Report on conference, ‘Rethinking Late Style: Art, Literature, Music, Film’, held at Old Canberra House, ANU, and sponsored by the Research School of the Humanities, College of Arts and Social Sciences, ANU
The conference was organised by Professor Gordon McMullan (King’s College London, UK), Professor Sam Smiles (University of Plymouth, UK) and, in Canberra, Associate Professor Roger Hillman (ANU) as the second half of a two-part conference series designed to address the vexed but often undiscussed subject of ‘late’ or ‘old-age’ style – a topic that addresses the RSH’s thematic engagement with the varying forms of life writing from an unusual angle, since one of the key questions asked of ‘late work’ is the extent to which it is, or is not, appropriate to read it as a version of autobiography. The first conference took place at King’s College London in November 2007 and the conference at Old Canberra House was planned to do two things: to provide an Australian perspective (including consideration of, inter alia, Aboriginal art and Australian photography) and to tackle topics (notably the question of women and late style) that, though discussed in London, had not received the head-on treatment that seemed to be needed. It succeeded pleasingly in both these aims.
‘Late style’ is a category mostly taken for granted by biographers and critics. It signifies the resurgence in creative expression that appears at the very end of the lives of a handful of supreme artists, a final uplift marked by a certain abstraction and, at times, a return to the engagements of youth but with the benefit of a lifetime of experience, producing an unmatched synthesis which is at the same time fragmentary or jagged. Yet to suggest that a description of this kind offers a way to account for features across time and location – that the late work of Titian is akin to that of Turner, say – is to raise a deal of issues about the nature of creativity and its contingency. Late style has traditionally been read as the expression of a certain serenity late in life; on the other hand, it has recently been celebrated by Edward Said, at the very end of his own life, as an expression of resistance, of exile, of conscious refusal of unity and transcendence. So there are contradictions even within the ranks of those who accept the category. As this suggests, late style as a term for certain works of art raises more questions than it solves and it therefore a usefully provocative subject for a multidisciplinary conference in which the perspectives of differing fields and genres can be juxtaposed and interrogated.
The Canberra conference was a success. There were seventeen speakers, covering a vast range of subjects from the paintings of Turner to the poetry of John Forbes, from the art of Huang Binhong to the novels of Jane Austen, from The Tempest to The Misfits. The discussion was wide-ranging, notably addressing issues of gender (why have late styles been attributed to so few women?), of interdisciplinary understanding (how to explain late art to a literary scholar, etc), of the intellectual origins of late style (is it an artistic phenomenon or a cultural construct?), and of the development of the analysis of lateness from art, music and literature to photography and film.
One of the organisers, Sam Smiles, was, sadly, unable in the end to attend the conference: he was obliged to return home early to the UK due to severe illness in his family. His paper was read out to the conference.
The speakers, in alphabetical order, and their subjects were as follows:
Jaynie Anderson (University of Melbourne): ‘Endgames in Venice, or what happened to Giovanni Bellini and Titian when they grew old’
Liam Dee (University of South Australia): ‘Where is Cultural Lateness?’
Helen Ennis (ANU): Max Dupain’s last photographs: a late style?’
Graham Hair (University of Glasgow): ‘After Beethoven, after Adorno and after Modernism: Schoenberg’s late tonal style in the context of three varieties of twentieth-century tonality’
Melinda Harvey (ANU): ‘Early death, late style: Katherine Mansfield examined’
Roger Hillman (ANU): ‘Film reflections on the millennium’
Duncan Hose (University of Melbourne): ‘Late Style in the Poetry of John Forbes’
Roseanne Kennedy (ANU): ‘Late feminism, late style: reflections on the career and works of Joan Didion’
George Kouvaros (University of New South Wales): ‘”Those who wait”: The Misfits and late style’
Karen Leeder (Oxford University): ‘Constructions of lateness in the poetry of Michael Hamburger’
Gordon McMullan (King’s College London): ‘Inventing Late Shakespeare’
Olivia Murphy (Oxford University): ‘Suffering sea-changes: Jane Austen and the possibilities of a late style’
John Potts (Macquarie University): ‘The Idea of Lateness: Biology and Metaphor’
Claire Roberts (ANU): ‘Balancing Darkness and Light: the late paintings of Huang Binhong’
Sam Smiles (University of Plymouth): ‘Recapitulation and recension: J.M.W. Turner’s Liber Studiorum in the 1840s’
Luke Taylor (AITSIS, Canberra): ‘Development in the Art of John Mawurndjul’
Peter Tregear (University of Melbourne): ‘Arriving late to the party: investigating the politics of musical late style’
As this list makes very clear, the range of the papers was substantial, but the discussions all contributed to a shared understanding of the possibilities yet to be explored in the field of late-style studies. Particular issues that arose included: the question of the choice a feminist critic might face between claiming a late style for a woman artist and offering a critique of the concept; the difficulty of offering close analysis of music to a non-specialist audience yet the impossibility of pinpointing late style in music without so doing; the problems presented by early death or by accounts of late style in a living artist; the clash of cultural expectations in attempts to ascribe a late style (arguably a western/European concept) to Chinese or Aboriginal art.
The overall impact of the conference was considerably to strengthen and deepen the participants’ understanding of late style and its complexities and possibilities. The next step will be for the organisers to construct a collection of selected essays drawn out of papers from this conference and its London predecessor (Cambridge University Press and Palgrave have both expressed initial interest in such a collection).
The organisers wish to thank everyone involved in the RSH and in particular everyone involved in setting up and running the conference – especially Leena Messina – for their enthusiastic, efficient and willing engagement with the event. It demonstrated to the full what a magnificent place the RSH is for the running of a tightly-focussed, small-scale, closely engaged conference of this kind.
Gordon McMullan
Sam Smiles
Roger Hillman
