Aboriginal Painting: Identity and Authenticity

Abstract

A recent Australian television documentary, Art from the Heart? presented a case for believing that Aboriginal paintings produced for the market could not be authentic.' The documentary assumed there was such a thing as Aboriginal and that this was and spiritual but that the items for sale were not genuine Four claims were made to show this. First, the paintings in question are not spiritually motivated but were produced for sale and therefore are not traditionally Aboriginal. Second, Aboriginal paintings produced in acrylics, on canvas, or in any other medium that is not traditional, are not authentic. Third, some paintings were not produced by people of Aboriginal descent and are not, therefore, Aboriginal And fourth, as some paintings were not produced by the persons who were believed to have produced them, the Aboriginal people who signed them were engaged in the production of fakes. These claims were supposed to lead us to the conclusion that the paintings under question are fakes: in the sense that they are not traditional Aboriginal art and in the sense that they are not art. Yet, Aboriginal groups have presented counter-claims that challenge Western philosophical preconceptions about authenticity in painting. They have claimed that works that are obviously inauthentic from a Western perspective are in fact authentic. If such claims by Aboriginal groups about authenticity can be sustained, then Aboriginal painting has a significantly different ontological structure than painting in the Western tradition. In this paper, I attempt to articulate this structure. Aboriginal claims about authenticity seem to rely on some kind of relationship between Aboriginal and Aboriginal identity. I argue that (precontact and present-day) Aboriginal ceremonial designs have the same ontological structure as insignia. The model of Aboriginal as insignia has significant explanatory power. The ontology of insignia shows that Aboriginal claims about the relationship between their and their identity can be understood literally, and it organizes a wealth of anthropological detail about the relationship between art, land, and authority. In addition, the ontology of insignia fits with a pattern of Aboriginal judgments about the authenticity of the paintings and practices that have been the subjects of scandals. If North American indigenous totemic is also insignia, the argument presented here may also be of interest in the context of debates about North American indigenous and identity and the authenticity of indigenous This paper is divided into four sections. In the first section, I present a synopsis of the current debate about indigenous or primitive and authenticity and show how my approach differs from the usual approaches. In the second section, I discuss a number of scandals involving Aboriginal paintings between 1996 and 1999 and articulate the differences between Western and Aboriginal attitudes toward the authenticity of the paintings. In the third section, I develop a model of Aboriginal as insignia. The insignia model provides different criteria for determining the authenticity of paintings. If I am right about this, the reasons presented in Art from the Heart? for believing the paintings to be inauthentic and, therefore, not Aboriginal are based on false premises. My model is based on tribal Aboriginal culture and is not applicable to all contemporary Aboriginal However, as the painters that have been involved in the scandals are from remote communities, it is applica-