Hope, Ethics and Disenchantment: a critical sociological inquiry into the Aboriginal phenomenon

by Laura Fisher A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD () University of NSW 2012

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Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

Surname or Family name: Fisher

First name: Laura Other name/s:

Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: PhD (Sociology)

School: Social Sciences and International Studies Faculty: Faculty of & Social Sciences

Title: Hope, Ethics and Disenchantment: a critical sociological inquiry into the Aboriginal art phenomenon

Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE)

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art art has come to occupy a significant space in cultural landscape. It has also achieved international recognition as one of the most interesting aesthetic movements of recent decades and has become highly valuable within the . Yet there is much that remains obscure about Aboriginal art. It seems at once unstoppable and precarious: an effervescent cultural renaissance that is highly vulnerable to malign forces. This thesis brings a critical sociological perspective to bear upon the unruly character of the Aboriginal art phenomenon. It adopts a reflexive and interdisciplinary approach that brings into dialogue scholarship from several fields, including , and criticism, post-colonial critique, sociology of art and culture, theories of modernity, theories of cross-cultural brokerage and Australian political history. By taking this approach, the thesis is able to illuminate the intellectual and aesthetic practices, social movements and political events that have been constitutive of Aboriginal art‟s meaning and value from the late 19th Century to the present. It foregrounds the various social, political and economic causes to which Aboriginal art has been anchored, and reveals the contingencies of Aboriginal art‟s status as both a genre of and a highly symbolic and commercialized form of visual culture. It also reveals that the entities of the Aboriginal art object and the Aboriginal have an extraordinary motility within the clashing frames of the Aboriginal fine arts movement, the speculative Aboriginal art market, and the Aboriginal arts and culture industry.

Ultimately the thesis argues that Aboriginal art has been a theatre for the redemptive project pursued by governments and civil society in post-assimilation to repair Indigenous/non-indigenous relations, that it has been a significant medium for transnational post-colonial critique, and that it has resonated strongly with disenchanted perspectives on industrial capitalist modernity. It reveals the myriad ways in which the politics of the Settler State have been refracted through the Aboriginal art arena, and shows that Aboriginal art has been enmeshed within utopian and dystopian currents of thought about art, Indigenous social justice and modernity.

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Acknowledgements

This thesis was supported by the inaugural Petre Foundation scholarship, and I wish to thank Daniel Petre for his generosity in selecting this project, and for his kind and personable support. I am also indebted to all the people with whom I conducted interviews, listed in Appendix 1. Even though I have not been able to draw upon them all directly, they proved to be invaluable and frequently challenged my assumptions on a range of issues. There are several other individuals with whom I had valuable conversations in which I was able to share my ideas candidly, including Michael Symonds, Chrischona Schmidt, Merryn Schriever, Olivia Bolton, Charlie Cooper, Lisa Stefanoff, Ann Snell, Christine Godden and Margo Neale. John Gardiner- Garden at the Australian Parliamentary Library was kind enough to look over a draft of the policy chronicle (Appendix 2), and I am grateful to him for his comments. I wish also to thank my co-supervisor Claudia Tazreiter for the feedback she provided me on draft chapters and for her always uplifting encouragement. Also deserving a mention are my comrades in the library post-grad lab, who made my final year in particular a surprisingly enjoyable one. In 2008 and 2009 I was fortunate to be able to work on the Storylines Project with Vivien Johnson and Tess Allas. Apart from being able to learn from and share ideas with them both, I know that the thesis was greatly enriched by the fact that the research I conducted as part of Storylines offered me a privileged viewpoint on the biographies and practices of Aboriginal from the non-remote regions of Australia. Sections of Chapter 4 were previously published in the article „The art/ binary: Post-colonial tensions within the Field of Australian Aboriginal Art‟ in Cultural Sociology 6(2). I thank the peer reviewers and editor David Inglis for their very helpful feedback which assisted me in refining the arguments presented in that chapter as a whole. Throughout the project I have reflected on my good fortune in having been supervised by Paul Jones. He has always backed the exploratory side of this thesis and encouraged me to maintain a wide scope. I am most thankful for his bird‟s eye perspective on what I was aiming to achieve, his pragmatism and his attention to the minutiae of the project. I have always valued our humorous meandering discussions, with their never distracting digressions, and appreciated the fact that we were able to deal lightly with the heavier issues. This thesis was slowed somewhat by my having a son, Max, in October 2009, but not as much as it might have due to the support I have received from family members. My mother, Wendy Loefler, and mother-in-law, Gillian Roberts, met the challenge as grandmothers and without them I would not have been able to complete this project within a reasonable time frame. Gillian also generously offered to look over several draft chapters, and identified more than a few grammatical errors. I am also grateful to my brother Tom and father Andy for their support, and to Max himself for being such a clear eyed observer of life and a delight to come home to. My final thanks are extended to my husband, Jamie. I am blessed not only that you have embraced your parental role so wholeheartedly, but that you have been my intellectual companion with whom I have always been able to discuss and resolve the problems posed by this project. Not least, the thesis has benefited substantially from your incisive editorial eye.

Abstract

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art has come to occupy a significant space in the Australian cultural landscape. It has also achieved international recognition as one of the most interesting aesthetic movements of recent decades and has become highly valuable within the art market. Yet there is much that remains obscure about Aboriginal art. It seems at once unstoppable and precarious: an effervescent cultural renaissance that is highly vulnerable to malign forces. This thesis brings a critical sociological perspective to bear upon the unruly character of the Aboriginal art phenomenon. It adopts a reflexive and interdisciplinary approach that brings into dialogue scholarship from several fields, including anthropology of art, art history and criticism, post- colonial critique, sociology of art and culture, theories of modernity, theories of cross- cultural brokerage and Australian political history. By taking this approach, the thesis is able to illuminate the intellectual and aesthetic practices, social movements and political events that have been constitutive of Aboriginal art‟s meaning and value from the late 19th Century to the present. It foregrounds the various social, political and economic causes to which Aboriginal art has been anchored, and reveals the contingencies of Aboriginal art‟s status as both a genre of fine art and a highly symbolic and commercialized form of visual culture. It also reveals that the entities of the Aboriginal art object and the Aboriginal artist have an extraordinary motility within the clashing frames of the Aboriginal fine arts movement, the speculative Aboriginal art market, and the Aboriginal arts and culture industry.

Ultimately the thesis argues that Aboriginal art has been a theatre for the redemptive project pursued by governments and civil society in post-assimilation Australia to repair Indigenous/non-indigenous relations, that it has been a significant medium for transnational post-colonial critique, and that it has resonated strongly with disenchanted perspectives on industrial capitalist modernity. It reveals the myriad ways in which the politics of the Settler State have been refracted through the Aboriginal art arena, and shows that Aboriginal art has been enmeshed within utopian and dystopian currents of thought about art, Indigenous social justice and modernity.

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Contents

Acknowledgements ...... i

Abstract ...... ii

List of Abbreviations ...... x

Introduction 1

i. Opening remarks ...... 1

ii. Historical overview of Aboriginal art ...... 3

iii. Methodology ...... 8

iv. Chapter outline ...... 12

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1 Modernity and 15

1.1 Introduction and chapter outline ...... 15

1.2 The Great Exhibition tradition ...... 17

1.2.1 Aboriginal people and the Great Exhibitions ...... 21

1.3 Aboriginal people in seminal literature in the human sciences ...... 23

1.4 A history of the primitive ...... 27

1.4.1 , folkloricism and the Romantic movement ...... 28 1.4.2 Variations of primitivism in avant-garde movements ...... 31

1.5 Early connections between Aboriginal art and modernism ...... 35

1.5.1 The 1929 Primitive ...... 36 1.5.2 The UNESCO World Art Series publication – Australia: Aboriginal , (1954) ...... 40 1.5.3 Karel Kupka ...... 42

1.6 Australian modernism ...... 47

1.6.1 Aboriginalia, nationalism and tourism ...... 47 1.6.2 ...... 51

1.7 “The Australian aborigine definitely has good taste” (Adam, 1944:50): arty anthropologists ...... 55

1.7.1 Baldwin Spencer 1860-1929 ...... 55 1.7.2 A.P. Elkin 1891-1979 ...... 56 1.7.3 Frederick McCarthy 1905-1997 ...... 58 1.7.4 Charles P. Mountford 1890-1976 ...... 60 1.7.5 Leonhard Adam 1891-1960 ...... 62 1.7.6 Ronald Berndt 1916-1990 and Catherine Berndt 1918-1994 ...... 63 1.7.7 Lesser characters and summary remarks ...... 64

1.8 Conclusion ...... 65

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2 Governance, Nationhood and Civil Society 71

2.1 Introduction and chapter outline ...... 71

2.2 Understanding Aboriginal art subsidy ...... 74

2.2.1 Work ...... 75 2.2.2 Welfare ...... 78 2.2.3 The ambiguity of Aboriginal art industry policy ...... 81

2.3 Negotiating new intercultural relationships in the post-assimilation era ...... 83

2.3.1 Cultural trauma in Australian public culture ...... 83 2.3.2 The end of assimilation and the rise of „Aboriginality‟ and redemptive nationhood . 85 2.3.3 Paul Keating, indigenised settler nationalism and Reconciliation...... 91

2.4 Aboriginal people mobilising Aboriginal art ...... 93

2.4.1 Aboriginal art mobilised in political and legal domains ...... 93 2.4.2 The urban context: Aboriginal art, activism and pan-Aboriginal . identity ...... 96 2.4.3 Urban Indigenous aesthetic public spheres ...... 101

2.5 The State mobilising Aboriginal art ...... 103

2.5.1 The acquisition, endorsement and appropriation of Aboriginal art and the growth of Aboriginal public culture ...... 104

2.6 Constituting “Aboriginal culture” at the nexus of justice, recognition and redemption...... 110

2.6.1 Cultural rights, cultural loss and keeping culture strong ...... 111 2.6.2 Aboriginal culture and heritage as Australia‟s culture and heritage ...... 116 2.6.3 Aboriginal art as metonymic for Aboriginal culture...... 118

2.7 Conclusion ...... 123

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3 The Emergence of Contemporary Aboriginal art in the 1980s 125

3.1 Introduction and chapter outline ...... 125

3.2 The Australian in the 1980s ...... 128

3.3 The and provincialism ...... 129

3.4 The emergence of contemporary Aboriginal art ...... 131

3.5 Artistic and critical approaches to Aboriginal art ...... 133

3.5.1 Cultural convergence and rapprochement ...... 133 3.5.2 “Killing me softly”: cultural colonialism and ethnocide ...... 136 3.5.3 Landscape and tribalism...... 138 3.5.4 Appropriation ...... 139 3.5.5 and conceptualism ...... 142 3.5.6 Social justice ...... 146

3.6 Tensions around the overseas reception of Aboriginal art ...... 147

3.7 Post-colonial critique and urban Aboriginal voices ...... 153

3.8 The Bicentennial ...... 157

3.9 Conclusion ...... 159

4 Negotiating Difference 163

4.1 Introduction and chapter outline ...... 163

4.2 Facets of difference ...... 165

4.3 The cosmopolitan and the tourist: being an outsider with Aboriginal art ...... 170

4.4 Authenticity and “the story” ...... 172 vii

4.5 The Art/Anthropology binary ...... 177

4.5.1 “Without its meaning an object, however well executed, is dead, absolutely and irrevocably dead” (Berndt, 1950:187): Art vs Anthropology ...... 182 4.5.2 Western secularisation and the differentiation of Primitive art ...... 187 4.5.3 Anthropology, colonialism and the urban Aboriginal ...... 189 4.5.4 Difficulties around writing about Aboriginal art ...... 193 4.6 Conclusion ...... 196

5 Aboriginal Art, Money and the Market 201

5.1 Introduction and chapter outline ...... 201

5.2 Aboriginal fine art and Aboriginal mass culture ...... 203

5.2.1 A brief history of the Aboriginal fine arts market ...... 203 5.2.2 The evolution of “Aboriginal mass culture” ...... 205 5.2.3 Aboriginal art and the cultural industries ...... 210 5.2.4 Locating Aboriginal fine art within the arena of Aboriginal mass culture ...... 214

5.3 Commercialism and speculation in the Aboriginal art market ...... 216

5.4 The bifurcation of the Aboriginal art market ...... 222

5.5 A theoretical interlude on the relationship between art and money ...... 226

5.5.1 The Culture Industry ...... 227 5.5.2 Where can I find disinterested Aboriginal art? ...... 229 5.5.3 Kitsch and the “original reproduction” ...... 235 5.5.4 The ambivalent status of “low” culture and its relevance to urban/remote distinctions ...... 238

5.6 Ethics and exploitation ...... 241

5.6.1 Sympathetic engagements with Aboriginal art ...... 241 5.6.2 Altruistic initiatives ...... 242 5.6.3 Good and bad conduct in the Aboriginal art market ...... 244 5.6.4 Reflections and implications ...... 249

5.7 Conclusion ...... 252

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6 Concluding Remarks 253

6.1 Three sets of ethical problems...... 254

6.1.1 Redemptive nationhood ...... 254 6.1.2 The trans-national post-colonial movement ...... 255 6.1.3 The disenchanted western subject ...... 256

6.2 A utopian/dystopian dialectic ...... 260

6.3 Reflections on Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations ...... 264

References 269

Appendix 1: Interviewees 317

Appendix 2: Policy Chronicle 321

A.1 Early stages: 1960s - 1972...... 321

A.2 Whitlam Labor Government 1972-1975...... 322

A.3 Fraser Liberal Government 1975-1983...... 328

A.4 Hawke Labor Government 1983-1991 ...... 332

A.5 Keating Labor Government 1991-1996 ...... 340

A.6 Howard Liberal Government 1996-2007 ...... 346

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List of Abbreviations

AAAL: Aboriginal Arts Australia Ltd AAB: Aboriginal Arts Board ABA: Australian Bicentennial Authority AAC: Aboriginal Arts and Crafts Pty Ltd ACISS: Arts and Crafts Industry Support Strategy ADC: Aboriginal Development ANKAA: Association of Northern, Kimberley and Arnhem Aboriginal Artists AGNSW: of NSW AIATSIS: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies ATSIAB: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board ATSIAC: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Committee ATSIC: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission CAR: Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation CDEP: Community Development Employment Program DAA: Department of Aboriginal Affairs DEET: Department of Employment, Education and Training Desart: Association of Central Australian Aboriginal Art and Craft Centres DEWR: Department of Employment and Workplace Relations DoCA: Department of Communications and DCITA: Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts ECITA: Department of Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts HREOC: and Equal Opportunity Commission NAC: National Aboriginal Conference NACC: National Aboriginal Consultative Committee NACISS: National Arts and Crafts Industry Support Strategy NACIS: National Arts and Crafts Industry Support NGA: National Gallery of Australia RCIADIC: Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody SOCOG: Organising Committee for the

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Introduction

i. Opening remarks

To what can we attribute the remarkable rise of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art1 over the last four decades? We may point to the unique aesthetic power of dozens of art works, and the dynamism of Aboriginal art‟s endlessly multiplying styles and mediums. We may also argue that the symbolic content we find in much Aboriginal art, and the art‟s evocation of a sacred natural world, gives it wide appeal among people who may not otherwise engage with art, particularly in an era dominated by . However we will overlook a great deal if we limit our inquiry to discussions of content and ; that is, if we merely treat Aboriginal art as an “art movement”. Unless we also consider the often problematic negotiation of Indigenous identity and Indigenous people‟s status in post-colonial Australia, we will achieve only a shallow understanding of the reasons for Aboriginal art‟s success in the marketplace and its ubiquity in Australian public culture. It is no coincidence that Aboriginal art‟s emergence in the 1970s corresponded with the period during which the federal government dismantled the segregationist and assimilationist paradigms of Indigenous policy that had prevailed for much of the 20th Century. In many ways the story of Aboriginal art can be read as the poetic manifestation of two interrelated projects of the post-assimilation era: on the one hand, an oppressed people‟s struggle for emancipation

1 These days “Aboriginal art”, „Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art”, “ATSI Art”, “Indigenous Art” and “Indigenous ” (and vice versa) are all used to describe the category of work under discussion here. I will usually refer to “Aboriginal art”, as it remains the most common. With respect to references to “Aboriginal” or “Indigenous” people, both “Aboriginal” and “Indigenous” are used in the discourses I have drawn on and both have been argued to be problematic or appropriate in different contexts. In light of the irresolvability of this problem, and in keeping with the inconsistencies in my sources, I have not chosen to use either term exclusively. 1

and recognition, and on the other, a programme pursued by sequential governments and members of civil society to reconstruct Australia in a redemptive, inclusive and culturally refreshed vein, to embrace Indigenous people‟s difference and establish a positive space for that difference within the nation. With regard to the latter, were it not for the fact that Australian governments have consistently treated Aboriginal art and culture as vehicles to address a legion of political, social and economic concerns, Aboriginal art would now have a very different status. Altogether, since the late 1960s a medley of usually disparate aesthetic, cultural, governmental and economic interests has driven a tumultuous Aboriginal art “industry” that now seems at once unstoppable and precarious.

This thesis offers a sociological analysis of the Aboriginal art phenomenon, paying particular attention to the tensions underpinning Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations in Australia and the various ethical problems that have been formative of the art‟s meaning and have driven its circulation. With this in mind, it may be useful to regard this thesis as an investigation of the intersection of ethics and aesthetics in a particular cross-cultural setting. It is founded on three key areas of inquiry. The first of these pertains to a set of philosophical and aesthetic responses to the conditions of modernity that help us understand occidental audiences‟ attraction to and negotiation of Aboriginal art. The second is concerned with the history of Australian Settler-State, both with respect to Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations and Australia‟s imagined place in the world. The third attends to the conventions of the fine arts arena: its discourses, creeds, institutions and experts, and its convoluted treatment of the art object as commodity. This layered approach means that the thesis maps out a series of converging histories: a history of ideas about the Other of modernity (with a focus on Aboriginality); a history of the ideals and aspirations of Indigenous people, civil society and the State that have driven the Aboriginal art industry; and a history of the art arena‟s negotiation of a somewhat iconoclastic genre of art and the idiosyncratic settings of its production.

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ii. Historical overview of Aboriginal art

The Aboriginal art arena encompasses an extremely diverse body of creative practices. To understand the reasons for the eclecticism of the category of “Aboriginal art”, it is necessary to both review the pre-colonial foundations of Aboriginal expressive forms, and consider how current forms of Aboriginal art have been shaped by the uneven history of colonialism in Australia. Prior to colonisation, a highly complex visual language, in conjunction with song, dance and performance, articulated and affirmed totemic identities, ancestral histories, and the moral infrastructure of Indigenous society. These forms narrated the “Dreaming”, a temporally unbounded body of religious knowledge that explains the origin of all life, presents the natural environment as embodying the essence of creation beings, and dictates people‟s obligations to care for the land.23 Prior to colonisation, and for some tribes up to the middle-late 20th century, Indigenous people were semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers with ties to strictly differentiated areas of land. There were hundreds of linguistically distinct nations, and the practicalities of survival within each distinct territory were founded in an inalienable familial, moral and legal order (Sutton [ed], 1988; Rose, 1996).

The first British colonies were established in the South-East of the continent in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and many Indigenous nations in these areas were partially or wholly destroyed by frontier warfare, disease and the depletion of food sources. Vast areas of the desert interior and the northern tropics remained relatively free of European settlement well into the 20th century. Until the 1920s, Aboriginal people were subject to ad hoc policies of racial segregation or “protection”, which were underpinned by the belief that they would eventually die out. Between the 1930s and the early 1970s, assimilation policies were instituted by governments throughout Australia. These policies often involved the forced removal of entire communities from traditional

2 “Dreaming” is the English word used to refer to this body of religious knowledge. 3 The nature of Aboriginal people‟s relationship to their land is poignantly conveyed by Stanner:

No English words are good enough to give a sense of the links between an aboriginal group and its homeland. Our word “home”, warm and suggestive though it be, does not match the aboriginal word that may mean “camp”, “hearth”, “country”, “everlasting home”, “totem place”, “life source”, “spirit centre” and much else all in one.... The aboriginal would speak of “earth” and use the word in a richly symbolic way to mean his “shoulder” or his “side”.... A different tradition leaves us tongueless and earless towards this other world of meaning and significance (1968:44). 3

lands to centralised reserves, missions and towns, and the removal of Indigenous children from their families to be placed with white carers or in institutions. A web of intrusive and often punitive State control sought to expunge all language and cultural knowledge from these wards of state, with the ideal that Indigenous people of mixed ancestry would eventually “blend in” with the white population (Stanner, 1968; McGrath [ed], 1995; National Inquiry, 1997; Haebich, 2000).

From the first decades of settlement, pastoralists, government officials, navy and army servicemen, naturalists, anthropologists, museum collectors and travellers acquired cultural objects from Indigenous people, often by trading them for tobacco and other goods. At the mission stations, Indigenous wards were often encouraged to produce artefacts, paintings on bark (unique to Arnhem Land), curios and small craft and textile items decorated with Indigenous motifs, to be sold in the larger towns, usually to raise money for the settlements (Jones, 1988; Moore, 2006; Taçon & Davies, 2004). As will be discussed in detail in the first chapter, these objects were widely circulated from the early years of the 20th Century, and particularly in the interwar years. The first Aboriginal artist to receive wide acclaim was , a Western Arrente man based in Hermannsberg in Central Australia. In 1936 Namatjira received a small amount of tuition from the visiting non-Indigenous watercolourist Rex Batterbee, and was encouraged to paint by Friedrich Albrecht, the Pastor of the Lutheran Mission within which Namatjira had been born and raised. His watercolours of the region quickly gained attention and became extremely popular among the non-Indigenous public, and he achieved celebrity status in the 1940s and 1950s as a kind of exotic icon of assimilation. Many of his descendents and affiliates learnt from him and established what is now known as the . The Australian art establishment disdained Namatjira‟s popularity and regarded him as a mere imitator of western technique, and it is only in recent decades that his work has been re-evaluated. Regardless, he has inspired generations of Aboriginal artists across the country, and was the first Aboriginal artist to communicate to non-Indigenous audiences that much of Aboriginal art expresses a deep communion with the land (French, 2002; Kleinert, 1988a).

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When the Whitlam Labor government introduced its self-determination policy in 1972, Indigenous people in remote regions were encouraged to return to their traditional lands, a move made possible by welfare support. As Altman writes, this „outstations movement‟, along with other initiatives such as the formation of the Aboriginal Arts Board (AAB) and a Land Rights Commission (both in 1973), instigated a „cultural renaissance spearheaded by practice‟ (2005a: 4). In 1972 the Tula Artists cooperative was founded by Aboriginal men in Papunya, a remote government settlement which had been established in 1959 to administer a number of Central Desert tribes. Several of these men had been producing and artefacts in previous years and were affiliated with the Hermannsburg watercolour school, however it was with the arrival of , an erudite, sympathetic and idealistic school art teacher, that the Papunya painting “movement” was established in 1971-1972. Bardon encouraged the men to produce acrylic paintings on small boards of their Dreamings, in a strictly symbolic and non-representational style drawn in part from sacred sand and body paintings. With the indispensible financial support of the AAB and the efforts of a few pioneering collectors, Art Centre coordinators and museum professionals, these works eventually found a place in the contemporary Australian art world (Bardon, 1999; Myers, 2002; Johnson [ed], 2007). In the following decades, art production spread to other parts of the desert and was taken up by women. The tradition, which had its origins in the decoration of the walls of bark shelters, and body painting, flourished in Arnhem Land, and wood traditions from around the country were increasingly seen in sculptural terms (Taylor, 1996; Morphy, 2008). During the 1970s and early 1980s, the AAB and Aboriginal Arts and Crafts Pty Ltd (AAC) (also a government body) facilitated the sale and exhibition of Aboriginal art works at outlets in major cities, and underwrote the fledgling Art Centres (Peterson, 1983).

The art currently produced in remote regions of Australia usually has continuity with forms of pre-colonial cultural production, such as those mentioned above, as well as carved wooden tools, weapons, decorated sacred objects and woven baskets and bags. Aboriginal artists from urban and non-remote regions of Australia are more engaged with Western cultural forms and art genres (some are art-school graduates), though they may also reclaim and reinterpret historical practices. Therefore “Aboriginal

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art” today encompasses paintings which are produced with both natural and synthetic mediums and supports, and locally specific art forms such as pearl shell and egg carvings, possum-skin cloaks, hollow log coffins, carved or woven spirit figures, shell necklaces, painted ceramics, and various forms of fibre art. and fabric design are practised in a number of communities, while many urban Aboriginal artists work with photography, digital technologies, video and installation. , and other such items continue to be widely circulated within the tourist market (although they are not always produced by Indigenous people). Currently there are approximately 100 Aboriginal Art Centres that facilitate art production in remote areas. Modelled to some degree on Artists, these are usually artists‟ cooperatives with a communal structure. The artists, who often remain tribally oriented with low levels of financial and English literacy, employ an Art Centre coordinator who in almost all cases is a non-Indigenous person. These coordinators are required to mediate between the markedly different domains of remote communities and the cosmopolitan art market. Many artists also sell directly to dealers, wholesalers and other intermediaries who either visit the artists, or are based in , the largest town in central Australia with a large, transient Indigenous population.

Aboriginal art entered the contemporary fine art world following the inclusion of artists from Papunya and Arnhem Land in major institutional exhibitions such as the 1979 Sydney and the 1981 and 1983 Australian Perspectas, and the acquisition of works by State galleries in the mid 1980s. At this time Aboriginal artists from urban areas also began forming collectives and exhibiting. In the mid-1990s Sotheby‟s began staging exclusive Aboriginal art auctions which cemented the art‟s place in the Australian fine arts market, and auction houses now monopolise the secondary market for Aboriginal art. Some Aboriginal art works have achieved prices comparable with those achieved by highly-valued, non-Indigenous Australian works, and this has been partly due to the interest of overseas collectors (Australian Aboriginal Artists, 2012). There is some indication that the resale market peaked in the years 2007 and 2008. All State galleries now have Aboriginal art on permanent display with dedicated departments and , and major exhibitions of regional styles and individual artists have taken place since the 1980s. Key overseas exhibitions that attracted serious

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collecting interest include Dreamings (Sutton [ed], 1988), which toured North America in 1988-1989, and Aratjara (Lüthi & Lee [eds], 1993), which toured to Art Museums in in 1993-1994. There are now over 300 vendors of Aboriginal art in Australia, ranging from tourist-oriented retailers to dealers of Aboriginal fine art. The annual value of Aboriginal fine art has grown from $2.5 million in 1980 to recent estimates of between $100 million and $300 million (Indigenous art – securing the future, 2007). A final point to be made is that while the category of “Aboriginal art” is remarkably heterogeneous, art professionals and writers clearly differentiate between “remote” and “urban” Aboriginal art, and it is usually very easy for art audiences to place an Aboriginal art work in either of these categories. “Remote Aboriginal art” is produced in the Central and Western Deserts, the “Top End”, and Alice Springs, and is created by artists who do not have an education but draw on traditional knowledge and ceremonial designs to make work about their particular Dreamings and Country. “Urban Aboriginal art” is a disputed but enduring label for the art produced by Aboriginal artists who reside in metropolitan centres and rural towns who, for the most part, have had a tertiary level art education (Caruana & Isaacs [eds], 1990). The most successful of these are often cosmopolitan in their outlook and mobilise the discourses and genres of postmodern and conceptual contemporary art (although they may reclaim and reinterpret historical practices within these paradigms). As the outline above has intimated, the differentiation of “urban” from “remote” to some extent reflects the unevenness of Australia‟s colonisation process, because the latter reside in areas that were settled only recently, or very marginally. As Mundine (2009a) and many others have argued, the distinction between “urban” and “remote” Aboriginal art is problematic because the life-paths of many Aboriginal artists do not correspond to this crude geographic contrast. Nevertheless, for want of a better option, I will employ these terms throughout the thesis.

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iii. Methodology

The thesis draws on a large body of primary source material such as newspaper articles, , government discourses and policy documents. I also draw on over 30 interviews conducted with collectors, curators, art dealers and other professionals. While I quote from some of these interviews, the need for brevity has meant that they for the most part inform the thesis only obliquely. This thesis is also informed by my documented observations of exhibitions, art auctions and other events as well as the ideas exchanged in many informal discussions I have had with people engaged with Aboriginal art.

There are three scholarly frameworks that have been brought to bear upon Aboriginal art: anthropology, art historical and critical discourses, and what can loosely be described as perspectives grounded in post-colonial critique, identity politics and theories of cultural difference. The tensions that exist between these different approaches have been identified by several authors, and there is also a great deal of literature which transcends their respective limitations.4 However, to some extent scholarship on Aboriginal art remains constrained by the inclinations of these three traditions. Anthropological discourses are usually founded in the researchers‟ identification with, and advocacy for the particular communities with whom they work, and are concerned with conveying those people‟s cultural traditions and values to a world that is for the most part hostile or indifferent to them. Art history and criticism tends to reproduce a heroic narrative of the art movement that focuses on “great” individual artists and celebrates the aesthetic attributes of a highly select group of art objects. It usually engages with political and social issues only to the extent that these issues constitute challenges and inspiration for the artists and find expression in their work. Interpretations of Aboriginal art that are guided by post-colonial and cultural difference perspectives, including those articulated by Indigenous people, are often concerned primarily with instances of racism and injustice and with giving voice to the marginal. Such approaches are frequently founded upon a critique of unequal power relationships, and treat Aboriginal art as a form of resistance to oppression.

4 See for instance Sutton (1989; 1992a); Myers (1994; 1998; 2002); Morphy (2001; 2008); McLean (1998; 2011a; 2011b); Smith (2001; 2002); Langton (2008a). 8

As the reader will gauge from the extent to which I draw upon these literatures, I have a great respect for and am indebted to the work of scholars affiliated with these three broad fields. I am also highly sympathetic to the cause of advocating for Aboriginal artists and their work and to the cause of advocating for Indigenous rights – indeed, this sympathy galvanised the project. However the reflexive character of my research, particularly with respect to understanding the ethical concerns that pervade the Aboriginal art arena, has meant that I have made critical reflection on these modes of analysis a part of my investigation (see Wolff, 2008). Such an approach seems to me to be essential to any honest scrutiny of the Aboriginal art phenomenon and the density of Aboriginal art‟s meanings.

This thesis adopts an interdisciplinary approach that brings into dialogue scholarship from several fields in addition to anthropologies of art, art history and criticism and postcolonial critique. These fields include the sociology of art and culture, theories of modernity, , analysis, theories of cross-cultural brokerage and consumption, Indigenous studies and Australian political history. Ultimately this interdisciplinarity is grounded in a critical sociological perspective, because it seems best suited to elucidating the nexus between the social, political and aesthetic phenomena with which I am concerned. Inherent to this perspective is the understanding that art is socially produced and that it is a repository of cultural information that exceeds the intentions of the artist (Shiner, 2001; Wolff, 1981; 1983; 2008; Bourdieu, 1984; 1993). From this point of view, art can be treated as an arena of experimentation and contestation rather than a finite and transcendent entity (Eyerman, 2006). Furthermore, sociological literatures on art illuminate the structures, discourses and ideas that catalyse and organise the making of art, and pay close attention to the manner in which art is validated and made into a valuable commodity (Velthuis, 2005). In this vein I argue that we can only achieve a nuanced understanding of the Aboriginal art phenomenon if we foreground the historic, economic, social and political conditions of the art‟s production and circulation. With these general points in mind, there are several reasons why a critical sociological perspective is merited for this particular project. First, many art conventions at the level of curatorship, art criticism, commercial conduct and so on are

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severely strained when they are brought to bear upon Aboriginal art. A critical sociological perspective demystifies these conventions and therefore enables us to gain a clear view of the factors that underlie the many points of strain that are analysed in the thesis. Second, such a perspective offers resources for exploring the role of nationalistic, governmental and mercenary forces in Aboriginal art‟s story, and for considering the gamut of Aboriginal cultural production from fine art works to tourist products to widely dispersed licensed imagery. With the exception of discourses that are concerned with the commercial exploitation of Aboriginal artists, these facets of Aboriginal art are frequently discussed in a cursory or piecemeal fashion, or reduced to conjectural and polemical claims (though see Altman, McGuidan & Yu, 1989; Lovitt, 2000; Myers 2002; Thomas, 1999). I have tried to provide a range of concrete examples of the ways in which Aboriginal art exceeds the domain of art and circulates within Australian public culture. By paying sustained historiographic and analytical attention to these dimensions of Aboriginal art, it is possible to elucidate Aboriginal art‟s symbolic meanings within Australian society. Third, given that I am treating Aboriginal art as an intercultural phenomenon and examining the various ethical problems that are salient to it, the activities of those individuals who are engaged in the facilitation and mediation as opposed to the production of Aboriginal art are of central concern in this thesis. Sociological theories of art offer the tools for pursuing a substantial engagement with the agendas and conduct of these individuals, all of which can tell us much about how the tensions that underlie Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations in the Settler-State are refracted through the Aboriginal art arena.

My approach to the ethical problems that permeate the Aboriginal art arena requires some explanation. Throughout the thesis I will use the term „ethical problems‟ to refer broadly to matters of conscience that arise in relation to Aboriginal art and Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations, that is, to the contemplation of how justice and equality might be achieved, and to efforts to redress wrongs, ameliorate suffering and contribute to wellbeing. In taking this approach I wish to invoke an everyday understanding of ethics: a great variety of ethical arguments are presented in the discourses with which I engage and rather than cloak these in an overarching theory, I wish for them to speak for themselves.

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I have kept some distance from the artists‟ domain, an approach for which I have been criticised. While I frequently draw on artists‟ discourses and the expertise of those who have worked within the artists‟ domain, I have not interviewed artists or visited remote community Art Centres. This was a deliberate , designed to avoid the pitfalls of attempting to do too much and of conclusions from what would unavoidably have been inadequate fieldwork. I hope to have made this distance a strength: not only is it the case that valuable insights can be reached if one does not become personally invested in relationships with artists, but most non-Indigenous people view remote community art production from afar, and their perspective is an important facet of my investigation. In taking this approach, I am by no means suggesting that Aboriginal artists are not agents in this story, I have simply not made this agency the focus of my inquiry.

The thesis is thematic in its approach and therefore does not unfold chronologically. While many sections have historiographic depth, as a whole it does not provide the kind of comprehensive sequential account of the Aboriginal art movement that an art historian might. By way of compensation, the thesis has a lengthy appendix (Appendix 2) consisting of a chronology of the political and policy environment in which the Aboriginal art industry has evolved from the late 1960s to the present. This chronicle explains how Aboriginal art production and circulation have been facilitated by governments, and considers the agendas driving these policies. It also reviews the political events that fostered the growing appreciation of Aboriginal art and culture in Australian society and provoked particular kinds of artistic expression and advocacy. Even though parts of this chronicle will be familiar to some readers, and writers such as Myers (2001; 2002), Altman et. al (1989), Rowse (1985; 2000a) and McLean (1998) have detailed parts of this history, to my knowledge there has been no such sustained mapping of the intersections between Aboriginal affairs policy, Australian arts and cultural policies, and the Aboriginal art movement/industry. The majority of the thesis focuses on the historical period covered in this chronicle, and the reader will be encouraged to review sections of the appendix when some historical orientation would assist their understanding of the issue under discussion.

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iv. Chapter outline

Chapter 1 reviews the commercial, intellectual, popular and aesthetic frameworks which shaped the ways in which Aboriginal subjectivity and culture were conceptualised in the modern period.5 Its early sections are largely concerned with how the primitive subject – which Aboriginal were judged to exemplify at this time - was imagined within a range of settings, including the Great Exhibitions which were vital to the legitimisation of Imperial expansionism, and European scholarly and aesthetic movements from the late 18th to the mid-20th Centuries. The chapter then explores how these endeavours, particularly the cross-fertilising discourses of anthropology and psychoanalysis which inspired modernist primitivist idioms, were constitutive of the way Aboriginal material culture was interpreted and endorsed in the early to mid 20th century within Australia and Europe. Later sections focus on the interwar period in Australia, when Aboriginal art came into circulation in a manner that bears the mark of Australia‟s peculiarly popular and nationalistic brand of modernism. I explore the proliferation of commercialised and appropriated Aboriginalia, the practice of artists such as Margaret Preston, and the activities of several anthropologists who were sensitive to the aesthetic qualities of Aboriginal cultural objects in a modernist vein. Chapter 2 is concerned with the fact that Aboriginal art has become a dynamic arena of negotiation at the interface between Aboriginal people, the State and Australian civil society. The central contention of the chapter is that Aboriginal art has been “put to work” by these three entities to serve a range of agendas, many of which are inflected with ethical concerns. Its sections traverse the areas of cultural policy (relating to the arts, heritage, tourism, nationalistic public culture and the decade of Reconciliation), socio-economic objectives relating to Aboriginal disadvantage, campaigns for Indigenous rights that have taken place in activist and legal settings, and the political basis of the urban Aboriginal arts movement. The chapter is also concerned with the

5 In this thesis the term „modern‟ will sometimes refer to the historical period of modernity while at other times it refers to modernism as an aesthetic movement. While it is common practice to treat the latter as a proper noun in order to make this distinction clear, I have chosen to rely on context instead in order to avoid the cluttered effect of overcapitalisation. This problem does not arise in relation to other aesthetic movements that will be discussed in the thesis and thus Romanticism, for instance, will be capitalized. I will also capitalize terms that refer to particular political movements in Australia, such as Land Rights and Reconciliation. 12

redemptive and inclusive narratives that circulate in Australian civic discourse and visual culture. Ultimately I show that the symbolic formulations of Aboriginality that have been generated across these different settings have been constitutive of the meanings that have accrued to Aboriginal art in the post-assimilation era. Chapter 3 focuses on the decade of the 1980s, when Aboriginal art came to be treated as a contemporary art movement. At this time the Australian art world was experiencing a period of dramatic reformation and expansion, and the chapter reviews the changing circumstances upon which the emergence of contemporary Aboriginal art was predicated. It also analyses the ways in which Australian art practitioners, writers and professionals responded to the challenges posed by Aboriginal art, Aboriginal identity and the Aboriginal social justice movements of the day. Chapter 4 examines the way Aboriginal difference is negotiated in the Aboriginal art arena. Perspectives on the ethnic specificity of Aboriginal art and Aboriginal artists determine to a great extent how the art is appraised, and these perspectives are both an asset and an encumbrance within the contemporary art world. This chapter takes this fact as a starting point and explores the way Art norms and ascriptions of value are brought to bear on the ethnic specificity of Aboriginal art, and upon the wider social, political and moral questions that attend to Aboriginal identity. It examines the ways in which these differences are represented or obfuscated in the Aboriginal art arena and provides a detailed analysis of a particular discursive motif around which the various perspectives on Aboriginal difference crystallise: the Art/Anthropology (or Art/Ethnography) binary. Chapter 5 locates the recently established market for Aboriginal fine arts within the much larger and more established arena of Aboriginal “mass culture”, which encompasses forms of Aboriginal art that have a commercial, touristic and/or applied character. It draws upon theoretical literatures concerned with the relationship between Art and money and between “high” and “low” culture, literatures which provide a useful vantage point from which to analyse the idiosyncratic nature of the Aboriginal art market. This chapter also explores the variety of ways in which ethical issues that arise within the Aboriginal art market are negotiated. The 6th and concluding chapter focuses on the ethical problems traversed in the preceding chapters. It sharpens the argument at the core of the thesis: that Aboriginal art

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has been a vehicle for a range of altruistic impulses and projects. It shows that the many tensions and debates discussed throughout the thesis cluster around three categories of ethical problems. The first revolves around the specific history of the Australian Settler State, the current circumstances of Australian Indigenous citizens, and the culpability of non-Indigenous people to Indigenous peoples‟ experiences of loss, suffering and disadvantage since colonisation. The second pertains to the trans-national post-colonial movement, which has seen Indigenous and minority groups claim a space within political, cultural and academic domains from which they make demands for justice and argue for the value of their cultural traditions. The third pertains to a long running reflexive project pursued by the disenchanted western subject of industrial capitalist modernity. Many features of Aboriginal art resonate with aspects of human experience to which people who are sensitive to this project look with nostalgia and hope. This chapter also draws together the various ways in which Aboriginal art has been anchored to economic, political/ideological, cultural and aesthetic aspirations, and proposes that a dialectical interplay of utopian and dystopian tendencies underpins the Aboriginal art phenomenon. It also offers some reflections in the current conditions of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations. I ultimately propose that Aboriginal art‟s trajectory in the post-assimilation era, and the utopian and dystopian currents of thought that have arisen in relation to it, can be understood in terms of the contradictory effects of various efforts to instrumentalise Aboriginal art to serve benevolent ends.

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Chapter 1: Modernity and Modernism

1.1 Introduction and chapter outline

The majority of this thesis is concerned with the circulation of Aboriginal art between the late 1960s and the present, however a deeper historical inquiry is required if we are to understand Aboriginal art‟s highly contested meanings in this era. This chapter provides a “prehistory” of Aboriginal art, one that explores a range of governmental, intellectual and poetic responses to the conditions of modernity in the West that form part of the story of modernism. The focus of this prehistory is twofold. First, it is concerned with the way the subjectivity and cultural practices of Aboriginal and other non-western peoples were imagined by Europeans, both in the context of European imperial expansion and in relation to Australia‟s emergence as a nation between the late 19th century and the 1950s. Second, it examines the tumultuous heritage of many current fine arts ideals by reviewing several scholarly and aesthetic movements of the modern period. These histories initiate several threads of analysis that run through the thesis, and these will be identified in the conclusion to the chapter.

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Section 1.2 discusses the Great Exhibitions of the late 19th century which established traditions of objectifying and consuming the exotic Other through the prisms of colonial conquest, evolutionist display and commercialised aesthetic spectacle. Aboriginal material culture or Aboriginal people themselves appeared in these Exhibitions on several occasions. Section 1.3 explores the way Aboriginal society became the exemplar of primitive humanity in several nascent fields in the human and social sciences – including anthropology and psychoanalysis - in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Section 1.4 continues the focus on primitivism, tracing the idea of the primitive from the writings of 18th century scholars that informed the Romantic Movement to the avant-garde movements of the 20th century. It seeks to show that besides their association with Empire and white supremacist thinking, strands of primitivism have been highly formative of and remain salient to our understanding of art, the artist and the artistic endeavour in the West, and are integral to a cluster of reflexive ideas about the vitiating effects of the conditions of modernity. Section 1.5 consists of a discussion of Aboriginal art‟s changing status in the early-mid 20th century. It looks at the way modern artists and intellectuals came to esteem Aboriginal art and brought modern, and specifically modern primitivist ideas to bear upon it. As Mclean (1998:66) has argued, „[t]he frontier sciences of anthropology and pyschoanalysis effectively made Aborigines the unconscious of modernity‟, and the three case studies presented in this section reveal that the fertile association between these fields helped to orient the burgeoning admiration of Aboriginal art. Section 1.6 shows how Aboriginal aesthetics were commodified and appropriated in a great variety of popular and applied art contexts in Australia between the 1930s and 1960s. The taste for Aboriginalia was associated with the nationalism of the interwar period and the need for signifiers of Australia‟s uniqueness. The singular project of artist Margaret Preston forms an important part of this story. This growth in recognition transpired tangentially to the trends of the Australian art world (an art world that was initially hostile to modernism), and was fomented in large part by “arty” anthropologists whose insights resonated with (or were tailored towards) modernist tastes, and Section 1.7 presents profiles of these anthropologists.

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1.2 The Great Exhibition tradition

The Great International Exposition of the Works of Industry of all Nations, held in London‟s purpose-built Crystal Palace in 1851, was the first of dozens of International Exhibitions that took place in cities in Europe, Asia, North America, Canada, India, and Australia in the decades leading up to World War II.6 These events are a fitting starting point for this discussion, because they are emblematic of the dramatic social changes that we associate with modernity, modernism and with the era of European colonial expansion. The Great Exhibitions instantiated a new conglomeration of civic obligations that encompassed patriotism, consumption and self-improvement achieved through participation in beneficial public culture. They were very much a synthesis of Enlightenment principles, the emerging cultural-bureaucratic practices of nation- statehood, and the technologies of modern capitalism. With the expansion of suffrage in many Western nations in the late 19th century, non-coercive modes of State governance were required to socialise the newly enfranchised “masses”, and the Exhibitions became instruments for these efforts. They were remarkably popular events attended by millions of local and international visitors. The host country used them to market their raw materials and industries and to popularise their scientific discoveries, technological innovations, commodities and artistic endeavours. These accomplishments provided the foundations upon which to broadcast idealised constructions of harmonious national cultures and empires. The quest for comprehensiveness and global relevance stimulated ever more ambitious encyclopaedic displays, and as the genre evolved, the twin imperatives of education and entertainment (the former existing as a morally legitimising ideal, the latter being paramount for commercial viability) became the primary organising principles for the commissioners. The imperatives of education and entertainment were very much formative of the ways in which the citizens of the various Empires came to interpret the exotic Other of

6 The tradition of large Exhibitions has continued until the present today, however this discussion is only concerned with 19th and early 20th century forms. This overview draws on the following sources: Roche (2000); Hoffenberg (2001); Hinsley (1991); Greenhalgh (1988). 17

the colonies that they encountered at the Exhibitions. The Great Exhibition tradition fostered an appetite for western expansionism and a widespread belief in white supremacy, and imperial displays were a feature from the inaugural Great International Exhibition in London in 1851. At this event the raw materials, machinery, manufacturing and fine arts of India were lavishly presented in order to make British citizens appreciate these vital sources of the nation‟s wealth. In many subsequent Exhibitions, educational displays of colonial dominions took the form of life-sized dioramas that included of people, stuffed animals and plants. Some of the most popular attractions were the streets of pavilions and palaces modelled on the unique architectural and ornamental traditions of different colonies. Within these one could often find people from the colonies staffing specialty -houses or craft stalls. This was exemplified by the French Exposition Universelle of 1889, in which the streets of imperial displays formed a mini city in the district of the Champs de Mars and the Trocadéro. Among the grand pavilions, visitors would encounter “native villages” in which groups of people imported from the colonies built and occupied dwellings, wore traditional dress and performed quotidian, ritual and creative activities. The French novelist Paul Morand describes the atmosphere:

I made a thousand extraordinary journeys almost without moving .… The entire hill was nothing but perfumes, incense, vanilla, the aromatic fumes of the seraglio; one could hear the scraping of the Chinese violins, the sounds of the castanets, the wailing flutes of the Arab bands, the mystical howling of the Aissawas more heavily painted than De Max, the cries of the Ouled Naïl with their mobile bellies; I followed this opiate mixture, this perfume of Javanese dancing girls, sherbets and rahat-lakoum, as far as the Dahomean village‟ (in Greenhalgh, 1988:85).

The mood of this Exhibition marked a shift away from the sober pragmatism of Britain‟s imperial displays at its 1851 Exposition. As Greenhalgh suggests, the Empire was being „transformed from military and commercial conquest, from brutal control of other peoples for cynical economic purposes, to propagandistic entertainment, to a fair‟ (1988:67). In subsequent years, the imperial displays of Portugal, Belgium, Holland, America and Britain adopted the French . Europeans had become accustomed to aesthetic objectifications of the Other since the early 19th century, and the picturesque

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presentation of the native villages at the Exhibitions providing another setting for these encounters (Hoffenberg, 2001:147-148, 13). These displays contributed to the opulent spirit of the Exhibitions that resulted from the desire of host nations to out-do what had gone before. Hedonistic cultural offerings of the kind Morand describes became more excessive as these nations‟ empires became more vulnerable to criticism and collapse in the 20th century (Greenhalgh, 1988:90-93). The “primitivism” of the non-western people on display served as a foil to the manufactured goods and technological innovations (such as the Eiffel Tower built for the 1889 Paris Exposition) that symbolised the progress of western civilisation. Such juxtapositions affirmed the widely held belief that these people were precursors to the western, civilised subject rather than contemporary counterparts. Museum administrator George Brown Goode conveys this when he proposes that the 1893 World‟s Columbian Exposition in should articulate the modern by providing an „illustrated encyclopedia of humanity’ that showed „the steps of progress of civilisation and its arts of successive centuries, and in all lands up to the present time‟ (Goode in Hinsley, 1991:346, original emphasis). The burgeoning discourses of Social Darwinism and evolutionary Anthropology helped to validate this organisation of cultural difference into a sequence of human development. In the context of the Exhibitions, these ostensibly scientific paradigms could be seen to complement established fields of research such as Archaeology, Natural History and Prehistory. Corby points out that, „in anthropometric and psychometric laboratories at the world fairs, visitors could witness and even take part in scientific research on racial characteristics‟ (1993:354).7 In the Palace of Liberal Arts at the 1889 Paris Exposition, instructive anthropological displays of „charts, tables,

7 The young discipline of Anthropology played a significant role in the emergence of these human displays. In 1859, the Jardin d'Acclimatation was established in Paris and initially devoted itself to the study of botany and zoology. Struggling for funding and public , in 1877 it expanded its programme to include ethnological exhibitions, and „[f]ourteen Nubians were presented to a fascinated Parisian public, whereupon attendance increased markedly‟ (Greenhalgh, 1988:86). Members of the recently established Anthropological Society of Paris were frequent and enthusiastic visitors, and physical anthropologists were pleased with the institution‟s facilitation of anatomical examinations of the people displayed. Thereafter, the Jardin d‟Acclimatation became one of the leading European venues for human exhibits and performances toured by travelling entrepreneurs; a kind of human zoo, to the extent that it alienated (and then deliberately jettisoned) the scientific community (Corby, 1993; Schneider, 1982). Nevertheless, it had provided a template for organisers of the 1889 Paris Expo to pursue a programme in which voyeuristic human exhibits could have a scholarly premise.

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photographs, modelled figures, instruments and artefacts, bones and body parts‟ were designed to augment the human spectacles and inform visitors about the instruments and methods of the new discipline (Poignant, 2004:192). In general, the display of objects of material culture, skulls and preserved human tissue, and photographic records of researchers‟ encounters with exotic peoples, now had a scientific rationale. These tropes of expertise could bring a cleaner gloss to the voyeuristic attraction to tangible, authentic examples of „savages‟. In other words, they ensured that the imperative of education was not, on the face of it, eclipsed by that of entertainment. These Exhibition displays established the museological methods of collection and presentation that would become standard in Western societies, as well as the meanings associated with tribal material culture within Western natural-history/ethnographic taxonomies in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. The fact that these displays served the scholarly interests of educated elites as well as populist tastes for spectacle is consistent with the fact that, as Greenhalgh suggests, the Exhibitions were „lodged peculiarly between high and popular culture‟(1988:85). It is also significant that these seminal meetings between citizens of the large centres of western capitalism and the subjects of the colonies were mediated by the legitimising instrument of commercial exchange. As noted above, the Great Exhibitions inaugurated an aestheticised commodity culture that cohered with a grand program of civic socialisation. In the eyes of the directors and commissioners, visitors were impressionable and malleable: ready to be taught new ways of seeing the world. As Hoffenberg suggests:

Consumers were, after all, citizens and subjects, and vice versa, and consumerism was both an ideology for and mode of participation in the nation and empire.... The staging of exhibitions linked the ideal types of empire, or nation, and the market as participatory practices (2001:23).

With hindsight, the commercial and aesthetic foundations (what Hinsley calls “specular commerce” [1991:357]) of these early encounters between geographically, racially and politically differentiated peoples had far-reaching effects. Such modes of engagement are still evident in many tourism experiences, the design of exhibitions of non-western cultures within Western galleries and museums, and the trade of cultural objects across 20

the world. They also anticipate the transformation of particular peoples' traditions from everyday social structures and practices to compartmentalised and commodified cultural forms in the West (MacCannell, 1976).

1.2.1 Aboriginal people and the Great Exhibitions

With regards to Australian Aboriginal people in particular, the Great Exhibitions reveal the manner in which items of Aboriginal material culture served to authenticate Aboriginal people‟s status as the archetypal primitive, which is how they were regarded within many 19th century scientific and pseudo-scientific discourses. The Exhibitions are therefore indicative of the forms of knowledge, museological display, and aestheticisation that have been constitutive of the value and collectability of Australian Aboriginal objects. They also reveal a great deal about the way Aboriginality was constructed as part of the Australian narrative and ethos (both as a colony and as a sovereign nation) at a formative stage in Australia‟s history. and their material culture had a presence at many of the Great Exhibitions, and also featured in ethnological exhibits, anthropological studies, museum displays, human zoos and circuses affiliated with the Exhibition paradigm. For instance Poignant (2004) recounts the experience of two Aboriginal groups from North who were toured by a showman to a variety of institutions and events in Europe and America in the late 1800s. These performers demonstrated throwing and funeral dances in London‟s Crystal Palace in 1851, and were also presented as one of the satellite events at the World‟s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, 1893. Members of the troupes were examined by anthropologists in Brussels in 1884, and were also the subjects of anthropological photography, examples of which featured in the Palace of Liberal Arts display of the 1889 Paris Exposition. After his death, one of the troupe members (Tambo) was embalmed and displayed in the Dime Museum in Drew between 1883 and the early mid-20th century. Aboriginal material culture was frequently displayed at the Exhibitions. For instance the 1855 Paris Exhibition included a display of six bark paintings (Jones, 21

1988:155). At the Paris Exposition of 1878, one of the evolutionary exhibits that had become commonplace by this stage displayed a collection of South-Eastern Australian objects (accumulated by amateur naturalist and ethnologist Reynell Everleigh Johns), presented as exemplifying the most primitive kind of „technology‟ (Griffiths, 1996:49). The 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London included a diorama with a painted backdrop which presented a scene of Aboriginal life in the Lower Murray River region containing life-size models of Aboriginal people and animals. This was provided by the South Australian Museum (Jones, 1988:155-56). A collection of Port Essington bark paintings was included in the Ethnological Court at the Sydney International Exhibition of 1879 (Taçon & Davies, 2004:74). The 1888 Centennial International Exhibition in included an exhibition titled Dawn of Art, which comprised a suite of coloured-pencil on paper, recalling the style of cave paintings, produced by Aboriginal people who were either incarcerated or working at the Palmerston Gaol in Darwin (Jones, 1988:165).

The Australian displays at Exhibitions in both Australian8 and overseas cities were formulated with a range of objectives. Australia needed to prove that it was a credible trading partner by advertising its manufactured goods and raw materials, and it also needed to show that it was a sufficiently Europeanised destination for immigration. In addition, the Exhibitions sought to affirm the success of British colonial enterprises and, in contradiction, to foster pride in a unique national ethos. The Australian commissioners struggled to represent the distinctiveness of the country. The culture of settler Australia tended to be regarded as a rough and gauche derivative of British culture; an image largely attributable to perceptions of penal colony life, violent frontier conflict, the madness of the gold rushes, and suspicion of the colony‟s large contingent of Irish-Catholics. Furthermore, Australia‟s economy was deemed to be only partially industrialised and to have much in common with that of South Africa and Canada (Hoffenberg, 2001:136-138). Thus ethnological exhibits of Aboriginal culture alongside archaeological and natural history exhibits served to promote Australia‟s unique attributes. It was also

8 Three International Exhibitions were held in Australia in the 19th Century: the 1879 International Exhibition in Sydney, the Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880-81, and the Centennial International Exhibition held in Melbourne, 1888-89. 22

thought that the display of “relics” of Aboriginal culture such as spears, fishing tools, utilitarian objects, cloaks and medicinal plants could stand as evidence that there were scholars in Australia who were researching the history of the continent, which might convince audiences of the civility of its population (Hoffenberg, 2001:75, 143). The Aboriginal displays presented Aboriginal tools as simplistic precursors to advanced western technology, an approach that echoed European Social Darwinist and evolutionist anthropological ideas of the day. Such is conveyed in a document accompanying the New South Wales exhibition at the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle: „man in his “stone age”, as exemplified by the aborigines of Australia, [is] in juxtaposition with man in the golden age of his present civilisation...[who occupies] the great capitals of the old world‟ (T.A. Murray [1867] in Hoffenberg, 2001:144).

1.3 Aboriginal people in seminal literature in the human sciences

Aboriginal culture was of great interest to a number of currents of modern thought that were contemporaneous with the Great Exhibition paradigm. Mulvaney (1990) regards the publication of Charles Darwin‟s The Origin of the Species in 1859 as pivotal for scholarly and amateur researchers studying Aboriginal society and „prehistory‟. He suggests that the „evolutionary hypothesis of human development‟ which was inspired by Darwin provided these researchers with a shared and structuring modus operandi (1990:23). Charles Lyell‟s influential text Antiquity of Man (published in 1863) included T.H. Huxley‟s findings of a „marked resemblance‟ between the skulls of Aboriginal Australians and those of recently discovered prehistoric man in Europe, a comparison merited by the conviction that the „natives of Southern and are probably as pure and homogenous in blood, customs, and language, as any race of savages in existence‟ (in Mulvaney, 1990:25). This view was espoused so widely in subsequent years that it became almost axiomatic, across a diverse body of human scientific literature produced within and outside Australia, to identify Aboriginal

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Australians as living fossils of the primordial stage of human development.9 As such, they featured in speculative literature regarding: the geographic sites of human evolution; the impact of environmental stimuli upon different races; the point of anatomical transition from the ape to the human species; the evolution of the human intellect; the progression of tools, weapons and other forms of material culture; and the earliest incarnations of marital and familial structures. In 1911, W.H.R. Rivers declared to an audience of British Association members that:

No part of the world has attracted more attention in recent anthropological speculation than Australia, and at the bottom of these speculations, at any rate in this country, there has been the idea, openly expressed or implicitly understood, that, in the culture of this region, we have a homogenous example of primitive human society (in Mulvaney, 1990:43).10

The attention Rivers describes was due in part to the wide circulation of The Native Tribes of Central Australia, a book authored by the Australian anthropologist Baldwin Spencer and his ethnologist colleague Frances Gillen, published in 1899 (Spencer & Gillen, 1899). Spencer, whose career will be discussed further later in the chapter, was an inveterate adherent of social evolutionism who was convinced of the imminent extinction of Aboriginal people (Jones, 1988:149). Native Tribes was widely regarded to be an authoritative and thorough account of the Arunta (Arrernte) society in central Australia, and reviewed and cited by many scholars in the early decades of the 20th century. Its readers were left with an impression of an exemplary primitive race living in a tenuously hermetic state of authenticity. Spencer‟s and Gillen‟s accumulation of data through sustained fieldwork meant that the book distinguished itself from the composite theories produced by so called “armchair” anthropologists

9 For example, in his influential paper „The Mental Characteristics of Primitive Man‟, published in 1872, Charles Staniland Wake argued that Aboriginal Australians represented „the childhood of humanity itself, revealing to us the condition of mankind, if not in primeval times, yet when the original potentialities of man‟s being had been slightly developed by the struggle for existence ... This could not have been long after man‟s first appearance on the earth‟ (quoted in Mulvaney, 1990:33). 10 This interest was a driving force behind the ‟s establishment of a chair of Anthropology at Sydney University in 1925, subsidised heavily in its early years by the Rockefeller Foundation (Gray, 2007a: 6-13). 24

and, along with future works by the pair, clarified the purpose and methodology of the discipline of sociocultural anthropology (Kuklick, 2006:537-542).11 One such “armchair” theorist was James Frazer. In 1890 Frazer published the highly influential book The Golden Bough which, as Tythacott writes, was „devoted to myth, legend and belief around the world‟ (2003:54). Frazer maintained a long friendship with Baldwin Spencer. He assisted in the production of Native Tribes from its inception, provided vital publishing and editorial assistance, wrote the introduction for its second edition and later directed a successful petition to Spencer‟s superiors to demand that he and Gillen be given leave of absence to conduct their fieldwork (Kucklick, 2006:540; Mulvaney & Calaby 1985:190; Burn & Stephen, 1992:259). He championed the book among his European peers and in his own writings and was thus another significant conduit for the thesis that Aboriginal Australians were a remnant primitive race. Mulvaney and Calaby suggest that Spencer and Gillen saw in their relationship with Frazer the advantage of making „their own studies relevant to the emergence of scientific humanism‟, even if Frazer‟s support largely reflected his need for the theories he had already devised to be corroborated by ethnographic study (190; see also Mulvaney, 1990). Miller (1994; 1995) has argued that, in light of Aboriginal people‟s presence in the work of Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, Mauss12, Engels, Freud and others, Aboriginal people have been Australia‟s most important cultural export. With respect to early 20th century writings, this scholarly attention is largely attributable to the circulation of Spencer and Gillen‟s works and the advocacy of scholars such as Frazer (see also Stanner, 1968). Given that, as will be elaborated later, the dissemination of Freud‟s ideas was so important to the development of aesthetic modernism, it is worthwhile briefly outlining the nature of his attention to Aboriginal Australians in the context of his interest in the primitive and the prehistoric. Freud researched and collected antiquities of all kinds. In fact, he was the exemplary modern collector: the covetous, obsessive persona that emerged in Western Europe in association with the dramatic archaeological discoveries and raids of the early 20th century. His office and consulting room contained an

11Bronislaw Malinowski declared in 1913 that „half the total production in anthropological theory has been based upon [Spencer‟s and Gillen‟s] work, and nine-tenths affected or modified by it‟ (in Kuklick, 2006:540). 12 Marcel Mauss regarded Aboriginal Australians as „the sole survivors of the paleolithic age‟ (1923, in McMillan, 2005:193, fn. 1). 25

elaborate arrangement of Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Oceanic and African objects, and these objects informed his analyses of patients and the evolution of his psychoanalytic theories (Torgovnick, 1990: Chapter 10; Burke, 2006). He claimed to have read more archaeological than psychological texts, and famously told a patient that „the psychoanalyst, like the archaeologist, must uncover layer after layer of the patient‟s psyche, before coming to the deepest, most valuable treasure‟ (in Burke, 2006:4). Freud‟s Totem and Taboo (1985/1913) begins with the assertion that, though prehistoric man may only be available to us through the „inanimate monuments and implements which he has left behind‟, to some degree he remains „our contemporary‟ in the persona of the „savage‟. The savage, he suggests, offers „a well-preserved picture of an early stage of our own development‟ (1985/1913:53). Totem and Taboo describes a medley of social rules and taboos (relating to sexuality, punishment, social hierarchy, death and so forth) that occur among „primitive‟ peoples from Australia, , Africa, North America and elsewhere, in order to illuminate the cases of psychosis, anxiety and obsessive disorders that he had encountered among his patients. For Freud, „primitives‟ exhibited in the most transparent and concentrated form the universal human urges, desires and fears (as well as the most crude efforts to contain them) that might be the key to his patients‟ disorders. Drawing on the expertise of Spencer and Gillen, Freud identified Aboriginal Australians as the appropriate starting point for Totem and Taboo's exegesis, because they were „the most backward and miserable of savages‟ (54). It is also noteworthy that Totem and Taboo relied heavily on Frazer‟s The Golden Bough.

In sum, therefore, Aboriginal Australians became the infants of modern humanity in the eyes of many scholars. As Frazer declared with great melodrama:

Here, then, in the secluded heart of the most secluded continent the scientific inquirer might reasonably expect to find the savage in his very lowest depths, to detect humanity in the chrysalis stage, to mark the first blind gropings of our race after freedom and light (1899, in O‟Gorman, 1993:91).

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As I will explore in the following section, these beliefs are highly salient to the modernist trope of the primitive, and a range of other non-western peoples came to occupy a similar position in the western scholarly and popular imagination.

1.4 A history of the primitive

In his book The Preference for the Primitive (2002), Gombrich argues that an appreciation for the primitive has returned again and again in aesthetic movements and criticism since Plato. This preference has usually involved a favouring of the roughly hewn, the innocent and the sincere, and as such has often been a vehicle for idealism. It is frequently expressive of an aversion to falsity and decadence; to the mannered virtuosity that emerges as styles mature. Miller (1991) offers another perspective on primitivism in his essay „Primitive art and the necessity of primitivism to art‟, in which when he argues that primitivism is a kind of ubiquitous modern ideology. He suggests that this is because all art of the modern period can be characterised as „a fragmented comment upon the nature of fragmentation‟ that never relinquishes the ideal of resolution (1991:54). He remarks that „Primitivism stands for that aspect of the Romantic movement which is based on the assumption that there exists a form of humanity which is integral, cohesive, and works as a totality‟ (54-65). I begin with these perspectives because when primitivism is discussed in the context of Australian Aboriginal art there is often an exclusive focus on its colonial foundations and racist connotations and on late 20th century post-colonial debates. Though understandable, this focus can efface other dimensions of the concept that are not only pertinent to understanding how and why people engage with Aboriginal art but are symptomatic of compelling moral interrogations of the conditions of modernity. This focus also ignores the fact that such ideas have been formative of many of our most cherished beliefs about the formal, affective and existential dimensions of the Western artist‟s endeavours. This section traces understandings of the primitive from the pre-Romantic and Romantic periods to the avant-garde movements of the 20th century. It attends to both the specifically racialised permutations of thinking about the

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exotic Other as well as the nostalgic and utopian currents of thought that contemplate the Other of modernity.

1.4.1 Primitivism, folkloricism and the Romantic movement

As Millers‟ comment implies, a reverence for primitive and folk cultures emerged during the pre-Romantic and Romantic periods in Europe. In the work of Enlightenment rationalist thinkers, the customs, beliefs and mythology of “primitive” and “common” people were depicted as being rife with superstitious and erroneous phenomena, irrelevant to history and anachronistic to progress. 18th century scholars such as Vico, Rousseau and Herder refuted these interpretations. As Cocchiara (1981/1952) recounts in detail, these scholars recast the primitive subject as one who lives freely and instinctually within nature or is indeed analogous to nature, and is most alive to their senses, emotions, imagination and to the presence of the divine. In their eyes, the primitive was not only of equal worth to the civilised but was the historic and subjective bedrock of all humanity, and the noble savage living in a state of nature represented humanity's most virtuous and happy state. These scholars encouraged people to appreciate popular ancestral traditions as the repository of humanity's heritage and beliefs. They also fostered a reverence for the rustic and steadfast “volk” of the peasant village as embodying the nationally distinctive roots of a universal human spirit. These arguments were embraced by a large body of 18th and 19th century Romantic artists and writers. To understand the far-reaching implications of this poetic form of primitivism, we need to recall the tumult artists faced in early 19th century Europe. Following the decline of the system of courtly and aristocratic patronage, artists, and writers were compelled to participate in an impersonal marketplace as specialist producers (Wolff, 1981:44). The insecurity of these circumstances kindled a marked isolationism amongst them, made more acute by their shared sense of disenchantment with industrial capitalism. They sought to insulate themselves from its effects and increasingly saw themselves as duty-bound to preserve aspects of humanity that were under threat. Indeed, the artist who was resolute enough to stand apart was increasingly imagined to 28

be beholden to an ascetic spiritual calling. At the same time, the “personal liberty” creed of the French Revolution and its upheaval of social, economic and political institutions generated a powerful compulsion to discover and create the self anew amongst this group. All of these forces contributed to a highly idealised notion of the artist as a marginal and embattled member of society endowed with heightened sensibility, imagination and insight (Hauser, 1962/1951; Shiner, 2001:Chapter 11; Sturma, 2000). This tumult fuelled the escapist and nostalgic tendencies of the Romantics, and their refutation, like the 18th Century scholars discussed above, of the Enlightenment concepts of reason, order and objective truth. In their eyes, these concepts underpinned the utilitarian, mechanised, and economic rationalist processes of industrialisation that so repelled them. The Romantics sought heightened feeling and sensation and dwelt upon melancholy themes of solitude, decadence and disease as well as exalted notions of love and the sublime in nature. The Romantic movement was characterised by trends of Gothic and medieval revivalism, an interest in mysticism and mythology, and new conceptualisations of the divine in the face of secularism. Artists‟ and intellectuals‟ sense of dread of the conditions of the present led them to seek sanction in the very distant and unfamiliar in time and space and the obscure realms of the unconscious (Shiner, 2001: Chapters 10 & 11; Hauser, 1962 /1951; Bowler, 1997). One important manifestation of the Romantics' aversion to industrialisation was the championing of folkloric forms of culture over the formulaic yields of mass production (Williams, 1958:37; 1977:14). Folklore , tales and ballads that were either recovered from the past or documented from living traditions were gathered together, translated and published in several European countries. As Jones writes, this material „aided the formulation of a series of central critical tenets of Romanticism: the preference for „primitivist‟ or „exotic‟ artworks („cultural primitivism‟); the related hostility to the formal rules of neo-classicist composition and criticism, especially in poetry; [and] the celebration of spontaneous creativity.‟ As he suggests, this cultural primitivism was characterised by „an historical retrospectivity‟ (2004:32). Peasant societies were depicted as remnant examples of the „organic community‟ of a utopian past; a domain of genuine fellowship and belonging within which art, music, storytelling and performance figured in the everyday (Leavis in Jones, 2004:5). In folklore one could find the roots of a society's particular character from which a robust

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sense of nationhood could be extracted, an urgent concern during the Napoleonic era. The peasant moreover was anchored within nature, a domain invested with notions of the divine in Romantic thought. For the Romantic artists the folk denoted purity, simplicity and virtue, and their artisans and performers were felt to exemplify the imaginative freedom and unselfconscious capacity for self-expression to which they aspired (Williams, 1958:42; Cocchiara, 1981/1952). This was not “barbarism” to which “civilisation” was developmentally opposed, nor was it the culture of the urbanised “masses”. It was a humane realm of authentic cultural practice that shone against the monstrous edifice of industrial capitalism. These ideas were very much an echo of the idealised primitivism voiced by the 18th century scholars discussed above.

In many ways our current understandings of Art crystallised out of the defensive and utopian characterisations of the artist that took shape during the Romantic period (Williams, 1958:42; Lunn, 1982). It is for this reason that I suggest that interpretations of primitivism that focus only racism and colonialism ignore a very important facet of the heritage of the fine arts ideals to which most intellectuals adhere. Even though we can trace the idea that certain individuals are divinely ordained with artistic genius back to the Renaissance, as Wolff suggests, the industrial revolution‟s upheaval of the artists‟ circumstances and the Romantics‟ responses to that upheaval goes some way to explaining why we currently tend to see the artist as „outside society, marginal, eccentric, and removed from the usual conditions of ordinary people by virtue of the gift of artistic genius‟ (1981:10, 26-27). There is much contemporary resonance in the fact that Romantic artists saw it as both their right and their obligation to create in absolute freedom in the service of, as Wordsworth declared, the „embodied spirit of a people‟ (Williams, 1958:34). As Williams summarises, art came to be seen as „the embodiment ... of certain human values, capacities, energies, which the development of society towards an industrial civilisation was felt to be threatening or even destroying‟ (36). These convictions also accounted for the artists‟ contempt for the urbanised „masses‟ and the materialistic bourgeoisie, and their hatred of the idea that they should accede to any notion of the “popular”, or seek to gratify an ignorant and capricious public (Hauser, 1962 /1951:166).

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1.4.2 Variations of primitivism in avant-garde movements

The idealistic conceptions of the primitive and the folkloric that were so formative of Romantic values and idioms found new permutations in the post-Romantic era in the context of Empire. By the turn of the 20th century, many European art circles had embraced folk art and craft, children‟s drawings and amateur art (such as graffiti), and found cause to celebrate peasant and pastoral life (Rhodes, 1994:31-51; Gombrich, 2002). In addition, the dissemination of anthropological and psychoanalytic discourses enriched primitivist thinking at the height of European imperialist expansion. Psychoanalysis and anthropology were coterminous discourses of modernity. On the one hand, as we have seen, early anthropological writings had a great influence upon Freud‟s theories, and provided reinforcement for the concepts he had gleaned from ancient mythology and . On the other hand, as Slaney suggests, Freud‟s universalist theories about subjectivity offered a great deal to „the anthropologist seeking an ambitious synthetic view of all mankind‟ and provided inspiration for ethnographic methodologies (1989:218; Torgovnick, 1990:3, 7-8). As will be discussed below, the two fields were significant conduits of information about the Other – the exotic Other, the prehistoric ancestor and the primeval self - for the modern artist and intellectual. This synergy gave rise to impressions of pre-rational and unconscious truths and meanings, utopian ideas about universal humanity and community, and as Williams suggests, notions of „the true or the repressed native culture which had been overlain with academic and establishment forms and formulas‟ (1996/1989:58-59; see also Marcus & Myers, 1995; Bowler, 1997:26; Tythacott, 2003:52). The French painter Paul Gauguin typifies the racial permutation of primitivism. As a former stock-broker who had suffered serious financial losses, he hoped to start a new life away from Europe where his aspiration to paint would not be frustrated by economic constraints. He was a frequent and enthusiastic visitor at The Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889, whose live displays of scenes from the French colonies and other parts of the world was a stimulating source of information about where he might achieve this, and he departed for Tahiti in 1891 (Perloff, 1995:233-235).The heavily mythologised narrative of Gauguin depicts him as having pursued the authentic savage 31

(in Brittany and then Tahiti) and as eventually becoming the savage, in defiance of the spiritually barren and economically crippling edifice of Western “civilisation”.13 Gauguin‟s story is emblematic of one of the core ambivalences of modernism: the expanding metropolis, advancements in science and technology, and the profusion of commodities and leisure activities, fostered both utopian and dystopian imaginings (Lunn, 1982:Chapter 2; Brettell, 1999:60). Fin de siècle interpretations of the primitive and its attendant themes of nature, antiquity and spirituality were similarly ambivalent, with idealised representations countered by perverse and fatalistic themes that embraced ideas of excess, decay and corruption. Both poles were characterised by a nostalgic melancholia, and both were informed by artificial constructions of the Other - as exemplified by the exotic displays at the Exhibitions - rather than any meaningful cross- cultural encounters (Perloff, 1995:244).

As noted above, 20th century modernist sensibilities were also richly informed by notions of the unconscious, the archetypal and the instinctive. Freud and Jung as well as influential scholars such as Robert Goldwater and Herbert Read imbued the primitive and primordial with a static ontology that was transparent to analysis. They treated this ontology as being in accord with the repressed features of modern subjectivity that lay beneath the opaque layers of rational consciousness (Thistlewood, 1994). Importantly, childhood was a reference point for this repressed space in both scholarly and artistic practices. For instance, Freud proposed an analogous relationship between the psyches of children and primitive peoples in his explanations of neuroses (1955/1913; see also Rhodes, 1994:18). Idealisations of the primitive can thus be seen to overlap with ideas about the unconscious being a „source of new spiritual credibility and aesthetic efficacy‟ as well as melancholic notions of the lost innocence of childhood (which was also a Romantic concern, most notably in the poetry of William Blake and William Wordsworth) (Slaney, 1989:221; see also Bowler, 1997:26). The convergence of these ideas fostered the rubric of Art Brut, or “Outsider Art”, which encompassed the fraternity of The Primitive, the Child and the Insane. In the first

13 However, Gauguin remained largely removed from the Tahitian community in which he was located. He made no effort to learn the local language and his writings about Tahitian culture heavily plagiarised a 19th century ethnographic text. His „savage‟ persona was staged for the European art world upon which he depended for the legitimation of his transgressive position, and for sales of his paintings (Solomon Godeau, 1989; Cowling, 1992:177). 32

two decades of the 20th century, exhibitions and publications popularised naïve art, asylum art or the art of the insane in Paris at the same time as the first Primitive Art exhibitions and publications were finding an audience. Thus for European artists, poets and intellectuals such as Paul Klee, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Éluard and Breton, these forms of “Outsider art” were mutually affirming sources of inspiration (see Zolberg & Cherbo [eds], 1997).

The early years of the 20th century saw artists such as Matisse, Picasso, Derain and Vlaminck seek out exotic curiosities – primarily African in origin - from shops in Paris, and visit ethnographic collections in Parisian Museums such as the Musée d‟Ethnographie in the Trocadéro (Leighten, 1990:610). Picasso‟s well-known interpretation of the masks and objects he examined in the Trocadéro is redolent of the Freudian coupling of the primitive and the unconscious:

At that moment I realised that this was what painting was all about... it‟s a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange, hostile world and us, a way of seizing the power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires. When I came to that realisation, I knew I had found my way (in Slaney, 1989:223-224).

The belief that an inward world could be excavated and given tangible form through the medium of art is also conveyed in his description of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) as his „first exorcist painting‟ (in Leighten, 1990:625). While Picasso clearly imagined a ritualistic, fetishist sphere within which these objects had meaning, the avant-garde community of which he was part generally chose not to inquire into the original purpose of these objects. For the most part they favoured a formalist engagement with African “” that treated its qualities – weight, balance, spatiality - as commensurate with those of Western sculptural traditions (Cowling, 1992:178).

The Surrealists adopted a different approach. emerged in France at the same time as the field of Ethnology, and in their youth the two were collegially and ideologically allied movements (Clifford, 1988:Chapter 4). Surrealists incorporated ethnographic information into their own theories and drew from a number of mytho- 33

anthropological texts, Frazer‟s The Golden Bough foremost among them (Tythacott, 2003:4, 54). Freud‟s theories were also of enormous importance, as indicated by André Breton‟s definition of the movement as „thought‟s dictation, in the absence of all control exercised by the reason outside all aesthetic and moral preoccupations‟ (First Surrealist Manifesto, 1924, in Poser, 2005:23). The Surrealists‟ engagement with primitive objects is best understood as conceptual rather than formal and as very much grounded in notions of the unconscious and the primitive as sources of authentic creative material (Cowling, 1992:178; Tythacott, 2003:6-7). The Surrealists are also distinguished for their passion for collecting, which they shared with ethnologists. Indeed Breton‟s apartment, like Freud‟s, was regarded as resembling a museum (Tythacott, 2003:6, 44). The impulse to collect can be seen as central to modernism‟s harmonization of performative self-realisation with acquisitive and aesthetic projects. The Surrealists were enamoured with Oceanic and to a lesser extent Eskimo, Caribbean, American Indian and Pre-Columbian art. As Breton wrote in 1948:

Oceania – what prestige this word enjoyed with the Surrealists! It has always had the supreme ability to unlock our hearts. Not only has it let loose our dreams into the most vertiginous and boundless currents, but, more than this, so many objects that bear its stamp of origin have aroused our crowning passion…. From the beginning, the course of Surrealism is inseparable from the power of seduction, of fascination, that Oceanic objects exerted over us (in Cowling, 1992:177).14

Oceanic objects invoked a realm of magic and ritual, imaginative liberty, emotive and spiritual extremes, and marvellously incongruous images and objects (Clifford, 1988: Chapter 4). The Surrealists‟ desire to reject the „rational, logical and cerebral culture‟ of their own society led them to assert a miraculous equivalence between their principles and the life-world of Pacific peoples (Tythacott, 2003:50, 60-61; Cowling, 1992:181- 182).

14 Aboriginal material culture was not included in the Surrealist‟ categorisation of Oceanic Art (as the Australian continent‟s miniscule size within the „Surrealist map of the world‟ testifies), and appears not to have received much attention. Having said this, Tythacott (2003:45) identifies an Aboriginal bullroarer (a musical instrument) in the collection of the Surrealist artist Roland Penrose, and a reconstruction of Breton's workshop at the Pompidou centre in Paris includes four engraved boomerangs and a churinga, as well as a bark painting (a gift from Karel Kupka, discussed below) (Centre Pompidou, 2012). 34

For Art Brut artists and Abstract Expressionists, the primitive psyche resonated with their belief in the cathartic and revelatory purpose of creativity. Jean Dubuffet, the most prominent Art Brut advocate and practitioner, suggested that Outsider artists „produced, from the depths of their personalities and for themselves and no-one else, works of outstanding originality in concept, subject, and techniques‟ (1959 in Webb, 2002:143). Abstract Expressionists revered haptic elements in art which they believed signified the unmediated expression of unconscious purpose, and enabled the dissolution of cognitive rationality‟s hold over intuition. For instance Mark Rothko, who was influenced by the theories of Jung, proposed that „[t]he whole purpose of art... is to produce something inward‟, and focused on „achieving a tactile reality as opposed to representing the reality of appearances, [a quality] found most readily in the art of children, primitives, and the insane‟ (in Poser, 2005:26, 22).

The constellation of ideas that I have discussed in this section are discernible in overt and oblique forms in the work of a great variety of modern artists. Indeed classic art historical accounts of modernism, such as ‟ The Shock of the New, treat the project of sourcing a truer sense of self and a wellspring of creative energy in the unconscious, in dreams, in childhood, in the psyche of the mentally ill, in unrestrained physicality, and in „“primitive” tribal antiquity‟ as being a foundational thread of modernist practice (1996[1980]: 259, Chapter 5). We turn now to an exploration of the relevance of these ideas to the earliest exhibitions of Aboriginal art in the early to mid-20th century that augured its emergence as a form of fine art.

1.5 Early connections between Aboriginal art and modernism

This section seeks to show, contrary to the views of some writers (see Ryan, 1993:49; Morphy, 2008:14), that modernism, and specifically modernist primitivism, has been critical to the changing status of Aboriginal art over the last century. In the following discussion we will see that Gombrich‟s and Miller‟s interpretations of primitivism, and the elements of primitivist, folkloricist and Romantic discussed above, 35

are salient to a range of early Aboriginal art discourses. The following will focus on the 1929 Primitive Art Exhibition at the National Museum of ; the UNESCO World Art Series publication Australian-Aboriginal paintings – Arnhem Land (1954); and the Czech artist-ethnographer Karel Kupka. All three contributed to the repositioning of Aboriginal material culture as art in the first half of the 20th century, by bringing modernist sentiments and modes of analysis to bear upon Aboriginal creative practice, and bringing Aboriginal art into the purview of European modern artists and intellectuals. All three reveal that Aboriginal art was a vehicle for the articulation of modernist aesthetics in Australia; that primitivist conceptualisations of the Other underpinned early ascriptions of value to Aboriginal art; and that anthropology and psychoanalysis were an integral part of the meaning-making discourses that were pertinent to Aboriginal art.

1.5.1 The 1929 Primitive Art Exhibition

In 1929 the National Museum of Victoria staged the Primitive Art Exhibition, one of the first exhibitions of Aboriginal art in Australia. The exhibition displayed Aboriginal bark paintings and other objects drawn from the Museum‟s collection and those of other institutions. The bulk of the former was selected from material donated by the anthropologist Baldwin Spencer, who had recently retired as the Museum‟s director. Spencer had commissioned over 200 bark paintings by artists from the Oenpelli region of Arnhem Land in exchange for tobacco in 1912, all of which were donated to the Museum in 1917 (Mulvaney, 2012/1990).15 These works would come to have wide circulation in Australia and overseas in both exhibitions and print.16 As noted

15 Spencer was at this time the Commonwealth‟s Special Commissioner and Chief Protector of Aborigines. The dates of his directorship at the Museum were 1899 to 1927. 16 Native Tribes (Spencer & Gillen, 1899) contained illustrations of sacred designs on rock art sites, people painted for ceremony and decorated objects such as baskets, clapping sticks, forehead bands, shields, tjuringas (also spelt churinga) and boomerangs. The Arunta: a Study of a Stone Age People (Spencer & [the late] Gillen, 1927) contained an entire chapter devoted to „The Decorative Arts‟, also accompanied by photographs and illustrations. These images would provide some of the earliest source material for the appropriation of Aboriginal art in the fine and applied arts between the 1930s and the 1960s (discussed below). 36

previously, Spencer regarded Aboriginal people‟s demise to be inevitable in evolutionist terms. In light of this attitude, McLean remarks on the irony of Spencer‟s legacy:

He made Aboriginality visible to an extent never seen before. He amassed a huge collection of Aboriginal art, helped create an Aboriginal art movement and genre (of bark paintings) to meet the demands of his collecting, made photographs, films and sound recordings, wrote books and presented popular public lectures on Aborigines and their culture (1998:68; see also Thomas, 2011:6).

The 1929 Primitive Art exhibition is an important part of this legacy.

In some respects the exhibition emulated the approach of the Great Exhibitions. Museum director James Kershaw asked George Aiston, ethnographer and former policeman and Protector of Aborigines in Central Australia, to arrange for some Aboriginal people to be part of the display. If we recall the amalgam of education and entertainment objectives that characterized the Great Exhibition‟s treatment of exotic Others, Kershaw‟s remarks to Aiston that a human display was desirable to make the exhibition 'as realistic and instructive as possible‟, and because they would be „a great novelty and would create no end of interest‟ have a familiar ring (in Kleinert, 2002:10). Aiston reluctantly brought two Arrente men to Melbourne, Jack Noorywauka and Stan Lycurrie, and they performed dances and produced tools and ceremonial objects in front of a traditional mia-mia (shelter) (Jones, 1988:167; Kleinert, 2002:9-13). They were positioned before a clay model and illustrations of an historic rock art site (known as the Glenisla shelter or the Billimina shelter) in the Victorian Grampians region, thousands of kilometres south of Arrente country, created by the non-Indigenous artist Percy Leason. Charles Barrett and A.S. Kenyon, both members of the ethnological section of the Royal Society of Victoria with a passion for natural, archaeological and social history, had visited and made tracings from the shelter in anticipation of the Exhibition (Clark, 2008). As will be discussed shortly, both men contributed to the exhibition catalogue and in later years they co-authored two books on Aboriginal Australia. Despite this appeal to the taste for spectacle, the show‟s location within the Print Rooms of the National Gallery of Victoria (then housed at the Museum site) and the provision of a catalogue meant that, as one journalist saw it: „[w]hether by accident or 37

design, the Aborigin[al] Exhibition is so arranged that it recalls any other exhibition of Art, rather than the solid realities of bush life‟ (Hain in Kleinert, 2002:2). Indeed, Kershaw‟s catalogue preface states that „[n]o attempt has been made to treat the subject in a technical way, the object being to restrict [the show] to a popular description of Australian primitive art‟ (1929, n.p.). It is clear that aesthetic interpretations were encouraged by the exhibition planners. For instance Frances Derham - artist, designer and vice-President of the Arts and Crafts Society of Victoria at the time – presented two lectures in association with the exhibition that were distinctly modernist. In them she lamented the effects of „her own academic art education‟ which she felt „destroyed individual creativity' (in Kleinert, 2002:18). At this time the Australian art world was generally suspicious that the modern avant- garde‟s trajectory away from representational rigour was self-indulgent folly, and we can sense Derham‟s mindfulness of this fact in her assertion that „[a]ll over the world interest is being revived in primitive and ... This is not decadence in . The mental change indicates a yearning for simplicity‟ (in Kleinert, 2002:18; see also Radcliffe-Brown, 1927). It is worth noting how much this remark is indicative of Gombrich‟s perspective on the preference for the primitive, discussed above. In addition, Derham‟s defence of modernism, with her eye cast towards overseas developments, has much in common with the stance of Margaret Preston, which will be discussed later in this chapter. A different variety of modernist primitivism is present in Charles Barrett‟s catalogue essay, in which we find formal description inflected with a voyeuristic mysticism. He writes „[t]here are shapes of beauty, forms grotesque, and many that are repulsive. There are symbols with hidden meanings; strokes and curves and circles, totemic markings, tribal records, figures of gods and demons; a strange and entrancing medley‟ (1929: 10). That anthropology and psychoanalysis were pertinent to the exhibition is evident from the opening speech of influential anthropologist A.P. Elkin. In it he explained that „part of [the exhibition‟s] allure was the chance it offered to explore “the psychic” as well as physical conditions of “primitive man” and to discover the true motive underlying his art‟ (paraphrased by Griffiths, 1996:183). The catalogue essays frequently draw connections between the primeval, the unconscious and childhood that

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reflect a synthesis of psychoanalytic and anthropological theories about primitive subjectivity. For example, Barrett writes:

The records of our rocks contribute a chapter to the great story of art in its infancy. [The cave artists] had no skill in composition; their art was as simple as the first clear words of speech uttered by a child. Perchance the ancient artists found pleasures in their work; were gratified by artistic creation. The child in the nursery, scribbling portraits of “a man” is proud of its quaint achievement (1929:10).

In his essay, A.S. Kenyon writes „it appears possible that the study of primitive man, as represented by our own Australian black, will throw some new light on the subject‟ of „our own mentality‟, which he suggests is the purview of the psychologist (Kenyon, 1929:15). He counsels, however, that „for the study to achieve even a modicum of success, it is essential that the inquiring psychologist divest his mind of all civilised conceptions and mentality and assume those of the prehistoric man - or of the infant of the present day' (15). Kenyon goes on to formulate a complementary notion of „intellectual ‟ (as opposed to „visual realism‟) that he sees as being exemplified in the work of the primitive artist and the child (37). The 1929 Exhibition attracted many visitors as well as enthusiastic critical responses from newspaper journalists.17 As Kleinert points out, it was a critical moment in the history of Aboriginal art‟s reception in Australia. Not only did it take place contemporaneously with the first of the European and American Primitive Art exhibitions:

[it] brought together the two key groups most concerned with the promotion and advancement of Aboriginal culture: the amateur historians, collectors and scientists influential on public opinion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and representatives of the new discipline of anthropology (2002:7).

Indeed, the Exhibition was held only a few years after the first Australian chair of anthropology (occupied by Alfred Radcliffe-Brown at Sydney University) had been

17 A reporter for The Herald remarked playfully that the „fine collection of bark drawings‟ on show were in part produced by members of „the fierce Alligator tribes [Oenpelli], whose artists evidently included cubists and modernists‟ (in Jones, 1988:167). 39

established in 1925. As will be elaborated further below, the shared interests of these groups, alongside artists such as Frances Derham, would expedite Aboriginal art‟s incursion into the Australian art world in the mid 20th century, albeit tangentially to the academic and institutional pathways of that art world.

1.5.2 The UNESCO World Art Series publication – Australia: Aboriginal Paintings, Arnhem Land (1954)

Another instance of modernist appreciation of Aboriginal art can be found in the UNESCO World Art Series monograph Australia: Aboriginal Paintings, Arnhem Land (Read et. al, 1954) which McLean notes „outsold any other book published on Australian art‟ at the time (1998:96-97).18 Peter Bellew, who headed the UNESCO Arts division at the time, had previously been editor of the venerable periodical Art in Australia. He was assisted in producing the book by the Australian UNESCO Committee for Visual Arts. This Committee was chaired by anthropologist Charles Mountford (who led the commission to collect works and images for the publication), and included Hal Missingham - artist, photographer and then director of the Art Gallery of NSW - and artists Desiderius Orban, Margaret Preston and Wallace Thornton, the latter two of whom shared an avid interest in Aboriginal art (Read et. al, 1954:16; Phipps, 1997:19). The book was a luxury publication – an oversized hardcover with large colour plates of rock art and bark paintings. Its early pages contain august black and white photographs of Aboriginal people on rock ledges with titles such as „Modern aborigines and ancient rock paintings in Arnhem Land‟ and „Guardian of an ancient tradition in an ancient land‟. Mountford‟s preface, which begins by stating that „[t]he aborigines still practice an art comparable with that of our stone-age ancestors of

18 Other monographs in this series covered „Persian miniatures, Byzantine Frescoes, the Ajunta Caves in India, and Egyptian wall-paintings‟ (Thomas, 2011: 12). 40

Europe‟, provides an overview of the role of art in traditional community life (11). It concludes with the following statement:

Although the culture of the Aboriginal artist is vastly different from that of our own, the subject of his painting beyond the realms of our knowledge, his symbolism unlike anything we possess and his materials and colours extremely limited, he uses the same principles of line, colour, balance, and spacing of design elements which are present in all great art (14).

It is a summation that seems quintessentially modernist: it depicts a gulf between the culture of the occidental and the primitive, while also emphasizing the universality of form, which implies that some kind of parity exists in the world of artists. Herbert Read, the prominent British art historian and critic wrote the introduction to Australia: Aboriginal Paintings, Arnhem Land. As I noted briefly above, Read had a strong interest in the primitive and the primordial that was reflected in his art critical and pedagogical writings. He praised the creative expression of children and primitive artists as communicating elementary, primordial themes that were normally dormant in our subconscious, and he sought to develop a universalist theory of the human „aesthetic impulse‟ (Read, 1961a:21; 1961b; Thistlewood, 1994). His interest in primitive art had brought him into contact with Aboriginal art and, according to Edwards, in 1933 he „used Aboriginal drawings to illustrate to his pupils “the clarity and strength of line of this art”‟ (2005:164). Read was a champion of the European avant-garde: he edited one of the first monographs on Surrealism (with a contribution from André Breton among others) and his writings were highly influential among Abstract Expressionists. In his introduction to the UNESCO text he makes a case for the relevance of the Aboriginal works to the avant-garde when he writes:

As the cultured reader turns these pages, his delight in the paintings will be expressed in wondering evocations of the names of modern artists - now, Braque, now Klee, now Giacometti, now Wilfredo Lam. There is, of course, an element of speciousness in such comparisons - these artists have been influenced by various types of primitive art, and it is therefore no wonder that we find echoes of such eclecticism in these newly discovered prototypes (1954:5).

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Other passages contain references to stone-age man and prehistory and are illustrative of the importance of psychoanalysis to Read‟s thinking:

Just as the Djungao sisters [Arnhem Land creation ancestors], well-creating, path-finding, object-naming mythical heroines, are authentic relatives of our families - Prometheus, Pandora, Ulysses - so the aboriginal symbols for such heroic figures find echoes in our “collective unconscious”. We cannot, in our modern art, authentically recreate such primitive magic; but in looking at these fascinating paintings we may still feel some tremor, along our nerves, of a primeval terror (1954:9).

Read also suggests that visual perception is subordinate to „analytical knowledge‟ in the Arnhem Land works (an idea similar to A. S Kenyon‟s term „intellectual realism‟), and emphasises the „haptic‟ qualities which Arnhem Land styles share with other „prehistoric‟ art, whereby the evocation of movement is integral to the execution of the image (8). In 1957 Read and Charles Mountford shared a panel at a Symposium titled „The Artist in Tribal Society‟, staged by the Royal Anthropological Institute in London (Smith [ed], 1961). In the same year Read reviewed Mountford‟s Records of the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land: Art, Myth and Symbolism for the influential British fine arts monthly, The Burlington Magazine. In his review he describes the 1954 UNESCO publication as a „magnificent‟ and less scientific supplement to Records, and argues that Records’ value lies not only in its detailed visual material, but also in its usefulness for „the investigation of the social and psychological origins of art‟, and for „the student of mythology and religion, and … comparative symbology‟ (1957:351).

1.5.3 Karel Kupka

Karel Kupka was a Czech artist, writer and amateur ethnographer who, in his search for Art‟s origins, conducted research in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. Kupka had established a close friendship with André Breton (who was 25 years his senior) when he moved to Paris in 1945. According to Rothwell, Kupka would often visit 42

„Breton's studio on the Rue Fontaine, where works from Africa and Oceania were hung alongside paintings from the surrealist circle, and it was under Breton's tutelage that he began haunting the more obscure galleries and museums in Paris‟ (2007:30). Kupka‟s objective in travelling to Australia was to discover „an art, living and practiced in our own times, yet still related to the most “primitive” artistic expression‟ (Kupka, 1965:13- 14). His first trip in 1951 was spent making studies of museum collections. Alfred Bühler, the director of the Basel Museum of Ethnology in Switzerland, was excited by Kupka‟s aspirations and preliminary research and in 1956 Kupka returned with a mandate to acquire a large body of work for the Basel museum. Another Basel Museum commission followed in 1960-61, and a fourth trip in 1963 was for the purpose of acquiring works for Paris‟s new National Museum of African and Oceanic Arts (Kauffman, 2005). Kupka was assisted greatly during his study trips by A.P. Elkin, who was head of Anthropology at Sydney University at that time, and a long friendship ensued between the two men. In 1956, Elkin spoke at the opening of an exhibition of works Kupka had collected in Sydney, and later he provided letters of endorsement to help Kupka gain access to collections of material culture and to visit remote regions of Australia (McMillan, 2005; Gray, 2007b:163-165).

Kupka argued that Aboriginal art was worthy of the same treatment as other fine art. He published an article outlining his interpretation of Aboriginal bark paintings in Sydney University‟s anthropology journal Oceania, of which Elkin was the editor (Kupka, 1956/1957). Though this article provides a gloss of the art‟s mythical content and ceremonial origins, its focus is the distinctive formal qualities of the paintings. For instance, Kupka writes that „[p]recision of line and its purity, adequate use of colours and perfect balance of the painting proves the supreme skill of local painters‟ (266). He also argues that the art‟s formal qualities deserve evaluative judgement, and suggests that this „true art‟ can be nurtured by the discerning interest of researchers and collectors (267). A humanist universalism informs Kupka‟s endorsement of the bark paintings‟ aesthetic, one which has much in common with the Surrealists' and other modernists' efforts to substantiate the affinity they felt with primitive art by stressing the emotive, intuitive core of all creativity. Thus he emphasises the „deeply subjective‟ approach of the „native artist‟ and argues that „feelings have the same importance for his painting as

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his eyes, sometimes even more‟ (265-266). He goes on to say that „[t]his approach, and also their dynamism and pictorial quality, can place some of these works amongst the strongest expressionistic paintings of all human civilisations‟ (266). Kupka also remarks on the presence of individualistic styles in Arnhem Land art: „[f]reedom of conception is often fully apparent in the transformation and combination of human and animal shapes‟ (265) and „[t]he Aboriginal painter… enjoys with sovereign artistic freedom the pleasure of line and colour‟ (267). Elkin provides a telling editorial footnote to the article: „Mr Kupka has not only studied aboriginal art in museums, but also spent months in Arnhem Land amongst the local artists, observing them‟ (267). Here Elkin appears keen to underline the ethnographic credentials of Kupka‟s findings. Both the article and Elkin‟s qualifying supplement are indicative of the strong relationship that developed between Australian anthropology and aesthetic modernism from the 1920s, which will be elaborated upon in the following section.

In 1962 Kupka‟s book Dawn of Art was published in French. An English edition appeared in 1965, for which Elkin wrote the foreword (Kupka authored both editions, and Elkin is credited with checking over the English text). Dawn of Art provides an accessible overview of Aboriginal art and culture in Arnhem Land, and contains images of bark paintings, painted carvings and other cultural objects, and individuals with whom Kupka had conducted his fieldwork. André Breton wrote the preface to the first edition. In it, he emphasised the affective and spontaneous response demanded by the paintings:

[A]ny plastic work can have vital interest only in so far as it attracts or imposes itself on us before we start elucidating the process of its elaboration. This is especially true in the work of what we call – not without distorting the truth when they are our contemporaries – “primitives”, that is, beings governed by affective forces more elementary than our own (1965:8- 9).

He goes on to remark upon the „poetic magnetism‟ of Australia, and echoes the conviction of the anthropological and scientific scholars discussed above that parts of Australia contain „quite homogeneous human groups who are several thousand years 44

“behind” us‟ (9). He also remarks that Kupka „rightly considers, however late it may be, that on our side of the globe a living document of this order can be of the highest value, for by laying bare to us the roots of the it helps us to reconcile man with nature and himself‟ (9). This is a classic articulation of modernists‟ attraction to the primitive. From the outset, Dawn of Art depicts Aboriginal people as a remnant race, inhabiting a „continent [which] itself belongs to the earth's past‟ (33). Kupka shows his esteem for Aboriginal people's apparent purity in a Social-Darwinian vein, suggesting that their geographic isolation had ensured that they had „escaped natural competition and, by the same token, the invigorating effects of new blood‟ (18-19). He remarks on the value of direct observation of these „survivors of the stone age‟, arguing that such an approach is more illuminating about the „roots‟ of art than the flawed information we glean from the „mute‟ objects of the past (14-22). With regard to the bark paintings, Kupka voices many of the arguments he made in his Oceania article. He stresses the „personal vision‟, the „highly subjective‟ content, the „rich expressive strength‟ of the artists‟ line-work, and declares that „[t]hey resolve their plastic problems like the true artists they are‟ (71-74, see also 82-83). Consistent with Breton‟s emphasis, there are frequent invocations of affect, both with respect to artistic intent and “our” intuitive, emotive response to the work. Kupka identified Aboriginal artists by name in Dawn of Art (it was one of the first publications to do so), a reflection of the friendships he established with, and the admiration he felt for the artists (15). While there is a strong focus on technique and form, there are detailed accounts of the mythology, ritual significance and educative purpose behind the bark painters‟ pictography. Indeed, he argues that it is misguided to attribute too great a similarity between Arnhem Land work and modern abstract painting, pointing out that „Aboriginal painting, in fact, invariably “recounts”; this is its essential function and the fundamental reason for the existence of its signs‟ (99). He employs the phrase “Painted Literature” in his effort to communicate the social import of the bark paintings from Eastern Arnhem Land (109). What is noteworthy about Kupka‟s perspective is that his belief that Aboriginal people are a prehistoric race are not in conflict with his sense of fellowship with the artists themselves and his impressions of the sophistication of their art.

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According to Kauffman, the French edition of Dawn of Art received acclaim and sold well (2005:225). Beyond this success, Kupka‟s significance rests in his distribution of Aboriginal art works. He sourced works for Australian museums and the European museums from which he received his commissions, and even Breton‟s collection of Oceanic art was enriched by a gift from Kupka. The Sydney exhibitions he organised increased the visibility of Aboriginal art in Australia, and he also wrote articles for Australian newspapers urging the creation of a centre for the research and exhibition of Aboriginal art and culture (Rothwell, 2007:37; McMillan, 2005). Kupka sustained a long professional friendship with Alfred Bühler, and in 1958, Bühler staged the „Art of the Earliest Australians‟ exhibition at the Basel Museum of Ethnology. Critical responses to the exhibition predominantly focused upon their artistic qualities (Kauffman, 2005:223). Kupka‟s thesis Anonymat de l’artiste primitive received „maxima laude‟ accreditation in Paris in 1969, was published in 1972, and he later became a fellow of the Centre national de la recherché scientifique (McMillan, 2005:195). The 2005 Basel retrospective for Arnhem Land bark painter , Raark, attests to Kupka‟s legacy (Kaufmann & Museum Tinguely [eds], 2005). Here, an Aboriginal artist was honoured with a solo exhibition in a major European art institution, a rare achievement for any Australian artist. The foundational collections of the Basel Museum of Ethnology established a context for Mawurndjul‟s work to be shown (Mawurndjul‟s ancestral country is in the same territory in which Kupka conducted his fieldwork), and provided a multifaceted curatorial premise. Kupka had become the iconic art-historical pioneer: like the visionary patron, dealer or connoisseur, only with time have we fully understood his precocity. It is also noteworthy that a collection of approximately 40 barks collected by Kupka for the National Museum of African and Oceanic Arts in Paris is now on permanent display in the city‟s recently opened museum of Indigenous Cultures, Musée du Quai Branly.

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1.6 Australian modernism

Aboriginal art was ignored by many members of the Australian fine arts community in the period of activity described in the previous section, and its reception in the period between WW1 and the 1960s needs to be set against the backdrop of the haphazard reception of modernism within Australia. Professionals within fine arts institutions and many artists and art critics had a militant aversion to modernist aesthetics. Among other things they were offended by the European avant-garde‟s irreverence for „the artistic nexus of naturalism and illusionism‟ (Edwards, 2005:24) and their wilful manipulation of form. Aside from a few exceptions in the world of fine art, Australian modernism had a predominantly feminine and commercial character, and modern stylistic trends were widely adopted within commercial design, the decorative arts and domestic furnishings (Hunt, 2003; Moore, 2006:61-64; McLean, 1998:87-88; Stephen, McNamara & Goad, 2006). Underlying this popular embrace was a post-war nationalism that created a market for a specifically Australian aesthetic, particularly among the increasingly affluent suburban social class.

1.6.1 Aboriginalia, nationalism and tourism

The nationalistic program that informed the take-up of modernist styles in the applied arts led to the treatment of Aboriginality and Aboriginal art as tropes of distinctiveness and authenticity. A pervasive belief that Aboriginal people were “dying out” fostered romantic sentiments about a lost noble race and a salvage ethos that was in part encouraged by the increasing awareness of anthropologists‟ photographic records, writings, and the discovery of rock art sites such as Glenisla in Victoria (Edwards, 2005:164). A market for Aboriginalia – commodities whose design was inspired by or appropriated from Aboriginal material culture – developed and was at its height between the late 1930s and 1960s. Insignia, logos and coats of arms, designs for Australian enterprises such as Qantas and the P & O company, graphic design, fabrics, pottery, flooring and other architectural features, souvenirs and all forms of domestic

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paraphernalia were Aboriginalised, either by drawing on Aboriginal designs or portraying Aboriginal objects such as the boomerang.19 The market for Aboriginalia also extended to items produced by Aboriginal people, for example those living on missions like Hermannsburg in Central Australia, in Arnhem Land and Ernabella in . While women generally made rugs, cushion covers, painted scarfs and added decoration to small craft and domestic items, men tended to produce turlku (secret-sacred objects), poker-worked wooden objects, animal woodcarvings and other artefacts (Mackay, 1973; Berndt, 1983; Batty, 2007:69; Johnson, 2010:22-23, 122). Driving this production was the fact that these settlements were often under-resourced and welcomed the extra income. Missionaries were also keen to foster a sense of the value of labour and it was thought that habits of western femininity could be inculcated among tribal women if they were taught to sew, spin thread and weave. In some cases the encouragement of certain cultural traditions was intended to enhance the morale of the missions‟ constituencies. Morphy writes that the founding Methodist missionary at Millingimbin in Arnhem Land (established 1923), T.T. Webb, who was highly sympathetic to interests as an autonomous people, intended for the trade in arts and crafts to generate awareness among „congregations in the south of Australia that Yolngu had skills as artists and craftsmen which demonstrated their equality as human beings‟ (2008:32; Moore, 2006). In addition, reproductions of Albert Namatjira‟s paintings were highly popular and contributed to the Aboriginalisation of domestic interiors. The Aboriginal-owned and run outlet Aboriginal Enterprises, established in Melbourne by Bill Onus in 1952/3, traded in boomerangs, fabrics, stationery, ceramics and other commodities decorated with Aboriginal designs and native animals from that region (Kleinert, 2010). Despite the art establishment‟s hostility to modernism, a regionalist incarnation of modernist primitivism was pursued by several non-Indigenous artists, craftspeople and designers who studied, collected and appropriated from Indigenous material culture.20 Roman Black‟s well-illustrated publication Old and New Aboriginal Art (1964) devoted a chapter to these forms under the heading „The New Aboriginal Art‟, a title which testifies to the validity of such appropriation at the time (see also Healy,

19 See Isaacs (1999); Franklin (2010); Factor (2000); Black (1964), Jones (1992a). 20 See Moore (2006); Lovitt (2000), Isaacs (1999) & Franklin (2010) for details about these practitioners. 48

2008;Chapter 3). Motifs of Aboriginality were also mobilised by intellectual and literary modernist movements that sought to mark out uniquely Australian creative territory.21

The proliferation of Aboriginalia coincided with the growth of the tourism sector. The completion of the Trans-Australian railway in 1917, and the subsequent development of other railway lines traversing the desert regions, enabled the establishment of an outback tourism industry in the years following WW2 and this generated a market for Aboriginal crafts in Central Australia (Davidson & Spearritt, 2000: Chapter 7; Haynes, 1998:166; Jones, 1992a:66; 1992b:144-5). In 1935 the Australian National Travel Association (ANTA) began publishing the photographic magazine Walkabout to encourage outback tourism. It predominantly featured romantic portrayals of the country‟s remote landscapes and peoples, and as Russell describes, the noble savage was omnipresent (Russell 2001; see also Barnes, 2007). The magazine attracted a large readership and was widely distributed until it was concluded in 1974. Governments and corporations who sought to stimulate inland tourism faced the same problem as the Commissioners of Australian displays in the Great Exhibitions: there was a paucity of clear symbols of Australianess. As a consequence, Aboriginal culture was increasingly mobilised symbolically in this context. Aboriginal imagery was used by artists such as Gert Selheim and Eileen Mayo, artists clearly inspired by modernist aesthetics, for Australian National Travel Association Posters in the 1930s and 1950s (Powerhouse Museum, 2012a, 2012b, 2012c). In addition, the 1956 Melbourne Olympics was a significant driver of the tourist market for Aboriginalia (Klienert, 2010; Franklin, 2010; Factor, 2000). Changing ideas about remote Australia were critical to these nationalistic appropriations of Aboriginality. Haynes‟ Seeking the Centre (1998) provides an illuminating account of the literary, filmic and artistic interpretations of the desert and “the Centre” that were sparked by the greater ease of travel to and within the desert in the early decades of the 20th century. These responses did not entirely dispense with the impression that had predominated in the previous century of the desert as implacable

21 See for instance the Aboriginal-inspired covers of the literary journal in the 1950s. The Jindyworobuk poets and writers sought association with Aboriginal language and „environmental values‟ in a nationalistic mode from the late 1930s (McQueen, 1979:124-132). 49

and fatally antagonistic to Europeans, an impression partly attributable to the mythology surrounding the ill-fated 19th century explorers of the desert interior. However they reframed the desert as an environment of beauty by glorifying its vastness, antiquity, dramatic geological features and red colourscapes. The presence of Afghan cameleers and the appearance of exalted imagery of the ANZACs in the middle-east in WW1 invited poetic and sometimes Biblical allusions to the deserts of the Orient. Nationalistic sentiments in the inter-war years found expression in the dramatization of heroic and resourceful individuals forging their livelihoods in remote locations. Furthermore, a growing awareness of untapped mineral resources and artesian deposits fostered optimistic visions of a prosperous and populated interior.

A number of artists were inspired to visit the outback at this time, and in the case of people like Frances Derham, Margaret Preston, John Gardner and Rex Batterbee, these travels brought them into contact with Aboriginal missions, cave art and sacred sites, and with Aboriginal arts and crafts that could be used as resource material for Aboriginal-inspired work (Moore, 2006:72; Isaacs, 1999). As McLean writes „Seeing themselves as the vanguard or frontiersmen, modernists regularly plunged into the transgressive and primitive in order to revitalise both the project of modernity and their own subjectivity‟ (1998:66). This rings true in relation to Frances Derham‟s defence of modernism in the speech she delivered at the 1929 Primitive Art Exhibition, as discussed in the previous section. In addition to being an artist, Derham was a progressive educator. She was passionate about the role of art in children‟s lives, a passion that was in accord with the veneration of children‟s art by modernists such as Herbert Read. Like other artists and craftspeople, Derham began adapting Aboriginal motifs drawn from Spencer and Gillen‟s illustrated publications in some of her work in 1925. As a consequence of her acquaintance with Charles Mountford and Rex Batterbee, she visited both the Hermannsburg Mission in Central Australia and the Aurukun Mission in Queensland. In both locations she taught art to Aboriginal children and in the case of Hermannsburg she collected over 200 drawings which were subsequently widely exhibited (Kleinert, 2002:20-21; Piscitelli, 2011/1995).

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1.6.2 Margaret Preston

Margaret Preston was the most prominent Australian artist of this era to embrace Aboriginal imagery. From the early 1920s she pursued the idea of an aesthetic that could encapsulate the spirit of „modern Australian nationhood‟ (Edwards, 2005:61). This project was conceptualised in terms of an egalitarian, feminised, suburban private sphere; a space that could consummate a new collective identity (Thomas, 1999:129- 131). She reached the conclusion that an authentic Australian modernism had to be forged from local sources of inspiration and turned to Aboriginal art to devise its principles. She would ultimately spend many hours studying bark paintings and artefacts in museums and travel to remote country in Northern Queensland, the Kimberly, Kakadu, Oenpelli, and Bathurst and Melville Islands. Relatively early in her career Preston embraced the modernist aesthetic philosophies espoused by writers such as Roger Fry and Clive Bell. She perceived that the formal qualities of European post-impressionists and cubist work could be synthesised with those found in Aboriginal material culture which captured „the essential forms of the Australian environment‟ (Edwards, 2005:43, 100). This synthesis could inaugurate an artistic language that was relevant to the Australian community while being irrefutably modern in an international sense. Given modernists‟ pursuit of creative responses to nature that could find expression in non-illusionistic form, it is understandable that Preston found the austere pictography, asymmetry and non- naturalistic style of representation she encountered in Aboriginal artefacts, bark paintings and rock art tableaux so attractive. For Preston these qualities were expressive of the continent‟s expansive and uncluttered topography; the robustness of its plant and animal life; and its „harsh, cool‟ light (Preston 1935 in Long, 1935:18). She wrote: „[Aboriginal] artists have the skill to use solid shapes to show their ideas, they look at nature to get form and the external order of it, to see the inner life of things‟ (1946, in Preston & Butel; 2003:89). Preston appropriated from Aboriginal designs in her woodblock prints, paintings and craftwork. She very rarely copied Aboriginal images, but rather sought to distil their essential characteristics and innovate in the spirit of their imagery. She often declared her lack of interest in the religious and ritual underpinnings of Aboriginal art (Rolls,

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2006:9). Indeed, Edwards argues that Preston saw Aboriginal artists‟ creative motivation „not in terms of spiritual or cultural impulses but in relation to a Freudian- influenced concept of the “will to form”‟ (2005:106). Yet this position was reconciled with the conviction, which crystallised later in Preston‟s career, that an engagement with Aboriginal art could engender a spiritual engagement with the Australian environment (174-175). Preston advocated the practice of appropriation in public lectures, demonstrations and a series of articles published in art journals and home decorating magazines between the 1920s and 1940s (see Preston & Butel, 2003). In a 1937 article in Australian Home Beautiful she wrote „Australian landscape and flora are still in the Stone Age and their real quality can be truly experienced only by artists who are content to tread the primitive paths of their ancestors, see with their eyes and express what they see with patient sincerity‟ (in Edwards, 2005:154). These articles, written in a didactic style, encouraged the use of Aboriginal motifs for the purposes of decorating the home and feminine accessories. These suggestions cohered with the aforementioned fashion for ethnic, indigenous and folk „chic‟ that took root in Australia and other colonies. They were also consistent with the decorative and interior aesthetic of European modernists such as Matisse and Gauguin (Moore, 2006:63). Preston advocated a local, non-Europeanised art form and argued that „the study of our native art [must be] used to clear the mind of European standards‟ (Preston, 1946 in Preston & Butel, 2003:90; see also Edwards, 2005:76). However suggestions such as „[h]urry then and use our own material in an Australian spirit before other nations step in and we are left without even having tried for a national spirit in applied art‟ indicate that Preston felt the need to invoke the European centres of modern art to buttress her injunctions (Preston, 1924 in Preston & Butel, 2003:58; see also 1925 in Preston/Butel, 2003:60).

The international exhibition Art of Australia 1788-1941, which foregrounded Preston‟s work, illustrates how Preston‟s activities intersected with an emerging primitivist receptiveness to Aboriginal art. This exhibition was sponsored by the New York Carnegie Institute and was toured by the Museum of Modern Art within North America and Canada between 1941-1945, the first host being the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. According to Stephen, the exhibition‟s Theodore

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Sizer „grasp[ed] the modernist appeal of Aboriginal art and gave it an unprecedented place in the exhibition, which proved extraordinarily popular, with twenty-nine North American cities electing to take the show‟ (2006:583). Of the 134 works included, eleven were bark paintings from Oenpelli from the National Museum of Victoria‟s collection and three were pen sketches by the Victorian Aboriginal artist Tommy McRae. There were several works by non-Indigenous artists engaging with themes of Aboriginality, of which three were Preston‟s. The Australian graphic artist Alistair Morrison produced a spare, earth-coloured “primitive” design derived from Aboriginal art for the front and back covers of the catalogue, which was compiled and edited by Sydney Ure Smith, a highly influential publishing entrepreneur, and a friend and champion of Preston‟s.22 Smith wrote in the catalogue that „it has been left for Margaret Preston to strike the one original note in the development of a new outlook for Australian art‟ (in Edwards, 2005: 193, 196, 294 [fn. 61]). The exhibition structure characterised Aboriginal art as the creative core of an enduring national authenticity, with the Aboriginal art and the Aboriginal-inspired art book-ending works that were derivative of European trends. Preston wrote the introduction to the section on Aboriginal art in the catalogue, and two of her three paintings, Aboriginal Still Life (Arnhem Land motif) (1940) and Aboriginal landscape (1941) were hallmarks of her effort to Aboriginalise her works. Sizer hoped that Preston‟s regionalist modernism could inspire American artists who occupied a comparably marginal artistic milieu with respect to Europe. His appreciation for her approach was conveyed in his comparison of „the criss-crossed outlines of Arnhem Land‟ with the „dismembered extremities of Picasso‟s Guernica‟ (in Edwards, 2005:193).

It is difficult to make a definitive argument about the impact of Preston and of the circulation of Aboriginalia and Aboriginal-inspired arts during this period. Preston‟s advice was not widely heeded by fine artists and critical responses were often incredulous, however she had a public profile that was exceptional for a female artist at this time (Edwards, 2005:107; Thomas, 1999:127; 289[fn. 6]). She popularised an

22 Smith‟s publishing legacy includes the magazines Art in Australia and Home (in which most of Preston‟s instructive articles were published) and significant art historical texts such as Bernard Smith‟s Place, Taste and Tradition (1945). 53

Aboriginal aesthetic among members of Arts and Crafts societies, and there is no doubt that the applied use of Aboriginal aesthetics was in part the result of her advocacy (Edwards, 2005:97, 165; Thomas, 1999:119-120). In Thomas‟s view, Preston‟s „quotations‟ of Aboriginal designs and motifs in her work may not have succeeded in garnering support for her nationalistic aesthetic, but may simply have had the effect of drawing attention to Aboriginal art itself (1999:143). However Smith, commenting upon both the direct and oblique influence of Preston‟s approach to Aboriginal art upon artists such as Byram Mansell, Elizabeth Durack, Leonard French, John Olsen, Ian Fearweather and Tony Tuckson, has suggested that „[it]t may well be one of the significant components by which modern Australian art, at its best, has been able to crystallise itself out from its primary European and North-American sources‟ (1980:32). Jones has argued that the proliferation of Aboriginalia and commercial „Indigenous chic‟ at this time led to „a devaluation of Aboriginal art together with the Western public's image of Aboriginal culture itself' (1988:168). Yet this populist devaluation may have been essential to galvanising high-art gatekeepers to adopt caretaker positions with respect to genuine Aboriginal material culture. Arguably, the prominence of commercialised Aboriginalia during the modernist period created a space for sympathetic appraisals of the authentic products of themselves that were increasingly visible as a result of anthropological and museological activities. This is implied by the suggestion made in 1962 by Eric Westbrook, then director of the National Gallery of Victoria, that a Gallery of Australian Aboriginal art was needed in . He remarked that „visitors to the Capital, particularly overseas visitors, would like to see this sort of display, if only to be able to correct the impression they could form of Aboriginal art from the ash trays and other “typical Australian souvenirs”‟ (in Philp, 2007:51). In these words we sense the beginnings of the dialectic relationship between Aboriginal “mass culture” and Aboriginal fine art which remains a feature of the Aboriginal art arena today, and which will be a recurring concern in the following chapters.

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1.7 “The Australian aborigine definitely has good taste” (Adam, 1944:50): arty anthropologists

If the Australian art cognoscenti kept Aboriginal art at a distance, anthropologists were extraordinarily proactive in bringing Aboriginal art to the attention of the public and showing it to be worthy of aesthetic engagement (McLean, 2011a: 22- 24; Smith, 2006: 17-19). We have already encountered Baldwin Spencer, Charles Mountford, A.P. Elkin and Karel Kupka, and seen how they or their publications provided a bridge between Aboriginal art and modernist artists and intellectuals. The following will sketch the relevant activities of these and several other anthropologists who built bridges in this way. The following accounts are only rudimentary: these anthropologists‟ affiliation with aesthetic modernism is worthy of a thorough study of its own.

1.7.1 Baldwin Spencer 1860-1929

Baldwin Spencer‟s significance as a pioneer of anthropology has already been demonstrated, however as Mulvaney & Calaby note „one of the most interesting aspects of Spencer‟s many faceted career was his role in Australian art history as connoisseur, patron and gallery trustee‟ (1985:335). Spencer had received a university arts education and, as his drawings for his book Wanderings in Wild Australia (1928) indicate, he was an accomplished illustrator. He had many artists among his friends and was an enthusiastic collector and patron of Australian art, acquiring one of the largest private collections of Australian art in the 1920s. As trustee and later vice-president of the National Gallery of Victoria he advocated for a ministry of fine arts (Jones, 1988:250[f.n. 48]; Mulvaney & Calaby, 1985:335-336). He also served as president of the Arts and Crafts Society of Victoria for a few years, under the auspices of which he gave public talks in 1916 and 1917 urging designers to appropriate from Aboriginal imagery (McLean, 1999:115; Kleinert, 2002:18; Mulvaney, 2012/1990). In The Arunta:

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a Study of a Stone Age People (Spencer & Gillen23, 1927), it is argued that the Arunta have „more artistic capacity than has generally been granted‟. Specifically, Spencer and Gillen suggest that they have „considerable appreciation, not only of form, but also of colour‟ and that their designs all „show an appreciation of strong contrasts‟. Similarly, through the „striking feature‟ of feather down, the Arunta artist is argued to create „simple, bold designs of circles, spirals, and symmetrically curved lines, which are by no means devoid of artistic feeling‟ (1927:551-553). Such discussions deviate from the subject of the symbolism and content of designs, which is conventionally regarded as the anthropologist‟s focus, and rather attend to the formal qualities of Aboriginal art that appealed to the likes of Margaret Preston.

1.7.2 A.P. Elkin 1891-1979

A.P. Elkin was head of Anthropology at the between 1933 and 1956. Formerly a cleric and teacher of theology, Elkin had observed the tragedy of frontier relations in the Kimberly and became a passionate advocate for Indigenous justice and equality. He was in many ways the architect of the assimilation policy, and he argued its case in newspaper articles and other forums regularly (Wise, 2006). We have already encountered Elkin in his capacity as opening speech-maker at the 1929 Primitive Art Exhibition, and as professional advisor and friend to Karel Kupka (Kupka dedicated Dawn of Art to him). Several articles on Aboriginal art were published between the 1940s and 1960s in the anthropological periodical Oceania while he was editor, including Kupka‟s essay on Arnhem Land art, discussed above, and one written by Elkin himself (Elkin, 1949; Kupka 1956/1957; McLean, 2011a:24). Here, in response to an exhibition of Aboriginal art staged in 1948 at the David Jones Art Gallery, curated by the anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt (discussed in a later chapter), Elkin lamented the fact that art critics refused to offer commentary on „living schools‟ of Aboriginal art whose work was displayed in the Gallery, „taking its turn with the work of European artists‟. He writes „the art critics themselves were not prepared to treat it as a work of art. On the other hand, many artists as well as people

23 Gillen was acknowledged as co-author despite having died 15 years prior to publication. 56

who appreciate art not only visited the exhibition, but have spoken most highly of the artistic qualities of the art‟ (1949:81). Elkin was also an associate of Margaret Preston. They were members of the Anthropology Society of NSW and participated in the Society‟s field trips to see NSW rock engravings in the 1940s, and in 1945 the two of them opened an exhibition of Albert Namatjira‟s work in Sydney (Edwards, 2005:224). Roman Black acknowledges Elkin‟s support in putting together his publication Old and New Australian Aboriginal Art (1964:xxii), and within the „New Aboriginal Art‟ chapter, Black noted that the potter Rita Chin „was helped and encouraged by Professor A.P. Elkin‟ to produce painted replicas of Aboriginal bark paintings on pottery (158-159). What is significant about the many forewords, prefaces and newspaper articles in which Elkin wrote about Aboriginal art is that he frequently made humanitarian statements about the capacity for an interest in Aboriginal art to translate into greater compassion for Aboriginal people themselves. For example, his preface to Frederick McCarthy‟s publication Australian Aboriginal Decorative Art (discussed below) declared his hope that the publication would:

contribute materially to the appreciation of the Australian aborigines both as a people possessed of artistic powers, and as human personalities. Moreover, in so far as we let the aborigines – the civilised ones in particular – know our appreciation, we shall help them to get rid of that feeling of inferiority for which contact with us has been responsible (McCarthy, 1952:10).

Similarly, in a foreword to Charles Barrett‟s and R.H. Croll‟s 1943 publication Art of the Australian Aboriginal, he argued that:

… the more the art of the aborigines is publicised, the more appreciative we will all be of that race whose country we have usurped, and whose culture is capable of enriching our own literature and art … [T]hey find pleasure, beauty, and meaning in the result of their artistic efforts. Such a people consists of men and women of like passions as ourselves (quoted in Black, 1964:xvii-xviii; see also Elkin quoted in Lovitt, 2000:11).

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As Lovitt (2000) has argued, such comments are indicative of Elkin‟s hope that art could be a vehicle for assimilation by generating a new consciousness of the worth of Aboriginal people that would enhance the likelihood of their acceptance by white society. This hope is indicative of the ethical projects to which Aboriginal art has been attached in the post-assimilation era that is a core concern of this thesis.

1.7.3 Frederick McCarthy 1905-1997

Frederick McCarthy studied under Elkin at Sydney University and became the first social anthropology graduate to occupy a curatorial position in an Australian museum. He began working at the Australian Museum in Sydney in 1920, and his career there lasted three decades. He had a prolonged interest in Aboriginal material culture, and during his time at the Museum he recorded and published his analyses of a variety of rock art sites from different regions in Australia, and lobbied for their conservation. In Roman Black‟s book, McCarthy receives a commendation for the Museum‟s „up to date display of aboriginal art, and [encouragement of] artists and craftsmen to study and apply it‟ (1964:xxii). Like Elkin, McCarthy was keen to dispel beliefs about the primitivity of Aboriginal people. He encouraging people to see them as „human personalities‟ and suggesting that „they had an appreciation of the beautiful which could only come from a desire for a full emotional life‟ (in Lovitt, 2000:20).

In 1938, in response to a growing community interest in Aboriginal art, McCarthy published Australian Aboriginal Decorative Art. The book‟s introduction conveys McCarthy‟s ambivalent stance towards the growing appreciation of „primitive art‟ on purely formalistic grounds. He acknowledges the „subtle simplicity and appealing originality of African Negro ‟ that has generated interest in the art of „primitive peoples‟, and the increased awareness of the „fresh ideas to be derived from the handiwork of primitive man‟ (1952:11). However, he censures those who believe they can fully understand primitive art without grasping its place within the artists‟ social and spiritual life, and makes explicit comparisons with western practices to make this clear to the reader. For example, he suggests that just as Impressionistic 58

painting „is beyond the comprehension of the ordinary person‟ and requires an understanding of the artists‟ intentions to be appreciated, so too does primitive art elude understanding (11). He also compares the freedom of western artists to innovate and „ever seek… fresh ways of presenting their ideas‟ with the „binding‟ power of tradition that determines the practice of primitive artists (12). Yet he attributes some degree of parity between all art forms in his discussion of the „aesthetic impulse‟ and „innate sense of beauty‟ that all people share and seek to bring to the objects that surround them (12). It is the captions that accompany the photographs of Aboriginal material culture in the book that are most interesting. For instance: „Fig. 1. A pleasing combination is formed by these two clubs from western New South Wales, with patterns cut in high relief, and a hooked boomerang of the Warramunga Tribe, North Australia‟ (13). Indeed, whoever juxtaposed these objects from different regions of Australia for the photograph did create a pleasing abstract composition! In another case, the caption reads „Fig. 2. The symmetrical curves and neat designs of the south-east Australian shields are perfectly harmonised in these examples…‟ (14), and in another „Fig. 7. A club from Oberly Holding, Bogan River, New South Wales, the complex incised pattern of which exhibits a masterly control of line‟ (18). A honed aesthetic taste informs these words, and informs the artful composition of the objects in these photographs. Would- be appropriators are not only encouraged to consider the aesthetic potential of the designs on the objects, but to appreciate their arrangement as abstract shapes. Australian Aboriginal Decorative Art became extremely popular and was re- editioned several times, selling over 10 000 copies (Healy, 2008:83). Walkom‟s preface to the second edition (1948) indicates the degree to which his book converged with, and no doubt helped to cultivate, the growing taste for Aboriginalia:

During the interval since the publication of the first edition interest in the art of the aborigines has spread, and the subject has been incorporated in art courses… [with] students of [art] colleges visiting the Museum galleries regularly. Designs based on Australian aboriginal art motifs have been widely used by architects, interior decorators and commercial artists, and the Museum display of collections illustrating this primitive art is of service in this direction (in McCarthy, 1952, n.p.).

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Like Elkin, McCarthy was a good friend of Margaret Preston. In 1941 the two collaborated to organise the exhibition Australian Aboriginal Art and its Application held at Sydney‟s David Jones Department Store.24 The show included Aboriginal items from a range of museum and private collections, photographs of rock art, paintings by Albert Namatjira (his first exhibition in Sydney), a range of Aboriginal inspired textiles and craft objects produced by art and craft society members, and works by Preston and other non-Indigenous artists, designers and architects.25 It received wide press coverage (much of which commended the Aboriginal art over the appropriative work) and was seen by over 3000 visitors in the 11 day period of its display (Thomas, 1997:7; 1999:121-4; Jones, 1988:170; Edwards, 2005:204-205).

1.7.4 Charles P. Mountford 1890-1976

Mountford was a controversial figure in the Australian anthropology community because he had no scholarly training in the discipline. He was nevertheless involved with a number of significant expeditions, research projects and acquisitions related to Aboriginal rock art, bark paintings and material culture in his lifetime. He also produced a large body of documentary and analytical material on the mythology of Aboriginal artworks and was an enthusiastic promoter of Albert Namatjira. Jones argues that Mountford „achieved more success than any other in promoting Aboriginal art in exhibitions in Australia, Europe, and North and South America during the 1950s and 1960s‟ (1988:172; 2011). We have already made note of Mountford‟s involvement with the UNESCO publication Australia: Aboriginal Paintings, Arnhem Land (1954) and his scholarly friendship with Herbert Read. In 1957 he exhibited a collection of bark paintings at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the catalogue of which included a preface by Read (Read, 1961a:17).

24 This exhibition took place at the same time as the Art of Australia 1788-1941 exhibition which toured America and Canada discussed in the previous section, and this may not have been a coincidence. Stephen (2006: 583) points out that the gallery at David Jones had exhibited modern art since it opened in 1928, and that the then managing director, Charles Lloyd Jones (a prominent arts patron and trustee of the Art Gallery of NSW) had strong business ties in America, and established lasting relations with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which undertook the touring of Art of Australia 1788-1941. 25 Among these artists were Arthur Murch, Douglas Annand, Thea Proctor, Gert Sellheim and Fred Leist. 60

Mountford collected, along with Norman Tindale, several hundred crayon drawings produced by Aboriginal people from Central Australia which depicted their ground, rock and body designs (Jones, 1988:159). In the late 20th century these drawings came to be seen as significant antecedents to the Aboriginal art movement (Petitjean, 2000:60-61).He also led the well publicized, National Geographic Society sponsored, American-Australian Expedition to Arnhem Land in 1948, with which Frederick McCarthy was also associated (McCarthy, 1952:preface). The expedition visited Groote Eylandt, Yirrkala and Oenpelli, and the illustrated records of the tour provided imagery for appropriation in the 1950s, including for 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games paraphernalia (Isaacs, 1999). A large number of crayon drawings and bark paintings were collected during the expedition and in 1956 the Commonwealth distributed much of this artistic material between all State galleries around Australia. In many cases this marked the commencement of these institutions‟ Aboriginal art collections (Philp, 2007). Besides Herbert Read, Mountford‟s work resonated with the interests of other art scholars concerned with universal motivations and themes in art, and many became his correspondents (Smith [ed], 1961; Jones, 2011). Among his artist friends were Allen Lowe, a ceramicist who appropriated from Aboriginal art (Kleinert, 2002:21), and the modernist painter James Cant, one of the few Australian artists to enter modern art circles in Europe. Cant joined the British Surrealist Group in 1935, and later exhibited with artists such as Mondrian and Kokoschka. His artistic career changed course following his employment at the Sydney Museum in the early 1940s and his meeting with Mountford in 1945, and he went on to pursue an Aboriginal art-inspired design practice (Powerhouse Museum, 2012d; Mountford, 1950). In 1950 Cant and Mountford staged the London exhibition Australian Aboriginal Art, which was composed of Mountford‟s photographs of Aboriginal cave paintings that he‟d discovered in Arnhem Land, and Cant‟s painted reproductions of those cave paintings (Cant, 1950). In a manner that recalls the arguments of André Breton, Mountford‟s catalogue introduction draws a deferential contrast between the „scientist‟ and the „painter‟, and expresses his gratitude to Cant for enlightening him about the intrinsic, aesthetic value of the art. He suggests that:

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[The scientist‟s] investigations... finds little appreciation of beauty, of balance in colour and form, or of appeal to the senses. This emphasis on the intellectual, rather than the emotional side of art is to be regretted... The components of an artistic expression cannot be measured, they must be felt (1950, n.p.).

This modernist viewpoint was also expressed in a souvenir brochure for the 1960 Festival of the Arts, in which Mountford claimed that „All the bark paintings in this exhibition are examples of “art for art‟s sake”, of an activity that gives pleasure, but not gain, to the artist‟ (in Jones, 1988:172).

1.7.5 Leonhard Adam 1891-1960

Leonhard Adam was a German anthropologist and jurist who arrived in Australia in 1940 on the Dunera ship, which brought thousands of “enemy aliens”, many of them Jewish refugees, from Britain to Australia. After a period of internment, he was released to be tenured at the , where he gradually accumulated a sizeable collection of material culture from around the world, later to be named the „Leonhard Adam Collection of International Indigenous Culture‟. This collection began with the 1946 acquisition of a group of bark paintings from Groote Eylandt, an Island off the east coast of Arnhem Land in the Gulf of Carpentaria (Bosse, 2006). Adam‟s significance, however, also lies in his published work. The book Primitive Art, which he wrote prior to coming to Australia, was published in Britain in 1940 and was held in high regard for many years: it was twice expanded and re- editioned (Adam, 1940; Braunholtz, 1960:180). According to Edwards (2005:190-192), the book provided Margaret Preston with important theoretical foundations about primitive art upon which to base her arguments about Aboriginal aesthetics. In 1943, Adam wrote the catalogue for the Primitive Art Exhibition that was staged by the National Gallery and National Museum of Victoria (not to be confused with the 1929 exhibition of similar name discussed previously). The exhibition displayed Aboriginal objects alongside those from the Pacific, America, Africa and Asia, and Adam hailed it as one of the first „universal primitive art exhibition[s]‟ to have taken place worldwide 62

(Adam, 1943:1). His introduction attributed the growing interest in primitive art to the disciplines of Psychology and Anthropology „with which the study of primitive art is linked up‟, and he also voiced a core Art Brut conviction, that „all these different types of primitive art seem to have one feature in common, which makes all the difference when compared with modern European art, namely, the spontaneity and absolute sincerity of the primitive artist‟ (1-2). Adam‟s writings on Aboriginal art focused on those forms that he felt suited an “art for art‟s sake” paradigm. For instance, in an article published in the short-lived but influential avant-garde magazine , he suggested that the „decorative ornamentation‟ which adorns objects of Aboriginal material culture and „often reveals an astonishing sense of rhythm‟, is the most potentially long-lasting Aboriginal art form: „The Australian Aborigine certainly has good taste‟, he claimed (1944:50, see also 1950). Adam made the prescient suggestion that, in the face of the imminent decline of Aboriginal society and consequent abandonment of sacred objects, the training of Aboriginal artists in the use of European materials and techniques with which to continue developing their inherited designs could lead to the widespread production of decorative Aboriginal art, which would bring about „an aboriginal industry of some importance‟ (1944:50). \

1.7.6 Ronald Berndt 1916-1990 and Catherine Berndt 1918-1994

As a young man Ronald Berndt had worked in the ethnology department at the South Australian Museum where he came into contact with Charles Mountford, and in the 1940s and 1950s he completed anthropology studies at Sydney University under the mentorship of A.P. Elkin (Gray, 2007b). Catherine also undertook studies there and the two began conducting collaborative fieldwork in Arnhem Land in 1946. The Berndts would become highly influential collectors and interpreters of Aboriginal art from the region, and were involved in several seminal exhibitions and publications about Aboriginal art. Among these was „Arnhem Land Art‟ (1949), an exhibition at the David Jones Art Gallery of work collected on field trips. This exhibition was attended by 5000 63

people, including Tony Tuckson, an abstract expressionist artist and, from 1950, Assistant then Deputy Director at the Art Gallery of NSW. Tuckson subsequently instituted the most progressive collection and exhibition policy with respect to Aboriginal art of all state galleries in the post WW2 period (Elkin, 1949; Perkins, 2009:111). The Berndts‟ publication Art in Arnhem Land, to which Elkin also contributed, followed in 1950. In 1957 the couple curated the show „Australian Aboriginal Art: Arnhem Land Paintings on Bark and Carved Human Forms‟ at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. This exhibition was the first to identify Aboriginal artists by name and language group, and to locate them regionally with respect to stylistic differences (Jones, 1988:161). The Berndts are distinguished from the rest of this group of anthropologists for having been explicitly hostile to the application of modernist aesthetic concepts to Aboriginal art. This will be discussed in detail in Chapter 4.

1.7.7 Lesser characters and summary remarks

Other anthropologists are worth mentioning, if in less detail. Alfred Radcliffe- Brown, the first chair of anthropology at Sydney University (in 1926), was an art lover and an associate of Margaret Preston. He shared with Preston a cool, objectivist approach to Aboriginal culture and the belief that Australia needed to formulate a distinctive art (Edwards, 2005:103-104). In 1927 Radcliffe-Brown published an article titled „Margaret Preston and Transition‟ for a special Preston-focused issue of Art in Australia. Galvanised by the fact that Preston‟s work had been „viewed with disfavour as being infected with the vices of modernism‟ Radcliffe-Brown‟s article defended the post-impressionists‟ favouring of solidity and simplicity in form and overt design and argued that „we have learnt to appreciate‟ the art of the „Primitives, the ancient arts of the East, China, Japan, India, Persia – the arts of the so-called savage peoples in Africa, in Oceania, in America, which formerly reposed unnoticed on the shelves of ethnological museums‟ (1927, n.p.). As chair of department, Radcliffe-Brown supported Ursula McConnel‟s ethnographic research with Aboriginal communities in Northern Queensland. McConnel 64

had transferred her curiosity about religion, mythology and symbolism from the disciplines of psychology to anthropology in the early 1920s, and her Queensland research focused on the symbolism associated with women‟s ceremonies in body decoration and ritual ornaments, and „artistic designs on shields, paddles, boomerangs and other artefacts‟ (O‟Gorman, 1993:98). In 1935, McConnel‟s analysis of these qualities was published in an Art in Australia article titled „Inspiration and Design in Aboriginal Art‟, accompanied by several photographs of decorated shields, boomerangs, and members of the tribes with whom she conducted her research (McConnel, 1935). The article contributed to the enhanced visibility of Aboriginal imagery in the inter-war period.

What do these sketches tell us? Evidently many of these anthropologists were adept with the rhetoric of form; comfortably able - and often with flair - to discuss Aboriginal material culture in complementary aesthetic terms. In most cases, this ability reflects an appreciation of art in general. This is borne out by the associations between these anthropologists and artists and art scholars such as Margaret Preston, James Cant and Herbert Read, their patronage of the Arts, their membership and/or trusteeship of arts institutions and societies, and their willingness to speak at Arts events and to publish articles in art journals. What is striking is that almost all of these individuals endorsed appropriation and/or aided appropriative practices. Without modernist primitivism, this appropriation would have had no logic. Modernist primitivism rationalised the retrieval and preservation of a formal essence from a multifaceted, instrumental object of culture. In their encouragement of appropriation, these anthropologists fostered Australia‟s regionalist, patriotic, commercial brand of modernism.

1.8 Conclusion

The purpose of this chapter has been to show that early encounters with Aboriginal art were mediated by scholarly and poetic engagements with the conditions of modernity. We have seen that ideas about, and representations of, Aboriginal people 65

and their material culture were part of the specular, scientific and populist dissemination of ideas about the exotic people of the colonies to people in Europe. It is also clear that seminal scholarship on the origins and evolution of human society, most notably in the fields of anthropology and psychoanalysis, were both informed by scholarship on Aboriginal people and came to inform early interpretations of Aboriginal art. We have also seen that modernists who were confronting the implications of industrialisation, urbanisation and capitalism frequently drew on the primitive and the folkloric in their efforts to intervene upon or transcend what they judged to be a corrupt contemporary milieu. The mix of hope and disenchantment evoked by these projects is expressive of the way aesthetic philosophies of the Romantic and Modern periods oscillated between a sense of crisis and a sense of unprecedented liberty in the face of rapid social change. For some, it was imagined that contact with the domain of the tribal and pre-industrial subject might enrich and empower the modern subject, and we have seen that anthropological and psychoanalytic discourses encouraged modern artists and intellectuals to pursue this vantage point. When we consider the circulation of Baldwin Spencer‟s work, and recall the exchanges between individuals such as Charles Mountford and Herbert Read or between Karel Kupka and A. P. Elkin and André Breton, we can see how ideas about Aboriginal subjectivity and the content of Aboriginal art were ferried between Europe and Australia along the currents of these paradigmatic aesthetic movements and trends of scholarly inquiry. This chapter has also demonstrated that Aboriginal themes were pivotal to the emergence of a distinctive Australian national consciousness, particularly in the years following World War 1. As noted with regard to the Australian displays in the Great Exhibitions, the iconic Aborigine was part of the story of cultural and intellectual exchange between Australia and Europe at a time when Australia was seeking to establish itself as an independent nation with its own history. The advent of Australian tourism in the interwar years brought Australians into contact with the landscapes of the interior for the first time and generated a corpus of imagery of an ancient land with ancient inhabitants. The aesthetics of modernism was a medium through which Australians came to perceive an austere beauty in these landscapes, in the native flora and fauna and in Aboriginal material culture. The commercial and domestic settings of this aesthetic brought representations of Aboriginality into everyday spaces. Modernist

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primitivism also encouraged artists like Margaret Preston, James Cant and Frances Derham to draw upon anthropological texts, museum displays and rock art sites for inspiration.

The discussions in this chapter provide a critical back-story for the remainder of the thesis. First, many contemporary post-colonial critical discourses and art practices recall, with a mixture of anger, incredulity and sorrow, that Aboriginal people were historically characterised as quintessentially primitive across many discourses and that this had tragic ramifications with respect to government policy. The history of these ideas as recounted in this chapter is thus essential to understanding recent themes and debates in these areas which will be explored later, particularly in Chapters 3 and 4. Second, in the writings of Elkin, Kupka and McCarthy, the recognition of Aboriginal art‟s beauty and skilled execution was a medium for humanising Aboriginal people in a manner that went against the grain of prevailing discourses, and in the case of the former we find the explicit suggestion that such recognition might lead to a greater respect for Aboriginal people among the wider citizenry. With respect to the interwar period in Australia, Lovitt (2000) has revealed the synergy between the celebration by modern artists of the beauty of objects made by „primitive‟ peoples; the progressive anthropology associated with Franz Boas that rejected evolutionism in favour of universalist and culturally relativist principles; and the shift from the Protectionist policies of the past which assumed that Aboriginal culture was terminal and incompatible with white civilisation, to policies which advocated the assimilation of Aboriginal people into white society. The humanist declarations of artistic, intellectual and emotional parity between Aboriginal people and “us” made by anthropologists such as Elkin were well served by the universalist ideals of many modernists (articulated by Kupka and Mountford for instance) which celebrated the emotive foundations of all creative expression and argued that an innate sense of beauty and formal resolution manifests in all cultures. It is clear that at this time, Aboriginal art was a significant space in which to imagine and seek to expedite a sympathetic transformation in the Australian consciousness with respect to Aboriginal people, and as I will argue throughout the thesis, this objective has not abated.

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Third, Aboriginal art‟s sustained entanglement with is a theme that runs through the thesis, and this chapter has provided several illustrations of this entanglement. The forms of nationalism reviewed above were often progressive and reflexive in spirit and should not be seen in the negative light with which we often view patriotism in Australia today, and are not reducible to what we now regard to be kitsch objects of Aboriginalia. In the first half of the 20th century the intellectual and cultural elite of Sydney and Melbourne were relatively small. The careers discussed above lead us to understand that the ensemble of ideas and ideals that circulated around Aboriginal art were the fruit of sympathetic exchanges between a small group of artists, anthropologists, museologists, antiquarians and other members of society learned in fields such as Art, natural history and archaeology. The formation of an authentic national art was an objective of importance to many intellectuals and artists who were concerned with establishing a mature and sophisticated culture in Australia. We will encounter a similar set of ideals in Chapter 2, with regard to the emergence of concepts of Australian heritage in the 1960s and 1970s and the nationalistic cultural policies in the 1990s, and in Chapter 3‟s discussion of the Australian Art world of the 1980s. Fourth, contemporary Aboriginal art discourses frequently invoke a distinction between the expert paradigms of Art and Anthropology. These discourses tend to depict the former as respectful and progressive and the latter as circumscriptive in relation to Aboriginal art. I undertake a detailed critique of this tendency in Chapter 4, and the history I have recounted in this Chapter sets the scene for that critique. The discussions above make clear that numerous collegial associations traversed this between the 1920s and 1960s. Furthermore, anthropologists were explicitly engaged with modern art discourses and sought to enfranchise Aboriginal art within the framework of modernism in order to cultivate a wider audience for it. Indeed, we have seen that in some cases these anthropologists adopted oddly diminutive positions with respect to their own expertise and focused heavily on the formal and emotive thematics that made Aboriginal art relevant to modernism. Fifth, this thesis pursues a sustained sociological engagement with the complex nature of fine arts principles, in order to show the extent to which Aboriginal art poses a radical challenge to the philosophies and practices which underpin contemporary fine arts. This engagement was initiated in this chapter, in which I attended to the

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circumstances, and the hopes and anxieties, which were formative of the Romantic artist during the 19th century, with respect to both the character of the ideal artist and the idea that art is a precious space of autonomy in an industrial capitalist world. This chapter has also shown that many interpreters of Aboriginal art struggled to reconcile their appreciation of the autonomous beauty and the social embeddedness of the art. Concepts such as „intellectual realism‟ (A.S. Kenyon), „analytical knowledge‟ (Herbert Read) and „painted literature‟ (Karel Kupka) were all efforts to describe the extra- aesthetic dimensions of Aboriginal art and to acknowledge its social and psychological efficacy, while they also resonate with the Romantic quest for a form of art that enriches the everyday. This is indicative of a tension, one that I will show continues to be an agitating force in Aboriginal art discourses and curatorial practices, between having fidelity to the universality of form on the one hand and respecting the specificity of content and artistic intent on the other. Finally, this thesis argues that Aboriginal art and culture have always been subject to both popular/commercial and fine art/scholarly engagements. This was typified by the Great Exhibition tradition discussed at the beginning of this chapter, the market for Aboriginalia and the practice of Margaret Preston. As I will argue in Chapter 5, in which I examine the relationship between fine art and commerce, one of the reasons for the unruliness of the Aboriginal art phenomenon is that is has been deemed valuable and collectable within the context of specialised aesthetic circles while it continues to circulate in the realms of commercial mass culture and nationalistic visual culture.

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Chapter 2: Governance, Nationhood and Civil Society

2.1 Introduction and chapter outline

In the „post-assimilation‟ era – dating from the late 1960s to the 2000s - the status of Indigenous Australians, and popular understandings of Indigenous identity and culture, underwent radical changes within Australian society and, as Attwood writes, „the problem of Australian national identity and Aboriginal rights became increasingly intertwined‟ (2005:25). In this context, and as I will explore in this chapter, Aboriginal art has very often been called upon to broker two interconnected relationships: that which exists between Indigenous people and the State, and that which can be said to exist at a national level between Indigenous and non-Indigenous citizens. In other words, Aboriginal art has stood at the interface between the redemptive project of the Settler State and the movements for rights and recognition that have been pursued by Indigenous people, both of which depend upon the reflexive engagement of non- Indigenous civil society for their success. It is perhaps hazardous to take as a starting point three entities that are so internally fragmented and reciprocally entwined: the Indigenous community, Civil Society and the State. Nevertheless, I will argue that we can only grasp the nuances of Aboriginal art‟s complex social meanings if we examine the rhetorical and symbolic communication that takes place between these three entities within the discourses and forms of visual culture that animate Australian public life.

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Any project of this kind must consider how the relationship between Art and the State is shaped by Settler-State circumstances. Arts and cultural policies have long been underpinned by notions of civic virtue; that is, the conviction that through the subsidy of particular forms of culture, the best qualities of the human spirit and intellect are cultivated for the benefit of all. Therefore the following objectives are usually salient to cultural policy: encouraging high standards of artistic excellence and professionalism; fostering a sense of pride in the heritage of the nation or a particular locality or community; encouraging the harmonious coexistence of plural identities by facilitating diverse forms of self-expression; and creating opportunities for positive social interaction and building self-esteem among disenfranchised members of society through the therapeutic effects of creativity (Rowse, 1985; Craik, Davis & Sunderland, 2000; Stevenson, 2000). In post-colonial and post-conflict societies, these “public good” agendas are inflected with the particular problems that arise from historical injustice, ongoing inequality and ethnic difference (Thomas, 1999; Marcus, 2004; Dibley, 2007; Coombs, 2003: Introduction). This chapter will argue that in Australia these agendas have been conduits for a redemptive nationalistic project undertaken to acknowledge and make amends for the dispossession, exclusion and discrimination that Aboriginal people have experienced throughout the history of the Settler-State. It will address a range of forms of cultural governance that have been expressive of the State‟s sense of duty to Indigenous citizens as well as the evolving sympathies of non-Indigenous citizens. These include specialized arts subsidies, cultural policies pertaining to tourism, heritage and Reconciliation; large-scale events such as the Bicentennial and the Olympic Games; and cultural planning policies in local jurisdictions, all of which have fuelled the production and circulation of Aboriginal art, and made it an intensely symbolic form of visual culture.

Section 2.2 focuses on the subsidy of Aboriginal art production, particularly in remote communities. It underlines the complexities that arise from the fact that this subsidy has been seen as a means to meet economic objectives, cultural objectives, and to provide disadvantaged citizens with comfort and respite in distressing environments. Sections 2.3 to 2.4 map the civic and political movements and catalytic events that have galvanised Aboriginal art‟s mobilisation by Aboriginal people, the State, and Australian

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civil society. It reviews how, from the 1980s in particular, the State‟s concern with overcoming Indigenous disadvantage and social exclusion was taken beyond matters of discrimination and equal opportunity and emerged as a responsibility of moral consequence for the nation as a whole. It also looks at the powerful role played by art in articulating Aboriginal land custodianship claims, in solidarising a sense of Aboriginal collective identity, and in defining the grievances and agendas that propelled urban Aboriginal activist movements. The concept of „cultural trauma‟ theorised by Alexander (2003), Eyerman (2004) and others is drawn upon as a model for thinking about how the dynamics of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations in Australian public life, and the national project of redressing historical injustices, find expression in cultural forms. Section 2.5 shows how these processes have reverberated within Australian public culture, and focuses particularly on the acquisition, appropriation and endorsement of Aboriginal art by the State. It reveals how Aboriginal art has been pivotal to a sustained mobilisation of commemorative events, institutions, discourses and symbolically powerful forms of visual culture to address the tensions inherent to the post-colonial condition. Section 2.6 examines a range of exemplary discourses that arise at the nexus of State, civil society and Aboriginal personhood to delineate the particular way in which “Aboriginal culture” has been constituted in the post-assimilation era. It suggests that Aboriginal art has become emblematic for “Aboriginal culture” as it is positively imagined in Australian public life, and as such, it has become a space within which gestures of good will and declarations of respect for Aboriginality can find purchase. It has also provided a reservoir of imagery and symbolism which is consistently drawn upon to evoke a sense of Australian nationhood anchored by concepts of land and ancient heritage. Ultimately I make the case that, by enabling the attribution of worth and value to the Indigenous domain, and making that domain central to celebrations of Australian nationhood, Aboriginal art has been at the nub of the redemptive and reparative nationalistic projects that followed from the election of the .

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2.2 Understanding Aboriginal art subsidy

The Aboriginal art industry has been well subsidised from its inception, and as Altman, Hunter, Ward & Wright suggest, in general this subsidisation has come to be viewed within government as a „means to combine cultural maintenance with economic activity for both Indigenous and national benefit‟ (2002:2). The policy chronicle reviews a range of forms of Aboriginal art subsidy between the 1970s and the late 2000s that reflect this mix of objectives, from sources in state, territory and Federal governments, including the Aboriginal Arts Board, Aboriginal Affairs agencies, and targeted programs administered by ATSIC and Arts ministries within cabinet. (cf. Appendix 2, A.1, A.2.3, A.3.3, A.4.3, A.5.3, A.6.3). The remote community Art Centres which have driven the Aboriginal art movement have been the main focus of Aboriginal art subsidy discourses (as will be discussed below). Currently, approximately 100 Art Centres receive annual grants from the Federal Government to cover operation costs and salaries for Art Centre coordinators. According to data collected by Brian Tucker, who has audited Art Centres over several years, on average this funding amounts to 14% of Art Centres‟ annual income (B. Tucker, personal communication, December 13, 2011). Art centres are also sometimes recipients of ad hoc grants from both federal and state government sources for project-based art production (to make visits to country for instance) and to improve facilities and infrastructure, and to train and hire staff from local communities. Based on the findings of Mercer (1997) and Tucker (2011), it appears that between 1997 and 2008, the value of the marketplace sales generated by every subsidy dollar increased from $3 and $7, while in the years following 2008 the figure has fallen back to $5. Currently Art Centres are expected to be commercially proactive, but not self-sustaining.26 The following sections will explore the mix of objectives that have informed the subsidy of Art Centres, as well as other sectors of the Aboriginal art industry, and show how this mix has had bipartisan support to a degree that is unusual in Indigenous affairs.

26 Christine Godden (consultant with DesART), personal communication, May 15, 2011. 74

2.2.1 Work

Economic objectives have been central to the subsidy of Aboriginal art production from the early days of the movement to the present. These objectives have been articulated in terms of economic opportunity, economic empowerment, economic independence, labour-force participation, job creation and professional development across many policy documents, strategies and advocacy discourses.27 This is indicated by Myers who, in his discussion of the early days of painting at Papunya, writes that „an important part of the administrative response to the continuing presence, poverty, and high mortality of Aborigines was to find them a place in the economy‟ and the ideals of self-determination gave credence to the hope that painting might constitute „culturally meaningful work‟ (2002:130). The Aboriginal Arts Board (AAB), whose subvention was so vital to the survival of Papunya Tula Artists in its first decade, has regularly argued that the Arts are a means for Aboriginal people to overcome poverty and earn an income (Australia Council, 1977; 1979; 1984). In addition, in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, Aboriginal affairs agencies concerned with Aboriginal economic development and adult education initiated and/or funded several arts and crafts concerns in remote parts of Australia, including the Utopia Women‟s Batik Project, which launched the career of Emily Kngwarraye and other artists (Thompson, 1972; Batty, 2008:28; Bowdler, 2009; Powerhouse Museum, 2012e). The challenge of finding remotely located Aboriginal people a place in the economy to which Myers refers remains as relevant today as in the 1970s, and arts and craft production have continued to be seen as uniquely placed to enable this. Many employment, training and enterprise development programs, administered by both Federal and State governments, have subsidised the industry over the years in a manner that treats Aboriginal art production as a form of “work” (cf. Appendix 2, A.4.3, A.6.3). This has been highlighted, and advocated, in several government reports.28 Furthermore, as was documented in the 1989 Review of the Aboriginal Arts and Crafts Industry,29 government commitments to achieving employment and income equity for Indigenous

27 See Altman et. al (1989); Langton & CAR (1994); ATSIC (1995); Taylor (1996); Mercer (1997); Office for the Arts (2011a). 28 See Altman et. al (1989:118-121); RCIADIC (1991a: vol 4, 28.1.23, 34.4.15-21); Indigenous art – securing the future (2007:6). 29 Henceforth I will refer to this as the 1989 Industry Review. 75

Australians in the 1980s focused on the Aboriginal arts and crafts industry, often in association with the tourism sector, as one of the few areas that showed real promise (Altman et. al, 1989:Chapters 8 & 9). This was echoed in the Report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody30 in its discussion of how the disenfranchisement of Aboriginal people could be ameliorated, and recently in the Closing the Gap strategy which seeks to improve Aboriginal wellbeing across several socio-economic indicators (Johnston, 1991a:34.4.7-19; Office for the Arts, 2011b).31 It has also been affirmed by the establishment, in 2010, of a Government funded Cooperative Research Centre on Remote Economic Participation, within which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Economies and Tourist product are characterised as „enterprise development projects‟ (CRC-REP, 2012). The long-surviving Community Development Employment Program (CDEP), a kind of work for the dole scheme, has also contributed to the work-like quality of Aboriginal art production. The Art and Craft Centre Story, a report commissioned by the peak Art Centre body Desart, found that of the 39 Art Centres surveyed, ten were employing some or all of their artists as CDEP participants (Wright, 2000:31). Similarly, the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) reported to the 2007 Senate Inquiry into Australia‟s Indigenous Visual Arts and Crafts Sector32 that „around 130 arts activities are currently undertaken by 95 CDEP organisations‟ (Indigenous Art – securing the future, 2007:64; see also Wright, 2006; Altman, 2006:6). Besides wages paid to Aboriginal artists and artsworkers, CDEP has been an important source of grants for employment projects that are of benefit to Art Centres and artists and sustains organisations that are otherwise connected to the industry. While currently there are many Art Centres which do not make use of CDEP at all, the flurry of advocacy that arose in response to plans announced in 2007 to abolish the scheme reveals that some quarters of the industry very much rely upon it (see for instance Kohen, 2007; Peatling & Gibson, 2007; Owen, 2007a). For instance Birrinbirrin, chairperson of the peak Art Centre organisation Association of Northern, Kimberley & Arnhem Aboriginal Artists (ANKAAA), expressed the following concern:

30 Henceforth I will refer to this as the Deaths in Custody Report. 31 The Closing the Gap strategy is a framework for improving Indigenous people‟s lives across the areas of health, life expectancy, education, employment and living standards launched by the Australian Labour government in 2008. 32 Henceforth I will refer to this as the 2007 Senate Inquiry. 76

Nearly all of our art centre workers and artists rely on CDEP payments which have supported jobs in art centres for the past 20 years. Due to the years of under-funding of Indigenous education, many or [sic] our people are not (mainstream) job ready and some never will be. They do have meaningful work though; their job is the expression and teaching of our culture. They are artists (in Kohen, 2007:1).

The “work-like” quality of Aboriginal art production is also indicated by the fact that an up-front payment method has been adopted by many Art Centres, and in other cases the Art Centre makes an immediate payment to the artist that is then supplemented once the work is sold on to another party (Healy, 2005:71).33 The precedent for this was set at Papunya, where it became clear very early on that cash flow to the artists was essential for the continuation of art production. As the commercial interest in the art was initially meagre, the State was the primary source of this cash flow. In crafting a method of support for Papunya, the AAB decided to eschew the conventional Arts subsidy model of providing individual artists' grants and rather chose to commission and pay the Papunya artists for the paintings they produced. In reference to this idiosyncratic method, Robert (Bob) Edwards, the first director of the AAB, was known to say that Papunya „was the most heavily subsidised art in the country!‟ (Kimber in McCulloch, 2001:30, 32-33; Kronenberg, 1995; Myers, 2001:182- 183; cf. Appendix 2, A.2.3).

It is clear therefore that Aboriginal art production in remote communities has for a long time been construed as a form of work from which income is derived, and furthermore, its continuation has in part depended upon a variety of subsidisation measures oriented by the idea that a form of work is being undertaken and needs to be encouraged. Inherent to this method of governance is the awareness that, as Birrinbirrin suggested above, Aboriginal people in remote communities often lack the education and skills to enter the workforce, even where job opportunities do exist. Now that Aboriginal art and other practices such as dance, storytelling and performance are credited as being alternative realms of skill and knowledge, they have become an

33 However the resale royalty legislation that was recently introduced has forced many Art Centres to change their methods so that they are not the first point of sale (which would entail that they pay a royalty when they sell the work on to a gallery) but rather the agent for the artist (J. Altman, personal communication, July 29, 2011). 77

attractive target of policy. We should not underestimate the degree to which this unique economy of art production sets remote Aboriginal art practice apart from the art practice we associate with the Romantic artist discussed in Chapter 1. As I will discuss in detail in Chapter 5, it places mercenary interests at the centre of artistic purpose, and has been one of the factors driving the production of a prodigious amount of works of varying quality, both of which pose a challenge to fine art market conventions.

2.2.2 Welfare

The economic objectives that are pursued through the subsidisation of Aboriginal art production have in general not met with success in remote communities. It is clear that Aboriginal art production is a valuable source of income for Aboriginal artists, and it is remarkable that Art Centres are often the only source of “export dollars” in a remote community (B. Tucker, personal communication, December 13, 2011). However, because the artists live in environments in which welfare dependency is entrenched, where other opportunities for economic participation are minimal, where private property is not valued and communal obligations are usually more important than individual ambition, wealth and achievement, the income that artists receive from their work is usually quickly distributed among family members and does not translate into economic prosperity in the conventional sense (this will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 5). In cases where CDEP has been a source of income for artists, the subsidisation of Aboriginal art production through the scheme has taken place merely as an alternative to, or in addition to, paying those individuals a government pension. It should be pointed out that even though remote communities are often described in sympathetic discourses as being “impoverished”, in some cases there is a lot of money in circulation derived from welfare and CDEP payments, mining royalties and art sales, as was conveyed to me in several conversations I had with people engaged in remote community life. What needs to be made clear is that the manner in which this money is distributed and spent means that it does little to ameliorate the socio-economic and lifestyle factors to which remote Aboriginal disadvantage is generally attributed.

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Taking these factors into account, the subsidisation of remote Aboriginal art production can to some degree be interpreted as a form of mediated welfare provision which facilitates pastoral care and meaningful activity for disenfranchised citizens. Despite the fact that it does not contribute to economic empowerment in a conventional sense, art production at Art Centres clearly involves a sense of purpose and pride in achievement for practitioners and thus is a form of meaningful labour from which income – small and sporadic though it may be in most cases - is derived. This is implied by Gloria Morales, a coordinator at the Warlukurlangu Art Centre in , who characterises the painting activity that takes place there in the following terms:

This is a good thing for these people. It is meaningful, culturally appropriate work in a place where there is none. They also like doing it. The paint Monday to Friday from 9am to 5pm. They don‟t paint weekends because the art centre staff need to rest, but if it weren‟t for us, they‟d come and paint here every day of the week. (in Genocchio, 2008:93).

Furthermore, besides the obvious contribution the Art Centres make to the sustenance and affirmation of culture, they also exist as safe havens for people in communities whose lives are a struggle for a variety of reasons. Many Art Centres dedicate a portion of their 40% share of art sales to auxiliary projects, for instance in supporting people in medical and aged care, facilitating healthy eating projects or breakfast programs for children, or desexing and improving the health of community members‟ dogs. They also support artists and their family members in a range of other ways on an informal, day- to-day basis, for instance by providing transportation with the Art Centre vehicle or assisting them with filling out government forms (Indigenous Art – Securing the future, 2007:4.6-4.10; Warakurna Artists, 2006). The significance of the Art Centres‟ impact upon wellbeing is attested to by the fact that in recent years many Art Centres have acquired the status of a Public Benevolent Institution (PBI) for tax purposes (B. Tucker, personal communication, 13 December, 2011). This means they are defined as „a non-profit institution organised for the direct relief of poverty, sickness, suffering, misfortune, disability or helplessness‟ (ATO, 2008). Furthermore, Brian Tucker, in his role as an accounting consultant and auditor for many Art Centres, pointed out to me that Art Centres are most likely to

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succeed in their applications for funding from the current dedicated Art Centre subsidy scheme34 if they can prove they are commercially engaged and that what they are doing is culturally and socially beneficial. In his view, the real worth of the State‟s subsidisation of the commercial endeavour of Art Centres lies in these social and cultural benefits, benefits that may be more important than the income generated for individual artists which dissipates very quickly. In other words, the pursuit of a market for the art has become a vital mechanism for mitigating social ills, and he advises Art Centre staff to pursue profit to the utmost, even if this appears to contradict their not- for-profit status, because it is the reinvestment of these profits into the Art Centre and the community that can achieve the greatest good.

Therefore we can see that a distinctive (but not necessarily coherent) subsidy ethos has evolved to support remote Aboriginal art production in which, as noted above, an amalgam of economic, cultural, and social objectives is enshrined. In this amalgam we can discern, particularly in the conferral of PBI status, an admission that remote communities are often highly distressing places in which to live, and bereft of economic opportunities. Subsidised art production exists as a surrogate for labour-force participation, and the Art centre stands at the coalface of community trauma; mitigating suffering and facilitating therapeutic, harmonious social activity in a way that no other service currently can without substantial further investment by governments. What is clear is that this mix of agendas that drives remote Aboriginal art subsidy has been constitutive of artistic practices in remote Australia. The motives and incentives that drive production; the ways in which the market is interpreted by artists (for instance, the State and the commercial market have at times been indistinguishable from the artists' perspective (Myers, 2002:138)); and the number of non-Indigenous mediators to whom the artist and their relatives look for income are all facets of a uniquely calibrated economy underpinned in part by criss-crossing sources of government subsidy.

34 This is currently known as IVAIS (Indigenous Visual Arts Industry Support). 80

2.2.3 The ambiguity of Aboriginal art industry policy

It is noteworthy that the amalgam of economic, cultural and social objectives I have described appears to have had support from both major government parties during a period characterised by highly adversarial politics in Indigenous affairs. For instance in a 2003 media release which outlined a cross-department strategy for the Aboriginal art industry, Liberal Senator Richard Alston stated that: '[g]iven the employment, cultural, artistic and wealth-creating significance of the sector as well as its enormous potential to boost community self-esteem a whole-of-government approach is required' (Alston, Hardgrave & Abbott, 2003).35 A similar mix of objectives is articulated in the following 2010 statement from Labor Minister Peter Garrett which announced a $42 million investment in Indigenous arts, culture and heritage across five programs:

Together these programs are a significant part of the Government's commitment to Closing the Gap on Indigenous Disadvantage by contributing to the overall well-being of Indigenous communities and supporting employment opportunities for Indigenous Australians. It is crucial that as a nation we continue to protect, preserve and promote Indigenous arts, culture and heritage to help build a diverse and dynamic Australia. (Garrett, 2010a; see also Office of the Arts, 2011b).

The bipartisanship of which these quotations are representative is unusual. Indigenous affairs has been riven by disputes over the reasons and solutions for Indigenous socio- economic disadvantage, over the legitimacy of self-determination as a paradigm of Indigenous empowerment, over the ways in which Indigenous “rights” can be defined and enhanced, and about the meanings and duties entailed by Reconciliation (Goot & Rowse, 2007; cf. Appendix 2, A.6.1). These disputes are all indicative of the fact that, as Altman and Rowse have suggested, a recurrent tension in Indigenous affairs rests on the question of whether Indigenous policy should prioritise „equality of socioeconomic status‟ or the facilitation of „choice and self-determination‟ (2005:159). Clearly, Aboriginal art is highly mutable with respect to these disputes and can be viewed as

35 See also the following remark from Liberal Senator Robert Hill: „The Aboriginal art movement is consistent with our government's views on empowerment. It's giving Aboriginal people a means of expressing themselves. And it's now probably the largest non-government source of income to many communities' (in Milliken, 2004:24; see also Indigenous Art – Securing the future, 2007:1).

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complementary to both the project of achieving socio-economic equality and facilitating „choice and self-determination‟. Furthermore, the market success of Aboriginal art has arguably been a neutral mediator of policy, reassuring governments that subvention is pragmatic and uncontroversial.

A further point to be made about Aboriginal art‟s ambiguity with respect to the lenses of government policy is that the precise meaning of Aboriginal art‟s widely celebrated “success” is elusive. Is it a “market” success, an “economic” success, an “artistic” success, or an “Aboriginal” success?36 That this question cannot be easily answered is indicated by the fact that the motives for subsidy (particularly in the last decade) have been shaped by impressions of both the success and the fragility of the Aboriginal art industry. On the one hand, governments have focused on the recognition Aboriginal art has received in fine arts circles and its success within the art market. This is illustrated for instance by the introduction of resale royalty legislation in 2010 which, to some extent, was premised on the belief that that the consistent growth in the resale market for Aboriginal art observed in the 1990s and 2000s will continue, which is by no means certain. In addition, state and local governments across Australia have increasingly regarded Aboriginal arts-related initiatives to be good policy in the areas of Indigenous affairs, cultural planning and tourism. Such attention implies that these governments wish to mobilise the success of Aboriginal art within their own jurisdictions, and furthermore that they view such policies as a matter of equity: Aboriginal artists and arts workers among their constituents should not miss out on the support and attention accruing to their counterparts elsewhere.37 On the other hand, ministers and bureaucrats are constantly warned that if they take a particular policy line, or do not intervene in some way, Aboriginal art is in jeopardy. This was the case when plans to abolish CDEP were announced (discussed above), when the legitimacy of including art in self-managed superannuation portfolios

36 See Myers (2001:181-182) who notes that the difficulty of evaluating the efficacy of subsidy was evident in the early 1980s, and Healy (2005:6) who questions the notion of Aboriginal art‟s “success” with regards to the responsibilities Art Centres. 37 These motives appear to have driven the establishment of Art fairs and art prizes in the last decade, such as the Parliament of NSW Aboriginal Art Prize, the Victorian Indigenous Art Awards and the Indigenous Art Fair in Queensland. Other relevant initiatives include the Queensland Indigenous Arts Marketing and Export Agency, the NSW Aboriginal Arts and Cultural strategy, The Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair (NT) and the Victorian „Tribal Expressions: The Business of Art and Culture‟ series of showcases. 82

(subsidised through tax-breaks) has been questioned and in arguments made against the proposed resale royalty scheme. Such warnings were also expressed in the submissions to the 2007 Senate Inquiry which argued that the integrity of Aboriginal art could only be preserved if Art Centres received greatly increased support and the government cracked down on the unethical conduct of some dealers (discussed in Chapter 5) (Indigenous Art – Securing the Future, 2007; Glenday, 2010; Fulton & Morgan, 2010). It is clear therefore that within the spheres of government a range of hopes and concerns relating to Aboriginal social, cultural and economic wellbeing have placed unique expectations on Aboriginal art practice, and a great deal now rides upon the continuation of the Aboriginal art industry. As will be discussed in the following section, the policies in which these hopes and concerns have been invested have been an integral part of the renegotiation of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations in the post- assimilation era.

2.3 Negotiating new intercultural relationships in the post- assimilation era

The previous section provided us with picture of the way governance objectives in relation to Aboriginal art production have found concrete form in subvention policies. The following sections shed light on other dimensions of cultural and Indigenous affairs governance that have shaped the Aboriginal art industry by examining the changing status of Aboriginal heritage, subjectivity and culture in Australian public life in the post-assimilation era.

2.3.1 Cultural trauma in Australian public culture

In recent years cultural sociologists such as Jeffrey Alexander (2003) and Ron Eyerman (2004) have theorised the concept of cultural trauma and applied it to phenomena such as the Holocaust, the September 11 attacks, and the history of slavery 83

in the USA. They argue that cultural trauma arises when a shared sense of victimisation in relation to a devastating event or process is constituted through memorialising narratives and other representations in the public domain. Cultural trauma is therefore socially constructed as part of a process of collective identity formation. As Alexander suggests, „it is by constructing cultural traumas that social groups, national societies, and sometimes even entire civilisations not only cognitively identify the existence and source of human suffering but “take on board” some significant responsibility in it‟ (2003:85). Cultural trauma may be narrated and represented in religious, mass media, aesthetic and scientific/expert arenas, and through State bureaucratic processes. Together these mediations identify the victim, define the nature of the unjust act, present the victims' experiences in a way that corresponds to principles acceptable to the wider population, and attribute responsibility to the State and particular social groups. Alexander suggests that eventually „the heightened and powerfully affecting discourse of trauma disappears, [and] the “lessons” of the trauma become objectified‟ in a range of commemorative institutional, material and ritual forms (103). These ideas can be fruitfully brought to bear upon the way Australia‟s history has been reconceptualised in the last 50 years. In the post-assimilation era, a narrative of loss, suffering and injustice has evolved that encompasses many kinds of Aboriginal victimisation dating back to the arrival of Captain Cook in 1770 and the in 1788. This narrative melds several histories: experiences of frontier conflict, land dispossession, missionisation and institutionalisation, the fragmentation of families, deaths in the criminal justice system, racism, cultural loss and so on (see for instance Atkinson, 2002; Haebich, 2000; Reynolds, 1999; National Inquiry, 1997). All of these histories have been illuminated through a myriad of cultural representations and public dialogues in the last 40 years, particularly in association with Australia‟s decade of Reconciliation, from 1991-2001 (cf. Appendix 2, A.5.1, A.6.1; see also Goot & Rowse, 2007:Chapter 4). We gain a sense of how these histories coalesce and foreground the Indigenous/non-Indigenous divide in one of the dictums of the final Declaration of Reconciliation: “As we walk the journey of healing, one part of the nation apologises and expresses its sorrow and sincere regret for the injustices of the past, so the other part accepts the apologies and forgives” (in Gordon, 2001:135).

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The following section will argue that what can be described as Australia‟s cultural trauma narrative in relation to Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations has been inextricable from a broader civic project of revisioning Australian identity in a progressive and inclusive mode. This section establishes the groundwork for later discussions in this chapter which reveal how a narrative of Aboriginal suffering to which the State and members of non-Indigenous civil society have felt accountable have been highly formative of the meanings that have accrued to Aboriginal art over the course of its emergence. Indeed, I will argue that this narrative is at the heart of the symbolic role Aboriginal art has come to play in Australian public life.

2.3.2 The end of assimilation and the rise of „Aboriginality‟ and redemptive nationhood

In the last 60 years, efforts to improve the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians and forge a positive place for Indigenous Australians within the nation have taken many forms. In the 1920s and 1930s, the assimilation policy advocated by A.P. Elkin and others was seen as a progressive corrective to protectionism and the “dying out” thesis of earlier years, however by the late 1960s it was subject to increasing scrutiny and criticism. Specifically, there was growing recognition that assimilation policies were founded on highly problematic racial classifications, that they maintained a form of social and economic segregation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, and that they were fundamentally injurious to human dignity. Such perspectives were connected with the international decolonisation movements and the emergence of human rights discourses in the 1950s and 1960s, which stimulated a reappraisal of Indigenous cultural, political and citizenship rights in Australia (Attwood, 2003; 2005:20-22). This transformation in social attitudes drove the successful campaign for the 1967 Referendum, which led to the amendment of two sections of the Constitution so that Aboriginal people would be counted in the census and Aboriginal affairs would become a Commonwealth responsibility.

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These movements took place against the background of Britain‟s decline as the foundation of Australian nationalism following the Second World War.38 At the same time, the 1950s, 60s and 70s witnessed the maturation of Australian anthropology, archaeology and prehistory as scholarly fields within universities and museums across the country, and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies was established in 1961. These fields helped to establish the value of Australian cultural and environmental heritage and were a tributary to the Whitlam Government's „new nationalism‟ in the early 1970s and the associated ideal of enhancing civic pride in the „National Estate‟.39 The activities and advocacy of researchers in these fields helped to crystallise an image of the natural and cultural patrimony of the nation. As a consequence, , sites and material culture became interwoven with nationalistic impressions of an antiquated national heritage and a landscape-focused image of national identity.40 Robert (Bob) Edwards – the first director of the Aboriginal Arts Board whose career has traversed the fields of anthropology, archaeology, museum management and exhibitions – was instrumental in drawing these connections.41 In addition, the politics of contemporary Aboriginal identity, which were now interpreted through the lens of self- determination, transformed the status of Aboriginal heritage from being a matter of historical and scientific inquiry to being meaningful in the cultural present. The evidence of the antiquity of Aboriginal occupation of the continent became a powerful signifier of Aboriginal rights (Ireland, 2002; Russell, 2001:86-91).

According to Rowse (2000b), the germination of the self-determination and Land Rights policies (cf. Appendix 2, A.2.1) can be linked to the awareness amongst

38 The war itself contributed to these changes, as Aboriginal servicemen had received equal pay and experienced an unprecedented level of fellowship with non-Indigenous Australians (Hollingsworth, 1996:118-119). 39 In 1974 the Whitlam Government ratified the Convention for the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (Kirby, 2010:20). In that year Australia's heritage was formally investigated by Government for the first time with the Inquiry into the National Estate, and in 1975 the Australian Heritage Commission was established. For an analysis of the Whitlam Government's „new nationalism‟, see Curran (2002, Chapter 2). 40 See Myers‟ discussion of the Whitlamist „professional managerial class‟ whom he suggests leveraged the status of Aboriginal art in the 1970 and 1980s as part of their desire to create an authentic national culture (2001; see also Philp, 2007:61-62). 41 Edwards‟ engagement with these fields began with his interest in Aboriginal rock art, an interest he pursued with the encouragement and guidance of the anthropologist Charles Mountford (discussed in Chapter 1). See Edwards (1979); Mulvaney et. al (2011); Johnson et. al (2011); Gennochio (2008:76-80).

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the progressive members of the Council of Aboriginal Affairs in the late 1960s that two divergent senses of Aboriginal “difference” needed to be comprehended. On the one hand there was the undesirable difference associated with inequality and social exclusion, and on the other, the set of cultural differences which had endured since colonisation and which was understood to form the basis of Aboriginal people's „positive self-consciousness‟ (29). It is the latter understanding of Aboriginal difference which underpinned the Whitlam government‟s policy shift from assimilation to self- determination. Up to the 1960s, within both popular and policy discourses, “Aboriginal culture” had tended to be regarded as anachronistic to contemporary Australian life, and an impediment to Aboriginal people's integration into Australian society. As Rowse writes: „[a]ssimilation was a program of inclusion of indigenous Australians and it presumed and urged their ultimate sameness‟ (2000b:11, 17; see also Hollingsworth, 2006). Even progressive humanitarians did not usually look beyond the objective of Aboriginal people achieving equal citizenship rights. In the subsequent decade an extraordinary reversal of this view took place. From the sympathetic realisation that some Aboriginal people were not submitting to the assimilation project arose the conviction that Aboriginal difference should be respected, and that Aboriginal people's advancement depended upon their ability to make choices based on a sense of pride in their identity. “Aboriginal culture” came to be embraced within official discourses as something of worth, the foundation of a distinct identity, and the basis for a right to self- determination and to one's traditional lands. Moreover, it was embraced as something that Australian society as a whole could enjoy and cherish. As Sutton writes, „[b]y the late 1970s, “culture” was central to the new verbal currency of Indigenous liberation politics‟ (2009:63).

In the 1970s and 1980s a vibrant political movement founded on a sense of shared oppression amongst Indigenous people nation-wide emerged and found many non-Indigenous supporters. Among the issues that catalysed the movement were Land Rights, Deaths in Custody, the Treaty campaign, the touring of the South African Springbok Rugby Team, threats to sacred sites, the and the 1988 Bicentenary (cf. Appendix 2, A.2.1, A.3.1, A.4.1). In the scholarly and activist discourses that were associated with these movements, „Aboriginality‟ partly

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overcame the divisions associated with tribal affiliations and colonial racial classifications. As McLean writes, there was a shift „from a racial to a cultural paradigm‟ for thinking about that identity (1998:108). An Aboriginal polity with a national voice emerged, one which articulated a pan-Aboriginal concept of „Aboriginality‟ with which many Aboriginal people came to identify proudly. Amongst other factors, this can be attributed to the increased mobility of and interaction between Indigenous people from different parts of the country (particularly in urban centres such as Sydney and Melbourne), the influence of North American civil rights and „Black Power‟ movements, the powerful unifying symbol of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy which was established by Aboriginal activists on the lawns of Parliament House in 1972, and the design and widespread adoption of the Aboriginal flag (McLean, 1998; Berndt, 1983:35; Rowse, 2000a:88-9). The emergent tendency to identify positively as Aboriginal, and to proclaim publicly one's membership of an Indigenous nation (Yorta Yorta, Wiradjuri, Warlpiri) or to use regional Aboriginal vernacular to identify oneself (Koori, Murri, Nyoongar) also subverted the homogenising discourse of the assimilationist era which had made Aboriginal ancestry an object of shame (V. Johnson, 1986:14; Perkins, 1994). Aboriginal lawyer Pat O-Shane creates a strong image of pan-Aboriginality when she writes:

Aboriginal culture is what Aboriginal people today are, with all our collective experience. All of us carry our 40 000+ years of history within us. We lay on top of that our present experiences, and the outcomes are a mixture of pain, despair, bitterness, humour, optimism, resilience, anger, longing, a search for truth, a search for identity, a search for understanding... (in Thompson, 1990:n.p).

Gradually sympathetic non-Indigenous Australians became accustomed to an idea of Aboriginality founded upon the notion of a culturally distinct minority that had been dispossessed and had suffered at the hands of white society but had nevertheless survived the colonial project (McLean, 2002a: 34-35). John Pilger‟s landmark film The Secret Country (1985) encapsulates this perspective. As will be discussed in detail below, the self-critical and remorseful tendencies of non-Indigenous members of civil society contributed to the formation of this identity. In other words, a generalized,

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morally culpable “white society” helped to construct a reciprocal Aboriginal society deserving of recognition, sympathy, and generosity. It is critical to underline the role of racism in anchoring the sense of pan- Aboriginal identity I have described. For much of the 20th century, the State's ascription of undesirable difference to Aboriginal people ensured that habits of denigrating and assuming superiority over Aboriginal people were highly normalised in non-Indigenous society. A range of forms of segregation and exclusion (in cinemas, public pools, schools, bars and so on) were part of the social fabric of Australian towns, and were upheld by white citizens on a day to day basis. The advocacy for equality and self- determination and the rejection of racial discrimination in official policy in the 1960s and 1970s did not, of course, instigate a wholesale readjustment of these habits and attitudes. Aboriginal people‟s experiences of racism were significant in galvanising the activist movements of the 1970s and 1980s even though the causes with which they were affiliated were diverse and did not always refer to racism overtly. Many Aboriginal people's outlook on their opportunities, their successes and failures and the welfare of their families have been filtered through the formative experiences of contempt and discrimination, experiences that were part of simply going to school, visiting the shop, finding a job and so on (Cunneen, 2001; Hollingsworth, 2006; Cowlishaw, 2004; essays in Grossman [ed], 2003). As will become clear in later discussions in this and subsequent chapters, these experiences of racism and exclusion have been of great significance for the urban Aboriginal art movement in particular.

The Indigenous polity‟s demands for rights and recognition contributed to the highly ambivalent cultural messages of the 1988 Bicentennial. The Bicentennial organisers sought to demote the existing icons of Australian nationalism because of their unrepresentative nature, and re-imagine Australia in an inclusive and pluralistic mode that spoke to the diversity of its Indigenous and migrant communities (Healy, 2001:281) (cf. Appendix 2, A.4.2). The boycott of the celebrations by Aboriginal people and their supporters constituted a highly conspicuous campaign of consciousness- raising and activism that stood in opposition to and often shadowed the mainstream celebrations. Healy has argued that the events associated with the 1988 Bicentennial „placed unresolved questions around colonialism at the very centre of attempts to articulate the nation‟, and that following the Bicentennial there was a kind of heritage 89

vacuum in the nation's public culture (2001:284). He and others have pointed out that efforts to avoid controversial heritage themes in the celebrations resulted in the promotion of an optimistic, amorphous and sometimes highly corporatized internationalism. This result was subject to much criticism, which may have inspired the nationalistic focus on Aboriginal culture that we find in the Creative Nation cultural policy, launched in 1994, and other cultural policy contexts in subsequent decades, which will be discussed below (Carter, 1994; cf. Appendix 2, A.5.2). Several significant juridical and legislative events pertaining to Indigenous issues followed the Bicentennial: the release of the Deaths in Custody Report (1991), the Mabo and Wik Native Title decisions (1992 and 1996), the release of the Report of the Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (1997)42, and the ten year term of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (CAR) (1991-2001) (cf. Appendix 2, A.4.1, A.5.1, A.6.1). All of these events generated commentary and debate in Australian public life, some of which articulated highly compelling moral injunctions addressed to the citizenry as a whole (Moran, 2002). In conjunction with these events, Australia's history was being revised in both popular and academic historiography in light of contemporary notions of justice, equality and rights, the formerly neglected testimony of Aboriginal people, and a reassessment of Aboriginal resistance on the frontier. A prolonged and often acrimonious debate about frontier warfare, massacres, Aboriginal land dispossession and the effects of the assimilation policies upon Indigenous families took place across academic, institutional and journalistic forums in the 1990s and 2000s. At the same time, Aboriginal history was proliferating in the public domain through oral histories, biographical and autobiographical literature, theatre, film, TV, radio, exhibitions and other forms of public culture (see for instance Langford, 1988; Manne, 2001; ABC 1996).43

42 Henceforth I will refer to this as the Stolen Generations inquiry. 43 Attwood (2005:52-53) provides a useful account of non-academic forms of Aboriginal history and memory. It is also worth highlighting the wide readership of Henry Reynolds' highly accessible histories of frontier conflict, dispossession and State control of Indigenous Australians, which were often written in a very personal, conscience driven style, as conveyed in titles like This Whispering in our hearts and Why weren’t we told? (Reynolds, 1982; 1998; 1999). 90

2.3.3 Paul Keating, indigenised settler nationalism and Reconciliation

Paul Keating, whose prime ministership overlapped many of these events, embraced the prospect of catharsis and renewal within the national consciousness in relation to Indigenous affairs more than any prime minister before or after. His government established the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation in 1992, under the Reconciliation Legislation that had been introduced the previous year by the Hawke Labor Government. Under Keating‟s leadership, the acknowledgement of a shameful and repressed history became a civic duty upon which the restoration of Aboriginal wellbeing depended. When Keating launched the UN International Year of the World's Indigenous people in 1992 with his “Redfern address”, he declared that „With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. We failed to ask - how would I feel if this were done to me?‟ (Keating, 2001/1992). In retrospect, the statement is emblematic of a significant adjustment that took place within Australian civil society at this time.44 While some non-Indigenous citizens were deeply hostile to his prioritization of Indigenous issues and desire to guide the nation on a historiographic, redemptive civic project, others were receptive to his arguments and moved by the events that unfolded during that period.45 The latter sought some sort of rapprochement with Aboriginal people, whether on an interpersonal level or symbolically through cultural consumption, or by contributing to Aboriginal advancement through employment, mentoring, scholarships and other such initiatives (Gooder & Jacobs, 2001; Moran, 2002). What is significant about Keating‟s leaderships is that sympathy for Aboriginal suffering and a preparedness to imagine things from an Aboriginal person's point of view moved from being the potential inclination of individuals and small social groups, to being a normative civic discourse advocated by the State. This discourse sought to

44 In 2007 Keating‟s Redfern address was voted third in an ABC (Australia‟s public broadcaster) poll of what people considered to be „the most unforgettable speeches‟ in history, following Martin Luther King‟s „I have a dream‟ and Jesus‟ Sermon on the Mount, which gives some indication of its significance to recent generations. 45 Indeed, there were strong counter-currents to all the phenomena described here, including the rise of Pauline Hanson and the One Nation Party, the backlash against the Stolen Generations inquiry from the Liberal Government and other commentators on the Right, and the „‟ waged in the press and in relation to the National Museum of Australia (Mulgan, 1998; Macintyre & Clark, 2003; Manne, 2001). 91

foster collective affective experience and engender a sense of moral responsibility on a grand scale, a process that is integral to the construction of cultural trauma (Alexander, 2003:Chapter 3). This discourse was constitutive of, to use Moran's term, „indigenising settler nationalism‟. In a passage that is highly evocative of Alexander‟s theorisation of cultural trauma, Moran offers the following explanation of this form of nationalism:

It is characterised by an attitude of mourning and sorrow in relation to past and contemporary forms of oppression of the indigenous. It involves an honouring of, and a desire to make reparation to, the indigenous absent in earlier dominant forms of Australian settler nationalism..., and views the actions of the settler nation in the past with a more critical eye. It adopts a position that calls upon the nation to reconstruct itself through a fuller recognition of the indigenous and their claims as a central component of national identity (2002: 1014).

As will be illustrated below, the sentiments associated with this new civic discourse had an impact upon cultural consumption, government programs and forms of industry subsidy, and private sector decision-making.

The most important vehicle for indigenised settler nationalism was the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation. Its formation entailed that some citizens were placed in a position to employ the State's resources to appeal to the consciences and challenge the prejudices of other citizens. Alongside the formation of grass-roots Reconciliation collectives and initiatives, a range of projects targeted and mobilised the media, local government, the school curriculum, the community sector and the private sector (Gunstone, 2007:60-62, Chapter 3). In general the Council‟s activities were predicated on the following interdependent objectives: bringing about more opportunities for Indigenous people to participate in mainstream society, changing the way Aboriginal people were treated by non-Indigenous Australians, and changing popular representations of Aboriginality that shaped everyday attitudes about Aboriginal society and culture. Behind these objectives lay the ideals of finding paths to healing, developing a new sense of self-worth amongst a marginalised social group, forming mutually sympathetic relationships between formerly estranged people and constructing a new basis for a proud sense of nationhood.

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The Reconciliation process ultimately generated a new way of thinking about the moral calibre of the Settler-State and the very idea of Aboriginality to which subsequent policies are now accountable. It established a moral paradigm through which the various revelations about and revisions of Australian history, legal judgements and inquiries that have taken place since the 1970s have been refracted and made coherent. To use Alexander‟s words, these events and the public discourses that responded to them generated „a narrative about a horribly destructive social process, and a demand for emotional, institutional, and symbolic reparation and reconstitution‟ (2003:93). These processes all contributed to the crystallisation of a new perspective on the place of Indigenous identity, culture and history within Australian society, one that arguably filled the vacuum identified by Healy (2008) above in relation to the Bicentennial.46 It is now time to situate Aboriginal art within this process of change.

2.4 Aboriginal people mobilising Aboriginal art

There have been many cases in which Aboriginal people have used their art and material culture to pursue political agendas in the post-assimilation era. With respect the triumvirate of relationships with which this Chapter is concerned, the following section will focus on the role of art in the Aboriginal community‟s efforts to communicate its demands to the State and non-Indigenous civil society.

2.4.1 Aboriginal art mobilised in political and legal domains

On several occasions during the 1950s and 1960s, when Aboriginal art's identity as Art was not as secure as it is now, the Yolngu of North East Arnhem Land mobilised

46 To some extent this shift was aligned with, and perhaps assisted, another project pursued by the State and civil society: the project of making a component of Australian nationalism. As Lattas writes, Aboriginal culture, heritage and „otherness‟ provided the ground upon which emergent ideals about social inclusiveness and the accommodation of difference were able to find purchase‟ (1997/1990:242; see also Povinelli, 2002:18, 26; Langton & CAR, 1994:43). 93

their customary material culture (painted barks, sacred poles and sacred objects) to demonstrate to the Methodist missionaries who had jurisdiction over them, the solidarity that existed between their clans, their sense of autonomy, and the salience of their religion.47 They installed these objects – objects in which clan identities, land custodianship and law were symbolically inscribed - near or within the missionaries' churches. In doing this, they were placing secret-sacred material in the public domain in an unprecedented way (Morphy, 1983). During these and later years, they also presented paintings ceremonially to visiting representatives of the church, members of parliament, lawyers and police. In another more famous example, the Yolngu of the settlement of Yirrkala presented a petition to the House of Representatives of the Federal Parliament in 1963 in response to the announcement that large tracts of their traditional country were to be excised for lease by the Nabalco Mining Company. Previously of no value to settler interests, the area had been found to be rich with bauxite. The petition, typed out in both a Yolngu language and English, was signed by clan leaders and affixed to a length of bark upon which sacred clan designs painted in ochre created a border for the printed page. It stated the economic, social and sacred significance of the land upon which their tribes has lived “from time immemorial” and protested that the Yolngu had not been consulted over the planned excision and were fearful for their future (in Attwood, 2003:227-230). As Ginsburg and Myers write, despite the fact that the Yolngu were unsuccessful in getting the Government to change its policy:

[T]he bark petitions were a brilliant transformation of the longstanding cultural idiom of bark paintings into an emblematic form of cultural self- objectification as political performance .… the intuitively valid claims of Yolngu people ... epitomised in the bark petition, created greater sympathy throughout Australia for recognition of Indigenous rights to land, and created an Aboriginal culture and identity acceptable for national recognition: the „traditionally oriented‟ Aboriginal with religious and spiritual links to the land - and far from white settlement (2006:100).

47 These events are better understood as taking place in the spirit of reciprocity and negotiation rather than resistance to oppression, because many missionaries were sympathetic to Yolngu interests and respectful of Yolngu culture, and the Yolngu in turn accepted elements of their Christian teachings.

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In other words, this act was highly effective in garnering support for Aboriginal concerns in general in Australian civil society. The self-evident justness of the Yolngu claims to those on the left helped to galvanize many of the protest movements of the 1970s and ultimately led to the development of Land Rights legislation for the (cf. Appendix 2, A.2.1). The symbolic efficacy of the Bark Petition inspired members of the Northern and Central Land Councils to create the Barunga Statement, which they presented to Prime Minister Bob Hawke at the 1988 Barunga Sports and Culture Festival. The Barunga Statement also took the form of a collectively produced bark painting illustrating ancestral designs from several Northern Australian Aboriginal groups accompanied by a printed text. This text employed the language of Aboriginal sovereignty, self-determination and Human Rights and argued that a Treaty needed to be negotiated (Barunga, 2012). Hawke's acceptance of the Statement marked the moment when he explicitly declared his support for a Treaty, though this support was short lived (Gunstone, 2007:26). Hawke's last act as Prime Minister was to see the Barunga Statement hung in the Grand Hall of Parliament House.

In the 1990s Aboriginal art was again mobilized in a symbolic and performative way in the context of Native Title cases, in which claimants must prove the continuity of their traditional connections with the land (cf. Appendix 2, A.5.1). In 1997 Spinifex Art Projects was established to contribute to the documentation process required by the Spinifex people's Native Title claim over land in the Great Victorian Desert, Western Australia. Two large paintings which mapped the birthplaces of the male and female claimants provided evidence of their land custodianship. The claim was successful and these works were included in the preamble to the agreement which was formalised in 2000. The Spinifex community honoured this resolution by bequeathing 10 major „government paintings‟ to the state of Western Australia (Spinifex Arts Project, 1999). Also in 1997, over 50 traditional owners of land in the Great Sandy Desert in Western Australia produced an enormous painting, the Ngurrara Canvas, for the purposes of presentation at the Native Title Tribunal. During the hearings claimants stood and sometimes danced and sang on their respective parts of the canvas to give evidence of

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ongoing connection to land through a translator. This Native Title claim was eventually successfully concluded in 2007 (Winter, 2002:66-68; NMA, 2012a).48

These are all examples of the symbolic use of art to achieve specific outcomes. The gravity these objects have as political and legal instruments rests upon the fact that they are representative of a culture with no tradition of conventional cartography or documentation, yet for whom law and lore have long been symbolised and communicated through the poetic traditions of rock-wall, body and sand painting, carving, song and performance.

2.4.2 The urban context: Aboriginal art, activism and pan-Aboriginal identity

Aboriginal people outside remote Australia have also mobilised art for political purposes. In his analysis of the cultural trauma narrative associated with America‟s slavery history, Eyerman shows that art is a significant means to instantiate a sense of collective identity and fight for this identity‟s recognition in society (2004:63-74; 2006:30). Artists can depict a particular group as strong, virtuous, as having legitimate grievances and as deserving of respect. Not only does this help to generate a sense of solidarity within , it can provoke sympathetic reactions among external groups (see also Hall, 1990). Along similar lines, Said argues that an important means by which colonised people „assert their own identities and the existence of their own history‟ is through the production and dissemination of stories (1993:xiii). If we consider these insights in relation to Settler-State politics in Australia, it is evident that urban Aboriginal art has been a critical sight of Indigenous empowerment and identity formation. A range of Indigenous, „black‟ or „blak‟ cultural forms flourished in Australian cities in the 1980s and early 1990s, including dance, music and theatre groups, artists‟ collectives, periodicals, conferences, exhibitions and radio and television

48 See also the Saltwater Collection, a group of paintings produced by Yolngu artists to articulate their clan rights to waterways in Eastern Arnhem Land, which were produced after a barramundi fisherman left the severed head of a at a sacred site affiliated with Bäru, a Crocodile Ancestor being (Buku-Larrngay Mulka Centre & Drill Hall Gallery, 1999). Some of these works were presented during the Native Title Case, which was won by traditional owners following a High Court decision in 2008. 96

productions.49 These artistic movements have a strong historical and ideological relationship to the Aboriginal activist movements discussed above. This relationship is evident in the activist spirit of the Aboriginal Arts Board in the 1980s during the tenure of Gary Foley and Chika Dixon (Rowse, 2000a; Lambert, 1984a; 1984b; cf. Appendix 2, A.4.3). Their perspective on the potential of the Arts to serve Aboriginal political aspirations was shared by other members of the Board during the 1980s, such as , Bob Maza and (Kath Walker).50 Events such as the Bicentennial and the Deaths in Custody Inquiry stimulated a range of artistic responses and there was also some cross-over between art and activism in the production of posters and banners for various events. In a summation that is characteristic of many historical accounts of urban Aboriginal art, Neale writes that the urban Indigenous artists who emerged in the 1980s in the South Eastern states „were young, articulate and angry, fuelled by decades of dispossession and displacement‟ (2004:487; see also 2000; Onus, 1993; Croft, 2007). This kind of activist perspective is frequently invoked symbolically and rhetorically in the urban Aboriginal art arena. In 1987 the pioneering Boomalli Artists Cooperative was established by several Sydney-based Aboriginal artists, two of which, and Brenda Croft, were daughters of prominent political campaigners for Aboriginal rights. Boomalli is a Wiradjuri word meaning „to strike‟, and this choice is exemplary of the warrior, battle and weaponry metaphors that often appear in urban Aboriginal art discourses (see for instance Perkins & Fink, 1997; Croft [ed], 2007; Croft, 2010; Allas, 2010; Jones, 2010). Hetti Perkins and non-Indigenous writer and

49 Seminal art exhibitions included „Koori Art '84‟, „When two worlds collide‟ (1985), „Urban Kooris‟ (1986), 'NADOC ‟86 group exhibition of Aboriginal and Islander Photographers‟ (1986), „Aboriginal Australian views in print and poster 1987-1988‟ (1988) and „A Koori Perspective” (1989). See Johnson (ed) (1984); Caruana & Isaacs (eds) (1990); Williamson & Perkins (1994); Eather (ed) (2005); Croft (2007); Attwood (2003:Chapter 13). 50 Bob Maza was an actor, playwright and prominent activist in Melbourne. He was president of the Aborigines Advancement League in 1968 and participated in the Tent Embassy of 1972. Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker) was a writer and . Her history of campaigning for Aboriginal rights dated from her membership of the Communist Party in the 1950s and her senior position in the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aboriginal and (FCAATSI) in the early 1960s. Lin Onus was a painter and sculptor whose advocacy of Indigenous aspirations echoed the ambitions of his father, Bill Onus, who had been involved in several political organisations representing Indigenous interests in the 1950s and 60s and founded the Melbourne company Aboriginal Enterprises (discussed in Chapter 1) (see Thompson [comp.], 1990 for relevant autobiographical essays; Attwood, 2003:315-318; Kleinert, 2010). 97

curator Victoria Lynn depict Aboriginal art as a form of activism in the following comment:

It is the neo/post colonial context in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists create their work that has lead many artists to believe that are (sic) not artists only – they are cultural activists. This implies that making art is as much a political statement, if less overtly so, as the dramatic demonstrations and protest marches of recent times (1993:x, see also Mundine, 2006:58).

We find another great example of an activist perspective on urban Aboriginal art practice in the following passage from the catalogue introduction for the seminal exhibition „Koori Art „84‟, written by prominent black activist Bobbi (Roberta) Sykes:

[C]ontemporary Black artists confront the conscience of the global public with images of our modern reality... Too frequently, the subject speaks of pain. This is not, however, the artists‟ fascination with the morbid – it is the reality of Black modern life and visual representation of our recent history. The scenes are torn from the psyche of a people, and in their presentation the Black community can weep and begin the process of recovery. Our grief and pain must be acknowledged!... Our creative people ... provide the vanguard of our relentless march towards justice, and depict for us the history of this march (1984:n.p, original emphasis).

It is a potent quotation in its evocation of cultural trauma, and its linking of Aboriginal art to the pursuit of justice.

Pan-Aboriginality was central to the political movements described in the previous section, and it was also highly consequential for the Aboriginal art movement. As McLean suggests, the concept of pan-Aboriginality permitted all forms of Aboriginal art to be treated as facets of a heterogeneous cultural arena with which white society was now supposedly engaged in „dialogue‟ (1998:108-9). A useful illustration of this change is the following statement from the non-Indigenous artist Tim Johnson in an essay in the 1986 Sydney Biennale catalogue:

From Alice Springs to Redfern, from the to the distant ceremonies of surviving tribal groups, from that depict changing times to interwoven, inherited living mythology, Aboriginal art is 98

undergoing a renaissance .... Aboriginal artists have not abandoned responsibility for their world, their own country and their own lives. In other words, no matter what the settlers, missionaries, landowners, miners and industrialists have done, Aboriginal communities still retain their culture and the conviction that what happens to them is still within the realm of their own control‟ (1986a 64).

The iconic , an artwork created to mark the 1988 Bicentennial, is also illustrative of the cohesive influence pan-Aboriginal consciousness had upon Aboriginal art. It comprises 200 traditional hollow-log coffins, as a memorial or a cemetery of sorts, to honour all those Aboriginal people whose lives were lost over the 200 years of colonisation and settlement. The coffins were created by 43 Ramingining artists, and their arrangement is precisely connotative of their clan estates. The memorial was conceptualised and orchestrated by Djon Mundine, a Bundjalung man from NSW affiliated with the urban Indigenous art movement and the Art Centre coordinator at Ramingining at the time. The work was partly inspired by the John Pilger film The Secret Country in which Pilger lamented the fact that, even though Australian servicemen who fought wars in foreign lands were honoured in Australia, there were no memorials to those Aboriginal people who had died trying to defend their homelands. The Memorial‟s exhibition at the Sydney Biennale of 1988, and its immediate acquisition by the National Gallery of Australia (where it has remained on prominent permanent display) was a defining moment in the high art world‟s acceptance of Aboriginal art (discussed further in Chapter 3) (Mundine, 2000; Mundine & Morphy, 1990; Smith, 2001). The scope of the art work‟s message and its collaborative nature means it is very much resonant of pan-Aboriginality, while it can also be viewed as a potent crystallisation of the Aboriginal cultural trauma narrative.

Despite its significance to Aboriginal political and artistic movements, it is important to acknowledge that pan-Aboriginality has always been a fragile and contested thing. Non-Indigenous Australians continue to draw strong distinctions between urban and remote Aboriginal people based on ideas about authenticity and judgements about skin colour. A mixture of affinity and discord characterises commentary (and polemic) on the relationship between urban and remote Aboriginality in Aboriginal art discourses (see Caruana & Isaacs [eds], 1990; Bell, 2002; O‟Riordan, 99

2009; Browning 2010; Jones, 2010). As Myers and Ginsburg suggest above, the concept of Aboriginality that was embraced by Australian civil society in the 1970s was rooted in remote, „traditional‟ Australia and in a sense of incommensurate difference. It was not necessarily inclusive of people with lighter skin and mixed ancestry, whose Aboriginal ancestors had inhabited land that had been settled for several generations, and who had suffered the most severe destruction and fragmentation of their families, communities and traditional culture. Therefore the recognition that has accrued to remote Aboriginal culture in institutional contexts, public culture and in legislation such as the Land Rights Act (NT) has been regarded ambivalently by many Aboriginal people who recognise that they are outside, or on the cusp, of this domain of recognition (Lin Onus, 2003/1990; Johnson, 1991a).51 Indeed, in line with my discussion above of Aboriginal people‟s highly formative experiences of racism, this exclusion can be regarded as another thread of cultural trauma for Aboriginal Australians who live outside remote Australia. Artist Brownyn Bancroft has remarked on the sense of exclusion engendered by this partial recognition, writing that: „[f]or years we were punished for being black, now we're punished for not being black enough‟ (in Perkins & Lynn, 1993:x). Bob Maza notes that „we urban Aboriginals used to look on Aboriginal culture as being “over there” – just like we considered the white culture as being “over there” – and we were in a sort of no man's land (Maza in Thompson, 1990:161-162). The artistic practice and advocacy of people like Bancroft, Maza and in recent years the artists and Gordon Hookey, give voice to a sense of Aboriginal identity that is relevant to the majority of Aboriginal people in Australia. This identity can be roughly (and riskily) generalised as having a heritage in mission life, in urban “fringe-dwelling” and in displacement and transience, while it has also arisen from circumstances of partial and sometimes successful integration into white society. In many cases it has been shaped by low levels of education, uneven employment and being part of an itinerant rural labour-force. This kind of Aboriginal identity is one forged through resilience in the face of racism and adversity. It is also vested in the retention of songs, stories, language and bush skills as well as the

51 This ambivalence is reflected in the biographies and stylistic developments of several pioneering urban Aboriginal artists such as Lin Onus, Bob Maza, Trevor Nicholls and who learned from and were mentored by elder Aboriginal artists in remote communities even as they developed distinctive styles and raison d'êtres for their work (see Mundine, 1990; Onus, 1989a). 100

adaptation of distinctly Aboriginal social structures, norms and ideals to changing conditions. It is rooted in extended familial and communal ties that were relied upon and reinforced by experiences of social exclusion and discrimination that ran across several generations (Langton, 1981; Ah Kee & Barkley, 2009; Johnson, Allas & Fisher, 2009/2010). The urban Aboriginal arts movement was both a product of and helped to foment a new consciousness and sense of pride in these experiences, bringing into the public domain varied representations of Aboriginality and forms of artistic expression that contested negative stereotypes of Aboriginality and satirised white society (Thompson [comp.] 1990; Caruana & Isaacs [eds] 1990). The following artists' statements are expressive of these circumstances:

Ricky Maynard: We have seen the negative stereotyping of Aboriginal people either as passive fringe dwellers or the noble savage. I intend to redress this situation and show the strength, kinship and cultural pride within urban Black Australia from an Aboriginal perspective (Queensland Art Gallery, 1990:57).

Brenda Croft: I am fair, I am aware that I am not what people are looking for when they want something black, something real, something authentic, something truly Aboriginal, but I am here (Croft, 1998/1993).

In both of these quotations we sense that art is imbued with an activist sense of purpose, whereby the representation of one‟s identity and experience might have emancipatory potential for a collectivity, not just the individual.

2.4.3 Urban Indigenous aesthetic public spheres

Following Habermas it can be argued that these Indigenous activists, artists and intellectuals have established a robust „aesthetic public sphere‟. Habermas has argued

that social arenas in which emerging aesthetic forms are shared and discussed have the potential to generate broader spheres in which individuals engage in dialogue regarding civic matters and thereby supervise the exercise of State power over the

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public (1974/1964:52). As Jones explains, the examples Habermas presents in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere are the London coffee houses and salons which in the 18th Century became settings where members of the newly formed bourgeoisie critically debated literature, art and culture (2007a:76-78). In these contexts, the „discussion of aesthetic matters provides the associative fora which are capable of turning their concerns to matters of state‟ (Jones, 2007b:120). The committee of artists and activists on the Aboriginal Arts Board described above constituted a vital and highly consequential politicised aesthetic sphere, as have art collectives and cooperatives such as Boomalli, The Campfire Group and ProppaNOW. We might also point to the publishing opportunities opened up by magazines such as Art Monthly and Artlink which have dedicated entire issues to Aboriginal art and Aboriginal writers, and events such as the Blakatak Program of Thought (2005). Beyond these concrete examples of „public spheres‟, it can be argued that urban Indigenous artists, curators, writers and professionals (and their non-Indigenous supporters) have treated the art arena as a surrogate State: a domain that can be radicalized and democratized and compelled to provide the Indigenous subject with the recognition that the actual State withholds. Richard Bell's statement: „I came into art through politics… I discovered, as far as activism goes, there's no better forum than art‟ may be interpreted in these terms (in Sorensen, 2006:8; see also von Sturmer, 2006). Urban Aboriginal artists have produced compelling and confronting work about Australian race relations, the colonial past, and the current marginalisation of Indigenous Australians, and their aesthetic innovations compel a cultural elite to engage with such issues. These activities can be viewed from the point of view of Paine‟s argument that „much of Fourth world politics is about turning physical powerlessness into moral power and then putting that to good political account‟ (in Ames, 1991:9). These actors have, by the force of their political will, the intensity of their aesthetic forms and the „moral power‟ of their social critique, compelled art institutions and their attendant professionals and audiences to create a space for their art and their message.52

52 I must acknowledge that Aboriginal artists and art professionals (see Katona, 2007; Foley, 2006; Mundine, 2009a, 2009b) have experienced and observed a systemic paternalism and suspicion regarding their conduct amongst non-Indigenous art professionals, and argue that they remain marginalised with respect to dominant discourses (such as Anthropology). While disempowering, I would argue that these experiences in fact reflect the efficacy of the Indigenous aesthetic public sphere.

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2.5 The State mobilising Aboriginal art

Earlier in this chapter I drew attention to Healy‟s argument that the Bicentennial left a „heritage vacuum‟ in Australian public culture. Healy has suggested that following this event, an „intercultural zone‟ of „Aboriginality and heritage‟ came to monopolise nationalistic forms of governance with respect to civic culture at the end of the 20th century (2001:287).53 This is evinced by the flourishing of Aboriginal-produced and themed music, performance, festivals, film and literature in the 1990s and 2000s which had very little of the “fringe” quality that the Aboriginal arts had in the 1970s and 1980s, and in fact became a significant niche within the Australian Arts sector. This flourishing was undoubtedly connected to the cultural trauma narrative outlined in the previous section and, with respect to Arts subsidy, the State's need to publicly reconfigure the terms of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations. This „intercultural zone‟ is also displayed in the landmark Creative Nation cultural policy of 1994, in which Aboriginal economic prosperity and well-being was married to the cultural enrichment of the Australian community and to national Reconciliation. This synthesis remains salient to Australian public culture discourses and initiatives today and is pivotal to understanding the agendas that drive the circulation of Aboriginal art (DoCA, 1994: 67, 75; see also Langton & CAR, 1994; Craik, 2007:45; Garrett, 2010a).

The following section is concerned with this movement of Aboriginal art to the centre of Australian public life in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, and reveals the many ways in which the production and circulation of Aboriginal art during these decades has been propelled by State objectives. It will argue that Aboriginal art has been facilitated, acquired, appropriated and endorsed by various arms of State as symbolic tools of transformation; to instantiate a post-colonial catharsis and resolution that might be generative of a new kind of nationhood. This must of course be recognised as an intercultural project, driven by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous advocates and

53 This concept of the „intercultural zone‟ was drawn from Langton (1993) who states that: „“Aboriginality” arises from the subjective experience of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people who engage in any intercultural dialogue, whether in actual lived experience or through a mediated experience…‟ (31; see also Healy, 2001:285; Beckett, 1988). 103

public servants. Chapter 5 will address the Aboriginal “mass culture” that has proliferated in commercial and corporate settings that are of relevance to this nationalistic project, however here I will focus on those forms of Aboriginal culture that have a direct relationship with cultural governance and which can to some degree be interpreted as vehicles for State-sanctioned and subsidised narratives of recognition, redemption and nationalism.

2.5.1 The acquisition, endorsement and appropriation of Aboriginal art and the growth of Aboriginal public culture

It is worth beginning with the simple fact that government agencies have been significant purchasers of Aboriginal art for several decades. Myers argues that public sector acquisitions of Aboriginal art in the late 1980s provided respite in the then feeble commercial market for Aboriginal arts and crafts (2001:189). He writes that in 1986 the „Government company‟ (at that time called Aboriginal Arts Australia Pty Ltd) „doubled the sales in just one year...- mostly from sales to government offices such as the , the Parliament House art collection and the government-owned Artbank (which rented out art to government offices)‟ (2002:200-201).54 Since that time, in addition to the national, state and regional galleries which have endeavoured to build representative Aboriginal art collections, government offices and agencies at the local, state and federal level have purchased and commissioned innumerable Aboriginal artworks. In particular, Universities, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), Land Councils and other Aboriginal organisations have all established large collections of Aboriginal art.55 Aboriginal art works are on permanent display in government offices, Embassies and Parliamentary buildings and have often been used as backdrops for politicians facing the press.

54 Myers suggests that „[t]he Government purchases were clearly inspired by a changing national construction that embraced Aboriginal culture as part of Australia, a construction that must have been supported, if not among the majority of Australians, then at least among those involved in politics and cultural production‟ (2011:189). 55 See the National Museum of Australia‟s „Off the Walls: Art from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs Agencies 1967–2005 exhibition of some of the 2000 of these objects that became part of its collection in 2007 (NMA, 2011). 104

Another setting in which government agencies gave sustenance to the Aboriginal art movement is the Australian Heritage Commission Art of Place National Indigenous Heritage Art Award, which was first staged in 1994. 1993 was the UN Year of Indigenous Peoples, and staff at the Commission were eager for Indigenous people to put forward nominations for the register of the National Estate. An art exhibition was conceived and Indigenous curator Margo Neale recognised that the exhibition could be tailored to the Commission's goals if the artists were encouraged to create works about places of heritage significance to them and elaborate on this significance as part of their submission (M. Neale, personal communication, 4 July, 2011). The success of the exhibition led to it being staged at Parliament House in 1994, 1996, 1998 and 2000. The Award was inclusive both in geographic terms and because it encouraged the participation of established, emerging and amateur Aboriginal artists. In contrast to other competitive contemporary art prizes, it was designed to affirm and raise awareness of the diverse ways Aboriginal people from across Australia experienced a connection to their ancestral country (Australian Heritage Commission, 1998; 2000). In 2000, a Reconciliation category for collaborative works created by Indigenous and non- Indigenous artists was introduced. What is noteworthy about the Awards is that they allowed a connection to be drawn between the gravity of Aboriginal land custodianship and nationalistic ideas about environmental and cultural heritage. If we recall the advocacy of the research community engaged with Aboriginal rock art, archaeology, anthropology and so on in the 1960s and 1970s discussed at the beginning of this chapter, we might regard the Awards as another phase of the project of forging a positive place for Aboriginal culture in the national culture, both as a basis for Aboriginal pride and participation, and to establish the distinctiveness and depth of the culture of the nation.56 Such is conveyed in Liberal Senator Robert Hill's „Minister's message‟ in the 1998 catalogue: „What the Australian Heritage Commission is doing through important initiatives like this Art Award and Exhibition is to bring to the public the notion that heritage includes a vast array of cultural and natural places that are dear to Australians and which we want to

56 Among those who were instrumental in establishing the Awards were Sharon Sullivan (then director of the Australian Heritage Commission) and Betty Meehan, both of whom had long been involved in Indigenous archaeological and historical scholarship (M. Neale, personal communication, 4 July, 2011). 105

keep. And it's doing it through the vitality of the art of Australia's indigenous people‟ (1998:3).

As noted previously, Government funded Indigenous arts events have proliferated in the 2000s, with almost all state and territory governments establishing dedicated Indigenous arts strategies and/or regularly subsidising Indigenous art fairs, prizes and showcases. These events, as well as the opening of museum and gallery spaces dedicated to Aboriginal art and culture, exhibitions, and large corporate commissions, are frequently launched by Government ministers, State premiers and other dignitaries, or are affiliated with Australian Embassies and opened by dignitaries abroad. This pattern dates back to Prime Minister Gough Whitlam‟s launching of the National Seminar on Aboriginal Arts in 1973, which marked the establishment of the Aboriginal Arts Board (cf. Appendix 2, A.2.3; Whitlam, 1973). Such events are important instances of Aboriginal art mediated reciprocal agendas at the interface between State, civil society and the Aboriginal community. For instance, when the Governor-General, Bill Hayden, opened the „Great Australian Art‟ exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide in 1989, he highlighted the 40,000 year history of the continent rather than the 200 year history being commemorated by the exhibition. He remarked that „I sometimes think that unless we obtain an understanding of the landscape and the truths as Aboriginal people know them we will always be aliens in Australia‟ (in Lattas, 1997/1990:227). Upon his retirement in 1996, Hayden made a speech on in which he declared:

Aboriginal creativity has taken its place as a major influence in our national consciousness... In a very real sense [Aboriginal people engaged in the Arts] are helping to reshape our own concept of self and of country – of the way we see and feel things as Australian – and as others see us (in Smallacombe, 2000:155; see also Liberal Minister Amanda Vanstone‟s remarks in Price, 2005).

Both statements treat Aboriginal culture, heritage, and ecology as foundations for a progressive nationalism. In similar vein, Aboriginal Affairs minister Robert Tickner made the following statement at the launch of the first of three Qantas jets featuring Aboriginal designs, for which Qantas had commissioned the Aboriginal-owned 106

Balarinji Design Studio (in 1994, 1995 and in 2002): „If we as a nation believe in the reconciliation process, if we believe in bringing greater understanding between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, this [aircraft] must be seen as a flying beacon of hope in that process‟ (in Black, 2008:340; QANTAS, 2012). One of the most significant commissions the Commonwealth government has undertaken is a mosaic designed by Warlpiri Papunya artist Michael Jagamara Nelson for the forecourt of the new Parliament House in the nation's capital, which was opened during the Bicentenary in 1988 (Kleinert, 1988b; Johnson 1997). More recent commissions include the Walama Forecourt at Sydney Airport, Reconciliation Place in Canberra, and the Brisbane Magistrates Court. The Australian Indigenous Art Commission for the Mus e du Quai Branly in Paris (composed of permanent installations of 8 Indigenous artists' work within the architecture of the museum), unveiled in 2006, was funded by the French and Australian Governments as well as some Australian private donors, with the Australia Council being a partner in the management of the project, and celebrated in highly nationalistic terms (Mus e du Quai Branly et. al, 2006; Clark et. al, 2007). Small commissions are no less significant in terms of their symbolic purpose and effect. Between 2007 and 2009, The Storylines Project researched approximately 600 biographies of Indigenous artists from the „settled‟ (non-remote) regions of Australia for publication on the Australian artists‟ biographies database Design and Art Australia Online (Johnson et. al, 2009/2010; Storylines, 2012). This research found that among many of those artists who have practiced in the last few decades (most of whom had modest careers), small scale commissions from government bodies, schools and businesses comprised a significant proportion of their paid practice. These commissions included organization logos, events posters and banners, website designs and decorative imagery for booklets and documents. They also included small projects such as murals, mosaics and public sculpture to commemorate important individuals, local history and heritage and acknowledge traditional land custodianship.57

These symbolic mobilisations of Aboriginal art have been part of a broader effort by arms of State to encourage the celebration of Aboriginal culture within

57 See for instance Lander (2008) on „Badger‟ Bates and Fisher (2007/2011) on Mark Blackman. 107

Australian public culture. During the 1980s and 1990s, Aboriginal tourism became established as a niche within Australian tourism, and policy strategy formulated by ATSIC and state and federal governments located Aboriginal art and culture within a cultural tourism paradigm. In subsequent years, Aboriginal art and performance and the representation of Aboriginal custodianship of beautiful environments have became ubiquitous in national as well as state tourism advertisements, particularly those promoting the Northern Territory (DoCA, 1994; ATSIC, 1995; Office of Northern Development [ed], 1993; Zeppel, 1998; Hinkson, 2004).58 State-endorsed discourses and events associated with the Olympic Games (the logo of which featured a boomerang) of 2000 created a strong relationship between tourism, Aboriginal culture, Reconciliation and the celebratory and welcoming atmosphere of the Games themselves. Reconciliation as both a concept and a movement was vitally important to nationalistic discourses that circulated during the bidding process for the Games and in anticipation of the event itself. Indeed, the Games arguably marked the apex of the Reconciliation movement (Elder et. al, 2006; Hanna, 1999). John Morse, who oversaw the tourism campaign associated with the Games, said in 1999 that „tourism and reconciliation go hand in hand... Tourism provides us with the opportunity for a much better understanding of the Aboriginal culture of this country‟ (in Craik, 2001:107). In 1997 the Sydney Olympic series, staged over the four years leading up to the games, was launched with the Festival of , dedicated to Aboriginal Arts and culture and comprising a range of events and programs produced and performed by Indigenous people (Hanna, 1999). This Festival was a watershed event and established and consolidated the careers of many Indigenous artists, performers and arts professionals. The Opening and Closing Ceremonies were also dominated by Aboriginal themes and performances. The selection of Aboriginal athlete to light the cauldron-flame (with a boomerang-shaped torch) was widely applauded (Russell, 2001:21-22; Elder et. al, 2006). Freeman would ultimately provide the most iconic imagery of the Games when she ran her victory lap with both the Australian and the Aboriginal flags.

58 The first government reports of the 1960s which foreshadowed the establishment of Australian tourism policies identified Aboriginal art and culture as an attraction for inbound tourists, and Aboriginal culture has been a feature of Australian tourism policies ever since (Mackay, 1973; Davidson & Spearritt, 2000: Chapter 7). 108

A range of other festivals, anniversaries and calendar events have been part of this project of bringing Aboriginal culture into the heart of Australian public culture. Following the Olympics, the Dreaming Festival became an annual event staged in Queensland, and the Garma Festival of Traditional Cultures has been staged in Arnhem Land annually since 1999.59 Within the public, non-government and private sectors, the performance of Aboriginal music and dance became increasingly common at launches, media events and conferences in the 1990s and 2000s.60 Associated with this has been the widespread adoption of “welcome to country” policies by government as well as non-government organizations and corporations. Town, city and regional cultural planning policies have also played an important role in State efforts to acknowledge Aboriginal heritage, belonging and sense of place through artistic and cultural endeavours (Stevenson, 2000:154, Chapter 5; cf. Appendix 2, A.5.2). In these plans, which began to be adopted by local governments across the country from the early 1990s, public art commissions, cultural centres, cultural tourism ventures, walking trails and festivals are among the initiatives identified as a means to encourage respect for local heritage, affirm diverse identities and create opportunities for civic participation. The commemoration of Aboriginal heritage, places of importance and the engagement of the Aboriginal community are invariably specified as objectives in these plans (see for example Coffs Harbour City Council, 2009; Dubbo City Council, 2008-2012). Like the Art of Place Awards, these planning initiatives can be viewed as another manifestation of the effort to redefine Australian heritage so that it encompasses the meanings Indigenous people attach to place. Since the 1980s, sacred sites across the country have been identified and protected, and Indigenous knowledge of topography, flora and fauna has become part of the management and education programs associated with National Parks and State Forests. Indigenous place names have proliferated in the cartography of the country and land management and

59 Other annual events include Reconciliation Week, Sorry Day/Journey of Healing Day, the and the Message Sticks Indigenous film festival. 60 The Roadmap for Reconciliation, one of the final Documents of Reconciliation, stipulated that „All parliaments, governments and organisations observe protocols and negotiate with local Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander elders or representative bodies to include appropriate Indigenous ceremony into official events‟ (CAR, 2000). 109

conservation practices now often draw on Indigenous custodianship traditions (Langton & CAR, 1994; Birch, 2003/1992; Rose, 1996). Thus we see how Aboriginal Art and other distinctly Aboriginal cultural forms have become enmeshed within a redemptive political project which has attempted to affirm Indigenous presences and stimulate new visions of nationhood, heritage and intercultural fellowship. We move now to an elaboration of the significance that ideas about “Aboriginal culture” have acquired within this project.

2.6 Constituting “Aboriginal culture” at the nexus of justice, recognition and redemption.

Bureaucratic processes which are tasked with addressing cultural trauma must address the space where individual psychology and cognition imbricates with a socially constituted sense of collective victimisation (Alexander, 2003:100; Nagel, 1994; Hall, 1990). In many cases of cultural trauma, the primary objectives of State discourses and projects are to foster a sense of self-worth and healing as they pertain to a previously maligned identity. To achieve this, the State must not only address the victimised collective, but the wider society upon whom that collective‟s sense of belonging and recognition depends. The Australian public servants who turned their energies to unravelling the ideology and policies of the assimilation era in the late 1960s and early 1970s had to contend with precisely these problems, as did those people who became engaged in the Reconciliation movement. Having been essentially entombed in the public imagination, “Aboriginality” had to be resurrected as a living thing. The State‟s recognition of the legitimacy of Aboriginal cultural difference needed to be made manifest in the public domain and, to recall Rowse‟s phrase, strategies for nurturing Aboriginal people‟s „positive self-consciousness‟ needed to be formulated. The preceding sections of this chapter have made the case that Aboriginal art and other cultural forms have been central to this process, and my purpose in this section is to extend this argument by showing that in many ways Aboriginal Art has become metonymic for “Aboriginal culture” in this context.

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2.6.1 Cultural rights, cultural loss and keeping culture strong

It might be suggested that “Aboriginal culture” is such a general and ubiquitous referent that its meaning cannot be usefully established for this purpose. However much can be deduced from the gravitas the concept has in public discourse and, as already noted, its centrality to the promotion of Aboriginal self-determination in place of assimilation with respect to governance. I would argue that the events and discourses so far discussed have contributed to a post-assimilation constitution of Aboriginal culture which is located at the nexus of justice, recognition and redemption. Aboriginal culture has become a locus of meaning and intent generated primarily by the State‟s need for symbols of its bestowal of recognition, the consolidation of a pan-Aboriginal platform of difference in advocacy discourses, and the fact that the growing but often anchorless good will of the non-Indigenous Australian public needed to find purchase in something tangible. As will be illustrated below, public discourses on Aboriginal issues consistently draw a correlative and causative connection between evincing the worth of Aboriginal culture and evincing the worth of Aboriginal personhood.

In the rhetoric of prime ministers such as Whitlam and Keating, and the discourses surrounding Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, the Stolen Generations and Reconciliation, “Aboriginal culture” has been prominent in arguments advanced about the need to reverse the process of assimilation, to rehabilitate Aboriginal people's sense of self-worth and to correct the view that prevailed throughout much of Australia's history that Aboriginal people and their culture were inferior. I will provide several examples. For instance, in the Deaths in Custody Report, Commissioner Johnston writes that:

[Aboriginal people] never voluntarily surrendered their culture and, indeed, fought tooth and nail to preserve it, throughout dispossession, protection, assimilation, integration... They have the right to retain that culture, and that identity. Self-determination is both the expression and the guarantee of that right. (Johnston, 1991b:1.7.21).

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Similarly, in his Redfern address Paul Keating asked non-Indigenous Australians to recognise that „[w]e took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life‟, and to „imagine if ours was the oldest culture in the world and we were told that it was worthless‟. He highlighted „the demoralisation and desperation, the fractured identity‟ that had been revealed in the Deaths in Custody cases, but suggested hopefully that:

[w]e are beginning to more generally appreciate the depth and the diversity of Aboriginal and Torrest Strait Islander cultures. From their music and art and dance we are beginning to recognise how much richer our national life and identity will be for the participation of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders (Keating, 1992).

An important thread of the Stolen Generations Inquiry was that children who were removed had been deprived of „community ties, culture and language‟ (National Inquiry, 1997:283, see also 296-314). As the Report states:

One principal effect of the forcible removal policies was the destruction of cultural links. This was of course their declared aim. The children were to be prevented from acquiring the habits and customs of the Aborigines (South Australia's Protector of Aborigines in 1909); the young people will merge into the present civilisation and become worthy citizens (NSW Colonial Secretary in 1915). Culture, language, land and identity were to be stripped from the children in the hope that the traditional law and culture would die by losing their claim on them and sustenance of them (1997:202, original emphasis).

The Inquiry found that this stripping away of culture was enforced not only by the children's separation from their families, but by the fact that they were often punished if they spoke or sang in their language; in general they were taught to be ashamed of their Aboriginality and aspire to become white. This notion of cultural loss informed the Inquiry's allegation that the policy amounted to „genocide‟, because „the predominant aim of Indigenous child removals was the absorption or assimilation of the children into the wider, non-Indigenous community so that their unique cultural values and ethnic identities would disappear, giving way to models of ‟ (National Inquiry,

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1997:272-273; Curthoys & Docker [eds] 2011). The grieving and sympathetic discourses that circulated in connection with the Inquiry lamented the children's disconnection from their culture, and the fact that they were left without a sense of identity. As one testimonial put it: „Why was I made to suffer with no Aboriginality and no identity, no culture?‟ (National Inquiry, 1997:277). Such declarations of suffering are indicative of the fact that cultural loss is an important facet of the Aboriginal cultural trauma narrative in Australia. With respect to official Reconciliation discourses, a recurrent claim has been that members of non-Indigenous society need to understand and respect Aboriginal culture as part of the „distinctive character‟ of the nation if Reconciliation is to be achieved (CAR, 2000; Department of Indigenous Affairs (WA), 2012). The following statement found on the Reconciliation Australia website „Share Our Pride‟ is exemplary:

It is important for all Australians to understand the essential features of Indigenous culture, including our special connection to the land and our commitment to family and community. So we can walk on this land together as friends and equals. So you can share our pride. Understanding and respecting our culture also gives you a better sense of the impact on our communities when life-sustaining structures are ignored or broken, as they have been and continue to be (Bridge, 2012).

These discourses around cultural loss and respect for culture are often strongly inflected with the language of rights, and sometimes the concept of “cultural rights”. From the 1960s onwards, concepts of human rights and social justice became powerful platforms for advancing Aboriginal interests in Australia (Attwood, 2005:20-21). International law has been a fertile arena of progressive thinking in relation to Indigenous issues, in terms of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous academics and professionals. ATSIC and other Aboriginal organisations, activists and advocates, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (now the Australian Human Rights Commission), and political leaders like Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating, have all employed the language of social justice, human rights, the instruments of international law and the idea of a rights-cognizant international gaze to criticise and justify State

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policy.61 The concept of having a right to one's heritage and to enjoy one's culture, articulated by Commissioner Johnston above, has consistently featured in this discourse. For instance, the program booklets of the Aboriginal Arts Board often employed the language of rights:

The existence and operation of the Aboriginal Arts Board is based on the right of the indigenous people of Australia to determine the future of their own cultural heritage. The Board's responsibility is to provide support to promote and develop activities which give expression to this basic right (Australia Council, 1979; see also 1982; 1985a).

The „National Strategy to Promote Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Rights‟, one of the four strategies outlined in the Roadmap to Reconciliation, also locates Aboriginal culture and heritage within a human rights framework (CAR, 2000). More recently, the Victorian Government's Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities Act 2006 (VIC) specified the „distinct cultural rights‟ of Aboriginal Victorians (Bell 2008; see also HREOC, 2003). Thus we see that human rights concepts have provided a sacrosanct footing and vocabulary for both defining and advocating for the survival of “Aboriginal culture” in relation to past and present practices of the State.

The meanings associated with “Aboriginal culture” can be further illuminated if we look more closely at the way the concept is articulated by Aboriginal people. When Aboriginal spokespeople from remote Australia have a platform to speak about their interests, they very frequently talk about “culture”: their determination to retain it and to pass it on to their children. Given that these speakers often work with a limited English vocabulary, the ubiquity and magnitude of “culture” seems all the greater. For Aboriginal people who don‟t live in remote parts of Australia, “culture” is no less important as a signifier of a domain of Aboriginal difference that must be nurtured and

61 For instance, Whitlam claimed that „Australia's treatment of her aboriginal people will be the thing upon which the rest of the world will judge Australia and Australians - not just now, but in the greater perspective of history‟ and spoke of removing „a stain from our national honour‟ with respect to Aboriginal rights and justice (in Kirby, 2010:42; see also Whitlam, 1973; Curran, 2006:121). Since the 1980s, Aboriginal people have been instrumental in the drafting and resolution of the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples at the UN (Dodson & Pritchard, 1998). Following the Mabo Native Title decision in 1992, the Keating Government promised to implement a Social Justice Package founded on human rights principles, however this did not eventuate (Gardiner-Garden, 1999:18-19). For other relevant literature, see Dodson (1996); Behrendt (2003); Janke (1998). 114

renewed. In Aboriginal discourses, as illustrated in the „Share our Pride‟ quotation above, “Aboriginal culture” is usually depicted as being synonymous with healthy Aboriginal personhood. It is both portrayed as a resilient force that is indivisible from Aboriginal subjectivity, and a fragile thing on the brink of loss. It is also often nostalgically described in Arcadian terms, as a domain free from the ravages of western society (see for instance Reynolds [ed] 2006; Roberts, 2011).62

These ways of picturing “Aboriginal culture” are true of statements made in the art context, which is one of the few forums in which remote Aboriginal peoples' voices are regularly heard by non-Indigenous Australians. Discourses articulated by the Aboriginal Arts Board, ATSIC, Art Centres and Aboriginal artists themselves consistently telescope from taking about Aboriginal “Art” to Aboriginal “culture” (cf. Appendix 2, A.3.3, A.5.3). In these discourses, the former is depicted as being embedded within the latter; interconnected with Country, Dreaming, law, ceremony and kinship. The following excerpt from a Desart advertisement is exemplary:

The art means to carry on our stories, to know it belongs to my family and it belongs to my father and grandfather, so that everyone can know about us, so we can carry on, so our kids can carry on forever, even when we're gone. So non- Indigenous people can know about us in the future, how we fought to keep our culture strong for the sake of our children's future (Valerie Napaljarri Martin in Desart, 2009).63

62 See for instance the comments made in „Voices from the Heart – Part 4‟, a series of interviews with Yuendumu residents published by Reconciliation Australia on its website and in The Australian in 2007. Cherlyn Napangardi Granites made the following statement: KEEPING our culture strong, it's all about not forgetting our elders. Lots of young people out there, they forget their people because of drugs and alcohol. Drugs and alcohol don't belong to yapa culture, to Aboriginal people -- it's from Europeans. They're the ones that brought and made all those things, and that's how people lose their culture and families. I want my people to keep their culture strong -- not lose it.... [Culture] is in language and painting, it's in everything. It's just there. ...[My daughter] Tanisha, she's seven years old, I always talk to her about Jukurrpa -- Dreamtimes -- and every year we go out on country visits and that's the really main one for young kids, and even me, to learn more. I'm really interested about learning more culture, about my people... Their life was so amazing. They had really good lives. They didn't have any diabetics or stuff like that, sickness... (Don‟t forget our elders, 2007; see also We have to teach them the culture, 2007). 63 For other examples from Aboriginal artists and leaders, see Jagamarra (2000), Roughsey (1976); Yunupingu, (1997). 115

This connection between “Art” and “Culture” is also drawn in the mottos of Art Centres (many of which are identified as „art and culture‟ centres) and in exhibition discourses.64

2.6.2 Aboriginal culture and heritage as Australia‟s culture and heritage

We have already encountered another way in which Aboriginal culture has been constituted at the nexus of justice, recognition and redemption: since the 1970s there has been a progressive interweaving of Indigenous “culture” and “heritage” with Australia's “culture” and “heritage”. As Moran writes, the development of indigenized settler nationalism „has involved a discourse of sharing culture and heritage‟ which has entailed that Aboriginal people‟s „cultural heritage, their long and deep spiritual connection with Australian lands, given as a „gift‟ to the national community, would indigenize the Australian nation as a whole‟ (2002:1030). This has been illustrated above in relation to Whitlam's new nationalism, the nationalistic configuration of Aboriginal culture in the Creative Nation policy, Bill Hayden‟s speeches, in the Reconciliation mantra that Aboriginal culture be seen as integral to the distinctive character of the nation, and in nationalistic celebrations of Aboriginal culture being the oldest continuing culture on earth. This amalgam is often made explicit in funding announcements and media releases in which the allocation of monies to Indigenous art, culture and heritage projects is tied to the „important position Indigenous history and expression occupies in Australia's cultural life‟ and the need for the nation to „continue to protect, preserve and promote Indigenous arts, culture and heritage to help build a diverse and dynamic Australia‟ (Garrett, 2010a). Consequently, imperatives that may only be directly relevant to a tiny group of people, such as maintaining localised cultural practices, recording nearly-extinct languages and songs, and documenting stories

64 Ananguku Arts, for instance, carries the motto: „Arts kunpu, tjukurpa kunpu, munu waltja tjuta kunpu: Strong arts, strong culture, strong families’. The motto of Tjala Arts is „Nganampa Art. Nganana walytjangku. Business palyanu. Munula tjukurpa kanpu kanyini‟ (Our Art. Our Business – keeps our culture strong). The first Indigenous Art Triennial Exhibition at the NGA was titled „Culture Warriors‟ (2007), and in 2011 the Casula Powerhouse Centre staged an exhibition titled: „Strong Women, Strong Painting, Strong Culture‟. 116

associated with particular areas of Country have been funded and facilitated by government grants and initiatives on the grounds that they are national imperatives. This is in part premised on a belief that the State might be able to halt the cultural destruction it has caused, however is also premised on the concern, one that has global resonances and is enshrined within the charter of institutions such as UNESCO, that a deficit is suffered by humanity as a whole should particular traditions and languages be lost to history. In sum, the discourses cited here show us that “Aboriginal culture” has been constituted in the public imagination by a medley of hopes and moral arguments that are contingent upon very particular political circumstances. It has been characterised as a realm of plenitude and virtue made fragile by patently unjust acts. It is a fundamental human right, the basis for a coherent Aboriginal identity and sense of collective self- worth. Its recuperation is a path to rehabilitating Aboriginal psychological well-being and Settler society's atonement for the crimes of the past. It is rich and dynamic, deserves respect, and it is what most distinguishes Australian culture. It has remarkable antiquity and is a gem of the universal patrimony of humankind, the further erosion of which would be an indictment of Australian society.

Morton has noted that definitions of Aboriginal culture in Australian public life seem to always have moralistic intent and involve „judgements of worth‟ (2006). In light of the arguments and examples above, I would suggest that these tendencies can be attributed to the fact that being able to ascertain and celebrate the worth of Aboriginal culture has been pivotal to the State‟s and non-Indigenous civil society‟s negotiation of their obligations to Aboriginal people. The examples above illustrate (as do earlier discussions in this chapter) that this negotiation tends to be oriented by the following types of oppositions: injustice and justice, oppression and empowerment, destruction and survival, loss and renewal, denial and recognition, shame and pride, despair and self-worth, trauma and remedy. As Peter Sutton has written with some disillusionment:

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A central focus of progressive politics and governmental thinking in Australian Indigenous affairs since the 1970s has been on recovery: recovery of lost political autonomy, lost property rights, lost regional integration, lost economic self-sufficiency, lost pride, lost languages, lost identities, lost sacred objects, lost human remains. Many have put their trust in the promise that „culture‟ and its partial recovery will do more than restore dignity and the respect of others – it will work wonders more broadly by overcoming economic and social dysfunction (2009:65).

Within a narrative of cultural trauma that stretches back to the founding moment of colonisation, the State and hostile white society arguably stand accused with respect to all the former terms in the oppositions I have outlined and all of the losses in Sutton‟s list. Aboriginal culture, as a highly elastic and morally charged idea, has been anointed as the vehicle for making amends and reversing the effects of unjust policies of the past.

2.6.3 Aboriginal art as metonymic for Aboriginal culture.

Let us return to my suggestion that Aboriginal art has become metonymic for Aboriginal culture in Australian public culture. I make this suggestion because it is clear that Aboriginal art is one of the most potent and amenable means available of circulating positive images of Aboriginality in the public domain and symbolising the redemptive intentions of non-Indigenous civil society and the State. This can be illustrated on four fronts.

First, it is clear that positive conceptions of Aboriginal culture that were so essential to the task of drawing a line under the paradigm of assimilation ultimately found the most traction in the paradigms of the arts and land custodianship. The arts and ecology are domains within which the Dreaming can be authenticated and the value of Aboriginal knowledge and skill can be honoured with the greatest cogency and accessibility. In these spaces, “Aboriginal culture” is recognised as an entity of sophistication and intelligence that can be compared to other great traditions around the 118

world. In addition, both the arts and ecology resonate with the sympathies and interests of left-leaning civil society. The revered status of art within Western culture opened up a sphere of value with which Aboriginality could be affiliated by the State and by sympathetic non-Indigenous civil society.65

The frequency with which people suggest that Aboriginal art can be, or is, a conduit for respect and understanding between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, attests to this. For instance, in his 1973 report on the government company Aboriginal Arts and Crafts, Pty. Ltd, Mackay argued that a primary objective of the Aboriginal art industry should be that it generate „in the viewing and buying public an awareness and deep respect for Aboriginals, their skills, culture and way of life‟ (1973:28; see also Thomas & Baily, 1973). Anthropologist Nicolas Peterson makes a similar point in his submission to the 1989 Industry Review, in which he notes that the government is „aware that it is through Aboriginal arts and crafts that one of the most positive and acceptable images of Aboriginal people and their culture is made available to the public‟ (in Altman et. al, 1989:235). Similarly, the high-profile collector Colin Laverty remarks that „[s]o far, art has been the key way that Australia at large has come to understand and learn about and have respect for Aboriginal people‟ (in Rothwell, 2006a; see also).66 It is also noteworthy that Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating were art lovers who made the Arts and Indigenous Affairs central and highly nationalistic platforms of their leadership. This is also true of the polymath economist and bureaucrat Nugget Coombs, a pioneering and persuasive advocate of both Indigenous interests and the arts who had a significant influence on the Holt, McMahon and Whitlam Governments (Rowse,

65 Outgoing French President Jacque Chirac provides a wonderful illustration of this in a speech justifying the creation of a wing of the Mus e du Quai Branly (a Museum of Indigenous Cultures) within the Louvre:

[T]he Louvre is more than simply one of the great museums of the world. It is also, like it or not, a dispenser of prestige, a renown from which it would be unfair to exclude whole civilisations... The Louvre, an emblem of culture, is indeed a place of symbolic consecration (in Amato, 2006:47-48). 66 See Gantner in Neales (2004:20) for a similar remark from a collector, and the comments of former Federal Indigenous Affairs minister, Clyde Holding in Cadzow (1987:3). 119

2000b; 2001).67 The Arts and Indigenous Affairs were thus pictured as kindred concerns among the community of progressives who were the constituents and affiliates of these leaders.68

Second, Aboriginal art captures both the historicity and contemporaneity of Aboriginal culture, the union of which has become vital to the picturing of Australian nationhood as youthful and progressive on the one hand and as having a dignified, ancient and locally grounded heritage on the other. It is clear that evidence of Aboriginal cultural survival is fundamental to the imagining of a reconstructed, virtuous Australia, and the vitality and dynamism of Aboriginal art makes it a powerful emblem of this survival. This aesthetic is the inverse of the nostalgic dying race aesthetic that prevailed in Australian literary and visual culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At the same time, Aboriginal art is viewed in terms of ancient national heritage, the survival of which is significant to the nation and to the world. Declarations that Aboriginal culture is 30, 40 or 50 000 years old; that it is „the world‟s most ancient continuous culture‟ and that Aboriginal art is the „longest continuing art tradition in the world‟ have become a mantra among Aboriginal arts advocates, activists, art and museum professionals, writers and politicians (as exemplified by Paul Keating above). For instance in 1983, Aboriginal Affairs Minister in the Hawke government, Clyde Holding, stated in Parliament that „at a time when our European forbears still lived in caves, art and dance, song and ceremony, language and religion, had become an integral [part] of this great ancient culture‟. He argued that this culture could „now enrich and enhance all our lives,‟ and that contemporary Aboriginal art was „undoubtedly the most

67 At different times Coombs was Governor of the Commonwealth Bank (the highest economic post at the time), Chair of the Council of Aboriginal Affairs, the founding head of the Australia Council for the Arts when it was formed in 1968, the chair of the Aboriginal Arts Committee of that council and instigator for the establishment of the Aboriginal Arts Board a few years later, and chaired the Aboriginal Treaty Committee between 1979 and 1983. Coombs was instrumental in the first official acknowledgement of an infringement of Aboriginal copyright, when he compensated and honoured the artist David Malangi after one of his designs was reproduced on the Australian one dollar note in 1966. He was also a mentor of Robert (Bob) Edwards (Myers, 2006:120; Berrell, 2009). 68 See for instance Myers‟ discussion of the collector Margaret Carnegie, who responded to the encouragement of Bob Edwards to acquire Papunya works (2006). 120

distinctively Australian cultural item that is produced by modern Australians‟ (in Moran, 2002: 1031).69 Carter has suggested that the idea of Aboriginal antiquity is appealing because it enables an elevation of „our own knowledge and thus control‟. As he points out, „it is we Europeans who associate antiquity with “a rich cultural heritage”. In discovering the Aboriginal past, we demonstrate our piety towards the household gods of our own history: the very variousness of Australia's cultural origins suggests an epic potential‟ (in Baume, 1989:110-111). Furthermore, these evocations of cultural richness can and have been mobilised to legitimise Indigenous claims to justice and recognition. Therefore, in addition to being able to encapsulate a sense of historicity and contemporaneity in both Aboriginal and Australian culture, Aboriginal art provides a rare platform for Aboriginal advocates and non-Aboriginal representatives of the State to sing in tune. Third, the subsidisation and endorsement of Aboriginal arts by the State, and the discourses that promote Aboriginal art exhibitions, Art Centres, festivals, performances and so on, very often appeal to the latter terms in the oppositions listed above such as empowerment, pride and self-worth. Janet Holmes à Court who, with her husband Robert Holmes à Court (now-deceased), was a path-breaking collector and supporter of Aboriginal art, made the following exemplary statement in a recent interview as an explanation for why she became involved with Aboriginal art:

If the rest of the world could see and appreciate the work of our indigenous people, it would help them gain self-esteem, self-respect - if they realised that they were able to produce things that were regarded as on a world scale then that would help lift their self esteem and maybe lift them out of the dreadful circumstances in which many of them find themselves (Hoy & 7.30 Report, 2011).70

69 For other examples see AAB (1975), Miller [ed] (2004); Russell (2001:87); Ryan (2008); Radford in Megaw (1990:85). It might be argued that the rhetorical power of such claims is that they generate a sense of kinship with these historical generations of Aboriginal people by enfranchising them - as a humanist corrective to primitivist portrayals - as cultured; as having always possessed 'our' creative and intellectual faculties. 70 For other examples see Carnegie, Holmes à Court & Hall (1991:126); Australia Council (1982); Office for the Arts, 2011b.

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These kinds of statements echo the association drawn between Aboriginal cultural rejuvenation and wellbeing that we have encountered in the above discussions of Reconciliation and Stolen Generations discourses and in the way Aboriginal people portray “Aboriginal culture” (see also the discourses associated with Aboriginal Arts Board: cf. Appendix 2, A.3.3). Such statements also evoke non-Indigenous sympathy and remorse. They therefore incorporate Aboriginal art into the broader narrative with which this chapter has been concerned, in which Aboriginal culture is located at the nexus of Aboriginal social justice and wellbeing, State accountability and remedial duty, and reconstructed Australian nationhood. Fourth, Aboriginal art has particular magnetism as a positive image of Aboriginality because there are many other manifestations of Aboriginality in Australian public culture that cannot be part of affirmative engagements with that identity. Much is omitted in the State-endorsed constitution of “Aboriginal culture”. For instance, politicised claims to sovereignty, autonomy and enduring land ownership are aspects of Aboriginality that contest the authority of the State and the legitimacy of Settler society. Furthermore, there are Indigenous traditions that have endured since colonisation which remain inassimilable and in some cases repugnant within the framework of liberal democratic Australia. Amongst these we might include young women being promised as brides to older men, male circumcision, corporal punishment such as spearing, and forms of superstition and sorcery to which cases of intra- communal violence have been attributed in recent years. We might add to this delineation of problematic Aboriginality the general figure of community dysfunction that haunts remote Aboriginal Australia, in which the degree of trauma that is presented in press reports seems unimaginable from the point of view of urban middle-class life. One of the most fraught and contentious questions encountered in Indigenous affairs discourses is whether (or which) aspects of “Aboriginal culture” can be understood to contribute to this suffering.71 There is no doubt that Aboriginal art, and the Aboriginal arts in general, provide a powerful counter- narrative to the story of chronic poor

71 For recent discussions of these complexities, see Langton (2008b); Sutton (2009); Morton (2006); Toohey (2008); Austin-Broos (2011); Background Briefing (2011). It is important to note that the figure of Aboriginal dysfunction that dominates the public imagination of Aboriginal life cannot be attributed solely to the conservative side of politics, to media irresponsibility or to prejudicial attitudes as has often been alleged. Organisations and advocates who seek to hold the government to account for their failure to alleviate disadvantage have also contributed to this discourse. 122

wellbeing that informs how Aboriginal Australia is perceived by many non-Indigenous citizens. Thus not only is Aboriginal art salient to the redemptive project of Reconciliation, but it gives Australians a reprieve from seemingly intractable “problems” in Indigenous Australia.

2.7 Conclusion

This chapter set out to reveal how Aboriginal art mediates the relationship between Indigenous people, Australian civil society and the State. This line of inquiry was necessarily situated within a broader exposition of the ways in which the complexities inherent to Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations find expression in public life through the lenses of cultural trauma, Reconciliation, heritage, nationalism, Indigenous rights, Indigenous disadvantage and so on. It also required an adumbration of the linkages between, on the one hand, the structural and economic factors that underlie policy initiatives, subvention and the partial nature of Indigenous Australians‟ citizenship, and on the other hand, the symbolic, metonymic and rhetorical manifestation of ideas that are collectively negotiated in public culture. While the former can be identified in the intersections between Indigenous affairs policies, Arts and cultural policies and the Aboriginal art movement (cf. Appendix 2), the latter is fluid and elusive, and I have frequently provided several examples of particular ideas in order to show that they represent a pattern rather than an individual case. What I hope to have shown, particularly by drawing on the rich concepts of cultural trauma and indigenised settler nationalism, is that Aboriginal art has been mobilised and to some extent instrumentalised within a variety of activist, governmental, intellectual and affective processes through which Aboriginal people, Australian civil society and the State has addressed the exigencies of the post-colonial condition.

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Chapter 3: The Emergence of Contemporary Aboriginal art in the 1980s

3.1 Introduction and chapter outline

In 1983 the non-Indigenous Australian artist and critic Ian Burn published an article in Art Network titled „The Australian National Gallery: Populism or a new cultural ?‟, in which he reviewed the opening exhibition at the Australian National Gallery which had been launched the previous year. In it he critiqued the intransigence of modernism-inspired curatorial decisions and Australian art‟s subordinate placement in relation to the international collection in the exhibition. He also made clear that he saw the program of thematising Australia‟s national identity and heritage that the „custodians of our national taste‟ had undertaken at the Gallery as being deeply problematised by Aboriginal issues (1983:40). Indeed, the article begins with a description of a major Land Rights protest that had taken place in Brisbane the week before the official opening. Burn also noted that only a few Aboriginal works which had served as source material for non-Indigenous Australian artists were included in the “Australian Art” hang in the opening exhibition. Regarding the juxtaposition of a 1946 bark painting by East Arnhem Land artist Djawa with two Margaret Preston works, Burn asked „what does it do for our understanding of Djawa's art or Aboriginal culture?‟ (41). He went on to argue that „unless the incorporation of bark paintings into the white Australian collection can be accomplished to reveal as much about black traditions, it must inevitably carry echoes of the assimilation policy, now so thoroughly discredited‟ 125

(41). For Burn, the fact that the more substantial showing of Aboriginal art was to be found in the „Australian Aboriginal, Oceanic, Black African, Asian and Pre-Columbian American‟ section was highly problematic, not least because it implied that Aboriginal art was not part of Australian art.

I begin this chapter with Burn‟s article because it can be read as a pr cis of its main themes. The 1980s was a transformative era in Australian art for several reasons. Not only were Australian artists attempting to reconfigure their relationship to the wider art world, but that wider art world was transitioning away from modernism towards the more globalist, relativist and highly diversified field of “contemporary art” (Smith, 2005/2006; McLean, 2011b). As Wolff writes, feminist and postcolonial critiques were „expos[ing] the myth of objectivity in Western aesthetics and art history‟, and demonstrating „the very clearly extra-aesthetic principles and practices at work in excluding the work of women, minority, and non-Western artists from the canon‟ (2008:19). These critiques, and the influx of postmodernist ideas, had an invigorating impact upon the Australian art arena in the 1970s and 1980s. An unprecedentedly large, mobile and ethnically mixed generation of Australian practitioners (artists, writers, curators) were eager to interrogate old paradigms and embrace new ones, and a new landscape of arts subsidy created unprecedented opportunities to do so. These practitioners were also highly sensitive to the equivocal negotiations of nationalism taking place in Australian public culture at this time in relation to both multiculturalism and Aboriginality. It was into this milieu that Aboriginal art emerged as a form of contemporary Australian art, and as is well illustrated in Burn‟s essay, Aboriginal art and Aboriginal issues became ensconced within the critical and exploratory movements of that era. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an analytical account of those movements which were responsive to, or mediated, the emergence of Aboriginal contemporary art.

Sections 3.2 to 3.4 explore the reasons for the unprecedented vitality and reflexive tendencies of the Australian art world of the 1980s and the circumstances that led to Aboriginal art being integrated into the contemporary art arena. These sections also discuss the way recalcitrant notions of the „Cultural Cringe‟ and Australian 126

„provincialism‟, which were expressive of the country‟s marginal and deferential relationship to the centres of culture in the Northern Hemisphere, were vigorously challenged in artistic, critical and curatorial practices. At the same time, a sustained debate was conducted about the relationship between Aboriginal and Settler culture, which pivoted on concepts such as „cultural convergence‟ and „cultural colonialism‟. It is here that we witness the art world‟s gestation of the implications of Aboriginal rights campaigns, Aboriginal disadvantage and the of 1988, in addition to the challenge posed by the unique aesthetic and conceptual qualities of Aboriginal art itself.

Section 3.5 documents the variety of approaches taken to Aboriginal art by non- Indigenous artists, curators and writers in the 1980s, in relation to landscape traditions, the practice of appropriation, and postmodern, post-structuralist and conceptualist discourses for instance. Section 3.6 examines the tensions that arose around the frameworks of interpretation that were brought to bear upon Aboriginal art and non- Indigenous Australian art by overseas audiences and art professionals at this time. Sections 3.7 and 3.8 shows how many non-Indigenous artists and writers were directly engaged in the Indigenous political movements and debates and receptive to burgeoning currents of post-colonial critique. They also show that the emergent urban Aboriginal art movement and advocacy base sensitised non-Indigenous practitioners to issues of exclusion and misrepresentation, and compelled them to bring questions of justice to bear upon their professional activities and reflect upon the implications of the 1988 Bicentenary. The conclusion of the chapter focuses on two interrelated sets of questions that were negotiated in the 1980s: how to empower Indigenous artists and the Indigenous voice, and how to dismantle Eurocentric, primitivist and exclusionary structures within the fine arts domain.

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3.2 The Australian art world in the 1980s

In the 1980s the Australian arts sector was reaping the benefits of the 1970s policy initiatives of the Whitlam Labor Government (cf. Appendix 2, A.2.2). Several state galleries had expanded their spaces and, as we know from Burn‟s article above, the new Australian National Gallery was launched (by the Queen) in 1982. Sotheby‟s Australia was established in the same year and during the decade, which was characterised by a buoyant economic climate, corporate investment in art increased and there was a boom in the Australian art market (Van den Bosch, 2005:63-64; Huda, 2008:103-107). There were also an increasing number of tertiary educational institutions offering art courses which produced an exceptionally large generation of art school graduates. Art journals such as Art Network (established in 1979), Artlink (1981), Art & Text (1981), Praxis M (1983), Art Monthly (1987) and On the Beach (1983) were in most cases made possible by Australia Council subsidies and/or institutional affiliation and provided new fora for critical reviews and debate regarding contemporary art in Australia and overseas (Murphy, 1981; Thomas, 1988; Eagle, 1984/1979). The first Sydney Biennale was staged at the Art Gallery of NSW in 1973, and the Australian Perspecta - a biennial showcase of contemporary Australian art - was initiated by the same institution in 1981. Each was a watershed in legitimising the work of the new counter-cultural generation of Australian artists. The Sydney Biennale was particularly important because it established an exhibition program in which the work of Australian contemporary artists was regularly displayed alongside that of prominent overseas artists.

The artistic, curatorial and discursive practices of this era were highly adventurous and reflexive. Postmodern and poststructuralist concepts were brought into dialogue with - and in some cases mobilised to challenge - the subcultural movements that were ongoing from the 1960s and 1970.72 Pluralist theorisations of identity had wide appeal, as they provided platforms for self-expression for immigrant Australians of non-Anglo-Saxon origin, but were also salient for white Australians who wanted to unyoke themselves from the bland and derivative paths they associated with their

72 These ideas were also embraced within the emerging discipline of Australian cultural studies, the writings of which often overlapped with the themes addressed in art theory and were heavily influenced by French post-structuralist thought (see for instance Morris 1983; Muecke, 1983; 1984). 128

British heritage and the antipodes. Many artists embraced an anti-establishment (which usually entailed anti-modernist), anti-elitist and anti-commodity ethos. The flourishing of conceptual and “post-object” art practices led to a great diversification of artforms, as well as non-commercial exhibition methods and settings for collegial exchange. While some practices became highly esoteric, others were engaged in social critique and pursued activist and collectivist forms of expression (Taylor [ed], 1984; Lumby, 1995).

3.3 The Cultural Cringe and provincialism

It is difficult to overstate the significance of these reformations. In the preceding decades, much of Australian art history and criticism had upheld the idea that Australian cultural life was unassailably conditioned by the country‟s marginal, dependent and envious relationship to the metropolitan centres of Europe and North America. In the absence of an endogenous aesthetic tradition, it was believed that Australian artists and writers had no alternative but to emulate overseas trends. This meant that their work was often judged against largely inscrutable notions of international standards. In 1950, the literary critic Arthur Phillips coined the phrase „Cultural Cringe‟ to evoke this condition (Burn, Lendon, Merewether & Stephen, 1988:77-79). Phillips argued that artists who sought to refute the Cringe were ignored and/or maligned, which led him to propose that „the Cringe is a worse enemy to our cultural development than our isolation‟ (in Burn et. al, 1988:77). This was the atmosphere in which Margaret Preston and other artists, writers and publishers advocated for a national spirit in Australian art, as discussed in Chapter 1.

The theme of Australia‟s artistic dependence on overseas developments had also infused Bernard Smith‟s seminal and highly influential Australian art history texts Australian Painting (1971/1962) and Place, Taste and Tradition (1979/1945). In the 1960s and 1970s, he and other critics employed the concept of „provincialism‟ to explore this condition (see Smith, 1971/1962:333-334; T. Smith, 1969). For instance in a 1973 essay, Ian Burn theorized „provincialism‟ in relation to what he regarded as the

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cultural imperialist implications of the American avant-garde‟s pre-eminence (1991/1973). He argued that in order to overcome the deferential attitude that prevailed in „provincial‟ settings which sustained and naturalized American art‟s prestige, it was necessary to appraise the local conditions of art practices and stop treating aesthetic concerns as universal and ideologically disinterested. The most well known example of the critique of Australian provincialism is Terry Smith‟s 1974 article „The Provincialism problem‟, which was published in the New York art journal Artforum (1974). Here he remarks that in Australia:

[many overseas styles] have had small to quite large bands of advocates who devote their artistic maturity to mastering, then elaborating aspects of the initiatives of those they have imitated. This process continues unabated today, like a succession of faithful echoes, always open to replenishment at the sound of a new call from the other side of the divide (55).

Smith noted that in addition to artists, several Australian critics contributed to this „pattern of provincialist submission‟ (59). He acknowledged that Australian artists were appearing in overseas exhibitions and international art magazines and identified several currents of local innovation, and like Burn he argued that art-making is „a thoroughly context-dependent activity‟ for which there are „no ideologically neutral cultural acts‟ (59). Nevertheless, the message of the essay was that provincialism was an intractable Australian condition: „As the situation stands, the provincial artist cannot choose not to be provincial’ (57, original emphasis).

The themes of the Cultural Cringe and provincialism were frequently debated in the 1980s and were the subtext of many of the reflexive activities of the period. The question of whether or not Australian art had left these afflictions behind was of concern to many commentators. For instance a 1983 edition of the London-based art journal Studio International was themed „Australian Art: Beyond the Cringe‟. In his editor‟s introduction, Michael Spens enthused: „it now seem[s] that heads are turned, and return travel passes sought, to Australia; the one-way route to the mother country has now been dramatically reversed, and the flow of cultural escapees, refugees and prospectors has become legendary.‟ Spens proposed that Australia‟s „exile‟ status has given way to 130

„sanctuary‟, and that the country „has developed of late a new and ebullient cultural confidence‟: „The Cringe, then, is no more…. The Cringe has gone‟ (1983:6).73 In the context of this debate Australian artists sought to determine whether it was desirable to forge a specifically Australian art and to ask what it might consist of. Regionalism, a creative and critical movement that advocated the particularities of locally conceived art practices, was one manifestation of this undertaking (Hoffie, 1997; Murphy, 1981:13; 1988; Terry Smith in Nairne et. al, 1987:211-212). Therefore a distinguishing feature of this era in Australian art was a widely shared, nationalistic concern with the question of how to devise a new individual and collective relationship to the transnational art world.

3.4 The emergence of contemporary Aboriginal art

The circumstances and debates discussed so far are critical to understanding why Aboriginal art was radically reappraised by Australian art institutions and cognoscenti in the 1980s.74 In the 1970s, Aboriginal art from Arnhem Land and the Central and Western Deserts had been acquired by some private collectors and state galleries, however these acquisitions were scarce and in many cases only occurred due to the persuasive efforts of the art‟s advocates (Myers, 2006; Johnson et. al 2008; Johnson & McMillan, 1990:24; Morphy, 2008:56-58). Within state galleries, Aboriginal art collections were generally housed in Primitive Art departments and were only rarely integrated into the galleries‟ exhibition schedules (Caruana, 2003:194; Philp, 2007). Aboriginal art was still a very small part of the Australian fine arts market, with the Government Company galleries and Sydney‟s Hogarth Galleries (which established a dedicated Aboriginal art wing in 1976) being among the only vendors (Peterson, 1983). As I noted in the introduction, it was not until artists from Papunya and Arnhem Land were included in exhibitions such as the 1979 and 1982 Sydney and the 1981 and 1983 Australian Perspecta exhibitions that Aboriginal art really entered the sphere of contemporary art (Biennale of Sydney, 1979; Murphy [ed], 1981; 1983; Sturgeon,

73 For other writings which refer to the Cultural Cringe and provincialism, see Waterlow (1983); Murphy (1988), Smith (1988); Van den Bosch (1985); Nairne, Dunlop & Wyver, (1987); Montgomery (1983:15); Davila (1987:55); Thomas (1988:51). See also the artist Imants Tillers‟ retrospective insight in Johnson (1997:71), and Montgomery (2008) and Butler & Donaldson (2009) for recent reflections. 74 McLean (2011a) provides a detailed account of the transition outlined here. 131

1982). For instance, the 1979 Biennale included work by artists from Ramingining and Yuendumu as well as prominent non-Indigenous Australian and European artists such as Bea Maddock, Imants Tillers, Joseph Bueys and Gerard Richter. Among other things, we can see the inclusion of Aboriginal art in these exhibitions as being inspired by the heuristic and ethical tendencies of the conceptual art practices that were widely represented within them.

In 1980 both the Australian National Gallery and the Art Gallery of South Australia acquired paintings from Papunya, and the latter become the first gallery to include this work in a display of contemporary Australian art. In the following year, James Mollison, then director of the Australian National Gallery, made his first trip to Central Australia where he was greatly excited by the Papunya movement, declaring that it had produced „possibly the finest achievements to date in Australia‟ (in Johnson, 1990:16). A dedicated collection program was initiated and by 1987 the Gallery‟s holdings of Aboriginal art numbered 700 works (Ward, 1987; Altman et. al, 1989:92-4; Myers, 2001:186; Philp, 2007). Other State galleries began to establish Aboriginal art departments, collections and curatorial roles and to stage substantial exhibitions of Aboriginal art from remote regions, while the Perspecta and Sydney Biennale exhibitions continued to feature Aboriginal art and performance from both remote and urban areas (Nairne et. al, 1987:214; T. Johnson, 1986; V. Johnson, 1997).75 This corresponded to the growth in Aboriginal art showings in elite commercial galleries, and non-commercial art spaces‟ forays into mixed showings of Aboriginal and non-Indigenous art (Tasmanian School of Art Gallery, 1981; V. Johnson, 1986a; Adams, 1987; Ewington, 1986).

75 Among these exhibitions were The face of the centre: Papunya Tula Paintings 1971-1984 (1985) at the National Gallery of Victoria, Art from the Great Sandy Desert (1986) at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the touring exhibition The Inspired Dream: life as art in Aboriginal Australia (1988) and Aboriginal Art: The continuing tradition (1989) at the National Gallery of Australia.

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3.5 Artistic and critical approaches to Aboriginal art

We now have a clear picture of Aboriginal art having emerged as contemporary art at a time of progressive art practice and debate around the character and future of Australian art. As Hoffie suggests, Aboriginal themes were pivotal to the reimagining of Australian culture, identity and art traditions at this time (1997:69-70). Mediating this reimagining were a set of discussions that were oriented not only to the radical new presence of Aboriginal art, but to the questions posed by contemporaneous Aboriginal rights campaigns and the growing public consciousness of the history of Aboriginal dispossession. The following section will discuss the concepts of „cultural convergence‟, „rapprochement‟, „cultural colonialism‟ and „ethnocide‟. While the first two had somewhat hopeful foundations in notions of dialogue and exchange, the latter were highly dystopian. All four concepts are indicative of the fact that formulating an ethical standpoint in relation to Aboriginal art and Aboriginality was a widely shared imperative in Australian art forums in the 1980s. Following this discussion, I will explore a range of cross-cultural encounters in the domains of Australian art practice, curatorship and writing, each of which was shaped by a heightened sensitivity to moral questions pertaining to Aboriginal art, Australian history and social justice.

3.5.1 Cultural convergence and rapprochement

The concept of cultural convergence entered Australian art discourses as a result of „The Spectre of Truganini‟ Boyer Lecture series delivered by the aforementioned art historian Bernard Smith in 1980.76 These path-breaking essays attest to the degree to which heroic narratives of the nation‟s history were being interrogated in academic and

76 The Boyer Lectures have been hosted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) since 1959. They involve a prominent Australian presenting a series of radio lectures on political, social, cultural and scientific matters. 133

public discourse at this time.77 The lectures‟ analysis of the history of Indigenous/non- Indigenous relations and the aesthetic manifestations of this relationship were premised on the view that „the country was acquired by the forcible dispossession of the indigenous inhabitants of Australia from their ancestral lands, a process that might be more fittingly described as invasion and conquest‟ (1980:8). By employing the vocabulary of „dispossession‟, „invasion‟ and „conquest‟ in this way, Smith was offering a controversial revision of prevailing historical discourses around “settlement”. Smith was concerned with the „psycho-cultural mechanisms‟ (16) of white Australia‟s efforts to forget these origins, and argued that there was a „close connection between culture, place and morality‟ (10). Consistent with his focus on place in his other writings, he suggested that the attainment of a virtuous and authentic Australian culture would depend upon a cultural consciousness enlightened to the unique knowledge that emanated from „this ancient land‟ (45). He hoped that a condition of cultural „convergence‟78 might by catalysed by the non-Indigenous public‟s growing awareness of the many injustices Aboriginal people had experienced, a condition characterised by „a relationship in which identities are maintained and even developed but relationships become more complex and fruitful, and beneficial to the Australian culture as a whole‟ (50). Smith‟s perspective is redolent of several of the post-assimilation processes examined in Chapter 2: his essays are highly politicised meditations on the nation‟s conscience that articulate the Aboriginal cultural trauma narrative, and they also present what were relatively new conceptualisations of Australia‟s antique cultural and national heritage. As with the Cultural Cringe and provincialism, the themes raised in „The Spectre of Truganini‟ were often echoed and debated in 1980s art critical literature, such that in 1988 convergence was described as a „much overworked phrase‟ (Maughan,

77 Truganini was a Tasmanian Aboriginal woman who, following colonial efforts to rid the island of its Aboriginal population, was iconised as the “last of her race” when she died in 1876. Her skeleton was on public display at the Tasmanian Museum between 1904 and 1947 and repatriated for cremation nearly 100 years after her death. A large Aboriginal population has survived in , but as they are of mixed heritage, they have had to fight for recognition in the face of the intrigue and nostalgia evoked by the idea of the “last full-blood”. Though Smith affirms the myth that she was in his lectures, this view is no longer sustained (Ryan, 2011/1976; Hansen, 2010; Reynolds [ed], 2006). 78 Smith attributes the term to the Australian poet (1980:50) and elaborated upon his theory of convergence in Smith (1988 /1985). 134

Megaw, Megaw & Sumner, 1988:25).79 For instance, in his essay „Locality Fails‟, non- Indigenous artist Imants Tillers mentions the concept in the context of a critique of non- Indigenous art that, in his view, sought to appropriate the sheen of Aboriginality. He suggested that:

[Australian‟s resistance to forging] an authentic „cultural convergence‟ can in part be explained by the deep guilt underlying Australian culture. For the history of white settlement in Australia in relation to the Aborigines is a story of homicide, rape, the forcible abduction of children from their parents and the methodical dispossession of the lands upon which their well-being, self-respect and survival have depended. „Cultural convergence' is attractive as an idea because it offers a painless way to expiate our collective guilt of this history while simultaneously suggesting an easy solution to the more mundane but nevertheless pressing problem of find a uniquely Australian content to our art in an international climate sympathetic to the notion of „regional‟ art. The reality of „cultural convergence‟ which necessitates that political and economic inequalities be rectified first is a less satisfying prospect (1982:53).

This passage provides a great example, like Ian Burn‟s review above, of the ways in which acknowledgements of Aboriginal people‟s suffering were being brought into dialogue with interrogations of what constituted Australian art in 1980s critical discourses.

A concept with which the idea of convergence was sometimes associated was „rapprochement‟. For example, Adams writes of „the European Australian‟s belated rapprochement with this continent. The much vaunted appeal in Australian culture for a sense of place has adopted the notion of aboriginality (as quite distinct from Aboriginal culture) as a vehicle for a natural convergence of people and land‟ (1983:31; see also 1987). With regard to the appropriation of Aboriginal art by non-Indigenous artists, Vivien Johnson wrote that „[w]hite incursions onto the terrain of Aboriginal representations are now highly problematic. But they are equally imperative in order to contradict in practice the dismal doctrine that no rapprochement is possible‟ (1986b:15,

79 For other articles which mention „convergence‟, see Van den Bosch (1985:10), Adams (1983:31; 1987); Lingard (1989a:49); Taylor (1989). 135

original emphasis; see also T. Johnson 1986; 1988). As will be elaborated below, the ethics of non-Indigenous artists appropriating from Aboriginal art was the subject of serious debate at this time.

3.5.2 “Killing me softly”80: cultural colonialism and ethnocide

Another significant concept in 1980s critical discourses on Aboriginal themes was „cultural colonialism‟. In 1982 an article on Aboriginal art written by Canadian cultural critic and Inuit art expert Kenneth Coutts-Smith was published posthumously in Art Network (it had been commissioned for publication in a Canadian journal). Coutts- Smith had visited Australia in the early 1980s in part to pursue theories about cultural colonialism which he had canvassed in an overseas journal in 1976 (Coutts-Smith, 1991/1976; see also McLean, 2011b:337). The spirit of his argument is captured in the following quotation: „[c]ultural colonialism does not massacre and imprison and institutionalise a subservient people, but, more gently, it absorbs the values of a peripheral culture into the larger system of the dominant one‟ (1982:55). Although critics found flaws in his approach, Coutts-Smith‟s argument that colonisation operated in covert and insidious ways in the cultural realm was frequently echoed in other critical writings of the day.81 Marrie for instance invoked the themes of cultural colonialism, assimilation, cultural genocide and the idea that Australia was „not yet decolonised‟ in his critiques of the way Aboriginal art and cultural heritage were trapped within western ethnocentric frameworks of expertise and institutional control rather than being under the control of Aboriginal people themselves (1985; 1987). Even when they are not explicitly cited, the concepts of „cultural colonialism‟ and „cultural imperialism‟ were implicit reference points for other critiques of the Aboriginal art world at the time. For example Kirby‟s essay „Aboriginal Art and the New Patrons‟ (1982) analyses, in a Marxist vein, the sponsorship of a major Aboriginal art exhibition at the National

80 This phrase appeared in critical writings on Indigenous art concerned with the theme of cultural colonialism (Murphy, 1987; Marrie, 1985, 1987), and was also the title of a book on the heritage of the Pitjantjatjarra people published in 1977: Killing me softly: the destruction of a heritage. 81 See McNahon & Mackinolty (1983); V. Johnson (1987; 1989); Davila (1987); T. Johnson (1988); Nairne et. al (1987:216). 136

Gallery of Victoria by American Express, and argues that Indigenous land rights movements and aspirations to maintain culture were enervated by such corporate opportunism (see also Megaw, 1986:52; von Sturmer, 1989).

An idea that was strongly affiliated with the concept of cultural colonialism was ethnocide. Ann-Marie Willis and Tony Fry wrote three articles published in the Australian journals Artlink and Praxis M and the overseas journals Third Text and Art in America (1989a; 1989b; 1989c; see also Benjamin, 1990), in which they employed this idea in their discussions of the commercialisation of Aboriginal art.82 These lengthy essays were written from an academic standpoint explicitly located outside the art world, notwithstanding their chosen sites for publication (see particularly 1989a:5). They advance an extremely pessimistic polemic, arguing that the impact of commodification on Aboriginal culture was totalising in its degradation, and that colonial forces were simply tightening their grip through the various economic, cultural and social exchanges that were constitutive of Aboriginal art. They argued that it was erroneous to regard Aboriginal artists as empowered in light of the racial inequalities that prevailed within the art world and in Australian society generally. They also suggested that a neo-colonial form of primitivism was prevalent in the Aboriginal art world. In general their arguments were grounded in a critical Marxist perspective on capitalist relations and hegemony as well as ideas relating to ethnocentricism and Eurocentricism.

The reputation of these essays is particularly interesting. Willis‟ and Fry‟s arguments were not endorsed at the time in the way that cultural colonialism was, and they were critiqued for their totalising cynicism and for effacing the agency of Aboriginal artists, most elaborately in Roger Benjamin‟s riposte article in Art in America (1990). In subsequent years however, these essays have frequently been cited and included in anthologies as typifying an uncompromising post-colonial critique of the Aboriginal art industry (see Butler [ed] 2004/1996; McLean [ed], 2011; Araeen, Sarder & Cubitt [eds], 2002). Willis and Fry have recently written that their intervention sought to „contest claims about [Aboriginal art] as a politically progressive activity –

82 A shorter version of the article published in Third Text (Willis & Fry, 1989a) appeared earlier in the Australian publication Praxis M (no. 20, 1988), presented as writing back to a previous Indigenous art themed issue of the journal. 137

claims made loudly by non-Aboriginal voices‟ (Willis & Fry, 2011:286). They argue that „[g]iven the structurally subordinate position of Aboriginal people within Australian society, the question of the efficacy of a claimed cultural politics of Aboriginal art was (and still is, as far as we‟re concerned), the only ethically valid question to consider‟ (in McLean, 2011b:286). As will be discussed later, these arguments are indicative of the fact that post-colonial critiques generated a highly problematic dichotomy for people who were sympathetic to Aboriginal artists and the cause of Aboriginal rights: was the Aboriginal artist an agent of cultural survival and resistance, or a victim of commercial and cultural exploitation? There was a profound friction between people‟s optimism about the movement and their cognisance of the nuances of post-colonial power relationships and the inexorable proliferation of capitalist relations.

3.5.3 Landscape and tribalism

We move now to a discussion of other artistic and critical engagements with Aboriginal art and Aboriginal themes in the 1980s. Landscape had long been the dominant paradigm of Australian art, and many artists and writers perceived the depth of the challenge that Aboriginal art posed to those traditions in conceptual, formal, affective and spiritual terms (B. Smith, 1988/1985:301; Burn & Stephen, 1986; 1992; Hoffie, 1997). Land-focused artists were inspired by Aboriginal sacred sites, rock art sites and the role of narrative, song and performance in mapping and sustaining land custodianship. They were also responsive to Aboriginal ground (or sand) paintings, the topographical perspectives present in many paintings, the ceremonial context of traditional Aboriginal creativity and the use of natural materials such as bark and ochre.83 Several painters meditated upon the nature of the „abstraction‟ in Aboriginal paintings, and drew on Aboriginal themes to imagine a deeper and more emotive connection with place. For those artists who were affiliated with the burgeoning schools

83 Ground paintings appeared in several exhibitions, such as at the 1981 Festival of Sydney, the 1982 Sydney Biennale, the 1988 Dreamings exhibition in New York and Magicians de la terre (Magicians of the Earth) in Paris (McMillan & Johnson, 1990; Tillers, 1982:52 [fn. 3], McLean, 2011a: 66). 138

of performance, installation, environmental and situation–based art, many features of Aboriginal art and ceremonial culture resonated with the ideals of authenticity, transience and the non-commodity with which these schools were concerned. There was also a strain of artistic practice in which engagements with Aboriginal art were a facet of a broader exploration of non-Western culture and spirituality, tribalism, shamanism and the primordial (Adams, 1983; Tillers, 1982:52, Murphy, 1981).8485

3.5.4 Appropriation

Several artists engaged with Aboriginal art through the medium of appropriation. For instance Charles Cooper was concerned with how the problematic coexistence of Aboriginal and Settler society was manifest in the Aboriginal-themed imagery that circulated in Australian culture. Drawing on themes of visual perception, misperception and simulacra, he based a series of paintings on the photographs of rock art sites that were reproduced in popular books and stamps, particularly in association with the 1988 Bicentenary. These works juxtapose the poetic communication methods in Aboriginal society with the territorial and uniformist symbology of Settler society and highlight the „cultural annexation‟ of the former by the latter (Cooper, 1987; Sisley, 1988).

84 It is not possible to elaborate on all the artists encompassed by this summary. See Maloon (1982) and Murphy (1981:45) who write of the way Western Desert painting offered David Aspden a model for bringing a personal iconography, mythic and narrative element to abstract painting. See Bromfield (1988:16) and Banchflower (1988:58) on the artist Brian Blanchflower. See Adams (1983; 1987), Jones & Marcon (1987) and Murphy (ed) (1981) on the artists John Davis, David Jones, Bonita Ely, Marr Grounds and Ingo Kleinert. See John Coburn on himself (in Haynes, 1998:177). See Tillers‟ discussion of the European performance artists Marina Abramovic‟s and ‟s pilgrimage to Aboriginal communities following their participation in the 1979 Sydney Biennale (1982:54). See Lattas' discussion of the German artist Nikolaus Lang‟s work of 1987-1988 (1997/1990:235-236). See Carroll (ed) (1984) regarding the exhibition The Centre. See Karp (1991:13) who writes that at the 1988 Magiciens de la Terre exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, British land artist Richard Long‟s large “mud painting” on the wall above a Warlpiri ground painting installation appropriated Aboriginal concepts of the dreaming to serve Long's „attempt to return to the elemental‟ (1991:13). 85 It is likely that the performative practice of German artist , who popularised the idea of the artist as shaman at this time, had some bearing on this interest in tribal ritual and performance (Wallis, 2004:26).

139

Other artists who practiced appropriation were Tim Johnson and Imants Tillers, both of whom were impressed by the layered, iconographic conceptualism of Papunya painting, and the way its optical features resonated with other forms of contemporary art (see Tillers in Nairne et. al, 1987:223; T. Johnson, 1985a, 1985b; Tillers, 1983). Tim Johnson established an appropriative and collaborative practice in relation to Papunya painting which arose from direct engagements with Papunya artists and was expressive of his concerns about Indigenous/Settler relations and the political aspirations of Aboriginal people.86 This practice was also expressive of his interest in spirituality, which has seen him appropriate from and collage a range of non-western artistic traditions in his paintings (T. Johnson, 1988; Lingard, 1989a).

Imants Tillers, who cites Johnson as having sparked his interest in the work of Papunya artists, began appropriating from Aboriginal art in 1981 and has continued to do so throughout his career (Tillers in Johnson, 1997:71; 158 [fn. 16]). Tillers‟ practice is oriented by Duchampian, semiotic and postmodern themes and methodologies and he often makes use of small canvas boards which allow him to deconstruct and reconfigure his variously sourced imagery (Tillers, 1982; 1983; Hart [ed], 2006). In 1985 he produced a work titled „The nine shots‟ in which fragments of a well-known painting by Papunya artist Michael Jagamara Nelson titled „Five Stories‟ (also known as „Five Dreamings‟) from 1984 are interspersed with those of a figurative painting by German artist Georg Baselitz.87 Tillers‟ and Nelson‟s works were displayed together at the 1986 Sydney Biennale (Johnson, 1997). Tillers was also commissioned to create work for the dome of the Federation memorial in Centennial Park, Sydney which was opened in 1988, and here again aspects of Nelson‟s work (his ground mosaic at the new Parliament House launched in 1988) were integrated into the commission (Baume, 1988).

86 Tim Johnson and his then wife Vivien Johnson visited Papunya frequently in the 1970s and 1980s, where they befriended artists, collected works and assisted artists in getting exposure in the art world. (McMillan & Johnson, 1990; Myers, 2006). They also curated important exhibitions such as Koori Art ’84 and Two Worlds Collide: Cultural convergence in Aboriginal and White Australian Art (1985). 87 Tillers made a point of appropriating from reproductions, that is, from imagery that was already in circulation as part of mass produced culture. At this time the Jagamarra work was in high circulation within the art world as representative of the emerging Papunya movement (Tillers, 1986; Foss, 1987:138; Johnson, 1997:61). 140

Tillers is one of Australia‟s most respected artists and his practice and commentary were central to wider negotiations of Aboriginal art as contemporary art and to post-provincialist formulations of Australian art. In light of this, it is worth remarking on the ambivalent motivation behind his appropriations. To some degree it seems that they were a transgressive impulse: he was keen to distance himself from the sentimentality of some of the conscience-driven engagements with Aboriginal art that were emerging at the time. However this detached attitude is not so apparent in his refutation of the regionalist movement. In his essay „Locality Fails‟ published in Art & Text in 1982, Tillers extrapolates from a body of ideas associated with physicist John S. Bell regarding quantum mechanics. He argues that artistic content is not wholly determined by the circumstances from which it emerges, and that connections and causal relations can exist between events, ideas and expressive forms from disparate locations. In many ways this essay can be read as a critique of the views expounded by Ian Burn and Terry Smith in relation to provincialism (see section 3.3 above). Tillers concludes his essay by remarking that „[l]uckily a world in which „locality fails‟ is far more interesting than the one in which we are limited to our immediate circumstances and which we are suffered upon to reflect in our art‟ (60).

Tillers‟ antipathy to regionalism has three dimensions. First, regionalism seemed to entail an acceptance of Australian art‟s marginality in relation to the centres of art in Europe and America. Second, it treated landscape as the most legitimate and meaningful form of non-derivative Australian art, which rendered this condition of marginality intractable. Bernard Smith had often affirmed the „power of place‟, not only as inspiration for the most successful Australian art, but in cementing the Australianess of the many ethnic identities that formed Australian society. Tillers was the child of Latvian immigrants and was set on (and succeeded in) gaining entry to the international art world, and was hostile to such a view. There was to be no fidelity to place for him: his aversion to the „tyrannical‟ dominance of the landscape in the Australian artistic tradition was at the heart of his argument that „locality fails‟ and his appropriative practice (Foss, 1987:132).88 The third dimension brings us to Aboriginal art. According to regionalism‟s own principles, any overtly regionalist practice pursued by non- Indigenous artists was feeble in the face of the incontrovertible depth and richness of

88 See also Baume (1988:80); Tillers (1982:53); Nairne et. al (1987:224-228); Tillers in Davila (1987:55) 141

Aboriginal art. This had been suggested by Bernard Smith himself (1988/1985:301). Tillers was offended by the degree to which some practitioners seemed to be enthralled before this power. We sense this in his work the nine shots in which the circular icons of the Nelson painting perforate the white male figure, a portrayal which for Tillers evoked „danger and dread‟ (Foss, 1987: 136; Nairne et al 1987:223). At the same time, by reducing Papunya painting to mass-produced imagery that could be chopped up and manipulated, Tillers appeared to be seeking to diffuse the formidable authenticity of Aboriginal artists‟ cultural identifications with place.

3.5.5 Postmodernism and conceptualism

Postmodern and post-structuralist discourses were embraced by several artists and critics in their negotiation of Aboriginal art and culture, Tillers among them. For example, the concepts of smooth space and rhizomes in Deleuze‟s and Guattari‟s theory of nomadology were brought to bear upon aspects of Aboriginal society and art and cross-cultural encounters (see for instance Muecke, 1983; 1984; Tillers, 1983:15).89 The ubiquity of semiotic theory in discourses on art and culture at this time meant that the language of signification was often employed in discussions of Aboriginal art, frequently in connection with non-Indigenous artists‟ appropriative practices that drew on Aboriginal art (Foss, 1987; Willis & Fry, 1989:112; McNeill, 1985:24-25, Murphy, 1987).

The dissident anthropologist Eric Michaels offered the most sophisticated theorisations of Aboriginal art in relation to postmodernism. A recurring injunction in Michael‟s writings is that, in view of their ability to transform ritual, transient and localised forms into commodities that are secular, permanent and portable, Aboriginal artists of the Western Desert be recognised as innovative participants in the network of exchanges that was peculiar to the postmodern condition. He wanted people to see that, rather than occupying a discrete realm of exotic authenticity, Aboriginal works were

89 A translation of a section of Mille Plateaux (later published in English as A Thousand Plateaux) titled „Nomad Art‟ was published in Art & Text in 1985 (Deleuze and Guattari, 1985). 142

produced within a „dialogical space‟ and furthermore, that Aboriginal painters and Aboriginal media producers had a unique facility for self-expression in a globalised world (2004/1989:220). In making these arguments, Michaels drew on Marshall McLuhan‟s ideas about the semblance between modes of information transfer in the “electronic age” and non-literate tribal forms of communication (McLean, 2002a). He also mobilised Baudrillard‟s writings on art to critique the way notions of „authenticity‟ and „tradition‟ were being applied to Aboriginal art forms and to illuminate the non- individualistic and anti-authorial methodologies of Warlpiri painting (with which his fieldwork at Yuendumu had made him very familiar) (Michaels, 1994/1988).90 In Michaels view, postmodern modes of critique that engaged on a conceptual level with Aboriginal artworks were essential to combat both the constraints of conventional anthropological expertise and the risk that Aboriginal art become „fodder for Post- Modernism's consumerist appetite for the primitive‟ (2004/1989:220, 221).

Some artists and writers who embraced postmodernist viewpoints enlisted the idea of Aboriginality as, in Imants Tillers‟ words, „a ubiquitous quality which is no longer the exclusive domain of “black” Aborigines‟ (1982:51). On this point it is worth looking closely at the writings of Paul Taylor, an influential curator, writer and founding editor of the journal Art & Text, and a champion of Tillers‟ work.91 Taylor had an irreverent and relativistic style of commentary that was explicitly post-structuralist. In his writings, Australia is depicted as a site of simulacra and artifice, with a fragmented, multinational citizenry and an interior forsaken to American military bases. He also denounced „social purpose‟ art and regionalism and rather endorsed art that played on the frivolous and the mass produced (Taylor, 1982:49; 1983:30; 1984/1981; 1989; Davidson, 1983:46).

In this vein Taylor saw Australian art as being uniquely placed to flourish under postmodern conditions. In 1983 he published an essay titled „POPISM: the Art of White

90 Indeed, in answer to the criticism of appropriators of Aboriginal art (discussed below), Michaels argued that Western Desert artists were equally appropriative in their mobilization of Western painting practices (2004/1989). 91 Taylor, who died prematurely in 1992, had an international profile as the last critic to interview Andy Warhol and an author on Warhol and post- movements. 143

Aborigines‟92 which discussed the POPISM exhibition he had curated at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1982. The essay takes its title from an Imants Tillers‟ work in the exhibition which was titled „White Aborigines‟.93 Here Taylor suggests that „[a] search for a regional Australian culture, ultimately a worthless pastime, reveals a centrifugal impulse wherein our art, like the mythopoeic Dreamtime of the aborigines, is the flak of an explosion not of our detonation‟ (1983:30). He praises - with specific reference to those artists who had embraced the medium of the camera - recent Australian art as „an ab-original soulless, antipodal reflection‟, and asserts that POPISM, „like the aboriginal nomads, can therefore find a metaphor for itself in its existence on the surface and edges of the existing landscape‟ (1983:32). Taylor‟s rhetorical appropriation of aboriginality is thus indicative of his refutation of the qualities of authenticity and distinctiveness that had historically been coveted within Australian art. In Taylor‟s view, the absence of these qualities was a postmodern blessing.

Though the concept of „white Aborigines‟ was not favoured by many artists or critics94, echoes of Taylor‟s views about Australian culture being vacuous and fabricated can often be found, and the phrase was well aired at the time.95 Imants Tillers raised kindred ideas in his 1983 Art & Text essay „Fear of Texture‟, in which he theorises the specificity of Australian artists‟ treatment of texture, surface and finish. He brings the instrument of the „dot-screen‟ to bear upon Papunya painting techniques, noting that their dotting „dematerialises‟ an image at the same time as it constitutes it (15). Following a discussion of how Papunya artists adopted this method of obscuration to allay concerns about the revelation of secret-sacred material, he suggests that:

The dot-screen in Papunya painting is thus in addition to any other significance, a sign of not just the radical and transcendent superficiality of this art but also of its invisibility. There is a supreme irony in this since it is

92 This essay was commissioned by Flash Art (Milan) and published in a 1983 edition of the magazine, as well as in the Australian journal On the Beach (1983) – a short-lived homage to French post-structuralist ideas. Issues of On the Beach were dominated by translations and critical expositions of the writings of (or interview texts with) French theorists such as Baudrillard, Derrida, Kristeva and Cixious. 93 Tillers had a solo exhibition in 1983 at Matt‟s Gallery in London with the same title, for which Paul Taylor wrote the catalogue essay (Hart, 2006: fn. 26). 94 It is interesting to note that the term „white aborigines‟ was also interpreted by some as a metaphor for the way artists were marginalized in Australian society (Lingard, 1989a:48; Annear, 1986). 95 See for instance Adams, 1987; Foss, 1987; Phipps, 1984:13; Davila, 1987:55; Thomas, 1988:71; Megaw, 1986:52; Johnson, 1987:6; Sisley, 1988. 144

an attitude convergent with the art of “White Aborigines” – Australian „unexpressionists‟ – those who embrace the „dot-screen‟ of mechanical reproduction either directly or through its agent – photography (1983:18; see also Dunn, 1983 for commentary along similar lines).

In contrast to the irreverence of Tillers‟ and Taylors‟ writings, there were many more temperate conceptualist interpretations of Aboriginal art (Marcon, 1986; McNeill, 1987; Lingard, 1989b). For instance Bernice Murphy‟s curatorial writings are notable for their efforts to convey the purposefulness of the formal aspects of Aboriginal art works; to indicate that they are precise and subtle renderings of social, mythological and geographical knowledge (see for instance Murphy, 1981:15, see also 1983:47).

Nicholas Baume‟s article „The Interpretation of Dreamings: The Australian Aboriginal Acrylic Movement‟ (1989), published in Art & Text, is a useful illustration of the way themes from conceptual art were brought into dialogue with Aboriginal art. Baume criticises the tendency among some art writers to apply the frameworks of Abstract and to the desert acrylic movement. He focuses on the way the dot fields in Western desert painting had been interpreted from the point of view of the formalist grid, arguing that such an approach is reductive and misleading with respect to the artist‟s intentions. He questions the very idea that one can decode the meaning in Aboriginal paintings by examining their formal elements, and discusses several points of correspondence between conceptual art and the work of Aboriginal artists. For instance, in relation to the primacy of idea over object in conceptual art, he points out that for Aboriginal artists, the idea upon which a painting is based – from the artist‟s tjukurpa or Dreaming - exists prior to, and does not diminish after, it has been transposed into an art object. He notes that in their efforts to defy and transcend the art historical conventions that have engendered a fixation upon the art object, conceptual artists seek just such an untethered position. He writes: „[the] desire to look beyond the painted surface to its conceptual basis is gratified by Aboriginal art…. It not only caters for the conceptualist taste, the social integration of its ideas makes the attempts of Conceptual art look amateur‟ (118; see also 116).

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3.5.6 Social justice

As illustrated in the writings of Ian Burn, Bernhard Smith and Imants Tillers discussed above, Indigenous social justice issues impinged upon many engagements with Aboriginal art at this time. For instance, when Vivien Johnson asks audiences to remember that they are part of „the artistic dialogue of a subjugated people and their colonisers‟, the matter of justice is presented as being embedded in the intercultural exchange that is instigated by Aboriginal art (1986:14; see also 1987). Land Rights movements, deaths in custody, the repatriation of Aboriginal human remains from museums, cultural property issues, the Treaty campaign and the implications of the Bicentenary were often remarked upon in writings about Aboriginal art.96 Many artists and art professionals were sympathetic to Aboriginal political aspirations and participated in protests or advocated for Indigenous rights. For example, in 1981 and 1982 a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous musicians and artists in Sydney formed the group Apmira in support of Aboriginal land rights. Apmira organised several concerts and art exhibitions to raise money for state Land Councils, and dozens of artists composed pieces and donated works to the cause (Register of Australian Archives and Manuscripts [RAAM]: 2002). An exhibition of photographs of Aboriginal life and events during the decade 1972-1982 taken by non-Indigenous photographer Wesley Stacey and titled „After the Tent Embassy‟ was toured nationally in 1982 and 1983, accompanied by an essay by Indigenous scholar . A promotional piece on the exhibition published in the journal Art Network states:

The exhibition is a statement by us about our Aboriginality which since colonisation has been under threat. The photographic essay explains why we have a strong sense of identity, unity, and why we want real land rights. The statement is what every black person wants to say (Aboriginal Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1983:30).

96 See for instance Craig (1984); Kirby (1982); Stephen (1984); van den Bosch (1985), V. Johnson (1988); Hoffie (1988); Kleinert (1988a). 146

Stacey also assisted conservation and anti-logging movements seeking to protect forests in the South-East of New South Whales that were of significance to Aboriginal communities (Stacey, 1983:152-154). The non-Indigenous artist Peter Kennedy created video, installation and painted banners that addressed Indigenous social justice issues as well as issues faced by other disadvantaged groups (Kennedy 1979; 1983).

In summary, the emergence of Aboriginal art into the domain of Australian contemporary art triggered a variety of aesthetic, critical and ethical responses among non-Indigenous practitioners and mediated several debates concerned with renovating Australian art‟s relationship to the wider art world.

3.6 Tensions around the overseas reception of Aboriginal art

Aboriginal art‟s enthusiastic reception overseas in the 1980s provoked interesting responses within Australian critical writings that reveal another layer of this history. Many people had concerns about the way Aboriginal art and culture were being interpreted overseas, and the way non-Indigenous Australian art was positioned as subservient to Aboriginal art in overseas exhibitions as well as in local exhibitions which had an internationalist rationale. For instance, Imants Tillers wrote that at the 1979 Sydney Biennale, „Australian artists were often dismayed by the interest in and knowledge of Aboriginal culture shown by visiting artists and critics and the almost aggressive indifference they displayed to the Australian urban environment and its culture‟ (1982:54; see also Cameron, 1988:14).97 Artist Lyndal Jones made a similar point about an exhibition of Australian contemporary art (which included her own work) titled Continuum held in Tokyo, Japan in 1983. There was no Aboriginal art in this exhibition, nevertheless at the associated symposium Jones found that Aboriginal art and culture was the primary topic of interest for the audience, and perceived that it was widely assumed that non-Indigenous Australian artists must be influenced by Aboriginal art. For Jones, the „uninformed desire for an exotically decorative and

97 The marginality of Australian artists in world art terms was a particular concern for Tillers (Tillers in Davila, 1987:55; Foss, 1987:130-131). 147

pseudo-Aboriginal notion of “The Australian Art” by people of other cultures‟ was a serious matter. She goes on to remark that „[t]his simplistic homogenisation of the many cultures that make up Australia will continue to patronise, to marginalise, the art of Aborigines and white artists alike where such notions go unchallenged‟ (Jones, 1983:49).

It was the D’un autre continent: l’Australie le rève et le reel exhibition (translated as From another continent: Australia – the Dream and Reality/the Real) which provoked the greatest censure along these lines. This exhibition took place at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris during the 1983 Autumn Festival in Paris, at which Australia was the theme country. It comprised works by dozens of Australia‟s most prominent contemporary non-Indigenous artists, as well as a ground painting created on site by 12 Warlpiri male artists.98 Not only does this exhibition allow me to expand on the core themes of this chapter, it offers an excellent example of an ahistorical primitivist approach to Aboriginal art. What is perhaps most interesting about it is that we see French post-structuralist thought being mobilised to assert the progressiveness of non-Indigenous Australian artistic and critical practices, while the French themselves displayed the kind of primitivist idealisation of Aboriginal culture that was by this stage regarded as anachronistic in Australian intellectual circles.

The exhibition‟s literature reveals that postmodern discourses, contrary to Paul Taylor‟s hopes, could frame non-Indigenous contemporary artists to their detriment. Australian writer Meaghan Morris‟ catalogue essay provides a portrait of Australia to an imagined French audience.99100 A motif of this essay which echoes Paul Taylor‟s imagery discussed above (Taylor, 1983:30) is that an explosion has taken place elsewhere, scattering cultural debris upon the Australian continent from which such things as a national identity and aesthetic traditions are derived. Indeed her essay is titled „Jetsam‟, and she writes that „a compilation culture of borrowed fragments, stray reproductions, and alien(ated) memories is what we already have to begin with‟ (1983:39, original emphasis). Similarly, she suggests that our formative „explosion‟ is in part „a myth of origin for a culture created in the disintegration of the great European

98 See Phipps (1984) for an overview. 99 At the time, Morris was in the early stages of a distinguished career in the field of Cultural Studies. 100 Morris‟ essay was also published in On the Beach (issue 3/4, 1984). 148

schemas that produced the idea of this country‟ (38). For Morris, Australian culture was fragile, capricious and improvised: „[t]he strangeness, the absurdity of the Australian nation is that for most of its inhabitants it may exist only as a fictitious generalisation from the local environment - or as a mass-media experience‟ (37). Implicit in these characterisations is a contrasting vision of France as a country of antiquity and depth and as one who‟s development was consequential with respect to the evolution of Western culture. Instead of „civil wars‟, „revolutions‟ and grand transformative moments, Morris writes that „the surface of Australian history is pitted with isolated revolts, stray riots, strikes, and fleeting acts of defiance‟ (my emphasis). In Australia, „political militancy‟ has not corresponded to epic events, only „the “movements” of minority and specific-interest group [sic]‟. And, in the absence of iconic „saviours‟ and „liberators‟, Australia has only „guerrillas‟ in the form of convicts and bush-rangers (38). In sum, Morris constructs Australia as a quintessentially postmodern space in a manner that arguably presents another incarnation of the Cultural Cringe. In making such arguments, Morris trivialises the „“movements” of minority and specific interest groups‟ that fuelled the dynamism of post-1970s contemporary Australian art.101

French curator Suzanne Pag ‟s effusive introduction offered a lighter interpretation of Australia as a final frontier of adventure and romance in the European imagination, and as having a youthful and agile culture ready to assert „its entirely original identity‟ (1983:10). Pagé‟s text unfolds via several dichotomies which build a highly exotic picture of Aboriginal society and landscapes. She speaks of the „coexistence of an aboriginal civilisation over 40,000 years old and the shortest history in the world (less than 200 years)‟ and writes that the interior spaces that exist beyond the settled coastline offer „the vertiginous prospect of an eternal commencement, a featureless immensity as far as Darwin‟. Against the „mass of contradictions‟ that constitute settler society, „Aboriginal society, divided as it is into many tribes, stands with serene permanence and timeless transcendence‟ (10-11). While she suggests that non-Indigenous Australian artists are fortunate to be isolated from Europe and part of a

101 This is consistent with the fact that the relativist and apolitical tendencies of postmodern critique sometimes made a mockery of the social movements that had given rise to conceptual art in the 1970s. We see this with Paul Taylor‟s disdain for „social purpose‟ art above. Literature of this era (see for example Lingard, 1989a:50, van den Bosch, 1985:9) indicates that conceptual art was regarded as a finite movement that was being surpassed, whereas now it has become a generic term for ideas-based art. 149

young and culturally mixed society, such affirmations appear as a mere foil for statements such as „the necessarily ephemeral ground painting of the Aborigines, in clear and unshakable terms, bears witness to the timeless permanence of a solid religious tradition which finds its life and purpose in an unspoilt landscape‟ (13, my emphasis). These kinds of statements convey a pronounced deference to the Warlpiri participants in a primitivist vein.

This deference to the Warlpiri is conveyed in other parts of the catalogue. Warlpiri man Maurice Jupurrula Luther contributed an essay as a representative of the Executive Council of the Aboriginal Cultural Foundation (cf. Appendix 2, A.3.3), an organisation which worked extensively with Pagé to establish the terms of the elders‟ involvement in the exhibition. Another Foundation member, Lance Bennett, provides in-depth descriptions of the sacred sites, creation ancestors and ceremonies that informed the ground paintings. The catalogue also includes photographs taken by Axel Poignant (the only colour images in the catalogue) of Aboriginal ritual performance and a lengthy explanatory essay by anthropologist Nicholas Peterson. This content creates an impression of a self-confident society founded on disciplined adherence to antiquated values and religious beliefs. The following passages exemplify the sober tone of Bennett‟s text:

We did not do this ground painting in Paris to seek out praise, or honour. We only want the world to accept and respect our culture…. We Warlpiri present you here in Paris not with a “show-piece”…. Instead, we present you with a glimpse of the way we venerate the sacred Heroes who have given us our identity, so that Europeans can have some understanding of what we are, and of how strongly we feel about being allowed to remain ourselves ... We will never put this kind of painting on to canvas, or on to artboard, or on to any “permanent” medium. The permanence of these designs is in our minds. We do not need museums or books to remind us of our traditions (49, original italics).102

102 This text was interspersed with dignified, close-up black and white photographic portraits of some of the Warlpiri men. 150

Readers who took these texts at face value would not discern that such statements were being made in the face of immense upheaval in Warlpiri society as a result of contact with white society, and that these elders and the Aboriginal Cultural Foundation were battling to forestall this upheaval. Without contextualisation, such texts could be read as evidence of a surviving, unpolluted realm of tribal culture.

This hermetic image of tribal life was enhanced by Klaus Rinke‟s essay, which is situated between these sections on the Aboriginal participants and the „Plasticians‟ section dedicated to the non-Indigenous Australian artists in the catalogue. A French artist and Professor at the Académie Nationale des Beaux-Art, Rinke had participated in the 1979 Sydney Biennale. This essay narrates his two visits to the Australian bush in 1977 and 1979:

[I became familiar with] the symboles [sic], the totems, the taboos, the world of men, the tasks of women, the clan, the tribes, the mystical instruments for sacred ceremonies in secret places …. [O]ne who has had an insight into prehistory‟s creativity, cannot, from that instant, continue to create and still remain faithful to the art in which he believed before (1983:83).

Rink uses the term „pre-embryonic memories‟ to describe what he was able to derive from his experiences with Aboriginal people in remote Australia (it is the title of the text). These words, and many others in his text, richly recall the synergy of primitivist and psychoanalytic themes discussed in Chapter 1.

As a whole the catalogue is eccentrically imbalanced. It leaves the impression that the contributions of the non-Indigenous Australian artists were of secondary importance to the honour of being shown „how art and life can be integrated, [the] nostalgia of our modern age‟ by the Warlpiri ground painters (Pagé, 1983:13).103 Adding to the insult was the promotion of Paris as a venue for a mature rapprochement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Jill Montgomery published a

103 Indeed, Montgomery suggested that „[i]t is obvious that, without the aboriginal participation - the dance spectacle at the “Bouffes du Nord”, the ground painting by the Warlpiri tribe at the Museum of Modern Art, the aboriginal video programme and the acrylic paintings at the Australian Embassy - the Australian contribution to the Paris Autumn Festival would have been almost a “non-event”‟ (1983:3). 151

review of the Autumn Festival for the journal Art & Text which included an account of the responses of the French Press. Here she writes that the official exhibition speeches and the lecture tour of the show often echoed the remarks made by Pagé that most of the non-Indigenous artists „will be meeting an Aboriginal tribe for the first time in Paris‟; that the exhibition will display „side by side two realities which are still foreign to each other‟ and that „this is the first time a museum outside Australia presents this double participation‟ (1983:9-10; see also Pagé, 1983:11, 13).

The non-Indigenous exhibiting artists resented the way they had been presented as the antithesis of both European and Aboriginal culture.104 Participating artists Richard Dunn, Juan Davila and Phillip Brophy, all of whom were pursuing experimental and conceptualist art practices, voiced their disillusionment in a 1984 issue of Art Network (see also van den Bosch, 1985). Dunn critiqued the exhibition‟s premise as it was captured in the title:

White Australia was to be characterised as a dream; interlopers of other‟s imaginary space, colonisers of the Real place (the unFrench and the Aboriginal) and as purloiners of European Art. Forty thousand years of the Real in the form of the Warlpiri ground painting was to be set against the two hundred year dream: No contest! (1984:52).

Dunn notes that the pluralist character of both Aboriginal and non-Indigenous society in Australia was effaced by this opposition, and points to the aspirations of the Aboriginal Arts Board and other organisations as being far removed from the image of static tribal culture on show.

In an abrasive critique of the exhibition and discussion forums, Davila condemned the exhibition for including no works „that convey the plight of Feminism, Art Workers, Alternative Spaces, Movements, Gay Art, Migrant Culture, Urban Aborigines etc‟ (1984:50). Objecting to the principle of „eclecticism‟ that seemed to guide the treatment of the Australian works, Davila argued that such an approach trifled

104 According to Dunn (1984:53) this was reflected in the tensions that emerged between Australian and French participants at the event‟s roundtable discussions. 152

with, and had the effect of „cancelling out‟, the historically embedded, distinct identities that comprised Australia. He writes that „[t]he European public is drawn to the exotic and the novel and the Aboriginal presence fulfilled that role once again‟ (51). While Davila was irritated by the „passivity‟ of the Aboriginal artists at the round table discussions (51), we can also sense that he wished for Aboriginal and other marginal identities in Australia to remain inscrutable to some degree.

Philip Brophy‟s similarly caustic response begins with the following sarcastic statement: „In the domain of Arts and Culture, Australia is currently either embroiled, or calmly participating, in the intersection of Aboriginal and White Australian (otherwise known as “Not Aboriginal”) art practices‟ (1984:53). With regard to the Paris roundtable discussions, he remarked on the banality of listening to Warlpiri men explain in pragmatic terms how they adapted sacred ceremonies and ground paintings to public presentation and „French anthropologists (yawn) tell us about how Art functions differently in primitive tribal cultures from industrialised technological cultures‟ (53). Brophy‟s essay indicates that for him there was something highly contrived and undignified in the idea that a dialogue between black and white could take place in such a setting. Such a prospect was made meaningless by the „schematic‟ frameworks through which it was arranged and the irrelevance of the non-Indigenous artists to the Warlpiri men and their interests, and vice-versa. These critical responses illuminate the interstices between wildly divergent perspectives on Aboriginal art and Aboriginality, perspectives that were brought into unusually close contact at the D’un autre continent exhibition. They are indicative of the fact that, a will be explored below, the category of Primitive Art and the status of non-western art in general were being critically and ethically renegotiated in the contemporary art world.

3.7 Post-colonial critique and urban Aboriginal voices

The D’un autre continent exhibition took place one year before the controversial Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (1984) exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. The latter exhibition incited heated debate regarding the curators‟ rationale in juxtaposing artworks by 153

revered western modernists and non-western cultural objects which had inspired them or with which they shared a formal or conceptual „affinity‟.105 As McLean writes, critics argued that the exhibition „reinforced rather than reevaluated the colonialist relationship between modernism and non-Western art‟ (McLean, 2011b:334-335). These critical responses were pivotal to a burgeoning movement of post-colonial critique in the fine arts world, of which Kenneth Coutts-Smith was an important forerunner. As the following section will explore, in Australia the components of progressive curatorship and commentary were being negotiated in reference to these post-colonial critiques that were circulating in transnational debates, as well as the arguments of urban Aboriginal artists and advocates.

The debates that surrounded the 1984 MoMA exhibition informed many critical engagements with Aboriginal art. For example Bernice Murphy‟s attendance at the exhibition helped her hone her understanding of the problems associated with the category of Primitive Art and broaden her perspective on Aboriginal art and the responsibilities of a curator (1987). Juan Davila drew on Hal Foster‟s essay106 in making the argument that in Australian appropriative practices „Aboriginal quotation is stripped bare of any social or political connotations, and “aboriginality” is placed within the picture as resolved: namely, reconciled with the European tradition, cleansed and abstracted in an idealised and marketable package, one that represents the collapse of differences‟ (1987:55). Willis and Fry drew on both Foster‟s and James Clifford‟s texts in their Art as Ethnocide article (1989a).

These debates were also brought to bear on Aboriginal art in the 1987 UK book and TV series State of the Art (Nairne et. al, 1987). Its segment on „Identity, Culture and Power‟ used the 1986 Sydney Biennale to illustrate the diversity of global identities that were present in the contemporary art field. In it, Tillers‟ appropriation of Michael Jagamara Nelson‟s painting and the Arnhem Land performance piece from the Biennale exhibition were focal points for a review of art world debates surrounding issues of

105 See Rasheed Araeen „From Primitivism to Ethnic Arts‟ (1987/1985), James Clifford „Histories of the Tribal and the Modern‟ (1985, in Clifford, 1988), Hal Foster: „The “Primitive” Unconscious of Modern Art‟ (in Foster, 1985) and Thomas McEvilley „Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief‟ (1984). 106 Though he did not attribute his source. 154

race, Otherness and regionalism. In addition, the perspectives of people such as Thomas McEvilley, Paul Taylor, Gary Foley (Aboriginal activist, actor and director of the Aboriginal Arts Board) and Imants Tillers are situated within discussions that traverse the MoMA exhibition, Edward Said‟s seminal post-colonial text Orientalism and Foster‟s Recodings (Nairne et. al, 1987).

The participation of Gary Foley in the State of the Art production is a measure of the degree to which urban Indigenous artists and advocates were finding forums for critique and political argument at this time, often in connection with the Aboriginal Arts Board (C. Dixon, 1984; Onus, 1988; Mundine, 1990). The following statement from Foley appears in the State of the Art text:

I believe that any expression of Aboriginal art, be it traditional or contemporary, is an act of political defiance. So much time and effort, two hundred years of very concerted effort to destroy Aboriginality and Aboriginal culture, has gone into this country. The fact that Aboriginal culture does remain a living thing is in itself an extraordinary political statement about their resilience, their adaptability and their tremendous willpower (in Nairne et. al, 1987:216).

It is a statement that is redolent of the themes addressed in Chapter 2 (section 2.4.2 particularly); in which we saw that the arts were an activist domain in which a pan-Aboriginal base of solidarity founded on concepts of strength and survival took shape in the 1980s. Other urban Indigenous practitioners (and sympathetic non- Indigenous commentators) commented on the struggle Aboriginal artists faced in getting art world exposure and in having their experience of Aboriginality recognised as legitimate. They spoke of their desire to wrest control of their cultural heritage and identity from European institutions, and to escape the demeaning effects of the ways in which they had been represented by Europeans in colonial and anthropological photography.107 They were also critical of the appropriative practices of non-Indigenous

107 See Onus, 1988; 1989b; Croft; 2011/1989; Marrie, 1987; Fourmile, 1987; 1989; Maughan et. al, 1988; Caruana & Isaacs [ed], 1990. 155

artists, designers and the tourist product industry (C. Dixon, 1984; Tranby Aboriginal College, 1984; Langton, 1988). For instance Fiona Foley, one of the first urban Indigenous artists to attain a tertiary fine arts degree, stated in an interview that:

At Sydney College I didn‟t learn anything from them or any of the philosophies going around and didn‟t incorporate them in my work. They pushed – had respect for – Imants Tillers and Tim Johnson at that art school. They were for Post-Modernism... I was questioning that whenever I got the chance… Now Post-Modernists are stealing from other cultures. Those two artists are stealing from Aboriginal culture. They are held in high esteem by the art market and overseas. They sell their paintings for very high prices whereas the Aboriginal artists here in Sydney and throughout Australia find it hard to get recognition. (1987 in Michaels, 2004/1989:218).

Therefore we can see that the morally confronting claims of urban Aboriginal artists and advocates became authentic local instances of concerns being raised in international theoretical debates about the objectification and subordination of the Other within Western culture.

This relationship between international post-colonial discourses and the interventions of urban Indigenous voices found mixed responses in non-Indigenous commentary. Eric Michaels shows his distrust of the policing effects of such critiques when he writes sardonically that Aboriginal artists can object to the appropriation and marketing of Aboriginal art on the basis that they are „ethnocidal‟ instances „of hegemonic and imperialist attacks on authentic local traditions‟ (2004/1989:217). John von Sturmer questioned whether the „politics of representation‟ which was often linked to concepts of Aboriginal self-determination were an effective means of changing the way Aboriginal people were perceived in the public realm. He proposed that a radical avoidance of Othering relationships might lie in the occidental‟s „willingness to be made over in relation to the group‟, to find means of „immersion‟ and „presence‟ rather than „intervention‟ (1989:127-8, 137). In her critique of an article written by Terry Smith, Bernice Murphy articulated the project of diffusing Western epistemic authority and empowering the Indigenous voice, suggesting that it is „not particularly helpful to

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Aboriginal culture, in a period when its internal dynamics of difference are being examined more comprehensively by Aboriginal people than at any time previously, for white interpreters (again) to rush in too quickly and ascribe roles of singular historical purpose for all to act out‟ (Murphy, 1988:2; see also 1987; T. Smith, 1988). Burn and Stephen (1986) and Kleinert (1988a) raised similar concerns in their writings on Albert Namatjira‟s place in Australian art history, arguing for the importance of creating space for Aboriginal perspectives that might rest upon adaptation and cross-cultural exchange.

These writers were no doubt also conscious of the fact that essentialist and exotic interpretations of Aboriginality continued to circulate in Australian culture. Such interpretations were often characterised by idealisations of tribal spirituality and ecological harmony and in some cases advocated an Aboriginalised form of nationalism (Hamilton, 1990; Lattas, 1997/1990; 2000/1989). For example, popular forms of primitivism were present in the appropriation of Aboriginal cosmology and mythology by New Age mystics, and in Bruce Chatwin‟s bestselling book The Songlines (Marcus, 1997/1988; Michaels, 1988; Chatwin, 1988). Similarly, highly primitivist rhetoric appeared in the press in 1984 when the last of the desert tribes was brought in to Papunya by their Pintubi relatives and the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. Front page articles employed language such as „Desert nomads come out of the stone age‟ and „They arrived in the 20th century just a week ago‟ (Desert Nomads, 1984; R. Dixon, 1984; O‟Neil, 1984). We have also seen how salient primitivist ideas were to the D’un autre continent exhibition. Thus the target of post-colonial critique in relation to primitivism was still apparent in the popular and fine arts domain.

3.8 The Bicentennial

The Bicentennial of 1988 provided a backdrop for many of the critical and aesthetic engagements reviewed above (cf. Appendix 2, A.4.2). Several exhibitions were staged in that year which cemented Aboriginal art‟s place within Australian contemporary art and addressed the theme of colonisation and the changing nature of

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Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations (Commonwealth Institute, 1988; Sisley, 1988; McLean, 2011a:42). Artists‟ week at the 1988 Adelaide Festival had an Aboriginal focus, and the journals Artlink and Agenda dedicated issues to Aboriginal themes (Maughan et. al, 1988; Langton, 1988, Hoffie, 1988). As noted in Chapter 2, the Warlpiri Papunya artist Michael Jagamara Nelson was commissioned in 1985 to produce a large granite mosaic for the forecourt of the new Parliament House which was opened in 1988. At the event of its opening (at which Nelson met the Queen), Land Rights protests were staged and the urban Aboriginal activist and artist Kevin Gilbert (who coordinated the Treaty ‟88 activist campaign) was reported to have condemned the commission as being indicative of Aboriginal culture‟s cooption by the Settler State. This act provoked a heated exchange of views between Sylvia Kleinert and Vivien Johnson, non-Indigenous writers who advocated for Gilbert and Nelson respectively. (Kleinert 1988b, 1988c; V. Johnson, 1988, all published in Art & Text). This dispute revolved around the question of Nelson‟s agency and the degree to which an individual artist‟s aspirations could or should be subsumed by the pan-Aboriginal cause or was nullified by the hegemony of the Settler State. This exchange, and the event itself, highlighted the disjunctions between „urban‟ and „remote‟ Aboriginal people‟s perspectives and the tensions that arose from the fact that the remote (and black- skinned) Aboriginal had been designated the authentic Aboriginal to whom the State was prepared to bestow symbolic recognition.

Also of significance in the Bicentennial year was the Aboriginal Memorial (see Chapter 2, section 2.4.2) which, in response to a proposal presented by Ramingining Art Centre coordinator Djon Mundine, was commissioned by the National Gallery of Australia and shown at the 1988 Sydney Biennale. The Memorial was widely embraced as an innovative and moving piece of art that captured people‟s ambivalent feelings about the Bicentennial celebrations. Indeed the Biennale curator Nick Waterlow declared it to be „the single most important statement in this Biennale‟ because „the Aboriginal presence is the most civilising and creatively challenging element in our world‟ (1988 in Smith, 2001:648, see also Philp, 2007). Unusually, the National Gallery of Australia has guaranteed that the work will remain on permanent, prominent display and that it will never be deaccessioned (Smith, 2001:646).

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3.9 Conclusion

This chapter has shown that the 1980s was an extremely turbulent period in Australian art, and the reasons for this turbulence were made explicit in the art writings of the day. The writings discussed in this chapter are exceptional in terms of the scope of issues they address, the ardent quality of their prose and the reflexivity of their authors. In subsequent years, writings on Aboriginal art have become much more refined and cautious, and in some respects highly mannered in their rehearsal of now normative interpretations of urban (conceptual, political) and remote (formal, beautiful) Aboriginal art (this will be discussed further in Chapter 4). I wish here to offer a distillation of the key threads and tensions displayed in the 1980s literature.

First, Western Desert acrylic painting posed a profound challenge to hallowed Australian landscape traditions, while they also challenged conceptualist and post- object art practices. This work was incontestably “authentic” and grounded in tradition, yet current; the artists were forging a new kind of painting independent of western art practices. Furthermore, the inimitable depth of these artists‟ identification with country and spirit was consistently being verified by the public discourses associated with Land Rights and Treaty activism. Therefore, just as non-Indigenous artists were attempting to draw a line under the Australian provincialist past there was a sense, typified in responses to the D’un autre Continent exhibition and the practice of Imants Tillers, that they were to be derailed by a new kind of art which was novel, antique and uniquely Australian. An effervescent and eclectic non-Indigenous artistic culture was frequently counterposed to an august Aboriginal one. Thus Aboriginal art both inspired and problematised non-Indigenous Australian art practices at this time.

Second, Aboriginal social justice issues that were evolving in the public domain, and the links between Aboriginal art and Land Rights politics, loomed large for an art fraternity whose raison d’etre was that art had „political and social relevance‟ and offered fearless social critique (Baume, 1989:117). Moral concerns about Aboriginal political aspirations and the structural inequalities in Australian society were expressed in the writings of many Indigenous and non-Indigenous commentators, even though, as

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we have seen, there was a variety of viewpoints on the role Aboriginal art had to play with respect to these concerns.

Third, many non-Indigenous actors engaged with Indigenous social justice issues through the medium of critical discourses on Otherness, difference and post- colonialism which, as noted in the introduction, were flourishing at this time. These people were sensitive to the imperative of establishing ethical means of engaging with minority cultural difference and facilitating the empowered expression of that difference. They were also keen to find ways of substantiating the burgeoning respect for and recognition of the Indigenous subject within Australian society. We have seen how these concerns crystallised around an ensemble of critical themes: cultural convergence, cultural colonialism, ethnocide and rapprochement.

Related to this was the programme of diffusing white/western/colonial power. Many non-Indigenous artists and audiences in Australia were responsive to Aboriginal art in a Romantic and primitivist vein: they envied Aboriginal people‟s deep attachments to place, the poetic means by which they communicated their lore, and their spirituality. However, as the critical writings on the MoMA Primitivism exhibition and the D’un autre continent exhibition illustrate, cutting edge theoretical literatures impugned the inclinations of the disenchanted modern subject. Even if these Romantic engagements were predicated upon a sincere and pertinent critique of western society, they were increasingly open to incriminating analysis as perpetuating a problematic modernist tradition and ignoring the flux of Aboriginal life and identity. Critics theorised colonisation as being of the present and proposed that many individuals were, unwittingly or not, complicit with its insidious force. Notwithstanding the presence of some urban Indigenous voices (particularly later in the decade), and the fact that close relationships were being forged between Aboriginal artists in remote communities and a few non-Indigenous researchers and practitioners, most debates were conducted between non-Indigenous people exclusively and articulated through the prism of theoretical discourses. In some of these writings we can perceive an urgent need to find an inviolable Aboriginal voice for which one might be a benevolent conduit and advocate. These desires were actualised in a range of ways, sometimes only rhetorically,

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sometimes in the realm of art making, and sometimes in the use of one‟s professional position to create opportunities that were hitherto absent.

In light of these themes, I wish to highlight a friction that arose between two prevailing tendencies, one which points to a key dilemma with which this thesis is concerned. On the one hand there were the ubiquitous ethical injunctions to draw respectful and protective boundaries around the Other; to affirm the Other‟s incommensurability and stem the „cannibalisation of Aboriginal culture‟ (Johnson, 1989:10). On the other, we find the art realm being depicted as an autonomous space for uninhibited experimentation and inquiry, in which nothing should be off-limits. The iconoclastic styles of Paul Taylor and the more equivocal Imants Tillers can be read as a refusal to submit to the above mentioned moral pressures. Appropriation was judged to be problematic by many commentators - particularly as the commercial exploitation of Aboriginal culture was a growing concern and thus artistic appropriation could be interpreted as another form of cultural theft.108 Nevertheless it was also recognised that such appropriative practices helped to break down the institutional categorisations of old that were indicative of inequity and exclusion. The sieving of Aboriginal art through the arguments and anxieties that attended to appropriation and concepts like „white Aborigines‟ and „rapprochement‟, and the associated theorisations of cross-cultural exchange, ensured that conceptualist and interrogative art strategies were brought to bear upon it, and this was undoubtedly “progress” in terms of establishing Aboriginal art as contemporary art (see Johnson, 1989; Michaels, 2004/1989; Morphy, 2006). Therefore we can perceive the tensions that existed between different paradigms of advocacy, and the dilemma entailed by employing moral arguments oriented by political or ideological concerns to contest the autonomy of art, while at the same time seeking to consecrate a new art form within that supposedly disinterested sphere. As Myers has suggested, an „underlying tension‟ in such projects is „the necessary survival of the category and institution of “art” for its own critiques‟ (1994:27).

With respect to the broader project of this thesis, many of the discussions that surround these challenges pivot on the distinction between Aboriginal agency and Aboriginal victimhood, a distinction that goes to the heart of the question of how non-

108 See Cramer [ed] (1989); Davila (1987); McNeil (1987:24); Murphy (1987:21). 161

Indigenous Australians might engage ethically with Aboriginal art and Aboriginal people. Did existing interpretive frameworks make the artist‟s intentions known or did they silence and/or distort those intentions? Was the art gallery a domain of emancipation for Aboriginal art, or did its sanitised and individualising spaces diffuse the challenging alterity of the art‟s makers? Was the art arena a vehicle for cultural regeneration or was it yet another intrusive and corrupting force in Aboriginal communities? A stance of advocacy could be, and was, adopted in relation to both Indigenous agency and victimhood. Furthermore, arguments affiliated with both positions could be (and were) critiqued for being naive, ethnocentric, racist, paternalistic and so on.

The emergence of urban Indigenous voices inflected this distinction between Aboriginal agency and Aboriginal victimhood with another set of problems. Urban Indigenous artists and advocates placed issues of equality of participation and empowered professional involvement at the fulcrum of Aboriginal art activities, particularly in association with the Aboriginal Art Board (cf. Appendix 2, A.4.3; Altman et. al, 1989:210-211; McLean, 2011a:61). They also encouraged an interrogation of white expertise per se (Onus, 1989b; Sutton 1989). Furthermore, once the understanding of what comprised Aboriginal identity was elasticised to encompass the meanings associated with pan-Aboriginality, a new kind of victimisation was apparent in those settings which only validated remote Aboriginal art. This was illustrated in Kevin Gilbert‟s stance on Michael Nelson Jagamarra‟s mosaic, and it is also expressed in Lin Onus‟ remarks about an Aboriginal art exhibition in which urban Aboriginal artists were not participants, titled Renewing the Dreaming: New Directions in Contemporary Aboriginal art. He writes „The title of the show... speaks loudly and unequivocally to non-traditional and urban artists and says: “You are not Aboriginal your art is not real and does not belong here”‟ (1988:29). These tensions between different formulations of urban and remote Aboriginal identity, political objectives and art will be pursued further in the following chapter.

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Chapter 4: Negotiating Difference

4.1 Introduction and chapter outline

“Aboriginality” (or “Indigeneity”) is a continually evolving identity that is shaped by both Aboriginal and non-Indigenous experience, knowledge and imagination. This process is well explained by Nagel, who writes that all ethnic identities arise from „a dialectical process involving internal and external opinions and processes, as well as the individual's self-identification and outsiders' ethnic designations‟ (1994:154; see also Hall, 1990).109 Aboriginal art is a category of art very much defined by the ethnic identity of its creators, and consequently it is drawn into the orbit of other forms of Aboriginal-focused culture and enmeshed in the dialectical process Nagel describes. To echo Jules-Rosette's findings in her study of African tourist art, Aboriginal art‟s circulation is always modulated by the properties of „cross-cultural interchange‟. As she writes, „[t]he producers and consumers of the art live in quite different cultural worlds that achieve a rapprochement only through the immediacy of the artistic exchange‟; a circumstance which foregrounds „the function of art as a communicative system across different settings and traditions‟ (1984:8; see also Shiner, 1994; Smith, 2002:149-152). Like African tourist art, much of Aboriginal art is produced locally for outsiders. This is most obviously the case when we are discussing remote Aboriginal art, however a „cross-cultural interchange‟ of some kind is also taking place in the case of urban

109 On the formation of Aboriginal identity specifically, see Beckett (1988); Langton (1993); Marcus (ed) (2000); Russell (2001). 163

Aboriginal artists who participate in the contemporary art milieu, because their Indigenous identity provides the framework for the interpretation of their art.110 The manner in which Aboriginal art is mediated by the dialectical negotiation of Aboriginal identity and the dynamics of cross-cultural interchange has been well illustrated in earlier discussions in this thesis. Apart from being a repository of cultural heritage, we have seen that Aboriginal art has been an anchor of collectivist consciousness, a means to engage in practices of cultural renewal and a political and legal instrument. It has become highly symbolic of Aboriginal identity within Australian visual culture and in this guise has been a focus of reflexive, sympathetic and remedial tendencies within the wider community, as well as nationalistic celebrations of inclusion and Reconciliation. This Chapter builds on these discussions and explores the way aspects of Aboriginal difference are negotiated in the realms of aesthetic taste, commerce, scholarly expertise, curatorship and institutional practice. Section 4.2 identifies the various facets of Aboriginal difference with which the art arena contends. Sections 4.3 and 4.4 focus upon the way remote Aboriginal art, both in terms of the exotic identity it evokes and the kinds of information required to make it legible, sits uncomfortably in relation to the austere protocols of the contemporary art arena and the inclinations of contemporary art audiences. Section 4.5 comprises an elaborate discussion of the contested status of anthropologists, Anthropology and Ethnography in the Aboriginal art arena. I show that an Art/Anthropology (or an Art/Ethnography) binary prevails in Aboriginal art discourses and interrogate its meaning and its reference points. I then proceed to treat this motif as a means to unpack a variety of debates and conflicts that arise from the negotiation of Aboriginal difference in art contexts. This involves examining the disciplinary antagonisms that exist between Anthropology and Art, the ways in which primitive art has been differentiated from western art, and Anthropology‟s entanglement with colonialism. I also discuss the implications of these histories for urban Aboriginal artists and critics who have repudiated the authority of the Anthropology-associated discourses and institutions to define „authentic‟ Aboriginal identity and art.

110 However, as will be discussed later, several high profile urban Indigenous artists have objected to this, including Brook Andrew, Richard Bell, and Gordon Bennett. See Williamson & Moffatt (1992) for an illuminating discussion of this issue. 164

4.2 Facets of difference

Aboriginal difference is perceived and problematised in several ways in the art arena. First, Aboriginality exists as a site of disadvantage and injustice, such that a range of parties advocate on behalf of this identity on the basis of principles of equality and fairness; inclusion where there was once exclusion, respect where there was once stigma. These issues are salient to the collecting practices of institutions, the opportunities available to Aboriginal artists and art professionals, and the degree to which Aboriginal art gains acceptance in eminent contemporary art settings. They are also relevant to the fact that, as discussed in Chapter 2, Aboriginal art‟s facilitation and endorsement has been driven by the conviction that the restoration of Aboriginal culture is a matter of human rights and a means to alleviate disadvantage. Chapter 3 explored the way ethical concerns of this nature mediated many engagements between non- Indigenous practitioners and Aboriginal art in the 1980s. Second, Aboriginality is a site of exotic difference, one which has an appeal that rests upon, as Langton suggests, „the perception of the fundamental difference between being Aboriginal and being its opposite‟ (2008a:35). Here we encounter all the ideas that underpin the objectification and commodification of Otherness. As we saw in Chapters 1 and 3, these ideas have revolved around notions of the pre-modern, the pre- industrial, the primitive, the tribal, the folk and so on, all of which have been reference points for artistic and scholarly formulations of modernity (Enwezor, 2003/2002; Marcus & Myers, 1995; Clifford 1988/1985). MacCannell offers some useful insights on this aspect of modernity in his seminal work The Tourist (1976), in which he argues that touristic experiences actualise the social differentiations that structure modern society. He argues that tourism produces a form of „modern solidarity‟ (78) by packaging, in the service of the sightseer, aspects of nature, place, history and culture that signify what modernity is not. As he writes:

The progress of modernity (“modernisation”) depends on its very sense of instability and inauthenticity. For moderns, reality and authenticity are thought to be elsewhere: in other historical periods and other cultures, in purer, simpler lifestyles. In other words, the concern of moderns for “naturalness”, their nostalgia and their search for authenticity are not merely casual and somewhat decadent, though harmless, attachments to the

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souvenirs of destroyed cultures and dead epochs. They are also components of the conquering spirit of modernity - the grounds of its unifying consciousness (1976:3; see also Miller, 1991).

Here MacCannell could be describing the ideas and desires that underpinned the Romantic folkloric movement as described in Chapter 1. It is also clear that the pursuit of authenticity as a vehicle for self-discovery and enlightenment that MacCannell describes frequently involves „cross-cultural interchange‟. Remote Aboriginal art and culture have a profound magnetism with respect to these tendencies and thus, as many scholars have pointed out, romantic, primitivist and nostalgic ideas dominate the landscape of reception of this art (Webb, 2002; McLean, 2002b; Lattas, 2000/1989). Conversely, as we saw in the previous chapter, Aboriginal art is a domain in which contemporary art practitioners and professionals have sought to refute these Othering tendencies and transcend the paradigm of primitivism which had formerly ghettoised non-western art (Araeen, 1987/1985; Hiller [ed], 1991). Third, the differences that exist within the Indigenous „community‟ mean that, notwithstanding the efficacy of the idea of a pan-Aboriginal consciousness, it is always problematic to generalise about Indigenous identity and experience. In addition to the distinct Indigenous tribal groups, nations and regional groupings with which Indigenous people identify (Fourmile, 1994), Indigenous experience in post-colonial Australia has been modulated by the uneven history of colonisation, pastoralisation and urbanisation across the continent; by the differentiating policies of the State; and by the varying degree to which Indigenous people have partaken of the responsibilities and benefits of citizenship within a western capitalist . At the same time, across the domains of popular culture, news media, academic scholarship, and remedial government policy discourses, dark-skinned Aboriginal people from remote areas are strongly differentiated from light-skinned Aboriginal people from rural and urban areas, and the latter are often excluded from the kinds of attention that validate Aboriginality as an identity (Lea, 2005; Langton, 1981; 2008b; Austin-Broos, 2011). Consequently, a range of representations – sympathetic, voyeuristic or derogatory - of Aboriginality are active in the public domain as external and often conflicting determinants of this identity and these representations inform audiences‟ perceptions of Aboriginal art. As I hope is now clear to the reader, the complexities that arise from these circumstances emerge most 166

clearly in relation to the tensions that underpin the opposition between urban and remote Aboriginal art (see Mundine, 2009a; Iseger-Pilkington, 2011). This facet of difference is further complicated by the degree to which urban and remote Aboriginal art are structurally differentiated in the Australian art arena, and this circumstance can be illuminated if we draw upon Bourdieu‟s field of cultural production model. Bourdieu's artistic field comprises a range of actors: artists, dealers, critics, curators, as well as institutions, styles, genres and movements, who compete for cultural legitimacy while simultaneously contributing to a field-wide consensus regarding what is legitimate (Bourdieu, 1993:30-6). Within the Aboriginal art „field‟, urban and remote Aboriginal artists occupy quite paradoxical actor-positions, such that they have markedly contrary experiences of marginality. On the one hand, urban Aboriginal artists, critics and advocates participate a great deal in competitive „position-taking‟ within the field (Bourdieu, 1993:30).111 This was made clear in Chapter 2, to the extent that I proposed that urban artists, art professionals and advocates have, in Habermasian terms, established an urban Indigenous aesthetic public sphere. However, because the field of Aboriginal art is dominated by art from remote regions, measures of commercial success, exhibition activity, and institutional validation will identify most urban Aboriginal artists as marginal within a field. Remote Aboriginal artists, on the other hand, are very much marginal in the field with respect to actor participation, even though their art often finds an audience and is collected much more rapidly than urban Aboriginal artists. This is because they tend to remain in their communities, do not have a sustained engagement with western art, and their art‟s content does not reflect deference to (or avant-gardist defiance of) a “canon” (Smith, 2002:148).112 Indeed, if we follow Bourdieu‟s (1993:61, 275 [fn. 38], 177) reading of the way naïve French painter Le Douanier Rousseau was constituted by the artistic field in order for his paintings to be deemed Art, a remote Aboriginal artist can be regarded as „a “creator” who has to be “created” as a legitimate producer‟; one whose art world trajectory depends to a large extent on how well he or she is „produced‟ by „impresario‟ figures such as pioneer Aboriginal art dealers Gabrielle Pizzi and Christopher Hodges (discussed below).

111 See for instance Fiona Foley in Martin-Chew (2011); Browning & Allas (eds) (2010); Blakatak (2005). 112 Rather, remote Aboriginal artistic production has communal and familial reference points and trajectories, and is informed by locally specific social practices and religious beliefs. Furthermore, all of this is affected by the unique economic conditions of remote community life. 167

As will be demonstrated throughout the chapter, this structural differentiation of urban and remote Aboriginal art contributes to many of the tensions that surround the negotiation of Aboriginal difference in the Aboriginal art arena, because it means that a range of activities are problematised by identity politics. For instance, remote Aboriginal artists “speak through” a range of non-Indigenous representatives, and this generates a large body of non-Indigenous experts on Aboriginal art and Aboriginal identity that antagonise members of the urban Indigenous aesthetic public sphere. It also means that the “Aboriginal voice” to whom non-Indigenous actors feel accountable can differ considerably depending upon one‟s geographic location and one‟s affiliations within the „field‟.

The problem of representing and advocating for the Aboriginal voice is highly pertinent to the fourth manifestation of difference with which I am concerned: the fact that many of the most knowledgeable people in the Aboriginal art arena (including the first people to promote the aesthetic merits of Aboriginal art) are associated with the traditions of Anthropology and Ethnography. Anthropologists cement art audiences‟ sense of Aboriginal difference in several conflicting ways: they are among the most strident advocates for the specificity of Aboriginal art forms and argue their case in ways that affront traditional Art discourses, their research traditions invoke the histories and ideologies of colonialism and evolutionism, and their focus on remote communities has the effect of authenticating the Aboriginality of some Aboriginal people to the detriment of other Aboriginal people. These issues will be explored in detail in the latter part of this chapter.

These four facets of difference cause the ethnicity of the Aboriginal artist to exist as a highly ambivalent component of the Aboriginal art object; one that has both a push and pull effect upon audiences and consumers. To some extent, the purview of the Aboriginal fine arts professional is the management of the dissonances that arise from this condition. This is captured in the following anecdote related to me by a Sydney fine , Michael Reid, regarding the reasons why his gallery began taking clients to remote communities to meet Aboriginal artists:

MR: We developed the art touring education program because one of our really important clients came back from central Australia totally shattered 168

and disillusioned about what he‟d seen. On the cultural level, he went to the wrong place at the wrong time. LF: What do you mean by that? MR: He went to the wrong community at the wrong time. A lot of these communities you do not go to. They don‟t want you to go and you shouldn‟t go. You don‟t - just because Papunya Tula has an artist‟s association, I don‟t advise anyone to go to Papunya. It‟s a dangerous, unpleasant, unhappy, place. …. MR: You see everybody‟s left Papunya.113.... You know if you turn up at Papunya Tula at the wrong time, you‟re possibly in danger! And you won‟t see any good art, and all this kind of thing. So you can come back, and he did come back quite shattered, and that‟s when we realised that we in fact needed to go with our best clients to gently kind of dip them in or marinate them in the culture. And so it has to be about education and social conditions and stuff like that. LF: (asks whether artists are receptive to their visits)

MR: [Yes, but with] some artists you won‟t. I mean we went to a community where they all just sat around on the floor and put their hands out, and we just said “look” to the coordinator “this is so dangerous and so damaging to them and to people‟s perceptions of what they do, you know, we don‟t want to meet people like this, we only want to meet people who want to meet us”. So yeah, there are other communities where people are a bit more geared to what we‟re trying to do and it was a much greater interaction (M. Reid, personal communication, June 2, 2008).

Reid‟s anecdote reveals the way Aboriginal art professionals face unique challenges that arise from the fact that most remote Aboriginal artists do not directly participate in the art arena and, moreover, live in circumstances that the clients with whom they deal may find deeply confronting (this will be explored in more detail in Chapter 5). Thus, as mediators of „cross-cultural interchange‟, the artists‟ advocates and representatives (Art Centre coordinators, anthropologists, government arts workers, curators, commercial gallerists) are constantly required to improvise and compromise as they manage the discord between the artists‟ domain and the art domain. The following sections will

113 Most of the artists associated with Papunya Tula Artists work at an art centre in the neighbouring communities Kintore and Kiwirrkura. However at the time of this interview a new art centre, Papunya Tjupi, had just been established in the community. 169

offer some further analysis of the ways in which the various facets of Aboriginal difference are negotiated.

4.3 The cosmopolitan and the tourist: being an outsider with Aboriginal art

When Jules-Rosette writes that African tourist art provides „a vicarious experience of the foreign and the exotic‟, she could just as well be describing the way many audiences engage with remote Aboriginal art (1984:17). However the taste for the exotic underpins a model of consumption that is highly antagonistic to contemporary fine arts sensibilities, and it is contemporary art audiences to whom those representing Aboriginal fine art seek to appeal. This problem can be clarified by drawing an analogy between tourism and art consumption. As MacCannell points out, while it is an accepted feature of western culture that we periodically escape from normal life and see the world, “the tourist” is also an object of ridicule. This is because we feel scornful of tourists' apparent satisfaction with what we know to be contrived, and feel anxious that we may be similarly deceived when we are in foreign places. MacCannell argues that the reflexive character of the modern search for meaning, whereby „reality and authenticity are thought to be elsewhere‟, entails both a quest for the sincere and authentic, and the presentiment that some artifice will make a fool of us (1976:3; see also Harkin, 1995:653). As he suggests, „touristic shame is [based] on a failure to see everything the way it “ought” to be seen. The touristic critique of tourism is based on a desire to go beyond the other “mere” tourists to a more profound appreciation of society and culture‟ (1976:9). MacCannell‟s arguments are arguably salient to many people‟s encounters with Aboriginal art. The fact that it is produced for outsiders who are often compelled by a sense of curiosity about an exotic Other makes many people suspicious that they may be a victim of the „mystification‟ that attends to those commodities which capitalise on the impression of authenticity (93). Just as tourists wish to „see everything the way it “ought” to be seen‟, the ideal of contemporary art appreciation is competence with a 170

particular aesthetic language, and membership of a collegiate of artists, art dealers, art professionals, collectors and connoisseurs. Contemporary western art, and the apparatus of expertise that validates it, is produced for insiders, for peers and like minds who share, in Bourdieu‟s terms, a particular cultural competence. As he writes, „the act of empathy [with a work of art]... which is the art-lover's pleasure, presupposes an act of cognition, a decoding operation, which implies the implementation of a cognitive acquirement, a cultural code‟ (1984:3). My suggestion is that Aboriginal art generates a layered and uncomfortable apprehension of difference for many people, with respect to both the ethnic difference inscribed within the art work that makes us feel like a foreigner as we try to comprehend it, and the sense that a commodified and perhaps contrived difference – a „staged authenticity‟ to use MacCannell‟s phrase, underlies the work, one which invokes a kind of recipient or audience that we find distasteful and embarrassing. In other words, Aboriginal art can make one feel like a tourist in a context in which we would like to think of ourselves as a cosmopolitan; a dupe and an outsider in a realm of intellectual and aesthetic pleasure in which we wish to feel “at home”. This insider/outsider dynamic was revealed to me in a range of settings, and I will provide three examples. First, during an informal discussion, a Sydney art dealer related to me a succinct riposte from one of Sydney's most prominent and longstanding contemporary art dealers to the question of why he did not represent Aboriginal artists: „It's got nothing to do with me‟. The comment conveys, very simply, an aversion to entering a realm in which he is an outsider (if all non-Indigenous people took this view, there would be no Aboriginal art market at all!). Second, when London-based artist and The Times arts commentator Grayson Perry reviewed the 2007 Rarrk-London exhibition of Maningrida works staged by the contemporary art dealer Josh Lilley, he asked why Indigenous artists should wish to be part of, and furthermore be allowed into, the contemporary art „tribe‟. He writes:

The values of contemporary art are aesthetically and intellectually complex and have been refined through a long history of challenges and movements. Aboriginal art, whose value derives from a traditional folklore context, cannot just transfer that value into the more lucrative and far-reaching arena

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of contemporary art without having to work with and be judged by fine-art criteria (2007).

By provocatively employing the trope of the tribe, Perry creates a very strong image of insiders and outsiders and emphatically excludes the art from a contemporary art context.114 Third, Georges Petitjean, the curator at the Aboriginal in Utrecht, had taken the institution in a new direction in 2008 soon after his tenure there began by exhibiting the work of central Australian Aboriginal artists from the museum's collection – , , Lilly Kelly Napangardi and Jackie Giles - alongside that of renowned Belgian conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers, in an exhibition titled Nomads in Art. As he remarked to me during our interview, this was intended to attract audiences who may have regarded the gallery as naïf, primitivist and not the province of contemporary art. This curatorial strategy sought to circumvent the “outsider” identity that the institution, by its very specificity, has transmitted to visitors (G. Petitjean, personal communication, August 10, 2008; see also Petitjean, 2008).

4.4 Authenticity and “the story”

As MacCannell argues, the taste for the exotic is often connected to a quest for authenticity, and this plays a large part in shaping perspectives on cultural objects founded upon ethnic specificity. For many audiences, Aboriginal art objects, particularly from remote communities, have an aura of authenticity that makes them appear to be conduits of a pre-colonial, pre-modern realm. As we saw in Chapter 1, the archetypal Aborigine was an object of interest at the first mass culture events of modernity, the Great Exhibitions, and in later years took commodified form in the Aboriginalia market. These commodities and commodified experiences depended upon

114 Perry‟s approach has been critiqued by several writers (see Moore, 2007; Owen, 2007b); however, rather than trivialising the tribal traditions from which the Maningrida works derive, a generous reading of his review might interpret it as posing the following questions: “Why are those traditions not good enough for these artists? Why aren‟t they happy being tribal artists?”. His allusion to the folkloric evokes the kind of community-based, locally meaningful practice that the Romantics revered; a domain from which the western contemporary artist is estranged. 172

an essentialist construct of desirable and enigmatic ethnicity. This figment of ethnicity evoked all the primitivist notions of authenticity with which we are now familiar, a „world of the unspoiled, pre-contact “natives” who live in another time than our own‟, to use Shiner‟s terms (1994:229; see also Russell, 2001; Price, 1989). It is clear that notions of authenticity have an ambivalent status in the Aboriginal art arena. The reasons for this return us to the insider/outsider dynamic discussed above and the tension I have identified between touristic and contemporary art modes of engagement with Aboriginal art. That is, while in some contexts we find that concepts of authenticity are a very important part of the explanation and brokerage of the art, in other contexts they are eschewed and treated with derision. This can be illustrated by looking at the way “the story” (the Dreaming narrative that is the reference point of most remote Aboriginal artworks) and, by extension, the spiritual content that denotes the alterity of the art, features in the brokerage of Aboriginal art. Due to the iconographic nature of much Aboriginal art115, “the story” has been an important entry point for many people, as well as a qualifier of the art‟s authenticity. In the early days of the Papunya painting movement, Geoffrey Bardon provided diagrams that partially decoded iconographic features of the paintings, as well as explanations of the Dreaming narrative or sacred country that was depicted (Bardon & Bardon, 2004). This approach was adopted at many Art Centres in subsequent years in the authenticity certificates that are attached to the works when they are sold. It continues to be common practice (although the information provided is often simplified or generic, as in cases where every work produced by an artist is documented as an expression of a single story), however “the story” is regarded by many to be an odious accompaniment. It signals that the work demands a different, and perhaps primitivist, framework of appreciation to western art, and as Petitjean writes, the „stress on the secret and sacred content in a painting often results in inaccurate and populist generalisations about Aboriginal culture, society, religious beliefs and art‟ (2000:242). The provision of “the story” may therefore imply that the works are being made accessible to inerudite audiences, and that dealers are explicitly trading on the exotic, both of which invoke a touristic mode of engagement. The following will provide several examples of the ways in which this

115 As Sutton states, remote Aboriginal art is usually characterised by a 'preference for cryptography and obliqueness demanded by a restricted economy of religious knowledge' (1988:37). 173

content is negotiated by different brokers and mediators, after which I will offer some analysis. The first example is drawn from an interview I conducted with Euan Hills, the owner of Art Mob in , Tasmania. Hills has had no art school training and ran a successful computer company before he established his Aboriginal art business. Located on the Hobart docks (an area with high tourist traffic), Art Mob sells an array of Aboriginal art, craft and associated products to tourists, residents and online consumers. The following quotation was preceded by Hills describing how his interest in the art was partly inspired by visits to rock art sites around the world:

[I realised Aboriginal art] was today‟s embodiment of what had been going on for many many millennia on rock walls. Just in a more modern format - modern media. And I started buying more. And looking at the people who I‟m buying from and thinking: “crikey, they‟re treating this as a whitefella‟s aesthetic. They‟ve got no idea of the culture behind it… And, they don‟t know anything about the artist who‟s producing it. They‟re just selling pretty paintings for the sake of yet another commercial transaction.” I felt that there was a better way to do it. Because you don‟t just sell the sausage, you sell the sizzle with the sausage (E. Hills, personal communication, April 18, 2008).

Here Hills conveys his desire to make the art more accessible and interesting to audiences by focusing on the ancient heritage of Aboriginal art rather than the aesthetics, and throughout our interview he indicated that he thought the stories associated with particular paintings or particular artists were of great value to the brokerage process. A similar view is expressed in the following quotation from an Art Centre staff member in Wadeye regarding an exhibition staged in San Francisco in 1994:

All the paintings we sold, we made sure the stories were there. Just to be fair to the people that were buying it. …I mean you look at some of the paintings and artistically they may or may not turn you on. But then when you hear the story you think, “Oh, shit, that's really interesting,” and that's what sells the paintings as much as – as I say, the actual art work might not be terribly appealing, but when you hear the story, it's just so interesting (in Belk & Groves, 1999:24).

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These opinions can be contrasted to those of Beverly Knight, the owner of Alcaston Gallery in Melbourne, one of the premier Aboriginal fine art galleries in Australia:

Stories don‟t sell art, the aesthetics sell art. Where story is important is in the motivation and inspiration for the artist. People may have that deep cultural knowledge but their work is not selling. People who were collecting for that reason are no longer collecting, trust me, they‟re not. The contemporary collector is looking at the aesthetics (in Finnane, 2012).

In a similar vein, Christopher Hodges, also an eminent dealer in Aboriginal fine arts, made the following remarks regarding how his gallery first started showing Aboriginal art in Sydney in 1988:

CH: We didn‟t show it, you know, to an Aboriginal audience, we showed it to a contemporary audience because that‟s- I didn‟t know the Aboriginal audience, I only knew the contemporary audience.116 And so, we took it into that area… and I‟ve never put wall labels up next to paintings saying this is the such and such dreaming. When people ask me what galleries do we go and see good Aboriginal art [in], I send them to the Art Gallery of NSW first, and then I say don‟t go to anything that‟s got the words “Aboriginal”, “Dreaming” or “investment” in it. LF: ... the wall text issue is such an interesting one when you‟re dealing with cross-cultural art engagement, isn‟t it? Because, is something left out then, in terms of what the artist might be wanting to communicate? CH: People can find that out later. But Emily Kngwarreye said, you know she tapped the painting and she‟d say, “this is ”, “this is-” you know, in her own way “this is my country, this is our alhalkere”, and she‟d touch that painting, she‟d sing a little song with that painting, which is you know, about her country, and she believed that you should look at this painting... and you‟ll understand. Now that‟s an artist who believes that they can put everything they want into the painting. In the end, no matter what anyone says, if you‟ve got a painting that‟s hanging on the wall the only thing you‟ve got to judge it by is the painting. If the painting isn‟t any good, in that way that art is great or not great... no amount of blurb on the wall‟s going to improve it (C. Hodges, personal communication, March 18, 2008).

116 Note that Hodges' term 'Aboriginal audience' refers to people who might be solely interested in Aboriginal art and objects or 'ethnographica'. 175

A quotation from collector Colin Laverty provides another variation of this way of seeing Aboriginal art. Colin and his wife Elizabeth are widely regarded as the most important private collectors of Aboriginal art in Australia. In a 2008 radio interview on the occasion of the publication of a monograph about their collection, titled Beyond Sacred (2008), Laverty remarked:

[W]e think it's a pity people can hardly look at Aboriginal paintings without first saying „what's the story?‟ And we would like people to look at them, as you look at non-indigenous art and say „this is a great painting‟ because, say, it has fantastic visual impact, or it's beautifully painted, or it's beautifully colourful, or it's illustrative of abstracted landscape mapping and that sort of thing. Rather than go straight to wanting to know what the underlying story is (Copeland, 2008).

All of these quotations reveal contestations over the way the content of Aboriginal art - content that requires some explanation to be understood - is treated differently within the Art arena. Explaining this content in terms of sacred Country and Dreaming stories may indeed open a door to greater understanding and appreciation and a larger audience. However, two problematic consequences may follow from this. First, by invoking popular stereotypes of the authentic and exotic Aborigine, such interpretive frameworks herald the engagement of a cohort of buyers that falls outside the exclusive sphere of contemporary fine arts appreciation, and perhaps worse, the more overtly business-minded vendors such as Hills who seek to cater to this cohort. This is conveyed for instance in Hodges‟ grouping of the terms „Aboriginal‟, „Dreaming‟ and „Investment‟ to evoke the semantics of tourist-oriented vendors of Aboriginal art. Second, as is implied in Laverty‟s and Hodges‟ remarks (and indeed in the title of Laverty‟s monograph), “the story” may take primacy over form. Notwithstanding the short-lived conceptualist engagements with Aboriginal art of the 1980s, for these kinds of advocates it is the formal, usually abstract, beauty of Aboriginal work which underpins the art‟s value as contemporary fine art, and as will be discussed at the end of this chapter, this is consistent with current trends in Aboriginal art criticism. Both Hodges and Knight allude subtly to the acuity of their own connoisseurial judgement in this respect, in contrast to the Wadeye Art Centre staff member who is quite comfortable with the idea that “the story” might be more appealing than the artwork

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itself. All of the individuals discussed above are concerned with making the art more appealing to more people. However Hodges, Knight and Laverty are speaking to erudite contemporary art audiences for whom aesthetics is a universal entry point; the cosmopolitans who are a world away from the touristic consumers to whom Hills seeks to sell „the sizzle with the sausage‟.

4.5 The Art/Anthropology binary

“The story” is of great importance to another group of people who are professionally engaged in the Aboriginal art arena: anthropologists. Anthropologists are keen to convey the content of Aboriginal art to art audiences for quite different reasons to purveyors such as Hills, yet, as I will argue in this section, these reasons are just as aggravating for many people in the contemporary art arena. As I have noted previously, Art and Anthropology (or Ethnography) are frequently in antagonistic relation in Aboriginal art discourses. This binary is often presented in narrative form, such that Aboriginal art is understood to have journeyed from „Anthropology‟ or „Ethnography‟ to „Art‟. We find a clear articulation of this narrative in a much cited Art & Australia essay titled „Aboriginal Art as Art‟, written in 1976, by Australian art historian and former NGA curator of Australian art, Daniel Thomas. Thomas writes that „Australian Aboriginal art became art, as far as the European-Australian art world was concerned, in the 1940s. Previously it had been anthropology‟ (1976:281). We are familiar with this era from the discussions in Chapter 1: it was in the 1940s that modern artists such as Margaret Preston began to promote and appropriate the formal properties of Aboriginal cultural objects, and the first art gallery exhibitions of Aboriginal art took place at locations such as the David Jones Art Gallery in Sydney. Thomas goes on to write that:

It was not until the 1950s, however, that the art museums of Australia began to form small collections of Aboriginal art, not in rivalry with the great collections that already existed in all the natural-history museums, but to 177

give Aboriginal artists the dignity of an art-museum context, to make their large collections of Australian art more truly Australian and to give the art public, which might never visit a science museum, an opportunity to see work of great beauty (1976:281).

In a later article titled „The margins strike back: Australian art since the Sixties‟ (1988), Thomas writes of „the advance of Australian Aboriginal art from the ethnographic margins of our art to its very centre‟. He commends AGNSW curator and abstract expressionist artist Tony Tuckson for being „the first to liberate [Aboriginal Art] from anthropology museums and, in the late 1950s, give it high visibility in the collections of at least one art museum, the Art Gallery of New South Wales‟ (1988:70). This view has been echoed many times in subsequent years, including by the current director of the NGA, Ron Radford, when he launched the Gallery‟s dedicated wing for Indigenous Art in 2010 (Hinkson, 2010/2011). The following examples of the opposition between Anthropology (and Ethnography) and Art are drawn mainly from non-Indigenous authors writing in leading Australian newspapers.

Art writer Miriam Cosic states that „[John] Mawurndjul is one of the stars of the Maningrida Art movement: a magisterial painter of Kuninjku Dreaming and an individualist whose genius has helped move indigenous art out of ethnography and into the contemporary mainstream‟ (2004a:19). In another article, Cosic writes that the art dealer Gabrielle Pizzi „was one of the first dealers to take indigenous art out of the ethnographic ghetto and promote it as an intellectual and spiritual force in contemporary culture‟ (2004b:18). Curator Judith Ryan writes that „The best Aboriginal works are no longer trapped in an ethnographic category but possess a unique aesthetic aura born of truth‟ (2006:10). In Susan Owens‟ article „It's about the art – not the ethnography‟, gallerist Mary Durack (who was establishing a Paris outlet at the time) is quoted as saying „Aboriginal art has an ethnographic label in Europe… I want to break the constant references to anthropology and history. It's a significant contemporary art movement‟ (2006). A final example can be found in Nicolas Rothwell‟s review of John Mawurndjul's 2006 retrospective exhibition Rarrk at the Museum Tinguely in Basel. Here he commends the fact that the artist has moved away from figurative imagery that is appealing because it „persuade[s] the viewer that it brings them near the heart of 178

something sacred‟ (2006b:12). Indeed, Rothwell sees Mawurndjul‟s embrace of abstract designs whose spiritual derivation is unintelligible to Western audiences, that is, reducible to „decoration‟, as a significant milestone:

Mawurndjul and his fellow masters of North Australian Aboriginal art are thus staking a claim to be regarded as artists without adjectives, contemporary painters who just happen to be from a particular cultural background. This momentous decision on their part goes some way towards dethroning anthropology as the key litmus of indigenous art and may yet herald the beginning of a legitimate school of critical appreciation of Aboriginal painting (2006b:12).

Here, Rothwell suggests an intriguing chain of causality: only when the artists adjust their practice to a Western-contemporary idiom can anthropology be jettisoned and real art criticism become possible. It is also worth noting that in Rothwell's and Cosic's remarks about Mawurndjul, individualism is posited as the condition of his art's contemporaneity. In keeping with the western convention of deifying great individual artists, such a view counterposes the anthropological focus on community to the iconic artist-as-pioneer.

Before we explore the context and subtext of these examples, let us first be clear about what is meant by the terms “Anthropology”, “Ethnography”, “and “Art” in them. Both Anthropology and Ethnography generally allude to the way tribal artefacts were displayed in natural history museums in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As we saw in Chapter 1, in such settings an evolutionist perspective presented Aboriginal and other “races” as primitive and approaching extinction (Karp & Lavine [eds], 1991). Cultural objects were displayed as self-evidently illustrative of these assumptions, and their worth rested in their revelation of the practices of an historic or declining culture. It was this “salvage ethos” that allowed early anthropologists to advocate for the significance of their field of study (Coombs, 1991; Harrison, 2006:68). These examples also convey the understanding that the primary focus of an Ethnographic or Anthropological framework is the way cultural traditions are encoded in an object, which means that objects are presented as authentic exemplars of a generalised community practice, and tradition is regarded as having strictly determined the character of community members‟ creative output (Mulvaney, 1982/1983; Jones, 1988:156-8; Zolberg, 1997:57). In 179

contrast, the term Art conveys the understanding that, in Shiner‟s (1994:225) words, we have encountered „a distinct realm of works or performances of elevated status‟ that are the creation of an inspired individual. Accordingly, individual artworks can be celebrated for their artistic merit, irrespective of the conditions of their production or the identity of their makers. With regard to the history of Aboriginal art, there is much that is true in these portrayals of the Art/Anthropology binary. Many of the first forms of Aboriginal cultural production that caught the attention of Europeans were indeed collected by anthropologists and (often amateur) ethnologists and presented in museums as historical artefacts. And as Durack's statement implies, Europeans came into contact with forms of tribal material culture as the paraphernalia of conquest and empire, and often still remain resistant to placing non-western art in the same category as European/American art.117 It is also the case that people like Gabrielle Pizzi broke ground in their efforts to gain recognition for Aboriginal contemporary art. As late as 1997, Pizzi was rejected in her bid to bring Aboriginal artworks to the Basel Contemporary Art Fair because, as Throsby relates, the „selection committee felt that letting in recognisably indigenous works from Australia would open the floodgates to „primitive‟, „tribal‟ and „folk‟ art from all around the world‟ (1997:32). This snub is indicative of the obstacles dealers faced in cultivating a market for Aboriginal art. Indeed, late 20th century Aboriginal art from remote areas occupied an institutional no-man‟s land for a number of years. For example, in 1977 the Australian Trade Commissioner in New York rejected the bid of Aboriginal Arts and Crafts Pty Ltd (the Government Company) to introduce Arnhem Land artworks into the American market, on the basis that works produced for sale were regarded by Museum directors to be inauthentic and thus not able to be assimilated by the primitive art market (Morphy, 1994:214-5). Similarly, Papunya paintings were largely ignored by the art establishment for a decade followed the establishment of Papunya Tula in 1972. As Johnson writes:

These paintings were seen, at best, as anthropological curios, at worst, as tourist kitsch. Over the same period, the museums (with some notable exceptions) also declined to collect them on the grounds that they were

117 See Amato (2006), Clifford (2007) and Price (2007) regarding the resilience of colonial paradigms in relation to the new Paris Museum of world Indigenous Art, the Musée du Quai Branly. 180

“non-traditional” - that is, ethnographically speaking, “unauthentic”. This judgment showed at least a finer appreciation than that of the art “experts” of the quality of innovation in these paintings (1991:19).

In 1980, when Vivien Johnson and Tim Johnson offered paintings that they had acquired in Papunya to the National Gallery of Australia, they were rebuffed with the claim „we‟ve got one of those‟ (Johnson, 2007:39, 41 [fn. 43]). These exclusions are indicative of the way institutions negotiate the identities of the objects under their care, and define the ambit of their patronage in contradistinction to other institutions (Karp & Lavine [eds], 1991). Authenticity is the key fault-line in this context, around which perceptions about pre- and post-colonial activity, commercial/non-commercial production, and the sincerity of artistic intent coalesce. On this point it is interesting to note that while bark paintings from Arnhem Land certainly had a greater monopoly on authenticity in the 1970s and 1980s, the fact that both the barks and the Papunya paintings were produced for sale meant that they were not deemed suitable for museum collections. This stain of commercialism also meant that they could not be consecrated as Art in the way „outsider art‟ forms such as Primitive art and Asylum art had been, because their value was premised on the belief that such art objects were never produced for money, but by inner necessity; for unique psychological or cultural reasons (Bowler, 1997:28-9).

Clearly this history is the reference point for the above examples of the Art/Anthropology binary. However this history does not exhaust their meaning. In these and many other examples, the terms Ethnography and Anthropology appear as euphemisms for an unjust exclusion from the domain of Art: they are are depicted as marginal, undignified, circumscriptive spaces; while the entity „Art‟ is depicted as unequivocally progressive. At times this treatment appears to be historically informed, at times it is ahistorical in nature, and at times it clearly implicates contemporary affiliates of the discipline of Anthropology. There are many reasons to interrogated this rhetoric, both with respect to the history to which it alludes and its connotative effect. As noted above, members of the art establishment were dismissive of Aboriginal art works that are now highly esteemed and valuable, right up to the 1980s. In contrast, many Australian anthropologists

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promoted Aboriginal art as Art from the early years of the 20th century, befriending and collaborating with non-Indigenous modernists to bring Aboriginal art to the attention of art audiences. This was demonstrated in some detail in Chapter 1. Moreover, since the 1980s, anthropologists such as Eric Michaels, Peter Sutton, Fred Myers, Luke Taylor, Marcia Langton, Howard Morphy, Christine Nicholls and Jon Altman have participated in the field of Aboriginal art as curators, artists‟ representatives, translators, and as writers of catalogue essays, art criticism and art historical essays (see for example Nicholls, 2006; Altman, 2005b; Morphy, 2003). Indeed, artists in remote communities have often made it clear that they regard anthropologists to be trusted representatives who can and should convey the significance of their cultural traditions to art audiences (Anderson, 1991; Sutton, 1989; 1992b; Myers, 2011). It is often these same anthropologists who have assisted Aboriginal communities with Land Rights and Native Title claims in the judicial system. Given that anthropologists have been integral to Aboriginal art‟s emergence as fine art and continue to use their expertise to the benefit of Aboriginal artists and their communities, we must ask why the Art/Anthropology binary is invoked so often, and an anti-Anthropology stance adopted so readily? The answer arguably lies in the amalgamation of several conflicts. The following sections will examine several histories and scholarly disputes that are pertinent to the Art/Anthropology binary, and in doing so present a range of other examples of its iteration. These discussions will build a detailed picture of the complexities that surround the facets of Aboriginal difference that are encountered in the Aboriginal art arena.

4.5.1 “Without its meaning an object, however well executed, is dead, absolutely and irrevocably dead” (Berndt, 1950:187): Art vs Anthropology

One of the conflicts that orient the Art/Anthropology binary derives from a long surviving tension between formalist-aesthetic interpretations of cultural objects and interpretations that focus on the meaning and purpose of those objects. This tension is

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integral to the adversarial character of the disciplinary relationship between Art History and Anthropology, and it can be traced back to seminal writings and curatorial engagements on Aboriginal art that emerged after the 1950s when Aboriginal art‟s status began to change. What should become clear in the following discussion is that the examples of the Art/Anthropology binary discussed above are predicated upon a set of qualitative oppositions between form and content/meaning, aesthetics and utility, autonomy and context, individual and community, that have been highly formative of Aboriginal art‟s path to recognition as a form of high art. The adversarial relationship between Art and Anthropology is well explained by Losche who, having intended to write a book about the disciplines, found that:

[T]raversing cultures (for example an anthropologist who goes to place x, or an art historian who investigates time y) is a less complex experience, and easier to encode, than traversing disciplines. What I mean here is that, as long as one assumes that there is a coherent body of work called „anthropology‟ and „art history‟ one can proceed to place one‟s material into that edifice of ideas. If, however, one questions the boundaries and outlines of those objects that are constituted by traditional disciplines, one is in problematic territory (1999:211; see also Marcus & Myers, 1995; Morphy, 2001).

The tensions between the disciplines are many. As Losche suggests (1999:12), while the disciplines of Art history and theory promote the idea of the autonomy of art, both in terms of the purpose of its production and the viewer's experience of its aesthetic qualities, the discipline of Anthropology (very much like the Sociology of art) refutes the idea that any sphere of human life is discrete from others (see also Sutton, 1989). Furthermore, as Morphy and Perkins write, a tension „remains between the avant-garde view that art speaks for itself and is open to universalistic interpretation, and an anthropological perspective, which requires an indigenous interpretative context‟ (2006:5). With respect to the subjectivity of the creator, an adherent of the former view might draw the following contrast: The artist is the master of his or her conceptual universe and is one with whom the art writer, curator and audience shares some experiential and intellectual fellowship, while the subject of the anthropologist‟s attention is the servant of socially normative, functional and supernatural imperatives which must be illuminated by the expert interlocutor in order for the true significance of 183

the object to be realised. It is also important to note that, as Marcus and Myers have pointed out, a „division of labour between the study of “primitive”, small-scale societies and complex contemporary Western ones‟ has been perpetuated over several decades now, due to the boundaries between the disciplines (1995:8). This antagonistic relationship was articulated by Ronald and Catherine Berndt, two of the anthropologists profiled in Chapter 1. The Berndts were passionate about the need to adopt a contextual and meaning-focused approach to Aboriginal art. In an illustrated article published in the literary journal Meanjin118, they write that:

[In Arnhem land] we find a society which has been concerned vitally with its own particular canons of beauty, having a social structure elastic enough to permit of individual treatment and variations on traditional themes, and the energy to have developed through the ages its own „school of art‟ (Berndt & Berndt, 1950:183).

Such a statement seeks to persuade readers of the intrinsic value of Aboriginal art as a vital and sophisticated form of Art. However the Berndts refuted the prevailing modernist focus on form and argued that Aboriginal art should be recognised as „the external expression of the „soul‟ of the people‟ and the „living representative of [a group‟s] own social order‟ (183,188). The following passage is particularly interesting:

[W]ithout its meaning an object, however well executed, is dead, absolutely and irrevocably dead. Allocated to some museum which concerns itself largely with relics of the past... or ripped from its cultural context to serve an alien purpose, its death is just as definitely assured (Berndt, 1950:187).

This emphatic statement indicates that for the Berndts, the Aboriginal art object is enervated by both „relics of the past‟ museology and the decontextualising paradigm of formalist aesthetics. We find similar arguments in the 1964 volume Australian Aboriginal Art, which was a watershed publication edited by Ronald Berndt that marked a profound shift in Aboriginal art‟s reception. The book documented the works (with 73 colour reproductions) that had comprised the landmark exhibition of the same name staged by

118 See also Berndt (1951) for an earlier article on Arnhem Land art published in Meanjin. 184

curator and artist Tony Tuckson at the AGNSW, which toured all the state galleries in Australia in 1960-61 (and was part of the inaugural Adelaide Arts Festival in 1960). As noted above, Tuckson was the first curator to display Aboriginal works in a state gallery, a decision in part inspired by his own admiration for Aboriginal art as an abstract expressionist painter. Besides contributions from Tuckson and Berndt, the publication contained chapters by several of the anthropologists we encountered in Chapter 1: Tony Tuckson, A.P. Elkin, Frederick McCarthy, Charles Mountford, as well as T.G.H. Strehlow (a linguist and ethnologist born in Hermannsburg who had conducted extensive research with the Aranda people of Central Australia) (Berndt [ed] 1964; Thomas, 2011:8-9). Berndt‟s preface conveys his concern with the fact that Aboriginal art was being integrated into a Western-European art paradigm in such a way that the intentions of the artists were being jettisoned (1964:2-3). He emphasised the complex „utilitarian‟ nature of Aboriginal art, the importance of engaging with it on its own terms, and the need to understand that „[u]nless we know something about [the art‟s meaning], we cannot pretend to understand Aboriginal art‟ (7-10). Berndt also disputes the suggestion made by Herbert Read and others that Aboriginal art „remains at a childish stage of development‟ and that it might therefore be instructive with respect to the origins of art in Palaeolithic Europe. As he writes, „[e]nough has been said to demonstrate the gross inadequacy of such a statement. On the whole this is a mature, adult art, reflective of a people‟s social and cultural life, and of their underlying values and view of the world‟ (7). The book concludes with a weighty but polite dispute between Tuckson and Berndt. Tuckson's essay „Aboriginal art and the western world‟ is very much written in a modernist spirit. He refers to European modern aesthetic theories and artists such as Picasso, and argues that modern artists‟ interest in Primitive Art is likely to be associated with „man‟s search for fundamental values‟. As he writes: „the artist is returning, as it were, to the genesis of art – its means and meaning‟ (61). Tuckson‟s universalist focus on formalist decision making and judgement, and his adherence the Kantian notion of disinterested contemplation, is reflected in his suggestions that art audiences can draw on „the same sense of intuition as the artist‟ and that „it is possible for us to appreciate visual art without any knowledge of its particular meaning and

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original purpose‟ (1964:64, 63). Berndt‟s epilogue-riposte argues that Tuckson's approach is problematic because it meant „evaluating and interpreting [Aboriginal art] in our own idiom, within the climate of our own aesthetic traditions‟ (1964:71; see Morphy, 2001 for an illuminating analysis of this debate). In this exchange we find the essence of the Art/Anthropology binary.

Given that we are familiar with Margaret Preston‟s encounters with Aboriginal art as a pioneering Australian modernist, it is worth pointing out the parallels between the perspectives of Preston and Tuckson with respect to the counterposing of form to meaning. Preston had written in 1930 that students of Aboriginal art should not „bother about the myths the carver may have tried to illustrate. Mythology and religious symbolism do not matter to the artist, only to the anthropologist‟ (in Stephen, 1980:15). Art historian Deborah Edwards situates this approach within an Ethnography-to-Art narrative in the following statement:

[I]t was Preston‟s privileging of formal compositional qualities, of abstract Aboriginal artforms over the figurative, which was crucial in the recoding of Aboriginal art by white Australians. This diverged from what was seen (by subsequent abstractionists) to be a content-ridden ethnography (2005:97).119

Preston clearly typifies the kind of formalist treatment of Aboriginal art that irritated Ronald Berndt, and correspondingly, it may be that Berndt‟s polemical arguments galvanised Tuckson, another adherent of modernist formalism, to defend the autonomous integrity of the Aboriginal art object in a universalist spirit. This is suggested by art historian Terence Maloon when he writes that „[i]n the role of Aboriginal art expert [Tuckson] had to take an opposing position to the anthropologists who to put it crudely, generally argued for the radical dissimilarity of all things traditionally Aboriginal to all things traditionally European‟ (in Morphy, 2001:40). The dispute of which the Berndts and Tuckson are representative has been echoed many times. On the one hand, the Berndt‟s sentiments about the silencing effect

119 The Robert Hughes echoed Preston‟s and Tuckson‟s emphasis on form in his 1960 review of the „splendid collection of Aboriginal bark-paintings and ancestor figures assembled by Anthony Tuckson at the New South Wales Gallery‟: „The barks can certainly be enjoyed as design; I can think of no large exhibition at the Gallery in recent years, except the French and Italian shows, which presented so huge and varied a vocabulary of unsuspected forms as this one‟ (1960:23; see also Gleeson, 1959 in Tuckson, 1964:63 for critical praise along similar lines). 186

of formalistic treatments of Aboriginal art have been echoed by a range of other anthropologists (see for instance Sutton, 1990:178; Morphy, 2001:43). On the other hand, arguments about the superfluidity and exoticising effect of explanations of content and meaning have frequently been made by art writers, professionals and dealers, as we saw above in the case of Beverly Knight, Christopher Hodges and Nicholas Rothwell.120 These respective standpoints are indicative of the fact that, despite the many curatorial and scholarly activities that traverse them, a rift remains between Anthropology and Art in the Aboriginal art arena. This rift is arguably partly attributable to the combined effect of bold personalities, polemical writings and the disciplinary „division of labour‟ described by Marcus and Myers above. That is, the oppositions between form and content/meaning, aesthetics and utility, autonomy and context, and individual and community have become overdrawn, infused with defensive and protective tendencies and entwined with the disciplines and institutions in a bluntly adversarial way.

4.5.2 Western secularisation and the differentiation of Primitive art

Another conflict upon which the Art/Anthropology binary is founded, one which intersects with the antagonistic disciplinary relationship described above, has its origins in the way Primitive art was negotiated by the Western art world in the context of modern secularisation. As noted in Chapter 1, secularisation was one facet of the social tumult that transformed the status of art and the artist in society, and fomented the Romantic Movement in 19th Century Europe. With the ascendency of scientific over religious explanations of life in modern thought, faith found a new home in the artist‟s raison d’ être. Inglis offers a useful summation of this transformation:

[I]n many ways „Art‟ had come to function as a substitute for religion in a society that was becoming in certain ways ever more secular, for Art was

120 See also Myers (1998) for a relevant discussion of the disagreements that surrounded the 1993 exhibition La peinture des aborigènes d’Australie at the Musée National des Arts d‟Afrique et d‟Océanie in Paris. 187

seen to be almost „holy‟ in nature and „above‟ ordinary social considerations.... [T]he artist replaced religious figures such as prophets as the figure whom one should venerate because of his privileged insights into „spiritual‟ and extra-mundane matters (2005:17; see also Shiner, 2001: Chapters 10 & 11).

However faith also found a home in the primitive. As Thomas points out, the celebration of „esoteric ritual, mystical transgression and spirituality‟ was central to primitivist thinking (1995:15; see also Russell, 2001:11-4). Among the many reasons why Primitive art remained categorically distinct from modern European art, despite the avant-garde‟s admiration for it, was the fact that primitive subjectivity and the primitive art object were seen to be steeped in religiosity (see Shiner, 1994; McLean, 2011a:26- 28, 32). By being reduced to the dimensions of spiritual life that had been demystified by scientific and technological developments in the west, primitive objects became symbolic of peoples and practices left behind by modernity and the focus of intrigue and desire for the disenchanted subject of the industrial capitalist west (Araeen, 1987/1985). The following paradigmatic contrast emerged. On the one hand, the iconic Western artist was a unique reflexive agent with purely aesthetic or existential concerns, producing “art for art‟s sake”, a calling which was confirmed by the new austere yet palatial settings for the display of art (Duncan, 1991). It is the peculiar hallmark of the western art tradition to have sacralised itself as transcending other aspects of life in this manner, despite the fact that it is clear that all art is socially contingent and purposeful in some way (Gell, 1992; 1998; Bourdieu, 1993). On the other hand, the primitive artist was anonymous within the tribe, inexorably bound to tradition and law and enthralled to his or her Gods, producing cultural objects heavily inscribed with social and religious mores. As art critic Robert Hughes flippantly remarked in a review of an Aboriginal art exhibition in 1988: „Tribal art is never free and does not want to be. The ancestors do not give one goanna spit for “creativity”....‟ (in Marcus &Myers, 1995:15). The reader will recognise the parallels between this contrast and the oppositions outlined above in relation to the disciplinary tension between Art and Anthropology. Therefore religiosity was cloven into two paradigms of faith, the one founded upon ideas about transcendent aesthetics, the other founded upon ideas about primitive

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spirituality. This cleaving entailed that Primitive art was constituted in a negative and oppositional guise in relation to Western art, a constitution which has, to some extent, underpinned the intransigent primacy of Western cultural forms in the contemporary art arena. This history provides us with another means of comprehending why the content of Aboriginal art, which very often has a spiritual derivation, is difficult to reconcile with the ostensibly secularist paradigms of fine art that currently prevail. As suggested above in relation to the “the story”, for many participants in the contemporary art arena, a focus on sacred content feels anachronistic and harnesses Aboriginal art to the domain of exotic Otherness and primitivism.

4.5.3 Anthropology, colonialism and the urban Aboriginal art movement

Another set of problems that has contributed to the endurance of the Art/Anthropology binary derive from, as Coombs states, anthropology‟s „tarnished reputation as a product and perpetrator of the colonial process‟ (1991:187). Claude L vi Strauss made the following evocative comment about the relationship between the field of Anthropology and colonialism in 1966:

Anthropology... is the outcome of a historical process which has made the larger part of mankind subservient to the other, and during which millions of human beings have had their resources plundered and their institutions and beliefs destroyed, whilst they themselves have been ruthlessly killed, thrown into bondage, and contaminated by diseases they were unable to resist. Anthropology is the daughter of this era of violence; its capacity to assess more objectively the facts pertaining to the human condition reflects, on the epistemological level, a state of affairs in which one part of mankind treated the other as an object (in Kulick, 2006:934).

This summation is highly pertinent to the history of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations in Australia. As we saw in Chapter 1, the pioneering work of Spencer and Gillen was influential in scholarly circles precisely because the Aranda were seen to be such a rarity as a remnant primitive race. As a range of researchers have argued, the 189

discourses, images and museum displays produced by anthropologists and affiliated scholars and institutions during the 19th and early 20th centuries provide disturbing evidence of the way Indigenous people were thought about and treated by colonial power in Australia (see for instance I. Anderson, 2003; B. Anderson, 2002; Mulvaney, 1982/1983). Through their “scientific” and usually evolutionist explanations for the peculiarity and inferiority of the “race”, anthropologists and associated researchers helped to rationalize the policies to which Indigenous Australians were subjected. Furthermore, only certain types of Indigenous subjects and cultural objects were considered worthy of anthropological attention. There was (and largely still is) a strong disciplinary bias towards communities that could be regarded as “pure”: untouched by western modernity; a favouring which entailed a de-authentication of the Indigenous identity of Aboriginal people from the South-Eastern rural and urban regions who had mixed ancestry and whose communities had suffered colonization most intensively. For these reasons, Anthropology and Ethnography have long been treated with suspicion by many Indigenous people outside of remote Australia.121 Many of the Aboriginal artists, activists and critics associated with the urban Aboriginal movement are very mindful of this history, and their grievances have unquestionably contributed to the circulation of the Art/Anthropology binary. Indeed, the refutation of anthropological expertise about, and museological representations of, Aboriginal identity and culture has arguably been foundational to the formation of the urban Aboriginal artistic and intellectual consciousness that I explored in Chapter 2, as well as the emergent trend of post-colonial critique discussed in Chapter 3 (see for instance Moreton-Robinson, 2003/1999). This is implied by Indigenous curator and art historian Margo Neale when, in her discussion of the marginalisation of Aboriginal artists from South-Eastern urban areas during the 1980s, she states that „[w]hile those from the south remained outside the ethnographic gaze, invisibility was assured‟ (2004:489). The reference to the ethnographic gaze in this quotation, which is not uncommon in urban Aboriginal discourses, very much suggests a fetishistic focus upon the pure, traditional Aboriginal subject.

121 Through a relatively recent process of external and internal critique, the spirit of which is conveyed in Levi-Strausse‟s statement above, Anthropology has been to some extent forgiven, in part because anthropologists persistently align themselves with the powerless and advocate for the interests of the minority groups with which they work (Kulick, 2006; Sutton, 2005). 190

We find other illustrations of this perspective in the context of the Aratjara exhibition, a highly successful exhibition of urban and remote Aboriginal art which toured in Europe in 1993/1994. Aratjara was one of the most important achievements of the Aboriginal Arts Board during the phase of Gary Foley‟s and Chika Dixon‟s leadership (cf. Appendix 2, A.4.3). Foley writes that „Aratjara was born when a Swiss artist called Bernard Lüthi approached the AAB in 1984 and expressed the view that Australian Indigenous art should be exhibited in the modern art galleries of Europe rather than the ethnographic museums where at that time they languished‟ (Foley, 2005:186; see also Lüthi, 1993:16). In addition to being designed to subvert the exclusionary tendencies of European art institutions, the exhibition was to some extent a response to the landmark Dreamings exhibition of Aboriginal art staged at the Asia Society Gallery in New York in 1988. Curated by anthropologists based at the South Australian museum, the Dreamings exhibition and catalogue were criticised for, among other things, focusing on „classical‟ cultural traditions and excluding the work of urban Aboriginal artists.122123 A diverse range of Indigenous artists, curators and writers participated in Aratjara and the exhibition was pivotal to legitimising the art practice of Aboriginal people from the South-East (Edmonds, 2010). The subtitle of the exhibition was „Art of the ‟ and many of the catalogue essays bear the tone of political activism (Lüthi & Lee [eds], 1993). In the discourses that surrounded the exhibition we can sense that museums and anthropologists are seen to perpetuate racist ideas about the Other, to ghettoise Aboriginal art from the fine arts world, and to unjustly define the limits of “authentic” Aboriginal identity and art.

Urban Aboriginal artists continue to critique the ways in which ethnographic museology and anthropological scholarship have transmitted particular ideas about “authentic” Aboriginality to the public. In their artistic practice, many have drawn on archival material from museum collections, or appropriated ethnographic modes of seeing the subject, in order to deconstruct the way Aboriginal identity has been

122 See Sutton (1990; 1992a); Maughan et. al (1988); Megaw (1990:85); Willis & Fry (1989b); Myers (2002:241-242). 123 It is interesting to note that one of the artists from a remote region who was included in the Dreamings exhibition responded to complaints that it did not showcase urban Aboriginal art with the statement that the latter had “lost their Law. We still have ours” (in Myers, 1994:37). 191

imagined within Settler and European society.124 This is because, on the one hand, they identify with those who were objectified in often demeaning ways in these settings. On the other hand, they recognise that their life experiences are made largely invisible in these settings, and this exclusion is indicative of the way their Indigenous identity (because they have light skin and they haven‟t had a “traditional” upbringing) is the subject of suspicion within non-Indigenous Australian society (Browning, 2010; Thomas, 1999:220). Post-colonial critiques of anthropological discourses and institutional methods have found other forums in addition to these artistic practices. For instance Indigenous artist Richard Bell, in a polemic that accompanied his work ‘Scienta E metaphysica (Bell's Theorum), or Aboriginal Art it's a White Thing‟ (2003), criticises the „“Ethnographic” approach to Aboriginal art‟ that he suggests associates it with spirituality and the „Dreamtime‟. He suggests that „[m]any Urban artists have rejected the ethno-classification of Aboriginal art to the extent that they don't participate in Aboriginal shows. They see themselves as artists – not as Aboriginal artists‟ (2003:3, original emphasis; see also Minter & Andrew, 2005:146; Mundine, 2009a). Such positions imply that the Aboriginal identity that is evoked by “Aboriginal art”, attributed by many to a fetish for the “Ethnographic”, invokes a hierarchy of legitimacy that subordinates artists from urban areas to such an extent that some would rather be located outside that paradigm altogether. This circumstance is indicative of the structure of the Aboriginal art „field‟ with respect to remote and urban Aboriginal art, as I discussed above, which entails that urban Aboriginal artists and critics feel oppressed by the quantity and authority of non-Indigenous experts on remote Aboriginal art. Bell also suggests that Aboriginal art from remote regions should be marketed by drawing on „purely Western construct[s]‟ and argues that we should „[d]emand that it be seen for what it is – as being among the World's best examples of . Ditch the pretence of spirituality that consigns the art to ethnography…‟ (2003:2; see also Isaacs, 2002:549-50). These comments echo the tendency we have seen illustrated throughout this chapter, to regard the prioritisation of form over content/meaning, and

124 See for example the work of R E A, Fiona Foley, Brook Andrew, , Yhonnie Scarce and . 192

the eschewal of spiritual content, as being fundamental to a progressive approach to remote Aboriginal art.

The grievances of urban Aboriginal artists and critics discussed above offer another example of the ways in which objectives relating to recognition, justice and redemption have underpinned Aboriginal art‟s mediation of the relationship between the Aboriginal polity, Australian civil society and the State, as discussed in Chapter 2. That is, these grievances form part of the critical discourses and practices of the urban Indigenous aesthetic public sphere, and are indicative of the fact that Aboriginal art has been mobilised to instantiate particular formulations of Indigeneity within Settler society, and to provoke members of Settler society to interrogate their assumptions about Indigenous identity. In light of those earlier discussions it can be argued that the Art/Anthropology binary is a rhetorical “artefact” of the negotiation, but participants in the Aboriginal art arena, of the political and moral issues that attend to Indigenous/non- Indigenous relations in Australia. Therefore for urban Aboriginal practitioners and their non-Indigenous advocates, to reject Anthropology and embrace Art is to make a political statement of opposition to primitivism and racism.

4.5.4 Difficulties around writing about Aboriginal art

As I have argued elsewhere (Fisher, 2012), the Art/Anthropology binary may help to explain the shallowness of art critical discourses about remote Aboriginal art. The pace of the commercial success of Aboriginal art in the 1990s and 2000s was not matched, in terms of volume, by scholarly or critical writings, and many commentators have also remarked on the scarcity of negative reviews of Aboriginal art.125 A good deal of writing on remote Aboriginal art in the context of Art history and criticism is descriptive, formalist and employs an abstract expressionist idiom, but does not engage with it analytically or conceptually as is the norm with non-Indigenous art. Nicholas Rothwell, who has been the most consistently engaged newspaper critic of Aboriginal

125 See Michaels (1988); Benjamin (2000); Bonyhady (2000); Smith (2002:152-153); Smee (2006). 193

art in the last decade, is distinguished by his effusive, adjective-rich prose in this vein (despite having argued that Aboriginal art criticism needs to do more than this) (see Rothwell, 2006c; 2006d; 2012). One of the reasons for the dearth of criticism is suggested by art scholar Terry Smith, who has argued that the „politics of speaking positions‟ makes the field „impossible‟ for non-indigenous critics (Smith, 2002:152; see also Sutton, 1992a). In other words, post-colonial criticism‟s interrogation of the power of the non-Indigenous scholarly voice (as discussed in Chapter 3) has constricted non-Indigenous commentary in the field. Clearly there are also major practical difficulties associated with producing in-depth analytical writing on remote Aboriginal art. For art writers to engage with it in a conceptually enlightening way they would need to undertake detailed research into the artist‟s milieu, and with the exception of writers such as Vivien Johnson (1990; 1997), few are prepared to do so. Furthermore, as Lowish (2005) points out: „[m]uch of what is relevant to the discipline of art history does not correspond easily to the study of Aboriginal art, just as much that is vital to understanding the complexity of Aboriginal art… lies outside the reach of art history‟ (2005:63; see also Thomas, 1999:225; Webb, 2002:138).

The scholars who can and do provide in-depth analyses of remote Aboriginal art are, of course, the anthropologists. However even though they do contribute to exhibition catalogues and monographs, there has been little rapprochement between anthropological expertise and art critical and historical writing.126 Art writers in general seem unable or unwilling to formulate an aesthetic language that can illuminate remote Aboriginal art forms in complex ways in light of the artists‟ reference points and intentions. Moreover, in art gallery and art museum settings there has been an aversion to providing informative wall-text beside remote Aboriginal art, even though this is normal practice for conceptual artworks in art museums around the world (Johnson, 1986a:55; Mundine, 1997:71; Hinkson, 2010/2011). We have reason to ask why. After all, isolated from their adversarial disciplinary bearings, Art history/theory and Ethnography/Anthropology of art are simply explanatory discourses that enable a deeper understanding of the art object (Myers, 1994; Morphy, 2008:172). As Gell has argued, just as wall text, written material, interviews and so on are necessary to

126 See Smith (2002:154-157) for an interesting exception. 194

illuminate Western conceptual artworks „as vehicles of complicated ideas‟, so can objects produced by non-western artists be „enfranchised‟ via the provision of ethnographic material that shows how they are „embodiments or residues of complex intentionalities‟ (2006: 230-234). Furthermore, it is quite clear that for many remote Aboriginal artists, the meaning of their work is profoundly important as an expression of cultural truths and bonds to Country. By evading the content of remote Aboriginal art and employing an abstract expressionist idiom that focuses (for example) on design, gestural vitality and the richness of an artists‟ palate, art writers are able to locate these art objects within a sanctified aesthetic domain which accrues to these objects the qualities of excellence associated with that domain. Furthermore, by eschewing ethnographic information and repudiating Anthropology and Ethnography, as the broadsheet writers I quoted above do, art writers are demonstrating their recognition and respect of Aboriginal art forms (and therefore the Indigenous subject) by refusing to associate that work with primitivism or with touristic modes of consumption of the exotic Other. Continuing the tradition of Preston and Tuckson, this approach suggests that if Western abstract art can be appreciated “on its own terms”, then so should Aboriginal art, the implication being that the work is diminished by any dependence on further explanation.

We can discern here the conundrum that the recent travails of the art historical tradition has created for current generations of art writers and scholars (see Wolff, 2008). If Art is to be democratised to accommodate non-Western forms and traditions – a moral imperative in this age of post-colonial and pluralist critique - it must accommodate those features of culture to which it defined itself in opposition through the progressive phases of modernism (including, for instance, the profound religiosity of artistic purpose in the case of much remote Aboriginal art).127 Yet arguably, in the case of Aboriginal art, the art world has not felt compelled to evolve new interpretative strategies. As I argued in Chapter 3, there has been a retreat from the interrogative approaches of the 1980s. At the entrance to the new Indigenous art wing of the National Gallery of Australia, a plaque states that „Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art is as

127 On this point it is worth noting that McLean has argued that Aboriginal art was the first movement to be understood as “contemporary art” (in an epochal sense), because its status as simultaneously ancient and current compelled people to think about new paradigms for understanding the eclecticism and syncretism of current global art practices (2011b; see also 2003). 195

alive today as it was thousands of years ago. As in the ancient past, the art is inseparable from everyday life.‟ This statement is consistent with the holistic view of art that is so frequently articulated by Aboriginal artists (cf. Chapter 2, section 2.6; Appendix 2, A.3.3, A.5.3). However, the Gallery‟s displays of Aboriginal art are barren of any information about this interrelatedness (see Hinkson, 2010/2011 for a critique). Similarly, when Rothwell commends the artist John Mawurndjul for producing abstract imagery whose spiritual orientation is opaque, and suggests that this points the way to the „dethroning‟ of anthropology and a new kind „critical appreciation of Aboriginal painting‟, he implies that there is no room for the supernatural in any mature critical engagement with Aboriginal art. It is evident that strict conditions continue to apply to the consecration of remote Aboriginal art in the contemporary art world.

4.6 Conclusion

This chapter has sought to illuminate the layers of Aboriginal difference that are encountered in the art arena, and has analysed the overt and discreet ways in which this difference is negotiated by participants in this arena. Here I will highlight the ways in which these discussions expand upon this thesis‟ abiding concern with the ethical problems that mediate Aboriginal art. Each of the four facets of difference I outlined at the beginning of this chapter: Aboriginal disadvantage and injustice, exotic Otherness, the differences that exist within the Aboriginal community, and the dominance of anthropological expertise, point to a variety of ethical problems. They confront us with the histories of colonisation and racism that are both particular to Australia and indicative of the broader story of modern imperialism. They also invoke the politics of recognition and equality which I have argued have been central to the remedial and restorative intentions of the post-colonial Settler State and civil society, as well as the post-colonial discourses and artistic practices of the 1980s and subsequent decades. What this chapter has demonstrated is that even though participants in the art arena are now cognisant of a range of ethical imperatives pertaining to non-Western and particularly Aboriginal art, 196

any objectives that are grounded in ethical thinking must be tailored to a set of art world norms that still rest heavily on principles of transcendent aesthetics and autonomy. Furthermore, objectives which seek to subvert primitivist perspectives on Aboriginal art may also subvert the desires that will ultimately compel a person to buy a piece of Aboriginal art.

The insider/outsider dynamic that I initially outlined in relation to the cosmopolitan and the tourist is useful for thinking through the ethical problems that pertain to Aboriginal difference. When we think about insiders and outsiders in any context, we are conscious of themes of inclusion and exclusion, belonging and exile, the experience of being recognised and validated or being ignored or maligned. There is an emotive subtext to many of the disputes I have discussed above that resonates with these themes. For instance, with respect to my Bourdieu-informed discussion of the Aboriginal art „field‟, it is clear that the popularity of remote Aboriginal art among non- Indigenous audiences and collectors, and the large, expert pool of non-Indigenous representatives of that art, makes some urban Aboriginal artists feel like outsiders in the Aboriginal art world. Poignant and often unspeakable issues around cultural loss (as we saw in Chapter 2) are brought to the surface by this predicament. For an urban Aboriginal person, this circumstance suggests that one‟s ethnic identity is not being validated in the public domain and worse still; a privileged non-Indigenous person knows the components of Aboriginality better than oneself. There is also an emotive subtext to the insider/outsider dynamic for some non- Indigenous people engaged with Aboriginal art. In the antagonistic relationship between Art and Anthropology that I discussed above we can discern a profound ethical dilemma between, on the one hand, having fidelity to the specificity of an Other‟s view of the world within the context of the dominant and dispossessing culture, and on the other hand seeking, in a humanist vein, to bring about some equality of treatment through a universalist lens that transcends the discriminatory paradigms of the past. In their refutation of anthropological/ethnographic expertise and their adherence to formalist modes of engagement, many of the art writers I have discussed are resisting being characterised as outsiders in relation to Aboriginal art, and are adhering to the latter pole in this ethical dilemma. It is arguably distressing for many of these individuals to

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be associated with any discourses, curatorial strategies or the like which have been accused of giving succour to colonialist and racist paradigms of thought, and the discourses and practices of Anthropology are perceived to do this. This is despite anthropologists‟ close and highly sympathetic affiliation with remote Aboriginal artists and their commitment to conveying their intentions and aspirations to the non- Indigenous public. We could argue that these art writers are concerned with being insiders within the project of bestowing value on Aboriginal identity and culture, and they are able to do this by arguing for the existence of shared territory across cultures on the grounds of empathy and the universality of artistic virtuosity.

In sum, I see the Art/Anthropology binary as being a highly consequential discursive product of the Indigenous polity‟s struggles for recognition and empowerment. An anti- Anthropology or Ethnography stance signifies the resilience and legitimacy of an eclectic Indigenous identity that has withstood the colonial project and the discriminating “authenticity fault-line” that accompanied it within the cultural domain. It is clear that many non-Indigenous professionals have been responsive to this struggle for recognition and empowerment and feel morally culpable when faced with the grievances articulated within the urban Indigenous aesthetic public sphere.128 Arguably the binary has become a rhetorical anchor upon which non-Indigenous individuals can secure their virtuous stance; or in Bourdieuan terms, it is mobilised as part of those people‟s competitive position taking within an art „field‟ that has been sensitised to post-colonial critique. The binary allows one to repudiate Anthropology to indicate one's abhorrence of the forces of colonialism, which establishes a reactive dynamic whereby Art, which is antagonistically related to Anthropology for other reasons, becomes an unequivocally progressive space. In concluding I wish to propose that, as I implied in my discussion of Aboriginal art criticism, the policing effect of the Art/Anthropology binary may be affirming rather than subverting primitivist views of remote Aboriginal art. In a range of settings it appears that the desire to, in Langton‟s terms (2003:90), „deny the viewer any opportunity to apply old modernist and premodernist categories‟ encourages superficial

128 See Smith (2006, particularly 13-14; Lowish, 2005; Thomas, 2011) for discussions that indicate that Australian art historical scholarship has become politicized by debates around the recognition of Indigenous people‟s art, identity and status. 198

and purely formalist modes of engagement that elide the art‟s conceptually intricate and politically demanding content, and preclude meaningful cross-cultural exchanges. In other words, a strange situation has arisen whereby Aboriginal art must be denuded of many of its properties in art discourse, even those that might be intrinsic to its meaning and its uniqueness, if it is to be enfranchised as contemporary art. The fecundity of Aboriginality‟s problematic associations, with respect not only to Anthropology but to the other facets of difference I have identified in this Chapter, means that it must essentially be de-Aboriginalised.

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Chapter 5: Aboriginal Art, Money and the Market

5.1 Introduction and chapter outline

Out of all the discussions thus far, it is the divisions and conflicts that arise in relation to the economic dimensions of the Aboriginal art phenomenon that are most relevant to the title of this thesis. It is within these settings that we find strong optimism and deeply compassionate sentiments entangled with the most cynical conduct and dystopian perspectives. This chapter seeks to enhance our understanding of why this is the case, by analyzing the ways in which Aboriginal art has been negotiated within a variety of commercial settings. It takes a very inclusive approach to what “Aboriginal art” is, which means that it discusses a range of commodified aesthetic forms which would be excluded from other histories of Aboriginal art. I have taken this approach for two reasons. First, Aboriginal art‟s significant presence in Australian public culture, which has been a central concern throughout this thesis, is attributable to the extraordinary number of ways in which Aboriginal artistic practices have been commercialized. Second, Aboriginal artists produce works of highly variable quality and value, all of which should be taken into account in an inquiry of this kind. In adopting this inclusive approach, I wish to underline the importance of distinguishing between the Aboriginal art movement, the Aboriginal art market, and the Aboriginal art and culture industries. If we attend to the idiosyncrasies of these three arenas, we can better understand the effect that the economic, nationalistic and remedial motivations 201

that drive the production and sale of Aboriginal aesthetic forms have upon the brokerage of Aboriginal fine arts.

Section 5.2 explores the relationship between the Aboriginal fine arts market and the much larger arena of “Aboriginal mass culture” in which forms of Aboriginal visual culture which have a commercial and popular character have circulated since the early 20th century. It provides a history of both, the latter of which has some symmetry with Chapter 2‟s account of the evolution of Aboriginal public culture that took place in association with the redemptive refashioning of Australian nationhood by the State and civil society in the post-assimilation era. I also argue that the evolution of Aboriginal mass culture since the 1980s has been contingent upon the emergence of a „cultural industries‟ policy framework in Australia which subsumes art and culture within market-based strategies. Section 5.3 details the tensions that permeate the Aboriginal art market; tensions that can be attributed to the fact that the idealistic and often duplicitous principles of fine arts are travestied by the overt mercenary objectives that drive many participants in that market, including artists, commercial operators, collectors and auction houses. Section 5.4 discusses the deep rift that exists between a small and elite collegiate of Aboriginal art dealers and associates who adhere to the conventions of the wider fine arts market, and the remaining segment of the Aboriginal art market which is made up of vendors who have no reverence for these conventions and adopt crude business methods. Section 5.5 brings critical and theoretical writings about the relationship between art and money, and between high and low culture, to bear upon aspects of the Aboriginal art market. It argues that the Culture Industry thesis, and ideas around „interest‟ and „disinterestedness‟ and „kitsch‟, can shed light on this market‟s peculiar character. This section also brings the ambivalent status of low culture since the advent of Duchamp and Pop art to bear upon the relationship between remote and urban Aboriginal art, in order to explain the paradigmatic contrast between the ways the two are consecrated in the contemporary art arena. Section 5.6 focuses on the way the Aboriginal art market has been a forum for a range of advocacy projects and discourses relating to Aboriginal wellbeing and

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socioeconomic disadvantage. It examines the many altruistic initiatives that have sought to capitalize upon the success of Aboriginal art, and looks at the way discourses around ethical or unethical conduct have been employed strategically within a highly segregationist marketplace. This discourse has sought to define and protect a small legitimate space for the facilitation and trade of Aboriginal art based on arguments about who has the artists‟ welfare, and the long-term integrity of the art, at heart. The section concludes by providing a critique of this discourse, one that seeks to highlight the real, but sometimes unspeakable, problems to which it is addressed.

5.2 Aboriginal fine art and Aboriginal mass culture

5.2.1 A brief history of the Aboriginal fine arts market

The history of the Aboriginal fine arts market has been partially outlined in the Introduction, Chapters 2 and 3, and as it has been well documented elsewhere (see for instance Myers, 2002; Altman, 2005), so I will provide only a brief history here. Arnhem Land art was the first to find a fine art market in the 1960s, largely due to the efforts of specialist dealers Dorothy Bennett and Jim Davidson who had both domestic and international collectors among their clients (Morphy, 2008:57-58). As noted previously, the emergence of the Papunya painting market in the 1970s and 1980s depended on the work of the Aboriginal Arts Board, as well as some determined Art Centre advisors, who placed Papunya work into major private and public collections in Australia and overseas. Sales in Aboriginal arts and crafts increased rapidly in the closing years of the 1980s, by which time several Aboriginal Art centres has been established in addition to Papunya, and the Bicentennial celebrations were focusing attention on Aboriginal culture. While at this time the Aboriginal fine arts market was dominated by sales to institutions and the public sector, the private market grew steadily in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in part due to the activities of dealers such as Clive 203

Evatt, Adrian Newstead and Christopher Hodges in Sydney, and Gabrielle Pizzi in Melbourne (Myers, 2001:186-188; Ryan, 2005; Johnson et. al, 2008). High profile collectors who contributed to the increase in value of Aboriginal art (and galvanized the State institutions to expand their holdings) in these early years included Australians Robert and Janet Holmes à Court and Margaret Carnegie, Lord Alistair McAlpine (UK), Donald Khan (US), John Kluge (US) and Richard Kelton (US) (Altman et. al, 1989:17, 94-95; Carnegie, Holmes à Court & Hall, 1991; Myers, 2006). The leadership of people within State institutions (such as James Mollison, founding Director of the National Gallery of Australia), and major exhibitions such as the 1988 New York Asia Society Dreamings exhibition and the inclusion of artists and Trevor Nickolls in the 1990 Venice Biennale all contributed to the legitimization of Aboriginal art as valuable fine art.129 By the late 1990s Aboriginal fine art was increasingly accepted as part of mainstream Australian art and collected widely by private citizens. A turning point came when the auction house Sotheby‟s, at the initiative of Contemporary Art Department head Tim Klingender, staged a „Contemporary and Aboriginal Art‟ auction in 1995, a „Fine Aboriginal and Contemporary Art‟ auction in 1996, and an „Important Aboriginal Art‟ auction in 1997, all of which were highly successful.130 The last, which was previewed at Contemporary Art Week in New York, realised $2.4 million with 94% of lots sold, and some of the most valuable works went to international bidders who had fast out-paced local collectors. Sotheby‟s has continued to hold dedicated Aboriginal art sales (though success-wise these reached a peak in 2007) with only sporadic competition from other auction houses. A large part of this success was the escalation in value of Papunya boards that had been painted in the 1970s. Many of these had been initially „unearthed‟ by Klingender, as he has described, „in people‟s caravans and under their beds and in cupboards and in the houses of people who‟d worked as missionaries or nurses or policemen or whatever…‟ (in Byrne, 2004:38; see also Johnson, 2010). In addition, Sotheby‟s was very effective in publicizing within the Australian press the involvement of overseas collectors in their

129 See Bond (1985); Ward (1987); Cadzow (1987); Schwartz (1989); Sutton et. al (1988); McCulloch (1997a); Dwyer (1999), Myers (2006), Morphy (2008:189); Philp (2007). 130Sotheby‟s was established in Australia in 1982 as a result of the financial investment and tenacity of Robert Bleakley. Bleakley had formerly worked in the antiquities department at Sotheby‟s in London and had also successfully directed its Primitive Art department (Huda, 2008:105-108). In earlier years, Sotheby‟s had included Aboriginal art in tribal art sales. 204

Aboriginal art auctions, collectors who were contributing substantially to the success of many of their sales by value (but not necessarily by volume). Sotheby‟s reputation as the high water market for integrity in the secondary market, and its relationship with overseas collectors, contributed greatly to the consecration of Aboriginal fine (Van den Bosch, 2005:187, Huda, 2008: Chapter 6).131 Throughout this period a collegial nexus developed between the Art Centres, a small group of elite commercial dealers, State collecting institutions, and the Sotheby‟s- dominated auction market. It is this collegiate which has validated Aboriginal fine art and has been the source of information and assurance for the educated collector.

5.2.2 The evolution of “Aboriginal mass culture”

The Aboriginal fine arts market I have just described is a very small and specialized component of a much larger and older Aboriginal art and culture industry. This industry encompasses a huge variety of Aboriginal-associated commodities and forms of visual culture that have a commercial character and are often associated with tourism, nationalism and with the State‟s desire to keep positive images of Aboriginality circulating within Australian public culture. I will use the term “Aboriginal mass culture” to refer to these cultural forms which are for the most part embedded in the “popular” realm as opposed to, or in addition to, the fine arts realm. This term is a deliberate allusion to the fraught relationship between high and low culture that has been theorized by a range of scholars in relation to modern and post-modern art, and I will expand upon the relevance of these theories later in the chapter.

Aboriginal mass culture can be traced back to the Aboriginalia which, as was discussed in Chapter 1, emerged in association with Australian Modernism in the early

131 The Aboriginal market had grown from a value of $666,000 in 1988 to $26,455 000 at its peak in 2007, though 2007 was an anomalous year for both the Aboriginal and the wider Australian market. The 2006 result of $16,54 000 is a truer reflection of the upward curve in Aboriginal sales value over that period. In 2011 Aboriginal art sales had dropped back to 2002 levels, at $8,164 000 (Australian Art Auction Sales, 2012). 205

20th Century. As I noted then, the Aboriginalia market was inclusive of craft objects, carvings and artifacts made by Indigenous people living on missions and settlements, ceramics, fabrics, souvenirs and other goods made by Indigenous and non-Indigenous craftspeople, Albert Namatjira‟s paintings (as well as numerous print reproductions of those paintings), and symbolic renditions of Aboriginal people and culture that appeared in the context of tourism advertisements and major events such as the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games. More recently, Aboriginal mass culture has proliferated in association with post-assimilation era formulations of nationalism. As I argued in Chapter 2, the dissemination of the idea that the nation had ancient Indigenous heritage greatly enhanced the repertoire of material that could be designated authentically Australian. Indeed by the late 1980s, as McGrath (1991) and Marcus (1997/1988) have argued, “the Outback” and “the Centre” had accrued immense symbolic and mythic potency in Australian culture, and the trend amongst non-Indigenous Australians of visiting Uluru and other remote destinations had acquired the qualities of a religious pilgrimage (see also Haynes, 1998). These tendencies ensured that implicit and explicit representations of Aboriginality became ubiquitous in visual and material culture in a range of settings.132 In the following years, representations of Aboriginality became central not only to the branding of inland Australia as a tourist destination, but to Australia's exported self-image, as illustrated in the Creative Nation cultural policy (c.f. Appendix 2, A.5.3; DoCA, 1994; Zeppel, 1998; Craik, 2001:106-109; Hinkson, 2004).133 Chapter 2 also discussed the way the Bicentenary of 1988 and the decade of Reconciliation prompted local, state and federal government bodies to seek an Aboriginal aesthetic, which saw many Aboriginal artists being commissioned to create murals, logos, posters and banners for government agencies and corporations. Aboriginal artists also created this kind of material for the activist campaigns of the time.134 The association between the 2000 Olympic Games and Reconciliation contributed to the growth of an Aboriginal corporate aesthetic, at the forefront of which was the Aboriginal-owned Balarinji

132 See Black's (2008:165-167) discussion of the role of Aboriginal themes and design in Qantas Airways' highly nationalistic branding and marketing projects of the 1950s and 1960s. See also Factor (2000) for a relevant discussion of 1950s Aboriginal-style commodities, and Maynard (1999) for a discussion of Aboriginal-inspired fashion in the 1970s that accorded with the Whitlam Government‟s „new nationalism‟. 133 The Australia Council estimates that between 1990 and 1996 the level of consumption of Aboriginal- themed souvenirs by overseas visitors rose by about 11.5 % per annum (Guldberg, 2000:55-57). 134 See for instance the „we have survived‟ series of posters produced in 1988 (NMA, 2012b). 206

Design Studio, the company responsible for the globally familiar Qantas jets decorated with Aboriginal designs.135136

The degree to which Aboriginal art was commercialized in the second half of the 20th century in association with these movements is demonstrated by the emergence of Aboriginal copyright between the 1960s and 1990s. During the modernist phase of Aboriginalia it was the norm for artists and artisans to copy Aboriginal designs and motifs without any concern for intellectual property or copyright. As noted previously, it was in 1966 that this was first officially acknowledged to be an infringement of rights, when David Malangi was compensated by Nugget Coombs (then Governor of the Commonwealth Bank) when his artwork was reproduced on the one dollar note. In 1976 the Aboriginal Artists' Agency was established to protect Aboriginal copyright. Its founding was triggered by the discovery by Yolngu leader, artist and inaugural Chair of the Aboriginal Arts Board, , of a tea towel and tablecloth decorated with paintings created by himself and his father, Mawalan Marika (Marika, 1976; Adams, 1996/1974:12). As we saw in Chapter 3 (section 3.7), in the following decade the commercial and artistic appropriation of Aboriginal culture was censured by urban indigenous artists and critics and non-indigenous sympathisers.137 As a consequence of these movements, the 1970s and early 1980s witnessed a gradual (but not complete) movement by non-indigenous enterprises towards developing collaborative and licensing arrangements with Indigenous artists and enterprises.138 Balarinji‟s success is indicative of this shift (Nicoll, 1993:705; Maynard,

135 See Debenham (1995); Qantas (2012). Balarinji‟s other clients have included Bank of America, British Airways, Lendlease, Renault France, Coca Cola Atlanta, and City of Sydney. 136 For instance in 2003, Aboriginal design-themed Qantas uniforms were developed by Australian designer Phillip Morissey and Balarinji. In 2000, Morrissey had launched a collection of clothes that featured textiles designed by Anmatjera artist Jacinta Numina Waugh (Epaminondas, 2000; Black, 2008: 347-351). 137 For, instance non-indigenous art writer Ann Stephen wrote: The Aboriginal movement in a series of symbolic acts … ha[s] forced us to see the land not as our national heritage but as a series of frontiers and sites of invasion. However white Australian culture has sought to deflect and absorb the Black movement's radical critique mythologising „Aboriginality‟ as some timeless essence. This latest form of colonisation is evident in forms of [sic] diverse as high art, rock clips, high fashion and tourism (1984:28). 138 The changing regard for appropriation at this time was illustrated by the abandonment of an Aboriginal-inspired swimwear line created by swimwear company Speedo for Australian competitors in the 1988 Olympic Games. Designer Gloria Smythe had based the designs on drawings she had produced in the 1940s when the curriculum at the art school she attended directed students to make 207

1999). Several court cases relating to the infringement of Aboriginal artists‟ copyright took place during the 1980s and 1990s, with the most significant judgement being handed down in December 1994 (Johnson, 1996).139 In the 1990s the commercialization and exploitation of Aboriginal culture became a concern across a range of industries, not only artistic and cultural ones (Wells, 1996). A protracted government effort to find solutions to the problem of collectively owned Indigenous cultural patrimony culminated in the report Our Culture: Our Future – Report on Australian Indigenous Intellectual and Cultural Property Rights (Janke, 1998; see also Altman et. al, 1989:Chapter 14; Altman & Taylor [eds], 1991).

In response to the strictures on direct appropriation, a more euphemistic form of commercial appropriation evolved, such that the creation of „Aboriginal-look‟ designs (for T-shirts and textiles for instance) and „pseudo Aboriginal art‟ became widespread in the 1980s and 1990s (Golvan, 1992; Johnson in Maslen, 1999:104). Designs containing earthy colours, cross-hatching, dots, boomerang shapes, “x-ray” depictions of animals and hand-prints (echoing those left in ochre on the walls of rock shelters), all of which connote Aboriginal art without being traceable to any particular work, became common and remain so, particularly on garments and souvenirs oriented to the tourist market. Many non-elite Aboriginal artists and artisans, particularly those in the South-Eastern states, have contributed to the proliferation of this aesthetic.140 This has come about because they appropriate such signs as a statement of their Aboriginal identity, and have capitalised on the tourist market‟s satisfaction with simple and contrived signs of Aboriginality to earn an income (Fourmile, 1989:9; Zeppel, 1998:33-4; Allas, 2008).

As we can gather from this history, by the late 1980s a commercial realm of Aboriginal art and culture in which products were poorly differentiated in terms of

designs based on Aboriginal objects on display at the Australian Museum (Powerhouse Museum, 2010). 139 This case involved substantial „cultural damages‟ being paid to the artists concerned and the recognition that a commercial design derived from a small part of an Aboriginal work was as serious an infringement as those that made complete copies. 140 Examples of this kind of practice include dolphin paintings with Central Desert designs found at East Coast artisan markets and objects produced in association with the Government-owned company Queensland Aboriginal Creations, which had historically „employed Aboriginal people to paint copies of bark paintings from various publications‟ (Roberts and Johnson in Blakatak, 2005 [no. 3]:11, Altman et. al, 1989:288). 208

authenticity, cultural integrity and quality was entrenched (Altman & Taylor [eds], 1991). To a large extent the Aboriginal art industry still retains this character. For instance, it can be hard for new buyers to distinguish Aboriginal fine art from low-value Aboriginal art and tourist product. While some “dot paintings” are expensive pieces of fine art, others are highly generic and sold very cheaply. It is also hard for buyers to know whether a particular object has been made or designed by Aboriginal people. There is now an abundance of Aboriginal-themed commodities from which Aboriginal people glean economic return, including hand-made and mass-produced items, licensed clothing, cards, diaries and so on (Altman et. al, 2002:4, 9). At the same time, the growth of internet commerce, and the globalised nature of trade means that it is possible for businesses to manufacture and sell goods that are marketed as “authentic” Aboriginal product and have nothing to do with Aboriginal people. In 1999, Vivien Johnson and her Sociology students at Macquarie University compiled the „House of Aboriginality‟ website and CD Rom which identified companies, products and websites that made unauthorised use of Aboriginal designs or exploited Aboriginal culture in some way. Enough objects were found for a house to be „entirely furnished with everyday items decorated with Aboriginal or “pseudo Aboriginal” designs‟, as a „visual metaphor for the mass circulation of Aboriginal imagery in Australian popular culture‟ (Johnson, 1999-2002; see also Johnson, 1996; Gosford, 2010).

Thus “Aboriginal mass culture” encompasses an array of commodities and forms of visual culture in which Aboriginality is symbolised in more or less stereotypical ways. It is clear that the late 20th century forms of Aboriginal mass culture evolved contiguously with the flourishing of Aboriginal music, literature, performing arts, film, radio, television and cultural tourism, and in dialogue with the political events of the post-assimilation era. As a consequence, between the 1980s and the 2000s the scope and visibility of Aboriginal-themed forms of cultural production developed to an extraordinary degree, and Aboriginality was refracted through an enormous variety of popular and fine arts forms.

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5.2.3 Aboriginal art and the cultural industries

We can further our understanding of how and why Aboriginal mass culture proliferated if we take into account the emergence of the cultural industries policy paradigm in Australia. The concept of the Culture Industry has its origins in a Marxist critique of capitalism‟s enervation of meaningful culture, and will be discussed later. The phrase „cultural industries‟ entered the policy lexicon of some western governments in the 1980s to address popular forms of culture that stood outside traditional arts funding paradigms. As Hesmondhalgh argues, the emergence of cultural industries policies within the UK, Australia and other countries in the 1980s and 1990s reflected an aversion to the elitism of the classical high arts and a recognition that „most people's cultural tastes and practices were shaped by commercial forms of culture and by public service broadcasting‟ (2008:555, original emphasis; 2002). The aversion to high art was in part associated with the egalitarian and counter-cultural movements of the time which sought to democratize arts funding (cf. Appendix 2, A.4.2). In addition, scholars in the emergent discipline of Cultural Studies were countering the Marxist view that capitalist structures were inherently disempowering, and identifying acts of agency and creativity that were in fact enabled by these structures. Ultimately the cultural industries policies arose from the fact that an irreverent view of “ivory tower” high culture harmonized with emergent neoliberal principles of governance geared towards a „return on public investment‟ (Hesmondhalgh, 2008:556, original emphasis; Turner, 2001). With regards to arts subsidies, these policies focused less on subsidising artists and more on assisting them to reach audiences/consumers through marketing and distribution. Market-based principles of accountability, performance and competitiveness increasingly shaped policy perspectives on cultural institutions and programs and the target client became the consumer rather than the citizen. „Economic regeneration‟ was employed as a justifying concept, and policies were increasingly designed to work in concert with the free market to stimulate and augment entrepreneurial initiative and innovation (Hesmondhalgh, 2008:555-556; Craik et. al, 2000; Caust, 2003). The emergence of this policy paradigm is clearly reflective of a social order in which cultural experiences are increasingly mediated by acts of consumption (Belk,

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2007:740). Commerce is now integral to the way governments approach the question of how to generate beneficial cultural experiences among citizens. This is illustrated in the Keating government‟s Creative Nation policy, which advocated the integration of „cultural and economic life‟, and was at the forefront of the adoption of cultural industries policies around the world (although these policy changes had certainly been initiated by the preceding Hawke Labor government) (DoCA, 1994:19, Hesmondhalgh, 2008:555; Stevenson, 2000; cf. Appendix 2, A.4.2; A.5.2). Within the cultural industries paradigm that Creative Nation exemplifies, art is viewed as one among many cultural attractions and leisure activities that can be marketed to locals and visitors, and its subvention increasingly rests on the belief that art-related activity can cross-pollinate with other streams of commercial activity while also serving civic goals (Craik et. al, 2000).

The proliferation of Aboriginal art and culture in the late 20th century has been contingent upon this transformation in the governance of culture. Of particular importance is the fact that, as Hesmondhalgh points out, the cultural industries paradigm offered governments a way to categorise a range of social problems as manifestations of social and economic „exclusion‟ that could be overcome by accommodating rather than resisting market forces (2008:556). This perspective is exemplified by the Creative Nation policy, which presents a highly optimistic synthesis of Aboriginal culture and Australian culture; Aboriginal uniqueness and Australian uniqueness; Aboriginal prosperity and Australian prosperity. The policy acknowledged that Aboriginal people had been vulnerable to opportunistic market forces and made specific mention of Aboriginal copyright and intellectual and cultural property issues (DoCA, 1994:67, 79). What was required now, the policy implied, was for Aboriginal people to re-appropriate the aspects of their culture that had been exploited by others and commercialise them for their economic benefit. In the absence, in many cases, of conventional education and professional skills, and given many Aboriginal people‟s geographic isolation from the mainstream economy, the culture that Aboriginal people possessed was promoted as a rich asset around which could be built a lucrative sphere of consumer engagement. In addition, as I noted in Chapter 2, the policy saw the flourishing of the Aboriginal arts sector as serving nationalistic conceptions of

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Australian distinctiveness on the international stage (essential to the tourism market) and intercultural harmony at home (DoCA, 1994:6, see also Marcus, 1997/1988:32). These ideas were echoed in other relevant policy documents, such as the Council of Aboriginal Reconciliation's (CAR) publication Valuing Cultures (Langton & CAR, 1994) and ATSIC‟s Cultural Policy Framework (ATSIC, 1995; cf. Appendix 2, A.5.3). When Colin Mercer reviewed ATSIC‟s Arts and Crafts Industry Support Strategy (which subsidised the Art Centres) in 1997, his diagnosis of the strategy‟s weaknesses and advice regarding the Industry‟s future clearly expressed a cultural industries ethos (see Mercer, 1997:25). This is illustrated in the following amendment to one of the Policy‟s objectives:

Old objective: to promote the general recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts and cultures as vital elements of Australian culture.

New objective: To promote, through funding strategies, education, promotion and product placement, the general recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander visual arts and crafts as dynamic and integral elements of Australian culture and as resources for both cultural dialogue and economic exchange (Mercer, 1997:37).

We find further evidence of Aboriginal art having been embraced from a cultural industries perspective when we look at the attention it has received from several researchers affiliated with the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). These researchers have been leading exponents of the “creative industries” discourse and policy perspective (a variant of the cultural industries paradigm) (see Hesmondalgh, 2008; Jones, 2011).141 Among them, Ryan, Keen & Cunningham (2005; 2008) have characterised the Aboriginal art market as an exemplary creative industry. The following quotation reveals how Aboriginal culture is depicted within this discourse:

For Indigenous people in Australia, as elsewhere, the raw material of content creation is culture and knowledge, which is to say their everyday lives, beliefs and practices. Combined with the creative talent of the artist,

141 Hesmondhalgh suggests that these authors favour the term “creative industries” because: „[it] fits with the political, cultural and technological landscape of globalisation, the new economy, and the information society‟ (2008:561). The authors to which I refer include Stuart Cunningham, Mark David Ryan, Michael Keane and John Hartley. 212

the performer and the technician, this becomes a unique and distinctive intellectual property that finds its way into several markets (domestic - Indigenous and non-Indigenous - tourist and international) of which the most profitable is the elite international or „high art‟ market (Ryan et. al, 2008:285).

Similarly, in a report prepared for The Economic Development Branch, Brisbane City Council, titled „From ceremony to CD-ROM: Indigenous creative industries in Brisbane‟ (2001), Keane and Hartley argue that „Indigenous culture functions as a “brand” among a range of creative products and experiences available to consumers‟ (9). They point to new „signs of synergies between subsidized and commercial Indigenous creative industries‟ (8) and use the phrase „social value-adding‟ in their discussion of the social benefits of economic development in this area (18). In these quotations, artistic practices have been reduced to marketable components within a highly functionalist discourse that rescinds all of the Romantic idealism about art (and disenchantment about capitalism), that we encountered in Chapter 1. These examples of instrumentalist approaches to culture are highly relevant to the history recounted in Chapter 2. The cultural industries paradigm interweaves governance, commerce and the social good, and therefore provides the foundation for the amalgamation of commercial projects with altruistic and nationalistic civic projects. We have seen that Aboriginal arts and crafts have long been treated as a means for Aboriginal people to achieve economic empowerment, and that affirmative conceptualisations of “Aboriginal culture” (visual and discursive) have been integral to the mechanisms by which Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations have been renegotiated in the post-assimilation era by governments, activists, artists and civil society. These objectives have been productive of a variety of Aboriginal-themed commodities, as well as a range of symbolic renditions of Aboriginality that circulate in the public domain. These processes must therefore be seen as having contributed, and as continuing to contribute, to the proliferation of Aboriginal mass culture.

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5.2.4 Locating Aboriginal fine art within the arena of Aboriginal mass culture

Aboriginal fine art has a complex relationship with Aboriginal mass culture. We have seen that Aboriginal art traverses tourism (both national and Aboriginal cultural tourism); Aboriginal and national heritage (environmental, cultural and ancient); Australian nationalism (in terms of symbols of distinctiveness employed by the State and narratives of Reconciliation); and objectives connected to concepts of remedy and restitution with respect to the economic and emotional wellbeing of Indigenous people and the vulnerability of their culture. This conglomeration means that the arena in which Aboriginal aesthetic forms have circulated for much of the 20th century is one in which nationalism, ideological influence, mass production, therapeutic intentions and economic objectives have been the norm. If we widen our perspective to consider the contemporary art arena in general, all of these dimensions pose problems to fine art markets. This is because the value of fine art has traditionally been predicated, more than any other commodity category, on our appreciation of it being disinterested, original, authentic and clearly differentiated from mass produced commodities. If we return to Aboriginal art specifically and reflect on the above conglomeration of tourism, heritage, nationalism, remedy and restitution, we can see that Aboriginal fine art is intertwined with Aboriginal mass culture to both its benefit and detriment. The Aboriginal fine art market has without doubt benefited from fact that all of these settings have been entry points for collectors of Aboriginal fine arts, and attracted audiences and government subsidies without which Aboriginal fine arts would not have gained a footing in the wider art market. However, as the engine behind Aboriginal mass culture, this conglomeration has also contributed to an abundance of generic and idealised representations of Aboriginality, and been responsible for a messy, undifferentiated commercial sphere that is undoubtedly detrimental to the Aboriginal fine arts market. This is conveyed in a recent broadsheet article, which states that „Indigenous art is everywhere: at airports, in kitsch shops in The Rocks, on the walls of your doctor‟s waiting room. It can make you feel more familiar with it than you actually are‟ (Keenan, 2010:6; see also Langton 2003:90). In other words, an enormous variety of products (and vendors) are now denoted by the category “Aboriginal art”, and the proliferation of Aboriginal mass culture means that many audiences have a generic 214

impression of that art category. Belk indicates the problems that such an impression creates for the Aboriginal fine arts market when he writes that „massification threatens us with anonymity in an impersonal marketplace‟ (2007:738). This offence is particularly acute in the fine arts context, not least because the corollary to the specialisation of the fine art object is the specialisation of the community who admires it. To draw on my discussion of MacCannell (1976) in Chapter 4, Aboriginal mass culture gives discerning collectors the impression that Aboriginal art is the province of unsophisticated buyers and tourists, people without the „cultural competence‟ that underlies the „aesthetic disposition‟ associated with fine art (Bourdieu, 1984:4).

In light of this, it is not surprising that the orthodox narrative of the contemporary Aboriginal art movement effaces the varied and pecuniary nature of Aboriginal cultural production over the last century. This narrative usually sees the movement as being founded in Papunya in 1971 (with a retrospective acknowledgement of the bark painting tradition), and looks to the blossoming of Art Centres in the subsequent years. It depends heavily on the anointing power of the tragic-romantic figure of Geoffrey Bardon: the compassionate and aesthetically erudite school art teacher who encouraged the old men at Papunya to paint and facilitated an outpouring of cultural expression in an environment in which these men had been treated with disdain by the town administrators.142 As has been pointed out by Johnson (2010) and Healy (2008), this is a distortion of Papunya‟s history. Three of the most important figures at Papunya: Kaapa Mbitjana Tjampitjinpa, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, had been creating art for several years prior to Bardon's arrival. These men had identified strongly with the Hermannsburg watercolour school pioneered by Albert Namatjira. Tjampitjinpa had taken up watercolours, and the others had established reputations as carvers of animals such as snakes and lizards, carvings which were probably sold at Napperby station where they all worked (Johnson, 2010).

142 Bardon, who trained at the National Art School in Sydney in the mid-1960s when abstraction was the dominant aesthetic, was also instrumental in installing abstract expressionism as the favoured idiom through which the paintings could be appreciated as both aesthetically strong and authentic (Smith, 2006:24). He was inspired by Herbert Read‟s concept of hapticity and made eloquent arguments about Papunya painting being an embodied and uniquely conceptual kind of painting that was not reducible to visual or pictorial decision-making (Bardon, 1999/1991:125-136; Johnson, 2010:116-117). He also directed the artists to remove „whitefella‟ elements from their work when they had initially included realistic forms and figures (Bardon, 2000; Michaels, 1988:152-153). 215

Other Papunya artists had produced boomerangs for trade and there was also a long history of churingas (sacred objects) and other curios being produced and/or painted for sale in that region (Anderson & Dussart, 1988:97; Batty, 2007). Nevertheless, as the title of the landmark retrospective exhibition of Papunya painting Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius (Perkins & Fink [eds], 2000) implies, a founding moment of inspiration and innovation is essential to the fine arts narrative, and thus the continuity between forms that are designated as being “low” and “high” art is severed.

Ultimately I suggest that a useful way of understanding the relationship between Aboriginal fine arts and Aboriginal mass culture is to recognise that the members of the fine arts collegiate I discussed above (see section 5.2.1) have endeavoured to import a highly specialised fine arts ethos and methodology into an arena whose properties were antithetical to the fine arts tradition. That arena continues to pose challenges to the autonomy and integrity of Aboriginal fine arts, and individual artworks are always at risk of a demotion in status. Adopting this perspective on the Aboriginal art phenomenon is essential to appreciating the conflicts that arise in the Aboriginal art market, which will be explored in the remaining sections of the chapter.

5.3 Commercialism and speculation in the Aboriginal art market

The following history of the Aboriginal art market will build on my sketch of the Aboriginal fine arts market presented above, but take a far more inclusive approach that accommodates the more mercenary and speculative commercial practices that drove the market‟s rapid growth in 1990s and 2000s. It is important to note that much of the following discussion pertains to remote Aboriginal art, and not urban Aboriginal art. The success of the Aboriginal art movement has revolved around the remote Art Centres that were founded in the years following Papunya Tula‟s establishment, and by the late 2000s, there were over one hundred of these (Wright & Morphy [ed], 2000; Indigenous Art – securing the future, 2007; Australian Art Collector, 2010). The

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number of vendors of Aboriginal art had grown rapidly in the late 1980s and 1990s, and while those who were part of the fine arts collegiate sourced the vast majority of their works through these Art Centres, there were a number of galleries, wholesalers and intermediaries that engaged directly with artists outside the Art Centre system. Some artists started moving between their communities and Alice Springs and painting in the homes, workshops or galleries of retailers and agents located there. The phenomenon of private dealers establishing themselves in Alice Springs and/or visiting remote communities and competing over “name” artists was stimulated by the rapid rise to fame of Anmatyerre artist Emily Kngwarreye (from the Utopia community in Central Australia) between 1988 and her death in 1996. Once her “star” status was established, Kngwarreye was encouraged and often harassed by dealers, family members and others to produce large numbers of paintings (Cadzow, 1995; McCulloch, 1996; Batty, 2007). It is estimated that she produced between 3000 and 4000 works in those 8 years, and by her death she was represented by around 7 agents. Despite the poor quality of much of Kngwarreye‟s work that circulates in the market, and the poor reputation of many of these agents, she is the most highly valued Aboriginal artist and Australian female artist on the auction market and arguably among the most loved and well exhibited Australian artists of recent decades (Neale [ed], 2008). She is thus emblematic of the way in which Aboriginal fine art is intertwined with Aboriginal mass culture. As Kngwarreye‟s experience typifies, the pressures upon Aboriginal artists to produce quickly to meet demand escalated once the commercial operators and Aboriginal artists (and their extended families) came to reap the benefits of the growing popularity of Aboriginal art. There was a dramatic increase in production and an over- supply of product of varying quality across the Aboriginal art marketplace (Cadzow, 1987; Kronenberg, 1995). A series of scandals over works that were attributed to and carried the signature of name artists (Kathleen Petyarre, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Tolson Tjupurrula) but were either partially or fully painted by family members, or forged by outsiders, was aired in the press, often as sensationalist front page exposés (McCulloch 1997b; 1997c; 1999).143 The existence of hundreds of “school

143 Such practices were not problematic from the perspective of Aboriginal law in the Western and Central Desert, so long as the contributions took place under the direction of the artist who had authority over the depicted Dreaming narrative (Johnson, 2000; Nicholls, 2002; Myers, 2005). 217

of” and faked paintings by Emily Kngwarreye, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and other artists also became known (McCulloch, 1996; Usher, 1999). Aboriginal art acquired the reputation of being highly mercenary and lacking integrity, and as having inspired a „gold rush‟ market (Allam, 2005). This was the subject of two ABC TV documentaries in 1999: Art from the Heart? and Dot for Dollar (Moore & Eccles, 1999; Healy, 1999; Eccles, 1999; Four Corners, 1999). The title of Ben Gennochio's book Dollar Dreaming (2008) echoes many broadsheet headlines that have depicted Aboriginal art as being lucrative and overtly commercial, particularly with respect to the art sold in Alice Springs (Rothwell, 2006a).144

While they have been vital to the consecration of Aboriginal fine art, auction houses such as Sotheby‟s have also contributed to the art's mercenary reputation by fostering the Aboriginal art market's highly speculative and capricious character. In contrast to non-indigenous art, the secondary market for Aboriginal art has remained almost entirely in the hands of the auction houses. As Johnson (2010) has written, Tim Klingender at Sotheby‟s very effectively promoted the Papunya Boards as the foundation stones of the contemporary Aboriginal art movement and also brought historic bark paintings and artifacts into the ambit of “contemporary art” sales. From their first showing in 1996, sales at double and triple the pre-auction estimates were achieved for Papunya boards from one auction to the next. Given that in most cases they had not been valued or exhibited as fine art when they were first sold in the 1970s, the Boards were essentially entering the fine arts market for the first time, within the glamorous setting of a prestigious auction house during a period of economic prosperity. Other works by artists such as were similarly successful. By the 2000s, the public face of Aboriginal art was strongly associated with the spectacle of the auction house sale room, frequent media stories about record prices, and the impression of strong demand from mysterious moneyed collectors from

144 See for instance „The art boom of dreamtime‟ (Cadzow, 1987) and „Dots for Dollars‟ (Schwartz, 1989). Another example of this interpretation of the Aboriginal art market is an interactive installation titled All Stock Must Go! which was staged by the Brisbane collective The Campfire Group outside the Queensland Art Gallery during the 1996 Asia-Pacific Triennial. The installation consisted of a cattle truck painted with Aboriginal designs and laden with items of Aboriginal art, kitsch and tourist souvenirs, all with price tags. It was staffed by members of the collective who, along with various signs around the truck, encouraging onlookers to „buy buy buy‟. All the objects were sold by the end of the Triennial (Neale, 1996; Eather [ed], 2005). 218

overseas (McCulloch, 1997a; Moore & Eccles, 1999; Dwyer, 1999; Gennochio, 2008). Investments in Aboriginal art received further impetus when the wider boom in the Australian art market led people to establish art collections as part of their self-managed super funds, and Aboriginal art was seen to have the greatest chance of accruing value (Neales, 2004; Fulton & Morgan, 2010).

Among the interviews I conducted, I had the most historically informative discussion about the market with fine Aboriginal art dealer Neil Murphy, who was formerly employed at Coo-ee Art in Sydney before he established his own business. Murphy identified the period 2000-2002 as the time when he sensed a shift in the way people were engaging with Aboriginal fine art. Not only did he perceive that collectors were less interested in being informed about the works they were buying, but he also sensed that a new kind of collector was entering the market:

N.M: [O]ne was dealing not so much with the time depth and the culture and the formation of painting, or various formations of painting, at that time there was definitely a shift in the market place and people were starting to invest large amounts of money quite… erratically, without sort of seeking very much advice…' … L.F: „Right, so they weren‟t searching as much for a depth of understanding.‟ N.M: „No… really the investment motive I think was starting to emerge much more strongly.‟ (N. Murphy, personal correspondence, November 19, 2007)

My interview with Murphy took place after a highly successful Aboriginal art auction staged by Lawson Menzies, one of a series that took place between 2004 and 2007. These auctions were controversial because Lawson Menzies consigned Aboriginal art works that would have been rejected by other auction houses on the grounds of poor (that is, they were traceable to non-Art Centre sources and dealers thought to be of ill-repute) (Allam, 2005; McDermott, 2008; Perkin, 2008). For Murphy, the Lawson Menzies sales were indicative of a market becoming „incoherent‟, „chaotic‟ and „frenzied‟. „Cultural value‟ was being displaced by „financial value‟ in determining not only what people were looking for, but which kinds of people were acquiring works. 219

In Murphy‟s choice of words we can sense how offensive an overtly mercenary approach to art is to fine arts sensibilities. As Velthuis notes in his of contemporary art prices, dealers of contemporary fine art tend to be derisive of the secondary market and hope that a collector will not resell a work acquired from them for a long time, if ever. Indeed some refuse to sell works to people they perceive to be profit-oriented, because in the hands of such people „the art work fails to get rid of its commodity character‟ (2005:43-44). This has not been the case with Aboriginal fine art, and indeed the Lawson Menzies sales exemplifies a pattern that has been seen at many Aboriginal art auctions, whereby artworks are sometimes sold at auction only a few years after they initially appeared on the primary market, and then reappear at auction after relatively short intervals. The period of maturation that usually sees, in the case of non-indigenous artists, the high-end resale market develop very late in the career of a very small number of successful artists, or after they have died, has thus not applied to Aboriginal art.145 In light of this, we can appreciate why Murphy described the market as frenzied and chaotic. Consistent with the view that the Aboriginal fine arts market has been highly speculative is the frequently expressed concern that, as discussed in the previous chapter, art historical and critical literature pertaining to Aboriginal art remains scarce relative to the scope and success of the movement (Benjamin, 2000; Acker, 2008). In an informal discussion, an auction house professional related to me that she finds preparing “copy” for Aboriginal art auction catalogues extremely demanding because for some artists there is very little credible literature from which to draw. Murphy made a similar point about the prevailing lack of knowledge about individual artists:

NM: [I]f some of these artists are considered to be some of Australia‟s most significant contemporary artists, then one should really start to think about how their work is entering the marketplace... How it‟s being regarded in the marketplace, whether there‟s a coherent, self-generating discourse around the work, whether anybody buying the painting would even recognize the artist if they walked into the gallery. Whether the person who runs the gallery, or the shop, or the business, would recognize the artist if they walked into the gallery. Ah, I don‟t think that‟s the case in many cases. (N. Murphy, personal communication, November 19, 2007).

145 In one controversial case an emerging “star” artist, Irruntju painter Tommy Watson, painted work for a dealership which was then sold directly through an auction house, by-passing the primary market (Eccles, 2005). 220

Despite this dearth of information about the artists and their art, there has been an energetic discourse around investment and collectability, and it is often in the context of art market discourses that the greatest illumination of art works, styles, subject matter and artists' biographies has taken place. For instance, Sotheby's catalogues have been notable for their eloquent and detailed explanations of individual works and the spiritual and custodial knowledge that informs artists‟ practice. For instance, Wally Caruana, who was the pioneering Senior Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art at the NGA between 1984 and 2001, and involved with many seminal exhibitions and monographs on the Aboriginal art movement, has been a senior consultant at Sotheby's for many years and involved in brokering relationships with major collectors. Adrien Newstead, director of Coo-ee Gallery and former head of Aboriginal art at Lawson Menzies (during the period discussed above), has recently launched the Australian Indigenous Art Market Top 100, a website that offers a profile of the artist, a discussion of their style, a market analysis, a graph illustrating market performance and a list of the top ten artworks at auction (AIAM100, 2012). The dearth of information about individual artists, and the fact that expertise about artists finds an outlet in these commercial settings, is indicative of the degree to which the dissemination of information about the Aboriginal art movement and the development of a lucrative resale market for Aboriginal art have occurred simultaneously rather than consecutively. This is unusual in the contemporary art world, in which art discourses are usually a very important part of the consecration of fine art, from which value in the marketplace follows. We have therefore seen that the Aboriginal art market has been characterized by highly speculative tendencies and overtly mercenary objectives, and that these forces have impacted upon the way the Aboriginal art movement has been perceived within the fine arts market. These disorderly characteristics are critical to understanding the peculiar structure of the Aboriginal art market, to which I now turn.

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5.4 The bifurcation of the Aboriginal art market

Since the 1990s the Aboriginal art market has been characterized by extremely polarized approaches to the facilitation of art production and the sale of art. This rift exists between fine arts dealers on the one hand, and what can be described as business- oriented dealers on the other, and to a great degree it corresponds with what Velthuis describes as the „opposition between the sacred world of art and the profane world of commerce‟ (2005:42). This rift was discussed in many of the interviews I conducted, for instance with Christopher Hodges, Beverley Knight, Neil Murphy and Tim Klingender (see also Hodges, 2007).146 For example, Murphy described the entrance of small business-oriented dealers into the Aboriginal art market around the 2000 Olympic Games. He lamented the fact that these dealers, having successfully traded small and insignificant works, then assumed that they had „the right to sell any artist‟s work‟. He went on to say that „[These] people were going into the communities more commonly and acquiring works before they were even seen by the established galleries who traditionally had dealt with those works‟. Beverly Knight presented this rift in a different manner by dramatically delimiting the fine Aboriginal art market in our interview. When I asked her a general question about the reasons for the „success‟ of Aboriginal art, she responded by saying that „[Aboriginal Art is] reasonably successful, but not all that successful. In fact if you look at all the galleries that exhibit Aboriginal art, I can hardly think of any, I can think of three that I think are good galleries, and we‟re talking about the whole of Australia here‟ (B. Knight, personal correspondence, September 25, 2007).

Murphy and Knight are emblematic of fine arts dealers in the sense that they are cultured elites based in cities who share a “love” of art. Such dealers collaborate with Art Centres in staging exhibitions and managing an artists‟ career, although in rare cases they may represent an independent Aboriginal artist who is not associated with an Art Centre. They uphold fine arts conventions, which means that they seek a long-term

146 C. Hodges (personal correspondence, March 18, 2008); N. Murphy (personal correspondence, November 19, 2007); T. Klingender (personal correspondence, February 22, 2008). 222

association with an artist, often work with a consignment model147 of representation and show only the best works in annual exhibitions. They dedicate themselves to cultivating artists‟ reputations and educating collectors with whom they have sustained relationships over time. Negotiations between all interested parties are (ostensibly) transparent and conducted according to strict professional standards that correspond to those upheld in the wider fine arts market. Collectively, these dealers in association with the Art Centres circulate “well-provenanced” work, which is critical to the art's resale value on the auction market.

In contrast, the business-oriented dealers, intermediaries and wholesalers take a competitive, free market approach to the sale of Aboriginal art. They are also far more numerous than the fine art dealers. In almost all cases they have had a professional background outside the arts (as was the case with Euan Hills, discussed in Chapter 4), or sell Aboriginal art as an adjunct to another business venture such as a caravan park, shop or taxi service (see Petitjean, 2000: Part 1; McDermott, 2008). It is highly unlikely that these vendors would seek to represent other forms of art, as they do not have the knowledge or cultural capital to build an artists' profile or clientele. Such vendors are located in Alice Springs, major cities and tourist spots and usually cater to tourists and occasional buyers. They generally treat the works they sell as revolving “stock”. Paintings are mixed in with other merchandise and the vendors are not interested in restricting supply but rather respond directly to perceived demand. Further, they do not believe that any other dealer has propriety over a particular artist. They source product from wherever they can, and rather than taking works on consignment they usually buy them outright and resell it with increased mark-up. In such contexts an artwork may pass through the hands of several agents and intermediaries before reaching the buyer. While these dealers may source work from Art Centres, generally they don‟t have sustained relationships with them, and in some cases they may encourage an artist affiliated with an Art Centre to paint for them or other parties. There may not be thorough accounting, and the terms of trade may be highly unconventional and untransparent. For instance, artwork might be exchanged for a regular taxi service in

147 The consignment model entails that both the artist and art dealer take a percentage of the sale price for an art work, often at a 60/40 split. As Christopher Hodges summarises, this means that „every sale, every decision, is of mutual concern and benefit‟ (2007). 223

Alice Springs, a secondhand car, weekly food drops, or alcohol. In other circumstances an ongoing relationship of reciprocity between artist and vendor is negotiated, where an artist can „drop in‟ or call to request cash, food or assistance anytime, and the vendor expects them to paint for them periodically (A. Knight, personal communication, September 9, 2007; E. Hills, personal communication, April 18, 2008).

A normative reading of the fine art dealers and business-oriented dealers that adheres to a fine arts ethos would differentiate the two groups as follows. While the fine art dealers support the Art Centre model which enables artists to stay in touch with country and family, use quality materials in a safe and comfortable environment and produce works of high “aesthetic quality” and “cultural integrity”, the business-oriented dealers “poach”, or “cherry pick” the most successful artists from the Art Centre and take them to demeaning locations, provide them with poor quality materials and encourage them to produce works quickly. These practices weaken the collectivist base of the Art Centre, where the income from well established artists supports the practice of emerging artists who have not yet found a market, and compel artists to cheapen their product and their reputation. While the former uphold strict standards of professionalism expected by serious collectors, the latter dealers break all the rules of artist representation, and encourage the artists to do so as well. While the former have labored to persuade collectors of the fine arts merit of Aboriginal art and ensure that an artist has a sustainable career, the latter are opportunistic and profit-driven, and have exploited the auction market hype to trick naïve buyers into believing that the substandard work they sell is worth a lot of money. In light of the broader story being told in this chapter, the fine art dealers are knitting Aboriginal art into an august, fine arts tradition, while the business-oriented dealers anchor Aboriginal art to the realm of Aboriginal mass culture. There is a pronounced moral dimension to this differentiation that goes much further than the contrasts that I have drawn here, and this will be expanded upon later in the Chapter.

We find a useful illustration of the dynamics of these relationships in the following anecdote related to me by Adam Knight, the director of Aranda Art (A. Knight, personal communication, September 9, 2007). From the point of view of some fine arts dealers, Knight is a dealer who is complicit with the commercial side of the 224

market (see McDermott, 2008; Eccles, 2005). He has no background in art but has been involved with outback Aboriginal communities for most of his life, both during his childhood and in his adult years as a business man, and came to Aboriginal art via an Emu oil business. Aranda Art's website includes images of Knight with Aboriginal artists and their families, with whom he has sustained friendships. The use of such photographs (common in business-oriented dealers‟ advertisements), is distasteful in the eyes of the fine-arts collegiate. It is judged as being designed to convey to touristic consumers that the dealer is in touch with the authentic, black-skinned Aborigine, and such a marketing tool would serve no purpose in the world of non-indigenous fine art. The following event took place at an airport after a conference in Central Australia. Knight, in a private capacity, had been on an Art Centre‟s waiting list for a painting by a well-reputed artist – „an absolute superstar of the art world‟ in his eyes. Apart from rare exhibitions, this particular artist‟s work is only shown at the gallery of one urban fine arts dealer. Knight had recently been informed by the Art Centre coordinator that the anticipated painting was ready for him, and he crossed paths with the artist and coordinator at the airport. The artist‟s urban dealer was also there, and was travelling business class while the artist travelled economy, which Knight found amusing given that the artist „could make more money than [her dealer] ever could‟. Knight, who was warmly received by the artist, asked the coordinator if she would take a photo of him with the artist. The photo was about to be taken when suddenly the fine art dealer raced towards the group yelling „Stop, Stop! Do not dare take a photo of that man with that woman!‟ Ultimately no photo was taken. This story conveys the importance, for the fine arts dealer, of preventing any public association being drawn between this particular artist and a dealer associated with the business-oriented side of the market. With respect to Knight himself, the story conveyed his genuine admiration for the artist, and his incredulity at the pomposity and possessiveness of the urban dealer.

Knight‟s anecdote is indicative of the fact that the arts collegiate feel that they are embattled against a hoard of profiteering philistines who are perverting fine arts principles for monetary gain. However, the preceding discussions in this chapter might encourage us to see the fine arts collegiate as interlopers within a vast and well- established arena of Aboriginal mass culture, whose efforts go against the grain of the actions and priorities of the majority of artists, retailers and consumers in that arena. 225

Through this lens, we might see the business-oriented vendors as being simply the most recent participants in the arena of Aboriginal mass culture, who have practiced a style of market opportunism, adaptation and entrepreneurship which is characteristic of and indeed respectable in many other markets.

5.5 A theoretical interlude on the relationship between art and money

The tensions that underlie the bifurcation of the Aboriginal art market can be better understood against the backdrop of the motile relationships between high and low culture and between art and money. Ever since artistic and cultural forms became commodities in a market economy in Europe in the 18th century, Western artistic spheres have been shaped by the tensions that underpin these two overlapping relationships (see Shiner, 2001: Chapter 6). This is suggested by Huyssen, who has argued that „Modernism constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other: an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture‟ (1986:vii; see also Jameson, 2002:159). If we recall Chapter 1‟s discussion of the Romantic Movement, we could argue that it was during the Romantic period that this „strategy of exclusion‟ was inaugurated. As I noted then, underpinning the figure of the Romantic artist was the conviction that an autonomous realm for art, insulated from the volatility of popular trends, commercial imperatives, and the ideological forces of the political realm, must be preserved in an industrial capitalist world. The relationship between high and low culture has been theorized by a range of scholars and in the following sections I will bring some of these theories to bear upon the Aboriginal art arena.

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5.5.1 The Culture Industry

In a chapter of their book The Dialectic of the Enlightenment titled „Enlightenment as mass deception‟, Horkheimer and Adorno present a highly pessimistic view of the effects of capitalism on the integrity and autonomy of cultural forms (2002/1947; see also Adorno 1991/1938; 1978/1967). Hesmondhalgh provides this summation of their thesis: „Culture and Industry were supposed, in their view, to be opposites but in modern capitalist democracy, the two had collapsed together. Hence, the Culture Industry‟ (2002:15). According to the Culture Industry thesis, capitalism conditions all objects and practices of culture to serve mercenary and administrative imperatives. Rather than encouraging critical thought and imaginative engagement, culture becomes a diversionary and incapacitating form of entertainment.148 Indeed, under capitalism, culture is the means by which our submission to an inequitable and repressive social order is perpetuated. As Adorno and Horkheimer write „[a]musement always means putting things out of mind... At its root is powerlessness. It is indeed escape, but not, as it claims, escape from bad reality but from the last thought of resisting reality‟ (2002/1947:106). Mass culture inscribes an identity upon us in a schematic way such that, even though we believe our tastes are freely-formed and unique, we consume cycles of standardized forms, masked by the gloss of novelty, that are targeted to particular social „types‟. Our enslavement to work means that our spontaneous, heuristic and reflexive inclinations are circumscribed, and we are consequently enslaved to impoverished cultural forms. All efforts to assert individuality and autonomy in a manner that cannot be co-opted result in severe social exclusion and a chronic sense of one‟s inadequacy and irrelevance. For Adorno and Horkheimer, the antitheses of the objects of consumer culture produced by the Culture Industry are „autonomous‟, „authentic‟, „serious‟ and „pure‟ works of art that are free of the reifying „principle of utility‟ which underlies capitalist society (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002/1947:128; Adorno, 1978/1967:111). However, they argue that a negative dialectic exists whereby this art that encapsulates the forces of truth and protest that are stifled in everyday life is in fact powerless to change our lives, due to the intellectual and emotional deprivations generated by the conditions of

148 In addition to the primary texts, the following summary draws on Bernstein (1991), Lunn, (1982) and Negus (1997). 227

capitalist production. The other implication of their thesis is that the forces of mechanical reproduction which have allowed art and culture to be shared by a much larger community than had done before have been turned to the cause of mass oppression, not mass emancipation. Adorno's potent summation of the problem in a letter to Walter Benjamin declares that high culture and popular culture comprise „torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up‟ (Adorno in Jones, 2011:49; Bernstein, 1991:17; Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002/1948:127-128). The Culture Industry thesis was criticized for its rigid and homogenising approach to cultural activity, and for taking an elitist view of what constitutes authentic art, however there is a strong tradition of sympathetic critique (Hesmondhalgh, 2002:15-17; Eyerman, 2006; Jones, 2011).149 We can see how much the policy paradigm of the cultural industries (and the creative industries) has inverted the philosophy at the heart of the Culture Industry thesis. Rather than seeing art as a space from which to critique and imagine alternatives to capitalist relations, these policy paradigms treat art as a resource to enhance commerce. For those who are still concerned about the inequitable and inhuman consequences of the expansion of capitalism, the cultural industries policy paradigm very much attests to the dystopian acuity of the Culture Industry thesis.

The Culture Industry thesis is highly pertinent to the process by which Aboriginal culture has been commercialized and instrumentalised in the context of the cultural industries policies, as discussed above. The writings of the QUT researchers, for instance their argument that people‟s „everyday lives, beliefs and practices‟ are the „raw material for content creation‟, constitute precisely the kind of rationalist synthesis of culture, subjectivity and enterprise that Adorno and Horkheimer feared would become the norm. Similarly, we can perceive the problems that surround the instrumentalisation of culture in the following remarks from ATSIC‟s 1995 Cultural Policy Framework:

It is unfortunate that we have had to allow the recognition of indigenous cultural forms and practices as valuable and saleable commodities – in

149 See Negus (1997) for a discussion of UNESCO's The Culture Industries: a challenge for the future of culture report of 1982 which echoed many of Adorno and Horkheimer‟s concerns. 228

Aboriginal art and cultural tourism – to be a key factor in their general recognition as integral and vital components in Australia's cultural resources. But nonetheless, since there is recognition at national and international levels, there is an agenda to be developed .... A cohesive policy overview mechanism and structure for the production and marketing of indigenous cultural product is also imperative for consolidating and increasing the economic empowerment and well-being of indigenous peoples. Of equal importance is the role of production, distribution, promotion and market development of this product plays [sic] in fostering an understanding by the broader Australian community of the unique nature of indigenous culture (1995:8, 17, original italics).

This passage is noteworthy for the fact that, on the one hand, it is premised on laudable social aspirations and acknowledges that the commodification of culture is problematic, while on the other, it is suffused with marketing vocabulary and articulates an overt means-ends instrumentalism. The survival of Aboriginal culture would seem to have become predicated on its ability to be reified, commercialized and subordinated to various principles of utility.150

5.5.2 Where can I find disinterested Aboriginal art?

Adorno‟s and Horkheimer‟s concept of autonomous and non-purposive art is Kantian in spirit, and this heritage allows us to explore another useful concept for understanding the tensions that surround the economic dimensions of the Aboriginal phenomenon: disinterestedness. As Shiner writes of the emergence of the norm of disinterested aesthetic contemplation in the 18th century, Kant suggested that the „true aesthetic experience‟ was founded upon the „“harmonious free play” of our imagination (precepts) and our understanding (concepts)‟ (2001:146). As Shiner explains, the paradox inherent to the concept of “disinterestedness” is that it „involved an intense “interest”, in the sense of focused attention, but a complete absence of an interest, in the sense of a desire for possession or personal satisfaction, even of a moral or religious

150 See Sutton (1992b) for a sombre interpretation of Aboriginal art‟s status in Australian and international culture that resonates strongly with the cultural industries critique. 229

kind‟ (2001:144). That is, one‟s engagement with the art object should be free of any covetous, ideological or utilitarian intentions. Such ideas remain a mainstay of fine arts thinking, underlying the sacredness of art‟s autonomy. They are also integral to fine art‟s duplicitous relationship with money (in terms of both profit and wealth). As Bourdieu argues, the kind of distancing associated with the Kantian aesthetic disposition corresponds to, and is in fact dependent upon, one‟s distance from economic need (1984; 1993). However, this enabling wealth must be misrecognised because, as Miller remarks, the „role of art as moral and critical commentary upon modern life ... is threatened by the amoral and quantitative qualities of money‟ (1991:52). It is the very particular skill of the fine arts dealer to hold this contradiction in suspension. They must advocate for the art they represent in „disinterested‟ terms, yet ensure, through discreet strategies and the reputation of their connoisseurship, that the art becomes desirable to those with wealth.

The concepts of „autonomous‟ and „disinterested‟ art present us with another vantage point from which to contemplate the phenomenon of Aboriginal mass culture. We could argue that members of the fine arts collegiate have sought to affiliate Aboriginal fine art with the Kantian aesthetic tradition. However, a range of forces anchor Aboriginal art to the sphere of commerce and to ideological agendas; that is, to the realm of „interest‟. We already have a strong sense of this from the discussions above, however it is worth reminding ourselves of these forces. In a very straightforward sense, the economic circumstances of Aboriginal people anchor Aboriginal art to the realm of „interest‟, because a great deal of Aboriginal art practice is interwoven with highly liquid, hand-to-mouth economies that involve many dependent relatives. As I have indicated in earlier discussions, this is not a new condition: artifact, craft and art production have been – for more than a century – a means for Aboriginal people to earn money when other avenues have been limited. This has been the case on missions, reserves and pastoral stations; for Aboriginal fringe dwellers, itinerants and low-skilled workers; and in cooperatives and small businesses catering to the tourism industry and the Aboriginalia market. Aboriginal art has also been anchored to the realm of „interest‟ by being immured within the morally inflected economic, nationalistic and civil society projects explored in Chapter 2. And as we have seen, the cultural industries

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framework, in addition to other policy imperatives, has encouraged various arms of the State, including Indigenous bodies such as ATSIC (as illustrated in the quotation above), to treat the commercialization of Aboriginal art and culture as a vehicle for empowerment. Finally, the auction house market and business-oriented dealers have also anchored Aboriginal art to the realm of „interest‟. In the case of the former, this is somewhat paradoxical suggestion given that auction houses have been so essential to the consecration of Aboriginal fine art. Nevertheless, it is unquestionably the case that auction houses catalysed and capitalized upon the speculative character of the Aboriginal art market. The consequence of this has been that ideas about monetary worth have been an explicit part of the collective negotiation of the significance of Aboriginal fine art works in the contemporary art arena. The business-oriented dealers sully any Aboriginal art that might be considered „disinterested‟ because they cater explicitly to the tourist market and other consumers with no cultural capital, and, as mentioned, treat art as „stock‟. This is illustrated in the following comment from Art Mob dealer Euan Hills (discussed in Chapter 4, section 4.4): „I try and make [my gallery] free and accessible to most people by having a range of product from, you know, five bucks up to a couple of hundred thousand. So there‟s something there for everyone‟ (E. Hills, personal communication, April 18, 2008). In a similar vein, the following (not unusual) newspaper advertisement is an insult to fine arts sensibilities on many fronts:

ABORIGINAL ART SALE: hundreds of paintings, overflowing stockrooms & new works on the way! Take this opportunity to buy quality, authentic, contemporary aboriginal art at a seriously discounted price! (Kate Owen Gallery, 2010).

The language and strategies of commerce that are displayed in Hills‟ comment and Kate Owen‟s advertisement ruin the impression of exclusivity and connoisseurship that contemporary fine art dealers work so hard to cultivate, and reduce the art to a basic, tradable commodity.

All of these forces which anchor Aboriginal art to the realm of „interest‟ set it apart from other fine cultural forms that have an enduring pedigree, well established 231

traditions of professionalism and discretion, highly specified pathways to consecration, and a high-culture oriented audience. A clear illustration of this can be found in the following derisive comments made by London fine art dealer Josh Lilley about the overtly Australian spin of some Aboriginal art exhibitions he had seen in London:

You don‟t need to have those [gum] leaves burning in the corner, and the Australian commissioner and, um, music, and – I‟m not joking about these things, I‟ve been to exhibitions in London with all three of those things … I mean that‟s just naff in my opinion, and unnecessary, and detracting from the beauty and the quality of the work (J. Lilley, personal communication, July 9, 2008).

Lilly‟s comment is indicative of the fact that, within the contemporary art arena, Aboriginal art is laden with associations and instrumentalised in ways that exceed the control of, and greatly frustrate, the fine arts collegiate for whom the autonomy of the art is paramount.

In light of these circumstances, we can appreciate that the institution of the Art Centre is so vital because it has come to guarantee in a unique way the disinterestedness of fine Aboriginal art forms. In Western fine arts contexts, the signs of disinterestedness with which we are familiar include artists' preparedness to forsake the benefits of normal working life in order to devote themselves to their art, their nomination by society as the providers of clear-eyed commentary on social and political matters of the day, and their preoccupation with formal and conceptual problems intrinsic to art itself. The Art Centre acts as a surrogate for these signs and a trustee of Aboriginal art‟s integrity in several ways. First, their not-for-profit status ensures that the affirmation and rejuvenation of culture is recognised as a priority of art production. Second, in almost all cases a non-indigenous person acts as a buffer between the world of commerce and the world of the remote Aboriginal artist. Third, by providing a space in which elder artists can mentor younger artists, and in which coordinators can exert quality control measures and convey fine art expectations to artists, an art school scenario is simulated to some extent. Fourth, fine Aboriginal art is thought to be created by an artist deeply in touch with their country, either experientially (by living on country or making frequent visits), or in their memory and imagination, and the remote 232

Art Centre provides the best conditions for sustaining this connectedness. This means that “Country”, by being a deeply emotive referent for Aboriginal artists that is now widely respected, brings a unique ethnic inflection to disinterested Aboriginal art. Altogether we could say that Art Centres exist as bulwarks against the irredeemable commercialization of Aboriginal art and are domains which assure collectors that something akin to non-indigenous fine art practice is being fostered (Wright, 2000; Healy 2002; Indigenous Art – Securing the future, 2007; Australian Art Collector, 2009; 2010).

The principles of autonomy and disinterestedness are salient to another problematic feature of Aboriginal art production to which I have alluded: the abundance of product. For many people, the ubiquity within the Aboriginal art market of colourful, decorative paintings, and in particular, dots, elicits the belief that Aboriginal art is homogenous and conformist and that there is now too much of it. The argument has frequently been made that the market is flooded, the movement has peaked, and the bubble has burst.151 Pioneer fine art dealer Gabrielle Pizzi made the following remarks in 1989:

[There has been] an indiscriminate flooding of the market with work of alarmingly poor quality... The curatorial ineptitude and greed of some get- rich-quick dabblers in Aboriginal art is responsible for currently being inundated with an avalanche of alarmingly banal and outrageously overpriced paintings (1989 in Ryan, 2005:507; see also Kronenberg, 1995; Grishin in Altman et. al, 1989:287).

As with Euan Hills‟ comment and the Kate Owen advertisement, Pizzi‟s quotation provides us with another vivid evocation of the blasphemous commodification of art. The problem of oversupply in part derives from the promiscuity of some remote Aboriginal artists with respect to who they paint for: at any one time it may be possible to acquire a particular artist‟s work from a range of sources, such as an Art Centre, a wholesaler in Alice Springs, a prestigious art auction, an urban fine arts gallery, through an online vendor and at a tourist-oriented outlet (Hills, 2006; Acker in Finnane,

151 See for instance Altman & Taylor (eds) (1991); Greer (2005); Rothwell (2010). 233

2012).152 Furthermore, some artists paint works of variable quality depending on the acumen and expectations of whichever agent they are negotiating with (Kronenberg, 1995; Schmidt, 2012). These practices transgress the traditional artist/dealer relationship on many fronts and create problems that rarely arise in the non-indigenous art world, in which a restriction on supply and consistency with respect to representation is critical. Clearly, the oversupply of Aboriginal art is a result of Aboriginal people‟s pursuit of income to serve the most basic, short term needs working in productive relation with particular dealers‟ pursuit of profitable products.

In summary, it is evident that the distinctions that exist between fine art and commercial art that are usually well maintained by both vendors and consumers in western art markets are unraveled in the Aboriginal art market to the extent that a particular artist‟s work can inhabit both spaces at once. Works can remain marketable even if an artist‟s behavior goes against fine arts principles, because business-oriented dealers can refer to a strong record of institutional acquisitions and auction house sales to prove an artist‟s credentials to a naïve buyer and to assure them of high resale worth.153 At the same time, the fine arts collegiate will often endeavor to maintain the profile of such an artist, in order to affirm the integrity of their connoisseurship and maintain good relations with collectors.154

152 Ben Korman's (2006) submission to the 2007 Senate Inquiry provides an illustration of this phenomenon, in which he mention of two artists who fit this description: George Ward Tjungarrayi and Ronnie Tjamptajinpa. 153 Such works are unlikely to ever be consigned for resale by prestigious auction houses. As Tim Klingender and another auction house professional related to me, a large part of their job is the „art of the gentle let down‟, as they only consign a tiny minority of Aboriginal art works based on quality and provenance grounds (T. Klingender, personal correspondence, February 22, 2008). 154 For instance, in 2010 Christopher Hodges‟ gallery Utopia Art Sydney held an exhibition titled „The Real : An Honest Survey‟. Gloria Petyarre is one of the most widely known and traded Aboriginal artists with an easily recognisable, decorative aesthetic. While Utopia Art Sydney has represented Gloria Petyarre since the 1980s, her work is sold through dozens of vendors. It is also the case that her particular style has been emulated by many other artists. The title of the show reveals an effort by Hodges to elevate a select few pieces above the multitude of “mass culture” works which he casts as false (not „honest‟) and irrelevant (not the „real‟ Gloria) (Meachem, 2010). 234

5.5.3 Kitsch and the “original reproduction”

Another concept that has been used to explore the complexity of the relationship between high and low culture, and which is pertinent to many of the issues discussed above, is kitsch. As Clement Greenberg (1939) argues, at the same time as the audience for the avant-garde was diminishing in the late 19th Century (attributable to the avant- garde‟s increasingly esoteric abstractions of form and meaning), another realm of entertainment for the newly literate urbanised working class was being established. These people's tastes were served by „popular, commercial art and literature with their chromeotypes, magazine covers, illustrations, ads, slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood movies, etc., etc.‟ (1939:4-5). Such objects comprise the world of kitsch. Greenberg argues that the „raw material‟ of kitsch is „the debased and academicised simulacra of genuine culture‟ (5), and this argument is highly salient to the market for Aboriginal tourist products and other commercial forms of Aboriginal art. As he writes:

The precondition for kitsch, a condition without which kitsch would be impossible, is the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends…. It draws its life blood, so to speak, from this reservoir of accumulated experience (1939:5-6).

The objects at the centre of the tourist art exchange are shaped by a fluid process of adaptation, by producers and brokers, to what they perceive to be consumers‟ expectations about what a desirable and emblematic figment of exotic culture might look like (Jules-Rosette, 1984; Shiner, 1994). In the case of Aboriginal art, the reference points for these negotiations include historic rock art and bark paintings, didgeridoos, boomerangs, Papunya paintings and particular works by artists such as Emily Kngwarreye, all of which fit Greenberg‟s description of a „fully matured cultural tradition‟. All have an inexhaustible luster which ensures that they both nourish and weather the forces of Aboriginal mass culture. Many of the Aboriginal-themed commodities that I discussed earlier in this chapter can be described as kitsch in these terms. A particularly eclectic example of „ethno-kitsch‟ was observed by Jones in

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Central Australia in the early 1990s. As he describes, „[s]mall mass-produced terracotta lidded containers in the shape of sea shells and animals, embossed with motifs from Arnhem Land, are hand painted with acrylic dots by Central Australian women whose employment is subsidised under a Commonwealth scheme‟ (1992b:142). It is noteworthy that this example is also illustrative of the way governmental economic objectives has influenced the proliferation of Aboriginal mass culture.

Another interesting example of Aboriginal cultural production that can be defined as kitsch are the „bush leaves‟ paintings produced by Gloria Petyarre, and other Utopia artists – many of whom are Emily Kngwarraye‟s kin. These are optically engaging and pretty works, and they are extremely popular among casual buyers and tourists: an unending supply in varied colours, sizes and prices can be found in galleries and shops in Alice Springs and other locations. Their decorative appeal is attested to by the fact that Australian jewellery company Mondo Rondo has created a handmade, licensed „Indigenous Utopia Collection‟ of earrings, pendants and brooches featuring these artists' designs (Mondo Rondo, 2012). Similarly, in 2009, Paris fashion house Hermès commissioned Gloria Petyarre to create a design for their collectable silk scarves, again based on the bush medicine leaves theme, and in 2011 Nintendo commissioned four Utopia artists to decorate limited edition consoles to be auctioned on Ebay for charity. We can gain a more nuanced perspective on the kitsch quality of these bush leaves paintings if we reflect on the way Aboriginal artistic labour has been interpreted by observers. In Aboriginal art discourses, notions of “slave labour”, and “production line” and “production chain” art are common. This can be seen, for example, in Toohey‟s description of the „unregulated backyard sweatshops of Alice, where artists are cajoled from their communities to produce fast - but genuine - art for cash‟ (Toohey, 2008).155 In his theorisation of the nature of artistic labour, Ryan suggests that all forms of contemporary cultural production depend for their credibility on there being an „explicit separation and preservation of the creative phase of production from the reproductive phase‟ (1992:41). It is clear that many people perceive the forces of mass

155For other examples see Willis & Fry, 1989b; Rothwell, 2006a; Cadzow, 1995; Kronenberg, 1995; Allam, 2005; Bell, 2002; McDermott, 2008. 236

culture to be at work in the „creative phase‟ of Aboriginal art production, and this raises interesting questions about how we should define the objects that are the product of such labour.156 It could be argued that the creators of the bush leaves paintings are themselves, in many cases not unwillingly, engaged in a form of mass production even before we get to the licensed earrings, scarves and consoles. In other words, original works of Aboriginal art such as these are often of a piece with the industrial manufacture of Aboriginal themed objects, because the artists are in a sense embedded in the system as „reproductive technologies‟ (Johnson, 1996). They are producing what we might call an “original reproduction”: a painting which is one of many versions of a design that has been found to be popular; something akin to a mass produced print that is still an original painting on canvas by an Aboriginal person.157 This circumstance is, once again, a reflection of the unique place Aboriginal art has within the economies of Aboriginal communities, and illustrates how the usual distinctions between high and low culture are blurred in the Aboriginal art arena. To recall Greenberg‟s terminology, these artists are producing the „debased simulacra‟ of their own original cultural tradition with great irreverence for the hierarchical and oppositional structures of the high art world that bestow variable value upon cultural objects.

156The following description from Murphy, in which we can perceive the fine art dealer‟s priorities of restricting supply and bringing only the highest quality art to the market, highlights to the degree to which the imperative of reproduction is part of the creative phase of artistic labour in the case of many Aboriginal artists:

NM: I‟ve said [to artists] ... “paint less. More money.” … if an artist is capable of producing very fine work, then it shouldn‟t be over-produced. Ten paintings can hold the same value as a hundred paintings, by restricting the market for them. And so an artist doesn‟t have to be a slave to painting. ... [T]hat‟s the way I think it should function, but you just have artists running from caravan to caravan to backyard to backyard to painting shed to painting shed, from sort of car yard to car yard just sort of painting consistently, and never making any money! (personal correspondence, November 19, 2007).

157 It is important to note that this kind of fast and repetitive production cannot be exclusively seen in terms of poverty and pressures to produce. It is well understood that many Aboriginal artists have a relatively careless relationship to the art object. In part this reflects a non-materialistic social order, and in part the fact that painting, as with song, dance, ground painting and other forms of traditional Aboriginal culture, is a transient enactment of a piece of a universe of knowledge held by the artist. Thus the repetition of a design can entail cultural affirmation, rather than debasement. Having said this, artists are also clearly responding to market demand (Jones, 1992b; Michaels, 1988; Schmidt, 2012). 237

5.5.4 The ambivalent status of “low” culture and its relevance to urban/remote distinctions

Throughout the thesis I have attended to the tensions that arise in relation to the distinction between urban and remote forms of Aboriginal art, and my exploration of the relationship between high and low culture in this chapter provide another opportunity to do so. The following discussion is not only of relevance to the Aboriginal art market, but to the patterns of consecration that apply to Aboriginal art.

“Low” culture has a far more ambivalent status in the fine arts realm than the above theorizations of the high/low culture opposition suggest. Adorno, Horkheimer and Greenberg leave little room for the possibility that any art of quality can be produced outside of the exclusive spheres of cultivation that nurture the fine artist. However, if they are right, how do we account for the highly reverential view of popular forms of culture that emerged in Europe during the pre-Romantic and Romantic periods, and in the taste for the folkloric and the primitive, as discussed in Chapter 1? Clearly “low” culture has not always been “bad” culture in the high art realm. Furthermore, many of the idealised attributes of the Romantic artist are traceable to these reverential attitudes towards the folk and the primitive. Among these attributes we might include, for instance, the belief that an artist is driven by emotion, intuition and instinct more than the rest of us. The value of low culture in the fine arts realm is also evinced by the fact that artists have often sought to engage with the world of the “common people” and mass culture, sometimes because they have an anti-elitist ethos and/or because they share the Romantics‟ belief that vernacular cultural expressions have great authenticity and are vessels of important truths about humanity. Furthermore, since the innovations of Duchamp, Warhol and the advent of Postmodernist concepts of culture, artists have embraced the spectrum of popular and commodity culture in the fine arts realm. Indeed, in contrast to Greenberg who sees the avant-garde as the creators of „superior culture‟, Huyssen (1986) accords avant-garde status to that lineage of artists who refuted and sought to destabilise the adversarial relationship between high and low culture that was

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such a feature of modernism, and sees this destabilization as a permanent condition of postmodernism.158 Recognising the ambivalence of low culture in the high arts realm can help us understand the very different ways in which urban and remote Aboriginal art have been consecrated in the contemporary art arena. Pop art perhaps best typifies the kind of art movement that has destabilized the high/low culture opposition, and many of the most successful urban Aboriginal artists share a pop sensibility. Aspects of popular culture feature in their work in an ironic and humorous mode, and they appropriate a variety of cultural forms and techniques of representation and manufacture from the realm of popular consumer culture to construct artworks with layered cultural references and meanings.159 Importantly, it is the explication of these that underpins the art‟s validation in institutional, art critical and art market settings. In contrast, remote Indigenous art has been integrated into the fine art realm on Romantic, folkloricist and modern-primitivist terms, and in making this point I wish to remind the reader that these paradigms of engagement are not reducible to an abhorrent racism or exoticism. A large part of Aboriginal art‟s appeal rests upon the belief (one affirmed by the artists themselves) in the emotive sincerity of the artist's connectedness to their “Country‟; their fidelity to mythological and ancestral narratives; and to some extent on people‟s attraction to the idea of small, non-materialistic communities removed from urban society in which art, music and narration are embedded within daily life. It could be argued that advocates of Indigenous fine art seek to draw a seamless union between the features of “classical” Indigenous culture that are at the source of the work (affirmed by the Art Centre locale) and the Romantic idea that art is a meaningful and authentic expression of self.

158 On this point it is noteworthy that, in Williams‟ eyes, the Romantics can lay claim to being among the first modernists (1996/1976:32). 159 Richard Bell has created racialised appropriations of Roy Lichtenstein's cartoon strips, and inserted his work within the suburban domestic interiors of non-Indigenous artist Howard Arkley's airbrushed paintings. Brook Andrew has emboldened and amplified a Wiradjuri design in a variety of ways using neon, advertising formats and a jumping castle, and Vernon Ah kee has created a series of surf boards decorated with Queensland shield designs. Destiny Deacon and Tony Albert have made use of Aboriginalia in their works. Amongst Lin Onus's most admired works are a sculpture of a hills hoist (a washing line and symbol of Australian suburbia) hung with fruit bats whose droppings on the floor take the form of central desert dotted roundels, and a painting in which one of his recurring motifs, a dingo, rides Utagawa Hiroshige's iconic wave.

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Therefore, urban and remote Aboriginal art can in general be seen as being consecrated in relation to very different permutations of “low” culture. Remote Aboriginal art is associated with the folkloric “low” culture idealized within the context of disenchanted modernism while urban Aborginal art coheres with the post-modern celebration of the mediums of “low” mass culture.160 The enfolding of Aboriginal art within these distinct „regimes of value‟ (Myers, 2002) is arguably essential to the fine Aboriginal art market and art institutions, because it allows the fine arts collegiate to vitiate the disjunctions that underlie the way urban and remote Indigenous identity are conceptualized in Australian society. On the one hand, the Romantic/folkloric/ primitivist sphere of validation not only excludes art made by urban Aboriginal artists, it utterly discredits it. As I demonstrated in my discussion of the Art/Anthropology binary in Chapter 4, urban Aboriginal artists can rarely lay claim to the kind of cultural connectedness that I have just described in a manner that is convincing for art audiences, and they are always viewed as inauthentic from this perspective. On the other hand, the trends of postmodern irony, reflexivity and pastiche very clearly do not accommodate remote Aboriginal art (indeed, that art seems anachronistic from the point of view of postmodernism), while these mediums are clearly rich vehicles for the provocative and irreverent messages that cosmopolitan urban Aboriginal artists address to mainstream Australian society. Therefore, completely different types of art that incessantly bring each other (and the subjectivities that inform them) into question can be validated under the umbrella of Aboriginal fine art (see Willis & Fry, 2011:286-287).

160 Very interesting anomalies exist. See for instance the digital media innovations taking place at Yirrkala in Arnhem Land, the text-based work of Ngaanyatjarra artist June Walkutjukurr Richards and artist Linda Syddic's paintings of E.T. The works of Esme Timbery, which include harbor bridges and Opera Houses decorated with velvet and shells that were historically produced for tourist visitors to La Perouse in Sydney is also relevant. Her works have been consecrated as fine art in the last decade precisely because of their kitschy nature, and because they can be interpreted as a playful Indigenization of icons of the Settler State (see Allas, 2006). There is also a thread of realist landscape painting among Aboriginal artists who are not remote which expresses a highly Romantic attachment to place (Fisher, 2011).

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5.6 Ethics and exploitation

As has been discussed above, the socioeconomic disadvantage of remote Aboriginal communities creates a volatile setting for art production, and it is also the case that the success of the art produced in these communities draws the public‟s attention to this disadvantage. The following section will discuss sympathetic engagements with Aboriginal art and demonstrate that many people have sought to harness the good will that surrounds Aboriginal art to improve Aboriginal people‟s wellbeing. It will also explore the more complex manifestations of ethical concerns which are to be found in the machinations of the Aboriginal art marketplace itself, a marketplace which has been riven by conflicts over what constitutes virtuous conduct on the part of various non-indigenous agents.

5.6.1 Sympathetic engagements with Aboriginal art

It is important to begin by noting that the very formation of the Aboriginal art movement, with respect to the germination of the Art Centres and the art‟s ascendency within the fine art sphere, has depended on the altruistic motives of non-indigenous people who have dedicated large amounts of capital, time and expertise to it. Consequential figures like Geoffrey Bardon, Bob Edwards, Tim Johnson, Vivien Johnson and Rodney Gooch have clearly been motivated by a sense of compassion for and comradeship with Aboriginal people (see Myers, 2002:125; 2006:132-133; T. Johnson 1986; 1988; [ed], 2008). Many Art Centres have their origins in the introduction of batik, pottery and screen printing by non-indigenous artists and craftspeople, and have been affiliated with adult education initiatives which harness the idealism and humanitarian ethos of such individuals.161 Thus an important aspect of the genealogy of Art Centres, and the systems of training and mentoring artists that have emerged in association with them, has been the belief in the self-affirming and community-affirming benefits of creativity for the marginalised, with production and

161 This is the case for the Hermannsberg Potters, Ernabella Arts, Mangkaja Arts, Utopia Women‟s Batik project, Ngukurr/Roper River, Tjanpi Desert Weavers, Tiwi designs, Bima Wear. 241

distribution only later being refined to satisfy fine art sensibilities. It is also clear that altruism and compassion is what keeps many Art Centre coordinators in their jobs, given the exhausting and multifaceted nature of their responsibilities (see Kozeluh, 2007). With respect to collecting Aboriginal art, it is evident that many people are motivated to acquire Aboriginal art by sympathetic responses to Aboriginal people‟s circumstances and the belief that some remedial effect may flow from their support. This was conveyed by collector Janet Holmes à Court‟s suggestion, quoted in Chapter 2, that if Aboriginal people know that their art was valued around the world, this might „help lift their self esteem and maybe lift them out of the dreadful circumstances in which many of them find themselves‟. The decade of Reconciliation undoubtedly brought many people to the Aboriginal art market who wished to connect in a meaningful way with Aboriginal people, which is to say that remedial and sentimental impulses have driven the art‟s consumption at least to some degree. This was suggested by Beverley Knight during our interview, when she remarked that in the past there had been a „certain, do-gooder sort of client base - not many, with their aesthetics not great, they‟re just - they want to sit down with the Aborigines sort of thing...‟ (B. Knight, personal communication, August 25, 2007). Currently, many Art Centres retail inexpensive craft alongside fine arts, and license original art work for mass produced items such as calendars and diaries. The consumption of these objects, like the market for fair-trade and third world goods, is often driven by the belief that it will benefit someone in a disadvantaged position.

5.6.2 Altruistic initiatives

The sense of dynamism and hope that has surrounded the Aboriginal art movement, and its status as metonymic for Aboriginal culture, has made it the target of many charitable and altruistic projects relating to Aboriginal wellbeing. For instance, dozens of charity auctions of Aboriginal art have been staged to fund various projects and in addition, percentages of the profits raised from mainstream Aboriginal art

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auctions have been allocated to charitable projects.162 The charity World Vision Australia ran an Aboriginal art gallery in Sydney, Birrung Gallery, between 1996 and 2010. Another relevant initiative is the Gamarada Indigenous Scholarship Program, run by Shalom College at the University of NSW in Sydney since 2005, which sees the proceeds of Aboriginal art exhibitions (with works donated by artists and galleries) fund college residency scholarships for Aboriginal students undertaking medical degrees (Shalomgamarada, 2012). In 2011 this program was the beneficiary of the charity auction of the Wii consoles painted with bush leaves designs by Utopia artists. Other organisations such as the Aboriginal Benefits Foundation have seen Aboriginal art dealers and advocates mobilise their networks and resources to fund various programs (see Jennings in DECITA, 2007a:67-68; Martin, 2004). We find another example of a charitable initiative in the world: Australian cricketer Matthew Hayden recently played with four cricket bats painted by Tiwi artists during a 2020 match, bats that were subsequently auctioned to raise money for his charity initiative The Tiwi College Project (Lalor, 2012). In addition to the many commissions Aboriginal artists have received from corporations, Aboriginal art has also been integrated into corporate social responsibility strategies. For instance, following the filming of a (NAB) TV commercial in the small desert community of Titjikala, a relationship was formed with the Titjikala Art Centre which culminated in the NAB commissioning artists to create ten works that were reproduced in the „surrounds‟ of their Automatic Teller Machines in 2009. The NAB CEO at the time, Ahmed Fahour, was a member of the government‟s Australian Social Inclusion Board and a strong advocate of the project. In 2009 the initiators of this project were awarded first prize in the „Corporate Social Responsibility Category‟ at the Australian Marketing Institute Awards for Market Excellence (NAB, 2012; Robinson, 2008; AMI, 2009). The National Australia Bank had adopted a Reconciliation Action Plan in 2008 and had also begun a rebranding campaign to present itself to the public as a socially responsible and compassionate enterprise.

162 See for instance the funding of dialysis units in Kintore by Sotheby‟s auctions in 2000 and 2007 (Ahmed, 2007). See also the „Ochre – Supporting Indigenous Health through Art‟ auction 2008 which raised money for the Menzies School of Health in Melbourne (Mossgreen Auctions, 2008).

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Finally, the new resale royalty legislation that applies to Australian art can be seen as having been motivated by altruistic intentions in the Aboriginal art arena. This legislation was very clearly triggered by concerns about the discord between the growing value of Aboriginal artworks and the poor life circumstances of the artists themselves (Ceresa, 1997; Martin, 2004; Dow 2008; Special focus edition: Indigenous artists, 2006). Although its efficacy was disputed by many art dealers and professionals, it was launched in 2010 in the presence of a group of Aboriginal women artists in Alice Springs, an event at which Arts Minister Peter Garrett made specific mention of the anticipated benefits for Aboriginal artists (Gregory et. al, 2004; Newstead, 2004/2005; Garrett, 2010b). All of these altruistic motivations and initiatives have shaped Aboriginal art production, trade and circulation. Indeed, they encourage us to see many Aboriginal art objects and forms of visual culture as repositories of the good will and remedial wishes that have circulated within non-indigenous civil society in the post-assimilation era.

5.6.3 Good and bad conduct in the Aboriginal art market

Let us now turn to the Aboriginal art market and the prevalence of discourses around ethical and unethical conduct within it. In this setting we find that altruism does not find such direct avenues for expression as the initiatives described above, but is entangled with, and perverted by, the acrimonious relationships that pervade that market. A worthwhile starting point for this discussion is Nicholas Rothwell‟s 2006 broadsheet feature article „Scams in the Desert‟, in which he provides a vivid account of the „rotten, morally decayed state of the indigenous art trade‟ (2006a). The essence of the article lies in the parallels he draws between the Aboriginal art trade and two other markets that are indicative of moral corruption: the slave trade, and the WWII trade in works of fine art taken from Jewish homes. He writes:

[T]he problem, of course, is not just technical or legal, it is moral. The dark side of the desert painting trade is a national disgrace and it is also destroying the broader Aboriginal art industry, the one viable source of

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income and the one productive economic activity for Indigenous people across remote Australia [...] Art buyer, as you read this weekend paper, is your conscience clear? (2006a: 22).

Rothwell‟s article was one of the catalysts for the Senate Inquiry into the Indigenous Visual Arts and Crafts Sector, which reported in 2007 (Indigenous Art – securing the future, 2007). Concerns about exploitation and untransparent dealing date back to the 1980s (Schwartz, 1989; Altman et. al, 1989), however it was around the Inquiry that they found their most concrete and consensual expression. With the exception of members of government bodies and experts concerned with strategies for dealing with fakes, the majority of those who made submissions and participated in the public hearings were representatives of fine arts dealerships, Art Centres and Arts institutions.163 Most of these advocated for the Art Centre system and condemned the conduct of a cluster of dealers, wholesalers, agents and intermediaries (often referred to as „carpetbaggers‟, „backyarders‟ and „unscrupulous dealers‟) who were engaged with the production and sale of art outside this system. Put simply, the agendas and methods of the latter were presented as antithetical to the ethical conduct exemplified by the relationships between Art Centres and fine arts dealers. In a broadsheet opinion piece commenting on the inquiry, Marcia Langton offered an incendiary synopsis which echoes the tone of Rothwell‟s article: „Indigenous art, the great economic lifeline for bush communities, is being undermined by its own success and parasites feeding off its lifeblood‟. She asks „[h]ow many children have gone hungry -- and become ill, terminally ill -- in these exchanges while carpetbaggers pay off their mortgages, spruce up their equity portfolios, dine out with clients, buy a new BMW?‟ (2007). At one of the Inquiry‟s Senate hearings, Indigenous curator Hetti Perkins (speaking on behalf of other Indigenous curators) made the following statement in the context of her argument that a small group of profit-driven dealers were strategically undermining the Art Centres:

We take issue with those people that claim Aboriginal artists should be given free choice and that to do anything otherwise is racist and discriminatory. We feel that it is racist and discriminatory to presume that

163 There was a notable absence of artists‟ voices in the submissions (though Senators did visit some artists in remote areas and a handful of artists participated in the public hearings). 245

artists particularly in the more remote areas or the more disadvantaged areas are able to make free choices, given their circumstances (DECITA, 2007b:52).

The accusatory and anxious discourses that surrounded the Inquiry, of which Rothwell‟s, Langton‟s and Perkins‟ are examples, paint the following picture. Aboriginal artists are not getting a fair share of the income generated by their work. They are being compelled to leave their homelands and live in places like Alice Springs where they become prey to relatives who demand money from them while also being exposed to the deprivations, alcoholism and violence that is a daily reality for disenfranchised Aboriginal people in such towns. Profiteering agents take advantage of their poor literacy and numeracy skills and exploit the power of the obligation they have to their kin164 by manipulating artists‟ relatives. Naive and/or well meaning collectors are buying debased art in the belief that artists are benefiting from that sale and that the work is valuable. These discourses indicate that the market bifurcation that I outlined above, between fine arts dealers and business-oriented dealers, is underpinned by a severe moral differentiation of commercial operators. Indeed the quotations above are evocative of a battle between good and evil: between virtuous and malevolent conduct.165 They also speak very overtly to the broader politics of Indigenous/non- indigenous relations with respect to racism, injustice and disadvantage.

There were a small number of submissions from people who conducted business outside the Art Centre system, most of whom suggested that allegations of widespread misconduct were exaggerated and in some cases served particular commercial interests (see for instance Korman, 2006; A. Knight, 2007; Plunkett, 2007). These submissions pointed out that some artists do not have access to Art Centres and that artists‟ dissatisfaction with a particular Art Centre, or Art Centre mismanagement, has sometimes led them to paint for other people. They also argued that artists paint regularly for some non fine art dealers because they are in fact well paid and well cared for by them, or knowingly paint “rubbish paintings” for agents who are remiss in these

164 This obligation is now widely understood as „demand sharing‟ (Altman, 2011). 165 This has been stated explicitly by Will Stubbs, Art Centre coordinator at Yirrkala: „a customer who thinks that they are doing themselves a favour by bypassing [Art Centre] channels really deserves what they get... The product of other people‟s misery, as opposed to something that enhances their lives or the lives of the artists‟ (in Coslovich, 2003). 246

respects for quick cash. These submissions argued that there were many ways for business dealings to be conducted ethically and that an artist‟s right to choose to paint for whom they wished should be encouraged rather than denigrated. They also raised questions about whether it was fair that high-earning individual artists should be relied upon to prop up Art Centre income, when in other situations they might actually earn a larger income.

The conflicts around ethical conduct that found public expression in the Senate Inquiry have manifested in a range of other settings. For instance, in 1998 the ABC documentary Art from the Heart? addressed, in a somewhat provocative manner, the tension between cultural imperatives and the desire for profit in the production of Aboriginal art. This tension is conveyed in the question mark in the title. The film contained interviews with Art Centre coordinators, artists and a range of private dealers, and artists were shown trying to sell their art in Alice Springs and making comments about the fact that they painted for money. The film was heavily censured for its approach and was twice prevented from being screened. It was claimed that there was „inherent racism‟ in the film and that it had „present[ed] negative stereotypes of Aboriginal people without context and without explanation‟ (see Greene, 1999:2; Healy, 1999, 13-14; Eccles, 2000). Much of the substance of the criticism and defense is captured in the following comment from one of the filmmakers, Jeremy Eccles:

Although the white gatekeepers of the industry... have made careers and businesses out of the Indigenous arts industry, they are unhappy to witness scenes like the one at the start of Art from the Heart? – where a drunk Aboriginal man approached the film crew in Alice Springs with a painting for sale. Why didn‟t they like this scene? – Jacqueline Healy states, „because it is demeaning to us all‟. Healy‟s moral judgment begs the question of whether it was demeaning to the artist who was going about the business of survival in a scene repeated day in day out for tourists on Todd Mall. However unfortunate this may be – and in the context of other scenes we witnessed around Alice, this was mild, it is representative of a very real „facet‟ of the market in Indigenous art (Eccles, 2000:4-5).

Before providing some analysis, I will briefly summarise some other key areas in which tensions around ethical and unethical conduct have been negotiated. First, while a few dealers have been convicted for facilitating fraudulent art production and 247

trading in fakes, there have been many additional cases where the “authenticity” of particular works and the integrity of dealers has merely been questioned in the public domain. This has taken place in the press or at public events, or simply in gossip between interested parties. The term “authenticity” is rhetorically effective, for while its use may not always suggest that fraud is taking place, it nonetheless indicates that there has been bad-practice of some kind and that one is at risk of being conned (Korman, 2006; Hills, 2006; Borham, 2006; McCulloch, 2000; Money, 2011).166 Second, and in a similar vein, the concept of “provenance” has been mobilised to validate certain art works over others, such as when auction houses and state art institutions will only consign, exhibit or acquire work that has been sourced through an Art Centre.167 The idea of “provenance” serves the important function of flagging an elite pedigree and standard of professionalism (Caruana, 2006). It has a powerful differentiating force in the Aboriginal art marketplace and helps the fine arts collegiate to deal with the existence of the myriad of paintings that have been authored by artists in contexts which are disapproved of. This means that even if works of great artistic merit are made outside the Art Centre system (although many people deny that this is possible), such works are likely to be discounted by the fine arts collegiate on principle (Laurie, 2006; T. Klingender, personal communication, February 22, 2008; E. Hills, personal communication, April 18, 2008; McGregor in Lendon, 2011). Third, several voluntary ethical codes have been developed, though none have achieved industry-wide support or reflect industry-wide consensus regarding what constitutes ethical conduct (Wilson, 2011; Boland, 2010; Indigenous Art Code, 2012). The Art Centre advocacy organisations Desart and ANKAAA have also distributed a large amount of buyer awareness material on how to purchase Aboriginal art ethically, and the Australian Art Collector magazine has published Guides to Aboriginal Art Centres (2009; 2010). These guides were premised on the argument that collectors needed to be informed about how to source their work ethically (and by corollary,

166 In response to the controversies over fakes, many business-oriented art dealers routinely document the production process with photos and video to authenticate the work produced. Fine arts dealers do not do this, and indeed the fine arts collegiate see the existence of such documentation is a blight on the market; indeed, as evidence of unconscionable dealing rather than the absence of it. 167 The exceptions are those fine arts dealers of impeccable reputation who may represent an Aboriginal artist on an individual basis. 248

source work that would have resale value in the future), so that a corrupt industry could be reformed. Fourth, boycotting strategies have been employed by some participants in the industry, most notably at the 2008 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, the major annual prize of Aboriginal art. At this event, works by several finalists from six Art Centres were withdrawn as an act of protest against the fact that the Prize had accepted works by artists who painted for John Iannou of Agathon Galleries, a private dealer much maligned for having undermined the Art Centre system (Wilson & Perkins, 2008; Lloyd, 2008).

5.6.4 Reflections and implications

In the contexts I have described, the opposition between the fine arts collegiate and business-oriented dealers is almost always conflated with an opposition between ethical and unethical conduct and between good and bad art, and this conflation is widely echoed within Aboriginal art scholarship. Indeed, to discuss the bifurcation of the market without invoking moral judgements, as I sought to do earlier in the chapter (see 5.4), is a counterintuitive task for anyone who is socially and professionally embedded within the fine arts collegiate. Yet it is important for us to interrogate these ethical discourses. Not only is it the case that they cannot be wholly accounted for by benevolent interests, but it also possible for benevolent principles to imbricate neatly with other, often more mercenary, imperatives; that is, it is possible for fine arts dealers to employ ethical discourses to serve their own interests within a competitive marketplace. These discourses have produced caricatures of dealer personas that leave little room for the possibility that one may operate an Aboriginal art business in a manner that offends find arts principles, and yet still care about an artist‟s wellbeing. This possibility is suggested by Art Centre consultant Christine Godden in her submission to the Inquiry:

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There are private dealers, commercial galleries and backyard production groups that operate with great respect and care for their Aboriginal artists. They pay fairly, support artists and their families with health and other issues, look after intellectual property issues, invest their artists‟ earnings, and manage their estates after they have passed away. It is important that such people are not tarred with the same brush as the very large number of unethical operators in the industry in Central Australia (2006).

In addition, it is widely known that there have been cases of significant malpractice in the Art Centre system (see for instance Wright, 2011). Furthermore, in many of the interviews I conducted and informal discussions I had with art market participants and observers, I heard a range of stories of misconduct, fraud, corruption and hypocrisy that cut across the fine arts collegiate/business-oriented dealer opposition. Many in the fine arts domain shared gossip about each other or insinuated that their counterparts had much to hide, and some of the most strident advocates for ethical conduct were the subject of highly incriminating stories. Finally, in these discussions people noted that particular artists would not choose to improve their life circumstances to a standard that would satisfy the sympathies of outsiders, no matter how much money came their way. They also pointed out that, as I mentioned in Chapter 2, some of the art money that enters communities has in fact contributed to the lifestyle ills suffered by their inhabitants, and not ameliorated them.168169

Rather than being solely concerned with unethical practices, it is clear that the adversarial discourses and strategies I have outlined are symptomatic of a general feeling that Aboriginal art is under threat from a range of enemies. There is little doubt that claims of unethical conduct have been mobilized to address the imperative of excluding a large body of Aboriginal art works from the fine arts circuit; to have them struck from existence with respect to the consecrative mechanisms of fine arts institutions, prizes and the high-end resale market. In other words, concerns about ethical practices, while often being well founded, have also served as a „market control

168 For sources that document the tensions between the two groups, see Petitjean 2000; Allam, 2005; Rothwell, 2009; Korman, 2006; Warakurna Artists, 2006; Eccles, 2005; 2006; Hagan, 2007; McDonald, 2010; Lendon, 2011 (including the correspondence that follows). 169 Several people told me that the press images and descriptions of artists living in humpies, riverbeds, or messy hotel rooms, that are designed to indicate that artists are destitute and mistreated, are misleading, because some Aboriginal people who live transient lives, do not like being indoors and do not value possessions would not choose to live otherwise. 250

mechanism‟.170 It is also the case that arguments about ethical practices have frequently been deployed as part of fine arts dealers‟ and representatives‟ attempts to maintain an exclusive association with artists, an association which allows them to better emulate the manner in which a non-indigenous artist‟s career is managed. Finally, as we have seen from the ways the quotations above depict Aboriginal poverty and vulnerability, as well as the controversy surrounding Art from the Heart?, many people invoke ethical arguments in their efforts to protect artists from being seen as anything other than victims in circumstances that might compromise their standing in the fine arts world. Ultimately I see these ethical arguments as being underpinned by two key problems. The first of these relates to the precariousness of Aboriginal fine art within the arena of Aboriginal mass culture. It is clear that Aboriginal fine art is being sullied by a set of commercial operators who do not adhere to a fine arts ethos, either because they do not understand it or care little for it. Furthermore, the mercenary behavior of Aboriginal artists in terms of the promiscuity of their dealer associations, and their variable and prodigious output, is antithetical to the self-interested behaviour of an artist who cares about the integrity of their reputation and their art within the fine art marketplace. The second, related, problem pertains to vexed questions around the agency of Aboriginal artists. While it is controversial to make the following point, the behavior of Aboriginal artists who do not adhere to fine arts conventions is inexplicable to many non-Indigenous people in the contemporary art world and there is little doubt that the circumstances of Aboriginal people in Alice Springs and remote communities is somewhat shocking to the sensibilities of the cultured, metropolitan elite. As the statement from Hetti Perkins above indicates, the virtue of the artists‟ conduct can never be a point of question, and thus criticism must be diverted to those non-indigenous agents who collude in their unruly and damaging behaviour.

170 This was a phrase used by an auction house professional in an informal discussion with me. 251

5.7 Conclusion

In seeking to unravel the reasons for the Aboriginal art market‟s disorderly and adversarial character, this chapter has explored three kinds of economic problems: the complexities inherent to the relationship between fine arts ideals and money, the increasingly intricate connections that exist between art and commerce within the cultural industries policy paradigm, and the fact that the depressed economic circumstances of remote Aboriginal communities creates a unique and volatile environment for art production. This chapter has drawn on a range of theoretical literatures, empirical examples and exemplary discourses to reveal the way these three intersecting problems play out in the Aboriginal art arena. The concluding discussion of the ethical tensions that characterize the Aboriginal art market was intended to be the culmination of all the discussions that preceded it. That is, it sought to show that the problems underlying these ethical disputes are not reducible to cases of exploitation and moral corruption. They are in fact traceable to problems generated by the wide dissemination of commercialised Aboriginal culture within Australian public culture, to Aboriginal art‟s susceptibility to market-oriented cultural policy mechanisms, and to the irreverence of the artists and many dealers for fine arts principles. In coming to terms with the fact that artists are sometimes complicit in the very processes that undermine their standing as fine artists, we may need to allow for the fact that, whether or not they are poor, their priorities and perspectives might never align with those of the fine arts collegiate, and may in fact have greater commonalities with some non-elite dealers with whom they have sustained relationships. It may also be the case that the question “what is in the best interests of Aboriginal fine art?” is not the same question as “what is in the best interests of Aboriginal artists?” With this in mind, it is perhaps useful to see this chapter as having illuminated the tumultuous space between the rigid inscrutables of the mainstream fine art market and the highly fluid inscrutables of remote Aboriginal Australia.

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Chapter 6: Concluding Remarks

This thesis has sought to understand the cross-cultural engagements that underpin the Aboriginal art phenomenon. It has approached this problem from a variety of perspectives, and its analysis has encompassed aesthetic practices and discourses, scholarly debates, activist and civil society movements, policy histories and the professional and commercial activities of the art arena. This prismatic approach is not well served by a conventional conclusion. Instead, what I wish to do here is draw together several threads that cut across the thematic foci of each of the preceding chapters. I will first identify three sets of ethical problems to which many discussions in the thesis have alluded. The first two of these, which I refer to as “redemptive nationhood” and “the transnational post-colonial movement”, have been well established in earlier discussions and will therefore be summarized briefly. The third, “the disenchanted western subject”, will be dealt with in more detail. Following these discussions I will present an exploratory argument about the interplay of utopian and dystopian tendencies within the Aboriginal art arena, and offer some reflections on what the Aboriginal art phenomenon can tell us about the condition of Indigenous/non- Indigenous relations in Australia.

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6.1 Three sets of ethical problems

6.1.1 Redemptive nationhood

Perhaps the most obvious set of ethical problems that has shaped the Aboriginal art phenomenon is connected to the project of establishing a more harmonious and just co-existence of Indigenous and non-Indigenous citizens in the post-assimilation era. Throughout the thesis we have seen people express the hope (or presumption) that Aboriginal art‟s circulation may be a means to humanize Aboriginal people in the non- Indigenous citizen‟s imagination, and to generate respect for Aboriginal culture and sympathy for Aboriginal people‟s circumstances. This hope was first discussed in Chapter 1. There we saw that A.P. Elkin advocated for Aboriginal art in the context of his support for a progressive assimilation policy, and that he brought a humanitarian spirit to his encouragement of individuals like Karel Kupka. It is worth noting that this advocacy is resonant of the humanitarian principles that were espoused by church groups, labour organisations and other bodies who were sympathetic to the plight of Aboriginal people between the 1930s and the 1967 Referendum (Kupka, 1965 [foreword]:ix; Stanner, 1968; Goot & Rowse, 2007:10-13). As I also argued in Chapter 1, a humanist universalism was an important facet of modernist thought, and was likely to have influenced the thinking of some of the anthropological and archaeological scholars, amateur researchers, artists and collectors who embraced Aboriginal heritage and art during the modern period. The hope that Aboriginal art might be a vehicle for substantiating the worth of Aboriginal people in Australian society and improving their well-being did not subside in subsequent decades. In Chapter 2 we saw that such objectives underpinned the activities of consequential figures such as H.C. „Nugget‟ Coombs and Bob Edwards. They were also discernible in the rhetoric of politicians such as Clyde Holding, Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating, and in the policy discourses associated with the Aboriginal Arts Board, ATSIC and various Reconciliation bodies (cf. Appendix 2, A.2.3; A.3.3). Chapter 2 also argued that the subsidisation and facilitation of the Aboriginal art movement, and the symbolic dissemination of Aboriginal art in Australian visual culture, can be seen to have been driven by these objectives.

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It is important to recognise that the above objectives have frequently been framed in nationalistic terms across artistic, civil, and policy domains. That is, these efforts to improve the status and wellbeing of a minority were attached to the ideal that the character of the nation and all of its citizenry can be ennobled through this redemptive process. Such is conveyed by collector Margaret Carnegie when she writes that „We Australians need to arrive at a new vision of ourselves as neither settlers nor conquerors, but simply as Australians, since it is vital that we co-exist in harmony, justice and compassion with the earliest inhabitants of the continent, the Australian Aborigines‟ (1991:5, see also other essays in the volume). Carnegie‟s remarks are indicative of the fact that Aboriginal art has been a vehicle for „indigenised settler nationalism‟. A final point to be made is that many of the altruistic initiatives and ethical discourses discussed in Chapter 5 are arguably connected to the ethical problems that surround the project of redemptive nationhood. The Aboriginal art movement has been a focus point for non-Indigenous Australians who have been responsive to the Reconciliation movement, and has drawn many people‟s attention to the disadvantage in remote communities. The good will of these people seems to have found an outlet in some of the charitable projects relating to Aboriginal health particularly which have sought to harness Aboriginal art‟s success. This thread of good will is also salient to the disputes that surround the concept of ethical conduct within the Aboriginal art market. Participants within this market are aware that many collectors are inspired by the idea that an impoverished minority is able to empower themselves economically through their art, and wish to be part of that celebratory national story, and this knowledge is very much a component of the adversarial politics that characterise the market.

6.1.2 The trans-national post-colonial movement

A second set of ethical problems which has been explored in the preceding chapters arises from the intellectual legacy of the decolonisation, civil rights and social justice movements of the 20th century. These movements dramatically transformed the way Indigenous peoples, minorities and non-occidentals were treated in the cultural 255

spheres of Western democratic societies. As Chapters 3 and 4 explored in detail, this transformation has been manifested in the contemporary art arena as a strong thread of post-colonial critique. We have seen that post-colonial critiques has been formative of the themes of war, activism and resistance that emerge in urban Aboriginal art discourses, and have entailed that a range of artistic and institutional practices and discourses, including the Primitive art paradigm, appropriation and Anthropology, have been censured for being discriminatory, exploitative and exclusionary. As the activist spirit of the Aboriginal Arts Board in the 1980s exemplifies, their other effect has been that art professional practices in Australia are now inflected with identity politics with regard to principles of empowerment and equality (cf. Appendix 2, A.4.3). With respect to the tensions that surround anthropological expertise that I explored in Chapter 4, we sense that minority groups such as Indigenous Australians, and those who are sympathetic to such groups, currently face the predicament of wanting to appeal to the principles of universality and autonomy which underpin concepts of value in the contemporary fine arts arena, while also wishing to assert the validity of difference within that arena. In sum, Aboriginal art has been a medium for the negotiation of transnational post-colonial critique. As a consequence, a range of ethical concerns that are connected to the post-colonial condition underpin the contested ways in which the intentions of Aboriginal artists are understood, and the way Aboriginal art works are displayed, interpreted and traded.

6.1.3 The disenchanted western subject

The final set of ethical problems that I wish to discuss is associated with a reflexive movement in the West that is concerned with the destructive and inhuman aspects of industrial capitalist societies. This movement, which is existential and aesthetic in nature, has both intellectual and popular manifestations. It is characterised by discourses which lament “our” disconnection from nature, from a sense of community, from the sacred, and indeed from “culture” itself. In its search for insight

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and inspiration, it looks to societies and practices that appear to uphold that which it perceives to be diminished in modern everyday life. Remote Aboriginal culture and art has resonated strongly with this movement. As we saw in Chapter 1, in the 19th and early 20th centuries the Aboriginal subject was designated as the quintessential prehistoric being, and inscribed within seminal discourses about the psyche, human sociality and progress. In its early phases of circulation, Aboriginal art was susceptible to trends of modernist existentialist and aesthetic inquiry that were connected to these currents of thought and to primitivist and Romantic ideals about the pre-modern subject. This was illustrated in my discussions of the writings of Herbert Read, Karel Kupka, and the discourses that were associated with the 1929 Primitive Art exhibition. In such settings, Aboriginal art was treated as a window to a pre-modern and pre-industrial world: as metonymic for something other than “us” - the modern western subject – but also as a primeval and more genuine version of “us”. Later manifestations of these disenchanted tendencies which we have encountered include the primitivist discourses surrounding the 1983 Paris D’un autre Continent exhibition and some of the non-Indigenous Australian art practices of the 1980s that were inspired by Aboriginal art. I wish to provide three further examples of engagements with remote Aboriginal art that evoke themes of disenchantment that will allow me to elaborate on the complex implications of this set of ethical problems. First, non-Indigenous Australian artist Fiona Hall draws an interesting contrast between her own spatio-cultural location and that of Yirrkala artist Djambawa Marawili in the following quotation:

[I am located within a culture] in a continual state of flux, drifting without an anchor. It is an affluent place, foundering in the ocean of its superfluity. I have a sinking feeling. Djambawa‟s world is split in two. But it is not fractured. It is whole; everything in it is Yirritja or Dhuwa, which are the twin streams of the complex Yolngu clan and kinship system. They flow together through the land and coastal , through every person, every plant and creature, through Yolngu society and ancestry and sacred songs and ceremonies. Incredibly, Djambawa and I belong to the same nation (2011:6).

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We find a second example in the following passage, in which collector Ruth Hall describes her attraction to Aboriginal art that is „produced within an Aboriginal communal ethos‟:

I am interested in how Aboriginal people work as a family, a community: the singing, the telling and retelling of stories, seeing works that are the sons and daughters of other stories, the now of the Dreamtime made present in the paintings. There‟s a continuity – nothing is lost in what is forever living, contemporary and eventful. Permeating all the images and stories, there is the land, timeless and evocative .... What I respect and feel an affinity with is that their work reflects not only the traditions themselves but also the artists‟ efforts at maintaining those traditions... I believe that the Aboriginal people‟s sense of family, community, land and traditions allowed their skills to survive despite the last 200 years of white occupancy of this country (Carnegie, Holmes à Court & Hall, 1991:126-127).

A third example can be found in art critic Nicholas Baume‟s interpretation of Imants Tillers‟ commissioned work for the Federal Pavilion in Centennial Park, in which iconography drawn from Michael Jagamara Nelson‟s work is part of the frieze on the interior of the Pavillion. He writes:

What the Federation Pavilion learns from Aboriginal culture is not the particular symbolic significance of its artistic expression, but man‟s need for a richly symbolic life. Mythology and symbolism are painfully absent from our lives, on all levels of culture (1988:83).

All three quotations depict a space of cohesion and continuity in which creative acts have meaning and purpose in daily life, and they all leave an after-image of the fragmented and compromised world of the disenchanted western subject.

Engagements with Aboriginal art that are expressive of a sense of disenchantment with the modern world are often looked upon disfavourably, even with ridicule, in the Aboriginal art arena. Post-colonial critiques have revealed the extent to which such approaches are often symptomatic of highly problematic perspectives on the exotic Other: they are frequently narrow-minded and self-serving, and perpetuate an anachronistic primitivism or racism. Yet it is clear from the quotations above that responses to Aboriginal art that are symptomatic of disenchantment are often highly 258

interrogative and reflexive. In light of this, I wish to argue that we should not allow the distasteful and sometimes unethical dimensions of the project of the disenchanted western subject to blind us to its ethical dimensions. Indeed, I would argue that the kinds of engagements with Aboriginal art that are expressed in these quotations are pertinent to some of the most important philosophical and ethical questions that have been posed about the modern condition. These can be summarised by drawing on Weber, who, as Habermas explains, attributed the condition of cultural modernity to the „differentiation of the value spheres of science and knowledge, of morality and of art‟ which had formerly, in small-scale societies, been in seamless accord under the edifices of „religious and metaphysical world-views‟ (1996/1981:45; see also Miller, 1991:51). In other words, the spheres of knowledge, aesthetics and ethics from which our sense of truth, beauty and the good are derived have become institutionalised domains subject to abstract principles of validity. This process of differentiation and reification means that, as individuals, we are increasingly estranged from the things that give us the greatest intellectual and spiritual nourishment, and that underpin our ability to engage meaningfully and ethically with each other. The reflexive quotations above can be interpreted as having recognised the interpenetration of Weber‟s spheres in the world of Aboriginal art. These quotations tell us that part of the intrigue, and the reward, that a close engagement with remote Aboriginal art engenders is the sense that we are beholding a culture in which dance, music, performance and painting are not only the vessels of the knowledge of the people but are the means by which each individual‟s membership of and purpose within the community is sustained from one day to the next. Just as the Romantics idealised folk culture, so too do some Aboriginal art audiences perceive that in these contexts art is (or was) “a way of life” in contrast to contemporary western art which stands aloof from the realities of daily life. In light of this, we might see Aboriginal art as a vehicle for people to protest the erosive impact of capitalist and bureaucratic systems on our creative and communal selves (Habermas, 1996/1981:44, see also Symonds, 1997; Jorgensen, 2008:199). Without question the image of Aboriginal “culture” proposed here is a distortion of remote community life, which is now deeply engaged with western industrial capitalist systems, technologies of communication, consumerism and so on.

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Notwithstanding this, many examples of Aboriginal art undoubtedly instantiate this ideal social space, for its creators as well as for its audiences. In the case of the former, this is affirmed by the Aboriginal people‟s holistic interpretations of their art, the distinctions they draw between their and “our” way of life, and the fact that elder artists have sought to use their art as a communicative repository of their traditions for their descendants. It is worth noting that these perspectives fundamentally challenge the more dogmatic post-colonial critiques of primitivist discourses.

6.2 A utopian/dystopian dialectic

In presenting these three categories of ethical problems, I do not wish to suggest that all of them can be viewed in wholly positive terms. There are expedient and cynical dimensions to all of the movements I have described and all have been compromised by objectives that undermine, rather than further, the project of bringing about the just treatment of Aboriginal people and their art. Indeed, I wish to argue that a dialectical interplay of utopian and dystopian tendencies underlies the Aboriginal art phenomenon.171 Throughout the thesis we have encountered many discourses and practices that are redolent of utopian and dystopian thinking. Utopianism is expressed in those discourses which celebrate Aboriginal art as a cultural renaissance and which articulate the idea that Aboriginal art is a site of emancipation and empowerment. The ways in which Aboriginal art has been mobilised as symbolic of a virtuous, inclusive Australian society, in the context of the Reconciliation movement for example, are also expressive of utopianism in some respects. Dystopian thought is present, for example, in pessimistic writings about ethnocide and cultural colonialism, in allusions to sweat shops and slave labour, in arguments that business-oriented dealers have sabotaged a great art movement, and in Richard Bell‟s critique that Aboriginal art is „a white thing‟. All of these indicate that Aboriginal art has been a locus for hope and optimism while also being the subject of narratives of tragedy, exploitation and futility.

171 See Sutton (1992b) and Jorgensen (2008; 2011) for arguments which identify utopian and dystopian tendencies. 260

This duality is also attributable to the moral implications of the post-colonial condition. To engage in any depth with Aboriginal art is to comprehend the tragedy of dispossession and the many strands of the Aboriginal cultural trauma narrative. Such an engagement, as I argued in Chapter 5, also compels art audiences to think about the level of disadvantage Aboriginal people currently experience. The rates of suicide, early mortality, addiction and violence in remote communities testify to an extraordinary level of suffering and sorrow that is contiguous with the vitality of the Aboriginal art phenomenon. This underpins the poignancy of the fact that some Aboriginal Art Centres are now being defined as Public Benevolent Institutions. Indeed, the utopianism engendered by the Aboriginal art movement may be of such an intense nature precisely because of the dystopian representations of remote Aboriginal communities that circulate in Australian public culture. There is a fundamental tension between, on the one hand, Aboriginal art‟s status as an innovative (even avant-garde) fine art movement that symbolises a positive Indigenous alterity, and, on the other hand, the static, even regressive character of the conditions of its production in remote communities from the point of view of the cosmopolitan context of its reception, and human rights principles.

The interplay of utopian and dystopian thought in the Aboriginal art arena can perhaps be best illustrated if we return to the economic dimensions of the Aboriginal art phenomenon. The refrain that Aboriginal art has contributed and can continue to contribute to the economic empowerment of Aboriginal people in remote communities is challenged by the fact that the income Aboriginal artists derive from art does not appear to have reduced economic dependence on the State or alleviated the social ills just described. This gives rise to the deflating but obvious question: how could we expect an art movement to achieve such a radical transformation anyway? If we recall Chapter 5‟s analysis of the fragility of Aboriginal fine arts in relation to the mercenary objectives that drive many participants in the Aboriginal art arena, we can bring a more nuanced perspective to the utopian/dystopian ambivalence of the economic dimension. Art is one of the most important domains for giving expression to a society‟s utopian visions: with respect to both artistic practice and audience engagement, it is sustained by a collective sense of idealism about the pursuit of truth and beauty, the expression of human fellowship, and the belief that it offers respite from, and the strength to resist, malevolent forces in society. To some extent, the 261

Aboriginal art movement has appealed to audiences, and stimulated the altruism of non- Indigenous collectors and art professionals, because the idea that a profoundly marginalised minority has found a voice through art of remarkable beauty and originality resonates very powerfully with these ideals. However, this space of utopianism is undermined by the fact that the subtle labours of Aboriginal artists‟ agents to create a space for them within hallowed fine art domains are so frequently made futile, or turned to the benefit of expedient commercial operators, due to the complex mix of objectives and relationships that drive the artists concerned. Even though contemporary societies are now dominated by consumerist and market-oriented patterns of social organisations, and the cultural industries paradigm is pervasive in the West, there is an abiding ethos in the fine arts arena of treating economic pursuits as inimical to aesthetic pursuits, and of ensuring that financial imperatives do not undermine the integrity and autonomy of the art object. Yet in the Aboriginal art arena, financial imperatives very clearly do encroach upon the art, and this brings a highly dystopian pall to the Aboriginal art narrative. In making this point, I wish to stress that economic agendas have been a touchstone for idealism and hope in the Aboriginal art arena just as much as the aesthetic and cultural dimensions of Aboriginal art have been. The normative market discourses discussed in Chapter 5 quite explicitly counterposed economic interest to cultural and aesthetic priorities on an ethical axis intended to discredit a large segment of the Aboriginal art market and define an exclusive space of virtue. I hope that this thesis has shown that no such simple opposition between mercenary and ethical interests can be drawn, and indeed that “ethics” has become a form of currency in the Aboriginal art marketplace.

Ultimately, this interplay of utopian and dystopian forces in the Aboriginal art arena encourages us to recognise that Aboriginal art has been a vehicle for a range of worthy aspirations in a post-colonial setting, and that some of these aspirations are in conflict, and some of them are meeting with failure. In this sense, the Aboriginal art phenomenon could be analysed as a kind of social movement, in which great and sometimes unrealistic hopes frequently encounter profound disappointment and disillusionment. We have seen that Aboriginal art has been entwined with several movements in the post-assimilation era, across the domains of Indigenous activism and 262

left-wing civil society, progressive governance, and post-colonial intellectual and aesthetic domains. Arguably these movements have had four dimensions: cultural, ideological/political, aesthetic and economic. Sometimes these dimensions complement each other, as we see from the fact that Aboriginal cultural traditions have been intrinsic to the emergence of a new genre of fine art. However they are frequently in tension. Clearly, for instance, the project of Reconciliation has contributed to the symbolic circulation of Aboriginal art in association with nationalism in such a way that Aboriginal fine art can be difficult for audiences of contemporary art to differentiate from Aboriginal mass culture. By framing the dynamics of Aboriginal art in these terms I am suggesting that the complexity of Aboriginal art lies to some degree in the contradictory effects of various efforts to instrumentalise Aboriginal art to serve benevolent ends. This instrumentalisation, which has been negotiated interculturally, encompasses the efforts of various arms of government, progressive civil servants, scholars, and others to facilitate and subsidise the Aboriginal art market to empower Aboriginal people economically. It also encompasses the mobilisation of Aboriginal art and culture to symbolise the reversal of assimilationist paradigms, to serve Reconciliatory nation- building agendas, and to communicate the Indigenous polity‟s demands for rights and recognition within the Settler State. These interlacing movements were perhaps best illuminated in Chapter 2, where we saw that a particular figuration of “Aboriginal culture” had evolved in the service of an intercultural agenda propelled by both redemptive and emancipatory desires. Underlying this figuration was an aspiration to achieve a confluence of strong Indigenous identity, revitalised culture, economic participation, and a rich and inclusive sense of nationhood. This confluence can be seen as an idealised synthesis of the cultural, ideological/political, aesthetic and economic dimensions of the various movements with which Aboriginal art has been affiliated. This synthesis has, however, not been achievable. Arguably, the stresses and strains at play in the Aboriginal art arena are expressive of the limitations of these projects, and of the points where the avenues by which each project pursues its imperatives clash. The tensions that I have described in relation to the Art/Anthropology binary, the relationship between urban and remote Aboriginal art and identity, and the relationship

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between Aboriginal art and money, are all exemplary of these stresses and strains. It is arguably at these points that we find a crystallisation of the utopian/dystopian dialectic.

6.3 Reflections on Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations

Several discussions in this thesis have implications for our understanding of the current condition of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations, and specifically, the limits of non-Indigenous Australians‟ recognition of the specificities of Indigenous Australians. This is perhaps true of the discussions in Chapter 5 in particular. At the heart of many of the debates about ethics and exploitation in the Aboriginal art marketplace that were discussed there are highly distressing questions around Aboriginal agency and Aboriginal victimhood. If Aboriginal people behave in ways that members of non- Indigenous Australian society find inexplicable (because it is damaging to their own interests for example), do we attribute this to their poor and victimised status, or do we accept that they have a different way of seeing the world, a different way of doing things? Another way to approach this question is to ask the following: which aspects of Aboriginal people‟s behaviour that non-Indigenous people find troubling are indicative of long-term suffering, disadvantage and vulnerability to exploitation, and which are indicative of cultural difference? Further important questions include: How much is the State and non-Indigenous society prepared, or obliged, to recognize aspects of Aboriginal culture that contest mainstream social norms? Who is accountable for, and what are the solutions to Aboriginal disadvantage, and what is the future of remote communities on Aboriginal lands? All of these questions are highly pertinent to the complexities of Indigenous affairs issues in general.

It is clear to me that the intractability of Aboriginal poverty in remote communities, or at least remote Aboriginal people‟s marginalization from the mainstream economy, is a concern to many non-Indigenous people; however, this sympathy appears to be conditional. In a country in which liberal individualist principles of entrepreneurship, personal accountability and self-reliance are deeply

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enshrined, the attribution of current Aboriginal disadvantage to the traumas of colonisation, child removal, racism and to the failures of successive governments does not always convince non-Indigenous Australians. There is much to suggest – and the acquisition of Aboriginal art is a strong indicator I believe - that non-Indigenous Australians are most sympathetic to and supportive of Indigenous Australians if they are industrious and seeking economic independence. Thus the productiveness and purposefulness of the artists in the Art Centres evokes a comforting sense of normality.

It is also evident that pan-Aboriginality remains a precarious and contested idea in Australian civil society. It is disputed by Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in a range of settings, despite the fact that a unitary figure of Aboriginality is endorsed on a symbolic level in Australian public culture and is part of the nation‟s mainstream lexicon. There are very few individuals from remote Australia who advocate and lobby for their community‟s interests in a way that is audible and efficacious in the world of non-Indigenous Australians. This means that the “Aboriginal community” is an enigmatic entity in the minds of many people, and in the public imagination it figures as both idyllic and repellent due to the polarised representations that enter the public domain. There is also a fundamental discord between the interests of Aboriginal people in urban and remote Australia (and there are also dramatic differences between remote communities), and the realities of remote Australia are in some ways distorted by the concepts and methodologies deployed in pan-Aboriginal advocacy discourses in urban settings. This thesis has presented many illustrations of these tensions. For instance we have seen that some urban Aboriginal artists refuse to adopt the mantle of „Aboriginal artist‟ and its implications of minority status. We have also seen that the ways in which remote Aboriginal Australia has been embraced as the site of valuable cultural difference by anthropologists, collectors and Australian public culture has generated a sense of exclusion for many Aboriginal people. Urban Aboriginal artists and advocates are often engaged in censuring the omissions and idealizations inherent to the positive representations of Aboriginality that circulate in Australian public life and regard this partial recognition as a form of injustice. It is clear from the precariousness of pan-Aboriginality that Indigenous and non- Indigenous Australians continue to struggle with exactly what it means to be

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Aboriginal, and thus to what non-Indigenous Australia owes recognition, understanding and sympathy. This means that being identified as Aboriginal in Australia is both empowering and constraining, because such a person is subject to ideas about Aboriginality in the public domain that are deeply confused and charged with moral anxiety. Ultimately I take the view that many non-Indigenous Australians have a strong sense of good will towards Aboriginal people, but do not have concrete ideas about what Aboriginal people‟s real needs are and feel equivocal about the specificities of their justice claims. This was suggested by Goot and Rowse (2007) who conducted a detailed study of opinion polling on Indigenous issues over the period between the 1967 referendum and the culminating year of Reconciliation, 2000. Goot and Rowse gleaned that Australians were „divided... within themselves‟ and that the poll results were repeatedly indicative of „our collective philosophical ambivalence‟ (2007:18; see also 171-173). Similarly, Rowse has commented on the poignancy of the „baffled willingness to help‟ he discerned in the responses of Australians to a recent Reconciliation survey (Reconciliation Barometer, 2009:10; see also Horne in Rowse, 2000b:20). These insights tell us much about the character of the Australian Reconciliation movement. Ultimately, abstract and symbolic negotiations of intercultural relations are much easier to bring about than interpersonal encounters which meaningfully bridge the Indigenous/non-Indigenous divide. It is on a detached, conceptual level that many members of Australian civil society who adhere to humanitarian principles of respect, compassion and equality and who feel obliged to acknowledge historical injustices have engaged with the idea of Reconciliation. It is highly likely that Aboriginal art, by being a beacon of cultural survival and embodying a sense of exuberant freshness, has allowed non-Indigenous people to engage with the world of Aboriginality in a non-confronting way. Notwithstanding the opportunistic mercenary motivations of collectors and commercial operators in Australia that accelerated the Aboriginal art market, I would suggest that the Aboriginal art phenomenon can be partly attributed to the fact that it has served as an unthreatening mediator of Reconciliation and a reference point for the sympathetic and benevolent currents of thought that were stimulated by the narratives of cultural trauma that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. Through the power that visual

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culture has in contemporary western societies, Aboriginal art in its many forms (fine art, public murals, tourist art) seems to exist as tangible evidence that the nation has achieved some kind of recompense, while at the same time it serves as a surrogate for a form of connectedness and understanding that is always elusive.

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Appendix 1: Interviewees

Name Name Interview Date Role/Status Location Altman, Jon 29 July 2011 Professor, Centre for Canberra Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, ANU

Berthier, Luc 22 July 2008 Director, Galerie Paris, France Luc Berthier

Burkhardt, Gérard 3 August 2008 Collector and Môtiers, founding Director, Switzerland “La Grange” Aboriginal Art Museum

Burkhardt, Theresa 3 August 2008 Collector and Môtiers, founding Director, Switzerland “La Grange” Aboriginal Art Museum

Crawford, Catherine 4 July 2007 Collector Sydney

De Waal, Anne 11 August 2008 Director, Walonia Utrecht, The Aboriginal Arts; Co- Netherlands Founder and Board Member, Aboriginal Art Museum

Durack, Mary 22 July 2008 Director of Paris, France Contemporary Aboriginal Art

Estrangin, Bertrand 14 August 2008 Collector Brussels, Belgium

Galt, Graeme 20 February 2008 Collector Sydney

Gregory, Bill 21 November 2008 Director, Annandale Sydney Galleries

Hills, Euan 18 April 2008 Director, Art Mob Hobart

317

Hodges, Christopher 18 March 2008 Director, Utopia Art Sydney

Kauffmann, Christian 29 July 2008 Curator for Oceania, Basel, Museum der Switzerland Kulturen

Kelly, Alison 25 September 2007 Director, Alison Melbourne Kelly Gallery

Klingender, Tim 22 February 2008 Head of Aboriginal Sydney Art Department, Sotheby‟s Australia

Knight, Beverley 25 September 2007 Director, Alcaston Melbourne Gallery

Knight, Adam 27 September 2007 Director, Aranda Art Melbourne

Kornhauser, Dana 26 September 2007 Gallery Manager, Melbourne Nellie Castan Gallery

Latimer, Bruce 13 October 2007 Collector Sydney

Leon, Laurentia 20 July 2008 Public Relations and Basel, Exhibition Switzerland Organisation, Museum Tinguely

Lilly, Josh 9 July 2008 Director, Josh Lilly London, UK Gallery

Murphy, Neil 19 November 2007 Director, Neil Sydney Murphy Fine Art

Norris, Robert 9 July 2008 Agent for Aranda London, UK Art

Petitjean, George 10 August 2008 Curator, Aboriginal Utrecht, The Art Museum Netherlands

Plewig, Gerd 7 August 2008 Munich, Germany

Reid, Michael 2 June 2008 Director, Michael Sydney Reid

Spaccapietra, Stefano 4 August 2008 Collector Lausanne, Switzerland

318

Smith, David 13 August 2008 Director, Leslie Amsterdam, Smith Gallery The Netherlands

Stevenson, Alastair 19 November 2008 Collector Sydney

Tilbury, Helen 25 July 2007 Collector Launceston

Tucker, Brian 13 December, 2011 Collector and Brisbane Director Brian Tucker accounting (Art Centre accountant)

Anonymous 24 January 2008 Collector Sydney

Anonymous 24 May 2007 Collector North Carolina, USA

Anonymous 19 June 2007 Collector Sydney

Anonymous 2 September 2008 Collector London, UK

319

320

Appendix 2: Policy Chronicle

A primary goal of this thesis is to contextualise Aboriginal art with respect to the politics of the Settler State. To this end, this chronicle provides an overview of the political and governmental terrain in which the Aboriginal Art industry developed between the late 1960s and the 2007 Senate Inquiry into Australia‟s visual arts and crafts sector. It moves through the Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke, Keating and Howard government eras, focusing on Indigenous affairs policies, Arts and Cultural policies and the development of the Aboriginal art industry. This chronicle is not intended to be comprehensive, but is rather designed to highlight key moments, and to identify important points of intersection between these three areas, in order to provide a context for many of the discussions in the thesis that are concerned with the State.172

A.1 Early stages: 1960s - 1972.

Even before the Aboriginal art movement began in the early 1970s, government bodies were heavily involved in the production, distribution, marketing and sale of Aboriginal arts and crafts. Artefacts, craft objects and souvenirs were produced on missions and reserves that were under the jurisdiction of Departments for Aboriginal Affairs in state governments. Staff at these locations managed the trade of these objects

172 In compiling this chronology, I have been mindful of the fact that presenting the development of public policy as corresponding sequentially to the terms of particular governments can distort the historical record, and simplify the competing agendas upon which the formation and implementation of policy is contingent. For instance, the policies of the Aboriginal Arts Board are not always explained in historically discreet sections, as this would fragment important continuities in its conduct. See Craik (2007:8) for a useful overview of the often „ad hoc and episodic‟ phases of Australian arts and cultural policy. 321

and liaised with wholesalers and retailers, some of whom were themselves government agencies (Mackay, 1973). Inspired in part by the potential for Aboriginal culture to contribute significantly to the tourist economy (to the benefit of Aboriginal people),173 the Commonwealth government first provided funding to the industry in 1970 when the Aboriginal Arts Advisory Committee was formed within the Australian Council for the Arts (established in 1968). The Committee‟s budget grew from $60,000 in 1970 to $500,000 in 1972 (Roughsey, 1976:236; Thompson, 1972). In 1971, the Commonwealth also established Aboriginal Arts and Crafts Pty Ltd [AAC], which was intended to take responsibility for marketing Aboriginal art and wholesaling works obtained from remote communities to retailers, or selling them in its own outlets in major cities (Peterson, 1983).

A.2 Whitlam Labor Government 1972-1975

A.2.1 Aboriginal affairs policy

The election of the Whitlam Labor Government heralded a complete reimagining of Indigenous affairs. Whitlam replaced a policy of assimilation that had been sustained nationally for the previous two decades and in an ad hoc manner by state governments for many years prior to that, and introduced one of self-determination.174 This decision was indicative of the government's responsiveness to the emergent international human rights discourse associated with worldwide processes of decolonisation (Sanders, 2002). Whitlam's government centralised management of Indigenous affairs (formerly the responsibility of the States and territories) in the hands

173 A 1965 report on the country‟s tourism industry recommended that the government provide infrastructure support for the development of an Aboriginal Arts and Crafts sector (Altman, 2000:461). The idea that the government could facilitate an Aboriginal art market for the economic benefit of Aboriginal people was first proposed by the anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt in 1942 (McLean, 2011a:24). 174 This reform was, however, presaged by the ‟s election of Barrie Dexter, Bill Stanner and H.C. „Nugget‟ Coombs to the Council of Aboriginal Affairs following the 1967 Referendum. These men were aware of minority rights movements and arguments from other parts of the world and sympathetic to Aboriginal people‟s struggles for land rights and to retain their culture. See Rowse (2000b) for an illuminating account of how the transition from assimilation to self-determination was negotiated internally by government. 322

of the Commonwealth (through the Department of Aboriginal Affairs [DAA])175 and established the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee (NACC) so that Aboriginal spokespeople could formally advise the Commonwealth. A Royal Commission into Land Rights was launched that would culminate in Land Rights legislation in the Northern Territory in 1976. The Racial Discrimination Act was passed in 1975, giving legislative force to Australia's ratification of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and the Commonwealth began funded legal services for Aboriginal people in all states and territories. The Whitlam government also supported the formation of incorporated Indigenous organisations and councils across the country to manage the delivery of government services and resources to Indigenous people and address matters of concern to their communities.176 These organisations, which took many forms, flourished in the following decades. Rowse has argued that the emergence of these State-subsidised „agencies of collective choice‟, which comprise a large part of the Indigenous sector, has been the most significant legacy of the self-determination policy (2002:1, 17). A related body of measures gave momentum to the „homelands movement‟ that had begun in Arnhem Land in 1970, which saw Aboriginal people move away from missions, reserves, pastoral stations and townships to form outstations on their traditional clan estates (Coombs et. al, 1982). Welfare payments and grants to establish basic infrastructure, housing and services on remote outstations encouraged this decentralisation. A consequence of these initiatives and the Land Rights legislation that followed was the redistribution of Aboriginal people into tiny communities across northern and central Australia. In 1982 these numbered around 200 with a collective population of 6,000 people, while recent figures suggest that there are now 1200 remote outstations with a population approximating 120,000 to 150,000 (Coombs et. al, 1982:427; Altman, 2005a:1). The 1970s witnessed a dramatic rise in Indigenous activism and political engagement, particularly amongst urban communities. This was underpinned by a sense of defiant pride in the identity of „Aboriginality‟ (Attwood, 2003: Chapter 13). It was

175 Prior to this, Aboriginal affairs had been the jurisdiction of State governments as well as various denominations of the church. Queensland alone refused to cede administration of Aboriginal affairs to the Commonwealth. 176 This was furthered by the Aboriginal Councils and Associations Act, which was passed by the in 1976. 323

also galvanised by the fact that the wider population were increasingly sympathetic to Aboriginal aspirations, particularly as people became aware of the impoverished circumstances in which many Aboriginal people lived. This poverty was sometimes akin to that of the third-world, and human rights discourses underlined the relatively new idea that Aboriginal people were citizens who had a right to expect the same services and opportunities as the rest of the Australian population. Aboriginal activists and lobbyists were driven both by the sense of hope that the new policy paradigm created, and frustration that the promised reforms were not taking place swiftly or equitably across the country (Lippman, 1979). City-based Aboriginal organisations and activists demanded statutory autonomy and authority in governance matters and compensation for loss of land. They developed innovative and in some cases militant styles of protest, which were at times strongly affiliated with the African- American “Black Power” ethos of resistance to white oppression, to articulate their grievances and embarrass the government. With respect to Aboriginal people in remote areas, where tribal affiliations were still robust, it was clear that the Aboriginalisation of service delivery and community management that was an objective of the self- determination policy could not happen without fostering the specific inclinations and skills required to adopt western styles of administration. Therefore the needs and expectations of Aboriginal people to whom ministers and bureaucrats were accountable were varied and conflicting.

A.2.2 Arts & Cultural policy

The Whitlam Labor Government placed the Arts at the centre of its policy agenda. It brought to fruition arts initiatives associated with previous governments and injected substantial subsidies into the sector (Gardiner-Garden, 2009). State galleries, several of which had expanded their exhibition spaces during the 1960s and 1970s, saw an increase in government and donor support for acquisitions. In 1973 the federal government presided over the statutory reconfiguration of the Australia Council for the Arts, and this was ratified by an Act of Parliament in 1975. Responsible for arts funding, policy and promotion, the Council had a suite of boards dedicated to different areas of the arts which allocated funding on the basis of peer review at an “arm's length” from government. This consolidation, and the dramatically expanded arts budget that 324

accompanied it, recast Australia as a viable place to develop an artistic career (Craik, 2007:12). The introduction of tertiary level art education in universities across Australia in the 1960s and 1970s, and the establishment by the Whitlam Government of free university education, created a large community of young artists and arts workers. The Australia Council subsidised flagship arts companies, independent arts councils and those artists working within traditional genres, and it also gave support to artists who departed from traditional methods, genres and themes in their engagement with the counter-cultural movements of the day (Murphy, 1983b; Burn, 1983:40). The Australia Council's charter and some of its committees – particularly the Community Arts Committee - challenged the then default view that the State serves the arts most effectively by enabling the best artists to do the best work, and that the benefits of this inevitably flow through to society as a whole. While excellence and national identity remained core premises for distributing subsidy at this time, social democratic principles of access, equity and participation were introduced into the arts policy discourse, as was the highly elastic category of community to which these principles could be oriented (Rowse, 1985; Hawkins, 1993). Associated with this change was the desire to recharacterise national culture so that diversity with respect to ethnicity, sexuality, region and so on could be accommodated and celebrated. This subsidy ethos assisted many young artists to find audiences in defiance of still- conservative curators and gallerists. These artists formed collectives and artist-run spaces, participated in community-based art projects and staged non-commercial exhibitions in the new university or college funded galleries and in venues funded by the Visual Arts Board (Smith, 1984:24-25).

A.2.3 The Aboriginal Art Industry

Only one of the Australia Council's seven boards was dedicated to a particular social group rather than a category of the Arts, and this was the Aboriginal Arts Board (AAB). The AAB‟s formation typified the policy vision of self-determination. Its establishment was marked by The National Seminar on Aboriginal Arts in 1973, a week-long series of talks and discussions involving Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians and overseas guests, accompanied by several exhibitions, performances and 325

film screenings (AAB [ed], 1973). Whitlam, who was only five months into his prime- ministership, gave a rousing opening speech which situated Aboriginal affairs at the centre of his Government's agenda:

[I]f there is one ambition we place above all others, if there is one achievement for which I hope we will be remembered, if there is one cause for which I hope future historians will salute us, it is this: that the government I lead removed a stain from our national honour and gave justice and equality to the Aboriginal people (1973:4).

Whitlam's speech indicated that Aboriginal people's difference, in terms of their cultural heritage and customs, would be respected and encouraged to flourish. Aboriginal people would be empowered „to make their own decisions about their way of life within the Australian community‟, and Whitlam saw the AAB's mandate, its exclusively Aboriginal membership, and its access to financial resources, as exemplary in this regard (4). His speech positioned the arts as integral to the exercise of self- determination, because they ensured the preservation and adaptation of cultural traditions; had the power to instil within non-Indigenous audiences an emotional awareness of Aboriginal people's plight; and were an avenue for the expression of protest by those Aboriginal people living in towns and cities who suffered from „isolation, ...prejudice, and a multitude of social and economic handicaps‟ (6).

The AAB was vital to the formation of the Aboriginal art movement. As Altman et. al have pointed out, „[i]n the period 1973-1981, the AAB was the major, and frequently the only, financial supporter of the Aboriginal arts and crafts industry‟ (1989:21, see also Johnson, 2007:33; Peterson 1983). In many respects, the means by which it provided this support were unconventional. As stated in the AAB‟s section of the Australia Council‟s Annual Report 1975/1976, rather than provide „individual fellowships or living allowances‟ to artists, such as those who had just begun to paint in Papunya, the Board supported them by commissioning and purchasing the work they produced. This model was „the antithesis of the handout mentality frequently adopted in Aboriginal programs… which has greatly damaged Aboriginals‟ dignity‟ (Australia Council, 1975/1976:23). The Board also provided funding for supplies, transportation and salaries for art advisors at the fledgling Art Centres, and worked towards building a

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retail market for Aboriginal art. This market was slow to develop however, and between 1973 and the early 1980s, the Board took the radical but prescient step of staging exhibitions of Aboriginal art overseas. These exhibitions were often followed by donations of works to the hosting embassies and institutions so that the emerging market at home was not flooded (Berrell, 2009; Edwards in McCulloch, 2001/1999:32- 33). In its early years, the Board was strongly focused upon Aboriginal cultural survival and rejuvenation, Aboriginal people's rights to their heritage, and the contemporary relevance of their traditional cultural practices (Australia Council, 1974; 1979). For the AAB, the restitution of what had been eroded by colonisation had far more weight than concerns about professional artistic development. Many grants were intended to facilitate cultural practices such as dance, song and ceremony specific to particular tribal groups. With respect to the conservation of heritage, funding was allocated to education programs, the documentation of oral traditions, the making of bilingual recordings, the establishment of keeping places for objects of significance, and to advising museums about the appropriate treatment of artefacts in their collections. The Board‟s first chair, Dick Roughsey, writes that the Board's ambitions were „an expression of pride and confidence that stems from the fact that it will be decisions made by Aboriginal people that will ultimately determine the future of their art and culture, and its integration within the total spectrum of Australian art‟ (1976:239). While initially this usually entailed a focus on the art produced in remote Australia, more eclectic and European influenced art practices emerging from settled areas of the country gradually gained recognition as Aboriginal art. The Board came to regard the variety of art forms produced by Aboriginal artists as a reflection of the diverse experiences and objectives that underpinned Indigenous identity in contemporary Australian society (Australia Council, 1974:41; Rowse, 2000:516).

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A.3 Fraser Liberal Government 1975-1983.

A.3.1 Aboriginal Affairs policy

Malcolm Fraser's liberal government was much more conservative and disciplined, focussing strongly on reducing government expenditure. Several Indigenous policy programs were subject to budget cuts (Lippman, 1979). However, for the most part the Fraser government kept faith with the new policy direction in Indigenous affairs, though the rhetoric shifted from self-determination to „self- management‟ (Johnston, 1991c:20.4.9). The principle that Aboriginal people should have a role to play in the formation of Aboriginal policy was upheld and several formal bodies were established or reconfigured (Weaver 1983a; 1983b). Among these was the Community Development Employment Project (CDEP), which was established to counteract the ill-effects of what was known as “sit-down money”. CDEP tied welfare payments to forms of employment in remote communities where there was little opportunity for sustained labour force participation. Fraser saw through the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act in 1976, which allowed Aboriginal people to claim freehold title over unalienated Crown Land with which they retained traditional ties, and to claim royalties from mining ventures that took place on that land. Land Rights would remain the dominant Aboriginal Affairs issue during Fraser's term, maintained as such by the activism of Aboriginal people, the advocacy and notoriety of the newly formed Central and Northern Land Councils, the attention of the press and the government's own prioritising. From 1979, the NAC and other pressure groups began advocating for a Treaty between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. While the implications of Aboriginal sovereignty embedded in this concept led Fraser and subsequent governments to reject it, the Yolngu concept of a Makarrata, defined as bringing to a close „a dispute between communities and the resumption of normal relations‟ received more favourable consideration from the government (Gunstone, 2007:20).

A.3.2. Arts & Cultural Policy

Arts and cultural policies during the Fraser years involved a retraction of the largesse of the Whitlam government, with the Australia Council budget suffering major 328

cuts (Hawkins, 1993:47-50). The support of excellence took primacy over provisions for access and participation, and the flagship opera, ballet and theatre companies retained their support. However, the Community Arts Program also received endorsement from government and acquired the status of a Board. The government also introduced tax incentives for private donations of major works to public collections (Gardiner-Garden, 2009:8). In 1982 the Australian National Gallery (now the National Gallery of Australia) was substantially upgraded and formally opened by the Queen (Waterlow, 1983:10). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, “community” cemented its place in the arts patronage nexus, particularly as result of the activities of the Aboriginal Arts Board, the Community Arts Board and the Crafts Art Board (Rowse, 1985; Craik, 2007:12-13). Subsidies now had to be warranted according to whether the “community” would be engaged by the resulting production. The concept of community evolved from referring to a particular locality to encompassing minority groups, women, youth, workers, the elderly and disadvantaged members of society. To be “culturally disadvantaged” no longer meant that you were starved of the best forms of culture because of your geographic location, but that you were a victim of social inequality and the government's failure to engage diverse groups in society in the arts, groups characterised by different experiences, heritage and capacities for self expression (Rowse, 1985; Hawkins, 1993). Consistent with these changes, a more egalitarian and everyday notion of “culture” began to emerge in arts policy discourse.

A.3.3 The Aboriginal Art Industry

The discourses of the AAB went against the grain of normative ideas about excellence in the high arts in their characterisations of art and culture. Within the opening pages of its 1979 programs of assistance booklet (and this remained unchanged in its 1982 booklet), a section titled „Aboriginal Art as a way of life‟ states:

Art is not a separate function in the traditional context, nor is it categorised as it is in many other societies. Art is an integral part of social and religious behaviour and the survival of skills in traditional art forms is therefore vital to the survival of the social structure and beliefs .... The role of the arts in Aboriginal society has acquired a new and urgent emphasis. Where traditionally it was to express and transmit culture, it now strives also to 329

preserve a cultural identity within a larger encroaching society (Australia Council, 1979:2-3).

This way of underlining Aboriginal art‟s significance by pointing to both its interconnectedness with other aspects of Indigenous society and its status as a bulwark against precipitous cultural loss has continued to permeate Aboriginal art discourse, including in policy contexts as will be illustrated below. There is reason to believe that the Board sometimes struggled to reconcile these two foci with conventional Arts categories. For instance, „ceremony‟ was frequently mentioned as a funded practice in the early years, while later documents reveal some equivocation about the term, such that it is sometimes paired with, or replaced by, „festivals‟ (Australia Council, 1984:32; 1987; 1990; 1993/1994:8; 1994/1995). Furthermore, while concepts of pride, wellbeing and a sense of identity recurrently underpin arguments about the importance of facilitating Aboriginal people‟s participation in the Arts177, AAB funding guidelines in 1982 stated that „Recalling its primary responsibility to the Arts, the Board does not fund projects where arts activities are a means to other ends, such as craftworks in rehabilitation programs‟ (in subsequent years the last part of this sentence was abridged to „(eg arts as therapy)‟ (Australia Council, 1982:9, 1983:5). From the early 1980s, projects related to conservation and heritage, such as those relating to museums and keeping places, were removed from the funding agenda despite having been a central priority initially (Australia Council, 1983:5; see also 1991/1992). Hence the priorities of preserving heritage and tribal traditions, strengthening cultural identity and enhancing personal wellbeing in the face of disadvantage were all critical objectives of the Board, however, like some Community Arts priorities, they were in conflict with the driving philosophy of arts patronage that was upheld within the Australia Council as a whole. This conflict also rested upon the fact that distinguishing the amateur from the professional, an implicit requirement of all arts patronage founded on principles of excellence, was very difficult to do in relation to Aboriginal

177 See for instance Australia Council (1978/1979), in which we find the suggestion that „[w]here tribally oriented people believe their traditions are not under threat, they cope better with the complex problems of their changing life-style. And in cities and towns, Aboriginals who are several generations removed from their traditional culture derive purpose, pride and identity from the existence of the traditional arts as part of a living culture‟ (17; see also 1984:3). 330

practitioners. The Aboriginal arts were in an embryonic phase, and were often associated with traditions of learning and training that remained the domain of anthropological expertise rather than aesthetic judgement (or conventional art education). With the growth of an Aboriginal arts industry, these non-arts priorities were finessed in AAB policy discourse so that they were treated as forces energising contemporary Aboriginal creative practice that was of a high professional standard and corresponded to existing Arts categories. It is also noteworthy that the AAB maintained a focus on communities and groups rather than individual artists. In 1981/1982 the number of organisations dedicated to Aboriginal art and culture had grown to 50, and these were drawing 76% of the Board‟s funds, whereas individual artists‟ grants comprised only 10% of grants allocated (Australia Council, 1981/1982). Art Centres were also proliferating, such that in 1981 the Board was supporting 17 art advisors (Healy, 2005:75). In the following years, this money was provided to community organisations in the form of grants so that the recruitment and decision making shifted from the AAB to the artists themselves. One organisation that received a consistently large allocation during the 1980s was the Aboriginal Cultural Foundation in Darwin, which offered grants for cultural maintenance programs, traditional ceremonies, inter-tribal meetings and festivities, and the teaching of culture to the young. The Aboriginal Artists‟ Agency which was dedicated to responding to individual artists‟ needs with respect to training, publishing, copyright and so on was another regular recipient of major grants. Dance and theatre companies in major cities and regional cooperatives were also supported, as were conferences, training programs and exhibition organisation and touring initiatives (Rowse, 2000).

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A.4 Hawke Labor Government 1983-1991

A.4.1 Aboriginal Affairs Policy

In the 1980s, both Fraser and Hawke shifted the core agenda in Aboriginal affairs policy from being deferential to cultural and separatist concerns in relation to self-determination, to focusing on Aboriginal people participating in the economy, and achieving equality with non-Aboriginal Australians with respect to education, employment and other socio-economic indicators (Lippman, 1979; Altman et. al, 1989: Chapter 8). Hawke's government upheld the principles of self-determination178 and consultation in Aboriginal affairs. It sustained strong budgets with respect to the provision of basic services to Aboriginal communities, and established major policy frameworks for Aboriginal employment, training, enterprise development and education initiatives (Jennett, 1990). It also introduced legislation to protect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage, and to return some pieces of land, such as Uluru (Ayers Rock), to Aboriginal ownership. In the early years, the Hawke government's Aboriginal affairs policy was heavily focused on establishing National Land Rights, with the intention of bringing the varied legislation that had been introduced by State governments into accord with Commonwealth legislation (Gunstone, 2007:15-17). However, partly in response to the aggressive lobbying of the mining and pastoral industries, and the impression that the majority of the Australian public were not in favour of it, the Hawke government began to withdraw its support for National Land Rights in 1984 (Jennett, 1990; Goot & Rowse, 2007:61-72). The ideal of establishing a Treaty followed a similar path: while Hawke's government indicated its support for the idea of some kind of „compact‟, particularly in the lead up to the 1988 Bicentenary when it was anticipated that there would be major Aboriginal protests, these suggestions were never made concrete. The rate at which Aboriginal people were dying in prison and police custody was another major issue that dominated Indigenous affairs politics during this period. In 1987 the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (RCIADIC) was established to investigate the deaths of 99 Aboriginal people in custody. Its findings

178 However this was not consistent. While self-determination was explicitly advocated at some points, it was also, as with the previous government, sometimes replaced by „self-management‟ (RCIADIC, 1991c:vol. 2, 20.4.9). 332

brought to public attention not only cases of brutality, negligence and racial discrimination with respect to the treatment of Aboriginal prisoners, but the tragic life paths of disenfranchised Aboriginal people that had led to their overrepresentation and high rates of suicide in custody. The late 1980s were dominated by anger and disappointment amongst Aboriginal activists, lobby groups and organisations that Hawke had stepped back from both National Land Rights and the makarrata/Treaty process. As foreseen, the 1988 Bicentenary celebrations in Sydney were overshadowed by protests with large cohorts of Indigenous as well as non-Indigenous participants. The protests hailed January 26th as “Invasion Day” and as a “National Day of Mourning”, and demanded National Land Rights and justice for Black deaths in custody. Hawke's government did, however, introduce two highly significant pieces of Aboriginal affairs legislation. First, after an extended period of consultation with members of Aboriginal communities across the country, it established the Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander Commission (ATSIC) in 1989. Both the National Aborigianl Conference (NAC) (abolished in 1985) and its predecessor the NACC had been deemed failures for various reasons (Jennett, 1990; Weaver, 1983a; 1983b). ATSIC was a statutory authority designed to encompass the roles of the NAC, the DAA, the Aboriginal Development Commission (ADC) and other Aboriginal programs in government. The organisation was intended to further Aboriginal self-determination in a concrete way within a democratic structure that enshrined the principles of accountability and representativeness. Second, in 1991, the Hawke government introduced legislation that initiated a process of Reconciliation. The idea of reconciliation had become more prominent following the Bicentenary as an alternative to, or indeed as a means to avoid, the Treaty path, and its origins can be traced to the Makarrata debate. The government undertook extended consultation and negotiations over what Reconciliation might involve with Indigenous people as well as church and community groups, unions, and the opposition party, particularly in the years 1990-1991 (Tickner, 2001; Gunstone, 2007:29-32). The wide ranging RCIADIC Report on Aboriginal deaths in custody, released in 1991, brought official validation to the anger over racial discrimination and injustice that was fuelling Indigenous activism, and its final recommendation was that a bi-partisan process of Reconciliation process was necessary and urgent if „community division,

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discord and injustice to Aboriginal people are to be avoided‟ (Johnston, 1991d: recommendation 339). On the condition that addressing Aboriginal people‟s socio- economic status would be a priority, the legislation gained the endorsement of the Opposition and passed through Parliament with unanimous support. The Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (CAR) was established with a 10 year mandate to improve Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations. Great symbolic importance was attached to the fact that this period would culminate in 2001, the anniversary of Federation.

A.4.2 Arts & Cultural Policy

Much cultural policy during the Hawke years pivoted on the commemoration of Australia‟s Bicentennial in 1988. The Australian Bicentennial Authority (ABA) established in 1980 supported a series of major events, exhibitions, publications and television broadcasts, some of which were modelled on events associated with the American Bicentennial of 1976. The Australian events had a contemporary rather than historic focus, and a highly celebratory orientation that presented national heritage, culture and identity as being characterised by diversity (Sarah, 1989; Cochrane & Goodman, 1988). This inclusive approach was in part symptomatic of the pluralistic and postmodern inflection of the intellectual culture of the time. It was also a defence against the tensions around multiculturalism, republicanism, Aboriginal activism and other points of conflict that would make any attempt to advance the notion of a consensual and virtuous national narrative extremely controversial. A focus on the popular, the accessible and the spectacular also reflected the hope that mass participation in the festivities themselves could provide the foundation for unity that was made so elusive by the actual history of the continent and its inhabitants (Spillman, 1994:21). Geographic elements such as journeys of arrival and navigation, stories of hardship and survival within inhospitable environments, and landscapes of beauty and grandeur – were also focal points of the Bicentennial. In her comparison of the American and Australian Bicentennials, Spillman (1994) notes the unusual significance of the idea of having the world‟s attention in the Australian context, and this outward looking nationalism has been identified by other 334

scholars as being a characteristic of Australian cultural policy (see Rowse, 1985; Stevenson, 2000). The Bicentennial organisers promoted the anniversary as a mark of Australia‟s maturity as a nation-state within the international community, and various events, particularly those associated with the Arts and Sport, were treated as opportunities to display Australian culture and achievements on the world stage.

With respect to Arts policy, the Hawke government restored the arts budget to a level consistent with Whitlam's reforms (Gardiner-Garden, 2009:15). However the status of the arts in Australian culture was to change radically, to the extent that Craik (2007) argues that Hawke oversaw the most dramatic revisioning of cultural policy of all governments since Federation. As the tone of the Bicentennial celebrations appears to illustrate, the government‟s cultural policy gave an even firmer footing to an eclectic conception of culture that encompassed everyday activities, popular culture and sport, and showed some irreverence for the flagship arts companies and traditional notions of excellence in the arts (Gardiner-Garden, 2009:10-11). At the same time, the Hawke government fostered a newly managerialist style of governance which focused on accountability and efficiency in expenditure, and oversaw such changes as „the application of performance measurement, the introduction of market incentives and corporatisation‟ (Craik, 2007:13). Late in Hawke‟s term the Australia Council was rationalised, so that the number of Boards, staff and the administrative budget were all reduced (Gardiner-Garden, 2009:20-21). Economic arguments were also increasingly present in the Council‟s arts and culture advocacy discourses. For instance, the Council frequently highlighted the generative impact the arts had on other sectors of the economy in order to argue that strategic government „investment‟ could have far- reaching effects (Hawkins, 1993:82). In sum, as Stevenson points out, the Hawke government was responsible for:

the development of an industry approach to cultural policy whereby the language of subsidy came to be replaced by the language of economics with new emphasis being placed on “demand” (i.e. consumption and audience development), rather than subsidising “supply” (performance and creative development). In other words, it was during the Hawke years that the arts came to be regarded as an industry and not a part of the welfare state (2000:34; see also Parson in Gardiner-Garden, 2009:17-18).

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These changes sowed the seeds of the “cultural industries” approach to arts and cultural policy that was later adopted by the Keating Labor government. Two complementary shifts in the cultural policy landscape were significant. In the first, the recently expanded view of “culture” that had been underpinned by social democratic and often anti-capitalist ideals was now happily associated with forms of mass entertainment enjoyed by “ordinary people” that were produced and distributed in consumer-oriented contexts. In the second, there was a new expectation that the State, and many non-commercial institutions that depended upon State patronage, should manage their revenues in a corporate fashion and compete in the marketplace as if they were businesses. The arts were not to be exempt from this, and thus an instrumentalist approach to the arts that sought to serve democratic and therapeutic ends had become compatible with commercial methods and objectives.

A.4.3 The Aboriginal Art industry

The term of the Hawke government corresponded with a period of major transformation in the Aboriginal arts industry. Within the AAB, this period was characterised by an activist agenda that reflected the “pan-Aboriginal” basis of the national Land Rights and Treaty movements of the time. The first two chairs of the AAB had been Dick Roughsey and Wandjuk Marika, both highly esteemed men from remote communities learned in classical Indigenous culture and dedicated to its preservation. During their time, the directors of the AAB had been non-Indigenous men: Bob Edwards and Alan West. In the early years of the Hawke government, two high profile urban Aboriginal activists took on these positions: Chika Dixon was Chair of the Board from 1982-1986, and Gary Foley served as Director from 1983-1986. Dixon and Foley had participated in the 1970s (Aboriginal) Black Power movement, the establishment of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy on the lawns of Parliament House, protests against (among other things) the touring of the South African Springbok rugby team in 1971, and Union movements (Attwood, 2003: Chapter 13). They had also been involved in pioneering Aboriginal controlled services relating to health, legal rights, and employment opportunity. For Dixon and Foley, the AAB was another domain in which to assert Aboriginal rights to justice, equality and autonomy (Lambert, 1984a). Following the retirement of several members, an entirely new board was elected in 336

1983/1984. This Board was more geographically representative and included several practitioners now regarded as path breakers in their artforms. At this time the language of AAB policy within Australia Council documents changed markedly (Australia Council, 1984; Australia Council, 1985a; 1985b). There was a notable increase in references to self-determination (the term had receded somewhat in the previous years), and an emphasis on consensual decision-making, equity and representativeness in the distribution of grants. The salience of social democratic ideals was reflected in the fact that young people, women, the unemployed and prisoners were argued to have „high priority when allocating funds‟ (1985b:53). Furthermore, “consultation” - with artists as well as government agencies such as the DAA, the NAC and the Land Councils - had new prominence in the description of the Board‟s methods. It appears that consultative and outreach measures resulted in other government agencies committing funds to Aboriginal arts, giving the Board scope to redirect some of its funds (Australia Council, 1984:33). While the Board remained committed to funding organisations, there was a new emphasis on individual artists. Targets of this new focus were those artists practicing in urban centres who were regarded as having been neglected in previous years. They received individual grants but were also beneficiaries of the Board's support for key exhibitions such as Koori Art '84, and Aratjara, a landmark international touring exhibition staged in 1993 which included urban and remote artists (Lambert, 1984b).

A tighter focus on Indigenous economic development and labour-force participation within Indigenous policy in general impacted upon the fledgling Aboriginal art industry at several levels. Within the AAB there was new attention to arts-related employment opportunities for Aboriginal people. By 1985 all of the Board's non-Indigenous staff had been replaced by Indigenous staff, and organisations that were recipients of AAB grants were encouraged to do the same (Rowse, 2000:516). Indeed in 1986, major organisations who were recipients of grants were warned that if they did not employ Indigenous staff in senior administrative roles, the Board might refuse to pay for those salaries. Similarly, any new initiatives that sought funding were informed that they had to hire Indigenous administrative staff if they wanted to be credible candidates (Australia Council, 1986:26).

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Art Centres received funding from the Aboriginal Development Commission and other government agencies under a range of training, employment and business development schemes (including CDEP), in some cases on the basis that they were Aboriginal enterprises that would eventually become commercially sustainable (Altman et. al, 1989:114-122). The Commission also took over the running of Aboriginal Arts Australia Ltd (AAAL, formerly AAC) from the Australia Council in 1984 (25). Employment has remained important features of Aboriginal art industry subsidy to this day. In 1989, the Department of Aboriginal Affairs‟ Review of the Aboriginal Arts and Crafts Industry presented its report (Altman et. al, 1989). This review had been precipitated by the refusal of a group of Art Centres to submit to the centralising and rationalising objectives of AAAL, by then known colloquially as the “Government Company”. AAAL still had control over the circulation and marketing of Aboriginal art and was also seen to be competing unfairly with the small group of commercial retailers that had emerged by then (Altman et. al, 1989:57-60).179 This boycott paved the way for Art Centres to compete within the free market (Healy, 2005:29-30). The Review was also responsive to the fact that there had been a series of disputes and a crisis of confidence relating to the Board's conduct within the Australia Council, and the Board‟s relationships with the Aboriginal Development Commission and the Arts and Aboriginal Affairs Ministries were deteriorating (Hewett, 1989a; 1989b; The next move in Aboriginal art, 1989). The Review Report argued forcefully that the industry could empower Aboriginal people in economic terms:

The major means to maintain and extend support to the Aboriginal arts and crafts industry is to emphasise its economic significance. In many parts of Australia, the only means to move towards AEDP [Aboriginal Employment Development Policy] goals of employment and income equity is to facilitate Aboriginal involvement in the arts and crafts industry... This in turn requires a shift in emphasis from viewing Aboriginal arts and crafts production as

179 The Government Company had been disbanded and reformed under several different names between 1983 and 1987, largely because it had been mired in corruption and mismanagement allegations and conflicts over control between the Board and Federal Ministries for the Arts and Aboriginal Affairs. Following serious financial losses, its galleries were finally closed in 1991 (Hewett, 1989a; Cochrane, 1991). 338

primarily cultural activity to viewing it as an economic activity with a great deal of cultural significance (Altman et al, 1989:123, see also 322).

In making this argument, the authors of the report endorsed a policy approach that was far removed from traditional “Arts” policies. Generally speaking, even where arts policies, such as that associated with Community Arts, have been designed to engage disadvantaged people in public life and culture, they very rarely identify the overcoming of economic disadvantage as an explicit goal. On this point the Aboriginal Arts Board had set a precedent: it had consistently highlighting Aboriginal people‟s involvement in the Arts as a means for them to overcome poverty and earn an income (Australia Council, 1977; 1979; 1984).180 It is likely that the authors of the 1989 Report sought to harness the emerging economic rationalist values of the time, values that increasingly regarded the market as the most effective way to engage marginalised citizens, in the service of the artists and the movement as a whole.181 However, this convergence of cultural and commercial concerns was recognised to be problematic, and the report indicated that the Aboriginal artistic products on the market would need to be strongly differentiated if the support provided by different government agencies was not to have negative consequences. For instance, Aboriginal manufacturing enterprises which produced derivative and “kitsch” Aboriginal art were being subsidised to enhance employment opportunities, and such enterprises were seen to undermine other areas of the industry in which artists and their representatives were endeavouring to legitimise Aboriginal art as culturally distinctive fine art (Altman et al, 1989: 88-90; 123-125).

Following the release of the 1989 report it was decided that the Board was to focus its budget „on arts promotion and advocacy and professional development for key Aboriginal artists‟ while ATSIC would have responsibility for subsidising Art Centres and other aspects of the industry (Altman, 2000a:464). In 1989 the Board was replaced

180 For instance, in one annual report it was noted that „Members of the Board are aware of the demoralising effects on people who depend on hand-outs for their livelihood. The Board has therefore pursued a policy of encouraging Aboriginals to produce works in order to assure themselves of economic independence‟ (Australia Council, 1977:25). 181 It is interesting to note that the RCIADIC Report echoed these arguments (RCIADIC, 1991a: vol 4, 28.1.23-25; 34.4.15-21).

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by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Committee (ATSIAC), overseeing three sub-committees dedicated to Visual Arts, Performing Arts and Literature (Hewett, 1989c). The ATSIAC‟s 1990 “Programs of Assistance” document clearly illustrates its diminished jurisdiction, with applicants being advised that ATSIC, state funding bodies and the Department of Employment, Education and Training (DEET) were alternative sources of funding (Australia Council, 1990). „Aboriginal Enterprises for Manufacture of Arts and Crafts‟ were advised to liaise with ATSIC and DEET in preparing applications to the Committee. This document also illustrates the changed discourse of arts policy in general; specifically there was a focus on marketing strategies, operation costs, accountability measures and performance. It is clear that while the Australia Council as a whole was adjusting itself to the imperatives thrown up by the new cultural industries paradigm, ATSIAC was unique in seeking to reconcile an uncomfortable nexus of artistic, cultural and economic objectives. With respect to Art Centres, Healy notes that „transferring responsibility for the funding of art centres to an economic division of ATSIC‟ entailed that „the sources of funds and the requirements for funding for art centres [shifted] from arts-based to predominantly economic criteria with the establishment of the Arts and Crafts Industry Support Strategy (ACISS) in the 1991-92 financial year‟ (2005:30). Art Centre staff were now expected to dedicate much more of their time to marketing, performance evaluation and to adopting more business-like practices in general (Altman, 2000b:91- 98).

A.5 Keating Labor Government 1991-1996

A.5.1 Aboriginal Affairs Policy

Although Paul Keating had shown little interest in Aboriginal affairs before he replaced Hawke as Labor leader in 1991, Aboriginal social justice issues would become central to his Prime Ministerial agenda and profile. The issue of Aboriginal rights to land re-emerged in a new guise in 1992 when the Mabo Native Title decision was handed down by the High Court. The substance of this decision, arrived at after a 10

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year court battle, was that Eddie Mabo's title to land in the Torres Strait which his ancestors had occupied for generations had not been extinguished by colonisation, and furthermore, that the claim that Britain had justly appropriated the Australian landmass because it had been essentially unoccupied was a furphy. From this point, Aboriginal interests would become the object of attack from the pastoral and mining lobbies, who would soon find a platform within the Liberal opposition party and some state governments. A fear campaign that misrepresented the threat Native Title posed to private land, public space and commercial interests would come to dominate the tenure of the Keating government, which in 1993 passed the Native Title Act, giving all Aboriginal groups the right to prove that their native title had endured on Crown land. From the outset, the Keating government expressed a strong commitment to the process of Reconciliation and to social justice for Aboriginal people. In December 1992, Keating spoke at the launch of the UN International Year of the World's Indigenous people in Redfern park in Sydney. His speech traced the current disadvantage that Aboriginal people suffered to the impact of colonisation and dispossession, and urged non-Indigenous Australians to recognise their („our‟) part in these injustices. He declared that the Mabo decision was a foundation for a new relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians (Keating, 2001/1992). The offence taken by members of the Opposition, state governments and large sections of Australian society to Keating‟s attribution of guilt and responsibility to white Australia as a whole, and the force of the campaign against Native Title, brought an end to bipartisanship over Reconciliation. The parliament became highly adversarial over many issues in Indigenous affairs. The government responded to the recommendations of the RCIADIC Report with a range of funded measures which addressed criminal justice and legal matters as well as the social, cultural and economic reasons why Aboriginal people were disproportionately represented in custody (Tickner, 2001). In 1993, the role of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner was established within the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC, the Australian human rights watchdog which had been established by statute in 1986 under the Hawke Government). The Commissioner's mandate involved reporting annually on both the human rights of Aboriginal people and the progress of Native Title. In 1995 the

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National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal Children from their Families began within HREOC.

A.5.2 Arts & Cultural Policy

Keating had brought to his reelection campaign in 1993 a raft of promises relating to the formation of a national cultural policy that would make the Arts and Culture a priority of his government (Stevenson, 2000:32-33). As Craik et. al (2000:190) point out, he vigorously promoted the idea of a „culture-led renaissance of the Australian economy‟, an aspiration which entailed that the instrumentalist approach to culture inaugurated by the Hawke government would be consolidated under his leadership. In 1994, Keating‟s government unveiled its Creative Nation policy (DoCA, 1994). Creative Nation articulated a democratic view of culture that encompassed the traditional high arts and their institutions, commercial mass media, new communications, heritage, and cultural tourism. It championed the culture industries model by treating the health of the high arts, the burgeoning tourism sector, the creative features of goods and services and other policy imperatives that were otherwise dispersed across several portfolios, as affiliated concerns. Most significantly, it made the Arts and Communications part of the same Cabinet Portfolio. This measure was indicative of the government‟s hope that by establishing a vibrant and diverse cultural sector that offered varied cultural forms for both domestic and international consumption, the „assault from homogenised international mass culture‟ (1) could be withstood. The following passage from Creative Nation conveys the gravity of this imperative, and recalls the „cultural cringe‟ history discussed in the 1980s chapter:

The revolution in information technology and the wave of global mass culture potentially threatens that which is distinctly our own. In doing so it threatens our identity and the opportunities this and future generations will have for intellectual and artistic growth and self-expression. The measures we have taken in this cultural policy are substantially designed to meet this challenge, and ensure that what used to be called a cultural desert does not become a sea of globalised and homogenized mediocrity' (DoCA, 1994:6- 7).

Tourism was an important component of the Creative Nation policy, and cultural tourism in particular became a high priority of governments from the national to 342

the local level during the 1990s. Sydney's successful bid for the 2000 Olympic Games in 1993 played a pivotal role in this, but in the early 1990s tourism was already being advocated as a means to revive Australia's depressed economy (Rowe, 1993; Van den Bosch, 2005:173). The focus on tourism affected much of the cultural sector. It impacted upon the way arts, heritage and cultural organisations developed and justified their programs, and underpinned their increasingly entrepreneurial approaches to attracting audiences (or “consumers”) and corporate sponsorship (Hawkins, 1990). State governments began developing cultural tourism programs in the second half of the 1990s, a project with which the Australia Council and state Arts ministries were often involved (Stevenson, 2000:143-146). The arts were now irrefutably intertwined with the leisure and entertainment sectors. They were also now imbricated with nationalistic formulations of what constituted “Australianness” that underpinned efforts to market the signature attractions of Australia to tourists, and with marketing campaigns promoting the attributes of particular cities, towns and regions. Related to these tourism initiatives was the development of cultural planning and cultural development policies during both the Hawke and the Keating Labor terms. In 1987 the Community Arts Board within the Australia Council became the Community Cultural Development Committee, and began to focus on „strategic partnerships‟ with organisations outside the arts and culture sectors (Hawkins, 1993:78-79). This Committee helped to disseminate cultural planning programs in local councils across the country. Cultural planning and cultural development policies introduced by local and state governments encouraged holistic strategies of integrating arts and cultural activities into policies addressing areas such as tourism, urban rejuvenation, heritage, regional economies, environment management, unemployment, health and social inclusion. Art and culture were thus now resources to be instrumentalised in a range of contexts (Hawkins, 1993:85; Craik et. al, 2000:195; Stevenson, 2000:108-114).

A.5.3 The Aboriginal Art Industry

The ideals articulated in Creative Nation rested heavily on celebrations of Aboriginal culture‟s uniqueness and marketability, and its importance to the project of

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establishing a more inclusive and virtuous civic culture and a positive international impression of Australian identity. The document‟s introduction states:

As never before we now recognise the magnificent heritage of the oldest civilisation on earth – the civilisation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. In literature, art, music, theatre and dance, the indigenous informs and enriches the contemporary one. The culture and identity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians has become an essential element of Australian identity, a vital expression of who we all are (DoCA, 1994: 6).

Such references to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture are made throughout the document. Furthermore, Aboriginal art and culture was positioned as the flagship of the Cultural Tourism sector, and evidence of overseas visitors' appetite for it was cited (100). As Craik points out, cultural tourism was argued to have „the capacity to stimulate cultural production, annex tourism to diverse cultural industries, and promote the culture of the nation‟ (2001:94). Aboriginal art and culture's prominence within this vision therefore made it, as Van den Bosch suggests, „pivotal to the marketing of a new Australian cultural identity‟ (2005:172-3). Aboriginal focused and run tourism ventures would increase throughout the 1990s under the banner of cultural tourism (Zeppel, 1998; Davidson & Spearritt, 2000: Chapter 7; Craik, 2001:106-7). This had been precipitated by RCIADIC‟s tourism-related recommendations, and subsequent policy research and commentary on the potential of the Aboriginal cultural tourism sector (Office of Northern Development [ed], 1993).

In 1995 ATSIC‟s Cultural Policy Framework was released (ATSIC, 1995). It argued, in the vein of the Aboriginal Art Board‟s founding blurb about Aboriginal art being a „way of life‟ (discussed above), that Aboriginal culture was distinguished by being „holistic‟ and „integrated‟, and that Aboriginal artistic practices were „organically related to the broader culture‟ (1995:v, 1-3 original emphasis). Specifically, we read that „[c]ulture is understood as closely linked to the economic and social well-being of indigenous peoples, to their spiritual well-being, and to their custodianship of the resources of land and sea‟ (3). It is interesting to note that this holistic view of culture sits very comfortably with the cultural industries ethos articulated in Creative Nation. In other words, in its rejection of the idea that culture is a discreet aesthetic sphere, this 344

figuration of Aboriginal culture is compatible with the view that art can have a symbiotic relationship with other economic endeavours and enhance the realm of the popular and the everyday. The Framework as a whole appears to very much endorse the cultural industries paradigm, although it is tailored towards the specific goals of Aboriginal economic empowerment, social justice and Reconciliation. It frequently underlines the importance of advancing Aboriginal cultural development in the “mainstream” to ensure maximum economic opportunity and control over the commercialisation of Aboriginal cultural forms, and to help forge a respected place for Aboriginal culture within the Australian cultural landscape. The opportunities associated with the Olympic Games in 2000, the Centenary of Federation and the Year of Reconciliation, both in 2001, are treated as critical to this objective, as are the tourism sector and the art market. The Framework cites a Value Production Chain Analysis and acknowledges that the „indigenous cultural industries‟ were currently hampered by being overly oriented towards the creative origins and production of culture, with little attention payed to „circulation‟, „delivery mechanisms‟ and „audiences and reception‟ (12-13). The correction of this imbalance, requiring a concerted focus on marketing strategies, was a priority of the Policy (17). In tension with this injunction were recurrent cautionary references to the protection and control of cultural heritage, the retention of cultural property, and the preservation of the integrity of Aboriginal culture.

Thus the arts and cultural policy goals of the federal government and those of ATSIC were complementary at this time. Similarly, the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation's document Valuing Cultures (Langton & CAR, 1994) located Aboriginal culture and heritage as central to national culture, and saw „Indigenous cultural industries‟ as potentially instrumental in achieving both Aboriginal economic empowerment and Reconciliation. What is clear is that, just as Creative Nation sought to combat the „assault from homogenized international mass culture‟ by facilitating the growth, diversification and export of a dynamic Australian culture, ATSIC's policy argued that the corrupting and exploitative forces of the free market could be combated if Aboriginal people were empowered to commercialise their cultural forms in strategic ways to serve the interests of the Aboriginal community. At this time, the successful

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marketing of Aboriginal-centred cultural industries was viewed as an avenue for addressing several objectives simultaneously: achieving Aboriginal economic empowerment, the rejuvenation of Aboriginal culture and the assertion of a distinctive Aboriginal identity, national Reconciliation, and the reconfiguration and enrichment of national culture in the eyes of Australians as well as those overseas.

A.6 Howard Liberal Government 1996-2007

A.6.1 Aboriginal affairs policy

With the election of the Howard Government the concepts of social justice and self-determination fell out of government discourse (Gardiner-Garden, 1999). This reflected a significant departure from the belief that Aboriginal people had special rights based on their unique identity and prior ownership of the land, and indeed from the belief that Aboriginal people comprised a distinct entity within Australian society. ATSIC's budget was reduced substantially in Howard‟s first year in office, which presaged its eventual abolition in 2004 (Gardiner-Garden, 2004). Just prior to the election of the Howard government, the Wik High Court decision had found that the Wik peoples retained Native Title to leasehold land (land in use by pastoralists or miners, leased from the government) on their clan estates in Cape York. Native Title became an increasingly divisive issue in Australian politics, and in 1998 the Government passed the Native Title Amendment Act which diluted Aboriginal rights considerably in favour of contesting interests. In 1997, a year into Howard's term, HREOC presented the Bringing them Home report, following its National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. The Inquiry had found that between 1910 and 1970, most Aboriginal families had been affected by policies of child removal that had targeted Aboriginal children specifically with the objective of assimilating them into the white population. These children had become wards of state in children's homes, missions, or were fostered or adopted by white families. Revelations from documentary sources and extensive oral testimony generated a great deal of sympathy and indignation

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amongst the Australian public. The Report revealed the suffering experienced by the children and their families, the deleterious effects of displacement and multiple institutional placements, and the harsh living conditions and disciplinary regimes in many of the institutions (National Inquiry, 1997). At the same time, the Report‟s invocation of the concept of cultural genocide, and its use of the phrase „Stolen Generations‟, were interpreted by the Howard Government and some Australian citizens as being highly inflammatory (Manne, 2001). The report‟s recommendation that the government issue a national public apology for past practices of the state was emphatically rejected by the Federal Government (even though apologies were eventually made by all State governments as well as many local governments, churches and community groups (Dow, 2008).

The refusal to say “Sorry” came to dominate Indigenous politics and became symbolic, for those sympathetic to the cause, of the Government‟s lack of commitment to the process of Reconciliation (Gunstone, 2007; Goot & Rowse, 2007:137-139). Many decisions and statements made by Howard and his ministers over the following years led to an irrevocable cleaving of the Federal government from the Indigenous leaders, advocates and organisations with which previous governments had for the most part negotiated in a collaborative spirit. The Reconciliation movement became a people's movement in resistance to and in spite of the stance of the Federal Government. In 2000 the Australian Declaration of Reconciliation was launched, and 150,000 people participated in The People's Walk for Reconciliation across Sydney's Harbour Bridge, and there were corresponding marches in other major cities (Gardiner-Garden, 2011:13). The government argued that it endorsed “practical” rather than “symbolic” reconciliation; that too much attention to the distinctiveness of Aboriginal people was fostering disunity and resentment within the Australian population; and refuted – in deference to the country's achievements since settlement - what it saw as the overly negative and activist-inspired „black-arm band‟ view of Australian history (Gunstone, 2007:Chapter 2). There was a sustained period of heated debate among political and intellectual circles and in the press about how Australian history should be interpreted (Macintyre & Clark, 2003). The government‟s Indigenous policy rhetoric focused on economic opportunity and independence, accountability and personal responsibility.

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In 2005 ATSIC was abolished, and the services it had provided were mainstreamed. This followed years of budget cuts and a gradual attenuation of its responsibilities and powers, partly due to corruption concerns and a loss of leadership credibility in the eyes of both its Indigenous constituents and the government. Some funding to Indigenous groups in communities took the form of Shared Responsibility Agreements and Regional Partnership Arrangements. In 2007, following reports of high levels of child sexual abuse and neglect in remote Aboriginal communities, the Northern Territory Emergency Intervention was launched. Several pieces of legislation were amended and new pieces were introduced to give the Government the power to enforce compulsory health-checks, quarantine social security payments, increase the Government‟s rights over parcels of Aboriginal land, and to facilitate a range of other measures (Gardiner-Garden, 2011:18). To some extent the Intervention was responding to 15 years of debate and criticism regarding remote communities and the Land Rights paradigm. Both were seen to sustain ways of life in which violence, substance abuse, morbidity, early death and welfare dependency were intergenerational and normalised.182

A.6.2 Arts & Cultural Policy

The Howard government for the most part worked with Creative Nation‟s policies and principles, athough many agencies received budget cuts initially. Two important national cultural institutions were expedited by the Howard Government: the National Portrait Gallery and the Australian National Museum (opened 2001), both in Canberra. The latter would be subject to a controversial review, due to allegations that its displays were under the spell of the “Black-armband” view of history (Marcus, 2004). Over the course of Howard‟s term, the government initiated several reviews into different parts of the arts sector which resulted in quite generous funding measures. Craik points out that this contradicts the widely held impression that the Coalition was anti-arts, with the caveat that areas that had not been targeted for review were often off the funding agenda due to the fact that no official policy had been formulated (2007:19). The government also facilitated greater collaboration between the arts and corporate

182 See Austin-Broos (2011: Chapter 4) for a useful overview of this discourse. 348

sectors, for instance by modifying tax laws to create incentives for private sector donations and sponsorship and to encourage cultural institutions to stage fundraising events (Gardiner-Garden, 2009). Following the Contemporary Visual Arts and Crafts Inquiry (known as the Myer Report), the Government launched the Visual Arts and Crafts Strategy, which projected the delivery of substantial revenue to the sector over 4 years, conditional upon matching contributions from the State and Territory governments (Myer, 2002). These governments had already begun to be more proactive in developing arts and cultural policy and would take on a bigger role in facilitating cultural activities at this time, particularly through cultural planning, community development and policy „attachment‟ initiatives. As Craik writes, the last of these entailed that „arts and cultural activities would form a part of policy delivery strategies targeting unemployment, health, environmental sustainability and training‟ (Craik, 2007:18-20).

A.6.3 The Aboriginal Art Industry

By the mid 1990s, the Art Centre had come to be recognised as the bedrock of the Aboriginal art industry. The economic rationalism that had informed government cultural policy as well as ATSIC‟s cultural policies from the 1980s onwards impacted heavily upon the subsidisation of Art Centres. In 1997 ATSIC commissioned Colin Mercer to conduct a review of the conduct of its Arts and Crafts Industry Support Strategy (ACISS) - which allocated the majority of funding to Art Centres (Mercer, 1997). Colin Mercer had been the Project Coordinator of ATSIC's Cultural Policy Framework (ATSIC, 1995, discussed above), and as an academic and cultural policy planner and consultant, he was strongly affiliated with the cultural industries and creative industries turn in cultural policy in Australia and other countries. The cultural industries paradigm provides the architecture for Mercer's report, which reiterated the Value Production Chain Analysis cited in the Cultural Policy Framework (Mercer, 1997:25-26 particularly). However the Report also paid serious attention to non- commercial aspects of Aboriginal culture, arguing that „for the majority of indigenous stakeholders for the ACISS program, there is no - or little - distinction between the economic imperatives of producing goods to live and to earn money, and the cultural imperatives of sustaining traditions, skills and cultural competencies‟ (21). Furthermore, 349

Mercer echoed the arguments of previous reports that it was dangerous to expect Art Centres to become commercially sustainable and independent of subsidies. He argued that not only was such independence economically unfeasible in most cases, it would place pressures on staff to shift their priorities away from the vital contribution made by Art Centres to the cultural and social life of the communities they serve. This perspective on the economic fragility of Art Centres was affirmed again in The Art and Craft Centre Story (Wright & Morphy [eds] 2000), a report based on a detailed survey and audit of 39 Art Centres who were members of Desart (the association of central Australian Aboriginal Art and Craft centres). Despite these concerns, the National Arts and Crafts Industry Support Strategy (or NACISS, which replaced ACISS following Mercer‟s Review) maintained high expectations of Art Centres with respect to their marketing strategies and annual turnover (Healy, 2005:32). This is illustrated in the experience of Warlayirti Artists, and Art Centre in the Western Australian community of Balgo. In 2001 Warlayirti Artists achieved relative success in adapting to the business model of Art Centre administration laid out by NACISS in its funding criteria, and its administrators even hoped that it could operate without grants within three to five years. In response, Warlayirti Arts' operational funding budget was halved in 2001/2002 and withdrawn all together in the subsequent financial year, which caused the Art Centre to go into deficit (2005:3). The tendency to “punish success” in this way remained a major concern for many stakeholders in the industry until ATSIC‟s abolition in 2005. In those years, the staff who were responsible for NACISS were also accused of incompetence and of not understanding the multifaceted role of Art Centres, of managing funding in a reactive rather than pro-active way, and they were also criticised for permitting major inconsistencies between the regional councils‟ administration of funds (Wright & Morphy [eds] 2000; Wright, 2002). These concerns were articulated in several submissions to the ATSIC review which preceded its abolition (DCITA, 2002; Desart, 2002). It is interesting to note that the Myer Report found that ATSIC was the second largest source of funding for the entire Visual Arts and Crafts Sector in Australia, after the Australia Council (Myer 2002:272). In the financial year 1999/2000, ATSIC provided $4.2 million to Art Centres through NACISS, and $2.8 million in additional

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funding through its regional arts and culture programs. Though it is impossible to accurately quantify the level of funding provided to the Aboriginal art industry relative to the mainstream Australian visual arts sector, Myer's findings indicate that, taking into account ATSIC funding alongside the Aboriginal Arts Board budget of $2.2 million for 2000/2001, funding for the Aboriginal arts industry (approximately $9.2 million) constituted half of the money allocated by the Commonwealth to the Australian Visual Arts and Crafts sector, which was $18.3 million in 1999-2000 (Myer, 2002:265-272).183

A summary point to make about the changes I have just outlined is that the early 2000s saw a paradoxical consolidation of the Art Centres as sophisticated market players in a highly lucrative industry and as organisations that would always depend on government support. Between 1995/1996 and 2005/6 the NACISS budget was frozen, and this freezing was symptomatic of the cuts made to ATSIC's overall budget during Howard's term (Indigenous Art – Securing the Future, 2007:62). Therefore at a time when the industry was expanding and the number of Art Centres was increasing, ATSIC was channelling funding away from successful Art Centres in order to support others, or simply could not extend funding to emerging Art Centres (Altman, 2005:13). ATSIC's policies, in tandem with the entrepreneurial initiative of many Art Centre coordinators, transformed Art Centres from being organisations devoted to facilitating production to organisations with sophisticated business capacities competing in the marketplace. This transformation was assisted by the fact that the advocacy organisations Desart and ANKAAA secured sustainable federal and state government support following the Myer Report to deliver training and skills development initiatives for Aboriginal staff in Art Centres, and assist Art Centres with marketing strategies, administration, ethical standards, consumer education and so on (Healy, 2005:72).

By the time ATSIC was abolished the vitality of the Aboriginal art industry was irrefutable, especially given the auction market successes. Unlike many other programs administered by ATSIC, the merit of subsidising Art Centres was not questioned by the

183 It is extremely difficult to make this kind of comparison for more recent years, due to the variety of initiatives from different government departments that have contributed to the industry (in some cases these were more focused on heritage, cultural regeneration and employment) and the fact that state and territory governments have expanded their art subsidy measures since the 2002 Myer Report. 351

government (see Alston, Hardgrave & Abbott, 2003). After the abolition of ATSIC, DCITA became the administrator of the National Arts and Crafts Industry Support (NACIS) program and the program's budget was immediately increased (Indigenous Art – Securing the Future, 2007:61-62). It was now clear that the Art Centres‟ success guaranteed their ongoing subsidisation, rather than their independence from it. In 2006, in response to longstanding concerns about unethical conduct in the industry that found significant media coverage, the government launched the Senate Committee Inquiry into the sector Indigenous Art – Securing the Future (2007), to assess how policy could best contribute to the sustainability of the sector.

While the recommendations and ramifications of the Inquiry‟s report are more relevant to the term of the Rudd/Guillard Labor government elected in 2007, it is worth noting the multiple sources of funding the sector was receiving at this point, as outlined in Chapter 6 of the report. These included NACIS and several other Indigenous specific programs administered by DCITA that had a collective budget of over $12 million for the year 2006/2007. Indigenous art projects were also identified as receiving funding through several mainstream funding programs within DCITA in the areas of exhibition touring, regional arts, festivals, and IT training. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board (ATSIAB) and other Australia Council programs were also contributing to the sector through direct grants to artists, funding for Desart and ANKAAA, and other programs. The Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) was providing funding to the sector via the targeting of Aboriginal economic development (support for small business, enterprise development, capital works and employment and training projects relating to Aboriginal art and culture). In addition, CDEP remained a source of funding (Indigenous Art – Securing the Future, 2007:64). While the Committee did not receive submissions from all States, it was clear that the sector was also receiving substantial funding through State arts programs, particularly in the Northern Territory. It is clear even from this brief overview that the Aboriginal art industry has continued to be resourced in a variety of ways by governments.

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