'The Aboriginal art movement flourished during a period in which the Australian public were awakened to the implications of the state’s decision to confront the legacies of colonisation and bring Aboriginal culture into the heart of national public life. Rather than seeing this radical political and social transformation as mere context for Aboriginal art’s emergence, this study argues that Aboriginal art has in fact mediated Australian society’s negotiation of the changing status of Aboriginal culture over the last century. This argument is illustrated through the analysis of Aboriginal art’s volatility as both a high art movement and a phenomenon of visual and commercial culture. This analysis reveals the agendas to which Aboriginal art has been anchored at the nexus of the redemptive project of the settler state, Indigenous movements for rights and recognition, and the aspirations of progressive civil society.
'At its heart this study is concerned with the broader social and cultural insights that can be gleaned from conducting a sustained inquiry into Aboriginal art’s contested meanings. To achieve this it focuses upon the hopeful and disenchanted faces of the Aboriginal art phenomenon: the ideals of cultural revitalisation and empowerment that have converged upon the art, and the countervailing narratives of exploitation, degradation and futility. Both aspects are traced through a range of settings in which the tensions surrounding Aboriginal art’s aesthetic, political and significance have been negotiated. It is in this dialectic that the vexed ethical questions underlying Australia’s settler state condition can most clearly be identified, and we can begin to navigate the paradoxes and impasses underlying the redemptive national project of the post-assimilation era. (Publication summary)
Table of Contents
Introduction; Part I: Governance, Nationhood and Civil Society; Chapter 1: New Intercultural Relationships in the Post-Assimilation Era; Chapter 2: Aboriginal People Mobilising Aboriginal Art; Chapter 3: Understanding Aboriginal Art Subsidy; Chapter 4: The State Mobilising Aboriginal Art; Chapter 5: ‘Aboriginal culture’ at the Nexus of Justice, Recognition and Redemption; Part II: Contemporary Aboriginal Art in the 1980s; Chapter 6: The Emergence of Aboriginal Art in the 1980s; Part III: Negotiating Difference; Chapter 7: Negotiation Aboriginal Difference; Chapter 8: The Art/Anthropology Binary; Part IV: Aboriginal Art, Money and the Market; Chapter 9: Ethics and Exploitation in the Aboriginal Art Market; Chapter 10: ‘Aboriginal Mass Culture’ and the Cultural Industries; Conclusion.
In 1982 Ros Langford, on behalf of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community, demanded Indigenous control of Indigenous cultural heritage at the Australian Archaeological Association’s annual meeting. Following the difficult repatriation of Truganini’s remains and the heated debate over Aboriginal heritage during the Franklin River campaign, this statement linked the campaigns for land rights and treaty with the ownership and self-representation of cultural heritage. Langford’s statement transformed archaeological practice by demanding recognition of Aboriginal cultures as living while reflecting the political shift at the time from assimilation to self-determination. This shift is also often cited as political background to the emergence of contemporary Aboriginal art and the establishment of Papunya Tula and other remote art centres in the 1970s. The model of cultural revitalisation of country, with the promise of economic independence, was utopian. Paintings of Dreaming stories fed a blossoming international art market, but disillusionment followed, with charges of exploitation and cultural subordination. Four decades on, many in the cultural sector still aspire to Langford’s vision, as evidenced in parts of the recent publications Indigenous Archives: The Making and Unmaking of Aboriginal Art and Aboriginal Art and Australian Society: Hope and Disenchantment. The subtitles of each book suggest a rise-and-fall narrative to explain the phenomenon of Aboriginal art. While each volume describes the hopeful beginnings of contemporary Aboriginal art, neither suggests that the movement has failed to bring emancipation and empowerment. Rather, these subtitles point to the discursive tensions that have shaped the interpretation and reception of Aboriginal art to foreground the complicated but significant place it has come to hold in national culture.' (Introduction)
In 1982 Ros Langford, on behalf of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community, demanded Indigenous control of Indigenous cultural heritage at the Australian Archaeological Association’s annual meeting. Following the difficult repatriation of Truganini’s remains and the heated debate over Aboriginal heritage during the Franklin River campaign, this statement linked the campaigns for land rights and treaty with the ownership and self-representation of cultural heritage. Langford’s statement transformed archaeological practice by demanding recognition of Aboriginal cultures as living while reflecting the political shift at the time from assimilation to self-determination. This shift is also often cited as political background to the emergence of contemporary Aboriginal art and the establishment of Papunya Tula and other remote art centres in the 1970s. The model of cultural revitalisation of country, with the promise of economic independence, was utopian. Paintings of Dreaming stories fed a blossoming international art market, but disillusionment followed, with charges of exploitation and cultural subordination. Four decades on, many in the cultural sector still aspire to Langford’s vision, as evidenced in parts of the recent publications Indigenous Archives: The Making and Unmaking of Aboriginal Art and Aboriginal Art and Australian Society: Hope and Disenchantment. The subtitles of each book suggest a rise-and-fall narrative to explain the phenomenon of Aboriginal art. While each volume describes the hopeful beginnings of contemporary Aboriginal art, neither suggests that the movement has failed to bring emancipation and empowerment. Rather, these subtitles point to the discursive tensions that have shaped the interpretation and reception of Aboriginal art to foreground the complicated but significant place it has come to hold in national culture.' (Introduction)
