The problem of aboriginal art.(Art)

THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT'S inquiry into various matters relating to Aboriginal art will avail nothing unless and until there is first--general agreement on what actually characterises Aboriginal art. It is a towering problem because, as the recent withdrawals from the Telstra Aboriginal Art Award indicate, not even the indigenous arts community itself is clear on that. It will avail nothing if white theorists or bureaucrats proceed as if everyone agreed on the issue. There is no agreement, because the issue has never been discussed.

The most silently eloquent indication of the problem is the separation--in the latest edition of the prestigious New McCulloch's Encyclopedia of Australian Art--of Aboriginal art into a totally different section from the rest of Australian art. This was a very significant act indeed, but--surprisingly--it has inspired little discussion. Although no rationale for this sequestering is given, the clear implication is that Aboriginal "art" may not be "art"---or, at least, not "art" in the same sense that the work of Sidney Nolan, Jeffrey Smart and Fred Williams is.

Sebastian Smee (in the Australian, November 27, 2006) and Robert Nelson (the Age, December 9, 2006) both gave the matter some attention, but neither suggested an adequate solution to the dilemma. Smee characterised McCulloch's attitude as "symptomatic of [an economic] bubble mentality ... But things are bound to look different when the hype and cupidity die down ..." Nelson took Smee to task for his negativity and suspected him of wishing to place Western control over the genre. While recognising the damage the market may be doing to the genre and the artists concerned, Nelson recommended that--instead--we should "look at Aboriginal art in a humbler, more curious spirit, and wofrk out what we can learn from it and how to assist its growth". He seems to be unaware that many of us have been doing this for many, many years--and it has achieved nothing!

While both writers observed that Aboriginal art has not had any effect on Western-tradition art either in Australia or abroad, only Nelson commented: "Why would it?" And herein lies the solution to the dilemma. Rather than it being a broad social issue--as some maintain--it may be that it is a purely aesthetic matter: a matter of what art actually is and whether Aboriginal "art" is "art" in the sense the West means by the term, and has done since at least the nineteenth century.

WHAT DISCUSSION there is of Aboriginal art rarely mentions the root problem. That is the disjunction that exists between Aboriginal tradition, as it is applied to visual expression, which proscribes--and even punishes--innovation and individual expression, and the fact that these are the very characteristics of art in the modem Western world.

The most frank admission of this issue has come from statements by Banduk Marika, a daughter of a prominent Yirrkala family, although they have universally been ignored by the art world--both white and black. She has often said that while in some of her art she is free to represent what and how she wishes, in some of it she must clear the imagery and colours with her elders. While it is not, at present, clear to what extent this restriction on individual creativeness is universal in indigenous visual expression, it clearly is a matter that requires extensive examination.

It is almost exclusively a problem for Australia alone to solve. Although there have been considerable and significant exhibitions of Aboriginal art in Europe and America, they have been in ethnographic--rather than art--museums. There was a great stink in Germany in 1994 when an Australian dealer wanted to show Aboriginal works in the contemporary art fair, Art Cologne. Permission was refused on the grounds that Aboriginal art is "folk art", and it is a longstanding policy of Art Cologne not to exhibit ...