Our high visual culture has been silent about this aspect of our history:

It's an untimely image.

How has this been forgotten?

The silence is an indictment on our culture. The deaf ears indicates just how conservative our culture has been. It has evaded the dark side of our colonial history, preferring to live with myth:

Sidney Nolan, GLENROWAN, 1945

Nolan is much praised and much admired by the defenders of beauty. But his work is much over-rated. It's time for a reassessmentthat disturbs its iconic staus, unset the aesthetic tradition, and embrace difference. Tis time to let go of terra nullis

S. Nolan, CENTRAL AUSTRALIA, 1950
The naive abdication here to thinking difference and change in the landscape leads to the deconstructing of a particularly modern form of representation so that we can constitute a new relation between the past and an as yet unknowable future. We need a new kind of representational space to the mythic one of Nolan.

A philosophy that disturbs is both an effort at recollection what has been forgotten and focused on the present. Rather than evade our history we need to plunge more deeply into it, and become aware of the possibilities opened up by the future.

This remembering is one way to bring Heidegger into the discussion over contemporary Australian concerns whilst remaining off-side to those who are comfortable within the humanist tradition that has defined the humanities in the academy. Many of the scholars who continue to re-inscribe and rehash the old cultural elitism conflate humanism with beauty and culture.

Recollecting what has been forgotten--images of aborigines in chains--- disclose or open up the historical sublime.

Comments

Posted by: Margaret Corrie | December 11, 2003 09:37 PM