Remote Avant-Garde: Aboriginal Art under Occupation by Jennifer Loureide Biddle

Abstract

Jennifer Loureide Biddle, Avant-Garde: Aboriginal Art Occupation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. 304 pp.Remote Avant-Garde: Aboriginal Art Occupation, by Jennifer Loureide Biddle, is a welcome addition to the literature on Indigenous Australian art, and more broadly to anthropologies of art, Indigenous Australia, and global Indigenous arts and aesthetics. I heartily recommend it to anyone those fields, and would happily teach with it anthropology, art history, art/artworlds, and museum studies.The monograph's main theme is the revelation of tradition via experimental art practice Australia's Western Desert. Biddle asserts that production - all its myriad forms-is a form of life-making for Aboriginal people (205) a nation-state that not only refuses to recognize them on/in their own terms,1 but fact is currently exerting an unprecedented level of intervention their lives. The juxtaposition of terms her title, Remote Avant-Garde seeks to obliterate the division between remote and urban that has persisted analyses of Indigenous Australia (3), elevate innovative expressions to a register and regime of value the artworld (the avant-garde), and, indeed, expand our imaginings of what that category might include.2 She highlights the importance of art centers as hubs of community health and well-being (15-17, 199), and emphasizes that Aboriginal arts are profoundly, unabashedly (36, 52-55, 94-95, 127-132, 141-144, 190, 205). As a frame for exploring Indigenous/non-Indigenous collaboration, the intercultural is something that has received intense anthropological attention Australia the last two decades,3 and I would have liked to see Biddle delve further into the stakes of this debate.Biddle argues that art central Australia is more performative than representational (198), art is inseparable the bodies and lifeworlds which it originates (153), and is (or, at least, can be) more about process than about the production of commodities for a market (142, 160). These are profound insights the context of a global art movement objectified the form of exhibition at the new Australian Parliament House Canberra, the Musee du Quai Branly Paris, the Venice Biennale, and the Museum of Modern Art New York; and sale through auction houses such as Sotheby's, Christie's, and Bonham's-all sites through which value and virtuosity accrue in/on art objects. As Myers writes his landmark ethnography, Painting Culture (2002), for the earliest painters at Papunya (an Aboriginal settlement that became the origin site of Western Desert acrylic painting), their works had value separate that negotiated the marketplace; they had value because they were from the Dreaming. Biddle's work is very much dialogue with Myers, and she strives for an emic perspective and a representational practice that honor the messiness and multifaceted nature of experimentation.4 Slippage between sacred and secular (see 124-125) is characteristic of many of these works, crucially challenging those who might read/receive/consume Aboriginal arts search of an authentic other(ness), and thereby forging a more expansive understanding of what it means to be Aboriginal, as Biddle says, in the contemporary (see 33, 44, 61,69, 71, 112, and throughout).Biddle has a delightful turn-of-phrase and poetic control of her prose. How does aesthetic emergence relate to emergency? (43) she asks, powerfully illustrating the collision of lifeworlds and meaning-making central Australia, where Aboriginal people must live their lives under occupation. She refuses an authoritative voice-whatever history is, it has to be activated and reactivated by humans the now and the know (193)-simultaneously communicating the potency of art practice and revealing her deep knowledge of Aboriginal cosmologies, such as the everywhen of Jukurrpa/Tjukurrpa/Tjukurpa. …