Gary,
there are still people who deny that indigenous arts are art.In doing so they are imposing an ideology which establishes a hierarchy of what is valuable that allows other groups of people to be seen as less cultured, and that reproduces colonial domination. This maintain a hierarchy of value that makes the artistic achievements of the indigenous people ‘invisible’.

This view is breaking down, thank goodness.

Pam,
the people you talk about--cultural conservatives one and all--- think art and
aesthetics are among the highest human achievements, and they presuppose that art and aesthetics are specific to European cultures. The implication is that European cultures are somehow more civilised than others.

Pam,

Is the notion that indigenous art is not "art" a peculiarly Australian bias?

For instance, I know almost no one in the States on either side of the culture wars, whether they be "cultural conservatives" or theory-slingers, who would deny that American Indian Art is genuinely art or might be, in any way, inferior to other varieties.

That assertion would be perceived as absurd--especially here in the American West where Native Americans have maintained their tribal identity, preserved or revived their aesthetic traditions and simultaneously produced contemporary indigenous work of the highest caliber.

I am not implying we are more liberal or evolved than Australians--anything but. Both countries have treated their indigenous populations shamelessly. And the average American lout has as little regard for so-called "primitive" cultures as any yobbo.

But I seldom encounter that same prejudice among artists, art historians, theorists, curators or anyone else involved in the visual arts. Native American art might not be their preference, and they might feel awkward about discussing something in which they are not well-versed, but I've rarely heard anyone argue that it isn't serious or of comparable merit.

Rocco Sole

Rocco,
re your comment 'Is the notion that indigenous art is not "art" a peculiarly Australian bias?'
Not in the art institution. The people there recognize the significance of the work being produced. They view it through modernist eyes.

The art public is interested, but they are unsure how to engage with it as much of the spiritual/religious meanings of the works are inaccessible.

Gary,

That's what I assumed. There was no patronizing or belittlement apparent in the presentation of indigenous art in the exhibitions I attended in Oz and there is none here in the States.

On a related note--having spent some time among Pueblo Indians in the American Southwest, I'm supportive of their deliberate misinformation and zealously guarded "secrets" --especially in Hopi katsina iconography and Pueblo ritual. I suspect that a similar protectiveness is demonstrated among your aboriginal cultures.

Which brings me to this:

If what is known, is almost indecipherable to the Europeanized mind and what isn't known will, most likely, remain unknown, how do modernist theorists like yourself approach the material? Are there any significant readjustments, apparent contradictions or difficulties?

Rocco Sole

Rocco,
It is true that indigenous 'desert' painting is most often a mapping of the sacred but alienated land and an account of its landforms —a little cosmology. We white people can neither understand these land-paintings even as we buy them as aesthetic objects. The Dreamings which the paintings map are not our white Dreamings.

It is held by same that Aboriginal art is ‘beyond criticism’ as we have no categories on which to base critical statements.

However, we white persons have modernism, which does allow for the ‘exotic’, to be seen as not-so-’exotic’; the‘primitive as not-so-primitive’; and it allows contemporary indigenous art to develop---innovation---as develop and change it does. Modernism provides an aesthetic bridge to evaluate the works in terms of good and bad in terms of their form and innovation.

Rocco,
I can build a bit on what Gary said re the modernism frame. The desert paintings have a familar notational structure: the circles (representing camp, campfire, waterhole) the dots, the lines, the ‘sandhills’, the shimmers, the colours etc So we can learn to recognise the play of these and how they are handled in a design, as a composition.

This helps to determine my aesthetic response to the surface of a painting.

Gary, Pam,

As you well know from my past comments, I'm rather skeptical when it comes to theory. At the very same time, I am fascinated by its various permutations and assertions and I am particularly interested in what occurs when modernist thought encounters tribal cultures, whose concerns and modalities (and I use that word in the physiological sense) can be so unlike our own.

In evaluating indigenous art, the idea of de-exoticizing or de-primitivizing the work appears to be a very credible approach--it acknowledges the cultural differences while recognizing what is universal.

Can you suggest any Australian critics who specifically concern themselves with the intersection of indigenous art and modernist theory?

Rocco Sole

Since a culture defines and is then defined by its aesthetics, it is little wonder that transcultural aesthetics has not been appreciated by philosophers. Very few cultures are founded on the principles of acceptance or even tolerance of other cultures. You see this even in such a thing as "youth culture," in which a culture finds it hard to recognize the new ideas and art of its own youth.

While the stories that are said to be expressed in aboriginal art are inaccessible to me, I am none-the-less amazed and humbled by the compositions. The forerunners of my European-based modernist aesthetics had the wisdom to look at so called "primitive art" and saw the essence of all art in those works. Likewise, I assume that an aboriginal artist could look at a renaissance painting and admire the photographically rendered figures without knowing the christian stories that are often related by those images.

Knowing the stories behind the work may add some dimension to the appreciation of the artist but not to the appreciation of the art. Which is to say, that which transcends storytelling. And, while it may be somewhat shallow to critique aboriginal art based on European modernist ideals the art holds up even without the story. Critics are a far too timid lot as are the collectors who wait to be assured of value before investment. Fortunately, artists of all stripe and color find ways to put aside these things in order to simply be inside what they create as they create it.
Best Regards,
JD Jarvis

"To live a creative life, we must lose the fear of being wrong." Joseph Chilton Pearce.

JD

Well said.

I assume you are the New Mexican, JD Jarvis, correct?

Rocco Sole

Yes, Rocco I live on the northern edge of of the Chihuahuan Desert just 50 miles north of Old Mexico. In a lot of ways, just barely in the US, but far enough "up state" that I can look down on Texas with scorn.
:-)
JDJ

Rocco,
You could start with the work of Stephen Muecke at the University of Technology Sydney. His latest book is Absolute Politics: Thoughts after the Book. The blurb says that this book argues that the cultural definition of contemporary Australia lies in a kind of quarrel between ancient and modern positions.

Whose ancestors deserve to be honoured? Whose myths, monuments and ceremonies? If it is the case that European modernity is built on its ancient ruins, then isn’t its transposition to Australia the source of settler anxiety? If it is the case that indigenous Australia has its own antiquity, shouldn’t that be a major reference for contemporary Australian modernity? Why are indigenous Australians attempts to participate in this modernity systematically denied?

Rocco,
I have written on Muecke over at coversations.

JD

Until recently, and for a very long time, I lived in Sonoita, Arizona on the Mexican border--as you say, barely in the USA.

Oddly enough, your name came up in a conversation I had with some artists in Tucson a few months back. Having your name appear on JFC was a peculiar coincidence, to say the least.

Texas is eminently worthy of your scorn and derision, JD. There are knuckle-draggers and snake-handlers everywhere you go. It is a very large and very regressive sinkhole. That being said, I, nonetheless, have a particular fondness for the Guadalupes and Big Bend.

Your approach to the "primitive" must be informed by your experiences in the Chihuahuan Desert and, most likely, the Sonoran. I've done time in both and I think it gives one a clarity and perspective concerning indigenous art (both traditional and contemporary) that might be lost on some of our urban counterparts.

Anyway, I appreciated your commentary and thought it was spot-on.

May we both enjoy our spots in Paradise--at least until 2012 when, somewhat appropriately, the Southwestern water crisis begins and the Mayan calendar ends.

Rocco Sole

Gary
another (postmodern?) frame for viewing indigenous art is post-colonialism with its advocacy of multiculturalism, hybrid cultural practices, and identity politics. As an Maclean observes in his review of Complex Entanglements Art, Globalisation and Cultural Difference (ed. Nikos Papastergiadis) postcolonialism was in the beginning primarily driven by ethical concerns - by a desire to hear the other speak.

However, the tendency is to flatten Anglo-Celtic Australia as a monolithic xenophobic culture that was creatively and belatedly transformed by migrants. Indigenous cultures, and the rich interactions between settler and Indigenous cultures, are usually ignored.

If postcolonialism was an ethical turn, then it is unclear what this means if indigenous art is held to be a critical force. Both ethics and aesthetics are neglected topics in contemporary art criticism in the postcolonial frame.

Pam,
Ian Maclean says that the question of a postcolonial ethics is most acutely, though tangentially, put in Marcia Langton's article on Aboriginal art in the Papastergiadis book.

Her focus is... the traditional Aboriginal concept of Dreaming as performed in the post-Papunya acrylic canvases (and also Arnhem Land bark paintings). Langton emphasises the hybrid poetics of these Dreamings in their geographical, cultural and social contexts ...and their respect for and elaborate protection of an incommensurable Otherness - called the 'secret sacred' ...Langton does not go so far as to call it an inherent ethical aesthetics, but she lays out the ground for such a claim by singling out the authentic spiritual content of this art for special attention.

McLean responds by saying that though this is a risky and very un-postcolonial move it is an:

essential one if such Aboriginal art is to be given its due, to be treated as its artists and Elders ask. While entering into an ethical relationship with such art rests on trust rather than knowledge because, as Langton makes clear, the uninitiate's knowledge of the work's iconology will always be minimal, the uninitiate's trust parallels the artist's own faith in the secret sacred (i.e. unknowable). In the end, faith is the secret of all secrets and the only path to the spiritual.

He adds that despite her commitment to the authenticity of the Dreaming, Langton infers rather than explicates such ideas. Her interests are more mundane or political.

She considers the different roles of Indigenous spiritualism in the reception of the art in the global market and its production in contemporary Aboriginal communities, and suggests that the relationship between these apparently incommensurable roles might be 'the basis of an ethical and intelligent relationship'.... For this to occur, she argues, the authenticity of the artists' spiritual practices must be taken seriously rather than assimilated into the universal aesthetic of global modernism as another postmodern hybrid art.

Pam, Gary,

Thanks for pulling my coat to Muecke's ideas and his recent tome. It appears to be precisely what I'm looking for.

Appreciatively,

Rocco

All,
As for the basis of an "ethical and intelligent relationship," I refer back to my flippant statement concerning Texas; which I presented as satire, but which nonetheless echos a real and enduring divide between virtually similar peoples. Having moved to this area of the US from the "mid-west," my experience was to see everyone as a "southwesterner." The subtleties of the distinctions between what appeared to be at first a homogeneous group took awhile longer. But, even though I have been exposed and know much more about the basis for this divide it remains, in my mind, as evidence against the often touted human desire for intelligent and ethical relationships. I think we actually desire, relish and promote differences wherever and whenever possible. The majority of our relationships are emotional. Intelligence and ethics are left out of the equation. We can not evolve beyond there being differences. Our only hope is to embrace difference and celebrate our unity and sameness in being different.

I do not believe that I can understand the stories associated with aboriginal art. Just as I find it hard to understand the machinations of Post-Modernist language. What I find most interesting about aboriginal art is that it comes from clearly Pre-Modernist roots. And, what I find even more interesting still is that many of the compositional elements (the layout and patterns) of aboriginal art are re-presented to me by my computer. As I go about my work of manipulating the most modern of our graphic tools, I find visual elements that repeat man's earliest and most "primitive" aesthetic forms. So, for me the question is: "who is wiring who?" Is there a critical mass to the number of microscopic synaptic interconnections that then leads our brain, as well as our brain replicating machines, to similar visual outputs?

While I know next to nothing about Dreaming or Dreamtime, I myself dream. That dream presents itself in imagery abstracted from my experience, to which I then attach a story, so that I can tell you upon waking what I dreamed about. But, I am beginning to suspect that a dream is not a story about anything but rather an activity associated with our wiring and "about" nothing less than being human. I know that I may be mixing apples and oranges, but isn't that what we are getting at in our quest for ethical and intelligent relationships? Assimilation into the universal aesthetic of global modernism is another post-modernist pipe-dream. Besides aren't we better off with the "differences" between apples and oranges and the "choice" to mix their "output" when and if we desire? It would be a huge mistake to do away with two distinct and different fruit (or art) for the questionable value and taste of one assimilated hybrid.
Best Regards,
JD Jarvis