The Making Of Indigenous Australian Contemporary Art

This publication brings together existing research as well as new data to show how Arnhem Land bark painting was critical in the making of Indigenous Australian contemporary art and the self-determination agendas of Indigenous Australians. It identifies how, when and what the shifts in the reception of the art were, especially as they occurred within institutional exhibition displays. Despite key studies already being published on the reception of Aboriginal art in this area, the overall process is not well known or always considered, while the focus has tended to be placed on Western Desert acrylic paintings. This text, however represents a refocus, and addresses this more fully by integrating Arnhem Land bark painting into the contemporary history of Aboriginal art. The trajectory moves from its understanding as a form of ethnographic art, to seeing it as conceptual art and appreciating it for its cultural agency and contemporaneity.

This publication brings together existing research as well as new data to show how Arnhem Land bark painting was critical in the making of Indigenous Australian contemporary art and the self-determination agendas of Indigenous Australians. It identifies how, when and what the shifts in the reception of the art were, especially as they occurred within institutional exhibition displays. Despite key studies already being published on the reception of Aboriginal art in this area, the overall process is not well known or always considered, while the focus has tended to be placed on Western Desert acrylic paintings. This text, however represents a refocus, and addresses this more fully by integrating Arnhem Land bark painting into the contemporary history of Aboriginal art. The trajectory moves from its understanding as a form of ethnographic art, to seeing it as conceptual art and appreciating it for its cultural agency and contemporaneity.

Double Desire challenges the tendency by critics to perpetuate an aesthetic apartheid between Indigenous and Western art. The double desire explored in this book is that of the divided but also amplified attractions that occur between cultural traditions in places where both indigenous and colonial legacies are strong. The result, it is argued, produces imaginative transcultural practices that resist the assimilation or acculturation of Indigenous perspectives into the dominant Western mod...

The archive is a source of power. It takes control of the past, deciding which voices will be heard and which won't, how they will be heard and for what purposes. Indigenous archivists were at work well before the European Enlightenment arrived and began its own archiving. Sometimes at odds, other times not, these two ways of ordering the world have each learned from, and engaged with, the other. Colonialism has been a struggle over archives and its processes as much as anything else.The eighteen essays by twenty authors investigate different aspects of this struggle in Australia, from traditional Indigenous archives and their developments in recent times to the deconstruction of European archives by contemporary artists as acts of cultural empowerment. It also examines the use of archives developed for other reasons, such as the use of rainfall records to interpret early Papunya paintings. Indigenous Archives is the first overview of archival research in the production and understanding of Indigenous culture. Wide-ranging in its scope, it reveals the lively state of research into Indigenous histories and culture in Australia.

Master's Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject Communications - Intercultural Communication, grade: 1.2, University of Kaiserslautern, language: English, abstract: Politics of Space ́s idea is to present a body of work that address some of the key questions that have held my attention over several years in relation to the nature and peculiar concerns of contemporary non-Western art, especially on how Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Art is perceived, received and read in significant parts of the public where cross-cultural exchange occurs. Significant areas of research in relation to Contemporary Indigenous Art are not only certain institutions within the art world such as art centres, art galleries and museums but also public areas like universities, government bureaus and particularly touristic institutions, as a vast majority of non-indigenous people experience non-Western art in this context only.

Chronicles the global critical reception of Aboriginal art since the early 1980s and argues for a re-evaluation of Aboriginal art's critical intervention into contemporary art.

This book aims to redefine Australia’s earliest art history by chronicling for the first time the birth of the category "Aboriginal art," tracing the term’s use through published literature in the late eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Susan Lowish reveals how the idea of "Aboriginal art" developed in the European imagination, manifested in early literature, and became a distinct classification with its own criteria and form. Part of the larger story of Aboriginal/European engagement, this book provides a new vision for an Australian art history reconciled with its colonial origins and in recognition of what came before the contemporary phenomena of Aboriginal art.

"This publication accompanies the exhibition Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, February 5 through September 18, 2016."

It is often assumed that the verbal and visual languages of Indigenous people had little influence upon the classification of scientific, legal, and artistic objects in the metropolises and museums of nineteenth-century colonial powers. However colonized locals did more than merely collect material for interested colonizers. In developing the concept of anachronism for the analysis of colonial material this book writes the complex biographies for five key objects that exemplify, embody, and refract the tensions of nineteenth-century history. Through an analysis of particular language notations and drawings hidden in colonial documents and a reexamination of cross-cultural communication, the book writes biographies for five objects that exemplify the tensions of nineteenth-century history. The author also draws on fieldwork done in communities today, such as the group of Koorie women whose re-enactments of tradition illustrate the first chapter's potted history of indigenous mediums and debates. The second case study explores British colonial history through the biography of the proclamation boards produced under George Arthur (1784-1854), Governor of British Honduras, Tasmania, British Columbia, and India. The third case study looks at the maps of the German explorer of indigenous taxonomy Wilhelm von Blandowski (1822-1878), and the fourth looks at a multi-authored encyclopaedia in which Blandowski had taken into account indigenous knowledge such as that in the work of Kwat-Kwat artist Yakaduna, whose hundreds of drawings (1862-1901) are the material basis for the fifth and final case study. Through these three characters' histories Art in the Time of Colony demonstrates the political importance of material culture by using objects to revisit the much-contested nineteenth-century colonial period, in which the colonial nations as a cultural and legal-political system were brought into being.