What Are the Issues with Curating Aboriginal Art?
An installation shot of “Desert Painters of Australia” at Gagosian. At right, Tjumpo Tjapanangka’s “Wilkinkarra” depicts the creation story of Lake Mackay, where he grew up. Yukultji Napangati/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; George Ward Tjungurrayi/Copyright Agency, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Tjumpo Tjapanangka/Copyright Agency, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York — https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/arts/design/aboriginal-art-australia.html
Demand that it be seen for what it is – as being among the World’s best examples of Abstract Expressionism. Ditch the pretense of spirituality that consigns the art to ethnography and its attendant "glass ceiling". Ditch the cultural cringe and insert the art at the level of the best in western art, avoiding the provincialism trap.—Richard Bell, ‘Bell’s Theorem’[1]
If you are not a physicist or like-minded scientist, it may be that the aptness of the name ‘Bell’s Theorem’ is lost on you. For the original Bell’s Theorem, propounded by the Irish physicist John Stewart Bell, otherwise known as ‘Bell’s inequality’, calls into question the consistency of predictions in quantum mechanics.[2] In physics, this type of theory is called 'no-go'.
The irony is, of course, serendipitous and enlarges upon Richard Bell’s 2002 polemic, which advanced in the most decisive way the extent to which Aboriginal art is a marketed construct that benefits more whites than blacks, and has little regard for the fundamental of Aboriginal rights, their past or their plight.
In the introduction, Bell states: 'There is no Aboriginal art industry. There is, however, an industry that caters for Aboriginal art'. These words have a ringing sound. By implication, Aboriginal art is both packaged and consumed by forces that are, in truth, hostile or indifferent to Aboriginality as such.
To see a painting by an Aboriginal artist in a national collection is to know nothing of the conditions of its making which are generally (depending on the artist) essential to it – and this means the heat, the sweat, and the grime of the dusty outback.
To see a desert painting on a white wall in a clean, air-conditioned room is equivalent to conversing with a desiccated corpse. This contradiction becomes more complicated when Aboriginal art is placed together with non-Aboriginal art in some kind of curatorial conversation.
Who is legitimating whom? And what kind of correspondence is being set up?
Outside of outright revolt, Bell’s solution is to ‘ditch the pretense of spirituality that consigns the art to ethnography’ and demand that Aboriginal art be seen as ‘among the World’s best examples of Abstract Expressionism’.
In other words, Aboriginals had it in the bag thousands of years before Greenberg’s climactic and heroic vision was ever conceived.
There are, of course, more than a handful of problems with this assertion – that it de-historicises an historical moment, that it plays loose with spiritual content that many Aboriginal artists hold dear, that it defies cultural specificity – yet these same problems are precisely those that are perpetrated against Aboriginal art; Bell has just turned them on their head.
To go back to the art of the whitefellas and say that it has been done better is to perpetuate the same solecisms disregarding context and intention that had ensured that Aboriginal art is, on hand, insulated from criticism (especially when 'traditional') and confirmed its status as floating aesthetic signifiers.
Let us look at the problems just enumerated that have to do with history, spirituality, and culture. The ‘bogan' statement that 'Aboriginal culture has no history' is both true and false.
This is also true of other cultures besides themselves that have not followed Euro-American evolution and discourse. But a statement more in the manner that 'Aboriginal culture has no kind of history' is to consign Aboriginals to the status of animals. I will come back to this at the end of this article.
The ethnographic, aesthetic, ethical, and curatorial ramifications of placing works of art with differing genera with respect to time, self, agency, and place are profound, should one wish to explore them. But these issues are purposely left suspended, and in their place is the somewhat empty rhetoric of inclusion, one that belongs to the same family as multiculturalism and racial diversity.
These notions work well as surface values and have no real program for their philosophical meaning, let alone their practical implementation.
To the question of placing a non-Aboriginal and an Aboriginal work of art side by side, we may also claim that the Aboriginal art, if it is on canvas or in a gallery, is already in Western clothing.
It is made to play a double game of being other while of the establishment. That the National Gallery has now devoted an entire wing to Australian indigenous art is a crowning example of this.
The market continues to rise. 2019 was a boom year for the sale of Aboriginal art in New York.
In the late 1970s and ‘80s, there began the gradual transition of Aboriginal artefacts into art, from ethnographic museums to art museums.
But we may ask whether the status of Aboriginal art – traditional and perhaps also urban – is not more appropriately positioned back in the ethnographic museum. This for two reasons: one is that it would at least register the difference between their so-called authentic function and the Western ideology of art.
The second is more provocative. To place non-traditional Aboriginal artists in ethnographic museums would more accurately reflect the grisly reality of most of Australia’s indigenous population.
It would perversely announce the difference between a packaged museum and chaotic reality.
Please do not take this suggestion too literally. However, the inclusion and celebration of Aboriginal art is not the inclusion of Aboriginal people. In this respect, the contemporary museum is still perpetuating the princely court's role in that what it patronises is for its internal aggrandisement.
The Aboriginal art market vs. the real plight of Aboriginal artists and the people to whom the art relates continues to be a fraught issue. Works by Kngwarreye command well over the $300k mark, while Gordon Bennett does the same. They are both deceased and are both written into the Aboriginal art history books.
Unfortunately, most of these books are written, figuratively or literally, by white people. The biggest drivers of prices are collectors from the US and Europe. One of the most significant European collections of Aboriginal art is the Foundation Opale in lens, Switzerland, nestled magnificently in the Valais, its glass façade reflecting the mountain landscape.
The whole thing is just odd if you even make a few steps to venture into what the work it holds is about 'Country', but that's not the Swiss countryside. This is not to suggest some essentialist paradigm, but the paradox of it all is striking and telling.
Thankfully Australia has made moves to develop and establish art centres in South Australia and Alice Springs.
While acknowledging the fact that the rise of Aboriginal art in the past four decades has increased immeasurably the visibility of and consideration for Aboriginal culture(s), one is compelled to a grim after-effect.
If the 1970s was the birth of Aboriginal art, '80s acceptance, '90s boom, and 2000s institutionalization, this institutionalization has the opposite effect of shrouding the grim reality in an aesthetic dream. For we have a dour contradiction on our hands: while Aboriginal art enjoys ample exposure in new and purpose-built buildings, the conditions of the majority of indigenous Australians continue to languish in relative misery.
The very wholesale institutional acceptance of Aboriginal art, its entry into public vocabulary both visual and written, has made the nature of this acceptance seem more obscure or dubious.
In Western terms, the closest analogy to this contradiction is the Madonna-whore binary that feminism locates as the touchstone of representing women in modernist art and literature.
Here Women occupy two extreme poles; she is either the object of worship or object of scorn; she is either the epitome of virtue or the embodiment of shame. She elides the inevitable mid-point, which is a combination of these, which is more pertinent to normal subjectivity.
She is immobilized in both cases: she is a superhuman ideal or is cast out and unworthy of attention. Put Aboriginal art on your wall but don’t invite an Aborigine to dinner; or to put this less allegorically, the generous representation of the Aboriginal nation(s) helps to obfuscate the need for more robust political representation and voice for Aboriginal peoples within ‘our’ halls of power.
Art's position outside of a causal agency, which is its strength, is exploited in its weakness. Our indigenous peoples are represented, yes, but in what capacity.
So far, the reader may notice that my use of the term 'Aboriginal art' is rather loose, bordering on the indiscriminate, not allowing for the relatively large differences and cultural demarcations that exist between traditional and urban practices (not to mention how many traditional artists of the past decade or so have sought recognition as 'contemporary' per se).
By the 90s, even the currency of the demarcation of ‘traditional’ and ‘urban’ was seen as too glib and constrictive, which has given rise to the lesser-used epithets of ‘remote area artists’ and ‘contemporary traditional’.
I also acknowledge the rise of the Aboriginal curator and even initiatives where shows are curated from the position of community engagement. But these are exceptions and have very little currency in major institutions, let alone internationally.
It is also moot whether the indigenous curator when on the international stage, is yet another performing monkey, seamless with the novelty that work inspires.
The generalization, then, owes itself to the homogeneity that persists through laziness, ignorance, or convenience.
Curators (more often non-indigenous) are happy to show traditional and urban works side by side. At the same time, it is also commonplace for non-Australian collectors and curators to bring them into a single ambit. However, it is also true that traditional Aboriginal art is more popular with American collectors for the all too obvious reasons of accenting the Abstract Expressionist tradition while adding an earnest kernel of spiritual benevolence.
But the regular, vernacular conflation of one practice with ties to place and language and one that maintains an irony if pact of aggression with the wording it uses is an extraordinary oversight.
It begs the question of the different ways a non-indigenous observer is supposed to engage with one as opposed to the other. Are they both spiritual? Spiritual in different ways? One would assume that traditional art has a premium on spirituality. Does this shortchange urban artists who still pledge affinity with spirit irrespective of their alienation or dispossession? Could someone possibly invent the spirit-gauge equivalent to a Gyger-counter?
Bell exhortation that indigenous artists divest themselves of the spiritualism is anathema to other Aboriginal artists who have sincere and deep bodily connections to people, land, and lore.
But again, it does help to locate another blind spot in how Aboriginal art is consumed as a commodity and an intelligible object.
Once again, the Madonna-whore reigns supreme: the spiritualism debate with Aboriginal art, or indeed with any culture whose religious beliefs do not conform to the Judeo-Christian model is subject to adulation or vilification.
Notice in the early 2000s, while the war raged in Iraq, the academic and cultural establishment busied itself with giving Islam favourable dispensation, emphasizing the nuance and the contradictions in the Western outlook.
The spiritualism in Aboriginal art is a convenient no-go-zone that insulates Aboriginal artists from commentary and from non-Aboriginals from commenting about it. No-one believes that any non-indigenous critic wants to mount a conventional critique on traditional painting.
Is it possible, or even appropriate, to cite a good Emily Kngwarreye from a bad one. When is an artist having a spiritual off day? However, the greatest beneficiaries of this semantic limbo are artists who manipulate the muteness of the spirituality card and the curators who have no stake in formulating any other message that the semblance of 'balanced representation'.
To suggest alternatives to how Aboriginal art is viewed, marketed, and consumed is naïve.
Experiments such as Relational Aesthetics have revealed that the art system is commensurate with the way capitalism works in the present day. It aspires to find operations that suggest alternatives and voice dissent only to absorb them with the benefit of the same advantages of the system that these operations negate. In less abstract language, capitalism and art both require exoticism and dissent to keep things shaken up and interesting.
Art wants to be hated to inspire the deeper and more libidinal ardor of upheaval, yet there is a difference between spirited art and bad art. The latter is just not interesting. What we have been facing in Aboriginal art are minimal standards of measure for good and bad.
But I would argue, that is not the right question.
In a recent book, the philosopher Andrew Benjamin examines animals representing qualities as beneath otherness. Animals form what Benjamin calls without relation.
As opposed to the 'other', these entities play a subordinate role to our human status as beings. This consigns them to an ambiguous status of either being beneath or ignored from understanding.
However, in a close reading of several thinkers, Benjamin demonstrates that such non-places allow humans to form a stable and acceptable idea of being. In other words, their disavowal or repression (words he resists using) is what stops human identity from being exposed as the construct and the fantasy that it is.[3]
To translate this back to the subject at hand, when viewed according to the Western framework of art per se, Aboriginal art, especially the 'traditional' kind, inhabits two realms: pure earth and pure spirituality pre-thought matter, and omniscience.
One in particular, the other is universal; both are unknowable and inarticulable. Non-Aboriginal art exists between these two poles, aspiring to both.
And yet, it is the non-Aboriginal settings of art as we know it, the art market, and the museum's loaded ideology that foisted these expectations on Aboriginal art in the first place.
Since non-indigenous people ‘made’ Aboriginal art in the sense of enframing it and controlling the way it is distributed and seen, it is preposterous to expect it to be more forthcoming about its content.
A question such as why Aboriginal art is more insulated from criticism than non-Aboriginal art avoids the more profound truth that the non-Aboriginal 'system' has made it this way.
To borrow from Benjamin’s thesis, the airy realms of inarticulability accommodate a convenient platform for non-Aboriginal art to shape its own fantasies of identity and awareness.
Is it ironic then that the Aboriginal galleries at the Art Gallery of NSW are underneath the rest? It is the visible-invisible conscience that all identities are unstable.
Curating Aboriginal art is therefore not a matter of a Sisyphean quest for fidelity but rather an exercise in exposing the varying levels of invention: national, personal, and spiritual.
References:
[1] http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/great/art/bell.html
[2] No physical theory of local hidden variables can reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics.
[3] Andrew Benjamin, Of Jews and Animals, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2011.
