Indigenous performing arts and the problem of judging 'excellence': A discussion paper (original) (raw)

Australian indigenous performing arts and cultural policy

Iccpr 2008 Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Cultural Policy Research, 2008

This paper examines how Australian Indigenous cultural policies have contributed to the development of Aboriginal theatre since the early 1990s. In many respects, the flourishing of Indigenous performing arts exemplify the priorities of national cultural policy more broadly. These priorities include the assertion of national identity in a globalised world -a goal that is amply realised in the publicly funded Indigenous performing arts. The paper examines how government policies have assisted the growth of Indigenous theatre companies and the professional development of their artists. It draws on interviews with Indigenous theatre artists to identify their changing professional needs, and argues that cultural policies need to develop pluralist strategies which encourage a diversity of practices for the future development of the sector.

How to (re) value Indigenous performing arts

The Asia Pacific journal of arts and …, 2011

In their paper on "Excellence and access: Indigenous performing arts" the problem that Hilary Glow and Katya Johanson describe is discursive, one that also has a discursive solution. An alternative can come from thinking through the process by which "value" is created, supported and circulated in the art world. Strategies to revalue Indigenous performance can thereby be directed to the various sites of institutional value which have long characterized Australian cultural policy -its importance to national identity, in the connection between culture and economics as well as to the debate over access and excellence -and come from artists as well as the communities they serve.

Entangled Values: Construction of a Global Conception of Australian Indigenous Arts

eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics, 2016

The integration of Australian Indigenous arts in the field of contemporary art is the fruit of a complex historical process deeply rooted in social and political relationships. The Aboriginal art market has grown exponentially since the 90s and acrylic paintings and bark paintings have become international icons of Australian national identity. Aboriginal art has been, and to a certain extent, is still endangered by cheap imitations, fakes and the transgression of Indigenous artists’ rights and community protocols. These issues have been addressed by various inquiries and reports since the 1990s. Recently, a new paradigm has emerged from the scholarship produced by researchers, such as Howard Morphy (2000), Jon Altman (2005) and others. These scholars have investigated particularly the community-controlled art centres and outlined how it could be taken as a business model. In their studies, the art centres are presented as inter-cultural institutions, as both a commercial and a cult...

Australian Indigenous ‘artists’ critical agency and the values of the art market

Les actes de colloques du musée du quai Branly, 2014

The recent integration of Australian Indigenous arts in the field of contemporary art is the fruit of a complex historical process deeply rooted in social and political relationships. The Aboriginal art market has grown exponentially over the last 40 years and the artwork has become an international icon of Australian identity. However, Aboriginal art has been, and to a certain extent, is still endangered by cheap imitations, fakes and the transgression of Indigenous artists' rights and community protocols. These issues have been addressed by various inquiries and reports since the 1990s. Recently, a new paradigm has emerged from the scholarship produced by researchers, such as Howard Morphy, John Altman and others. These scholars conducted research on the community-controlled art centres and outlined in particular how they could be taken as business models. In their studies, the art centres are presented as intercultural institutions, which are both commercial and cultural enterprises in which Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people are active agents. The expression 'Aboriginal Art. It's A White Thing' of the awarded-painting Scientia E Metaphysica (Bell's Theorem) by Richard Bell highlights another vision of the Aboriginal arts sector. Drawing on the debates generated by this prize-winning work, I will analyse how artworks and discourses surrounding these debates are entangled in a complex process of value creation. 2 In this paper, I will first use Richard Bell's theorem as an example of the critical agency of Aboriginal artists living in metropolitan cities, in order to draw attention to their valuable contributions to the arts sector. I will argue that their position as urban-based artists as well as Indigenous people gives them an overview of the process of definition, representation, circulation and regulation of what constitute the Australia's Indigenous arts sector. Australian Indigenous 'artists' critical agency and the values of the art market Les actes de colloques du musée du quai Branly Jacques Chirac, 4 | 2014

Building Capacity or Burning Out? Supporting Indigenous Performing Artists and Filmmakers

Media International Australia, 2010

Public support for both Indigenous filmmaking and the live performing arts has a number of common features: at a national level the present schemes were introduced in the early 1990s, and both sets of schemes aim to improve the capacity of Indigenous practitioners to tell their stories to national and international audiences. Yet, in the late 2000s, Screen Australia's support for filmmaking has contributed to well-known successes, whereas Australia Council support for performing arts has been withdrawn from two of the three state-based Indigenous companies. This article reviews the capacity-building strategies offered by the funding agencies to Indigenous filmmaking and performing arts. While the film policies appear to have been more successful than those in the performing arts, both sectors continue to experience obstacles to capacity-building for Indigenous practitioners and organisations.

Going 'mainstream': evaluating the instrumentalisation of multicultural arts

This paper considers how debates over the instrumentalisation of the arts have informed the cultural production of an Australian arts organisation – Multicultural Arts Victoria (MAV). In an effort to make multicultural arts more 'mainstream', MAV has increasingly adopted market-based rationales for its work – particularly the use of 'audience development' policy frameworks. It is easy to evaluate this marketisation of multicultural arts negatively as an acceptance of neoliberal policy agendas and as a weakening of its commitment to 'cultural development' goals. This paper suggests, however, via a critique of Ghassan Hage's analysis of multiculturalism, that such accounts do not consider how economic rationales actually sit in practice with MAV's other (cultural development) agendas. Such critiques, therefore, preclude an affirmative reading of the instrumentalisation of multicultural arts. An alternative analytical framework is proposed – one which can more readily account for multicultural arts as a set of practices informed by diverse agendas, and which acknowledges how such practices might both contest and converge with official government policies.