Crosscurrents in Australian First Nations and Non-Indigenous Art (Routledge 2023) edited by Sarah Scott (ANU), Helen McDonald (Melbourne) and Caroline Jordan (Latrobe) is a collection of essays that examines art resulting from cross-cultural interactions between First Nations and non-Indigenous people, from British invasion up to now.
Terry Smith, Emeritus Professor of Art History (Sydney) writes:
Truth-telling and reconciliation between First Nations and those who have since arrived has become the priority for all Australians, in all aspects of our lives and work. Awareness of this fact has been two centuries, and more, in the making. Indigenous art has been crucial to this development. It is a vivid evocation of a sovereign culture, an offering to fellow Australians and the wider world.
With the recent defeat of the referendum on the Voice the themes of recognition, collaboration and dialogue as played out in art are more urgent than ever. The book includes two conversational collaborations: one with First Nations artist Maree Clarke and one with First Nations curator Vanessa Russ, and an historian’s self-reflexive account of mediating between Traditional Wurundjeri Owners and Sotheby’s international art auction house to repatriate art by nineteenth-century Elder, William Barak, in 2022. Other essays address political protest in the contemporary moment: one in portraiture by photographer Therese Ritchie, of Garrwa and other people from Borroloola, the site of the McArthur River mine, and another analysing iconoclasm or ‘iconoclash’, in the blowing up of sacred sites at Juukan Gorge by mining company Rio Tinto and the defacing of statues of Captain Cook in the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Going back in time, studies examine ‘reverse appropriation’ by early nineteenth-century Aboriginal carvers of tourist artefacts and the production of enigmatic toa in the context of a South Australian mission. Cross-cultural dialogue and appropriation into the post-war period is traced in the evolution of the First Nations textile and fashion industry and in ‘Aboriginalism’ in design in the 1950s, in a comparison of the artistic and political work of Aboriginal activist and designer Bill Onus with that of white assimilationist designer Byram Mansell. Transculturation, conceptualism and collaboration are contextualised in the pivotal decade of the 1980s, which saw a new wave of intellectual and avant-garde appropriation and collaboration in the work of artists including Gordon Bennett and Imants Tillers, and a flourishing of collaborative First Nations ‘little’ exhibitions in the cultural powerhouse of the Aboriginal suburb of Redfern in inner-city Sydney.
The flier offers a 20% discount here
Image: Mrs N. Lewis from Pukatja (Ernabella), SA. Australian Coat of Arms: We Were There and We Are Here (2018). Spinifex grasses, raffia and wool. Copyright Tjanpi Desert Weavers, NPY Women’s Council. Photograph by Emma Poletti. Australian Parliament House Collection.
You must be logged in to post a comment.