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Art as ethnocide: The case of Australia

a a
AnneMarie Willis & Tony Fry
a
Lecturer in art history and theory , The City Art Institute , Sydney
Published online: 19 Jun 2008.

To cite this article: AnneMarie Willis & Tony Fry (1988) Art as ethnocide: The case of Australia, Third Text, 2:5, 3-20, DOI:
10.1080/09528828808576200

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Art as Ethnocide*
The Case of Australia

Anne-Marie Willis
and Tony Fry

* Pierre Clastres, 'On Aboriginal art has been enjoying unprecedented prominence in
Ethnocide', Art & Text Australia in recent years. It has moved from the basements and 'tribal
No. 28, Sydney, 1988.
art' sections of museums to be placed in the full glare of the carefully
stage-managed spaces reserved for contemporary art. Specialist
galleries are proliferating in capital cities to act as staging posts between
producers in remote areas and a local and international art market of
State, private and corporate collectors. It has become an area of
contemporary culture about which the cultivated classes feel a need
to be informed, hence a proliferation of glossy books and exhibition
catalogues and the introduction of courses on Aboriginal art in art
colleges and universities. Here we have an art of the Third World that
has been and is still being rapaciously appropriated by the institutions
of art of the First World. What is most extraordinary is that this buoyant
niche of the art market and its attendant service sector is being claimed
as an arena of political progress, a means by which the cause of
Aboriginal self-determination is being advanced.
So far, we haven't defined Aboriginal art. The problem of definition
is one that preoccupies curators and art critics in their efforts to police
 4

the boundaries of taste, to declare certain objects as authentic, others

as not. No such essentialist definition is sought here. We begin by
asserting Aboriginal art as a mobile set of signifiers that appear in a
variety of forms and situations from tribal artefact to hybridised
contemporary work; in the production of both desert and urban artists;
as object in the State museum, tourist shop, designer boutique,
upmarket gallery; as sign and reference to Aboriginality scattered across
the work of many non-Aboriginal Australian artists. What is dear from
the diversity of Aboriginal art and its multiple locations is that it has
become an object of strategic deployment that can have either
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progressive or regressive consequences for its producers.

This article is not seeking to discover some essential truth about
contemporary Aboriginal art, the aim is to address the non-Aboriginal
relation with that constructed object. What will be argued for is a need
to go beyond the parameters of the current debates, to recast the
'problems and issues'. This is being done with a sense of urgency,
stemming from a conviction that current ways of conceiving of the
issues and resulting modes of operation are counter-productive and
are often deepening the problems. It will be argued that most ideas
and practices in circulation are functioning to mask the continuation
of the exploitation of Aboriginal culture. In fact they are frequently
feeding forms of neo-colonialism in the unbroken and unceasing
process of colonisation. As Adrian Marrie puts it:

The political reality for Aborigines is that Australia has not yet de-
colonised. It is within this reality that various Western institutions can
practice, unfettered, their own forms of colonialism by which their various
interests, values and objectives are placed above the interests of the
Aborigines and their rights to cultural privacy.1

1 Adrian Marrie, 'The The claims made that contemporary Aboriginal art is a site of
Politics of Aboriginal
Heritage', Praxis M 'progressiveness' within the Australian and international art world
No. 17, Perth, 1987, particularly need to be questioned. The problems to be addressed do
P17 not centre around a concern with understanding 'Aboriginal art' (to
put this first on the political agenda a politics of seeing the world
through a picture frame is a major obstacle, as shall be argued), rather
they collide with a whole series of evasions, absences and blind spots
within cultural criticism. These exist not only in relation to Aboriginal
art, but in many areas of designated 'progressive' activity, which are
beyond the scope of this article. 'Aboriginal art' happens to be an
urgent priority; by foregrounding the debates around it (that in fact
'produce' it as a discursive field) the serious shortcomings of available
progressive positions can be brought into focus, and, more importantly,
the damage being done by these going unchallenged will become clear.
Such recognitions are an essential step, if change is to occur.
We write from the experience of our own encounters with a complex
field, designated 'contemporary Aboriginal art'. We did not first
encounter 'Aboriginal art' in some pristine space and then seek out
the 'theory' with which to grasp it. 'It' appeared already constituted
in institutional spaces and with a package of debates concerning why
 5

it should be there and how it should be read; we encountered 'it' as

a demand that 'it' should 'naturally' be included as major and minor
components in courses we were teaching.
Our arguments are addressed specifically to a non-Aboriginal
audience seeking to know or engage with Aboriginal culture. Our
intention is not to 'judge' Aboriginal people who choose to operate
in the white art world. On the other hand we are not advocating that
2 Frantz Fanon, The an uncritical ear be turned towards those voices. As Frantz Fanon has
Wretched of the Earth,
Penguin, 1973 shown, the words spoken do not necessarily correlate with the colour
of the skin of the speaker.2 In particular we will be arguing against
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the prevailing notion that 'we' must embrace contemporary Aboriginal

art, against the sentiments summed up in Vivien Johnson's proposition
3 Vivien Johnson, 'Our that "only in our rejection of it of them is Aboriginal Art
Appropriation is Your
Dispossession', Praxis unknowable or inherently 'Other' " ? What is being advocated
M No. 17, 1987, p5 instead is the necessity to reject such easy 'solutions'.

BEGINNING WITH REFUSALS

We need to begin by refusing to enter the art world debate on

Aboriginal art on its own terms. This world asks questions framed
within the art discourse like: How can we talk about Aboriginal art?
How can it be understood within the discourses of art? How can
productive non-exploitive exchanges occur between Aboriginal and
non-Aboriginal artists, gallery owners, curators? Such questions are
subtended by an ethnocentric assumption that it is Aboriginal people
and their culture that are 'the problem' and that the art world has to
find ways of dealing with it. The crucial shift that has to be made is
from seeing 'them' as a problem for authority and institutions to seeing
the forces of power (in its hard and soft forms) as their problem. In
other words, overt or covert, structural and institutional racism needs
to be the main focus rather than 'Aboriginal art'. What we must first
address then is the consequences of our own practices and their impact
on Aboriginal culture. The issue of 'Aboriginal art' then falls into place
as a secondary, rather than primary pathway into the political field.
The refusal to centre 'Aboriginal art' is of course linked to another
necessity. This is to refuse to disarticulate Aboriginal culture from the
crucial political agenda of social justice, including land rights, health,
housing and employment. In doing this it becomes impossible to view
the claimed artistic 'achievement' (viewed in white terms) of a few as
a marker of progress of the position of Aboriginal people in Australian
society. We must ask, for instance, just how significant is the fact that
more Aboriginals are having their work bought and displayed in
mainstream art museums and galleries in and beyond Australia, when
there are still an alarming number of deaths of Aboriginals in police
custody, when levels of health, education, life expectancy are all
 6

dramatically lower than the national average, and when rates of infant
mortality and unemployment are much higher? As will be argued later,
much of what is named as 'progress' is the assimilation of signs of
difference into a homogenising system, the art market.

A LEGACY OF ETHNOCENTRISM

Before we can usefully engage with 'Aboriginal art' we need to develop

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an understanding of how Anglo/Eurocentric culture has systematically

positioned cultures different from it. Cultural values and forms which
appear to throw into doubt the cohesion and the 'infallibility' of
Western culture (its taken for granted ways of explaining and operating
in the world) are positioned outside it as threateningly 'other',
thereafter they are kept at bay or assimilated. Here the aim is the culling
of elements which can be 'absorbed' into the mainstream dominant
culture without shaking any of its foundations. Historically, the culture
of 'the other' has moved through a series of Western logocentric
categorisations, from the despised or gawked-at fetish object of early
colonialism, to the 'primitive' artefact and relic of a past stage of an
assumed evolutionary human development of the nineteenth century
to the more recent embrace within late capitalism of the artefact as art
object to be displayed in museums in the same terms, to be admired
for the same reasons as Western art objects. Without embarking on
a history of otherness, it needs to be acknowledged that each of these
constructions is an imposition of changing sets of Eurocentric values
onto the cultures of others and that they say more about the culture
doing the naming than the culture named. As Hal Foster has said about
the 'primitive', (which continues to be operational, if unstated,
aesthetic of almost all contemporary Aboriginal art, even when it
appears in modern packaging such as the Western desert dot painting
executed on canvas):

the primitive has served as a coded other at least since the Enlightenment,
usually as a subordinate term in its imaginary set of oppositions
(light/dark, rational/irrational, civilized/savage). This domesticated
primitive is thus constructive, not disruptive, of the binary ratio of the
West; Fixed as a structural opposite or a dialectical other to be
incorporated, it assists in the establishment of a western identity, center,
norm and name.4
4 Hal Foster, Recodings, The primitive has been a major motor of avant-garde aesthetics and
Bay Press, Port
Townsend (USA), it lives on as a commodified signifier of 'raw creativity' within the sign
1985, p196 driven economy of late capitalism. In taking up the idea of the primitive
the avant-garde was not inducting something from elsewhere. Rather,
artists were locked into the logic of an object of their own culture's
making. The primitive was exported to the place where it was named
to exist. The idea simply travelled full circle via anthropologists taking
a theory formulated in a Western academy to Africa, the East, Australia,
then returning with objects classified by the theory which artists then
 7

encountered and eventually sent around the same circuit. What is being
described here are the operations of ethnocentrism, that practice of
assuming and applying the norms of one culture to another. To define
certain objects produced in Aboriginal culture as 'art' is to understand
them in terms commensurable with a dominant international culture
as it expresses its power via its 'system of objects' and socio-linguistic
frameworks of naming it is not to understand objects of 'the other'
in their own terms. Such definitions are part of a process of the
universalising of culturally specific criteria. James Clifford describes
this as a process whereby "a tribal piece is detached from one milieu
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in order to circulate freely in another, a world of art of museums,

markets and connoisseurship."5
5 James Clifford,
'Histories of the Tribal It could be retorted that the foregoing analysis is not applicable to
and the Modern', Art contemporary Aboriginal art, that class of objects knowingly produced
in America, April 1985, by Aboriginal people in (unchosen) change, as cultural forms that
p171
consciously partake of the traditional as revisited and as retreat, and
6 For example, Bruce the new as hybridised fragments from varied cultures. The appearance
Adams in a review of
Artspace exhibition, 'A of this art gets explained within the rhetoric of 'cultural convergence'6
Certain Place' says a rhetoric which conceals inequality of conditions and exchange
"...there has been a
need to sort out the between the First and the Third World communities of 'one' nation.
differences between Furthermore, the promotion of convergence ignores the initial
natural processes of imposition of the ethnocentric category of art. The implications of the
convergence and new
forms of cultural relationship of ethnocentrism and power have to be considered here.
colonization." Sydney An instance of this is that Aboriginals in Australia today do not have
Morning Herald 16
January 1987. One a simple choice between their culture and its 'other'. Assertions of
might ask just how difference have to be accommodated in the terms of the coloniser.
any set of social
processes could be Desires have to be cast in the language of and be commensurable with
"natural". the practices of the hegemonic order (one only has to look for instance
at the complex web of legal language around land rights legislation
to realise that Aboriginals who want to have some say in this have no
choice but to gain an intricate knowledge of that law which has been
and is still consistently used against them). They and we are always
dealing with a process of transformation rather than one of translation.
The traditional way of life can never mean what it did prior to invasion,
it can never be recovered, there is no way to return to origins. This
does not make old cultural forms valueless however, for they can
become vital resources in the creation of new hybrid cultures, cultures
of bricolage, cultures from which to speak, act and define difference.

THE CULTURAL COMMODITY

These brief comments can stand as markers of one set of issues that
need to be fully explored prior to an informed engagement with
'Aboriginal art'. So far we have been dealing with objects that existed
in one symbolic order, but which get removed from it and placed in
national and transnational cultures and their symbolic orders. We now
need to address the dominant 'system of objects' of transnational
cultures, that is, commodification. Art is a commodity; to define it as
 8

such is not to make a moral judgment but to describe its actual condition
of existence. Additionally it is a commodity whose economic and
symbolic value comes into being through a complex network of
exchange relations between artist, dealer, curator, critic and other social
actors of the art world. Bourdieu has shown that the accumulation of
symbolic capital prestige, authority which may or may not get
converted into economic capital, is a major activity of the high culture
industries:

For the author, the critic, the art dealer, the publisher or theatre manager,
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the only legitimate accumulation consists in making a name for oneself,

a known, recognised name, a capital of consecration implying a power
to consecrate objects (with trademark or signature) or persons (through
publication, exhibition, etc) and therefore to give value and to appropriate
the profits from this operation."7
7 Pierre Bourdieu, 'The There is nothing outside this circle of belief; Bourdieu seeks to
Production of Belief:
Contribution to an describe its terms of operation; the value of a work of art is not intrinsic,
Economy of Symbolic " t h e source of 'creative' power, the ineffable manna or
Goods', Media, Culture
and Society, 2, 1980, charisma... need not be sought anywhere other than in the field, i.e.,
p262 in the system of objective relations which constitute it, in the struggles
8 Bourdieu, p267
of which it is the site and in the specific form of energy or capital which
is generated there." 8
It is in such a field that we must seek to recognise the value of
Aboriginal art, of any art object, as economic or cultural commodity;
likewise appeals about the 'value' of Aboriginal art to Aboriginal
people, when spoken within specific locations inside the circle of belief
(in art journals, catalogue notes, newspaper reviews or in specific social
relations of production) cannot be taken simply at face value; they need
to be seen as part of the process whereby individuals, institutions,
organisations accrue (or lose) symbolic capital. In the case under
consideration, there is an accumulation of reputation for the support
of new and marginal art forms and, in a milieu of increasing
condemnation for white neglect of Aboriginal issues (for example, this
has been ever present in the hollow rhetoric generated throughout 1988
Australia's Bicentenary), such support comes to be seen as almost
mandatory, it becomes a necessary component of reputation of the
enlightened in 'progressive' spheres of the art world. It needs to be
made clear here, that specific individuals in the art system are not
merely being taken to task or condemned for cynical actions; what is
being asserted is the function of certain actions and statements within
institutional systems and their discourses. As Colin Tatz says,

I am hyper-aware that what knowledge we have, all that is heard, seen

and read, is white interpretation of Aboriginal being. For Aborigines the
ultimate indignity is the sovereignty of those who control the gathering
9 Colin Tatz quoted in and dissemination of the written and spoken word concerning their
Marrie, op cit, pl7 situation.9
Of course we need to add the visual text and its intertextual field to
his comment.
 9

INTERNAL ART WORLD DEBATES ON ABORIGINAL ART

Having put in place these over-arching considerations, we will now

turn to more specific and localised debates around Aboriginal art,
focusing on the claims made about 'progress' and 'progressiveness'.
Much attention has been given in Australia to the art of the Western
desert, particularly of Papunya, to the art of Ramingining and to urban
Aboriginal art. Artists in scattered communities around Asutralia are
seen to be reviving or re-appropriating traditional cultural practices
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using modern forms and materials. There has been much anguish by
curators around the art/kitsch divide; at first only the most traditional
artefacts in terms of their iconography and materials were accepted
as authentic. 'Transitional' forms traditional motifs painted on canvas
using acrylic paints or the work of urban artists who use traditional
stories and motifs and recent Aboriginal history, reworking these
through various conventions of Western painting, have now found
acceptance in the marketplace and in survey exhibitons of
contemporary art. The claimed progress is that such works are now
considered as legitimate cultural forms. Aboriginal artists are able to
move forward, to enter the art world on terms beginning to approach
those of non-Aboriginal artists (that the cultural and economic roles
of the artists in their respective cultures do not correspond simply gets
overlooked).
What needs to be recognised is that this kind of overview which
can see the arts of Papunya, Ramingining and the work of urban artists
existing as part of a totalityis, once again, one that can only be made
10 It is this kind of through the deployment of the categories of curatorship and art
overview produced by
art history that allows history.10 The power of the Eurocentric view and how it structures
Ann Stephen and Ian perceptions is essential to identify. An artist from Papunya, for
Burn to connect Albert
Namitjira to present example, and a 'cultured' Anglo-Australian are not looking at the same
concerns and to make textual object, and more obviously, not from the same place/point of
the tentative and view. They occupy different historico-aesthetic space as well as
highly debatable claim
of his art as a form of geographic, cultural, social space. The artist moves out to perceive the
resistance rather than world of art through the passage of his/her art work; for the few, this
assimilation.
'Traditional Painter: can mean seeing it as an exhibit within a Biennale or a Perspecta
the Transfiguration of (biannual national exhibitions of contemporary art), in a state or
Albert Namitjira', Age
Monthly Review, national collection, which for most will mean seeing it in a milieu of
Melbourne, November, visual incoherence (because the narrative that makes sense of the
1987 disparate objects is not in place). The 'cultured' viewer, however, is
able, almost automatically, to place the object within that ordered
hierarchical field of visual discrimination that constitutes the history
of art before its symbolic content is even recognised thus the object
is categorised, placed and qualified as a genre within a remade,
contemporary primitivism.
And so Aboriginal art has moved from an artefact of anthropological
concern to an art of curatorial interest and public display. 'Aboriginal
art' is a product of Western culture; as has already been indicated the
very category of art is specifically Western; this is not to deny a rich
Aboriginal material culture, but to recognise that the function of objects
 10

in those cultures is not as signs of disinterested aesthetic speculation.

The fact that Aboriginal management may be inducted into this activity
through trainee curatorship programmes and the like does not alter
the ethnocentric character of this assimilation exercise. Again, we affirm
that domination is not simply a figure of the past. In fact there is double
damage done; in addition to the 'usual' process of assimilation (the
imposition of new logics/practices and the displacement of a cultural
system), there is a process occurring in relation to what was once their
culture. First their visual culture was taken from them and next they
are told how it should be managed. Such 'reforms' neglect to recognise
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that any cultural or political self-determination must include the

freedom to name, to classify as part of its own logic. To do anything
else is to carry out acts of ethnocide through the action of deliberate
cultural destruction.
Contemporary Aboriginal art is, of course, not a totality. 'Papunya',
the place, signifies very differently according to who speaks the proper
noun. White writers may speak optimistically of the art-making
communities of Papunya and Ramingining and give an impression of
groups of people in charge of their own destinies using art as a form
of intervention, "a counter-offensive" to "cultural colonialism".11
But in the art market 'Papunya' and 'Ramingining' are names of
commodities and furthermore they are names that would never have
circulated anywhere beyond the local had not the process of
commodification inserted them into the system of exchange.
Commodification is the motor which drives the revival of Aboriginal
arts and it ushers in irreversible changes. What we are witnessing is
the partially comprehended induction of often fringe dwelling
Aboriginals into the political economy of art. In addition, Aboriginal
art has become, as said, an international commodity (in fact it was
popular with American art investors long before it was taken up by
local collectors) and its meanings/functions in that context are no doubt
even more remote to the producers. Talk of 'self-determination' and
'intervention' are hollow indeed, in this context.
Some have argued that because the meanings of Aboriginal culture
are vested in individuals and clan groups rather than the objects
themselves, the sale and display of objects in art galleries does not take
away from their functioning in Aboriginal culture. For example, Vivien
Johnson claims:

the authenticity of Aboriginal art persists notwithstanding the all-too-

obvious consequences of insertion into a Western context ... For
traditionally oriented communities like Papunya and Ramingining
(authenticity) consists in having fulfilled one's obligations as custodian
11 Johnson, p5 of certain Dreaming sites and tracks and the stories associated with them.
Regular materialization and appropriate ritual practice are part of this
12 Ibid., p5 process, in the Art Gallery of NSW or the Tanami Desert.12

We need to ask, however, for whom is authenticity an issue? It is clear

that the claim is being directed at a white audience, that liberal audience
for whom the idea of gazing upon an inauthentic cultural activity would
 11

be unacceptable. Yet the context of that authenticity is ultimately

unknowable to that audience; it may be crudely presented with
accompanying catalogue notes outlining mythological stories, but given
that the explanatory power of those narratives is incommensurable with
Western logic the stories can do no more than function as signs of
content.
Similarly, promotors of Aboriginal art point to the rich meanings
encoded into Papunya paintings concerning dreaming sites, sacred
places, mythological beings. But how do the variants of Western
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rational consciousness position such meanings? To be told that a

particular set of lines represents a snake or a series of circles,
waterholes, may at best generate a generalised respect for the
complexity of an unfamiliar cultural system, at worst function as signs
of an exotic modern primitive. Either way what is not faced directly
is that that belief system and the way of acting in the world it represents
has become increasingly inoperable with the ongoing process of
colonisation (particularly in its 'neo' form of cultural and economic
imposition). It no longer exists in a pure state. Viewers of Aboriginal
art are being asked to 'appreciate' signs of a living culture, when in
 12
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Black art for white eyes: Papunya dot paintings have gone the full circle from tourist commodity to high art
displayed in national collections, to their simulated popularised appearance, seen here by Expo 88 in Brisbane. The
works shown are copies of originals done by the artists for outdoor display would Therese Oulton, Bruce
McLean, R. B. Kitaj, Juan Davila, Sidney Nolan, Imants Tillers, Enzo Cucchi or other members of the validated
international art establishment agree to produce and display their work under such conditions?
 13

fact what they are actually gazing on is the power of their own culture
to appropriate signs of otherness. The fact that people from
Ramingining may perform their ritual ceremonies in the Art Gallery
of NSW is testimony to that institution's power rather than a
demonstration of the 'power' of Aboriginal culture; the only power
it would seem to have is to 'move' an audience, but this too simply
reflects back the power of Western art institutions, which have
progressively been able to accommodate difference under the levelling
mechanism of the aesthetic emotion. So it is nonsense for Vivien
Johnson to claim that it is "profoundly shocking" for the art world
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to discover that "not they but the gentle victims of the tyranny they
dispense hold the purchase on truth and beauty".13 This is no more
than the power of the primitive as an aesthetic category of Western
invention.

PAPUNYA AND THE ART OF ASSIMILATION

To 'progressive' sections of the art world Papunya represents a success

story dispossessed tribal Aboriginals reclaiming their traditional
culture and giving it a modern visual form in acrylic on canvas, gaining
a measure of economic independence and control over their products
in addition. This is claimed as progress because Aboriginals are no
longer locked into producing the 'authentic artefact' from traditional
materials such as ochres and barks. But this progress was only possible
through a re-designation of the hybrid art object from kitsch to high
art a shift which has little to do with Aboriginal initiatives. A change
in taste has been made to occur in the art market, one which has been
consciously engineered by enthusiastic collectors and curators who
have striven to present Papunya paintings in 'favourable' circumstances
professionally lit museums and galleries, high quality colour
catalogues as opposed to tourist and craft shops. The objects have
been re-coded through re-location. This is not to suggest that Papunya
paintings travelled a smooth path through the art institutions in early
days individual curators battled conservative boards of trustees and
gallery directors, but this intra-institutional struggle must never be
conflated with Aboriginal resistance. It was a battle over objects which
was won at the level of taste (one major gallery director who was
resistant for a long time now permits Papunya art to be collected and
displayed because he regards it as a superior form of abstract painting,
which, after all, is not a contradictory position to hold within the logic
of the art museum). And it might be added, that once won at the level
of taste it was irretrievably lost at the level of the complexity of the
political.
So, it appears that members of a fringe-dwelling community are now
making decent incomes out of the sale of their art, they have their own
13 Ibid., p4 company protecting their rights, there is control over the use of sacred
designs, their work is not sold as anonymous craft objects but as
 14

individual, signed authored works with due recognition for outstanding

talent (a survey of the work of Clifford Possum Tjapaltjari, for example,
was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London as part
of their focus on Australia in its Bicentennial year). These developments
may mean a great deal to individuals in that community we are not
in a position to know exactly what it means to them. But such
developments can only be seen as 'progress' within the discourses of
hierarchy of the art world in which the acceptance of what one produces
as high art is the assumed goal of artists. Yet the world of operation,
the art world, is not in fact viewable in the community of the artists
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(or it has an existence only as differentially mediated, fragmentary,

second and third hand reports, as stories and 'travellers tales'). So,
'success' exists in an invisible space.
Looking at the art of fringe-dwelling Aboriginals outside this system
of valorization and viewing it instead through the discourses of race
politics, it can be concluded that what has been achieved is not cultural
intervention or resistance, or place from which to speak 'their' cause,
but rather, moderately successful assimilation. A shift has taken place
from overt racism to cultural ethnocide. And control still rests ultimately
with 'white' institutions.
As a number of writers have pointed out Papunya was an artificial
14 Bernice Murphy,
'Curating settlement created by bureaucracy,14 in which a number of disparate
Contemporary tribal groups were collected together, an act of administration which
Aboriginal Art', Praxis
M, No. 17, 1987, p23
took on particular urgency with the testing at Woomera rocket range
in the 1950s and early 1960s (Settle Down Country Pmere Arlaltyewele
15 Pam Nathan and Dick records Aboriginal experiences of being rounded up and dumped at
Leichleitner
Japanangka, Settle Papunya, the subsequent illnesses and deaths due to being cut-off from
Down Country Pmere traditional foods, and memories of Papunya as an 'unhappy place').15
Arlaltyewele, Kibble
Books/Central Art making, the production of portable painted objects whose primary
Australian Aboriginal function is aesthetic contemplation, was at the time of inception an
Congress, Melbourne alien, Western concept introduced by white art teachers. The people
and Alice Springs,
1983 of Papunya are barely a generation away from a life of hunting and
gathering in the desert; few of them would have visited the city galleries
and museums that display their work; even fewer would be cogniscent
with the cultural strategies available to cosmopolitan white and
Aboriginal artists. The rhetoric of 'interventionism' (which is
consistently claimed by white voices) needs to be heard in this context.
Similarly, arguments have been put that Aboriginal artists travelling
overseas with exhibitions of their work, can act as 'ambassadors' for
land rights and liberation. But this claim needs to be seen in relation
to the constraining practices (via selection, close monitoring and
coercion) of the State when it is funding overseas appearances of
'Australian culture'. As activist Michael Mansell remarked in the press
in January 1988, there are often more strings attached to money given
by the Commonwealth government than by regimes such as Libya.
Additionally, the closures of the art world to political discourses are
well-maintained internationally (it is not so much that such concerns
are denied voice, but that they are consistently positioned as peripheral
to the 'real business' of art).
So, rather than 'cultural intervention', the production of paintings
 15

at Papunya (and other fringe settlements) can be seen as a culturally

problematic form of economic activity in an economically deprived
region, something that may offer a measure more independence than
welfare payments, but a form of economic activity that has become
'necessary' because white uses of the land have rendered the traditional
hunting and gathering life increasingly less viable. The presence of
Aboriginal arts and crafts advisers to settlements involved in art
production does not automatically guarantee Aboriginal control either.
Black voices speak as mediating agents for white domination when they
talk of quality control, deadlines and the need to promote individual
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artists (which is not to say the market economy can be avoided but
rather that control of exchange relations is inseparable from the issue .
of self-determination).
What the success of the arts of Papunya and Ramingining represents
is the shift of Aboriginal work from craft to art status (two of the biggest
Australian collectors are Alan Bond and Robert Holmes a Court), its
packaging according to the norms of the art market with regionally
distinct styles ('schools') and increasing prominence of selected
individuals, and in the process, the induction of certain members of
remote Aboriginal communities into the value system and social
relations of the art market. To claim that traditional values encoded
in the works remain intact while this process goes on, is to be blind
to the inevitable re-structuring of social relations ushered in by
commodification within conditions of extreme uneven development.
Dreaming stories, mythological sites ('the past') may be present in the
imagery as traces, but what happens to the cultural tradition of relations
between people in the present and in the future? What is significant is
that this question is not being asked by 'progressives' in the art world
who remain locked into the culturalist myth of art as an agency of
resistance and radicality in and of itself.
A recent tragic incident can serve as one answer to this question.
Six members of a single family were victims of a mass killing in Arnhem
Land in the Northern Territory in September 1988. One of the victims
was Dick Murrumurra, a well known bark painter whose work is in
the Australian National Gallery. The incident has been attributed to
a fight over the distribution of income from the sale of a painting. A
cultural economy of ownership, artistic identity and property collided
16 Reports in the Sydney with a cultural economy of common goods. In the weighted movement
Morning Herald 29
September, 3 and from one system of exchange to another the ethnocidal impetus gained
4 October, 1988 momentum.16

NO TURNING BACK

A particularly naive misconception perpetuated by paternalistic sources

is that art is providing the economic means whereby some Aboriginal
communities are being able to return to a traditional way of life. Here
are two examples, one more informed and sophisticated, the other
 16

crude and patronising; but we would argue that the popular journalistic
response cannot be separated from the curatorial one; they are two
sides of the one coin, and where curators may want to disassociate
their activities from the fashion world, they fail to recognise their power
as taste-makers who have initiated the recoding process that has
transformed the sign value and the sign exchange value of Aboriginal
designs from 'kitsch' as they were regarded in 'cultured' circles before
the mid 1970s to fashionably desirable. The first is by a curator, Bernice
Murphy:
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the introduction of an economic support for traditional Aboriginal culture

through the sale of arts and crafts, and the gaining of royalties and fees
for performances of various kinds, has provided a strengthening measure
of support for traditional cultural life to be renewed. The arts and crafts
development of the 1970s has directly related to development of the
important 'outstation movement', through the new economic and
cultural stimulus it has provided for the re-establishment of weakened
ties to traditional sites and lifestyles.17

The second is from an article 'Chic Outback' in The Western Mail

Magazine:

A unique meeting of Aboriginal art and fashion has given birth to a new
community in the Great Sandy Desert, south of Fitzroy Crossing. Jimmy
Pike, artist and convicted murderer, has returned to the desert to start
a new tribal life. To finance his dream, 1800 km away in Perth, Pike's
traditional paintings are turned into functional modern designs.
Jimmy Pike designs can be seen on fashion ranges for men and women,
on bed linen and on the walls of art galleries around Australia, while
back in the Kimberleys the artist paints on undisturbed by the hustle
and bustle of the business world. Seated at a crude table under the shade
of a tree, he paints designs that are destined to find their way into
thousands of homes here and overseas.
17 Murphy, p23
The marketing skills behind this meeting of two cultures comes from
Fremantle art teachers David Wroth and Stephen Culley. The pair started
18 The Western Mail the label Desert Designs, to promote WA artists and translate original
Magazine, Perth, 13 artworks into designs to be used on everyday items such as clothes.
December 1986, p18 Jimmy Pike is their (our emphasis) first success story.18
It would be easy to criticise the arrogant tone, delusory rhetoric and
out and out naivety of the second piece ("...the artist paints on
undisturbed by the hustle and bustle of the business world") but we
won't dwell on this. What neither statement considers the implications
of, is the impossibility for colonised peoples of ever returning to
traditional ways; the domination of the coloniser over the means of
doing so is one obstacle (we are still a very long way from uniform
and equitable land rights in Australia, many Aboriginals continue to
live on reserves whose day to day running or ultimate control is in
white hands); the other, perhaps more fundamental, is the knowledge
of those who are colonised that their culture does not offer a total
explanatory model; that once-certain beliefs and practices are powerless
in the face of other forces (technology for example: the incantation that
doesn't work in the face of the gun, the palpable effects of new
 17

diseases, the rituals of exchange not understood gifts taken by the

coloniser with nothing given in return). The coloniser is never
threatened by otherness in the same way precisely because he ('he'
is used deliberately to name patriarchy) holds the power.
For the colonised, the innocence of the past can never be recovered;
life in the present often becomes a condition of loss, perpetual
dispossession and extreme alienation. What remains, as progress for
the few, is the making of a culture of bricolage, but with devalued signs
and the fall-out of signs of domination. The selective appropriation of
traditions can work, as we have already observed, as resources in the
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building of new cultural forms and futures. This culture of bricolage

is practised by colonised peoples everywhere. It is always put together
within a framework of unequal power relations. Sometimes it becomes
constituted as resistance, but very often it is simply a means of survival
in a universe of limited options. Clearly the response to the culture
of the colonised should not be uncritical celebration or charity, rather
it should be met with justice. Progress then can be measured by signs
of change in fundamental structural conditions.

BEYOND GUILT AND EVASIONS

This brings us to the final part of this our argument. Here we want
to briefly look at why the art world is increasingly eager to celebrate
and teach Aboriginal art. To do this, we have to go some way towards
understanding the psychology of racism in Australia the racism that
has been internalised across the society. To consider this in a
comprehensive way is clearly beyond the scope of this article: we are
talking of an agenda that would need to work towards an historical
analysis of the myriad forms of racism, both the two hundred years
of migrants' treatment of indigenous peoples as well as one group of
migrants against another. Suffice to say this: there is massive collective
guilt about the situation of Aboriginals in Australia today the images
of alcoholism, crime, poor health and low standard housing erupt
periodically in the mainstream media to haunt white Australia; visitors
from overseas (several years ago, the World Council of Churches, most
recently the United Nations Working Group of Indigenous Populations
and the London-based Anti*Slavery Society) have condemned Australia
for its record on human rights.
The plight of Aboriginals is, as Adrian Marrie made clear earlier, a
constant reminder that the country has not transcended colonialism,
that ethnocide is not just history and the past, but also of the present.
Certainly it is inappropriate to talk as Vivien Johnson does, of "the
art of decolonization" the art of re-colonization is actually a more
apt term.
Frequently there is a latching onto and celebration of the slightest
signs of 'progress'. There is also the promotion of token 'successful'
figures. When the argument is put that the production of Aboriginal
art represents little more than a subsidisation of welfare, the answer
sometimes is, "Well isn't that better than nothing?" Here, the limited
 18

and reformist character of the enterprise becomes clear; what such a

statement reveals is that the dominant culture and those that speak
from and for it desire no more that the appearance of material progress.
They want a cleaned up version of Aboriginal culture no children
with flies crawling in their eyes, healthy-looking people producing
healthy-looking art, assimilation into our system of values and
exchange relations, but with the retention of surface appearance of
difference in the form of the good-looking commodity and
spectacularised culture (the latter also of great use value to the
burgeoning economy of tourism). What they are not at all concerned
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with, beyond sentimentality, are continuing structural inequalities.

Fears exist of a real transfer of resources and power, and even of power
being taken by force. Similarly threatening is the potential of the
challenge to dominant values by those made by a new Aboriginal
culture. Such fears exist, usually unspoken, certainly they are held
silently by many a progressive poseur.
Many Australian cultural institutions and their spokespeople have
been at the forefront of the development of policies that have a surface
appearance of progress while leaving structural inequalities in place.
The whole debate around museums and cultural property is one
example; the woolly concepts of 'world' and 'national' heritage are
deployed in order to assert the necessity of the continuation of the
museum's right over cultural objects. John Mulvaney has written a
carefully worded article, 'Museums and Cultural Property' in which
he strains to show how sympathetic he is to indigenous peoples' rights
to their cultural heritage, yet ends up suggesting that objects only be
returned to those peoples if they agree to certain conditions set by
museums!19 Unconditional transfer of power, the opportunity to
19 John Mulvaney, 'A
Question of Values: exercise fundamental cultural difference, are consistently shied away
Museums and Cultural from by white liberals. It often appears that an insidious game is played
Property' in I.
McBryde (ed) Who out across policy areas concerning Aboriginal people a kind of 'let's
Owns the Past?, Oxford see how progressive we can appear to be, without really risking
University Press, anything'. A great deal of the politics, then, is rhetorical play. The
Melbourne, 1985
rationale of these practices is that the preservation of cultural objects
takes precedence over the cultural rights of the dispossessed and the
uses of these objects to them now, a point poignantly observed by
Henrietta Fourmile:

My people around home who want to paint Aboriginal designs borrow

from those designs which belong to the people of Arnhem Land and
the Kimberleys, or copy them off DAA posters, because they have never
seen the designs which are their birthright, until last year when I took
back an album of photographs of our artefacts in the South Australian
Museum; things they never knew existed. And why was last year so
important? Because it was last year that I found out about the existence
and whereabouts of my heritage through my own efforts, not through
the efforts of the individual institutions which hold our cultural property.
It hurts me deeply to think that I was 30 years old before I saw artefacts
bearing the totemic emblems of my ancestors and yet the staff and
students of one particular institution have been making detailed studies
 19

of the material culture from my country for the past seven or eight years,
benefiting from the museum collections which we did not know
about.20
20 Henrietta Fourmile, Similarly, for non-Aboriginals to support 'Aboriginal art', for all the
'Museums and reasons already cited is to risk nothing; it is to be involved in the
Aborigines: A Case
Study in production of the appearance of progress. An illusion of cultural
Contemporary autonomy and a cultural politics is being put in place where the basic
Scientific Colonialism',
Praxis M No 17, 1987, pre-requisites for that do not exist (e.g. substantial land rights, a treaty
pp9-10 recognising Aboriginal occupation of Australia prior to white invasion
with appropriate compensation and reconciliation). While art is
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continued to be claimed as a vanguard site for the advancement of

Aboriginal interests, the more fundamental bases for change will
remain obscured. The danger is that while the myth of art as progress
remains in place it has the capacity to induct and subsequently de-
activate people (both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal) who have a
genuine interest in countering racism in Australia today.
As indicated earlier, the romantic interpretation of 'cultural survival'
needs to be challenged. Yes, it is a culture which has survived a very
long time, and that must be a source of Aboriginal pride. At the same
time it is a terribly damaged culture in both its past two hundred years
and in its contemporary forms.

FROM ABORIGINAL ART TO THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF

ABORIGINALITY

While a rejection of what has been constituted as 'Aboriginal art' is

being advocated, this does not in any way mean a complete turning
away from issues of culture and visual representation in relation to
Aboriginal politics. As stated at the outset the task should be to counter
racism, to view the cultures of domination as the problem; this requires
the development of a complex understanding of the functionings of
racism, the ethnocentric/logocentric bases of dominant cultures, an
understanding of power and institutions, the functioning of the art
system and culture industries.
What also needs to be understood is the function of the sign
'Aboriginal art' within the social text. It is increasingly becoming a
driving force in a sign system of commodification that seeks to claim
'Australian-ness'. And here there is a continuity, rather than a
separation, between the museum and the street. From the Ancestors
and Spirits exhibition at the Australian National Gallery to Clifford
Possum, Tim Johnson, Imants Tillers (both the artists' names and what.
they produce function as signs) to the down-market souvenir shops
that sell Aboriginal design(ed) T-shirts with swing tickets naming artist
and clan group (signs of the authentic commodity) to department
stores' .displays of Aboriginal style designer fashions to the journal
Bulletin/Newsweek with its declaration that in the Bicentennial year of
1988, Aboriginal art is 'in' (but the writers don't see the irony) all
 20

these signs proliferate claiming an up-dated, re-made culturally

sophisticated Australia-ness, (no more unauthorised, anonymous rock
carving designs on tea towels), which in addition circulates
internationally in step with the middle market commodification of post-
McClaren, post-Jean Paul Goude neo-primitivism. And, in
contradiction to the recentness of their production/coding as
commodities, cultural depth is claimed for these signs ("the oldest
living culture in the world", as the tourist brochures state). The
dominant culture desperately needs these kind of 'appealing'
appearances of Aboriginality as signs of distinctiveness and depth
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which its two hundred years of second-hand Euro-American culture

cannot claim.

POSTSCRIPT

When publicly presenting the type of arguments put forward in this

article we have been met with two types of responses that are con-
nected. One is that we are pushing a negative 'hands off' line that fails
to recognise 'good work' and the provision of enablement. The other
is that 'we' don't have a 'special relationship' with 'them' (as evidenced
by co-operative work, dialogue and cultural boundary crossing). Well,
partly we are asserting the necessity for 'hands off. Certainly we have
no qualms about opposing the education of a new corps of white
experts to fill positions in the hierarchies of the culture industry or the
teaching of Aboriginal art to almost exclusively non-Aboriginal students
as yet another topic within pluralistic art education. This is not to say
that we are advocating that nothing should be said or done. The
reverse. There is an urgent need in Australia, and we suspect
elsewhere, to teach about the ethnocentric construction of the history
of art and its implication in the organic nature of racism. This task is
not one to be tacked onto the discipline of art history but implies its
fundamental reworking. Certainly it is a task where the use of hands
is essential. As to those sensitive souls with their 'special relationships'
while acknowledging the need for co-operation, the romantic notion
of the existence of equality in conditions of unequal power is rejected.'
So is the self-deception of liberal paternalism. Establishing a mutual
Note: a shorter and
earlier version of this critical distance of respect in relations of re-distribution is the ideal.
article appeared in Without first putting in place an ethical framework, all other activity
Praxis M, No 20, simply feeds the continuity of the situation it is claiming to ameliorate.
Perth. 1988