to hospital. The series now starts with the story of that crash. "It was too good a starting point to pass on. The script wasn't conceived with me having an accident and breaking every bone on the right side of my body. But it precipitated the longest stay in Australia I've ever had - seven months - and that saved me from the curse of long-range pontification." But it also plunged him into a legal and media nightmare. He was first prosecuted and acquitted for causing the crash. But now the state of Western Australia is considering a retrial and he faces a possible defamation action. He accused the prosecutors of being politically motivated and called them turkeys. He also called the occupants of the other car "dumb scum". Meanwhile, he was being crucified by the Australian press. He was said to have called the prosecuting barrister (an Indian) a "curry-muncher" and to have accused Broome's fire department of stealing the tuna in the back of his car. Neither was true. But it was all part of a campaign of tall-poppy-lopping - "Lop the pop," he calls it - in which Australians try to cut down to size any of their countrymen who get above themselves culturally, especially if they live abroad. In Australia Hughes is seen as an expat traitor, a man who has been gone too long to understand the new Oz and who therefore has no right to say what he thinks. He is also the tallest poppy around. "Australia is my fame brothel," he says. "I can go back there to feel famous and then I come back here and have normal work conditions." Just last week, Hughes was in stormy weather again. An essay he wrote for the Sydney Olympics programme attacked the weakness of the Australians for not voting to ditch the monarchy. It precipitated a minor diplomatic incident - was this the sort of thing that should be mentioned at the Olympics? Well, yes, if Hughes has anything to do with it. He is 62 years old. His face - always bullish but always kind and extravagantly welcoming - looks much younger, but his body has been ravaged. He walks with a crutch and a pained, angled stoop. He opens the whisky and we wait for Doris, the new, passionate love of his life. They are both getting divorced from other people and will marry as soon as they can. The next day we head out of the city in Doris's Jeep Cherokee; there is a meeting at Chappaqua with the builder and architect who are going to renovate his new house. Hughes starts to talk from the front seat while Boo, Doris's wildly amiable spaniel, pants like a steam engine in my right ear. Born in 1938 to a Catholic family of lawyers, he was given a rigorous Jesuit education - in the TV series he goes back to the school for the first time in 40 years. Everything about the education stuck except God. He is a solid atheist, and his near-death experience after the accident did not cause his views to waver. "I mean, I'm quite prepared to entertain the idea of God as long as one can simultaneously maintain that he is a sadistic and irresponsible shit. The idea of a benign God is so contradicted by the content of modern history." But the Jesuits did teach him humility before the great works of the past and strict habits of critical assessment. They taught him little about visual art, however, but a glimpse of a haunting de Chirico print convinced him that it was his destiny. His brothers went into the family business - Tom rising to become Australia's most formidable barrister. "It would have been hard in the law being Tom's younger brother. He's scary. He used to practise his forensic techniques on me. It's given me a certain resistance to interrogation ever since." Hughes, as the Americans would put it, "scuffled". He dropped out of university and went to England in pursuit of a dancer with the Royal Ballet, with whom he had fallen in love. After numerous trips and adventures, he ended up in Italy at the house of the writer Alan Moorehead. There he intensively educated himself in art. He wrote a history of Australian art, which remains the standard work to this day, and a book called Heaven and Hell in Western Art, which landed on the desk of an editor at Time who, in 1970, made him the magazine's art critic, a job he still holds. At the time of his appointment, New York was past its best artwise. The golden age of Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionists was passing, to be replaced by the tinfoil age of hype. Hughes was the man to take it apart. And he did, trashing the posturing of artists such as Julian Schnabel and Jeff Koons. He was in his element - a real bull in a shop full of fake china. "I feel instinctively critical of imperial styles and imperial modes, and there was no question American art had an imperial flavour. I'm a provincial; I see things from the eyeline of a provincial." He also believes passionately in the craft of the human hand. He is a fine joiner himself - he startled the builder at Chappaqua by announcing he would be building all the kitchen cabinets - and he is a true descendant of John Ruskin and William Morris, with their belief in the redeeming power of human labour. As a result, he scorns conceptual art and art objects that the artist simply conceives and then gets others to make. "In my view there's something shonky about Damien Hirst and his shark. That thing might have been fractionally more interesting if he'd caught the f***ing thing himself instead of getting Charles Saatchi to pay a bloke in Queensland to catch it." (Shonky is Yiddish for fake.) In the early 1980s, with his television series The Shock of the New - a magisterial and definitive history of modern art - Hughes established himself as the most famous and, for me, the best art critic in the world. And, last year, with his ferocious campaigning to persuade the Australians to vote republican, he established himself as the leading spokesman for the Australianness of Australian culture. He is also, in the best sense, an old-fashioned figure. Politically left-wing, he is culturally very conservative. He believes in timeless great works that lie beyond politics. "Every work exists in a social matrix - we take that for granted - but, once that is said, what is specific about them, what makes them in a deep and binding sense art, very rarely has anything to do with politics or political therapeutics. I have a secular faith in art - it's not a substitute for religion, but it is a faith. "All that approach of Blair and co - new Labour - is potentially disastrous. England, of all places, has this wonderful, deep, rich deposit of art and architecture that has been secreted by the English themselves and by imperial venture. To treat that as though it were simply a bunch of icons of social well-being, I think it's total blasphemy. Those things weren't made in order to serve some pissant little outreach programme. I think what they are proposing is unspeakable." I couldn't help it - I cheered, alarming Boo and probably waking Doris. We were by this time talking early in the morning at the house on Shelter Island. The charge this all attracts - a particularly lethal charge in Australia - is that he is an elitist. He's past caring. "I'm 62. I don't mind being accused of being an elitist. I am an elitist. There are some works of art that stupid people will never understand because they weren't made for stupid people. And there are a lot of stupid people. Why should anyone assume that any work of art can be reduced to the level of comprehension of a contemporary eight-year-old?" He regards Beyond the Fatal Shore as the best television he has done. It is a warm yet gently ambivalent portrait of his home country. The crash casts its shadow over the whole series; in a few precrash shots he is able-bodied, but, in most, he staggers painfully along on his crutch. It is as if going back has damaged him literally as well as imaginatively. But he reaches no firm conclusions and he lets the country speak for itself. He plainly loves most of his interviewees. This is a homage to a flawed paradise. The press attacks on himself aside, the worst thing he has to say about the country is that it lacks "an optimistic sense of the public interest". "There's no tradition of cultural philanthropy. Rupert Murdoch gave four or five million dollars to the New South Wales Art Gallery for its acquisition fund and that was regarded as a completely crazy act. People were asking, 'Why did he do that?'" He drove me to the ferry. "You're a lucky bastard, Bob," I said, gesturing in the general direction of the Shelter Island spread and Doris. "Yeah, I am, I'm a lucky bastard." And I left hoping that he and Australia would patch up their differences. But, when I got back to England, an e-mail arrived. The series had resurrected animosity in Australia. "Every hissing hack in the press industry has found it a heaven-sent opportunity to revile me ... my friends say there has not been such a frenzy of tall-poppy-lopping in living memory; they are utterly bewildered by its ferocity." As a result, he has dropped plans to write a book about the accident
and its aftermath - "I don't want to revisit this miserable stuff." Instead,
he is moving on to a book about Goya. It will be brilliant. For the truth
is - let's, as he would say, cut the crap - this is the greatest living
Australian and, for the moment, his country just doesn't deserve him.
Beyond the Fatal Shore starts Sunday 27 August, 9pm, BBC2
www.wnet.org/americanvisions Elegant trip around America, by way of its art, with Robert Hughes |
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