The awarding of this year’s Prize to Roy Kennedy is a long deserved recognition of the historical substance that exists in so much of the art that is produced by Aboriginal people from New South Wales. Over the last four years there has been an diverse selection of shortlisted works for each year’s prize with many surprising introductions to work by artists that have not had the same exhibition opportunities as Sydney based artists. The exhibition is an interesting snapshot of the surface of Aboriginal art production in New South Wales but fails on some levels to give an indication of the scale of the project of developing an aesthetic and history that is independent of the institutions that are often charged with representing Aboriginal Art in New South Wales.
Compared to the Telstra art awards held in Darwin Annually ovwere the past 26 years the NSW premiers prize exhibition is a much smaller affair. Each year’s show is a testament to the work of regional development officers whose encouragement and assistance produces works referencing the local histories of some of the most geographically diverse regions to be put under the category “New South Wales.
New South Wales has many geographical contrasts from the snowfields to the desert to the semi tropical coastal areas and the social and cultural contrasts of the art produced by artists working in these diverse regions makes it difficult to bring a one size fits all approach to an evaluation of the Aboriginal art of New South Wales.
There are many regional towns and places that Sydney based Aboriginal artists have personal or family connections to and this connection to country is a reoccurring theme in many of the artworks entered in each tears art prize.
The Influx of Aboriginal people to Sydney throughout the 20th century has been documented buy several other sources but it is visual artists in particular who are finding ways of describing the emotional and geographical connection that many people feel towards the areas that they have lived or grown up in. The period after 1967 when the inalienable human rights of Aboriginal people in New South Wales were recognised in law that a growing self determined movement by Aboriginal people towards actively participating in the economic development of townships and urban centres in New South Wales began.
Prior to 1967 the “kitch” movement of representing Aboriginal people as an exotic other on velvet wall hangings, ceramic ashtrays and reproductions of artefacts were all non Indigenous craft industries that found a niche distributing an Aboriginal “influenced” product. Aboriginal art from New South Wales does not have the same ethnographic validation that exists for art from the remote areas of Australia and is therefore labelled as inauthentic by many non indigenous owned commercial galleries who maintain that real Aboriginal art is produced in a community art centre model and nowhere else. As Richard Bell aptly put it – “Aboriginal art - it’s a white thing” the validation and legitimacy of much of the art that is produced in New South Wales is not through peer assessment by New South Wales Aboriginal communities but purely through the commercial success of the artists work.
As noted by Coo-ee gallery director Adrian Newstead– (a commercial gallery that has operated in Sydney for over 20 years) in Australian Art collector Sept 09
By insinuating that the provenience of independently produced works is unsafe, they undermine more than 50 percent of the art currently being produced and a vast number of works created in the past that are sold through outlets other than elite exhibiting galleries and auction houses.
Aboriginal art in New South Wales is not produced in the same community art centre model that the more recognisable forms of Aboriginal art from remote regions is produced. Aboriginal art from New South Wales is far more individual than community based. It would be interesting (though pointless) for aboriginal artists in each suburb of Sydney to nominate an artist that is able to represent the community experience on behalf of the others that live in that community. How does one artist represent the Redfern experience in a way that encapsulates everyone else’s point of view?
Aboriginal art in New South Wales has been shaped by many political and social forces that have shaped the industry in ways both positive and disastrous. Political art in this exhibition was overshadowed by a more ecologically conscious art that shows a growing awareness among regional communities of the local impacts of global industrialised forces that impact everyone in the community.
The diversity of experiences between the generations is also sharply felt in the urban areas as it is in the remote art centres.
With all the galleries clamouring for the prestige of hosting the touring exhibition its surprising that there is no associated promotional material apart from the exhibition catalogue that accompanies this exhibition. While many art lovers will appreciate the historical associations that Roy Kennedy brings to his winning work the battle to change the perceptions of NSW audiences in relation to that Aboriginal art that is produced in their own regions is far from over. In some ways this exhibition validates the regional cringe of exhibiting in the big smoke. Many artists say it is difficult to be taken seriously by their local communities and would rather wait for the legitimacy of an expert in the City telling them that it is art than take a chance on working with their own community to produce local vernacular of artistic expression.
Adam Hill
Once again this year Adam Hill has thrown another “truth bomb” into the exhibition space by creating artworks that not only challenge what Aboriginal art is supposed to look like but also interrogates a common reality shared by many in relation to home ownership. While two thirds of the non indigenous community are owner occupiers the figures for Indigenous home ownership in New South Wales put the rate at around 1 in 3 for Aboriginal people. Playing with the concept of the welcome mat this work rather effectively brings complex social issues into stark reality These homely mass produced messages of “welcome” “come on in”. Housing has always been a sore point for regionally based Aboriginal Australians, the sad reality of Albert Namatjiri being a nationally recognised artist yet not being allowed to own a home in Alice Springs even though he could afford it is an example of the distrust that many Aboriginal people feel in participating in the housing market.
The great Aussie dream of owning a home has not become a reality for many Aboriginal Australians. there is a lingering memory associated with Aboriginal housing that passed through urban folklore in recent years in that ATSIC would build houses for Aboriginal family’s who would destroy them for firewood. Whether this ever actually happened is not as relevant as the fact that it has been used as a reason for excluding Aboriginal family’s from the rental housing market in many areas around Australia.
The welcome mat is an interesting aspect of urban life that implies a social interaction. Aboriginal housing is a social issue that has never been dealt with properly and many people think that Aboriginal people choose to live in squalid conditions as part of their rejection of mainstream culture.
In recent years Adam Hill has moved away from his bold painterly visual style that expressed his earlier work and broadened the artistic palette that he usages to create artworks that challenge received wisdom that is fed through the mainstream media and politics.
Having been shortlisted in numerous art Prizes in recent years it is disappointing that further recognition of the artistic risks that Adam Hill has shown with his photography and Installation and should be taking as their career matures are not recognised or rewarded by a sometimes conservative award structure.
Each year the premiers art prize is heavily dominated by painting, sculpture and photography are present but there is an element of risk in awarding a $20 000 prize to a work that challenges the majority of the audiences expectations of what a $20 000 artwork might look like. Hills work this year consists of three doormats - boldly declaring visitors “UN welcome”. Adam challenges the judges and the community with this work as we all like to think that Aboriginal art in New South Wales is on a par with the best of international contemporary art however the rejection of re evaluation of the primacy of painting seems to be a long way away for many New South Wales Artists
Bronwyn Bancroft
Bancroft is an artist whose skill lies in an ability to create visual abstractions of the conceptual representations of much of the social relationships that underpin kinship and connection to country. Bancroft’s recent work involves muted colours that bleed together – sometimes into grid like formations and sometimes into free flowing assosoiations and meditations on country, place, space and time. Bancroft’s work works best on a large scale where the interplay and tensions created by contrasting and jarring blocks of color that sometimes loosely reference networks of kinship affiliation and alliance.
In relation to the other artists in this show Bancroft’s work almost appears as an Aboriginal modernism in comparison with the more graphic and representational approach which seems to be the preference of other participating artists. Bronwyn has initiated and participated in several group approaches to making art (Designer aboriginals, Boomalli Aboriginal artists co operative, The strength of women art collective). Bronwyn has developed a style of her own that is easily recognisable to any seasoned Aboriginal art aficionado, there is no doubt that her work would be a necessary inclusion in any representative survey of the art of New South Wales over the past two decades and recognition of the work that Bronwyn has put into community initiated arts projects is evident in the several protégés that have worked alongside Bronwyn and with her guidance throughout recent years.
The influences of Bronwyn’s artistic has permeated through many younger artists colour palate and her use of colour is used in a much softer tone than the hard edge line work that is prominent in the paintings of Adam Hill or the be seen in several other artists work in this exhibition such as Natalie Bateman, Karla Dickens or Donella Waters. Bancroft incorporates the community responsibility of sharing knowledge especially among women as a way of including the community in the
Debra Beale
Artist Debra Beale photographic work for this years prize is a refreshingly different approach to a larger theme that was seen in several works in this year’s show - the ecological aspect of rural life in New South Wales. These photographs reference the ecological realities of water and land use agreements in the murray darling river system of western New South Wales. Beale simply yet effectively uses the bottled water as a metaphor for the traditional connections between language groups both upstream and downstream. For an authoritative traditional person in Western New South walse the river system acted like a modern broadbnand connection providing information about climactic events in other areas. As a source of food and sustenance.
The medicinal and utilitarian uses of botanical and animal life that existed along the river excist in many examples of information that was shared between women and the food gathering skills of women and the knowledge associated with this is a fascinating area to explore in opposition to a paternalistic male centric view of the land as a resource to be farmed and the water mentality of who gets to it first owns it as well as the traditional crafts of woodwork fibre making and that were used in fishing. That this water is pre sold for commercial industrial purposes is an interesting point and that the long term interests of the preservation of the river itself do not seem to be taken into account.
Roy Kennedy
Roy Kennedy has produced a substantial body of work since 1995 documenting memories of life growing up on missions and reserves in Western New South Wales. Roys artwork present an “in living memory” perspective of times both good and bad and the living conditions that Aboriginal people who grew up under the Aborigines protection act. Roy was 35 years old when the 1967 referendum on Aboriginal rights was enacted and has spent just over half his life being classified as a citizen of Australia. Encouraged by the Eora College of TAFE in Redfern’s Visual arts program he began to document his memories the missions that his mother and father lived on. Since 1998 Roy has produced over 42 etchings that depict various aspects of the
Missions were run by the church whereas reserves were ran by the state and the difference between the two styles of administration varies from indifference to hostile assimilations
The importance of firsthand accounts of the experience of life on the missions and reserves of New South Wales cannot be underestimated. “In living memory” is a curatorial premise that has been used by documentary photographer Mervyn Bishop in recent years to produce a series of exhibitions that add a firsthand indigenous perspective of the collections of cultural materials that are owned by non Indigenous cultural institutions. Roy’s vignettes on daily life growing up on a mission produce bitter sweet reactions to the blatant discrimination faced by Aboriginal people in Western NSW prior to 1967.
A first person perspective is often dismissed as unobtainable by major institutions that are working with cultural materials and it is a disgrace that artists such as Roy Kennedy, Elaine Russell and Harry J Wedge are not supported more widely by the Commercial art gallery system in Sydney. There is no shortage of high priced art centre artists whose work shares an affinity with first hand perspectives of community yet the experiences of New South Wales Aboriginal people producing art outside of a community art centre model are too often dismissed as “fake” and “contested” . Much like the work of Alex Black lock Roy Kennedys
Traditional NSW Language groupings of participating artists
Language group representation in the premier’s art prize 2009
Bundjulung/Djanbun I (F)
Yuin/Gadigal I (F)
Boon Wurrung/ Yorta Yorta / Gamiliroi I (F)
Ngarabal I (M)
Ngarabal/birpai III (F) (M) (M)
Kamiliroi IIII (F) (M) (F) (F)
Thunggutti I (M)
Wiradjuri IIII (F) (M) (M) (F)
Goomeroi IIII (M) (M) (F) (M)
Gumbayngirr II (M) (M)
Weilwan/Gamillaroi I (F)
Dharug II (F) (F)
Jerringa I (M)
Dhungatti II (F) (M)
Yaegl I (F)
Bundjulung I (M)
Wodi Wodi I (M)
Ngiyampaa I (M)
Gamilaraay II (M) (F)
Wailwan I (M)
Birpai/Worimi I (M)
Birpai I (M)
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Aboriginal art galleries in Sydney
This essay aims to provide definitions of the difference between traditional Aboriginal art, Urban Aboriginal art and commercial Aboriginal art. The history of Aboriginal art in Sydney is influenced by many factors - historical fact, cultural protocol, legitimacy and commercial sales.
In setting out an outline of how to determine what has played the largest influence in the development of Aboriginal art in Australia over the past 25 years it is important to understand the political contexts in which Aboriginal art has existed.
The under representation of Aboriginal artists in the history of Australian art was shown to be the result of entrenched racism that existed in Australia (blatantly prior to 1967 silently after this date) where Aboriginal people were excluded from many areas of cultural production such as media the arts and performing arts.
The impact of the growth and increase of Aboriginal art on the Australian commercial gallery scene over the last couple of decades has been developed largely outside of the tertiary education system. The conservatism of the commercial art industry is is evident in the skeptisism shown by many contemporary Aboriginal artists as to the actual benefits of the development of Aboriginal art as being beneficial for the Aboriginal community. Bell's theorem
That Aboriginal art has developed outside of the tertiary arts education system in Australia is not unusual in that the most commercially successfull and peer recognised Aboriginal artists are artists educated with English as a third or fourth language. This also highlights the use of the english language by an Aboriginal artist as being a factor in the determination of legitimacy in relation to whether an individual is an authentic representative of an original Aboriginal perspective.
Aboriginal art is not a unified art movement in the same context we know other art movements that have existed in Australia such as modernism. Aboriginal art in many cases arose out of the post modern and post colonial re evaluations of Modernist art history of the 1970’s and 1980’s.
Left wing political influences on the development of Aboriginal art have not been as easily accepted by Aboriginal artists as is widely believed. Aboriginal academic Romaine Mortein and others have highlighted the philosophical ambiguity of the use of the term "wilderness" as excluding Aboriginal knowledge sytems from ecological frameworks and being a construction of a priveledged western engagement with land use.
Successful collaborations between green and environmental agendas and Aboriginal land rights have become bogged down in clashes between wildlife conservation groups and proponents of traditional hunting rights of Aboriginal people. Also alliances between Aboriginal communities and mining companies as well as other multinational focused corporations produces unease within green groups who have a very different agenda in relation to community and cultural development.
Outside of the political construction of an Aboriginal art industry there have been many changes in recent decades that do not have anything to do with the political advancement of a unified Aboriginal australia and are contained with in a regional and individual proactive asertion of local knowledges. In 1987 the commercial aboriginal art industry in Sydney entered a transitional phase where opportunities for artists, curators, galleries and museums changed exponentially.
International interest and in the art of Aboriginal people was either met by the serious ethnographic art specialists that had existed in Sydney since the 1800’s or by a growing network of commercial art galleries in Sydney and Melbourne that developed international connections for their galleries through
The history of selling Aboriginal culture is disturbing in that there are too many examples of people whose culture was being sold being excluded from the process at all levels. Throughout history up until the 1970's the selling of everything from artefacts, body parts, souveniers, weapons and cultural material to institutions and individuals has created a secondary market where the vast majority of these artefacts are owned by non indigenous people and can be sold in the auction markets of the world along side artefacts from many Indigenous cultures for very large profit margins is sadisticly ironic given the historical treatment of the individuals who have produced these objects.
2010 marks a new era in the history of Aboriginal art in Australia. The Indigenous commercial code of conduct and the droit de suite programs being instigated by the federal government offer to bring a new sense of accountability top the Aboriginal art market. Selling fake Aboriginal art is nothing new in the 1980’s scientific testing showed that several skeletons held by institutions and bought in the 1800's as Aboriginal skeletons were actually European skeletons that had been sold to an unsuspecting trader as Aboriginal remains - a small sign towards a positive change might be that today unscruplulous art dealers sell artworks not body parts or stolen matrrial.
The success of remote art centres based thousands of Kilometres from the urban centres is astounding. There are many Aboriginal owned art centres that turn over more sales of artworks in a month than some commercial galleries do in a year.
This is an example of the distortion that many people see when they engage with Aboriginal art through the capital city commercial galleries. The sheer volume and variety of works produced leaves the Audience confused as to where the history of the movement begins and ends.
Was it commercial galleries, government funded arts programs that encouraged increased participation by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the arts or was it the artists themselves that created an industry that was worth $900 000 annually in 1975 into 100 million dollar industry in the year 2000?
Factionalism and in a sense tribalism’s exist within the industry where alliances are everything when it comes to the sharing of commercial in confidence information.
Contested and manufactured histories regarding seminal points in the development of the industry remain largely unexplained and while there have been several noteworthy exhibitions in recent years that have been curated by Indigenous curators.
However in New South Wales and Sydney in particular there seems to be a disadvantage when it comes to harnessing the existing professional arts and cultural institutions programs of representing Aboriginal cultural material and sharing the progress made with this with regional based Australians. Most programming in Sydney Galleries and museums is aimed towards an international audience rather than a local audience and is reflected in programming that intensively reserachs an area before moving onto the next. this is more rewarding for the institution that for the Aboriginal communities as the development of a domestic Aboriginal art market is more expensive than"plugging in" to the existing international Indigenous art market.
as evidenced by the increasing number of commecial aboriginal art galleries During the 1980’s Aboriginal art moved from an ethnocentric to commercial context. This was the result of several competing influences, and there were disagreements as to the best waty for the industry to proceed. The existence of ATSIC provided the primary unified national representative body for Aboriginal people that acted as a mediator between Aboriginal community representatives and federal and state public service institutions. and it was during the time that ATSIC existed that a sense of trust was developed between many aboriginal communities and representatives of a federal government that benefited the careers of many unkown artists.
ATSIC worked towards rectifying issues affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with a nationally focused and regionally coordinated approach to address recognised disadvantages faced by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community such as housing, health services and proactively asserting Aboriginal and Torres strait Islander people into business and professional development opportunities. Whether these policies have been succesful it is difficult to determine howevwer it is important the industry recognised that exploitative business practices where non Indigenous people and institutions profited from Aboriginal cultural information, objects and knowledge’s was not going to be ignored in a legal sense.
The work done by the Arts Law centre NSW, Viscopy and NAVA reflects the need for impertial juddgement of the business activities of all involved in the Aboriginal arts industry,
Since 1987 There have been several other non Aboriginal owned commercial art galleries in Sydney that in terms of business management have been far more successful in promoting Aboriginal art to international audiences so why didn’t an Aboriginal owned and operated art gallery such as Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative succeed?
There is two types of Aboriginal art in Sydney - there is Aboriginal art that is community recognised as Aboriginal art and then there is Aboriginal art that is commercially recognised as Aboriginal art. Commercial galleries and the Aboriginal community do not have the same agenda when it comes to the development of Aboriginal arts.
it is certainly not in any interests of a commercial gallery to work against a communities wishes but it is also not in their interests to be involved to closely either. The danger is in dividing the community un necessarily and setting up a communities expectations too high.
Failure to recognise that the Aboriginal community in Sydney and the Aboriginal community in the wider context of Australia have never been in a unified position in regards to collective decision making. Ignorance of the attitudes of "country" people and "city" people towards each other in Australia is a sign of a government propaganda that emphasises the national identity of all Australia over the local knowledge that shape the differences between the "city" and the "country"
Legitimacy is the keyword when it comes to determining Aboriginal artworks integrity.
Is there anything that we can learn from comparisons of the commercial art galleries, the Aboriginal community art centre model and the current buzzword in federal arts funding "artist run initiative"?
Why are Artist Run initiatives are classified as a different type of organisation that Aboriginal community art centres is an interesting point to start with. young urban artists are in a way being ghettoised in the sanmem way as aboriginal communities in the funding providers insistence on a collective identity that is legaly accountable to the funding provider in order to develop a relationship with the provider.
It would be hard to image that race is not a defining character in the distinctions between success and professionalism that are fundamental concerns when creating an operational plan or membership constitution for Artist run initiative or an Aboriginal community art centre.
It is obvious that some commercial art galleries dislike the fact that community art centres receive government funding to operate and are allowed to commercially sell art as well. This is protectionism that would never exist in any other industry.
One of the criteria that separate commercial art galleries from community art centres is this distinction – commercial galleries are not eligible to apply for funding to develop an artist’s work in the same way that remote community art centres are.
It is important not to transplant the remote community art centre model onto metropolitan commercial and public art galleries.
“Re territorialisation” seems to be the strategy of some state and federal arts funding bodies that use the success of the commercial art centres in remote settings as a benchmark and organisational template for the performance of the metropolitan Aboriginal art production that it encourages through its funding programs.
The “re territorialisation” of the community art centre model that has been attempted to be replicated by the commercial art gallery system through programming that favors an ethnographic nationalistic approach to the representation of of Aboriginal culture in Australia is the main barrier that prevents Aboriginal people as individuals from representing wider contexts and definitions of Aboriginality in the commercial and public art gallery and museum industry.
The optional operating model for a community based membership system of publicly funded art galleries is an organisation like Boomalli as it exists as a mid way point – a proving ground where artists who were serious about art were able to learn from more professional artists as well as learn from assisting other artists.
What set Boomalli apart from the commercial gallery system in Sydney was when peer assessment by other Aboriginal artists determined the importance and by participation and involvement in the development of their fellow artists career. Boomalli’s consistency came from its aim of an Aboriginal peer assessed artistic program and the quiet legitimacy that Aboriginal members of the gallery had determined that this was the art that they wanted to be represented by.
Legitimacy is the key to the success of an Aboriginal art gallery.
Commercial legitimacy is very different from community legitimacy and is a cause of division among many arts administrators who have no way of verifying the legitimacy of a particular type of Aboriginal art without offending the artist.
Commercial art galleries often “cherry pick” from community art centres – out of a group of 20 artists there may be one artist whose work outshines everyone because of its subject matter, composition or personal story of the artist putting the work in a context that makes it commercially viable in a way that the other artworks produced members of the group is not.
Many artists run initiatives as well as remote art centres for Aboriginal art are the same in that that the success or lack of success that comes with experienced artists exhibiting regularly needs to be part of a constructive critical feedback loop for the newer members.
It is not uncommon to see Sydney based Aboriginal artists praised for their courage and visionary mystical aspects of their work by audiences who are doing this to make themselves feel better about the plight of Aboriginal people in the remote communities. Can you imagine if artists in the different suburbs of Sydney had to run for election to be allowed to paint scenes of Sydney Harbour and portraits of the Sydney community? (Would Ken Done still occupy prime real estate underneath the harbour bridge if this were the case?)
Sydney has a fascinating and largely unknown Aboriginal history that can be told through stone tool artefacts, rock art, archeology and contemporary art yet there is a perception that because the Aboriginal people who live in Sydney today are not descendants of the Eora people who lived in Sydney prior to colonisation "why should their art be any better than other non aboriginal artists who have lived in Sydney their whole lives?". In the context of access to educational support for technical proficiency this is probably true, but this sentiment fails to take into account the community and social aspects of Aboriginal people living in Sydney today and the wider connections that family and history that these artists bring into their work.
Recently there were complaints from members of the Australia council’s indigenous commercial code of conduct committee that the membership of the administering board did not have any Indigenous members on its board.
It’s interesting that Aboriginal artists cop a lot of the blame for corruption in the industry when so few Aboriginal people or communities own and run Sydney based art galleries. The only galleries that are owned by Aboriginal people are in remote communities and are not in any of our capital cities like Melbourne or Sydney.
It is non Indigenous people that are the rogue elements in the industry, it is implied that Aboriginal artists and their susceptibility to corruption should provide the guidelines and frameworks that will be enforced in relation to determining the legitimacy of players in the industry.
It is not Aboriginal gallery owners that are responsible for the illegal practices that initially brought the senate committee to establish and implement a commercial code of conduct. It is the commercial gallery system that is entirely owned and operated by non indigenous stakeholders that have the most to lose from a commercial code of conduct so why is the burden of policing the industry put onto Aboriginal artists and not onto the thousands of non indigenous people that work in the arts industry already?
The most blatant examples of carpet bagging and insider trading were committed by auction houses and fly by night “dealers” selling artworks by established artists to art dealers for prices way higher than what the artist was paid.
It is fair to note that Aboriginal art in particular is one of the most unregulated markets to have existed in recent years. Allegations of corruption have tainted the industry to the point where a senate enquiry was called by the federal government and the Australia Council is to implement a commercial code of conduct that puts it in law that representatives of galleries are to pay artists with money rather than personal favours.
Allegations of corruption in the Aboriginal art industry are racist in the extreme – in 2005 the Australia wheat Board (read Australian Farmers) gave $300 million dollars to Sadam Hussein during a time of war. The AWB was not disbanded and its supporters vilified like what happened with ATSIC in fact the Australian Government at the time increased its financial support of the organisation to ensure administrative transparency.
Why the double standards when a successful Aboriginal industry attempts to regulate itself? The aboriginal communities and artists are the first to be blamed for all that is wrong with the industry. There is nothing remotely on this scale in the administration of Aboriginal Land councils or arts organisations in general yet the commercial art galleries in particular pass the blame onto “Rouge carpet baggers” definition: people other than them doing the same thing.
The disconnection between the Auction houses and high end commercial art galleries is so far from the lives of the people who are sustaining the industry that there is something very wrong with the administrative policies of the federal and state organisations that whose sole existence is to support artists and develop the industry.
For the scale of money involved in the Aboriginal arts industry the fact that it has been so unregulated has allowed profit to influence production in a way that has not sustained the industry.
Aboriginal artists face a contradictory attitude when it comes to commercial representation in Sydney. Both ends of the spectrum (the auction house and investment gallery) are locked into a ethnographic and historical market that is legitimate but has no conection with the everyday lives of the culture they represent.
To further compound the problem the handmade craft/tourism and souvenir market has been outsourced and commercialised by the tourism industry to the point where local producers end up with no financial model of successfully competing with the “Aboriginal style” wholesale mass produced artefacts that can be especially lucrative when at the right place at the right time.
Government arts funding providers will tell you that they spend millions of dollars each year supporting Aboriginal art in New South Wales but when you look at the actual allocation of this money more than 90% of it is allocated to established museums and galleries so that they can add Indigenous content to their existing programming of representing a nationally focused Aboriginal art.
There is no need to rehash the argument for a dedicated Aboriginal museum and gallery in Sydney – no politician will ever touch the issue, we had one for 22 years known as Boomalli and still the funding bodies would ask the organisation every year to argue its case for existence.
The National gallery of Australia will rectify this in 2010 by building ten dedicated permanent exhibition spaces for the purpose of exhibiting their collections of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art. While this is commendable it is fair to say that it will not have the same international exposure as an exhibition space of the same calibre put in Sydney or Melbourne. A tourist art shop in Manly or Bondi will get more vistors in the long term than the galleries in canberra
every state needs an institution like Boomalli to exist as incubators – spaces where market forces or political influences cant shape the day to day operating activities of creating art for arts sake. of encouraging the growth and development of Aboriginal and Torres strait Islander art into a system that is an exemplary model for all Australian artists.
ARI’s and Aboriginal Art centres cannot become complacent when it comes to grants and government arts funding. This type funding needs to be tied to specific projects and not to annual operating budgets as it can create a welfare mentality among organisations that are not encouraged to seek income sources outside of the safe arts grant funding system.
References
- The formation of ATSIC – a national representative body for all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (10 dec 1987) ATSIC encouraged the self determination by Aboriginal artists, performers, authors and academics
- The Aboriginal Memorial Ramangining community (d. Mundine 1987–88)
- the national bicentenary acknowledgement that was being planned by a Federal Labour government (1988)
- Magicians de la Terre centre Pompidou Paris (1989)
- The Formation of Boomalli Aboriginal artists co –operative (1987)
- This decade saw the rise of several Aboriginal owned and operated initiatives in media, art and performance such as Boomalli, Bangarra, Black Books, NAISDA, Indigenous Screen Australia
In setting out an outline of how to determine what has played the largest influence in the development of Aboriginal art in Australia over the past 25 years it is important to understand the political contexts in which Aboriginal art has existed.
The under representation of Aboriginal artists in the history of Australian art was shown to be the result of entrenched racism that existed in Australia (blatantly prior to 1967 silently after this date) where Aboriginal people were excluded from many areas of cultural production such as media the arts and performing arts.
The impact of the growth and increase of Aboriginal art on the Australian commercial gallery scene over the last couple of decades has been developed largely outside of the tertiary education system. The conservatism of the commercial art industry is is evident in the skeptisism shown by many contemporary Aboriginal artists as to the actual benefits of the development of Aboriginal art as being beneficial for the Aboriginal community. Bell's theorem
That Aboriginal art has developed outside of the tertiary arts education system in Australia is not unusual in that the most commercially successfull and peer recognised Aboriginal artists are artists educated with English as a third or fourth language. This also highlights the use of the english language by an Aboriginal artist as being a factor in the determination of legitimacy in relation to whether an individual is an authentic representative of an original Aboriginal perspective.
Aboriginal art is not a unified art movement in the same context we know other art movements that have existed in Australia such as modernism. Aboriginal art in many cases arose out of the post modern and post colonial re evaluations of Modernist art history of the 1970’s and 1980’s.
Left wing political influences on the development of Aboriginal art have not been as easily accepted by Aboriginal artists as is widely believed. Aboriginal academic Romaine Mortein and others have highlighted the philosophical ambiguity of the use of the term "wilderness" as excluding Aboriginal knowledge sytems from ecological frameworks and being a construction of a priveledged western engagement with land use.
Successful collaborations between green and environmental agendas and Aboriginal land rights have become bogged down in clashes between wildlife conservation groups and proponents of traditional hunting rights of Aboriginal people. Also alliances between Aboriginal communities and mining companies as well as other multinational focused corporations produces unease within green groups who have a very different agenda in relation to community and cultural development.
Outside of the political construction of an Aboriginal art industry there have been many changes in recent decades that do not have anything to do with the political advancement of a unified Aboriginal australia and are contained with in a regional and individual proactive asertion of local knowledges. In 1987 the commercial aboriginal art industry in Sydney entered a transitional phase where opportunities for artists, curators, galleries and museums changed exponentially.
International interest and in the art of Aboriginal people was either met by the serious ethnographic art specialists that had existed in Sydney since the 1800’s or by a growing network of commercial art galleries in Sydney and Melbourne that developed international connections for their galleries through
The history of selling Aboriginal culture is disturbing in that there are too many examples of people whose culture was being sold being excluded from the process at all levels. Throughout history up until the 1970's the selling of everything from artefacts, body parts, souveniers, weapons and cultural material to institutions and individuals has created a secondary market where the vast majority of these artefacts are owned by non indigenous people and can be sold in the auction markets of the world along side artefacts from many Indigenous cultures for very large profit margins is sadisticly ironic given the historical treatment of the individuals who have produced these objects.
2010 marks a new era in the history of Aboriginal art in Australia. The Indigenous commercial code of conduct and the droit de suite programs being instigated by the federal government offer to bring a new sense of accountability top the Aboriginal art market. Selling fake Aboriginal art is nothing new in the 1980’s scientific testing showed that several skeletons held by institutions and bought in the 1800's as Aboriginal skeletons were actually European skeletons that had been sold to an unsuspecting trader as Aboriginal remains - a small sign towards a positive change might be that today unscruplulous art dealers sell artworks not body parts or stolen matrrial.
The success of remote art centres based thousands of Kilometres from the urban centres is astounding. There are many Aboriginal owned art centres that turn over more sales of artworks in a month than some commercial galleries do in a year.
This is an example of the distortion that many people see when they engage with Aboriginal art through the capital city commercial galleries. The sheer volume and variety of works produced leaves the Audience confused as to where the history of the movement begins and ends.
Was it commercial galleries, government funded arts programs that encouraged increased participation by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the arts or was it the artists themselves that created an industry that was worth $900 000 annually in 1975 into 100 million dollar industry in the year 2000?
Factionalism and in a sense tribalism’s exist within the industry where alliances are everything when it comes to the sharing of commercial in confidence information.
Contested and manufactured histories regarding seminal points in the development of the industry remain largely unexplained and while there have been several noteworthy exhibitions in recent years that have been curated by Indigenous curators.
However in New South Wales and Sydney in particular there seems to be a disadvantage when it comes to harnessing the existing professional arts and cultural institutions programs of representing Aboriginal cultural material and sharing the progress made with this with regional based Australians. Most programming in Sydney Galleries and museums is aimed towards an international audience rather than a local audience and is reflected in programming that intensively reserachs an area before moving onto the next. this is more rewarding for the institution that for the Aboriginal communities as the development of a domestic Aboriginal art market is more expensive than"plugging in" to the existing international Indigenous art market.
as evidenced by the increasing number of commecial aboriginal art galleries During the 1980’s Aboriginal art moved from an ethnocentric to commercial context. This was the result of several competing influences, and there were disagreements as to the best waty for the industry to proceed. The existence of ATSIC provided the primary unified national representative body for Aboriginal people that acted as a mediator between Aboriginal community representatives and federal and state public service institutions. and it was during the time that ATSIC existed that a sense of trust was developed between many aboriginal communities and representatives of a federal government that benefited the careers of many unkown artists.
ATSIC worked towards rectifying issues affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with a nationally focused and regionally coordinated approach to address recognised disadvantages faced by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community such as housing, health services and proactively asserting Aboriginal and Torres strait Islander people into business and professional development opportunities. Whether these policies have been succesful it is difficult to determine howevwer it is important the industry recognised that exploitative business practices where non Indigenous people and institutions profited from Aboriginal cultural information, objects and knowledge’s was not going to be ignored in a legal sense.
The work done by the Arts Law centre NSW, Viscopy and NAVA reflects the need for impertial juddgement of the business activities of all involved in the Aboriginal arts industry,
Since 1987 There have been several other non Aboriginal owned commercial art galleries in Sydney that in terms of business management have been far more successful in promoting Aboriginal art to international audiences so why didn’t an Aboriginal owned and operated art gallery such as Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative succeed?
There is two types of Aboriginal art in Sydney - there is Aboriginal art that is community recognised as Aboriginal art and then there is Aboriginal art that is commercially recognised as Aboriginal art. Commercial galleries and the Aboriginal community do not have the same agenda when it comes to the development of Aboriginal arts.
it is certainly not in any interests of a commercial gallery to work against a communities wishes but it is also not in their interests to be involved to closely either. The danger is in dividing the community un necessarily and setting up a communities expectations too high.
Failure to recognise that the Aboriginal community in Sydney and the Aboriginal community in the wider context of Australia have never been in a unified position in regards to collective decision making. Ignorance of the attitudes of "country" people and "city" people towards each other in Australia is a sign of a government propaganda that emphasises the national identity of all Australia over the local knowledge that shape the differences between the "city" and the "country"
Legitimacy is the keyword when it comes to determining Aboriginal artworks integrity.
Is there anything that we can learn from comparisons of the commercial art galleries, the Aboriginal community art centre model and the current buzzword in federal arts funding "artist run initiative"?
Why are Artist Run initiatives are classified as a different type of organisation that Aboriginal community art centres is an interesting point to start with. young urban artists are in a way being ghettoised in the sanmem way as aboriginal communities in the funding providers insistence on a collective identity that is legaly accountable to the funding provider in order to develop a relationship with the provider.
It would be hard to image that race is not a defining character in the distinctions between success and professionalism that are fundamental concerns when creating an operational plan or membership constitution for Artist run initiative or an Aboriginal community art centre.
It is obvious that some commercial art galleries dislike the fact that community art centres receive government funding to operate and are allowed to commercially sell art as well. This is protectionism that would never exist in any other industry.
One of the criteria that separate commercial art galleries from community art centres is this distinction – commercial galleries are not eligible to apply for funding to develop an artist’s work in the same way that remote community art centres are.
It is important not to transplant the remote community art centre model onto metropolitan commercial and public art galleries.
“Re territorialisation” seems to be the strategy of some state and federal arts funding bodies that use the success of the commercial art centres in remote settings as a benchmark and organisational template for the performance of the metropolitan Aboriginal art production that it encourages through its funding programs.
The “re territorialisation” of the community art centre model that has been attempted to be replicated by the commercial art gallery system through programming that favors an ethnographic nationalistic approach to the representation of of Aboriginal culture in Australia is the main barrier that prevents Aboriginal people as individuals from representing wider contexts and definitions of Aboriginality in the commercial and public art gallery and museum industry.
The optional operating model for a community based membership system of publicly funded art galleries is an organisation like Boomalli as it exists as a mid way point – a proving ground where artists who were serious about art were able to learn from more professional artists as well as learn from assisting other artists.
What set Boomalli apart from the commercial gallery system in Sydney was when peer assessment by other Aboriginal artists determined the importance and by participation and involvement in the development of their fellow artists career. Boomalli’s consistency came from its aim of an Aboriginal peer assessed artistic program and the quiet legitimacy that Aboriginal members of the gallery had determined that this was the art that they wanted to be represented by.
Legitimacy is the key to the success of an Aboriginal art gallery.
Commercial legitimacy is very different from community legitimacy and is a cause of division among many arts administrators who have no way of verifying the legitimacy of a particular type of Aboriginal art without offending the artist.
Commercial art galleries often “cherry pick” from community art centres – out of a group of 20 artists there may be one artist whose work outshines everyone because of its subject matter, composition or personal story of the artist putting the work in a context that makes it commercially viable in a way that the other artworks produced members of the group is not.
Many artists run initiatives as well as remote art centres for Aboriginal art are the same in that that the success or lack of success that comes with experienced artists exhibiting regularly needs to be part of a constructive critical feedback loop for the newer members.
It is not uncommon to see Sydney based Aboriginal artists praised for their courage and visionary mystical aspects of their work by audiences who are doing this to make themselves feel better about the plight of Aboriginal people in the remote communities. Can you imagine if artists in the different suburbs of Sydney had to run for election to be allowed to paint scenes of Sydney Harbour and portraits of the Sydney community? (Would Ken Done still occupy prime real estate underneath the harbour bridge if this were the case?)
Sydney has a fascinating and largely unknown Aboriginal history that can be told through stone tool artefacts, rock art, archeology and contemporary art yet there is a perception that because the Aboriginal people who live in Sydney today are not descendants of the Eora people who lived in Sydney prior to colonisation "why should their art be any better than other non aboriginal artists who have lived in Sydney their whole lives?". In the context of access to educational support for technical proficiency this is probably true, but this sentiment fails to take into account the community and social aspects of Aboriginal people living in Sydney today and the wider connections that family and history that these artists bring into their work.
Recently there were complaints from members of the Australia council’s indigenous commercial code of conduct committee that the membership of the administering board did not have any Indigenous members on its board.
It’s interesting that Aboriginal artists cop a lot of the blame for corruption in the industry when so few Aboriginal people or communities own and run Sydney based art galleries. The only galleries that are owned by Aboriginal people are in remote communities and are not in any of our capital cities like Melbourne or Sydney.
It is non Indigenous people that are the rogue elements in the industry, it is implied that Aboriginal artists and their susceptibility to corruption should provide the guidelines and frameworks that will be enforced in relation to determining the legitimacy of players in the industry.
It is not Aboriginal gallery owners that are responsible for the illegal practices that initially brought the senate committee to establish and implement a commercial code of conduct. It is the commercial gallery system that is entirely owned and operated by non indigenous stakeholders that have the most to lose from a commercial code of conduct so why is the burden of policing the industry put onto Aboriginal artists and not onto the thousands of non indigenous people that work in the arts industry already?
The most blatant examples of carpet bagging and insider trading were committed by auction houses and fly by night “dealers” selling artworks by established artists to art dealers for prices way higher than what the artist was paid.
It is fair to note that Aboriginal art in particular is one of the most unregulated markets to have existed in recent years. Allegations of corruption have tainted the industry to the point where a senate enquiry was called by the federal government and the Australia Council is to implement a commercial code of conduct that puts it in law that representatives of galleries are to pay artists with money rather than personal favours.
Allegations of corruption in the Aboriginal art industry are racist in the extreme – in 2005 the Australia wheat Board (read Australian Farmers) gave $300 million dollars to Sadam Hussein during a time of war. The AWB was not disbanded and its supporters vilified like what happened with ATSIC in fact the Australian Government at the time increased its financial support of the organisation to ensure administrative transparency.
Why the double standards when a successful Aboriginal industry attempts to regulate itself? The aboriginal communities and artists are the first to be blamed for all that is wrong with the industry. There is nothing remotely on this scale in the administration of Aboriginal Land councils or arts organisations in general yet the commercial art galleries in particular pass the blame onto “Rouge carpet baggers” definition: people other than them doing the same thing.
The disconnection between the Auction houses and high end commercial art galleries is so far from the lives of the people who are sustaining the industry that there is something very wrong with the administrative policies of the federal and state organisations that whose sole existence is to support artists and develop the industry.
For the scale of money involved in the Aboriginal arts industry the fact that it has been so unregulated has allowed profit to influence production in a way that has not sustained the industry.
Aboriginal artists face a contradictory attitude when it comes to commercial representation in Sydney. Both ends of the spectrum (the auction house and investment gallery) are locked into a ethnographic and historical market that is legitimate but has no conection with the everyday lives of the culture they represent.
To further compound the problem the handmade craft/tourism and souvenir market has been outsourced and commercialised by the tourism industry to the point where local producers end up with no financial model of successfully competing with the “Aboriginal style” wholesale mass produced artefacts that can be especially lucrative when at the right place at the right time.
Government arts funding providers will tell you that they spend millions of dollars each year supporting Aboriginal art in New South Wales but when you look at the actual allocation of this money more than 90% of it is allocated to established museums and galleries so that they can add Indigenous content to their existing programming of representing a nationally focused Aboriginal art.
There is no need to rehash the argument for a dedicated Aboriginal museum and gallery in Sydney – no politician will ever touch the issue, we had one for 22 years known as Boomalli and still the funding bodies would ask the organisation every year to argue its case for existence.
The National gallery of Australia will rectify this in 2010 by building ten dedicated permanent exhibition spaces for the purpose of exhibiting their collections of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art. While this is commendable it is fair to say that it will not have the same international exposure as an exhibition space of the same calibre put in Sydney or Melbourne. A tourist art shop in Manly or Bondi will get more vistors in the long term than the galleries in canberra
every state needs an institution like Boomalli to exist as incubators – spaces where market forces or political influences cant shape the day to day operating activities of creating art for arts sake. of encouraging the growth and development of Aboriginal and Torres strait Islander art into a system that is an exemplary model for all Australian artists.
ARI’s and Aboriginal Art centres cannot become complacent when it comes to grants and government arts funding. This type funding needs to be tied to specific projects and not to annual operating budgets as it can create a welfare mentality among organisations that are not encouraged to seek income sources outside of the safe arts grant funding system.
References
- The formation of ATSIC – a national representative body for all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (10 dec 1987) ATSIC encouraged the self determination by Aboriginal artists, performers, authors and academics
- The Aboriginal Memorial Ramangining community (d. Mundine 1987–88)
- the national bicentenary acknowledgement that was being planned by a Federal Labour government (1988)
- Magicians de la Terre centre Pompidou Paris (1989)
- The Formation of Boomalli Aboriginal artists co –operative (1987)
- This decade saw the rise of several Aboriginal owned and operated initiatives in media, art and performance such as Boomalli, Bangarra, Black Books, NAISDA, Indigenous Screen Australia
The Political constrction of Aboriginal art in Australia
This essay is a snapshot of the political construction of Aboriginality in Australiapost 1967 is based on the shared memory of a people, not in the representation of the body of an individual.
It has been said in may contexts that the personal is political however do these political experiences shape the type of art that is commercial y viable? The mix between politics and Aboriginal culture can take many dangerous forms. There is a long history of animosity and antagonism between Aboriginal people and the various governments and their administration of Aboriginal affairs that exists.
In 2007 the racial discrimination act was withheld in Australia to allow the federal government to perform an “intervention” in order to save Aboriginal communities from themselves. At this same there was a senate enquiry into the visual arts and craft sector which has ultimately led to the establishment of the Australia council for the arts Indigenous commercial code of conduct. Regulating a multimillion dollar industry in the interest of creating a sense of fairness between Aboriginal artists Aboriginal communities and the commercial gallery system in Australia
The political achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in modern Australia are not recognised by many sections of the Australian community especially in relation to business administration and property management. The only defining factor on whether an art that represents a people or not is legitimate is whether it as seen as commercially successful in the eyes of "others".
Between the referendum for aboriginal rights in 1967 and the Prime ministers formal acknowledgment of the injustice of the policies of previous governments towards Aboriginal people in 2008 there existed many challenges from those who sought to change the inequitable conditions that many Aboriginal people found themselves living in. The perception of Aboriginal people in the wider Australian community has been largely negative, without there being a unified aboriginal voice to present an alternative.
An interesting reference in recent history is to compare the public reaction between the two formal apologies that were delivered by the federal parliament in 2007 to the stolen generations of Aboriginal people and to the apology to the forgotten generations in 2009
"This week, Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull united to deliver moving apologies to the so-called "Forgotten Australians": the hundreds of thousands of people abused in state care, often after being torn from their parents and sent to Australia against their will.
The ceremony recalled a previous moment, when Rudd, soon after winning election, apologised to the Stolen Generation of Aboriginal children.
But there was one big difference between the two occasions: when it came to the Forgotten Australians, there was no-one objecting"
Is there a role for non-Aboriginal people in the construction of Aboriginality as a legal and internationally recognised subject? How do Aboriginal people develop a level of regulating the control over the histories that are produced?
In this essay I will show painting as metaphysical history, and photography as anthropological history. Within the different variations of Aboriginal symbolism Different symbolic structures which are opposed to history and the great binaries that divide any social group.
Art as cultural capital becomes non localisable and the relationship between museums and exhibitions develop the ability to transform each other. ‘Art’ is what is found within institutions and sites of legitimate cultural production based on concentrations of capital and geo-political locations.
It could be said that literally anything could be labelled ‘art’, but whether it will be accepted or recognized as art will be an entirely different matter. If the museum is a discourse of art as object, the audience is a discourse of art as theory.
What makes Aboriginal art such a successful medium and platform for cultural interaction and engagement
the dominant discourse of legitimisation is the commercial art market and auction house - is this imposed by state and private institutions such as schools, art galleries, museums, dealers and buyers?
Real art it seems always exists in the past whereas the art of the present is always debatable. Contemporary art is already grounded in the art of the past, which provides a locality for the intensive practice of art as a spatial extension. Art as an object in itself is no longer necessary; all that is required is the objective standards of quality and quantity.
There is no individual subjectivity within the most commercially succsful sales of Aboriginal art.
When thinking of art as an object the individual does not automatically assume the role of a subject. It is simply the case that the majority of the audience will have control over the majority of subjectivity produced?
The experiences of Aboriginal Australia and its participation with world history, art is not the only possible way of demonstrating the difference between subjectivity produced by Aboriginal art and Aboriginality as experienced by an individual artist. expose dominant power relationships but most importantly, provide examples of the idea that subjectivity is politically constructed by the individuals’ relationship to the objectives of the dominant state apparatus.
Art and academic theory of art have not always nor will they ever be the same thing.
Contemporary arts do not necessarily rely on an object at all. Conceptual art is purely about ideas and the nature of thought itself. It is not the idea implicit in the artwork, which is the ‘cause’ of a specific subjectivity; it is the subjectivity itself which is the ‘cause’ of the idea.
At which stage does an individual take control over the possible choices of subjective positions? The placing of the object in a gallery or a museum will create an associated idea that ‘ other people think this is art’. The majority of people will always desire the desires of others.
Indirectly, politics and art have several shared components; economic protection, aesthetic conservatism and harnessing of the social engineering forces which have shaped the history of Australian artists as well as Australian Aboriginals.
Aboriginal artists are no different to Australian Artists. In much the same way early Australian artists sought their own Australian identity unique but not separate from the trends and fashions of European and American art, Aboriginal artists are today in a similar position of constructing their own identity.
The emergence and continuing production of Aboriginal Art is a turning point in the cultural production of subjectivity in Australia.
The internationalisation of Aboriginal art is synonymous with the capitalization of Aboriginal art. The production of art is essential to the production of subjectivity. Within the context of history and photography the subjective positioning of Aboriginality is going through continual change. The production of the subject through text and the production of the subject through images will offer examples about the process of how subjects are created through the production of art.
Within Australian political history Aboriginal people had been denied involvement in the production of their own political voice until 1967. Aboriginal art flourished in the period after 1967 partly because of the success of Albert Namatjira but also because of the changing social conditions that were sweeping the world, reaching remote stations in Australia such as Papunya and Hermansburg. A perceptual shift occurred between Aboriginal Australians and the state apparatus. Art that has been produced from this period onwards has indicated how this process has been experienced.
The idea of the Australian Aboriginal history which has existed within itself but which also has a place within the realm of world history.
Art is not necessarily a visual space but can be a sensory experience that gives an individual an understanding of the world as experienced by others. This space is not reducible to the canvas but is more of an event, where many separate factors are needed to uniquely identify objects and subjects within a particular cultural context.
“Writing has nothing to do with signifying, but with land surveying and map making, even of countries yet to come”
Delueze
In modern world history, war has played a larger role than art in producing objects and ideas that have facilitated cultural thought and expression. Many modern conveniences are the by-products of military planning and defense force budgets. Throughout history, the invention and introduction of more powerful weapons have shaped the politics of the nation state and geographic maps of the world.
Art is perhaps recognized as the power of ideas.
Hitlers claims that many of the modern artists of the time were ‘degenerate’ artists are an example of a fascist aesthetic influencing cultural production.
In many ways, the war artist has occupied a similar position to that of the contemporary Aboriginal artist. The war artist produces art objects for the purpose of constructing and identifying with a specific subjects’ nationalism.
Many political notions of Aboriginality expressed through contemporary art directly challenge the Australian mythological relationship to the land.
“In Fascism, as Benjamin has demonstrated, the political remains as a site for determinate judgement, by analogy with the determinate judgements of the beautiful which may be made about art. The political is conceived in terms of criteria which are claimed to be drawn from art (the ugly should be eliminated).”
The line between a weapon and a tool can be determined by its extension into the real world; hammers knives, and ropes have been building blocks as well as repressive tools in the shaping of cultural expression. Like the surgeon’s knife, which cuts as it heals; our modern society has grown out of military strategy as much as human endeavour.
The subjectivity produced by Aboriginal art is not a war machine in military terminology, but an abstract machine producing flows of symbols and images outside of state based thought. It makes connections and produces flows that state based thought systems do not recognize.
Dominant practices of Technique, style, and artistic forms of expression are philosophies of the state. Visual arts practice is a performative space where ideas are projected and deflected. The artwork and the associated time period, which the artist expresses, is an abstract interpretation of the present.
The use of photography for social documentation affected another essential factor in the production of artworks – patronage. Portraits were now attainable by the working class, affecting the artists’ privileged role documenting aristocracy. Whether artists were conscious of it or not, the use and abuse of history is evident in all styles of modernist and contemporary art. Perhaps this is why the political philosophy of art centres on the problem of legitimacy.
It would seem most people are comfortable accepting paintings rather than photographs as art. The history of painting has a broader subjective positioning available in terms of the production of cultural capital. Painting is more obtuse than photography whose subjective positioning is more precise and accurate. Photography is an internalising narrative. The eyes of the photographer are suggested to be in a similar positioning to that of the spectator.
The idea that an artwork has a particular value because it cannot be replaced is very flexible in post-modern painting and photography. The experiences in the artists’ life, which led them to paint this particular image at this particular time, plot the subjectivity of the artist in a way that can never be repeated. The artwork itself can very easily be reproduced. It is the individuality of the artist that legitimises a particular artwork.
How is post-modern art a type of cultural criticism? Post modernism can be described as a revision of modernism. A re thinking of the grand narratives and utopian promises of social history as expressed through art in the 20th century. That Aboriginal art is being recognized as a fine art has only properly happened within the last 25 years – apparently after modernism had ended. Aboriginal art has therefore played a role in defining postmodernism in Australia.
The geographic demarcation that is optically defined by the Greenwich meridian is the first example of a striation of the earth through the universal imposition of longitude and latitude. By 1788 all distances on the globe were measured from Greenwich meridian.
The reterritorialisation of geographic regions caused a significant part of the displacement and confusion Aboriginal people felt as they continued to live in their traditional cultural milieu. Unbeknown to the Aborigines the landscape had metaphysically changed forever. Previously the language spoken by the members of the tribe defined Pre-colonial tribal and geographic regions. The individual belonging to a particular regionally defined territoriality and subjectivity.
Aboriginal Australians were continually imposed upon by the dominant striated perspective of modernism until their haptic nomadic way of life was replaced by the building blocks of capitalist society - fences, cages, chains, and guns. Aboriginal people were reterritorialised and divided from their kinship groups to live on missions and stations. They became the unrecognised domestic help and farm hands – unpaid disrespected and continually driven away from any valuable or even usable space which would allow them to continue uninterrupted their ancestral cultural practices.
Imposing new codes of language and social relations on Aboriginal people was not questioned because the capitalist processes that were used to effect the processes were not brought into question themselves.
“Technology is a process of machinic relations, an abstract machine of language operating within a specific regime of signs. Capitalist technology is retrospectively projected to be come coextensive with the fields of nature history and society.”
Phillip Goodchilde
Capitalism is a perfect example of history operating as a counter memory. An object or desire is invested with cultural capital based upon its quantifiable or qualifyable elements.
Deleuze and Guattari note the work of Pierre Clastres whose work dealing with pre state societies they feel to be underrated. They note nomad societies are not pre state societies, but groups who ward off the formation of the state at every possibility. It is not that Aboriginal Australia lacked a national identity but that they refuse such a totalitarian concept.
The existence of a purely national art is a concept that is irrelevant to most contemporary artists. Ian McClean differentiates between the picturesque and the sublime in landscape representation – picturesque refers to an inhabited and cultivated landscape. Because the picturesque created a synthesis of nature and culture, it was the ideal aesthetic for representing the redemptive scene sought by colonization.
Aboriginal art is anti picturesque representation.
A question worth asking at this stage is ‘how is it possible to include Aboriginal art and Australian art in the same cultural context when they can be seen to be telling different versions of the same story? How is it possible for non-Aboriginal artists to portray Aboriginality outside of a collaborative context?
There is no simple dualism between Aboriginal and Australian art that is used to categorize a particular work. How is it possible to break down the perceived separation between Aboriginal and Australian art into descriptive aesthetic terms. In this way art history is like a cultural psychoanalysis.
Aboriginal societies aesthetics operated in a system that used art as a type of graphism, pictorially using images and symbols to demonstrate perceptions and ideas (quantities). Whereas western art aesthetics could be thought more as a progressive statistical aggregate of qualities.
Terms and labels are temporal; they are like codes shared between a sender and a receiver. How an audience receives an artwork can be influenced by varied factors. An artwork’s interpretation may change several times during the artwork’s existence, conversely some artworks are deliberately created to be re interpreted, and some that will be perpetually re-interpreted (re-territorialised).
‘Cultural capital’ is the ability to read and understand cultural codes; but this ability and hence cultural capital is not distributed equally amongst social classes. A work of art has interest and meaning only for those who posses cultural capital and can read the codes into which it is encoded … Identity is largely a ‘social imaginary’, which divides various cultural groups into ‘imagined communities’ by bonding them together in literary and visual narration’s located in territory, history, and memory.
I would like to borrow ideas from Pierre Bourdieu’s writings on the notion of cultural and relate the production of cultural capital with art production. Art is not always metaphor; art renders visible the forces of chaos continually surrounding us, and in which we live in. Art can produce maps, guides, and warnings to possible future abstract relations.
Freud, Darwin, and Marx and interestingly, these among many other prominent philosophers of the state referenced the Australian Aboriginal to reinforce their notions of primitivism. These early 20th century giants among philosophers of the state shared a unique fascination with primitivism and the desires and lifestyles of those unfortunate enough to be labelled tribal or from stateless societies.
Art does not provide us with a universal truth; there is no universal context. All thought is localizable to a particular space, time, and combination of the two. State philosophy is a belief that knowledge can be gained from reason. A belief that a transcendent (metaphoric or subliminal) device will act as a point of Subjectification allowing an individual to “know” concepts, read images, and combines the two as ideas.
How much they are learned and appreciated by others is a matter of value. If we say that quality is the effect of quantity over time, we could say that accumulations of particular knowledge would grow in environments conducive to particular growth. The qualities of the image are not necessarily aesthetic. Qualities are the properties that define an essential aspect of the image.
I would like to propose that in any case, Aboriginal art is more effective than the English language in expressing notions of Aboriginality. Within the context of the English language, 26 phonetic symbols can be re-territorialised into quantum theory, or the complete works of Shakespeare.
Why is it problematic to understand that the graphism of Aboriginal art (dots and rark) is referring to knowledge and history that is as complex and significant?
Photography is perhaps the shared visual perspective where the aesthetic differences between Aboriginal and western art are flattened out. With the proper consultation, non- indigenous people have access to representations of Aboriginality free of repressive subjectivities.
Traditional photography is characterized as being distinctly landscape or portraiture. The photographer’s mechanical eye could reproduce images that were pure constructs most often re creations of famous events. Ironically in some cases, what many people remember as historical events were actually dramatic recreations staged for the camera.
In contemporary photography, it is standard for the photographer to allow his subjects to choose how they wish to be portrayed. The subject selects the background or objects they wish to be associated with in the image, as well as the subject having the final say of which images are exhibited.
This freedom of subjective positioning has not always been the case. In a post-modern reading of the point of Subjectification and the vanishing point, they can be seen to rigidly express a fixed subjectivity. During renaissance painting, they were often merged with the face of Christ being the point of Subjectification through which everything else in the painting was subordinated.
Today it would be used more as a stylistic device, but in Renaissance art the vanishing point and the point of Subjectification were often merged. The point being to suggest a direct line between the viewer (subject) Christ (artwork) and god (transcendental signifier). The point of Subjectification can also be alluded to metaphorically by the positioning of lines of sight. Apart from this some artists have suggested the crucifix like quality of hanging artworks on the wall. The portrait providing the vertical and the landscape the horizontal for the Greenwich meridian like plotting of Christian subjectivity.
A great many Artists living in Australia deal with ideas of belonging and not fitting into the dominant modes of cultural expression in Australia. There are similarities between the experience of migrants and the experience of Aboriginal people in that they both existed outside the heterogeneous dominant philosophy of the state. I would describe these as post modern experiences as they produce new ideas of Australian identity while at the same time while at the same time rejecting traditional assumptions about art and cultural identity.
There is no universal context (yet) to measure the quality of one art object and compare it to any other existing artwork, which does not rely on the history if the intermediary (subject) being involved.
Deleuze and Guttari in the smooth and the striated, example the difference between the smooth and the striated as the difference between the haptic and the optic. Put simply these terms refers to the distance between the subject and the perceived object. The close range perspective is that of the haptic. Haptic can refer to the tactile but also to the tracings where your vision is so close to the perceived object it fills the entire space of vision. No grounding, no vanishing point, no edges or surroundings.
I have previously set up a dualism between Aboriginal art (smooth space/haptic) and what I have referred to as striated, metric or linear art (striated/optic). The opposite of the haptic is the optic. Optic space is best described as linear perspective or panorama, it always contains the universal limit of the vanishing point. Haptic is the space of the near seer’s, optic is the perspective of the far seer’s.
In Aboriginal art a symbol may be open to several interpretations. Concentric circles provide a good example; they could refer to growth rings in the tree or the growth rings in the sand as the seed grows into a tree. It may refer to a water hole or the flow of water over time. Smooth space art deals with movements over time, the graphs of events rather than signs and unitary signifiers.
The difference between haptic and optic is the difference between the optic linear perspective’s subordination to the vanishing point, and the haptic, which is subordinated to its proximity to the real or the actual. This is the fundamental difference, which these two artistic perspectives express.
Aboriginal art does not necessarily challenge capitalist technology. In a post-modern way, it criticizes without destroying. Deluze and Guattari claim that with 20/20 hindsight capitalist technology has become Retroactively projected to be co-extensive with the fields of nature history and society. Therefore, it is possible to escape the dichotomy of Aboriginal art and non-Aboriginal art in favour of opening out onto a new economic plane of immanence.
Aboriginal art denies the codes that capitalist technology uses to over code all flows of exchange production and recording and thus presents a perspective which is closer to the lived real experiences of individuals and the society they are situated in.
“Art therefore has a role analogous to psychoanalysis: It aims to bring the social unconscious into consciousness by making the recipient feel the implicit presuppositions that are at work in various social situations.”
Phillip Goodechild
There is representation from within an Aboriginal discourse, and representation of the Aboriginal discourse. Through representation, Abstract and ideological ideas are given concrete form. Representation from different perspectives can be used to demonstrate and affect other perspectives.
Capitalism deterritorialises Aboriginality by subverting the traditional roles that would limit and control social relations and productions (e.g. kinship, language, and geography). Capitalism reduces all social relations to universal equivalence. Capitalist technology itself has falsely been thought of as a natural process – the “progression” from tribal to despotic to capitalist society.
If technology is a process of machinic relations, Aboriginal Art is an abstract machine component, in the economic production of art, in the sense that it is a process of the deterritorialisation of pre capitalist Aboriginal Australia. This was achieved by means of the imposition of a new symbolic order, Aboriginality is therefore reterritorialised within present day capitalist society.
Everyone desires the desires of others. The individual is the desire of others. There is no individual.
“The problem is that the self isn’t real. The self is a necessary illusion that allows us to function in time, to create law, morality, art and the rest of civilization. But it was never meant to save us from death, or imbue our lives with meaning and purpose. The self is the root of selfishness, and selfishness is what makes us unhappy. Too much concentration on ourselves makes us anxious, because the self cannot support the weight. That is the difference between the self and the soul.”
David Samuels
“Why return to the primitives, when it is a question of our own life? The fact is that the notion of segmentarity was constructed by ethnologists to account for so called primitive societies, which have no fixed, central state apparatus and no global power mechanisms or specialized political institutions.”
Deleuze and Guattari
Desire is social rather than familial. Desire is learnt through experiences within the external world. The world makes our mind up for us. Desire is the underlying motivational force in the individual, within the experiences in their early childhood and in their family life.
Desire explains how the individuals relationship to their Mother, Father and authority figures is played out in micro scale, within the family unit and childhood. And the how these experiences can then express themselves in the macro scale of the behaviour of the individual within the authoritarian institutions of the socius; school, office, army, factory, hospital, prison. The mechanosphere. A medical, scientific, sexual, socio, technological, chemical, militarial, industrial, capitalistic machinic arrangement. The world before our eyes and senses is the external collective consciousness that our subconscious connects into.
How does desire progress from the familial to the social?
The focus on the self by both the individual and their society is primarily concerned with sub - individual body parts and their supra - individual connection because these processes are a qualitative and quantifiable figurative object that can be used by paranoid institutional agencies to measure individuals and regulate their desire.
The production of desire is a question of why do we do what we do, what are the drives, motivations and forces behind all of our everyday actions. There is no such thing as fate. Consciousness is the product of unconsciousness. Speech is the product of memory. Language is the product of history.
Multiplicity, creation and desire are the principal elements of the social unconsciousness for D & G.
Desire is a primary force rather than a secondary goal. Pleasure and happiness is a by-product, desire is immediate and more profound than pleasure. Desire is co-extensive with the individual and the collective social energy. Desire is a will to power the external world by de-intensifying the internal self.
Desire is a material it is not imaginary. Desire is indifferent to personal identity or linguistic expression. Desire is pure multiplicity independent of any unity. Desire is immanent to a plane that it does not pre-exist.
Deleuze and Guttari divide the experience of the socius and the individual into three interconnecting planes of consistency.
3 TYPES OF DESIRING PRODUCTION
SUPRA- INDIVIDUAL LEVEL
Social interconnections “this is where “lack” “scarcity” is created
Society, the world, external, you
INDIVIDUAL LEVEL
tc \l5 “INDIVIDUAL LEVELSelf or ego and all it’s guises (this is where lack is lived)
Me, myself and I, the body.
tc \l5 “self or ego and all it’s guises (this is where lack is lived)
SUB INDIVIDUAL LEVEL / ELEMENTAL LEVEL
Bodily parts and other fragments
Virus’, language, molecules, matter. Internal
A plane of interconnections at the sub-individual level gives a body consistency enough for the individual to connect with the supra individual level of the external world.
To use a political analogy we would look at the three assemblages above as being federal, state and local government. The three parts intermix to construct the nation state (self) and the individual particular to a specific environment.
Desiring Production - nothing that involves concrete content or substance lacks anything, psychoanalysis bases desire on a perceived lack. Freudianism focus is on the individual level. Marxism focus is on supra – individual. Science Fiction focuses on the sub individual
DELUZE and GUTTARI totally leave out the individual level and work with a single realm of desiring production. Much like the abolition of State government would increase federal and local government through placing responsibility on the individual within the commonwealth to regulate their own desire.
Never trust a triangle. Dualism’s and paradigms are bad enough. The most useful form of desiring production is by accelerating a multiplicity of possibilities that crack open both society and the individuals desire to repress themselves and others.
Freud elaborated a method of restricting, regulating desire within the family unit. The Oedipal complex is a triangular family structure which psychoanalysis reinforces within its interpretation of the subject. The Oedipal triangle is a rivalry and is set up in the family in a way in which one part plays against the two-thirds. Through Jealousy or fear.
The Oedipus complex replays itself in all types of social relations. At work, whether through fraternal office rivalries or the authoritative imperatives of the big boss. Many other examples are possible. The triangulation of desire exists in all types of rivalries. Another embodiment is where one part of the triangle can know the Oedipal structure and play against the other two parts for the greater good of all three. Guilt - law.
Knowledge of Oedipalisation and how to Oedopolize is first learnt in the family and is reproduced during different situations in social life. Take the duality between Psychoanalysis and institutions. An orphan or the child of a single parent has historically suffered the stigma of bastardisation. This reinforces pre existing methods of desiring production rather than breaking them by always reconstituting the subject within the family as being a part of the society of the family that is the dominant cultural code.
The production and reading of cultural code and cultural capital. The impositions of the dominant cultural codes are prostheticaly imposed on the individual during early childhood. Things like nursery rhymes, times tables, playgrounds etc. all introduce the child to cultural codes and the different ways an individual accepts or rejects reading and manipulating them. Coupled with the child’s home life where they are learning the codes of the family unit the child forms ideas about the individual and about the limits to experience and the consequences of different actions and thoughts.
Imposing new codes of languages and social relations on Aboriginal people was not questioned because the capitalist process itself was used to effect these changes and was not brought into question itself. Technology is a process of machinic relations; an abstract machine of language operating within a specific regime of signs will describe art as a process of machinic relations. Capitalist technology is retroactively projected to become co-extensive with the fields of nature, history and society. Known afterwards as retrospective projection.
Capitalist technology is retroactively projected to become co-extensive with the fields of nature, history, and society. Further, explain the re-territorialization of geographic regional languages and social relations that were imposed on Aboriginal people through capitalist technology.
Cultural objects have always work as facilitators of desire. A weapon or tool is a physical extension of an embodied idea. The freeing of the hand was similar to the freeing of the face. The hand ad voice become separate from each other. The free hand allowed symbols to be modified and manipulated. Technologies became the substance of the content matter made by the hand.
The anthropomorphic strata
The voice could make a range of sounds which had a form imposed through the sequencing of sounds. Words became the expressive substance that could represent things.
A collective semiotic machine forms as the product of both hand and voice to construct a machined arrangement or a regime of signs. There are always different ways of controlling the flows, of machining them.
A semiotic machine and collective enunciation are examples of abstract machines withdrawn from an event. Not necessarily metaphysical or transcending the event
THE DETERRITORIALISATION/ RE-TERRITORIALISATION OF DESIRE
Capitalism reduces all social relations to universal equivalency (currency, gold). Capitalism itself was a universal equivalent.
Capitalism deterritorialises desire by over coding traditional roles, ideas and laws that limit and control existing social relations and productions. (E.g. kinship roles)
Capitalism deterritorialises the old class structures (religious, traditional, folk) and then reterritorialises them in the form of capital currency and value. Creating signs and semiotic chains reduced to the dominant cultural code of capital.
Capitalism deterritorialises schizophrenic fluxes, scraps of things like body parts machines and factories and constructs assemblages that are then re-territorialzed in a neurotic Oedipal triangle. Triangles leave no positive way of acting on desire and will always end up lost in an internal involution towards itself.
DESIRING PRODUCTION
The assemblage and production of language is where the ideas of needs (of food warmth and nourishment) transform into language. Language is constructed in order to fill a lack created by the need for nourishment, warmth filling a void.
Desire will exist in the inability of language to express a need or want. We can never achieve what we desire as desire will be continually replaced, desire will always exist as long as there is a want or need. Desire is a flow, it cannot be blocked or stopped. Desire can be diverted internally through repression or flow externally through expression. We can sometimes choose which external stimuli we respond to and sometimes we cant. Positive desiring production is to be aware of the process, to watch what is happening, to engage with difference rather than negating it. Putting trust in ideological constructions alone can lead one into a false sense of security. A theo-retical (logical?) reliance on text rather than the spoken word will lead to assemblages favoring one aspect of the binary.
There is a proliferation in our language (possibly through the influence of advertising) of endless signifiers where lack is there only use value. The products lack a home, a family, or the home or family lacks a product, directly proportional to the liability the advertising company is legally bound to. Meaning advertising has no effect when they are selling petro-chemicals, alcohol or legal drugs yet to business and government who pay billions of dollars worldwide for advertisements they are priceless.
Some might think of the history of advertising as a tautology because the only way to discern between the two is be actively working in either of these
The reterritorialisation of geographic regions was a significant part of the confusion Aboriginal people faced when trying to continue living in their traditional cultural milieu. Pre-colonial Aboriginal boundaries were limited by the amount of members in the tribe. The persons who spoke a particular language rather than the colonial method of mapping geographic locations signified Territorial limits.
Imposing new codes of languages and social relations on Aboriginal people was not questioned because the capitalist process used to effect these changes was not brought into question itself. Technology is a process of machinic relations an abstract machine of language operating within a specific regime of signs will describe art as a process of machinic relations. Capitalist technology is retrospectively projected to become co-extensive with the fields of nature, history and society.
Aboriginal art deals with subjects that are timeless (compared to western conceptions of “time” and “history”.
The discourse of Aboriginal art and the other flows/discourses it intersects, reflects or generates, (Language, politics, ecology, familial relationships)
“ Art galleries serve the cultivated elite class, and this privilege is legitimized by claiming a distinction between good and vulgar taste, legitimate and illegitimate styles. Aesthetic judgements do not follow some kind of objective autonomous aesthetic logic, they substitute distinctions of taste for class distinctions and thereby fortify the divisions between classes and assert the right of the ruling class to sanction their authority over other classes.
Bourdier uses an economic metaphor to make his point.
“Cultural capital is the ability to read and understand cultural codes; but this ability, and hence cultural capital is not distributed equally amongst social classes”
The working classes have little cultural capital and systematically lose out in the battle for cultural power. When cultural capital is invested in the exercise of taste it yields both a high profit both for those that posses it and a “profit in legitimacy” which is the justification of the ruling class to be the ruling class.
A work of art has interest and meaning only for those who posses cultural capital and can read the codes into which it is encoded.
Also, look at aboriginal art in the sense that it is a smooth space that is reimparted by the striated discourse of western art and science.
The first interpretations of Aboriginal art (from the perspective of the non-Aboriginal) were when it was located with anthropological discourses. Anthropologists and archaeologists “discovered” Aboriginal rock carvings and paintings as well as noting descriptions on the insides of clothing or inside bark huts, artifacts and ceremonial body painting as a type of “primitive art”. These markings were not even regarded as a primitive form of art, signs/symbols, and language.
These early art forms were exhibited in museums as examples of traditional Aboriginality “broken remnants of a dead culture” they served no aesthetic purpose except to educate white people how technologically advanced they were. These reinforced ideas of what is the proper version of society and what is primitive gone forgotten a dark corner in the history of the mind.
It has been said in may contexts that the personal is political however do these political experiences shape the type of art that is commercial y viable? The mix between politics and Aboriginal culture can take many dangerous forms. There is a long history of animosity and antagonism between Aboriginal people and the various governments and their administration of Aboriginal affairs that exists.
In 2007 the racial discrimination act was withheld in Australia to allow the federal government to perform an “intervention” in order to save Aboriginal communities from themselves. At this same there was a senate enquiry into the visual arts and craft sector which has ultimately led to the establishment of the Australia council for the arts Indigenous commercial code of conduct. Regulating a multimillion dollar industry in the interest of creating a sense of fairness between Aboriginal artists Aboriginal communities and the commercial gallery system in Australia
The political achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in modern Australia are not recognised by many sections of the Australian community especially in relation to business administration and property management. The only defining factor on whether an art that represents a people or not is legitimate is whether it as seen as commercially successful in the eyes of "others".
Between the referendum for aboriginal rights in 1967 and the Prime ministers formal acknowledgment of the injustice of the policies of previous governments towards Aboriginal people in 2008 there existed many challenges from those who sought to change the inequitable conditions that many Aboriginal people found themselves living in. The perception of Aboriginal people in the wider Australian community has been largely negative, without there being a unified aboriginal voice to present an alternative.
An interesting reference in recent history is to compare the public reaction between the two formal apologies that were delivered by the federal parliament in 2007 to the stolen generations of Aboriginal people and to the apology to the forgotten generations in 2009
"This week, Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull united to deliver moving apologies to the so-called "Forgotten Australians": the hundreds of thousands of people abused in state care, often after being torn from their parents and sent to Australia against their will.
The ceremony recalled a previous moment, when Rudd, soon after winning election, apologised to the Stolen Generation of Aboriginal children.
But there was one big difference between the two occasions: when it came to the Forgotten Australians, there was no-one objecting"
Is there a role for non-Aboriginal people in the construction of Aboriginality as a legal and internationally recognised subject? How do Aboriginal people develop a level of regulating the control over the histories that are produced?
In this essay I will show painting as metaphysical history, and photography as anthropological history. Within the different variations of Aboriginal symbolism Different symbolic structures which are opposed to history and the great binaries that divide any social group.
Art as cultural capital becomes non localisable and the relationship between museums and exhibitions develop the ability to transform each other. ‘Art’ is what is found within institutions and sites of legitimate cultural production based on concentrations of capital and geo-political locations.
It could be said that literally anything could be labelled ‘art’, but whether it will be accepted or recognized as art will be an entirely different matter. If the museum is a discourse of art as object, the audience is a discourse of art as theory.
What makes Aboriginal art such a successful medium and platform for cultural interaction and engagement
the dominant discourse of legitimisation is the commercial art market and auction house - is this imposed by state and private institutions such as schools, art galleries, museums, dealers and buyers?
Real art it seems always exists in the past whereas the art of the present is always debatable. Contemporary art is already grounded in the art of the past, which provides a locality for the intensive practice of art as a spatial extension. Art as an object in itself is no longer necessary; all that is required is the objective standards of quality and quantity.
There is no individual subjectivity within the most commercially succsful sales of Aboriginal art.
When thinking of art as an object the individual does not automatically assume the role of a subject. It is simply the case that the majority of the audience will have control over the majority of subjectivity produced?
The experiences of Aboriginal Australia and its participation with world history, art is not the only possible way of demonstrating the difference between subjectivity produced by Aboriginal art and Aboriginality as experienced by an individual artist. expose dominant power relationships but most importantly, provide examples of the idea that subjectivity is politically constructed by the individuals’ relationship to the objectives of the dominant state apparatus.
Art and academic theory of art have not always nor will they ever be the same thing.
Contemporary arts do not necessarily rely on an object at all. Conceptual art is purely about ideas and the nature of thought itself. It is not the idea implicit in the artwork, which is the ‘cause’ of a specific subjectivity; it is the subjectivity itself which is the ‘cause’ of the idea.
At which stage does an individual take control over the possible choices of subjective positions? The placing of the object in a gallery or a museum will create an associated idea that ‘ other people think this is art’. The majority of people will always desire the desires of others.
Indirectly, politics and art have several shared components; economic protection, aesthetic conservatism and harnessing of the social engineering forces which have shaped the history of Australian artists as well as Australian Aboriginals.
Aboriginal artists are no different to Australian Artists. In much the same way early Australian artists sought their own Australian identity unique but not separate from the trends and fashions of European and American art, Aboriginal artists are today in a similar position of constructing their own identity.
The emergence and continuing production of Aboriginal Art is a turning point in the cultural production of subjectivity in Australia.
The internationalisation of Aboriginal art is synonymous with the capitalization of Aboriginal art. The production of art is essential to the production of subjectivity. Within the context of history and photography the subjective positioning of Aboriginality is going through continual change. The production of the subject through text and the production of the subject through images will offer examples about the process of how subjects are created through the production of art.
Within Australian political history Aboriginal people had been denied involvement in the production of their own political voice until 1967. Aboriginal art flourished in the period after 1967 partly because of the success of Albert Namatjira but also because of the changing social conditions that were sweeping the world, reaching remote stations in Australia such as Papunya and Hermansburg. A perceptual shift occurred between Aboriginal Australians and the state apparatus. Art that has been produced from this period onwards has indicated how this process has been experienced.
The idea of the Australian Aboriginal history which has existed within itself but which also has a place within the realm of world history.
Art is not necessarily a visual space but can be a sensory experience that gives an individual an understanding of the world as experienced by others. This space is not reducible to the canvas but is more of an event, where many separate factors are needed to uniquely identify objects and subjects within a particular cultural context.
“Writing has nothing to do with signifying, but with land surveying and map making, even of countries yet to come”
Delueze
In modern world history, war has played a larger role than art in producing objects and ideas that have facilitated cultural thought and expression. Many modern conveniences are the by-products of military planning and defense force budgets. Throughout history, the invention and introduction of more powerful weapons have shaped the politics of the nation state and geographic maps of the world.
Art is perhaps recognized as the power of ideas.
Hitlers claims that many of the modern artists of the time were ‘degenerate’ artists are an example of a fascist aesthetic influencing cultural production.
In many ways, the war artist has occupied a similar position to that of the contemporary Aboriginal artist. The war artist produces art objects for the purpose of constructing and identifying with a specific subjects’ nationalism.
Many political notions of Aboriginality expressed through contemporary art directly challenge the Australian mythological relationship to the land.
“In Fascism, as Benjamin has demonstrated, the political remains as a site for determinate judgement, by analogy with the determinate judgements of the beautiful which may be made about art. The political is conceived in terms of criteria which are claimed to be drawn from art (the ugly should be eliminated).”
The line between a weapon and a tool can be determined by its extension into the real world; hammers knives, and ropes have been building blocks as well as repressive tools in the shaping of cultural expression. Like the surgeon’s knife, which cuts as it heals; our modern society has grown out of military strategy as much as human endeavour.
The subjectivity produced by Aboriginal art is not a war machine in military terminology, but an abstract machine producing flows of symbols and images outside of state based thought. It makes connections and produces flows that state based thought systems do not recognize.
Dominant practices of Technique, style, and artistic forms of expression are philosophies of the state. Visual arts practice is a performative space where ideas are projected and deflected. The artwork and the associated time period, which the artist expresses, is an abstract interpretation of the present.
The use of photography for social documentation affected another essential factor in the production of artworks – patronage. Portraits were now attainable by the working class, affecting the artists’ privileged role documenting aristocracy. Whether artists were conscious of it or not, the use and abuse of history is evident in all styles of modernist and contemporary art. Perhaps this is why the political philosophy of art centres on the problem of legitimacy.
It would seem most people are comfortable accepting paintings rather than photographs as art. The history of painting has a broader subjective positioning available in terms of the production of cultural capital. Painting is more obtuse than photography whose subjective positioning is more precise and accurate. Photography is an internalising narrative. The eyes of the photographer are suggested to be in a similar positioning to that of the spectator.
The idea that an artwork has a particular value because it cannot be replaced is very flexible in post-modern painting and photography. The experiences in the artists’ life, which led them to paint this particular image at this particular time, plot the subjectivity of the artist in a way that can never be repeated. The artwork itself can very easily be reproduced. It is the individuality of the artist that legitimises a particular artwork.
How is post-modern art a type of cultural criticism? Post modernism can be described as a revision of modernism. A re thinking of the grand narratives and utopian promises of social history as expressed through art in the 20th century. That Aboriginal art is being recognized as a fine art has only properly happened within the last 25 years – apparently after modernism had ended. Aboriginal art has therefore played a role in defining postmodernism in Australia.
The geographic demarcation that is optically defined by the Greenwich meridian is the first example of a striation of the earth through the universal imposition of longitude and latitude. By 1788 all distances on the globe were measured from Greenwich meridian.
The reterritorialisation of geographic regions caused a significant part of the displacement and confusion Aboriginal people felt as they continued to live in their traditional cultural milieu. Unbeknown to the Aborigines the landscape had metaphysically changed forever. Previously the language spoken by the members of the tribe defined Pre-colonial tribal and geographic regions. The individual belonging to a particular regionally defined territoriality and subjectivity.
Aboriginal Australians were continually imposed upon by the dominant striated perspective of modernism until their haptic nomadic way of life was replaced by the building blocks of capitalist society - fences, cages, chains, and guns. Aboriginal people were reterritorialised and divided from their kinship groups to live on missions and stations. They became the unrecognised domestic help and farm hands – unpaid disrespected and continually driven away from any valuable or even usable space which would allow them to continue uninterrupted their ancestral cultural practices.
Imposing new codes of language and social relations on Aboriginal people was not questioned because the capitalist processes that were used to effect the processes were not brought into question themselves.
“Technology is a process of machinic relations, an abstract machine of language operating within a specific regime of signs. Capitalist technology is retrospectively projected to be come coextensive with the fields of nature history and society.”
Phillip Goodchilde
Capitalism is a perfect example of history operating as a counter memory. An object or desire is invested with cultural capital based upon its quantifiable or qualifyable elements.
Deleuze and Guattari note the work of Pierre Clastres whose work dealing with pre state societies they feel to be underrated. They note nomad societies are not pre state societies, but groups who ward off the formation of the state at every possibility. It is not that Aboriginal Australia lacked a national identity but that they refuse such a totalitarian concept.
The existence of a purely national art is a concept that is irrelevant to most contemporary artists. Ian McClean differentiates between the picturesque and the sublime in landscape representation – picturesque refers to an inhabited and cultivated landscape. Because the picturesque created a synthesis of nature and culture, it was the ideal aesthetic for representing the redemptive scene sought by colonization.
Aboriginal art is anti picturesque representation.
A question worth asking at this stage is ‘how is it possible to include Aboriginal art and Australian art in the same cultural context when they can be seen to be telling different versions of the same story? How is it possible for non-Aboriginal artists to portray Aboriginality outside of a collaborative context?
There is no simple dualism between Aboriginal and Australian art that is used to categorize a particular work. How is it possible to break down the perceived separation between Aboriginal and Australian art into descriptive aesthetic terms. In this way art history is like a cultural psychoanalysis.
Aboriginal societies aesthetics operated in a system that used art as a type of graphism, pictorially using images and symbols to demonstrate perceptions and ideas (quantities). Whereas western art aesthetics could be thought more as a progressive statistical aggregate of qualities.
Terms and labels are temporal; they are like codes shared between a sender and a receiver. How an audience receives an artwork can be influenced by varied factors. An artwork’s interpretation may change several times during the artwork’s existence, conversely some artworks are deliberately created to be re interpreted, and some that will be perpetually re-interpreted (re-territorialised).
‘Cultural capital’ is the ability to read and understand cultural codes; but this ability and hence cultural capital is not distributed equally amongst social classes. A work of art has interest and meaning only for those who posses cultural capital and can read the codes into which it is encoded … Identity is largely a ‘social imaginary’, which divides various cultural groups into ‘imagined communities’ by bonding them together in literary and visual narration’s located in territory, history, and memory.
I would like to borrow ideas from Pierre Bourdieu’s writings on the notion of cultural and relate the production of cultural capital with art production. Art is not always metaphor; art renders visible the forces of chaos continually surrounding us, and in which we live in. Art can produce maps, guides, and warnings to possible future abstract relations.
Freud, Darwin, and Marx and interestingly, these among many other prominent philosophers of the state referenced the Australian Aboriginal to reinforce their notions of primitivism. These early 20th century giants among philosophers of the state shared a unique fascination with primitivism and the desires and lifestyles of those unfortunate enough to be labelled tribal or from stateless societies.
Art does not provide us with a universal truth; there is no universal context. All thought is localizable to a particular space, time, and combination of the two. State philosophy is a belief that knowledge can be gained from reason. A belief that a transcendent (metaphoric or subliminal) device will act as a point of Subjectification allowing an individual to “know” concepts, read images, and combines the two as ideas.
How much they are learned and appreciated by others is a matter of value. If we say that quality is the effect of quantity over time, we could say that accumulations of particular knowledge would grow in environments conducive to particular growth. The qualities of the image are not necessarily aesthetic. Qualities are the properties that define an essential aspect of the image.
I would like to propose that in any case, Aboriginal art is more effective than the English language in expressing notions of Aboriginality. Within the context of the English language, 26 phonetic symbols can be re-territorialised into quantum theory, or the complete works of Shakespeare.
Why is it problematic to understand that the graphism of Aboriginal art (dots and rark) is referring to knowledge and history that is as complex and significant?
Photography is perhaps the shared visual perspective where the aesthetic differences between Aboriginal and western art are flattened out. With the proper consultation, non- indigenous people have access to representations of Aboriginality free of repressive subjectivities.
Traditional photography is characterized as being distinctly landscape or portraiture. The photographer’s mechanical eye could reproduce images that were pure constructs most often re creations of famous events. Ironically in some cases, what many people remember as historical events were actually dramatic recreations staged for the camera.
In contemporary photography, it is standard for the photographer to allow his subjects to choose how they wish to be portrayed. The subject selects the background or objects they wish to be associated with in the image, as well as the subject having the final say of which images are exhibited.
This freedom of subjective positioning has not always been the case. In a post-modern reading of the point of Subjectification and the vanishing point, they can be seen to rigidly express a fixed subjectivity. During renaissance painting, they were often merged with the face of Christ being the point of Subjectification through which everything else in the painting was subordinated.
Today it would be used more as a stylistic device, but in Renaissance art the vanishing point and the point of Subjectification were often merged. The point being to suggest a direct line between the viewer (subject) Christ (artwork) and god (transcendental signifier). The point of Subjectification can also be alluded to metaphorically by the positioning of lines of sight. Apart from this some artists have suggested the crucifix like quality of hanging artworks on the wall. The portrait providing the vertical and the landscape the horizontal for the Greenwich meridian like plotting of Christian subjectivity.
A great many Artists living in Australia deal with ideas of belonging and not fitting into the dominant modes of cultural expression in Australia. There are similarities between the experience of migrants and the experience of Aboriginal people in that they both existed outside the heterogeneous dominant philosophy of the state. I would describe these as post modern experiences as they produce new ideas of Australian identity while at the same time while at the same time rejecting traditional assumptions about art and cultural identity.
There is no universal context (yet) to measure the quality of one art object and compare it to any other existing artwork, which does not rely on the history if the intermediary (subject) being involved.
Deleuze and Guttari in the smooth and the striated, example the difference between the smooth and the striated as the difference between the haptic and the optic. Put simply these terms refers to the distance between the subject and the perceived object. The close range perspective is that of the haptic. Haptic can refer to the tactile but also to the tracings where your vision is so close to the perceived object it fills the entire space of vision. No grounding, no vanishing point, no edges or surroundings.
I have previously set up a dualism between Aboriginal art (smooth space/haptic) and what I have referred to as striated, metric or linear art (striated/optic). The opposite of the haptic is the optic. Optic space is best described as linear perspective or panorama, it always contains the universal limit of the vanishing point. Haptic is the space of the near seer’s, optic is the perspective of the far seer’s.
In Aboriginal art a symbol may be open to several interpretations. Concentric circles provide a good example; they could refer to growth rings in the tree or the growth rings in the sand as the seed grows into a tree. It may refer to a water hole or the flow of water over time. Smooth space art deals with movements over time, the graphs of events rather than signs and unitary signifiers.
The difference between haptic and optic is the difference between the optic linear perspective’s subordination to the vanishing point, and the haptic, which is subordinated to its proximity to the real or the actual. This is the fundamental difference, which these two artistic perspectives express.
Aboriginal art does not necessarily challenge capitalist technology. In a post-modern way, it criticizes without destroying. Deluze and Guattari claim that with 20/20 hindsight capitalist technology has become Retroactively projected to be co-extensive with the fields of nature history and society. Therefore, it is possible to escape the dichotomy of Aboriginal art and non-Aboriginal art in favour of opening out onto a new economic plane of immanence.
Aboriginal art denies the codes that capitalist technology uses to over code all flows of exchange production and recording and thus presents a perspective which is closer to the lived real experiences of individuals and the society they are situated in.
“Art therefore has a role analogous to psychoanalysis: It aims to bring the social unconscious into consciousness by making the recipient feel the implicit presuppositions that are at work in various social situations.”
Phillip Goodechild
There is representation from within an Aboriginal discourse, and representation of the Aboriginal discourse. Through representation, Abstract and ideological ideas are given concrete form. Representation from different perspectives can be used to demonstrate and affect other perspectives.
Capitalism deterritorialises Aboriginality by subverting the traditional roles that would limit and control social relations and productions (e.g. kinship, language, and geography). Capitalism reduces all social relations to universal equivalence. Capitalist technology itself has falsely been thought of as a natural process – the “progression” from tribal to despotic to capitalist society.
If technology is a process of machinic relations, Aboriginal Art is an abstract machine component, in the economic production of art, in the sense that it is a process of the deterritorialisation of pre capitalist Aboriginal Australia. This was achieved by means of the imposition of a new symbolic order, Aboriginality is therefore reterritorialised within present day capitalist society.
Everyone desires the desires of others. The individual is the desire of others. There is no individual.
“The problem is that the self isn’t real. The self is a necessary illusion that allows us to function in time, to create law, morality, art and the rest of civilization. But it was never meant to save us from death, or imbue our lives with meaning and purpose. The self is the root of selfishness, and selfishness is what makes us unhappy. Too much concentration on ourselves makes us anxious, because the self cannot support the weight. That is the difference between the self and the soul.”
David Samuels
“Why return to the primitives, when it is a question of our own life? The fact is that the notion of segmentarity was constructed by ethnologists to account for so called primitive societies, which have no fixed, central state apparatus and no global power mechanisms or specialized political institutions.”
Deleuze and Guattari
Desire is social rather than familial. Desire is learnt through experiences within the external world. The world makes our mind up for us. Desire is the underlying motivational force in the individual, within the experiences in their early childhood and in their family life.
Desire explains how the individuals relationship to their Mother, Father and authority figures is played out in micro scale, within the family unit and childhood. And the how these experiences can then express themselves in the macro scale of the behaviour of the individual within the authoritarian institutions of the socius; school, office, army, factory, hospital, prison. The mechanosphere. A medical, scientific, sexual, socio, technological, chemical, militarial, industrial, capitalistic machinic arrangement. The world before our eyes and senses is the external collective consciousness that our subconscious connects into.
How does desire progress from the familial to the social?
The focus on the self by both the individual and their society is primarily concerned with sub - individual body parts and their supra - individual connection because these processes are a qualitative and quantifiable figurative object that can be used by paranoid institutional agencies to measure individuals and regulate their desire.
The production of desire is a question of why do we do what we do, what are the drives, motivations and forces behind all of our everyday actions. There is no such thing as fate. Consciousness is the product of unconsciousness. Speech is the product of memory. Language is the product of history.
Multiplicity, creation and desire are the principal elements of the social unconsciousness for D & G.
Desire is a primary force rather than a secondary goal. Pleasure and happiness is a by-product, desire is immediate and more profound than pleasure. Desire is co-extensive with the individual and the collective social energy. Desire is a will to power the external world by de-intensifying the internal self.
Desire is a material it is not imaginary. Desire is indifferent to personal identity or linguistic expression. Desire is pure multiplicity independent of any unity. Desire is immanent to a plane that it does not pre-exist.
Deleuze and Guttari divide the experience of the socius and the individual into three interconnecting planes of consistency.
3 TYPES OF DESIRING PRODUCTION
SUPRA- INDIVIDUAL LEVEL
Social interconnections “this is where “lack” “scarcity” is created
Society, the world, external, you
INDIVIDUAL LEVEL
tc \l5 “INDIVIDUAL LEVELSelf or ego and all it’s guises (this is where lack is lived)
Me, myself and I, the body.
tc \l5 “self or ego and all it’s guises (this is where lack is lived)
SUB INDIVIDUAL LEVEL / ELEMENTAL LEVEL
Bodily parts and other fragments
Virus’, language, molecules, matter. Internal
A plane of interconnections at the sub-individual level gives a body consistency enough for the individual to connect with the supra individual level of the external world.
To use a political analogy we would look at the three assemblages above as being federal, state and local government. The three parts intermix to construct the nation state (self) and the individual particular to a specific environment.
Desiring Production - nothing that involves concrete content or substance lacks anything, psychoanalysis bases desire on a perceived lack. Freudianism focus is on the individual level. Marxism focus is on supra – individual. Science Fiction focuses on the sub individual
DELUZE and GUTTARI totally leave out the individual level and work with a single realm of desiring production. Much like the abolition of State government would increase federal and local government through placing responsibility on the individual within the commonwealth to regulate their own desire.
Never trust a triangle. Dualism’s and paradigms are bad enough. The most useful form of desiring production is by accelerating a multiplicity of possibilities that crack open both society and the individuals desire to repress themselves and others.
Freud elaborated a method of restricting, regulating desire within the family unit. The Oedipal complex is a triangular family structure which psychoanalysis reinforces within its interpretation of the subject. The Oedipal triangle is a rivalry and is set up in the family in a way in which one part plays against the two-thirds. Through Jealousy or fear.
The Oedipus complex replays itself in all types of social relations. At work, whether through fraternal office rivalries or the authoritative imperatives of the big boss. Many other examples are possible. The triangulation of desire exists in all types of rivalries. Another embodiment is where one part of the triangle can know the Oedipal structure and play against the other two parts for the greater good of all three. Guilt - law.
Knowledge of Oedipalisation and how to Oedopolize is first learnt in the family and is reproduced during different situations in social life. Take the duality between Psychoanalysis and institutions. An orphan or the child of a single parent has historically suffered the stigma of bastardisation. This reinforces pre existing methods of desiring production rather than breaking them by always reconstituting the subject within the family as being a part of the society of the family that is the dominant cultural code.
The production and reading of cultural code and cultural capital. The impositions of the dominant cultural codes are prostheticaly imposed on the individual during early childhood. Things like nursery rhymes, times tables, playgrounds etc. all introduce the child to cultural codes and the different ways an individual accepts or rejects reading and manipulating them. Coupled with the child’s home life where they are learning the codes of the family unit the child forms ideas about the individual and about the limits to experience and the consequences of different actions and thoughts.
Imposing new codes of languages and social relations on Aboriginal people was not questioned because the capitalist process itself was used to effect these changes and was not brought into question itself. Technology is a process of machinic relations; an abstract machine of language operating within a specific regime of signs will describe art as a process of machinic relations. Capitalist technology is retroactively projected to become co-extensive with the fields of nature, history and society. Known afterwards as retrospective projection.
Capitalist technology is retroactively projected to become co-extensive with the fields of nature, history, and society. Further, explain the re-territorialization of geographic regional languages and social relations that were imposed on Aboriginal people through capitalist technology.
Cultural objects have always work as facilitators of desire. A weapon or tool is a physical extension of an embodied idea. The freeing of the hand was similar to the freeing of the face. The hand ad voice become separate from each other. The free hand allowed symbols to be modified and manipulated. Technologies became the substance of the content matter made by the hand.
The anthropomorphic strata
The voice could make a range of sounds which had a form imposed through the sequencing of sounds. Words became the expressive substance that could represent things.
A collective semiotic machine forms as the product of both hand and voice to construct a machined arrangement or a regime of signs. There are always different ways of controlling the flows, of machining them.
A semiotic machine and collective enunciation are examples of abstract machines withdrawn from an event. Not necessarily metaphysical or transcending the event
THE DETERRITORIALISATION/ RE-TERRITORIALISATION OF DESIRE
Capitalism reduces all social relations to universal equivalency (currency, gold). Capitalism itself was a universal equivalent.
Capitalism deterritorialises desire by over coding traditional roles, ideas and laws that limit and control existing social relations and productions. (E.g. kinship roles)
Capitalism deterritorialises the old class structures (religious, traditional, folk) and then reterritorialises them in the form of capital currency and value. Creating signs and semiotic chains reduced to the dominant cultural code of capital.
Capitalism deterritorialises schizophrenic fluxes, scraps of things like body parts machines and factories and constructs assemblages that are then re-territorialzed in a neurotic Oedipal triangle. Triangles leave no positive way of acting on desire and will always end up lost in an internal involution towards itself.
DESIRING PRODUCTION
The assemblage and production of language is where the ideas of needs (of food warmth and nourishment) transform into language. Language is constructed in order to fill a lack created by the need for nourishment, warmth filling a void.
Desire will exist in the inability of language to express a need or want. We can never achieve what we desire as desire will be continually replaced, desire will always exist as long as there is a want or need. Desire is a flow, it cannot be blocked or stopped. Desire can be diverted internally through repression or flow externally through expression. We can sometimes choose which external stimuli we respond to and sometimes we cant. Positive desiring production is to be aware of the process, to watch what is happening, to engage with difference rather than negating it. Putting trust in ideological constructions alone can lead one into a false sense of security. A theo-retical (logical?) reliance on text rather than the spoken word will lead to assemblages favoring one aspect of the binary.
There is a proliferation in our language (possibly through the influence of advertising) of endless signifiers where lack is there only use value. The products lack a home, a family, or the home or family lacks a product, directly proportional to the liability the advertising company is legally bound to. Meaning advertising has no effect when they are selling petro-chemicals, alcohol or legal drugs yet to business and government who pay billions of dollars worldwide for advertisements they are priceless.
Some might think of the history of advertising as a tautology because the only way to discern between the two is be actively working in either of these
The reterritorialisation of geographic regions was a significant part of the confusion Aboriginal people faced when trying to continue living in their traditional cultural milieu. Pre-colonial Aboriginal boundaries were limited by the amount of members in the tribe. The persons who spoke a particular language rather than the colonial method of mapping geographic locations signified Territorial limits.
Imposing new codes of languages and social relations on Aboriginal people was not questioned because the capitalist process used to effect these changes was not brought into question itself. Technology is a process of machinic relations an abstract machine of language operating within a specific regime of signs will describe art as a process of machinic relations. Capitalist technology is retrospectively projected to become co-extensive with the fields of nature, history and society.
Aboriginal art deals with subjects that are timeless (compared to western conceptions of “time” and “history”.
The discourse of Aboriginal art and the other flows/discourses it intersects, reflects or generates, (Language, politics, ecology, familial relationships)
“ Art galleries serve the cultivated elite class, and this privilege is legitimized by claiming a distinction between good and vulgar taste, legitimate and illegitimate styles. Aesthetic judgements do not follow some kind of objective autonomous aesthetic logic, they substitute distinctions of taste for class distinctions and thereby fortify the divisions between classes and assert the right of the ruling class to sanction their authority over other classes.
Bourdier uses an economic metaphor to make his point.
“Cultural capital is the ability to read and understand cultural codes; but this ability, and hence cultural capital is not distributed equally amongst social classes”
The working classes have little cultural capital and systematically lose out in the battle for cultural power. When cultural capital is invested in the exercise of taste it yields both a high profit both for those that posses it and a “profit in legitimacy” which is the justification of the ruling class to be the ruling class.
A work of art has interest and meaning only for those who posses cultural capital and can read the codes into which it is encoded.
Also, look at aboriginal art in the sense that it is a smooth space that is reimparted by the striated discourse of western art and science.
The first interpretations of Aboriginal art (from the perspective of the non-Aboriginal) were when it was located with anthropological discourses. Anthropologists and archaeologists “discovered” Aboriginal rock carvings and paintings as well as noting descriptions on the insides of clothing or inside bark huts, artifacts and ceremonial body painting as a type of “primitive art”. These markings were not even regarded as a primitive form of art, signs/symbols, and language.
These early art forms were exhibited in museums as examples of traditional Aboriginality “broken remnants of a dead culture” they served no aesthetic purpose except to educate white people how technologically advanced they were. These reinforced ideas of what is the proper version of society and what is primitive gone forgotten a dark corner in the history of the mind.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Outlines exhibition Macleay Museum
Sydney is home to one of the largest outdoor rock art sites in Australia, and the largest population of Aboriginal people anywhere. Across Aboriginal Australia is a great diversity of art and belief practices. This exhibition brings together painting tools, ochres, shields, spears and clubs that all have their provenance in Aboriginal language regions of New South Wales, such as the Bundjulung, Wiradjuri and Dharug. The exhibition also includes stone tool artefacts from the Penrith lakes area thought to be around 15,000 years old.
This exhibition brings together painting tools, ochres, stone tool artefacts, shields, spears and clubs that all have their provenience in the regions of NSW. The stone tool artefacts in this exhibition provide grounding for evidence of millennia of Aboriginal cultural practice in the region of NSW. This exhibition aims to highlight the largely untold story that these objects can tell us about the regional knowledge's of NSW and their traditional custodians.
On level 2 of the stairway into the Macleay Museum is a cast of an Aboriginal rock carving from the Hornsby area of North Western Sydney (FIGURE 1). There were many thousands of existing rock art sites in Sydney and today there are still some publicly accessible sites. However this cast is of a rock art site that was destroyed for a road that was to be built. Its presence acts as a reminder of the many thousands more that have been destroyed over the last two centuries in Sydney.
The title of the exhibition "Outlines" is drawn from the two different styles of art that are most predominant in the region we know as New South Wales today. Petroglyphs (rock carvings) and dendroglyphs (tree Carvings).
Ornamentation, decoration and the transformation of practical everyday items into cultural practices that span generations of Aboriginal people are all evident in the objects on display in this exhibition. In an ethno botanical context there is much more that can be learned and discovered about the traditional knowledge's or medicinal purposes that these artefacts give evidence to.
Aboriginal art is the largest art movement in recent Australian history; Aboriginal art has been one of the most successful economic strategies employed by Aboriginal people in Australia to communicate in their own with National and international communities. The objects in this exhibition where originally collected in an ethnographic or anthropologic classificatory context that did not value the meanings that these objects held for the people that owned them. Modern museum and cultural studies have created proactive strategies that engage with Indigenous communities on their own terms and highlight the priority of first Australians having a first decision as to the extended interpretation or public presentation of these objects and artefacts.
This exhibition also aims to increase awareness about the art that existed in New South Wales and engaging community members to bring their own knowledge of these objects and materials in an effort to increase awareness of the richness and uniqueness of Aboriginal art production in New south Wales today.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community members are strongly encouraged to bring their interpretations and understanding of the meanings associated with these objects to the Macleay Museum.
Please note that all descriptive terms for objects in this exhibition have been described with Dharug (EORA) language which is specific to the Sydney Region and does not indicate the language that was used to describe these objects in their place of production.
Bundjulung
Coraki
The objects in this selection were presented by the Bundjulung people of the North East coast of New South Wales to Hugh James. James worked closely with New South Wales Government Chemist, Arthur Penfold developing technologies now associated with the development of an antiseptic produced from the cultivation of the tea tree plant.
The development of this industry essentially transformed (without any open attribution) information that was definitely known to the local Bundjulung people as having the medicinal properties of an antiseptic. The melaleuca tree (ti tree) is one of the largest industries in the Ballina region today. It appears that Hugh James had an amicable relationship with the local Bundjulung people as he was presented with a set of weapons made in specifically for him that demonstrated the tradition techniques of the Bundjulung people from the area.
The plant that this oil is made from is also casually referred to as Cabbage tree and Cabbage tree Island is the name of the mission that Aboriginal people in the Ballina region were moved onto in the 1890's. Whyralla and Coriki are areas where the Bundgulung people of the far north coast were displaced as the nearby urban centres of Lismore and Ballina grew. According to Bundjalung oral tradition, during the 1890s a group of Aboriginal people in north-eastern New South Wales (NSW) walked from Wyrallah near Lismore and crossed to Cabbage Tree Island. They aimed to take possession of the land and clear the thick scrub to begin cane farming.
... There's a real big fig tree there, that used to be there, when the boats used to come into the Ballina Harbour here, but the fig tree was their guide, way they'd see it from out at sea, the really huge fig tree on top of the hill. Well, the trees up there now, they used to camp around there and also at Wyrallah, they had a big bora ring at Wyrallah and Tuckean swamp. They used to live down at Tuckean swamp there, a lot of Aborigines, but then they came down this way, down near Cabbage Tree.''
Uncle Lewis Cook, interview 26 January 2005, Boundary Creek
For thousands of years the Bundjalung Aborigines from the north coast of NSW used Tea Tree as a medicine. The crushed leaves of Tea Tree were inhaled to treat coughs and colds, or were sprinkled on wounds after which a poultice was applied. In addition, Tea Tree leaves were soaked to make an infusion to treat sore throats or skin ailments
(Low, 1990; Shemesh & Mayo, 1991).
Wiradjuri / Kamilaroi
Murrumbidgee
This Parrying shield is from the Murrumbidgee River region of NSW, artist Roy Kennedy grew up on the Warrengesda mission during this period and many of his works focus on his memories of growing up on the Murrumbidgee River. This river separated two missions and Roy's father lived on one mission while his mother was made to live on the other. The Murrumbidgee River features strongly in the work of contemporary artist Roy Kennedy.
Kennedy's work rare memories of life growing up on the missions and reserves of the Darling River region in the 1930's and 40's. These objects are exhibited side by side to show that the stylistic influence of tradition cultural objects held by museums can provide interesting reference material for practicing artists.
Carved trees are becoming rarer in NSW as trees decay and fall over or are burnt. Aboriginal people used carved trees to mark burial and ceremonial sites. Usually a section of the bark of the tree was removed and a carving made on the exposed wood. These trees are still significant to particular Aboriginal groups.
These artworks by artist Roy Kennedy depict memories of his life growing up in places such as the Warangesda mission and the many activities that centred on the Murrumbidgee river
Artworks by Roy Kennedy in this exhibition include
Nulla Nullan
Warialda
Warialda is an area that sits in between the traditional language boundaries of the western Bundjulung and the Eastern Kamilaroi language groups of Northern NSW. This selection of ochres, pigments and ironstone show a brief glimpse at the artistic palate of the NSW region of the Gamilaraay. They are specifically from the town of Warialda and were presented to the university of Sydney Museums by Thelma Bush. The colour palette of these pigments ranges from yellow, umber, ochre, red, orange and purple. White clay was also used a pigment but is not from the same ironstone source as this selection of objects.
Painting existed in New South Wales on bodies, shields and on rock surfaces evidence of this was recently found in the Hawkesbury region of NSW with representational Charcoal paintings of a eagles dated at several thousands of years old.
The grinding stone in this exhibit also references the utilitarian purposes of these artefacts grinding stones were not only used in the production of food such as the grinding of seeds or root vegetable but also in the grounding of ochres to produce pigment.
Background: One of the earliest technologies that humans invented was the making of paint. By using different coloured earth, or grinding soft rocks to a powder, early people could make pictures of different colours. The first use of minerals was for cave painting. The Egyptians used minerals in their cosmetics and for tomb painting. Australian Aboriginal painters used earth colours - reds, browns, and yellows, black and white - from ochres and other minerals. Early humans used coloured pigments removed from the earth to paint their bodies and implements, and the caves in which they lived. Graves unearthed by archaeologists showed bodies covered in red pigment. Red was a colour associated with blood and symbolised life's meaning and end. The word haematite is derived from the Greek word haema meaning blood. As iron oxide (haematite) did not fade unlike vegetable dyes, people sought and mined the red pigment - haematite. (source HSC online).
It is also interesting to note that on the 21st of september 2009 the town of Moree (around 80 Kilometres from Warialda) held a corroboree Yanay to Gamilaraay, This particular type of ceremony had not been publicly held in New South Wales since 1938. On the 23rd September 2009 one of the largest dust storms in recorded history swept over large parts of the entire eastern coast line of NSW between Sydney and Brisbane – dancing up a storm perhaps?
Giba (ke-ba) stone or rock
Stone Tool artefact from the Dharug
(Western Sydney/Penrith Lakes region)
Macleay Museum Object # 85-5-82-4 (above)
"A pebble chopper found in situ at the base of the gravels, when pumping allowed inspection below the water table and the discovery of bog-preserved logs nearby (Stockton and Holland 1974:65). These were then dated to about 30,000 B.P. Subsequent work on the geomorphology of the terrace by Nanson and Young showed that the dated samples had been contaminated with younger carbon in the ground water" (Nanson et al. 1987).
The modified pebble (object 85-5-82-4) which is shown above is a worked uniface pebble (presumably incipient or unfinished) which was interpreted as having being flaked with the intention of forming a chopper tool. This pebble is Figure 7a in Stockton and Holland (1974) and Figure 5a Nanson, Young and Stockton (1987). Stockton and Holland (1974, p. 52) described this as a flat pebble of weathered rhyolite, measuring 12 x 10 x 3 cm, with three flakes dislodged by conchoidal fracture, one overlapping, in a series on one face along a straight 7 cm side.
They stated that "obvious pitting from age covers all surfaces (cortex, flake faces and ridges)" The thirteen or more items from the gravel bed at Upper Castlereagh which are in the Macleay Museum' Stockton collection as broken-up pebbles and cobbles of a variety of rock types include the above core of large broken porphyry clast (cobble) that has been 'smashed' in a number of places. (Object 85.5.82.9) This discovery at Upper Castlereagh discovery was made by Fr Eugene Stockton, and it has been published on by him and others.
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