Book Review: Gordon Bennett: Selected Writings (original) (raw)
Related papers
Challenging the paradigm: rethinking Aboriginal art within Australia’s art history
2018
In her ambitious Rethinking Australia’s art history: The challenge of Aboriginal art, Susan Lowish tackles an issue that sits at the very epicentre of art historical thinking in Australia, but one that until now has eluded the kind of singular attention it receives in this timely book. Much Australian art history and art historiography has sought to acknowledge and account for the transformation of the field as a result of the flourishing of Aboriginal art and art exhibitions, especially since the late 1980s. International scholars who are interested in contemporary challenges to the Eurocentric origins of art history and who are familiar with Australian art historical contributions to the field1 or some of the major international exhibitions in recent decades,2 will be aware that art historians and curators have sought to grapple with the challenges and opportunities provided by Aboriginal art. In this book Lowish seeks to investigate early thinking on the topic in the belief that ...
The Art/Ethnography Binary: Post-Colonial Tensions within the Field of Australian Aboriginal Art
Cultural Sociology, 2012
An Art/Ethnography binary informs a range of discursive engagements with Australian Aboriginal art. Ethnography is usually associated with colonialism, primitivism and regarded as circumscribing the art, while Art is posited as unequivocally progressive and good. This article will discuss the activities of various Indigenous and non-Indigenous actors in the Aboriginal art world, and explore the way the Art/Ethnography binary’s reiteration by these actors instantiates the way this field is shaped by the tensions that arise from Australia’s condition as a settler state with a marginalized Indigenous population. It will show that the trope of Art versus Ethnography has a multifaceted operative power that reflects remote and urban Aboriginal artists’ differential participation within the field, and the complex relationship between two objectives that politicize it: the desire for recognition on the part of Indigenous actors, and the desire for post-colonial redemption on the part of non-Indigenous actors.
Writing/righting a history of Australian Aboriginal art
Humanities Research, 2009
More sophisticated equivalences are starting to be made between works of Aboriginal art and the rest of the objects that inhabit the art world; as such, this is an exciting time for the discipline of art history. It is also a dangerous time, as it negotiates pathways through different narratives and is confronted with the dynamic interface of Indigenous and settler art histories. This paper discusses some of the problematic methodological approaches adopted by art historians and anthropologists in several major publications that have become standards in the fields of Australian and Aboriginal art. It examines the use of the label ‘Aboriginal art’ as an identifier of a category the contents and borders of which are currently racially defined and argues that a temporal emphasis be adopted that would see ‘Aboriginal art’ understood more as a period style. It argues that different kinds of primitivism have contributed to and maintained the difficulties in relating Aboriginal art to Australian art and vice versa. Finally, this paper considers how Aboriginal art can be written about in the future and asks how best to proceed. How do we write (or right) the history of Australian Aboriginal art?
International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2014
This article examines how foresight, hindsight and perception are enabled, modified and compromised by competing intellectual traditions and by social and professional exigencies. Focusing on the example of one scholar, Dr Leonhard Adam, and his essay ‘Has Aboriginal art a future?’ this article charts the trajectory of this question from obscurity to celebration. It explores why such a significant question was unable to ignite debate, at a time when there was considerable interest in the role of Aboriginal art in the articulation of national identity. It examines the intellectual and social conditions that framed Adam’s contribution and explores what enabled him, as a relative outsider, to develop such a prescient understanding of the future of Australian Aboriginal art.
Australian Historical Studies, 2023
The subject of this article is the absence of Aboriginal art during the period that established the idea of a distinctively Australian modern art. It is intended as a contribution to the historiography of modern and contemporary Australian art history. The period discussed is the two decades between 1962, when Bernard Smith published Australian Painting, 1788–1960, and 1988, the year of the Australian Bicentenary. The article explores what changed in these years when art historians, critics, and curators, albeit belatedly and reluctantly, finally began to acknowledge the great contemporary Aboriginal painting that had long been in many artists’ sights as inspiration and model, and in plain view on display in the so-called primitive cultures’ sections of state museums. It argues that this was because it did not seem part of the national story of art.