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38 | vol 31 # 2 [2011] < www.artlink.com.au
I hate the word
and. People have forgotten the importance of
sub-culture. We are a community and an intervention.
Ben Watt, Founder, Buzzin’Fly Records1
very so often I think about the word Indigenous
and the implications the word ca
ies along with
it. I often think about my family and how their
lives are different from mine. They live in regional
Western Australia, close to the land, but not in
the romanticised fashion often associated with
the Indigenous
and. I live in the city, in an apartment
overlooking the river and the freeway, with which I have a
great affinity. My family are Indigenous Australians, Yamitji
people from the Gascoyne Murchison region and Nyoongar
people from the south west of Western Australia. Most of my
family live in Yawuru and Gija Country in the Kimberley, where
I have spent a third of my life. They often fish, sometimes
at a fairly remote fishing spot called Minari and sometimes
with a trolley at a less remote place called Woolworths. Like
most of us, my family listen to popular music, travel on
aeroplanes, use the internet, communicate by email and, most
importantly, they don’t feel they are any less ‘Indigenous’ for
doing so.
I think about this probably a little too often, but this internal
dialogue resonates right to my core. If I am one thing, I am
hy
id, a result of many generations of diaspora. I am an
Indigenous man, but I am also Dutch, French, English, Scottish
and Pakistani and I, too, am Australian. I am these many
things, but
anded as one. Like a glowing iron
and taken
from the red hot coals of a day-old fire, I have been marked,
marketed, packaged and sold as an Indigenous man. I wear
this mark with pride, but this is just one component of my
identity.
In 2009 I made a pilgrimage to Melbourne to the National
Indigenous Photographers’ Forum. Indigenous photographers
and artists travelled there from all corners of Indigenous
Australia, from Palm Island, Sydney, Perth, Darwin and
emote Tjuntjuntjara, to name a few. The first of its
kind, the Forum was coordinated by Melbourne’s Centre
for Contemporary Photography to provide Indigenous
commercial photographers and visual artists with a platform
to discover more about the technical and visual principles
of photography. What I found most invigorating was the
discussion su
ounding the representation, or re-presentation,
of Indigenous people within historical colonial na
atives,
contemporary society and the art world. ‘Re-presentation’
in this context differs from representation and refers to
Indigenous artists who challenge historical representations of
Indigenous peoples.
The role of the artist is in constant re-creation; like a snake
shedding its skin, it is ephemeral, fluid, changing, growing,
thriving, struggling and, above all, it is transient. Both the
nature and social role of contemporary art practice is ever-
evolving. Its purpose for some is expression, for others it is
documentation, or radical thought. For others, it is a crucial
tool used to re-present personal cultural identity and a
sense of self. The question I asked myself as I left the Forum
was this: How do we re-
and ourselves in a world where
our Indigenous
and has become so synonymous with the
context and content of our work? Is it possible for a curator or
artist to escape the ever-strengthening grip of ethnographic
prescription, when it is this very prescription that the
Indigenous visual arts sector relies upon to sell the Indigenous
and? If it were at all possible, why would one want to
e-
and, or be freed from the
and? To bite the hand that
feeds? Why would McDonalds be rid of its famous glowing
golden arches?
What became apparent over the three-day Forum in
Melbourne was that the Indigenous
and has become
generalised. Indigeneity is diverse, and its
eadth of
personal experience and sensibility is almost immeasurable.
However, within the fine art field the alignment of the
and
with a visual aesthetic means that those working beyond
that aesthetic are in a constant fight for survival. You may
ask what art fits this accepted aesthetic? And, if you work
within the art world or are a passionate collector, then my
commentary may seem ambiguous, dated and redundant.
However, for a general public, this accepted aesthetic is dot
painting from the Central Desert.
This struggle is long-lived, continuing over some three
decades, yet there is no su
ender. Artists such as Fiona
Foley, Dianne Jones, Tony Albert, Vernon Ah Kee, Christian
Thompson, Brenda L. Croft, Gordon Hookey, Richard Bell,
Jenny Fraser, Nici Cumpston and Bindi Cole continue to
challenge the status quo by re-presenting their passions, their
cultures, their people, and most importantly themselves, as
considered contemporary artists engaged in art practice that
edefines the notions of Indigeneity. Indigenous curators
are now integral to collecting a
eadth of Indigenous work
and delivering exhibitions that re-present Indigenous people
in a self-empowered manner. These curators and artists
are at the forefront of this discussion, redefining publicly
accepted understandings to reflect the diversity of Australian
Indigenous life and, in a larger conversation, human life –
after all, we are all just human.
Looking closely at the structures within both commercial and
public art institutions it seems that the Indigenous
and is
oth the angel and the devil. Institutions have, in the past
three to four decades, focused on developing Indigenous
E
BRANDED
Glenn Iseger-Pilkington
Debates
The Indigenous Aesthetic
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www.artlink.com.au > vol 31 # 2 [2011] | 39
Above: Tony Albert & friends (detail) Pay Attention (mi
or view XXXXXXXXXX, mixed media on aluminium, each letter 75cm high, total length approximately 2100 cm. Courtesy the
artist and roundabout. Below: Fiona Foley Wild times #2 2001, type-C photograph, 76 x 112 cm. Courtesy the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne.
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40 | vol 31 # 2 [2011] < www.artlink.com.au
collections and endless exhibitions advocating for Indigenous
artists and communities. But is it this advocacy in the most
public of arenas that has predetermined the public conception
of the Indigenous
and and established the accepted and
valued Indigenous aesthetic? There is no question that
traditional contemporary Indigenous art practice, informed
y ancestral lore, language, ceremony and story, has produced
some of the most divine and visually succulent works of
art to come out of Australia. Commercial and institutional
commitment to this aspect of Indigenous art has indeed
changed the way the world perceives Indigenous society, but
at what cost?
With such investment and emphasis on custodial practice,
the associated notions of traditional life rich with language,
cultural knowledge and custom have somehow become
transferable to all Indigenous artists, working in all mediums
and thematic contexts. Artists working in photomedia,
video, and performance cannot escape the romantic notions
of traditional custodial
practice, and works
produced by an Indigenous
artist are somehow isolated
within the Indigenous
and, compared to the
associated aesthetic, and
then often refuted. For
some artists this is not
a problem and actually
provides inspiration for
content working with a
modality of institutional
critique, as seen in the
Aboriginal Dot Painting
series of 2001 by Dianne
Jones. In these works
Jones uses the text “dot,
dot, dot…” in simple and
highly graphic works which
investigate preconceived
ideas around Indigenous art
and its accepted aesthetic.
For artists engaging in the
critical discourse of the global
environment, whose work is informed, researched and seeking
dynamic academic engagement with issues su
ounding
global race politics, oppression and accepted European history,
such romantic notions of indigeneity are immobilising,
generic and pre-determined stereotypes of the colonial world.
In Fiona Foley’s presentation at the Forum, she made the
following commentary, which has been a catalyst for this article.
I’d like to reflect on the series, Wild Times Call, created in
the United States during 2001, and the response to the
work in Australia. Melbourne art critic Robert Nelson
made the following observation about the Seminole men
in the photographs, attired in their regalia, standing on
their reservation in Tampa, Florida.
Her photographs are monumental and melancholy,
depicting the artist among her people, the largely
massacred and displaced Badtjala, formerly of Fraser Island.
She often appears on her own, wrapped up in textiles of
heavy weave or coarse loom-state pattern, looking over an
Australian landscape with heroic sadness.
The same article also contained the word primitive no less
than thirteen times. In an international context, I thought
about white Australia’s attitudes towards Indigenous
peoples the world over. Did Robert Nelson think we –
Indigenous folk – all look the same? What was I to make
of the language used in this review? Is there a fixed
type of thinking about race in Australia? Perhaps a lazy
methodology in his