I have started reading Patrick McCaughey's 1969 book Australian Abstract Art. He says that there is no absolute distinction between abstract and representational art, that much Australian abstraction keeps in close contact with the physical world, and its aim is not to give an illusion of the physical world but to provide us with an experience of it (p.3).
McCaughey argued that the Sydney modernists (eg., Ralph Batson, Grace Cowley) in the 1950s embraced a constructivist interpretation of abstraction as a new order different from the natural order: ie., a new vision appropriate to the 20th century. This is linked by McCaughey to Moholy-Nagy's book The New Vision. The new vision was rooted in the technological culture of the twentieth century.
This technological culture included photography which was seen as the primary vehicle of modern culture. New Vision is camera vision but what is selected were a series of fragments that could exist only in a modern city of steel and concert and iron and hard unnatural surfaces, punctuated by the occasional person, reduced to an element of an abstract web of lines and shapes.
The significance of photography is what is missing from McCaughey's account. New Vision as camera vision is written out of his account. Moholy-Nagy predicted that “a knowledge of photography is just as important as that of the alphabet. The illiterates of the future will be ignorant of the use of the camera and pen alike.” What he meant was that in a machine age, only those who used machines and understood how machines worked could understand modern life.
The 1929 Film und Foto exhibition incorporating the newly discovered work of Eugène Atget and the anti-photographic montages of the Dada artists, the proto-Surrealist works of the American Man Ray, the father and son team of Edward and Brett Weston, the calm seriousness of Albert Renger-Patzsch and the always diagonals of El Lissitzky, combined with the definitive editing of Sergei Eisenstein and the humor of Charlie Chaplin. However, the philosophy of photography in Europe was quite different from those photographers in America and Germany who photographed the machines themselves in a direct fashion, called “Straight Photography” in New York and “New Objectivity” in Germany. The Americans emphasized beauty, something outmoded in Germany.
The National Gallery of Victoria staged Frontiers in 1971. This was only the second photographic exhibition at the NGV. Frontiers featured the experimental and abstract photography of John Cato, Peter Medlen, Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski, Mark Strizic and John Wilkins. It was too late to be mentioned in McCaughey's Australian Abstract Art, which was published in 1969. The book more or less finishes with mentioning the milestone exhibition The Field at the NGV in 1968; an exhibition of hard edged Colour-Field paintings preoccupied with formalist concerns such as colour and the flatness the picture plane for which McCaughey wrote an essay for the exhibition's catalogue. It had been preceded two years earlier by the Two decades of American painting exhibition.
An interesting what if. Would McCaughey have included Frontiers if his abstract book was published in 1972? Or would his thesis that abstract art was winning acceptance in the visual arts remained concerned with abstraction in just painting and sculpture and not photography?
I notice that Frontiers is not mentioned in Sasha Grishin's substantial book Australian Art: A History (2013), even though it deals most extensively with the visual art produced in Melbourne and Sydney. Though photography does make an appearance in the booK--in the Modernism Photography in Australian chapter (Max Dupain, Olive Cotton, Wolfgang Sievers, Athol Shmith, Margaret Michaelis) and in the last chapter ‘Australian Art in the Twenty-first Century’, (Bill Henson and Tracey Moffat) --- Grishin does not connect photography to abstraction in the visual arts.