'Bad Aboriginal Art is the extraordinary account of Eric Michaels’ period of residence and work with the Warlpiri Aborigines of western Central Australia, where he studied the impact of television on remote Aboriginal communities.'
'Sharp, exact, and unrelentingly honest, Michaels records with an extraordinary combination of distance and immersion the intervention of technology into a remote Aboriginal community and that community’s forays into the technology of broadcasting. Michaels’s analyses in Bad Aboriginal Art will disrupt and redirect current debates surrounding the theory and practice of anthropology, ethnography, film and video making, communications policy, and media studies - no less than his work has already disrupted and redirected the cultural technologies of both the Warlpiri and Australian technocrats.' (Source: Publisher's website)
This works contains:
A primer of restrictions on picture-taking in traditional areas of Aboriginal Australia
Aboriginal content: who's got it - who needs it?
Western Desert sandpainting and postmodernism
Hundreds shot at Aboriginal community: ABC makes TV documentary at Yuendumu
Hollywood iconography: a Warlpiri reading
For a cultural future: Francis Jupurrurla makes TV at Yuendumu
If "all anthropologists are liars..."
Bad Aboriginal art
Para-ethnography
Postscript: My essay on postmodernism.
