Australian Indigenous Art Research Articles

Dislocation, Exploration, Invigoration: Exploring the Cross-cultural Intersection of Art and Friendship

ABSTRACT If love can blind, are there are also scenarios in which relationality invokes clarity of knowledge and closeness of hearing? In this collaborative piece, Bardi artist and weaver Juanita Mulholland and researcher Sarah Bacaller explore the intersection between friendship and Australian Indigenous art forms. They reflect on the development and ethos of Juanita’s artistic practice, as it pertains to her sense of Indigenous identity and selfhood, including in the context of dislocation and loss. The dialogue is prefaced by reflections on recent criticism by Fisher [2012. The Art/Ethnography Binary: Post-Colonial Tensions Within the Field of Australian Aboriginal Art. Cultural Sociology, 6 (2), 251–270] on the ethnography–art binary in approaches to interpreting Australian Indigenous art in its diverse and varied forms. By exploring the dangers inherent in both objectivist (‘ethographic’) and subjectivist (art ‘on its own terms’) approaches, and building on the work of Biddle and Stefanoff [2015. What is Same but Different and why Does it Matter? Cultural Studies Review, 21 (1), 97–120], the authors explore how ethical relationality and connection can lead to a fuller understanding and appreciation of artworks and their artists, especially in relation to non-Indigenous engagement with Australian Indigenous artistry.

Repair in Australian Indigenous art

This article examines artworks by three emerging Australian Indigenous artists who are revitalizing Indigenous cultural traditions. The author argues that their work is reparative in the manner described by queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; that is, their art addresses the damage of traumatic colonial histories while being open to pleasure, beauty and surprise. The artists are all based in Brisbane and completed a degree in Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art at Queensland College of Art – the only degree of this nature in Australia. The artists are Carol McGregor, Dale Harding and Robert Andrew. McGregor’s work draws on possum skin cloak making, Harding has incorporated the stencil technique of rock art into his practice and Andrew uses a traditional pigment ochre and Yawuru language.

What Do Museum Objects Want? Re‐Thinking Photographic Conventions In Ethnographic Museums

ABSTRACTThis paper critiques the visual conventions applied to the photography of ethnographic museum collection objects. To “think photographically” in a museum collection, I draw a productive parallel between my fieldwork with Indigenous women artists in central Australia, and photography of poorly documented museum collection objects. I explore the presence of an intersubjective affective gaze in the central Australian Indigenous art works which is amplified through photography. This resistance inspired an experimental exhibition entailing photography of sculptural museum objects with faces. The exhibit's aim was to resocialize these objects into the present through photographs of them.

Editors’ Introduction

In the fourth issue of Index Journal, the polyvalence of the word secession extends across six art historical papers of diverse style and subject matter. For some contributors, secession is inseparable from dominant narratives of modern European art history. Others take the term as a starting point for writing non-European art histories; these papers examine the complex receptions of Australian Indigenous art, posit anti-nationalist trajectories of artistic development and ruminate on attempts to create new governance models in Australian community arts organisations.

Contemporary Indigenous Australian Art and Native Title Land Claim

This paper investigates a select number of examples in which largely non-literate First Nation peoples of Australia, like some First Nations peoples around the world, when faced with a judicial challenge to present evidence in court to support their land title claim, have drawn on their cultural materials as supporting evidence. Specifically, the text highlights the effective agency of indigenous visual expression as a communication tool within the Australian legal system. Further, it evaluates this history within an indigenous Australian art context, instancing where of visual art, including drawings and paintings, has been successfully used to support the main evidence in native title land claims. The focus is on three case studies, each differentiated by its distinct medium, commonly used in indigenous contemporary art—namely, ink/watercolours on paper, (Case study 1—the Mabo drawings of 1992), acrylics on canvas (Case study 2—the Ngurrara 11 canvas 1997) and ochre on bark, (Case study 3—The Saltwater Bark Collection 1997 (onwards)). The differentiation in the stylistic character of these visual presentations is evaluated within the context of being either a non-indigenous tradition (e.g., represented as European-like diagrams or sketches to detail areas and boundaries of the claim sites in question) or by an indigenous expressive context (e.g., the evidence of the claim is presented using traditionally inspired indigenous symbols relating to the claimant’s lands. These latter images are adaptations of the secret sacred symbols used in ceremonies and painting, but expressed in a form that complies with traditional protocols protecting secret, sacred knowledge). The following text details how such visual presentations in the aforementioned cases were used and accepted as legitimate legal instruments, on which Australian courts based their legal determinations of the native land title.

Heterogeneity in Auction Price Distributions for Australian Indigenous Artists

Studies of auction prices for artworks typically relate the conditional moments of a single realised price distribution either to characteristics of the artist, the artwork and the auction or to pre‐sale information. Using data from the Australian Art Sales Digest for the 100 best‐selling Australian Indigenous artists over the period 1987–2014, we use finite‐mixture models to understand heterogeneity in auction prices. Our results complement the existing literature by identifying new ways in which factors previously used in the literature may be related to price heterogeneity in a differentiated market such as that for Australian Indigenous art.

Gender differences in hammer prices for Australian Indigenous art

Considering leading Australian Indigenous artists, we investigate the role of an artist’s gender in the valuation of artworks. Our analysis shows that male and female artists work in different media and mediums and that both sale price and clearance rate differ by artist’s gender. Building on a descriptive analysis, the statistical analysis of the data using sample selectivity models and a Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition shows clear differences between the prices of artwork. We find that, accounting for differences in the characteristics of artworks and artists, the price of artworks by male Australian Indigenous artists is lower than that by female artists.

Inalienable Signs and Invited Guests: Australian Indigenous Art and Cultural Tourism

Australian Indigenous people promote their culture and country in the context of tourism in a variety of ways but the specific impact of Indigenous fine art in tourism is seldom examined. Indigenous people in Australia run tourism businesses, act as cultural guides, and publish literature that help disseminate Indigenous perspectives of place, homeland, and cultural knowledge. Governments and public and private arts organisations support these perspectives through exposure of Indigenous fine art events and activities. This exposure simultaneously advances Australia’s international cultural diplomacy, trade, and tourism interests. The quantitative impact of Indigenous fine arts (or any art) on tourism is difficult to assess beyond exhibition attendance and arts sales figures. Tourism surveys on the impact of fine arts are rare and often necessarily limited in scope. It is nevertheless useful to consider how the quite pervasive visual presence of Australian Indigenous art provides a framework of ideas for visitors about relationships between Australian Indigenous people and place. This research adopts a theoretical model of ‘performing cultural landscapes’ to examine how Australian Indigenous art might condition tourists towards Indigenous perspectives of people and place. This is quite different to traditional art historical hermeneutics that considers the meaning of artwork. I argue instead that in the context of cultural tourism, Australian Indigenous art does not convey specific meaning so much as it presents a relational model of cultural landscape that helps condition tourists towards a public realm of understanding Indigenous peoples’ relationship to place. This relational mode of seeing involves a complex psychological and semiotic framework of inalienable signification, visual storytelling, and reconciliation politics that situates tourists as ‘invited guests’. Particular contexts of seeing under discussion include the visibility of reconciliation politics, the remote art centre network, and Australia’s urban galleries.

Australian Indigenous Art Innovation and Culturepreneurship in Practice: Insights for Cultural Tourism

Indigenous cultural tourism offers significant future opportunities for countries, cities and Indigenous communities, but the development of new offerings can be problematic. Addressing this challenge, this article examines contemporary Australian Indigenous art innovation and cultural entrepreneurship or culturepreneurship emanating from Australia’s remote Arnhem Land art and culture centres and provides insight into the future development of Indigenous cultural tourism. Using art- and culture-focused field studies and recent literature from the diverse disciplines of art history, tourism, sociology and economics, this article investigates examples of successful Indigenous artistic innovation and culturepreneurship that operate within the context of cultural tourism events. From this investigation, this article introduces and defines the original concept of Indigenous culturepreneurship and provides six practical criteria for those interested in developing future Indigenous cultural tourism ventures. These findings not only challenge existing western definitions of both culture and culturepreneurship but also affirm the vital role of innovation in both contemporary Indigenous art and culturepreneurial practice. Equally importantly, this investigation illuminates Indigenous culturepreneurship as an important future-making socio-political and economic practice for the potential benefit of Indigenous communities concerned with maintaining and promoting their cultures as living, growing and relevant in the contemporary world.

Meaningful careers in social enterprises in remote Australia: employment decisions among Australian Indigenous art centre workers

This research investigates why Indigenous workers decide to enter, stay or leave their positions in art centres that serve as important social enterprises in remote Australia. We develop a framework that integrates identity theory and push–pull theory via institutional logics, thereby extending Wry and York (2017)’s typology configurations that is applicable to other actors in the entrepreneurial eco-system, including Indigenous art centre workers. Based on a qualitative study of 72 Indigenous art centre workers employed in remote Australia, the results indicate that although art centres have dual for-profit and social missions, it is mainly pull factors related to paid, local employment aligned to vocational interests, and pro-social motives that are important in explaining why Indigenous Australians choose to work there. Career motives also explain workers’ decision to stay, while diverse pull and push factors explain why workers quit. Importantly, the factors that explain employment decisions are multi-factorial, interrelated and closely tied to the social and cultural logics of community life. The research furthers our understanding of how identity factors contribute to decisions by Indigenous art centres workers to enter, leave or stay in their role, providing a more complete understanding of HRM within the context of social enterprises.

Artists and the Rite of Passage North to the Temperate Zone

For an aspiring Australian artist, a sojourn north to the world’s large cultural centres has become a rite of passage and to some extent a requirement to achieve recognition both abroad and at home. Many of Australia’s most recognised artists have spent some or a considerable amount of time abroad, such as musician Peter Sculthorpe, painter Arthur Streeton and contemporary indigenous photographer Tracy Moffatt. Despite the frequency of this rite of passage, Australian art continues to struggle to achieve significant international recognition. This article considers the influence of this rite of passage for Australian artists in the context of a rapidly changing global art world, which is increasingly subject to changing production and consumption patterns. It does so in the context of what Bourdieu describes as a cultural field and which involves a complex arrangement of horizontal and vertical power relationships. The paper also considers the extent to which this rite of passage is relevant in the second decade of the 21st century and for a nation which, although having strong historical ties to Britain in particular, is geographically closer to Asia and in a time of the Asian century.

Pre‐sale information and hammer prices for Australian Indigenous art

AbstractUsing sales data from 1987–2011 we investigate the role that pre‐sale price information plays in determining hammer prices for Australian Indigenous artworks. Importantly, we control for the degree of market concentration as this might influence buyers’ perceptions of fairness in relation to price estimates which are provided by auction houses. Auction houses therefore act as important intermediaries between art sellers and art buyers. The results suggest that pre‐sale estimates and market concentration have a differential impact on hammer prices, depending on the point in the conditional realised price distribution under examination.

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

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. …

The use of radiation in the study of cultural heritage artefacts

Patrons of art galleries and museums, tourists visiting historic buildings, and sightseers viewing archaeological sites are generally unaware of the extent to which science and technology has contributed to the value of what they see. Many countries rely on cultural tourism to generate national wealth. The use of radiation of many kinds to assist in the conservation/restoration of cultural heritage artefacts is described in this paper. In particular, the paper will describe studies of the pigments used in historic Australian Indigenous art, the degradation of manuscripts written using iron-gall inks, the protection of statues against corrosion and the selection of lubricants for use in old machinery.

From fluent to Culture Warriors: Curatorial trajectories for Indigenous Australian art overseas

In recent decades, Indigenous artists have been strongly represented in exhibitions of Australian art offshore. This article explores two such exhibitions: fluent, staged at the Venice Biennale in 1997, and Culture Warriors, shown at the Katzen Arts Center at the American University in Washington, DC, in 2009. These exhibitions took place during an era in which issues around Indigenous rights and recognition were frequently the subject of domestic public debate and policy turmoil. They have also been significant staging posts on Indigenous Australian art’s trajectory towards contemporary fine art status – something that, while no longer questioned in Australia, continues to be precarious overseas. By considering how both political and aesthetic concerns were addressed by Indigenous curators Hetti Perkins and Brenda L. Croft, this discussion sheds light on the ways in which emergent political meanings associated with Indigeneity have driven new kinds of institutional practice and international cultural brokerage.

Materiality, Language and the Production of Knowledge: Art, Subjectivity and Indigenous Ontology

Since all theories of knowing deal with the being of subjects, objects, instruments and environments, they can be viewed as onto-epistemological. This chapter examines key ideas that emerge from the work of Julia Kristeva – 'the speaking subject', 'materiality of language' and 'heterogeneity' – to demonstrate how ontology and epistemology are inextricably entwined in knowledge production. Kristeva also affirms both the agency of matter and the dimension of human/subjective agency implicated in cultural production. This is contrasted with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s account creative practice. The article also draws on the artistic work of researcher-practitioner Brian Martin, and his account of the relationship between Indigenous Australian art and culture to demonstrate that in an Indigenous world view, the real, the immaterial, the imaginary and the representational occur concurrently.

Aboriginal art and cultural diplomacy: Australia, the United States, and the Culture Warriors exhibition

Sending exhibitions of Aboriginal art offshore to promote Australia's international identity as a tolerant and enlightened nation has a relatively short history. Viewed with indifference at home by Australian art museums until the early 1980s, Aboriginal art is now regularly presented abroad as the nation's preeminent art form and leading cultural export, capable of representing Australia in the area of cultural diplomacy. To date, little attention has been paid in assessing the effectiveness of such costly cultural initiatives. To this end, this paper uses as a case study the 2009 US presentation of the National Gallery of Australia's Culture Warriors: Australian Indigenous Art Triennial. The paper draws on interviews with key figures involved in the exhibition's construction and US uptake. Touted in the United States as featuring strong political content, Culture Warriors is an exhibition that departs decisively from standard cultural diplomacy practices. Comparing this initiative with two key precedents, the author argues that while this exhibition may have fallen short of its goal to enhance US-Australian diplomatic relations, it should be considered as a useful point of reference for future cultural diplomacy initiatives organised by countries like Australia that continue to grapple with long-term issues linked to race relations.

When we look at pictures: Travel television and the intimacy of companion memory

Remembering in ‘modern’ Australia arises first and foremost through the transcultural processes of settler colonialism. This article explores some questions of memory’s cultures through a discussion of ‘travel television’. It argues that this kind of television is an example of a hybrid or non-human form of remembering that I call companion memory. I consider two examples: the 1950s television series, Australian Walkabout, and a recent television series on Australian indigenous art, Art + Soul. I conclude by considering how memory and travel might help us think about the kinds of intimacy and proximity implied by the notion of ‘memory up close’.

Indigenous Australian art in practice and theory

At the centre of this article lies the famous Ngurrara Canvas, a work of art that has supported land claims in a Native Title Tribunal in the Kimberley region (NT) in 1997. This artwork serves as model case for my discussion of the cross-cultural relevance of Indigenous Australian art. My concern is, in particular, the role European art museums play in representations of the ‘Other’. A brief look at some sample exhibitions in Europe supports my perspective on Indigenous Australian art in crosscultural contact zones.

Finding a Voice and a Place in the Contemporary Indigenous Art World

This paper arises from my research on the fine art market for visual artworks by community-based artists and Cairns-based artists in Far North Queensland, and on the role of the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair (CIAF). While there is a vast body of knowledge and research on Australian Indigenous art there has been limited research into the Indigenous art of Far North Queensland, particularly that of ‘fine art’. My research is anexamination of how the participants’ intercultural relationships can affect their collaboration and interdependency with other players in the art network. Taking a casestudy approach, or what might be termed micro-ethnography, my research has involved interviewing artists, arts coordinators, commercial and public gallerists and buyers. I haveexamined the role of intercultural exchange in these relationships. In this article, I concentrate on a few questions that relate to aspects of intercultural exchange from the points-of-view of the artists, with a few additional comments from art coordinators.