Seppos will never get a handle on drongos, I reckon. That is to say: I don’t believe Americans will ever be capable of fully understanding Australians, Australian culture, Australian attitudes, or Australian thought. And why would they? Americans are American, which means they aren’t obliged to understand anyone, even themselves. That’s the beauty of their version of “freedom,” after all.
Aussies, meanwhile, are up to our bottom lip in American culture, philosophy, politics, and—let’s call it what it is—psychosis from day dot, to the point where we’re both drowning in and drowned out by it. Your everyday drongo can parse, speak, and think seppo—maybe even pass themselves off as one, if they round out their vowels enough. For many Australian artists dreaming of making it big (or just making any money at all), to become American is to become powerful, heard (loud), omnipresent, and, most importantly, unashamed. This is the heady pipe dream of many an Aussie wanting to surpass the stunted heights offered by our flailing culture industry.
But even if this transformation is achieved, granting a ticket of leave from our roots, the fair-dinkum fact of our Australianness—our internal, eternal, undying drongo—can never be erased. There remains a crucial, seemingly irreconcilable difference between the two cultures: Americans are sincere to a fault, whereas Austalians are insincere to a fault.
This distinction is crucial to understanding Hannah Gadsby, the Australian non-comedian who drew acclaim for their live stand-up turned Netflix special Nanette in 2018, and more recently derision for their new art exhibition, “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” currently on display at the Brooklyn Museum.
The exhibition consists of a small collection of Picasso’s work highlighted with Gadsby’s commentary and so-called jokes, as well as a seemingly random collection of works by female artists taken from the museum’s collection. “It’s Pablo-matic” is pitched as a denunciation of the man himself, his misogyny, and the misogynistic forces of history that elevated his genius. It is the manifestation of a call-out post, if one that’s one degree of separation from the Sacklers.
Since “It’s Pablo-matic” opened in early June, American critics from hallowed American institutions like the New York Times have torn Gadsby apart for the show’s apparent philistinism, condescension, and smug self-assuredness. Times critic Jason Farago, in one buzzy pan, wrote of the exhibition, “There’s little to see. … The ambitions here are at GIF level.”
Those critics may be right in their barbed assessments, but they are missing a fundamental piece of the puzzle: the innate Australianness at the center of Gadsby’s work and philosophy.
To make sense of this, allow me to explain the Australian cultural phenomenon that is the elegantly simple “yeah, nah.” For the baffled seppo: “Yeah, nahhh” is Aussie slang that essentially means “I understand, but I disagree.” Despite our reputation as pissed-up, muscle-bound brawlers, Australians are, at our core, an incredibly passive-aggressive people who prefer waving someone or something away over sucker-punching or shooting it. “Yeah, nah” embodies our reflexive dismissiveness of anything that we find even mildly disagreeable. Conversationally, it’s a neat little tool that lets you wave away the paranoid rantings of a black-pilled Facebook uncle, or skirt around a stranger at a bush doof who is insisting you try their “home-brewed black acid”; it’s also just a nice way of saying “you’re fine, ay” without causing offense.
Where seppo language and thought can be block-lettered, cemented, and literal, Australia’s is scratchy, mercurial, and tricky. I like to think of it as Americans thinking and talking like kazoos, and Australians thinking and talking like slide whistles. Drongo thinking can be so slippery that it passes through our own grip on it, so something as seemingly innocuous as “yeah, nah” can suddenly go from being a stock response to a poly couple seeking a unicorn on a dating app to a kind of internalized dismissiveness of society, culture, and life at large. Any idea that gets your goat, even slightly, can be swept away with a simple, subliminal slap of the big “YEAH/NAH” button that all Aussie drongos carry everywhere with us in our heart of hearts.
At the root of all this is something known as the “cultural cringe.” Coined by critic A. A. Phillips in a very cheeky essay in Meanjin (fantastic Aus lit journal, check it out) in 1950, the “cultural cringe” refers to the belief that your own national culture is inferior to that of other countries. In Australia, this originally manifested as a desperation to appear British, which eventually transformed into a desperation to appear American once you mob took over—a desire that social media and the ever-darkening shadow of U.S. global imperialism has rabidly fueled over the years.
For Australia, a country with about as many inferiority complexes as one that largely owes its existence to an orgy-loving occultist naturalist could have, the natural endpoint of cultural cringe is a distrust of culture at large, as the very idea of it—cinema, theater, literature, high art—has been made to feel, essentially, un-Australian. As a people, we tend to have a knee-jerk “yeah, nah” response to the very idea of “the arts” in general. Probably since the first British marine painted the first convict deported to Port Jackson for public exposure, Australians have seen art as something solely for “wankers.” And if there are two things that Australians are paranoid about being perceived as, it’s wankers or poofters. Art, to our unending terror, has the whiff of both. This paranoia has been the major motivator behind much of our culture and history, and was why the man who wrote the poem that became our unofficial national anthem, “Waltzing Matilda”—our Walt Whitman or Mark Twain, if you will—decided to take up the pen name “Banjo” (+5 wanker points, −65 poofter points).
We are a people whose love of making fun of everyone and everything—I’m sure I’ll be accused of perpetuating “tall poppy syndrome,” or tearing down someone who has found great success, for this essay—is only outweighed by our rabid hatred of being made fun of. Australians are naturally suspicious of art and its challenging ambiguity; by merely existing, it is often perceived to be mocking us.
This is the drongo undercurrent of Hannah Gadsby’s work—of everything that has culminated in “It’s Pablo-matic.”
Back in 2018, when Nanette fever was sweeping the world and Gadsby was performing the show on Broadway, I was living above a glue factory in Bushwick. I made several attempts to watch Nanette, but a combination of apathy and a lapsed Vyvanse script made this all but impossible. I eventually caught the majority of it when my roommate’s girlfriend played it on our loft’s wall via our projector. The only part that made me laugh was Gadsby’s riff about Picasso. This wasn’t because I found the jokes funny, or because their ideas created “the tension” (as they put it) that necessitate a laugh, but because Gadsby sounded like any one of the firmly middlebrow “Art is for pooftas” drongos I had left back in my hometown, the famously culture-phobic Perth.
In this notorious part of Nanette, which Times critic Farago describes as Gadsby “most bizarrely” condemning art as “an elite swindle,” we see a perfect distillation of Australia’s antagonistic relationship with art and culture as a whole. When I watched Gadsby mockingly enunciate “CUUUUU-bism” while mugging and rolling their eyes for a delighted Sydney audience, I was dumbstruck by sudden-onset homesickness. When I heard them say that Picasso just “put a kaleidoscope filter” on his penis to think up Cubism, I was instantly taken back to Australia’s public school system, where the failed artists turned substitute teachers had an ax to grind against anyone suspected of thinking themselves superior to that lot (I have vivid memories of a teacher who talked about Andy Warhol like he’d murdered the guy’s family).
“It’s Pablo-matic” shares this dropkick drongoism with Nanette. But what makes both performances special is their touch of seppo. In what may be the most successful merger of Australian and American culture to date, Gadsby deftly melds Australian insecurity with American certainty. Gadsby’s work sits at the intersection of Australia’s reflexive anti-intellectualism and America’s corporatized identity politics. Both phenomena find a common ground in the middlebrow, the natural resting place of attitudes that find anything outside their comfort zone suspect, degenerate, or both. Armed with the overbearing sincerity that allows American critics and commentators to function as culture cops—categorizing and cauterizing art so that it can be decried and denounced without the hassle of serious interrogation—Gadsby is able to equip their quintessentially Australian view of art as snobby rubbish with an identity-wrapped crutch that doubles as a bludgeon. In Nanette, they conflate Picasso with Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump. In “It’s Pablo-matic,” they write “weird flex” next to a Picasso print of a nude caressing a sculpture of a naked hunk, and their and the Brooklyn Museum curators’ response to criticism of the exhibition was to delight in getting “(male) critics’ knickers in a twist.”
The end goal is the same: to take this thing that angers or disquiets you, stamp it as “toxic,” shrug at it, and sweep it aside.
Australian culture is always five to 10 years behind the rest of the world, which is why someone like Gadsby, with their stuck-in-the-2010s sense of humor and social issues, can thrive stateside: They’ve drifted in from a lagging parallel timeline, as entrancing (in a ’50s-themed diner sort of way) as they are confusing to contemporary American critics. To those critics, “It’s Pablo-matic” may be an abomination, but I see it as something closer to a miracle of seppo–drongo relations, a perfect merger of American sincerity and Australian insincerity. Gadsby has managed to invert, export to the American market—the only market that matters—and profit from Australia’s cultural cringe and fear of “the wanker.” In doing so, Gadsby has blessed America with a slither of Australian enlightenment: that beautiful little head tilt and wave-off known simply as the “yeah, nah.” The fact that that seems to overwhelmingly be the critical response to “It’s Pablo-matic” is, in its own way, art.
