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Session R1.1: Art, representation and identity

1.Sylvia Kleinert: Aboriginal enterprises: negotiating an
urban Aboriginality

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Abstract

During the 1950s and 1960s Aboriginal people in Melbourne negotiated new cultural representations of Aboriginality through their engagement in cultural tourism. For Indigenous people in southeast Australia living within the constraint and opportunities of an assimilation era involvement in cultural tourism was crucial to cultural survival. Until recently this history of cultural production in the south east has largely been overlooked, denigrated as inauthentic tourist kitsch. Yet such academic debates overlook the historical agency of Indigenous people and their creative interventions in a contemporary world.

This paper focuses on the cultural production of Aboriginal Enterprises, the tourist outlet established in 1952 at Belgrave on the outskirts of Melbourne by long time political activist and entrepreneur Bill Onus. Employing both Indigenous and non-Indigenous workers, the firm manufactured artifacts and furnishings, imported bark paintings from Arnhem Land and commissioned other small items from various sources. As one of the major tourist attractions in the Dandenongs, Aboriginal Enterprises attracted national and international interest creating a new paradigm for a dynamic urban Aboriginality. My paper examines the process of cultural production and the relationship between artistic creativity and issues of authenticity and appropriation to show how constructions of Indigenous identity are reflected in the very style and nature of cultural representations.

Author bio:

Sylvia Kleinert is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Australian National University and Charles Darwin University. Her research addresses questions related to Indigenous cultural production. She has published on the Hermannsburg School, Aboriginal art in south eastern Australia, Indigenous prison art, cultural tourism and cultural heritage.  She is co-editor (with Margo Neale) of the The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture (2000).

2. Chris Pease: Art, Ideology and History

Full paper | Audio | Video | Slideshow pdf 609KB

Abstract

There is still a public misconception with Aboriginal Art. If one mentions Aboriginal Art most people immediately think of dot paintings. Many Nyoongar artists use dots in a similar form to those of the dessert areas as a way of making that connection back to culture. The reason for this is that there is very little left of the traditional Nyoongar visual language. Due to its perishable nature only fragments of the Nyoongar visual iconography still exists. In the South West the Carrolup artists are important as they took western methods to get back to land and cultural expression.

My own work is a reflection of history, both indigenous and non-indigenous, as well as the juxtaposition of conflicting ideologies. That is the conflict between traditional belief and science and mathematics in expressing and understanding the world around us. Many traditional Nyoongar stories are in direct conflict with science. The science of Hydrology for example is a direct contradiction to the traditional story of how the Derbarl Yerrigan (Swan River) was created. The Dreaming becomes something that should be respected as traditional stories rather than events that actually happened.

I am drawn to pre-colonial images of the south-west because they are important historical references, not just by way of content but also by the way the content as been interpreted both by the artist and the viewers. The artists formalise the land and use artistic licence to make these unfamiliar landscapes more familiar by making the trees deciduous or simplifying plant forms and their positions. The images are also a precursor to darker times for the Nyoongar people. The interaction between the indigenous and non-indigenous also signals the exchange of new ideologies and new ways of thinking.

Author bio

Christopher Pease is a visual artist from the Minang/Bibbulman/Wardandi area. He graduated at Central TAFE with a Diploma of Art and Design in 1988. He has won several awards including the painting award at the Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Awards 2003. Christopher has work in many collections including the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Wesfarmers, the Holmes a Court Collection, the Kerry Stokes Collection, the BHP Billiton Art Collection and Murdoch University. In 2004 he was commissioned to create artwork for the Perth Convention Centre by the Department of Housing and Works. More recently he travelled to Washington DC as part of the Cultural Warriors exhibition at the Katzen Art Centre in 2009.

3. Barbara Ashford: Practices of value creation in the trade in Aboriginal art

Full paper | Audio | Video | Slideshow pdf 247KB

Abstract

The art dealership is situated at a nexus of relationships that contest and negotiate culturally informed values and categories of fine art, Aboriginality and commodities. I argue that dealers in Aboriginal art mediate categories of value through their particular practices of representation of the art and through the social relationships they foster with artists and buyers. Therefore, through the relationships formed in the exchange process, dealers both make and mark culture. I acknowledge the agency of Aboriginal artists but approach the process of negotiation of cultural categories from the perspective of the non-Indigenous audience for which the art is intended. Buyers are drawn to Aboriginal art for more than aesthetic reasons and objects and artists’ cultural identities carry high value especially if judged authentically Aboriginal in the current art market. Both the art and the artists are made and marked as commodities in the art market; and while notions of authenticity are central to value, value is itself shifting and authenticity unstable. In my paper I examine social relationships and situated practices undertaken at Fire-Works gallery in Brisbane. I argue that sales here are facilitated through the negotiation of valued and shifting cultural categories that are dynamically formed and reformed in the commoditisation of Aboriginal art by social agents.