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ART INDIGENOUS - APPROPRIATION |
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Rates
of exchange Any social
benefit from exchanges between cultures can not make all exchanges
equal. Borrowings by the dominant culture exact a marginal advantage.
Inequalities between the world’s art museums are boosting the exchange
value of art by Australia’s indigenes. Only the National Gallery of
Victoria has a wide enough range of first-class European paintings to be
a player in the art world game of ‘I'll lend you my Rembrandt, if you
lend me your Tiepelo'. The bargaining chip for Australian curators is
their control of Aboriginal work. The recent loan of the Funeral poles
to St Petersburg was a belated repayment for a collection of Russian
works shown here. Promotion of
indigenous art can now be detrimental to our comprehension of both
indigenous and settler artists. For instance, at the Customs House on
Sydney's Circular Quay, the Djamu gallery, an off-shoot of the
Australian Museum, recently held a show called Mapping
our country. The visual quality of the indigenous works was as high as any I
have seen. The first problem was that unless you came knowing that the
paintings were maps of country - land claims in effect - nothing in the
rooms would have guided you to that fact. Secondly,
the non-indigenous items were chosen with much less care. As a
consequences, they delivered only the most obvious of maps that the
multitude of Australians use. There was no flight-path, no ferry, train
or bus routes. A floor plan for a Westfield centre, representative of
how we negotiate spaces, would have helped viewers to see that the
seemingly abstract Aboriginal works were also leading people through
places, (a point made by the 1960 Festival catalogue). How to
determine the appropriate context for discussing these collaborations
and conflicts was the aim of From
Appropriation to Appreciation organised for Adelaide Festival 2000
through Flinders University Art Museum and curated by that university's
Head of Cultural Studies, Christine Nicholls. At first
sight, the title seemed to suggest an improvement over time, which would
have misrepresented the encounters between Aborigines and settlers. The
purpose, however, was to examine the current range of responses as they
shift back and forth between appreciation and appropriation, and most
importantly to recognise that those categories are rarely mutually
exclusive. Of course, to achieve that sophistication requires awareness
of the temporal shifts within past practices, whether by artists,
curators and critics, or audiences. For instance, what needed saying in
the 1970s about Margaret Preston’s views of Aboriginal design was
affected by the fact that she had been almost forgotten. Different
critical perspectives became possible once she became a public icon. Four of the
settler artists on display (Margaret Preston, James Cant, Ian
Fairweather and Fred Williams) were active before the current wave of
interest in indigenous art began in the 1970s. The catalogue essay does
not locate their responses in contexts where Aboriginal cultural
production was viewed outside the realms of fine art. The official
exhibition at the 1960 Festival was entitled 'Aboriginal Bark Paintings
and Carvings', not as fine art or sculpture. Although the items had been
selected from the State Gallery's collections, the introductory essay
was not by an art gallery curator but by C. P. Mountford, hon. Associate
in Ethnology at the Museum. The catalogue for a commercial exhibition of
'Battarbee Centralian Arts' held during the 1960 Festival conceded that
the 'skill and
sensitivity’ of the Aborigines 'sometimes leads them to produce
authentic works of art'. Instead of
absorbing those circumstances, Nicholls treats Preston’s writings as
first-year essays to correct with the insertion of [sic] after any
mention of ‘primitive’. Offensive as primitive now strikes us, the
term ‘Primitive art’ provided a password by which Aboriginal
creations could get out from under the rubric of ethnographic artifacts
to be accessioned as works of art museum quality. Nicholls is
more sensitive to the complexities facing Aborigines who work with
materials from outside their own country, such the late Lin Onus, a
Yorta Yorta man, who obtained permission to paint in the rarrk
style from central Arnhem Land. Equally, she treats the
multiplicities in Gordon Bennett or the urban critiques by Trevor
Nickolls with the layering that they bring to their art. Condemnation
of Saskia Anmatyerre's invented persona and made-up legend for his
decoration of the chapel at Mary McKillop Place is justified but
overlooks the question of how many legends now accepted by Aborigines
have come back to them via the story-telling of Europeans. The Three
Sisters in the Blue Mountains is one case where tourism in 1949 might
have generated the stories that we now have of that district. The
non-initiated must always accept that when we are told a legend -
whether through images or in words - even by the appropriate holder of
that story, that person may be misleading us in order to protect her or
his knowledge. After informants confess that they have provided
anthropologists with only the most childish of the layers of religious
knowledge, the scholars face the infinite regress of when is an
outsiders ever told the whole truth. Is the confession itself another
protective layer? Inevitably, curators follow anthropologists - those
marginal natives - in down playing the secrecy among the people upon
they have staked their careers. The inclusion
of works that Elizabeth Durack made under the name of Eddie Burrup, and
her participation in a seminar, were the most publicised points in the
Flinders University exhibition. That issue requires more space than it
can be allocated here just as two aspects merit mention: first, does a
woman pretend to be a man in order to dethrone kings in grass castles
and to escape from the shade of an elder sister?
Secondly, where has the Durack men’s Aboriginal offspring left
the women of their white family in regard to indigenous society? It is
also worth remembering that, although Durack has shattered the Wandjina
in her paintings, she not faked Lily Karadada’s telling of it, or the
surfaces of any actual artist’s work. Another change
since the 1960s has been the attachment of personal names to indigenous
works. The exhibition at the initial Festival in 1960 arranged Arnhem
Land works by subject, without any interest in identifying their makers.
When the Museum of Victoria sent bark paintings to Texas in 1965, the
catalogue spoke of Yirrkala and Oenpelli, but not of particular
creators. Aborigines later became capital-A artists through contact with
social workers, dealers and connoisseurs. The fake became possible
within that network of helpers. The layout of From Appropriation to Appreciation fell between the decorative bias
of a fine art museum, where curators like to make pretty patterns along
the wall, and the requirements for a museum of ideas where engagement of
the intellect should take precedent over the balancing of frames and
colours. The task was to arrange the images so that they posed questions
that the captions and catalogue essay could then explicate, if not
always answer. This objective was achieved in the coupling of the Durack
with the Karadada. In general, the ordering needed more juxtapositions
to help the images to make the point. Instead of pairing the Prestons,
each should have been set against an apposite Aboriginal piece. A keener
eye would have put one of Preston’s 1950s Biblical stencils to the
left of Linda Syddick Napaltjarris syncretic Christianity and one of
John Coburn’s desert series on the right. James Cant’s copying of
Mimi figures would have taken on a different significance had his canvas
been set against one of his previous angular Surrealist and Social
Realist paintings. If Cubists made their Modernism out of African
sculptures, Australian Modernists got to Primitive Art via one or other
of the moments of Modernism. Modernism also
accelerated the interchanges between gallery arts and quotidian design,
as the cubism of 1910 was marketed as the Art Deco of 1925. Preston's
interest in Aboriginal practices began with pottery and only later
extended to the application of their colours and patterns to her
wildflower paintings and finally to her landscapes. Thirty years after
Preston published her initial essay, 'Art for crafts: aboriginal art
artfully applied' in the December 1924 issue of The
Home, Australian consumers still had to be convinced of the
attractiveness of hand-made tableware. Moreover, the local product had
to struggle for shelf space against the English import. The thinking
about all cross-cultural appropriation and appreciation can be deepened
by considering the first Adelaide Festival of the Arts in 1960. Such
contextualisation is valuable in itself for a society where the new and
the now are depriving viewers of their sense of history as processes
working through the present. Indeed, behind the appeal of indigenous
cultures is the settlers’ loss of meaning under a blizzard of the
'news flashes', whether in fashion or politics. In reaction,
metropolitan sophisticates cannibalise the primitive to gain their fix
of deep time and secure space. At the 1960
Festival, the visual component included sixteen Turners from the Tate,
'The Art of Mexico' from the San Fransisco Museum of Art;
'Twentieth-Century Painting from Australian Galleries';
'Aboriginal Bark Paintings and Carvings' - all held at the State Gallery
- and a Dobell retrospective in a department store. That list would draw
crowds today. But what would this year's Festival-goers have made of the
13x8m. floral carpet of 400,000 blooms, modelled on Albert Namatjira's
'In the Ranges of Mt Hermansberg' and planted by the Kindergarten Union
on North Terrace for National Flower Day, one of the community events
absorbed into the 1960 Festival? In the year leading up to the first Festival, South Australia had been the flash-point in Aboriginal affairs because of the trial in which Max Stuart had been condemned to death for the rape and killing of a nine-year old girl near Ceduna in December 1958. A Royal Commission into how the police obtained Stuart’s confession followed in 1959. After Stuart's counsel walked out of that inquiry, the News published headlines which resulted in the trial of both its editor and its publisher, (Rupert Murdoch), for criminal libel against the Commissioners, who included the chief justice. The acquittal was delivered during the Festival, providing the most gripping theatre in town. Shortly before Stuart's arrest, Albert Namatjira had been sentenced to gaol for supplying alcohol to another Aboriginal, and died late in 1959. In this environment, that floral tribute could express support for Aboriginal advancement. Around that time, a left-wing member of the ALP in Brisbane showed me the place-mats with Namatjira designs that she had chosen to affirm her opposition to the discriminatory laws in Queensland. The surge of
interest in pottery in the Sixties reacted against the home-makers’
satiety of factory-made china and plastics during the first wave of
affluence in the 1950s. The editor of the ceramics section of the Commonwealth
Jeweller and Watchmaker, did all she could to direct interest
towards the local products in the hope that retailers would stock them
alongside the Shelley and the Carlton as bait for the tourists expected
for the Melbourne 1956 Olympics. Another change became noticeable around
1955 with references to Aboriginal designs on vases and tableware,
patterned by settler artists. Doulton got in on the act with a wall
plaque of 'a striking portrait study of a wonderful old Aboriginal
ruggedly arresting and typical of the finest points of his race'. Promotion of
these native designs coincided with the appearance of indigenous
elements in tourist imagery as shown at a recent exhibition at the
National Library of Australia. Eileen Mayo used dots inside block
letters for a Discover Australia Poster in the Olympics year of1956; a
few months later, Gert Sellheim included a boomerang decorated with a
swimmer and a merino for his central motif while the background carried
x-ray creatures. These commercial applications deployed generic
Aboriginalities rather than the stories of an identifiable person or
community. Few white artists, let alone settler Australians, would have
known that materials belonged - in any sense - to specific people. To recall
these connections is to pass judgement neither on Namatjira's
watercolours nor on the works in Beyond
the Pale. The present concern is to compare how those tablemats
operated ideologically among the palefaces of 1960 with the tasks that
museum-quality works by Aborigines perform in today's power structures,
whether in or out of the art whirl. Forty years ago, that demand would
have been met by the mythopoeic landscapes of Nolan, Drysdale and the
brothers Boyd. In short, what has taken over from those 1950s nic-naks
and canvases in pandering to the Europeans’ ache after a packaged
primitivism? The
incorporation of a boomerang into the logo of the Sydney 2000 Olympics
and the Art Gallery of New South Wales's directing its Olympics
exhibitions onto Aboriginal works are aspects of tourist art raised to a
norm by the authority of the state. Both are designed to meet visitor
expectations for the exotic. The logo will stimulate the souvenir trade.
The AGNSW will underwrite prices in the commercial galleries. A third of
the thirty-three full-page, full-colour advertisements at the front of
the summer issue of Art and Australia were for indigenous artists. Today, a set
of place-mats carrying Namatjira images is a double embarrassment,
entered in evidence of the Australian ugliness and as proof of
commercialisation. That repulsion guarantees moral and social
superiority to those settler Australians who now eschew as elitist any
other qualitative evaluation of art. |
| See also: ELIZABETH DURACK. Use 'back' button on your browser to return to this page |