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contemporary issues in aboriginal art
This session examines the debates that surround the interpretation of Aboriginal art and unpack the current state of play. The interpretation of Aboriginal art remains contentious, and mainly derives from the different disciplinary agendas of anthropology and the artworld. As well as direct disciplinary issues, they also include:
- Curatorial issues of its display in respect to other art and artefacts—overseas Aboriginal art is still often packaged in ethnographic terms
- The place of Dreaming and other traditional practices in contemporary art
- The relationships between remote and urban Aboriginal art
- Globalism and the relationship between local and wider agendas
- Historical issues about the place of Aboriginal art in modernity and post-contact Australia more generally
- The effects of non-Aboriginal participants—artists, art advisers, curators, anthropologists, dealers, art critics and historians etc—in the production and reception of Aboriginal art.
- The effect of the market in the production and reception of Aboriginal art.
Many of these issues are interrelated, and no doubt participants will identify others. The focus is on the reception not production of Aboriginal art. The session is not concerned with documenting and analysing various Aboriginal art practices, and nor is it concerned with issues that might be raised by Aboriginal artists in their work—such as land rights, Dreaming, gender, colonial and postcolonial representation—unless this analysis or these issues directly relate to the politics of interpretation that continue to frame the reception of Aboriginal art.
Convenors: Ian McLean (University of Western Australia) and Darren Jorgenson (University of Western Australia)
1. Art History at Remote Art Centres: The Conundrum of Wobbly Old People’s Painting (Darren Jorgensen)
This paper describes the problems, protocols and research possibilities offered by remote art centres for art history. At present paintings, punu objects and other artworks from remote communities are absorbed all too quickly into the market. All too quickly, that is, for art history, that bases its practices around institutions and exhibitions. In 2009 I have been travelling to remote art centres to access the records of remote artists, in order to construct local art histories. These records are often incredibly fragile, stored in substandard buildings or on individual computers that are often five years old or more. Yet these are archives offer a valuable resource for constructing local histories of remote artists, and in bypassing institutional and exhibition contexts, offers a new and non-national way of addressing the concerns of global art history. In this paper I will demonstrate how the records of Warakurna Artists and Waringarri Arts Centre address one of the central conundrums of contemporary Aboriginal art: that of Wobbly Old People’s Painting.
Biography
Darren Jorgensen lectures in art history at the University of Western Australia. He has published essays on Aboriginal art, science fiction and critical theory.
2. Aboriginal Art Centres as Frontiers of Thought (Dr Sally Butler)
This paper examines ways in which Aboriginal art centres perform the role of trailblazers in shaping 21st century global thinking. Negotiations by art co-ordinators between Aboriginal communities, artists, curators, government bodies, art dealers and art collectors evoke a unique interface in contemporary cultural and commercial affairs. Since the early years of western desert acrylic painting, art centres have emerged in a variety of formats and functions and changes in the ways art centres operate arguably stimulate new directions in thinking about the production and reception of Aboriginal art. This paper compares four case studies of art centres from the early years of the Aboriginal art market to more recently emerging examples to demonstrate how their structures and operation map shifts in thinking from postcolonial dialectics to a more future-orientated ‘anticipatory’ identity of 21st century Aboriginal culture.
The case studies of Aboriginal art centres include Papunya Tula, Maningrida Arts Centre, Wik & Kugu Art & Cultural Centre and Lockhart River Art & Cultural Centre.
Biography
Sally Butler is Senior Lecturer in Art History at The University of Queensland. Butler is author of Our Way, Contemporary Aboriginal Art from Lockhart River (UQP 2007) and curator of the international touring exhibition of the same name. Other recent publications include “Translating the Spectacle: the intercultural aesthetic of John Mawurndjul” (Between Indigenous Australia and Europe: John Mawurndjul, Reimar Publications, Berlin & Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 2008). Butler is one of the current editors of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art and former Associate Editor of Art Collector Magazine. Current projects include curating an exhibition of contemporary art from Aurukun and editing an anthology of essays on the same topic.
3. Collaboration between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Artists (Professor Ian McLean)
Why is collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists such an issue in visual art—when it is less of an issue in other art forms, such as music, dance and cinema? In addressing this question, this paper will develop a theoretical approach based on a typology of such collaboration and its historical contexts. At the centre of the paper is a critique Richard Bell’s Bell’s theorem: Aboriginal art is a white thing!
Biography
Ian McLean is Discipline Chair of Visual Arts at the University of Western Australia. He has published extensively on Australian art and particularly on the intersections of indigenous and settler art. His books include The Art of Gordon Bennett (with a chapter by Gordon Bennett) and White Aborigines Identity Politics in Australian Art, and an edited anthology of writing on Aboriginal art since 1980, titled How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art, to be published in 2010.
4. “How can this be art?” On the Reception of Aboriginal Art in German Art Space (Friederike Krishnabhakdi-Vasilakis)
My PhD research into the reception of Aboriginal art in German art space looks at the historical development of art history and anthropology in Germany which have led to the binary reading of art as a part of nation building processes. As a consequence, Aboriginal art from remote areas has been widely excluded from art institutions of contemporary art and interpreted through ethnographic frameworks. Such a dual approach to art is culturally motivated and often implies an insurmountable, essential difference. The implications are manifold: for example, while “contemporary” art is actively involved in the present, “ethnographic” art is seen as a witness of the past.
This paper explores underlying currents for the general resistance of German art institutions to exhibit remote Aboriginal art by looking at specific historical issues – such as historicising European art – that still delineate ideas of the place of Aboriginal art in modernity. Since the 19th century, art and ethnographic museums have been spaces which implicitly tell what the objects are and why one is looking at them. Art that is tied to oral culture seems to be stuck in the ethnographic frame due to the absence of written art documentation of most periods of its production.
Since the 1990s, Non-Aboriginal artists, dealers and curators such as Bernhard Lüthi and Elisabeth Bähr have had a great effect on the visibility of Aboriginal art as art in Germany through exhibiting and publishing Aboriginal artists. Events such as John Mawurndjul’s retrospective exhibition Rarrk 2005 and its symposium in Basel, Switzerland, which brought art historians and anthropologists together, are crucial in breaking away from the often oppositional 19th century binarism, towards an interdisciplinary and cross-culturally approach to Aboriginal art.
Biography
Friederike Krishnabhakdi-Vasilakis studied Ethnology, Art History and Media Science at the Philips University of Marburg, Germany, where she received a Master of Arts degree in Ethnology in 1994. Friederike has been lecturing part time in Visual Art Theory at the Faculty of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong (UOW) since 2005. She recently commenced teaching in Aboriginal Studies at Woolyungah Indigenous Centre at UOW. Her PhD, which is currently under examination, is titled ‘On the Reception of Aboriginal Art in German Art Space’ and focuses on the institutional framing of Aboriginal art through the humanist disciplines of Ethnology and Art History.
5. A Dead Art? Sustainability in the Aboriginal Art Market (Dr Meaghan Wilson-Anastasios)
Sotheby’s estimates that between fifty and seventy percent of the Aboriginal art it sells goes to buyers outside Australia. How do those buyers view that art? If you search for the Aboriginal art department on the Sotheby’s website, you will not find it listed with ‘Australian’ and ‘Contemporary Art’ under the ‘Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture’ category. Aboriginal art falls under the classification ‘Ancient and Ethnographic Arts’, alongside ‘Antiquities’ and ‘Pre-Columbian Art’.
Ethnographic art is inanimate, contained in a state of suspended animation. Its primary value to collectors is measured by its ‘authenticity’ and connection to a culturally untainted, semi-mythical point of genesis. Whereas a contemporary artwork is understood by the market to be produced by an artist working within a dynamic society, an object has the greatest ethnographic value if it emanates from a static, isolated society. The vitality and vigour of the Aboriginal desert art movement notwithstanding, by classifying Aboriginal art as ‘ethnography’ the message communicated to Sotheby’s collectors is that it is primarily a scientific and cultural curio.
This paper will show that the promotion and reception of Aboriginal art internationally as ‘ethnographic’ art is but one of a number of important aspects of the market that have implications for the industry’s long-term sustainability. Many of these features are peculiar to the Aboriginal art market. Using economic theory as its starting point, this paper will identify how some of the ways Aboriginal art is made, distributed, promoted and received may place the market at risk.
Biography
Meaghan Wilson-Anastasios is a researcher and sessional lecturer at the University of Melbourne. Her PhD thesis investigates art auction price formation and shows how and why superstars, as defined in economic terms, emerge in the Australian art auction market. Part of her research was the focus of a Four Corners program, Art for Art’s Sake, aired on ABC television in 2008. In 2009, Meaghan co-authored a paper with Professor Neil De Marchi of Duke University for the Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art: ‘The impact of unscrupulous dealers on sustainability in the Australian Aboriginal desert paintings market’. Meaghan is a registered art valuer and has seventeen years’ art-industry experience in public and commercial art institutions including Artbank, the National Gallery of Victoria and Leonard Joel Australia.
6. Dreamings or Nightmares: Small Words for Very Big Concepts – Who Owns Indigenous Culture in the 21st Century? (Brenda L Croft)
This paper will consider the critical and popular reception of a number of key contemporary Indigenous Australian exhibitions and commissions at both national and international levels since the early 1990s, culminating in assessing the conjunctive staging of Culture Warriors: Australian Indigenous Art Triennial at the Katzen Art Center, American University, Washington DC, 2009 and Icons of the desert: early Aboriginal paintings from Papunya Tula at the Grey Gallery, NYU, both in 2009. Culture Warriors was presented in Washington after a national tour; Icons of the desert will only be shown in the US. Also assessed will be the critical response to international-only Australian Indigenous arts/cultural events such as the Australian Indigenous Art Commission at the Musée du quai Branly, Paris and the broader collection display and Dreaming their way: Aboriginal women painters at the National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington, both in 2006. What will be the role of Indigenous curators and writers in the broader national and international arts/cultural industry(ies) during the next decade of the 21st century? Whose timeframe and perspective is applicable.
Biography
Brenda L Croft was born in Perth, and now lives in Adelaide. She is a member of the Gurindji/Mutpurra [pronounced Mootpurra] nations from Kalkaringi/Daguragu community in the Northern Territory, and is a Lecturer at the David Unaipon College of Indigenous Education and Research, and the School of Art, Architecture and Design, Division of Education, Arts and Social Sciences at the University of South Australia. Before that she was senior curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the National Gallery of Australia, from 2002 to 2009, and curated the inaugural National Indigenous Art Triennial, Culture Warriors, which tours to Washington, USA in 2009. A practising artist since 1985, her works are held in public and private collections in Australia and overseas and Brenda has been involved in the arts and cultural industry for over two decades as an Arts Administrator, Curator, Writer, Lecturer and Consultant. In 1995 Brenda was awarded a Master of Art Administration from the College of Fine Arts (UNSW). In 2001 Brenda received an Alumni Award from the University of New South Wales. In 2009 Brenda received an Honorary Doctorate in Visual Arts from the University of Sydney.