‘Art for a New Understanding’: An Interview with Valerie Keenan, Manager of Girringun Aboriginal Art Centre (original) (raw)
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The Continuing Problem of Aboriginal 'Art'
The lack of a coherent understanding of what constitutes art in Aboriginal Australia has dogged curation and criticism for many years. While there have been a number of calls to rationalize this problem, all have gone unheeded. This paper is submitted as a first attempt at this rationalization.
'We have survived': South-east Australian Aboriginal art exhibitions since 1988
reCollections, 2010
This paper focuses on several Aboriginal art exhibitions held since 1988 and includes a broad discussion of participating artists and their artworks. Taking this broad approach, rather than discussing individual artworks, illustrates the interconnectivity of art and culture and the importance of applying an integrated worldview to the exhibition process. Aboriginal-determined art exhibitions are part of an ongoing 'culture-making', where art, history and culture are made and remade as new ways of experiencing Aboriginality.[1] They have influenced a paradigm shift beyond the confining Western categories applied to Aboriginal people and their art styles, forcing a rethinking of the categories of fine art and high culture.[2] https://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/vol\_5\_no\_1/papers/we\_have\_survived
Liminalities: Journal of Performance Studies, 2020
HEART OF ARTNESS is a crafted audio storytelling podcast that explores little known crosscultural relationships behind the production of contemporary Australian Aboriginal art, a global industry and important cultural practice. it is co-hosted by art curator Margo Neale, Head of Indigenous Studies at the National Museum of Australia, and Siobhan McHugh, Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of Wollongong, and co-conceived with art historian Ian McLean, Chair of Contemporary Art at University of Melbourne. In the '80s, art centres sprang up across remote Australia like city-states of the Italian Renaissance. Vital community hubs, they offered a way for Indigenous Australians to stay on their land and generate income, while dynamically preserving and disseminating their culture. But these art centres also represent sites of collaboration and exchange. The managers, who are usually white, act as a bridge between the Indigenous artists and the commercial market. They have to balance the practical realities of running a business with the complex protocols of honouring Indigenous culture, while negotiating the challenges of vestigial colonialism. The art produced here is both spiritual and political, the artists drawing on a history of outsider trade and exchange that goes back 400 years. For Heart of Artness, Siobhan McHugh recorded 30 oral histories with Aboriginal artists and their associates in two remote and one urban community. She also recorded actuality and ambient sound, carefully blending these elements with edited interviews and tight scripting into engaging storytelling, intended for a public, mainstream audience. The podcast's appeal was confirmed when it won a gold award at New York Festivals. For podcast scholars, it's an interesting model in that it was competitively funded by our peak research body, the Australian Research Council, which accepted our argument that an audio output could literally include these marginalised voices and convey affective power. Journal article on our interdisciplinary process here, with illustrative audio clips
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...
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A mere twenty years ago most people thought of contemporary Australian Aboriginal arts and crafts as primarily the production of bark paintings and boomerangs, mostly for the tourist trade, or as the European-style watercolour landscapes of the Aranda artists from the Hermannsburg Lutheran Mission east of Alice Springs, of whom the best-known was Albert Namatjira (1902-1959). Collecting Western institutions were generally museums whose interest was primarily in the ethnographic aspects of the art. Since then there have been some remarkable developments in both quantity and range, at a rate which makes any description or analysis likely to be out of date as soon as it is written. In this, Australia's Bicentennial year, Aboriginal art has become one of the prime ways of asserting the continued and distinct identity of Fourth World people where, unlike the Third World, the colonizers never went home.
The Art/Ethnography Binary: Post-Colonial Tensions within the Field of Australian Aboriginal Art
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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.
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
How the knowledge within country informs Aboriginal arts practices and affirms and sustains identity
Australian Aboriginal peoples have a long history of relationships connected to Country: Australia's landscapes and seascapes and all the animals and plants and peoples that inhibit them. With an increasing shift of Aboriginal people to large urban areas and regional centres it does mean that many Aboriginal Australians now pass through, dwell, and live within the Country belonging to other Aboriginal Australians. This does not mean that one's connections to Country are lost, or that the significance of Country is no longer present. Pamela Croft and Bronwyn Fredericks live within Rockhampton region of Central Queensland: the Countries of the Darumbal (mainland and coastline) and the Woppaburra (Keppel Islands), who are intricately linked through history and relationship within Country. Within broader Australia, this region is marketed as the 'Beef Capital of Australia' and where 'the beef meets the reef' (Great Barrier Reef). It is also at the southern end of one of the world's greatest wonders; the World Heritage listed Great Barrier Reef. This presentation will demonstrate how the knowledge base from within the Countries of the Darumbal and Woppaburra can and does inform land-centred artistic crafts practice in the every day and enables a focus on cultural sustainability for the Indigenous and non-Indigenous generations to come.
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 ...