Empathy, Through the Mud: The Traditions of Aby Warburg and Edgar Wind in Australia

Giles Fielke
Monash University, Melbourne
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4853-5042

Volume 6, April 2024

Abstract
In 2023 a film written and directed by the acclaimed Kaytetye filmmaker Warwick Thornton premiered at the 76th Cannes Film Festival. The New Boy stars Aswan Reid and Cate Blanchett, who also co-produced the film, and draws on Thornton’s experiences as a boarding student at a Benedictine college in New Norcia, near Australia’s west coast. This mid-nineteenth century settlement by Benedictine missionaries is notable in Australian art history for its direct connection between the European colonisation of the continent’s west and the collection of Renaissance-era works of art that – upon first glance – seem to be so remote from their commissioning and histories related to, for example, the workshops of Raphael, Giulio Romano, and Giovanni Francesco Penni. This essay reflects on the theoretical connection between contemporary works on film and the study of art and its histories in Australia, by looking specifically at the influence of Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaft from Aby Warburg and Edgar Wind, and into Australian university departments of art history. In particular I focus on the seminars on method given by Professor Jaynie Anderson in collaboration with Professor Richard Woodfield at the University of Melbourne in 2010, and speculate on the lasting effects of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA) congress chaired by Professor Anderson in Melbourne in 2008 and titled ‘Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration, Convergence’. I argue that the ‘myth of isolation’ identified by Bernard Smith in his 1961 lectures at the University of Queensland still have some bearing on the development of art history in Australia, and that the conflation of images by First Peoples with Christian iconography remains contested in public debates on Australian national symbols such as the Southern Cross, and in our histories more broadly, by introducing the astronomy of First Peoples for the constellations of the southern hemisphere.

Keywords
Art historiography, Australia, Jaynie Anderson, New Norcia, Warwick Thornton

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