Pro Hart

The Fight for Egalitarian Art

In myth, Post-modern ideology seeks to flatten the distinction between elite art and ordinary art consumed and produced by the average person in society. In practice, this means that all art is equal but some artists are more equal than others. No where is this more evident than in the rejection of Pro Hart by the Australian Post-modern art bureaucracy.

Pro Hart was one of Australia’s most prolific, innovative, influential and commercially successful painters. Aside from developing distinct styles, Hart was unique because of his gravitation towards insects as subject matter. Few artists ever paint insects as they tend to be intimidating and ugly creatures. Hart, on the other hand, saw insects as objects as beauty.

Hart was originally a miner in the western NSW town of Broken Hill (the birthplace of BHP Billiton). He worked amongst the type of people that Vincent van Gogh did during his evangelical days as a preacher. Like Vincent, Hart's strong Christian faith helped him see beauty in the commoner which he communicated in his work. In return, commoners saw art in a new way.  When Hart started his career, Broken Hill was a hard-drinking mining town. By the end, pubs had been converted to art galleries and a town of only 30,000 people was supporting up to 100 professional and semi-professional artists. Additionally, Hart was appearing in television advertisements targeted at suburban Australia. He remains one of the few Australian cultural creatives to ever attain a level of popularity to appear in commericial advertisements. Admittedly, other artists have appeared as spokespeople for political campaigns, but these campaigns have almost always ended in failure.

Despite his popularity and historical significance, no public gallery ever bought his work and he has mostly been ignored by Australian art historians. Critics have also been harsh. One of these critics was Barry Pearce, head curator of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of NSW, who said that comparing Hart with the artists who normally hang in the gallery was "rather like Slim Dusty being compared to Mozart." Another critic was Alan Dodge, Director of Art Gallery of Western Australia, who said of Hart, "He is one of the most delightful illustrators of the Australian folk idiom, but let's not use the word art anywhere."

The works of "Mozart" that Pearce was referring to included things such as an artist's name italic letters that the artist himself stated had no intellectual insight. Additionally, they included pop art, which tries to make art out of the banal objects of popular culture in the name of making art egalitarian.

Dunnies

A bit like Vincent van Gogh, Pro Hart wanted to make art that was accessible to everyone. His main liability in regards to gaining acceptance amongst the public servie was his use of Australian vernacular words like ‘dunnies’ when naming his art and coming across as egalitarian. This was almost the complete opposite of what public art bureaucracies wanted. Specifically, they wanted crap art made by people who carried on as if they were the king shit.

Part of Hart’s liability was that his prolific nature produced some work that was a bit ordinary and looked much like a comic strip. Critics were able to focus on his lesser work when making derogatory statements about his talents as an artist. Admittedly, many artists have created comic-style work that held little claim to high end art. For example, Leonardo Da Vinci and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec created caricatures that would be ideal for the Sunday papers. Brett Whiteley's Olgas look like he took painting lessons at the Ettamogah Pub. Roy Lichtenstein literally made comic strips and exhibited them. Additionally, artists such as Takeshi Murakami, Andy Warhol, Piero Manzoni, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Marcel Duchamp took ordinary objects, or art that was clearly not high art, and gallerised them.  

The difference between Hart and the other artists was that Hart always claimed to be egalitarian and he gained a following from the common people. The others mixed with high society or were recognised as high-end artists. When Warhol, Murakammi etc put an average creation in a gallery, they were subverting the sanctity of the gallery and the elitist pretentions of its patrons. This caused cognitive dissonance amongst the patrons who wanted to maintain their perception of artistic hierarchies. They either needed to dismiss the average work as shit or discover some kind of genius in it. Most took the later option. Art critic Robert Hughes noted that the seeking of insight that just wasn’t there was a characteristic of writers about Warhol. He even quoted the words of John Coplan, who wrote nonsense such as:

"almost by choice of imagery alone, it seems, forces us to squarely face the existential edge of our existence."

As a miner that did not spend time around people with high-art pretentions, it was easy for people with high-art pretentions’ to dismiss Pro Hart. They just looked at the comic book style paintings and the egalitarian miner driving around a painted Rolls Royce and concluded that common people are stupid. Even though they purchased work that claimed to be flattening art and also held a Post-modern ideology that all art is equal, that equality made no room for a Christian miner from country Australia.

Grasshopper

Before becoming an artist, Hart was a miner. Perhaps spending so much time underground where there was no flora and fauna made  Hart more appreciative of it when he returned to the surface.