|
November 21, 2005
This Western Australian Indigenous artist from the Kimberley region would have to be one of Australia's finest painters:
Rover Thomas, Bullock Hide Story, 1995
The abstract shapes condense complex mythological and topographical information into simple elements without the image ever becoming minimalist:
Rover Thomas, Bedford Downs massacre, 1987
I find the way large areas of the canvas are outlined and taken up by a single colour-- in contrast with the "dot" painting style typical of Central Desert artists--very appealing.
It does make you question aesthetic modernism doesn't it. This is a modern painting that discloses a world, and it provides a way to interrogate and critique a Kantian-style aesthetics that is based on a representational mode of thinking and which presupposes a subject object dualism.
That's an aesthetic mouthfuI I know. It just signposts where I am. I'll come back to it.
I raise it because liberalism in Australia sees the pre-modern aboriginal traditions as holding indigenous people back, rather than as sources of strength with the potential to change and adapt. Australian settler liberalism places an emphasis on the virtues of material progress through technology and capitalism, and so Liberals have difficulty understanding the position from which Indigenous Australians like Rover Thomas are coming.from. It is very difficult for contemporary Australian liberals not to think that Aboriginal society is backward.
The art says otherwise. It questrions the liebrla view that indigenous people are disadvantaged and backward people who need help to be brought up to ‘our’ liberal standards and take their place in the modern liberal world of modernity.
previous
|
I love your insigts about ART, and you do "open my eyes, wide shot" again and again, and i'm thankfull for that!
are you an art teacher? you surely an Art LOVER...