Seeing Aboriginal Art in the Gallery

seeing aboriginal art in the gallery

HOWARD MORPHY

Ramingining Artists, The Aboriginal Memorial 1987-88. Natural pigments on wood, heights from 40 cm to 327 cm. Collection: National Gallery of Australia. Reproduced by kind permission.

Introduction for keeping all this art out? However, rather ne of the great embarrassments than attributing blame, it is much more inter- Oconfronting the art world in the post- esting to analyse the historical process of its colonial context is the recent history of the inclusion. The excluded objects became differ- exclusion of much of the world’s ‘artistic’ ent after they were included not because their production from the hallowed walls of the fine very inclusion magically changed their status, art galleries of the West (Sally Price’s ‘civilised but because the fact of their inclusion reflects places’).1 One might ask: how was it that it changes in Western conceptions of what art is. was excluded for so long and who is to blame The process of inclusion has involved three

37 Humanities Research Vol. 8 No. 1, 2001 significant factors: the critique of the concept the Australian case anthropologists have of ‘primitive art’, an associated change in con- played a major role in the process of including ceptions of what can be called ‘art’, and an Aboriginal art within the same generic cate- increased understanding of art as a commodi- gory as other people’s art, and there is evi- ty. Those factors have operated in conjunction dence that anthropologists have played a sim- with global political and economic processes ilar role elsewhere. This is not to argue that all which in some contexts have empowered the anthropologists were participants in the agency of Indigenous artists. In this paper I process. For much of the twentieth century will outline my theoretical argument and then anthropology neglected art. Non-Western art apply it briefly to the Australian context, and material culture were associated with reflecting on the history of the inclusion of ethnographic museums and some museum Aboriginal art in galleries of fine art and the curators were indeed unsympathetic to the significance of that change in the discourse categorisation of objects in their collections as over Aboriginal art. art objects. I would argue, however, that their The anthropology of art seems at times to position was often motivated by a desire to have been squeezed between — and distorted increase the understanding of the significance by — two myths: the myth adhered to by the to the producers of the objects in their collec- art market, and by some art curators, that tions. Many museum curators and anthropolo- somehow an anthropological approach to gists viewed the inclusion of non-European Indigenous art created its otherness and sepa- objects in the art category as a license for mis- rated it from Western art works; and the interpretation, through the imposition of uni- anthropological myth that classifying works as versalistic aesthetic concepts and in the cre- ‘art’ imposed a Western categorisation upon ation of difference at the level of meaning and them. These myths have a number of contin- significance. uing echoes in practice: for example the ‘Primitive art’ was viewed by modernist emphasis in art galleries on displaying works as critics and connoisseurs as formally dynamic, art, with the minimum of information lest it expressive, challenging and incorporable provide a distraction to the viewer, contrast- within the Western canon; as to its meaning it ing with the greater concern with information explored the primeval depths of human spiri- in ethnographic museums. This opposition has tuality and sexuality. It was this demeaning been reinforced at times by disciplinary battles and ill-informed categorisation of objects as over public spaces, by Indigenous and ethnic ‘primitive art’ that alienated anthropologists politics, and by the desire to be on the right from the art connoisseurs and signified the gulf side of the colonial/post-colonial divide. In between their discourses.2 It is ironic, yet part it has been maintained by the desire of inevitable, that for many years anthropologists the disciplines involved to emphasise their and connoisseurs of Indigenous art found distinctiveness in order to maintain their sep- themselves on opposite sides of the art/artefact arate identities and sources of funding. This divide. The recent challenge mounted to the motivation to maintain a structural division category of primitive art by anthropologists provides a clue to the ahistorical nature of the and art historians, such as Coote, Shelton, debate and the ever-present desire to lay Errington, Philips, Marcus and Myers, Price blame for an unacceptable history on a rival: and Vogel3 has allowed museum anthropolo- the art gallery can feel threatened by the gists to reincorporate the concept of art ethnographic museum, the anthropologist by within their theoretical discourse and may the art historian. foreshadow a bridging of the divide between The myth concerning the role of the the anthropological and art worlds. anthropologists in the creation of otherness of Part of the process of incorporating art primitive art has no historical basis. Indeed in within the theoretical discourse of anthropol-

38 HOWARD MORPHY Seeing Aboriginal Art in the Gallery ogy is the development of definitions that are itive art’ paradigm in bringing art back into cross-cultural and that distance the concept anthropology. Graburn puts this succinctly from its Western historical baggage. An exam- when he writes: ple of such a definition is one I produced myself: art objects are ‘objects having seman- We now realise that practically all the tic and/or aesthetic properties that are used for objects in our ethnographic collections presentational or representational purposes’.4 I were acquired in politically complex multi- am not concerned at this stage to defend this cultural colonial situations. Furthermore particular definition. Any cross-cultural we can state unequivocally that unless we definition of art, just as in the case of a cross- include the socio-political context of pro- cultural definition of religion, magic, gender duction and exchange in our analyses we or kinship, is part of a discourse that shifts the will have failed in our interpretation and term in the direction of broad applicability understanding.6 while still maintaining connections to its previous place in academic discourse. The To this I would only add a corollary: that recent history of the world biases epistemolo- material culture — however it enters the dis- gy towards Western definitions, but the chal- course of art — is an important source of evi- lenge of anthropology is in part to separate dence, for anthropologists, to better under- concepts from a particular past, as for example, stand the social conditions and historical in anthropological definitions of religion interactions of the time of their production. which have moved away from Christianity without excluding it. Cross-cultural defini- Art or ethnography a false opposition tions are as much concerned with time as with Aboriginal art is included today in the space: hence a cross-cultural conceptualisa- collections of every major art gallery and art tion of art must allow the analyst to museum in Australia, and is one of the world’s encompass the fact that conceptions of art most visible art forms. Its inclusion within the have changed in the last 400 years of Western category of fine art is no longer challenged in art practice and history as much as they differ Australia, though elsewhere in the world this cross-culturally. As a consequence the sets of can still be the subject of controversy.7 It is objects that get included under the rubric art easy to forget how recently this process of change continually over time. inclusion happened. Aboriginal art was barely However in relegating Western based recognised as a significant art form until the definitions of art to their place in a typology of 1950s and it was not until the 1980s that it possible definitions, it would clearly be naïve began to enter the collections of most to neglect the impact that Western cultures — Australian galleries, or gain widespread recog- and their definitions — have had on global nition as a significant dimension of Australian processes in recent centuries. The material art.8 However it is also important not to over- culture of Indigenous societies has been state the lateness of its arrival on the world changed as they have been incorporated with- stage. In 1964 Ronald Berndt was able to in wider global processes. However those write: processes of articulation and transformation are highly complex — both the incorporated Australian Aboriginal art is becoming bet- and the incorporators are changed thereby.5 ter known these days, or at least more Changing definitions of art are a microcosm of widely known, than ever before. Once it these larger processes. The increased under- was relegated to the ethnological section standing of the role of the commoditisation of a museum, and treated along with the and trade of material culture, including art, artifacts and material culture of other non- has been a partner to the critique of the ‘prim- literate peoples. Now it is not unusual to

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find such things as Aboriginal bark paint- phrasing it ‘crudely’, arguing in effect that ings taking place alongside European and anthropologists have failed to recognise the other examples of aesthetic expression. cross-cultural nature of art, Maloon oversim- And because they rub shoulders with all plifies the issues involved. forms of art, irrespective of cultural origin, It could indeed of course be argued that the inference is that they are being evalu- certain Western definitions of art themselves ated in more general terms: that there is are inherently cross-cultural since they posit not only wider appreciation of Aboriginal universals in human aesthetic appreciation. endeavour in this respect, but that it is, Clearly such a view lies behind Tuckson’s posi- almost imperceptibly, taking its place in tion as summarised by Maloon.14 He argues the world of art. ... Fifteen years ago few of that: us would have envisaged this meteoric rise in popularity, within Australia and over- [Aboriginal] artists make their paintings seas.9 with pleasure and imagination and intu- ition. They put their feeling into what It is often said that Aboriginal art first they do. They exercise skill and ingenuity entered an Australian gallery of fine art in in their use of materials; they are consider- 1959, with the acquisition by the Art Gallery ate of the ways their works are organised of New South Wales (AGNSW) of major and elaborated and are sensitive to the works from the Tiwi artists of Melville and resulting aesthetic effect. Bark paintings Bathurst Islands and the Yolngu artists of and other Aboriginal artefacts are not Yirrkala in north-east Arnhem Land. While ethnographic curiosities, but genuine this is an oversimplified account, nevertheless works of art. Furthermore, when non- this gift remains a significant and perhaps, in Aboriginal people respond to bark paint- hindsight, even transforming event. The ings as art, they are prone to recognise ‘the works were acquired by Tony Tuckson, Deputy underlying spirit of the imagery’ (in Director at the AGNSW in association with Tuckson’s revealing phrase).15 Stuart Scougall, an orthopaedic surgeon with a passion for Aboriginal art.10 One of the ways In countering Maloon’s/Tuckson’s16 thesis in which this event has been interpreted is as it is necessary to isolate two strands of argu- shattering the anthropological paradigm. For ment that are only loosely interconnected. example the curator Terence Maloon puts this The first is an essentialist view that associates position clearly when he states of Tony art with individual creativity, technical facili- Tuckson: ‘In the role of Aboriginal art expert ty, and aesthetic sensibility. The second is he had to take an opposing position to the masked by the phrase that bark paintings ‘are anthropologists who to put it crudely, general- not ethnographic curiosities’. I will address ly argued for the radical dissimilarity of all these issues by first stepping back in time to things traditionally Aboriginal to all things the debate between Tuckson and Ronald traditionally European’.11 According to Berndt that is the initial reference point of Maloon this enabled Tuckson to lay the foun- Maloon’s argument. The debate occurs in the dation ‘for the earliest public collection to be pages of Berndt’s edited book Australian acquired for aesthetic rather than ethnograph- Aboriginal Art which was published to accom- ic reasons’.12 Maloon here echoes Tuckson pany an exhibition of the same name curated who wrote: ‘Appreciation of Aboriginal art by Tuckson. A ‘reading between the lines’ has widened immeasurably because the gener- reveals that the book reflects a heated al public and the artist have been given a exchange between the two over how greater opportunity to see it as art, not as part Aboriginal art should be exhibited, appreciat- of an ethnological collection.’13 However in ed, and understood.17

40 HOWARD MORPHY Seeing Aboriginal Art in the Gallery

Tuckson certainly believed that there is archaeologist, and anthropologist’ and in the something universal about the character of art examples that he analyses does indeed use objects that makes it possible to evaluate them ethnographic data. in isolation from their cultural and social In essence Berndt is arguing that although background. He wrote: [there is] “an underly- it is possible to appreciate works purely on the ing unifying quality in art that resides in a basis of form, this appreciation is only partial, visual sense of balance and proportion, but and is biased towards the values of the viewing also an underlying spirit of their imagery ... culture. Following from this I would argue that [makes it possible] for us to appreciate visual while people can thus obviously appreciate art without any knowledge of its meaning and any work of art through the lens of their own original purpose”,18 (emphasis in the original). culture’s aesthetics, just as they can appreciate In a weak sense there is nothing unremarkable the aesthetic properties of found objects, they about this position. It is undeniably the case must realise that this is precisely what they are that ‘Western art appreciators’ can make aes- doing. They must not be under the illusion thetic judgments about works they know that they are experiencing the work as a mem- nothing about; the question remains who is ber of the producing culture would. The fail- included in the ‘us’, and are there differences ure to provide the background knowledge nec- in the bases of ‘our’ evaluations? Berndt writ- essary to interpret the object in relation to the ing in the same book acknowledged that producers culture can then be challenged both Tuckson was at least partially right: that the on moral grounds and on the grounds that it appreciation of the aesthetics of Aboriginal impoverishes the interpretation. art did attract the attention of the viewer: The counter-argument to this challenge is “however, we have attempted to go a little far- covered by Maloon’s statement that bark ther — to cross over the limits of our own paintings ‘are not ethnographic curiosities’. cultural frontiers, and to see something of the While he provides no explanation of what he broader significance of Aboriginal art”.19 But means, his underlying premise is that, as works Berndt thought that Tuckson pushed the argu- of art, they should not be positioned solely or ment just a little too far: even primarily as sources of information about the way of life of another culture. From this Tuckson’s contention is based on the uni- perspective art is a celebration of common versality of all art, irrespective of prove- humanity, and too much context distracts the nance. It is important for us to know here viewer. Indeed he suggests that the ‘spirituali- exactly what this means. The cultural ty’ that lies behind Aboriginal art is best background is not, here seriously taken revealed when it is viewed as art. This second into account; the function or use of the suggestion poses the greatest challenge to an object or painting, even the identity of the anthropological perspective on art, since it artist, may be completely unknown. ... Its deems irrelevant the particular cultural mean- decorative qualities, its design, its treat- ings associated with objects. The anthropolog- ment its overall appeal, are what matters; ical perspective would not deny that the we like its lines its curves its sense of bold- search for human universals and for categories ness, its balance and so forth. We are eval- that can be applied cross-culturally is perfect- uating it in our own idiom, within a ly compatible with a recognition of cultural climate of our own aesthetic traditions.20 difference. But the recognition of cultural difference requires that those categories be dis- While Berndt probably accurately assesses tanced from particular Western cultural the core of Tuckson’s position, Tuckson21 assumptions. Maloon’s/Tuckson’s universals acknowledged the importance of what he are in fact not universals at all but the expres- referred to as the ‘work of the ethnologist, sion of values of a particular (and indeed today

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Interestingly if we adopt a universalistic aesthetic perspective it is difficult to understand why the art world was so tardy in recog- nising the value of Aboriginal art — a value which appears to lie in its formal appearance unmediated by cultural knowledge. It seems unjust to attribute to anthropologists a significant role in the failure to recognise its universal attributes unless of course their attention to meaning was too much of a distraction. It was Australian artists and curators who so sin- gularly failed to draw attention (to paraphrase Maloon) to the ‘[exercise of] skill and ingenuity in their use of materials; [or the fact that] they are considerate of the ways their works are organised and elaborated and are sensitive to the resulting aesthetic effect.’ Indeed Margaret Preston,23 one of the few Euro- Australian artists who showed an interest in Aboriginal art until the 1950s, wrote at times as if the simple asymmetric geometry that she found so vital is almost the accidental product of a simple mind and faulty technique! She later modified her view. By way of contrast Cover photograph of ˆThe Adelaide Review, No. 23, 986, illustrating the curator’s intention to exhibit the toas as art. praise that issued from the pen of the anthropologist Baldwin Spencer foreshadowed Tuckson’s own (a fact that Tuckson clearly unrepresentative) European art world. The acknowledges): debates that raged over Rubin’s Primitivism exhibition generated similar debates in which Today I found a native who, apparently, it was argued that key assumptions of the ide- had nothing better to do than to sit quiet- ology underlying European modernism alien- ly in the camp evidently enjoying himself ated the art from the societies that produced ... he held [his brush] like a civilised artist it. Bernhard Lüthi, for example, wrote: ... he did the line work, often very fine and regular, with much the same freedom and Rubin’s love of modernism is based on the precision as a Japanese or Chinese artist fact that it took Western art beyond the doing his most beautiful wash-work with mere level of illustration. When Rubin his brush.24 notes that African, Oceanic or Indian arti- sans are not illustrating but conceptualis- However from Tuckson’s point of view ing, he evidently feels he is praising them Spencer’s involvement with Aboriginal art for their modernity. In doing so he alto- may have symbolised the very problem that he gether undercuts their reality system. By was trying to address. While Spencer was able denying that tribal canons of representa- to see the aesthetic dimension of Aboriginal tion actually represent anything, he is in art and responded to it in terms of universal effect denying that their view of the world characteristics of form, the paintings in his is real.22 charge remained in the National Museum, and absent from the walls of the National

42 HOWARD MORPHY Seeing Aboriginal Art in the Gallery

Gallery of Victoria. The paintings were part of er must also have some access to its history a comprehensive ethnographic collection and significance. Nigel Lendon has shown which included material culture objects in that, in viewing eastern Arnhem Land bark general, and thus the art was lost in the paintings, knowledge of the social and cultur- ethnography. It was not seen by others as art al background of the works enhances the because of where it was housed and how it was viewer’s appreciation of them: exhibited. The theory of a universal aesthetic is inter- The interpretation of these paintings may twined with a theory of viewing that opposes be compared to how the viewer might the art gallery to the museum. In this theory understand Western religious or political works of art should be allowed to speak for art, or the world of allegory. In that case themselves. Thus they need their own space we expect both the viewer and the artist for contemplation, and though their meaning to bring to the exchange a prior knowl- and impact will be affected by their relation- edge of the social and mythic space of the ship to adjacent works, and to the hang as a narrative, or at least a recognition of the whole, it is desirable that the act of viewing wider reality to which the image refers.25 should take place in space as uncluttered as possible by supplementary information. While Yet it is also undeniable that understand- the density of hangs varies, as does the amount ing the form of the paintings can provide deep of information provided, these broad princi- insights into culture and cognition. ples apply in art galleries around the world. Seeing a work as art is also quite compati- Museums, on the other hand, are often ble with seeing it as something else, and view- defined in opposition to art galleries as places ing an object in isolation does not of itself where objects are contextualised by informa- make it into an art object. However placing tion, by accompanying interpretative materi- objects in isolation, as in an art gallery, or in als, by dioramas, and by being seen in associa- sets, as in ethnographic displays, has at times tion with other objects. I think that it is desir- created the space for discourse over whether able to distinguish the Western concept of something is or is not an art object. And ‘seeing things’ as art from the presumption of a because art has been so inextricably intercon- universalistic aesthetic and indeed to separate nected with the market, the dialogue has been ‘seeing things’ as isolated or decontextualised entangled both in an economic and in a objects from ‘seeing things’ as art. cultural value-creation process. The South The real problem with Maloon’s/ Tuckson’s Australian Museum’s exhibition in 1986 ‘Art position, apart from its circularity, is that and Land’, provides an excellent example of Western viewers come to an art gallery already the discourse over Aboriginal art as art. It also laden with information and experience that illustrates just how challenging Tuckson’s can be applied to already familiar works of action was, nearly twenty-five years earlier, European art. This information will have been when he installed Aboriginal art for the first acquired from seeing works in quite different time in the AGNSW. ‘Art and Land’ was an contexts: not only the gallery walls, but also in exhibition of toas from the Lake Eyre region of publications and films, as reproductions, and Central Australia. Toas were direction signs so on. It is a conceit of a particularly narrow that marked where people had gone but they band of Western art theory and practice that were also engaging and diverse minimalist the appreciation and production of art has sculptural forms. On this occasion anthropol- nothing to do with knowledge of its particular ogist Peter Sutton and historian Philip Jones art history. For Indigenous art to be seen on decided to exhibit the objects not as ethnog- equal terms with Western art it requires more raphy but as art, by the simple expedient of than the right to an isolated space. The view- giving them their own space in a well lit

43 Humanities Research Vol. 8 No. 1, 2001 display with a minimum of accompanying because it existed in temporary form as body information. The protagonist who took them painting, sand sculpture, or ceremonial con- to task was an art historian, Donald Brooke, struction. While museum collections were who argued that the way they were displayed crowded with Australian weapons, Aboriginal in itself was a form of appropriation, since it cultures seemed to have produced few figura- contradicted the intention of the producers.26 tive carvings or masks, the items that had Although adopting a different and, on the gripped the imagination of sectors of the surface, opposite position from Tuckson, European art world. However this perception Brooke too appears to have been bound by the may have been reinforced by the evolutionist’s categories of his own culture. The acceptance eye. Aborigines as hunters and gatherers were of art works into the Western gallery context seen to represent the lower rungs of the evolu- is not simply a belated recognition of their tionary ladder. Fine art, thought to be a char- universal attributes. It can be a far more acteristic of high civilisation, was not antici- radical step that challenges the Western pated and hence remained unseen. It may also category itself and shifts the definition of art: be the case that, in formal terms, much exhibiting toas as art was part of that process. Aboriginal art fell outside the kinds of things That is why the inclusion of non-European art included within the nineteenth century continues to generate such opposition: it inventory of types of art. For example a toa insists on a different kind of art history that comprising a hunk of pubic hair stuck into a threatens to disrupt pre-existing values. At the ball of white clay on the top of a pointed stick same time Jones and Sutton provided, through was unlikely to have been acceptable as a work the accompanying book,27 and in the debates of art in Victorian-era Australia. Much that surrounded the exhibition, more contex- Aboriginal art could however more easily find tual information on toas than had been avail- its place in the later slots created by conceptu- able until then. As Luke Taylor pointed out in al art, minimalism, performance art and even reviewing the debate the error is in the abstract expressionism. While almost by defi- polarisation of views: in seeing works either as nition ‘primitive art’ provided something of a art or ethnography. challenge to existing categories, there were few Aboriginal artworks that did not pose a Our theory of art should not divorce the major challenge. Interestingly, in focusing on analysis of aesthetic forms from a consider- bark painting Maloon has chosen works that ation of social context; the form of the are most analogous to a fairly standard work is a crystalisation of those values. Western art form — that of pictorial represen- Rather we should investigate the cultural tation. setting of the artist’s aesthetic experience While anthropologists may have been and how this relates to the form of the complicit in the nineteenth century in con- works and also address the ways such artis- tributing to the image of hunter-gatherer soci- tic forms engender aesthetic responses in ety as representative of a pre-art, primitive members of other cultures who view the level of social organisation, they were also at works.28 the forefront of the challenge to such a view. Indeed it was anthropologists in association A short history of inclusion with a few artists and curators who, before If Aboriginal art had its advocates, such as World War II, pushed for the recognition of Baldwin Spencer and Margaret Preston, early Aboriginal art, and who, in the case of on, how was it that it remained neglected by Leonard Adam and Ronald and Catherine the Western art world for so long? There is no Berndt were the first to attribute works to simple explanation. Much Aboriginal art was known individuals. And according to uncollectable either because it was secret or Maloon29 it was at an exhibition organised by

44 HOWARD MORPHY Seeing Aboriginal Art in the Gallery

value to those works made before the influ- ence of European colonisation. In particular there was a tendency to reject art produced for sale. As Ruth Philips writes of Native American art:

...the scholarly apparatus that inscribes the inauthenticity of commoditized wares [is] a central problem in the way that art history has addressed Native art. The authenticity paradigm marginalises not only the objects but the makers, making of them a ghostly presence in the modern world rather than acknowledging their vigorous interven- tions in it.30

In the 1950s Australia was viewed as a country whose Indigenous inhabitants had been long colonised despite the fact that the frontier had only been extended to much of Arnhem Land and parts of central Australia in the decades either side of World War II. Almost from first contact bark paintings were viewed with suspicion by ethnographic museums and art galleries alike, and relatively few A Toa. Parakalani: To the plain which reminded were collected by museums in Australia and Kuruljuruna of his own, or his father’s (Parakarlana) bald overseas during the 1950s and 1960s.31 head. Kuruljurna camped here with his men for some time. White knob=plain. Top=hair representing Parakarlana or Collections made by Kupka and Scougal were Kuruljuruna. Diyari 215 mm. Collection: South Australian notable exceptions. Indeed this attitude that Museum. authenticity is allied to isolation, that charac- terised the views of some anthropologists, gives the Berndts in David Jones art gallery in a superficial weight to Maloon’s arguments. Sydney in 1949 that Tuckson first encoun- Perhaps because Aboriginal art had never tered Aboriginal art, and it was in a book edit- been a major token in the ‘primitive art’ mar- ed by Ronald Berndt that Tuckson wrote his ket there was less resistance to the inclusion of major article on the aesthetics of Aboriginal art made for sale in the fine art category when, art. Moreover it was not for nearly another eventually, the breakthrough came. The prim- thirty years that other galleries joined the itive art market needed to limit its products in AGNSW in adding Aboriginal art to their order to keep the market price high; also its collections. values rested on the difference between Just as it began to gain limited recognition Europeans and the romanticised primitive in the 1950s Aboriginal art had to face anoth- other who was tamed and, in a sense, devalued er challenge, this time to its authenticity. This through contact with civilisation. Between was felt to be threatened with contamination the 1940s and 1980s Aboriginal art moved by contact and trade. While rejecting the cat- from the non-art to the art category almost egorisation of Aboriginal works as primitive, without passing through the stage of being many anthropologists were allied with the considered as primitive art. Aboriginal art primitive art market in assigning a primary became art partly through the process of its

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action with the market. The designs on bark paintings were the same as those produced as body paintings, coffin lids, bark huts and containers or hollow log coffins — but in being painted on bark they were being produced for outside consumption. Similar considerations apply to the transfer of central Australian designs to acrylic paintings on can- vas, though in this case no-one could imagine that they were a pre-European product. Anthropologists who worked on art such as Berndt and Mountford, in making foundation- al collections of art in ‘new media’, were often without realising it integral to these processes of incorporating Aboriginal cultural production within the new market economy. However in doing so they were only reflecting the agency of Aboriginal people themselves, who used art as a means of persuading outsiders of the value of their way of life as well as a means of earning a living in the post- colonial context. Aboriginal art has also been fortunate in that at the time when interest in it was devel- oping, the categorisation of Indigenous art as primitive art was under challenge. The 1970s and 1980s have seen a breakdown of categories within Western art in general as the hegemony of the Western canon has come increasingly under challenge, from non- Western and Indigenous arts. This challenge has led implicitly to a shift in the definition of what art is and in who defines what is art. ‘Contemporary Aboriginal art’ emerged as a category in Australia during the 1970s and 1980s.32 Initially it included paintings which challenged the ‘primitive art’ category because of the dynamic nature of the art and the con- Shield from Murray River, Victoria. Collection: Pitt temporaneity of the artists. Previously the Rivers Museum, Oxford. Photo: Malcom Osman. only slot allocated to such work was the deval- commercialisation. Because so many forms of ued category of ‘tourist art’. The new category Aboriginal art are the temporary product of included art from all regions of Australia, with performance — body paintings, sand sculp- the proviso that the works were in continuity tures and ground drawings, string construc- with Aboriginal traditions, and thus part of a tions and fragile headdresses — or sacred trajectory that stretched backwards to the objects, in making works that could be sold precolonial era. It included the art of Arnhem Aboriginal craftspeople clearly produced Land — an art whose genesis was independent artefacts whose form was influenced by inter- of European traditions. The category came

46 HOWARD MORPHY Seeing Aboriginal Art in the Gallery into being partly because Aborigines asserted apparently changed rapidly over time; these the contemporary relevance of their art in the paintings thus became unproblematically Australian context. It was their contemporary avant-garde. Bark paintings, which used mate- art, it influenced white Australian art and in rials and techniques that were independent of turn was influenced by the post-colonial European art, had been accepted into the old context of its production. Aboriginal art, too, category of primitive art. Yet as art objects represented dynamic and diverse traditions, they and Western Desert acrylics occupied an and for those who were prepared to see, it was almost identical position, and both were relat- an avowedly political art. The category also ed directly to Indigenous iconographic came to include the acrylic art of the Western traditions. Such Aboriginal art seemed to be and Central Desert. simultaneously ‘primitive’ and ‘avant-garde’. The ‘Aboriginal Australia’ exhibition of As Jean-Hubert Martin pointed out, “If [con- 1981 which travelled to the State art galleries temporary] Aboriginal artists do produce work of Victoria, Western Australia, and of recognized value, then the categories Queensland was a major expression of this reigning in our institutions are in dire need of new and more inclusive category. In addition revision.”33 to bark paintings, Western Desert acrylic The development of ‘contemporary paintings and sculptures from Cape York Aboriginal art’ as a category rescued some Peninsula and Melville and Bathurst Islands, Indigenous art from being marginalised or it included decorated artefacts from all over devalued but it sowed the seeds for a different Australia. It also found a place for string bags kind of marginalisation. In the 1970s, when and basketwork which challenged the accept- the art of the north and the centre was begin- ed division between art and craft. Most inno- ning to achieve recognition, the Aboriginal vatively, perhaps, it included watercolours by art of south-east Australia was still unrecog- Namatjira, paintings by William Barak, and nised. There the illusion that Aboriginal art drawings by Tommy McRae. belonged to a past that was separated from The ‘Dreamings’ exhibition that toured contemporary life was easy to maintain. It was the USA in 1988-89 before returning to its simply a facet of the continuing invisibility of home gallery in Adelaide was in direct conti- Aboriginal people from the south in the con- nuity with ‘Aboriginal Australia’, although its sciousness of most white Australians until the agenda, to show the works as contemporary middle of the twentieth century. Aboriginal Aboriginal art, was even more explicitly art had gone just as Aboriginal people were articulated. ‘Dreamings’ emphasised the ‘fading away’. The near-prehistoric art of the commercial context of much of the art and early to mid-nineteenth century gained some drew attention, especially in the catalogue, to acceptance, but the art of the twentieth cen- Indigenous perceptions of the art as opposed tury and contemporary Koori art remained to Western aesthetics. It also included a far unrecognised, hidden as part of what W. E. H. greater proportion of works from the Western Stanner called ‘the great Australian silence’. Desert than did ‘Aboriginal Australia’, reflect- However, Aborigines in south-east ing the degree to which that art was beginning Australia had continued to produce art and to attract global interest. The exhibition of craftworks and a few, such as Ronald Bull, Western Desert acrylics and bark paintings gained a limited reputation as artists. But they from Arnhem Land together as equal members were in a difficult position, like Namatjira of the contemporary Aboriginal art category only more so. They found themselves posi- was potentially very challenging to the tioned either as producers of tourist art, which conceptualisation of the avant-garde. Western was negatively viewed as a contaminated form Desert paintings were a newly developed art of primitive art, or if their art was influenced form employing European materials, and they by, or indistinguishable in formal terms from,

47 Humanities Research Vol. 8 No. 1, 2001 contemporary Western art then what they fuzzy nature of the boundaries between stylis- produced was taken as a sign of their assimila- tic categories and the multiplicity of influ- tion. ‘Aboriginal Australia’ pushed at the ences on a particular artist’s work. The solu- boundaries of these categories by including tion forced by the nature of contemporary works by William Barak and Tommy McRae. Aboriginal art was the recognition both of its But more significantly the emergence of the plural nature and of the consequences of this category ‘contemporary Aboriginal art’ and plurality for Western art-historical theory. the positioning of Arnhem Land bark paintings and Western Desert acrylics within it Conclusion brought the contradictions of exclusion and The current moment provides a good opportu- Martin’s ‘need for revision’ closer to home. nity for a rapprochement between art histori- This was implicitly recognised in the cal and anthropological approaches to art. ‘Dreamings’ exhibition. Even so, while the The challenge to the old presuppositions of catalogue included reference to the contem- the Western art world, including the anthro- porary art of southeast Australia the exhibi- pological critique of the concept of primitive tion itself did not. art, has created art worlds that are far more In the 1970s and 1980s many Aboriginal complex and heterogeneous than their prede- people in south-east Australia began to devel- cessors, less subordinate to the developmental op as artists while simultaneously and confi- sequences of European-American art. Once dently asserting their Aboriginality. Most were non-Western arts were only thought to have a trained not in the remote bush or desert history at the moment of their discovery by regions of central Australia but, like many of the West. Such a view is no longer tenable. their white contemporaries, in the art worlds Art history must, as a result, be reinvented to and art schools of urban Australia. What was reflect the diversity of world arts and make their relationship to other Aboriginal artists? sense of the apparent chaos. This is not as rad- What was the relationship between ical a proposal as it may seem. Indeed contem- Aboriginal art and other contemporary porary art curation has long taken for granted Australian art? The paradoxes multiplied the existence of knowledge of the history and when non-Aboriginal contemporary artists significance of objects included in exhibitions, such as Tim Johnson and Imants Tillers bor- without which it is impossible to make sense rowed Aboriginal motifs for their own work. of changes in the artistic record. Many of the Tim Johnson even participated with variations in the Western canon can only be Aboriginal artists in the co-production of explained when related to the wider context paintings. Was a piece of Western Desert art of the objects’ production: why the works of contemporary Australian art when Tim the artists of the voyages of discovery paid Johnson painted some of the dots? Was it such attention to details of geology, environ- ‘Australian’ as opposed to ‘Aboriginal’ even if ment and climate, what motivated the impres- it was formally indistinguishable from other sionists to develop a new paradigm, the role of Western Desert pieces? If it was classifiable as colour theory in Seurat’s pointillism, the avant-garde could it no longer be Aboriginal cubist rejection of representational art, and so art? And if it was avant-garde then weren’t on. The anthropological endeavour of under- Aboriginal artists working in other avant- standing difference as well as similarity is one garde styles equally producers of Aboriginal that gives agency to the artists who made the art? works and allows their intentions and motiva- The apparent paradoxes arise because tions to be reflected in the histories of their Western art history creates pigeonholes. It works that are produced. An anthropological- tends to allocate individual works to single ly informed art history is needed to provide art-historical spaces, failing to recognise the the historical, art historical, social and cultur-

48 HOWARD MORPHY Seeing Aboriginal Art in the Gallery al information, not only for those artistic 4 Howard Morphy, ‘The Anthropology of Art’ in Tim traditions where background cannot be taken Ingold (ed), Companion Encyclopedia to Anthropology for granted but, it could be argued, for the (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 655. Western art tradition as well. 5 For a relevant discussion see Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge: Harvard HOWARD MORPHY University Press, 1991).

This is based on a paper given at the 2000 confer- 6 Nelson Graburn, ‘Epilogue: Ethnic and Tourist Arts Revisited’, in Ruth Philips and Christopher Steiner ence of the American Anthropological Association in (eds), Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in San Francisco, at a session convened by Russell Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds (Berkeley: Sharman on ‘The state of the anthropology of art’. I University of California Press, 1999), p. 345. would like to thank the discussant Nelson Graburn for 7 In 1997 for example there was controversy over the his comments. I’d like to thank Margaret Tuckson who exclusion of some categories of Aboriginal art from put me in touch with Richard McMillan, whose UNSW the art fair in Basel. David Throsby, ‘But is it Art?’, thesis proved invaluable. Nigel Lendon provided stimu- in Art Monthly Australia (Nov. 1997), p. 32, wrote to lating comments on the paper and corrected some of the the chairman of the committee saying that letting in recognisably Indigenous artworks from Australia errors. Christiane Keller provided some useful refer- would open up the floodgates to primitive, tribal, and ences and Katie Russell provided some valuable back- folk art from around the world. Interestingly Tracey ground research. Frances Morphy helped develop the Moffatt’s work was exhibited with great success at structure of the argument and improved the clarity of the same fair. The following year an even more heated debate broke out over the exclusion of a number expression. of Arnhem Land artists from the Cologne art fair, see John McDonald, ‘Black Ban: All They Want is a Fair Endnotes Go’, in Sydney Morning Herald, 29 September 1998. 1 Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places (Chicago: 8 Australian Perspecta (Sydney: Art Gallery of New University of Chicago Press, 1989). South Wales, 1981). 2 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture 9 Ronald M. Berndt, ‘Epilogue’ in Ronald. M. Berndt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). (ed), in Australian Aboriginal Art (Sydney: Ure The chapter titled ‘Histories of the Tribal and the Smith, 1964), p. 1. Modern’ provides an interesting discussion of these 10 Richard McMillan, ‘The Drawings of Tony issues though his eventual collapse of the opposition Tuckson’, (unpublished M. Arts Theory Thesis, between museum anthropologists and primitive art UNSW, 1997), documents the process of the acquisi- aesthetes into an ‘anthropological/aesthetic object tion of the collection and shows it as the result of a system’ oversimplifies the dynamics of the discourse complex process of negotiation between the Gallery and diverts attention away from the issues that divid- staff, in particular Tuckson and the director Hal ed them. Missingham, the Board of Trustees and the donor or 3 Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton (eds), sponsor Scougall himself. As Nigel Lendon pointed Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics, Oxford Studies in out to me the Indigenous works were still included the Anthropology of Cultural Forms (Oxford: under the rubric ‘Primitive art’ at the AGNSW until Clarendon Press, 1992); Shelly Errington, ‘What the 1980s. Became of the Authentic Primitive Art’, in Cultural 11 Terrence Maloon, Tuckson and Tradition, Painting Anthropology 9(2) (1994), pp. 201-226; Ruth Philips, Forever: Tony Tuckson (Canberra: National Gallery of Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native American Art Australia, 2000), p. 14. from the Northeast, 1700-1900 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998); George Marcus and Fred 12 Maloon, Tuckson and Tradition, Painting Forever, Myers (eds), The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and p. 14. Anthropology (Berkley: University of California Press, 1995); Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places 13 Anthony Tuckson, ‘Aboriginal Art and the West- (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Susan ern World’, in Ronald M. Berndt (ed), Australian Vogel (ed), Art/Artifact (New York: Centre for Aboriginal Art (Sydney: Ure Smith 1964), p. 63. African Art, 1988).

49 Humanities Research Vol. 8 No. 1, 2001

14 It is precisely the particular form of such universals tigation. The difference may be that the anthropolo- that explains why Bourdieu, in Pierre Bourdieu, gist wishes to establish first what the artist knows Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste about the subject of his painting by placing art with- (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), is so in a context of cultural knowledge and establish the determined not to engage in aesthetic discourse relationship between knowing and seeing, whereas a when considering judgements of distinction, and why particular modernist world view sees that knowledge Gell, in Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: and as being communicated directly through the art Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, itself. 1998), argues so passionately for an aesthetic rela- 23 Margaret Preston, ‘The Application of Aboriginal tivism that eliminates the aesthetic altogether as a Design’, in Art and Austalia, 31 March 1930, cross-cultural category. pp. 44-58. 15 Anthony Tuckson, ‘Aboriginal Art and the 24 W. Baldwin Spencer, Wanderings in Wild Australia, 2 Western World’, p. 63; Terrence Maloon, Tuckson volumes (London: Macmillan, 1928), p. 793. and Tradition, Painting Forever: Tony Tuckson, p. 14. 25 Nigel Lendon, ‘Visual Evidence: Space, Place and 16 I use this formulation Maloon/Tuckson in places Innovation in Bark Paintings of Central Arnhem where it is difficult to know whether the views repre- Land’, in Colonising the Country, special issue of sented are ones shared by Maloon and Tuckson or Australian Journal of Art,12, 1995, p. 60. are simply Maloon reporting his understanding of Tuckson’s position. The confusion may be a sign of 26 This exhibition provides a well documented con- just how well Maloon represents Tuckson’s arguments. tested arena for most of the issues discussed here. Luke Taylor’s ‘The Aesthetics of Toas: A Cross- 17 Indeed Richard McMillan’s 1997 UNSW thesis Cultural Connundrum’, in Canberra Anthropology The Drawings of Tony Tuckson, reveals a heated 11(1), 1988, provides an excellent discussion of the exchange between Tuckson and Ronald and main theoretical issues concerns and Peter Sutton, Catherine Berndt over publication of Tuckson’s ‘Unintended Consequences’, in The Interior, 1 (2), chapter in the book. Reading further between the 1991, pp. 24-29, provides an extended summary of lines one can’t help thinking that the somewhat the debate from his perspective. interventionist editorial style adopted by the Berndt’s helped to polarise the debate and make the protago- 27 Philip Jones and Peter Sutton, Art and land: nists’ views seem more opposed than in fact they Aboriginal Sculptures from the Lake Eyre Region were. (Adelaide: South Australian Museum, 1986). 18 Anthony Tuckson, ‘Aboriginal Art and the 28 Luke Taylor, ‘The Aesthetics of Toas: A Cross- Western World’, p. 63 Cultural Connundrum’, in Canberra Anthropology 11(1), 1988, p. 96. 19 Berndt, ‘Epilogue’, pp. 71-2. 29 Maloon, Tuckson and Tradition, Painting Forever, 20 Berndt, ‘Epilogue’, p. 71; my emphasis. p. 14. 21 Tuckson, ‘Aboriginal Art and the Western World’, 30 Ruth Philips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in p. 68. Native American Art from the Northeast, 1700-1900 22 ‘The Marginalisation of (Contemporary) Non- (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), p. x. European\Non-American Art (as reflected in the 31 see Howard Morphy, ‘Gaps in Collections and way we view it)’, in Bernhard Lüthi (ed) Aratjara: Spaces for Exhibition—Reflections on the The Art of the First Australians, (Dusseldorf: Acceptance of Aboriginal Art in Europe and Kunstammlung Norrhein-Westfalen, 1993) p. 23; In Australia’, Aboriginal Art in the Public Eye, Art writing a history of this particular period one is con- Monthly Australia Supplement (1992), pp. 10-12. scious of the fact that one is dealing with a coded language in which the use of words like conceptual is 32 The analysis which follows is drawn from Howard far removed from their ordinary language meaning Morphy, Aboriginal Art (London: Phaidon Press, and position the author in a particular way. Tuckson 1998). stresses that non-Western art is conceptual rather than representational, and clarifies his view with a 33 Jean-Hubert Martin, ‘A Delayed Communication’, quote from Golding, ‘The Negro sculptor tends to in Bernhard Lüthi (ed), Aratjara:The Art of the First depict what he knows about his subject rather than Australians (Dusseldorf: Kunstammlung Norrhein- what he sees’. Without agreeing with the presupposi- Westfalen, 1993), p. 33. tions about Negro art, this perspective should on the surface be compatible with an anthropological inves-