The Federation Show, or what's left of it at UWA, is a congeries of inconsequences, a depressing stew of absence, darkness and death. There is some good work. Nolan’s “No one knows anything of my case but myself”, a magnificent Ned Kelly piece in which the square black helmet fills the picture plane and splats of pastel colour dance across the eye slot and Ivor Hele’s superbly grim, grey rain soaked Burial of Three NCO’s both help set the tone of hopeless loss, inevitable failure.

It's a shame about Australian art. Once so glorious and full of fun, the scene had a vitality and energy second to none. Now its as grim, derivative and mediocre as it ever was. Our art may look different but, as Federation attests, beneath the skin its spirit is back in the fearful, uncertain fifties.

A decade ago art had its own dynamic, a well thought out identity with boundaries clearly marked by critical and scholarly debate. By 1988, a series of exhibitions such as Golden Summers and the Bicentennial exhibition itself provided enough evidence that there was something called Australian art with a unique range of concerns and loads of potential energy. From the late 70’s contemporary art appeared in a string of national and international exhibitions that related closely to the emerging scholarly picture.

Artists such as Imants Tillers, Jenny Watson, Mike Parr, Brian Blanchflower and Ken Unsworth worked in areas of personal, cultural, even social identity close if not identical to the concerns of scholarly curators such as Daniel Thomas or Charles Merewether. Their complex vision of art offered much on all levels. One artist-writer, the late Ian Burn, personified the era and its concerns, in his book National Life and Landscape and in his artistic career, which began in the humane ironies of New York minimal and conceptual art and took their premises back home to scrutinise everything from the fate of avant garde art to aboriginal painting.

None of the artists and writers noted above had to do with the Australian National Gallery Federation exhibition, the rump of which is currently at the Lawrence Wilson Gallery. Most have lost all enthusiasm for Australian experience. In a recent radio interview Jenny Watson declared that she and most other expatriate artists had no interest whatsoever in Australian identity. The inexcusable absence of Ian Burn’s work from the Federation show sets the seal on what might well become a permanent divorce between living Australian artists and the highly politicised versions of national heritage and cultural identity currently served up in our National and State Galleries.

It is widely acknowledged that the Federation show is an absolute disgrace, produced by an opinionated, manipulative critic, who was appointed, without any of the curatorial or scholarly experience required for his post, at a time when several of those who had driven the reinvention of Australian art history and critical exhibition making resigned from our national gallery, most notably Mary Eagle. It could have been a one off, except that the circumstances under which John Macdonald was given his head to trample rough shod over their two decades of hard work have not changed. The Federation show is not an inadequate aberration. It was the national statement about the century long contribution of the visual arts to Australia and the way it is to be represented in the third millennium, a definitive return to the days of Menzies and Macdonald’s namesake and Menzies mate the loathsome reactionary JBS MacDonald. Together they argued for a national school of art, court painters to the squatocracy, all cows in paddocks and sunburnt country.

John MacDonald tried to pull off the same ideological trick, for the knowing, cynical, corporate culture that currently lays claim to a patent Australian identity, the kind seen in Qantas ads and gardening programmes, - and which sees it imperilled by those other “people” that the appalling John Howard doesn’t want here. Macdonald’s difficulty was that, in Australia, the narratives of national identity, modernity, avant garde practice and, what, for want of better word, might be called the communitarian hypothesis of culture, especially in the visual arts, were all imbued with an antipaternalistic spirit of liberation, often linked to left leaning politics, forged in the Vietnam years and through the Whitlam revolution. Briefly, in this view, the visual arts could be seen to have participated in the development and construction of Australian experience towards a uniquely free communal culture and, given reasonable arms length support, might be expected to make an even more significant contribution in the future.

Ideally the Federation show should could have been a scholarly critique of this position and an alternative critical view of the present and future of art here. It might, for instance, have concentrated on the mediation of Australian notions of the beautiful and poetic or simply offered an account of what Australians approved at different times and stressed the role of individual artists and patrons in achieving. it. For whatever reason, McDonald was unable or unequipped to achieve this. Instead he decided to be a wrecker. His exhibition is a bizarre reverse image of the critical, communitarian account of Australian art carefully built up over the last two or three decades, reflected in the cracked mirror of his over reaching ambition.

Token images from that account - such as a photo of a meat queue or Drysdale’s painting of a rabbiter and his family are placed alongside unfamiliar and far less interesting work that nonetheless has the effect of dulling their critical impact. For instance , a picture of Menzies with a champion merino ram appears just round the corner from Lambert’s, Golden Fleece. In the communitarian account the Lambert is contrasted with the Shearing of the Rams by Roberts to show how Lambert achieves the appropriation of shearing as a bourgeois myth of wealth derived from proprietorship rather than labour. In Federation it is presented as a neutral record of individualistic economic progress carefully husbanded by the squatocracy. Menzies with his ram, a row of dull interwar portraits and a clutch of unknown ethnic artists make certain that embarrassing questions will never be asked about what exactly is being shown. MacDonald used a similar jesuitical approach for years in his Sydney Morning Herald column and in his intemperate interventions in public discussion. His goal was always to confirm and feed common prejudice, to fragment any coherent discussion and to replace it with an arbitrary assertion of power, as if it were considered sobre judgement. This is possible in the fast moving context of debate but works of art have a life of their own. A mean minded meretricious vision will always be attracted to work with which it can do business, art that neither challenges nor contradicts it.

This was the old deal between Australia’s ruling class and Australian artists. They could pose and prance in some inconsequential pseudo bohemia, just so long as no one alarmed the horses. Albert Tucker alluded to it, and his belated acceptance, when he said he had come home from exile for his back pay. Federation is an attempt to restore this same deal as the status quo for Australian art, using a strategy very close to that of John Howard in the recent election. Like Howard, McDonald the critic constantly complained about elites. Reactionary opportunistic rassentiment always operates a broad front. Most importantly it never offers a positive alternative.

That is why the only significant works from the last thirty years in Federation are a spray paint suburban view by Howard Arkley and an equally slushy soft centred bush painting by William Robinson, two sides of the same mediocre self congratulatory indulgence. Robinson quotes feebly from the grey, green, palette of colonial painting but presents an upward view of the forest as meaningless roccoco wallpaper.He can also be an ugly painter notably, in the way he breaks mucky grey blue into his summer skies. Arkley is an ugly painter all the time and thoughtless and arrogant with it. One longs for the inner passion of Whiteley or the sublime painterliness of early Michael Johnson.

Occasionally McDonald’s reassertion of class discipline sheds a surprising new light on recent cliches. Images of ATS drivers, pilots and women on horse back relocate to their dominant class context. That rosy cheeked girl in uniform doing her bit was never a social pioneer - soon she will be a Canberra matriarch serving god and Mr Menzies. There is plenty of real work to hand reviewing our assumptions about art without becoming a wrecker like McDonald. It is even worth revisiting the odd work in Federation,-Tucker’s, Victory Girls, Blackman’s vision of a school girl creeping past a corner shop plastered with adverts. and James Cant’s, The Bomb, are always rewarding but it takes a real effort to separate them from their tedious company.

The significance of Federation, however, lies elsewhere, in its abysmal pettiness and lack of vision. It marks the decline if not complete dissappearance of art as an originary force in the Australian imagination. Endless plains of worthy dullness stretch before us. It will be decades, if ever, before contemporary Australian artists are again able to confront their predecessors with any urgency.