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Arts & Communication Realist art of Kenneth Jack and rural towns

refers to Tolstoy’s class position and religious views and techniques were used as tools for a particular project, and
summarizes how liberal writers wanted to perceive him he then discarded them, implying that other researchers
to distract attention away from his more revolutionary could pick up where he left off. His theories were related
content. It refers to the ideology of his class and religion, to and derived from particular problems that he wanted
and especially the reactionary or antirevolutionary side, to explore and were closer to “temporary scaffolding” than
which could be perceived as a doctrine in total. theories intended to be universal. When he found aspects
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Therefore, one meaning of ideology is every thought, of the present intolerable, his microhistories allowed
idea, statement, or work of art as disseminated by and in readers to imagine how things might be different based on
institutions. Another meaning involves analyzing how the contrasts between past and present. He was very much a
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statement functions or can function to serve capitalism and historian of the present as it was the present that was his
primary interest. In fact, he avoided totalizing theories
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the interests of the ruling class. 27
such as liberalism and Marxism, which had, as their main
The opposite side of the coin is the impact that the presumption, the notion of progress through rationalistic
artwork may have on its audience, that is, its impact on tendencies that were possible to locate and theorize about,
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real-life social and political movements or the economic using, for example, the Marxist dialectic method. As things
base of society. If we stick to the tenets of historical were made, said Foucault, they can also be unmade, as
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materialism theory, the effects are probably going to be less long as we know how they were made.
than the impacts of the economic base on the artwork. The This article focuses on the works of Kenneth Jack
readers’/viewers’ perspectives in understanding a work of
art are important because it can produce various effects and the works of art cited here, but it also aims to
in and on society. An extreme case of influence upon an understand and speculate upon the ideologies inherent
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audience was suggested by Joseph de Maistre when he said in his work and the broader social conditions of his time.
that the philosophers Voltaire and Rousseau led to the fall In particular, his style is compared to Russell Drysdale’s,
whose pictures of rural themes tended to be darker and
of the Old Regime in France. 30
more confrontational. Jack’s apparent admiration for rural
Iser defines a work of art as being the product of the towns suggests a city-dweller’s restlessness with urban
text and the reader/viewer. The meaning of a work is life, similar to the earlier ideas expressed by Australian,
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decided in dialectical interaction between the past and European-origin poet Banjo Paterson (1864 – 1941). There
present, the author, and the reader. 32,33 Wolff attempts is an element of romanticization of rural areas with Jack as
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to convince us that reading or viewing is the second stage well, which is a reminder that if their populations decline,
of the creation of the work, as for Iser, and beyond that, basic services will disappear. Jack avoids the distinction
it is a material practice, just as the production of art is between the fertile rural areas nearer to the coast, the
material. To support this claim, she cites Marx from The remote and inhospitable outback, and deserts, although
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Grundrisse where he writes that consumption produces the latter two areas are probably his primary concern.
and determines production and that they are both integral However, Allen perceives that Drysdale was concerned
to each other within capitalism. 36 with the inhospitable lands at the edges of the areas
where Europeans were willing to settle. Unlike Boyd,
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3. Research approach Jack did not major in paintings of Aboriginal people, but
In her text on the sociology of art, Wolff argues that the they sometimes appear in his work in, consistent with
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various levels of art production need to be evaluated and his realism, those actual locations where one would
the links explored. It is quite possible to begin at the expect to encounter them, such as Cairns in Far North
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“micro-level,” such as one particular artist or one work of Queensland. Allen also notes that from 1944 onward,
art, and then link it to wider social, economic, and political Drysdale switched from painting elongated figures with
aspects at the levels of the art industry and broader slender limbs to more realistic human figures as part of a
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society. This is similar to Foucault’s approach where he “new realism.” His painting that most closely resembles
studied areas of society in a disconnected fashion, without Jack’s art is Sofala (1947).
referring to his previous texts. The areas that he studied
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included madness, the birth of the clinic, prisons, and 4. Australian context/Kenneth Jack
sexuality. His aims were limited: to better understand one In Art in Australia: From Colonization to Postmodernism,
object or aspect of society and to explore discontinuities Allen presents the history of Australian art in terms
based on the idea that present situations can be closely of various personas representing various stages in the
examined by showing how things differed in the past European settlement of the land—the explorer, the colonist,
and the present is not inevitable. His methodological and the settler. The explorer has the original European
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Volume 3 Issue 1 (2025) 4 doi: 10.36922/ac.3481