Justin Clemens

About as eminent an academic philosopher as they come these days, Robert B. Pippin made his reputation with a sequence of brilliant studies rehabilitating the great names of German Idealism – Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel – for a (mainly) baby boomer American audience. In the wake of the path-breaking interventions of Wilfrid Sellars and Richard Rorty, Pippin, alongside such colleagues as Terry Pinkard, Robert Brandom, and John McDowell, has argued for a version of the essentially dialogic nature of all philosophy, which seeks to bring together metalogical ratiocinations and nitty-gritty semantic theories with reflections on the diversity of social interactions.

Just because something is being done right now doesn’t make it contemporary. On the contrary, the predicate ‘contemporary’ in contemporary art is the name for a problem, not a clarified or self-evident state of affairs. As Boris Groys puts it, ‘This is because the contemporary is actually constituted by doubt, hesitation, uncertainty, indecision – by the need for prolonged reflection, for a delay.’ Such experiences, however, are not especially high priorities in the world of corporate rationalisation.

One of the notable things about living in a small country is that you can enjoy many first-rate second-rate things. Given the post-Renaissance domination of the visual arts by painting, prints have for a long time been driven into a supplementary role by artists, historians, and the market, and, as a result, have tended to be treated as minor works, curios, or historical illustrations. Because, moreover, Australia was a far-flung colony of the British Empire for much of its modern history, treated by its masters as ancillary to ‘the main game’, this situation mitigated against the acquisition of many exceptional paintings. Australians bought prints instead. State galleries acquired staggering print collections, from Dürer through to Rembrandt, Piranesi, Blake and Goya to the present. As its subtitle suggests, A Beautiful Line: Italian Prints from Mantegna to Piranesi showcases one important local collection, in Adelaide. Running the gamut from Renaissance to Rococo, the exhibition presents 135 prints ranging from the iconic to the obscure, culminating with works by such luminaries as Canaletto and Giambattista Tiepolo.