The first time I visited the gallery—I think this is how you start your Memo review nowadays—it was empty. It was a pristine, geometric, hard-edged, concrete space, an apt fit for the works. The second time I went, there were others: a guy on a mobile phone, taking pictures (of course, and I did the same myself later on), but also another couple speaking animatedly about the paintings and their makers. I took a short video of them on my phone, for no obvious reason that I can recall.

The show was Aspects of Abstraction at the Hawthorn Arts Centre, part of the municipality of Boroondara, which stretches all the way from classy Kew to the once-welfare suburb of Ashburton. It is an expansive survey, consisting of some eighty works from the collection of the esteemed art dealer Charles Nodrum, who this year celebrated forty years of his gallery in Richmond, and rumour had it—astonishingly but today tellingly—that the exhibition had been first offered to several state, regional, and university galleries but that no one had wanted to host it until Hawthorn put its hand up.

I always tell people about the openings at Nodrum’s gallery—and, really, Aspects of Abstraction is just a bigger, more inclusive version of one of his long-running survey shows like Abstraction 24, recently on at Church Street. (Actually, to be fair, he also staged this year an eye-opening selection of James Gleeson’s erotica, which cast a fascinating new light on a painter whose sometimes slightly ersatz Surrealist landscapes always seem to be hanging under the staircase of the gallery: now one can’t look at one of his pale attenuated coral-like polyps without seeing an encrypted penis.)

I love the fact that at a typical Nodrum opening one spends time in the company of an aging class of art-interested professionals—I’m guessing doctors and lawyers—in their well-worn and now too-big linen suits and silk dresses, who have obviously been collecting from him for decades. They appear to me as something of a disappearing moment of Australian art and culture altogether: elite, aristocratic, conservative, sure, also genuinely informed about art, buying the work and hoping it will hold it value, but also wanting to find out about what it is they have just bought. (One occasionally used to see them at public lectures at the University of Melbourne before COVID, arriving a bit late and puffed because work had just finished.) In a way, they’re exactly the kind of person one is trying to produce over decades of giving art lectures: not just another arts professional but someone out in the real world who happens to love art.

I also remember by contrast—and this is the new art moment—going to a Bill Henson opening at Tolarno Gallery recently and wondering who was buying all of the $50,000 multiples of his 1980’s seedy New York series (facades of X-rated cinemas, sex workers leaning down into the front of cars). They were middle-aged guys in often non-matching suits, T-shirts, and expensive runners. Who was this new class buying and able to buy such expensive art, I asked? Tech-bros, I was told by someone who was as equally interested in the sociology of the art world as I was, but who knew it a lot better than I did.

But back to Aspects of Abstraction. It takes you a little while to realise, but it’s beautifully hung and curated. The show truly is “aspects” of abstraction. Down one long wall, across two rooms, are the “geometric” abstract paintings. Best to list several of them: John Vickery’s Red Fury (1970), Leslie Dumbrell’s Midnight Maeve (2001), Tony McGillick’s Acid Rock (1969), and Ron Robertson-Swann’s Yellow Fire (1969). Then along the other wall of the first gallery are what I would call the experiments in colour. Again, let’s list a few: Paul Partos’s Sunset (1986), Fred Cress’s Westbury (1979), Gunter Christmann’s Light Green (1978), and John Peart’s Untitled (Minimal) (1968). And along both walls of the second gallery are the “gestural” abstracts (and I can only provide a much smaller sample): Tony Tuckson’s Untitled (Red) (1968), Lorri Whiting’s Gyro (Spinning) (1960), Aida Tomescu’s VIZ IV (1991), and Stacha Halpern’s Stormy Night (1962).

But then, within or even against this, there were smaller subcategories of both style and medium in the show. On one end wall, there were three Tachistes, working in that heavily textured style that was practised in Spain by such artists as Antoni Tapiès and Manolo Millares and in France by Nicolas de Staël and Jean-Paul Riopelle: Asher Bilu, Frank Hodgkinson, and Elwyn Lynn. Then, in a small alcove up the other end of the gallery, there were three “abstract” sculptures beneath an acrylic on card on board by Andrew Christofides: Clement Meadmore’s Monolith (1960), Robert Klippel’s Opus 309: Metal Construction (1974), and Norma Redpath’s Fragmented Arch (1967). There were all the fortuitous or well-observed formal pairings or matches: the black tessellations of George Johnson’s World View (1984) and William Rose’s Contrapunctal Theme (1957), the matching palettes of Dick Watkins’ Accident (1970) and Leonard Crawford’s Trio No. 2 (1963), and the split compositions of Donald Laycock’s Wings (1971) and John Firth-Smith’s ERGOL (1973). And, finally, there were all the clever, rule-breaking inclusions, in one sense predictable because Nodrum has had a long interest in the artists for decades, but in another sense unexpected because they are not obviously “abstract”: Fred Williams’s Sapling Forest (1962), which was paired with Godfrey Miller’s Forest Series (1953-57) and Ross Morrow’s Australian Landscape (1962); Sidney Nolan’s Abstract Flowers (c. 1940), which was paired with Mike Brown’s Twinkle (1965) and Janet Dawson’s Sun Trace 1 (1981); and Gleeson’s A Time of Uncertainty (1995), which was maybe paired with Leonard Hessing’s Narrenschiff (1964), Gareth Sansom’s Get Out of Here While You Can! (1964) and Charles Reddington’s Season in Hell (1964) on a nearby wall.

But maybe the work along with its hang that really got me thinking was my friend and colleague A. D. S. Donaldson’s Untitled (2005), right up at the entrance of the gallery, directly above the introductory didactic telling us that “Spanning from the 1950s to the 1990s, this exhibition offers insight into the evolution and diversity of Australian abstraction.” First of all, I was slightly surprised that Donaldson was in Nodrum’s collection—perhaps I shouldn’t have been, given his encyclopaedic taste—and second that it was placed in such a prominent position, serving almost as the prologue (or maybe artistic didactic) for the rest of the show. And, of course, Nodrum has installed it so that it can be seen to be in dialogue with—if not as something of an alternative to—Michael Johnson’s similarly squared-up, black-bound and, importantly, flatly entitled Frontal (1968), painted some twenty-seven years before.

But what I have not forgotten and what I would like to recall here is that some fifteen years before Untitled Donaldson had made a work called Banal Painting (1990). The point of Banal Painting—at least I have always thought so—was the end or exhaustion of the rhetorics around painting, and especially abstract painting. Of course, by this time there was no longer the modernist rhetoric of formal innovation and historical progression, but equally no longer the post-modern rhetoric of ironically quoting previous forms, as though there were some as yet unrealised space outside of this history to comment upon it from.

No, Banal Painting is about the end or exhaustion of all of these ways of looking at and thinking about art, as though there were something new to see or say. And if I could make a connection, I would suggest that either Francis Plagne or Philip Brophy, I cannot remember quite who, had a very similar insight when they proposed that art theory is over today and art history rules. But altogether what I think has happened, putting the two together, is that it is not a matter of us looking at an individual work of art and having it tell us something, for it is no longer a matter of “seeing” it or even “reading” it, but rather only of inserting it in a ready-made aggregative narrative, that is, historicising it. (And, of course, the great recent instance of this is that extraordinary Salon hang of portraits of women by women without any regard to chronology, reputation or style that introduced the Know My Name show.) There is now only a “banal” unproblematic and all-encompassing art history, and individual works of art cannot, or are not meant to, surprise us, challenge us, tell us anything we do not already know. (Let alone the fact that in our digitised, distracted, and deaestheticised world no one seems to have the time or inclination to spend that kind of dialogical, conversational, and open-ended time with an individual work of art.)

Foreseeing all of this, Ian Burn once offered a detailed reading of Donaldson’s Banal Painting, insisting that it still had particular things to tell us that could not be generalised, could not be known in advance. His adversary at the time was “theory,” but maybe today it would be “history.” The essay has been reprinted recently in his Collected Writings, in which he writes:

An important part of the meaning of this object is the fact that, within the process of looking, the object becomes ambivalent and the viewer is left uncertain, off balance. It imposes a particular kind of structural and categorical ambiguity on the viewer’s perceptual experience … which underpins its rhetorical manoeuvres, importantly. In other words, something happens when we look at it.

But we would like to make the point that history, if not theory, has won. All those connections in the show speak beautifully, like iconomorphic rhymes, but we have the sense that we cannot see the works directly, but only through such comparisons. That the works have nothing new to tell us in themselves, but only through their relationship with another. That they exist from the beginning in an exhibition like this, historicised, contextualised, memorialised. To put it simply, Aspects of Abstraction historicises all of the works within it. We might even say that henceforth there are only histories of Australian art to be written. That with the arrival of the “contemporary” and the end of the post-modern any ongoing or even properly revisionist history has come to an end, so that ironically there are only more histories. And, indeed, this is something of a memorial show—not only of Charles Nodrum, who has led an exemplary life collecting, exhibiting, and making available Australian abstraction, but also of abstraction, and perhaps even painting itself. The work sits up on the gallery walls enshrined, entombed, its formal and historical meaning now definitively known, shared, agreed upon, banal, in the proper sense of the word. I am tempted to reproduce another passage from Burn’s essay, in which way back in 1991 he was already imagining the “contemporary” and the difficulties its end of history, which was also the ubiquity of history, would have for thinking about the individuality of the artwork:

To argue for notion of history within artistic practice is not to reinstitute a linear history or any cause-and-effect logic. In those moments of change modernism began to be experienced as a simultaneity, and notions of a sequential history were already collapsing for artists. Ironically, this was the same moment that historicism was gaining the official sanction of institutions and academies.

There can be exhibitions like this, they can be historicised, both as the reflection of the life of a prominent art dealer and collector and as a fifty-year period of Australian art, but can any of the works speak in their own right, break with this history, any history? Maybe we can only write new histories of Australian art because its history is over; or they be written, perhaps endlessly, but only because there can be no more names added to it (or endless new names, but only standing in for the same thing).

In the Boroondara Community Gallery Summer Salon in the corridor outside Aspects of Abstraction, featuring work by local “amateur” artists, there are a number of abstract works: Alex Bridges’s Summer Show (2024), Adam Hoss Ayres’s Eye of Iris (2022) and Zahra Khajehsaeidi’s You are My Soul and Heart (2022). It’s not that they should be in the show. I’m not making that kind of cheap argument. It’s more that they’re already in the show, that whatever people are doing with abstract art today has already been done, and all that is possible now is the reclassification and rehistoricisation of the archive or collection.

We have the feeling that the most exciting thing in Australian art at the moment is the rewriting and recreation of its history. And it is not a matter of the rereading of its works, but of what they stand for, how they sit within that history. (In this it would be like contemporary art, in which it is not so much a matter of the work as who or what it stands in for.) Aspects of Abstraction is the passing of a moment, a moment that is in the past but also that will never pass and will be with us always. Or, to put it another way, abstraction is over and all we will have henceforth are “aspects” of abstraction.