Australian Aboriginal Art Discourse(s)

INDIGENOUS DISCOURSE AS CULTURAL PRODUCTION

• Paintings are turlku (stories). They represent events in the mythological past of tjukurrpa (the Dreaming) and they are mularrpa (true).

• Dreamings are about traveling, mythical ancestral beings that laced Pintupi country with their paths.

• Access to knowledge of these events, the right to tell the stories, and the right to reenact the events and reproduce the designs and objects in ceremony are restricted, and transmitted through kinship links.

“Aboriginal Art”

• As with First Nations art in Canada, this is a contested category of cultural production.

• Formed by two sets of discourse, aboriginal and non-aboriginal.

• Ironically, both are accessed through some sort of Westner translated textualization by most viewers.

“Look Who’s Talking”

• Several levels/arenas of discourse involved in the social construction of objects:

– Indigenous accountings to government cultural policies, art dealers and critics and anthropologists.

– All situated in the changing sociopolitical context of Aborigines in a settler society.

Questions of Discourse

• ABORIGINAL DISCOURSE (30 years after its acrylic painting was adopted as an activity – approx. 1971):

1. Is painting a means through which Central Desert people add their voices to the cultural discourses of the world?

2. Is it more evidence of cultural “homogenization”?

3. What is to be understood by Aboriginal claims that these very new forms are “authentic” and “traditional” – that they are “from the Dreaming,” “true,” or “from the beginning”?

ANTHROPOLOGICAL AND ART CRITICISM DISCOURSES

– What can be understood through ethnographic/visual culture analysis in terms of signifying something about Aboriginal culture.

2. Is the point to track the disjoined relationship between the discourses of the art world and those of Aboriginal painters? Or to document the activity in the gap between how the producers account for their paintings and what significance they are made to have in other venues?

‘Meanings’ and ‘Accounts’

• Knowledge and revelation of the Dreamings are both about one’s rights to a place, but also a performance of identity.

• As these paintings move through different cultural contexts (desert to gallery) the discourses of these paintings should not only be considered for their meanings rather they should be examined as accounts of their images. This takes into account the artist’s and audience’s role in their production, circulation and consumption.

• All interpretations, native and non-native are accountings – constructions – each presuming a set of taken-for-granted givens which they also reproduce.

Construction: Aboriginal Accountings/Meanings for Paintings

• Include:

• Painting as a source of income

• Painting as a source of cultural respect

• Painting as a meaningful activity defined by its relationship to Indigenous values (self-determination)

• Assertion of personal and sociopolitical identity expressed in rights to place.

Construction: Non-Aboriginal Meanings/Accounts for Paintings

• Non-aboriginal discourse around the images is primarily interpreted within the rubric of modernist ‘art’.

• ranging from visual invention (art for art’s sake or contextual)

• human creativity (individual genius or communal normality)

• loss of spirituality with development (return to a primitive past).

Artworlds and Anthropologists: Three Critical Points of View

• Hold paintings up to Western art culture and see how they circulate within that arena (said to be 2^nd rate neo-expressionism). Reject.

• Consider the paintings worth in light of the West’s nostalgia for some “other” that the Aboriginal paintings cannot represent by virtue of their ‘contamination’ by Western forms. Reject.

• Treat the paintings in terms of commodity circulation and the inevitable corruption it entails. Reject.

Anthropology’s Interest in Pintupi Acrylics: Between Discourses
of Nationalism and Spirituality

• Aborigine as Sign: Aboriginal peoples and cultures are increasingly figured into Australian discourse of a national identity as ‘the cultural and spiritual heart’ of Australia.

• Modernist discourse has emphasized continuities between paintings and Aboriginal traditions, emphasizing authenticity as expressions of a particular worldview.

• Aboriginal marketing of paintings as traditional and authentic says more about conditions of production than it does about the object itself.

• There is not one order of signification for these paintings – no ‘bottom line’ of meaning.

• Key to much discourse is that of ‘difference’ of knowing, place and identity and representation. They valorize for the Western buyer travel and experience of an ‘other’ place and people. For Aboriginal people they affirm different privileges, histories, and identities that affirm their self-determination and distinctness within and outside local cultures.

• Play a critical role in the creation of a tourist market and national identity (“heart” of Australia).

• Consumers are attracted to stories of ‘rootedness’, sense of place, fulfills a real or nostalgic sense of loss.

• Specific understanding of story not as important as the fact that it signifies so rich, complex, and unself-conscious a sense of connection.

• Placement of paintings in cosmopolitan art circles places anthropologists in an unfamiliar relationship to their stock-in-trade --- knowledge in local constructions.

• Presents again the argument for studying non-Western art from the departure point of outside influence/pressure/oppression to understand the inner workings of culture.

• Looking at artworld discourses around Acrylic paintings moves away from static debates over WHAT is authentic culture, toward analysis of HOW something comes to be considered authentic or how it is contested as such.