Authenticity and Appropriation in the Australian Visual Contact Zone of Brenda L. Croft

Abstract

In the Australian contact zone, visual art has for a long time been represented as colonial property and contemporary Indigenous art has often been studied as an appropriation or worse a stealing of this property. According to this study, the alienable nature of visual technologies has been largely denied by neo-colonial discourses because it implies a relation with other users. The recognition of Indigenous contemporary visual art as legitimate and authentic would be an admittance of co-habitation and hybridity that needs to be erased so that the myth of terra nullius can take place (Goldie, 1989: 148-169). This article hopes to demonstrate that the study of the digital photographic art of Brenda L. Croft reveals that neo-colonial claims of property of contemporary visual technologies are based on the desire of creating a mythical distance between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian peoples. Therefore, the study of Indigenous artistic practices can further our understanding of Australian Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations because they act as practices of proximity which interrupt non-Indigenous claims of sovereignty and the denial of Indigenous/non-Indigenous co-habitation.