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March 17, 2008
Despite the heat wave Saturday and Sunday afternoons were given over to having a look at the visual art exhibitions at the Adelaide Festival of Arts. There was a more expansive visual art offering at the Adelaide Festival than usual----due to Brett Sheehy, the festival's director, committing resources to visual art.
I left the Adelaide Biennial's Handle with Care curated by Felicity Fenner until a latter date. I explored the Destiny Deacon exhibition at Tandanya with its videos of historical footage, and installations about, the practice of assimilation in the 1940s and 1950s that is so dearly loved, and defended by the anti-Reconciliation Quadrant conservatives in the Australian cultural wars.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, foyer, SA State Library, 2008
Deacon's Clandestine exhibition was one of the stronger parts of the visual arts programme of the Festival of Arts --- it had more depth than the various Speed of Light shows: those of neon tube arranger New York-based Chilean Iván Navarro at Greenaway. and those of light and media artist Mischa Kuball at the Experimental Art Foundation, whose works look like wine cask innards (sculptures made from his digitized brain waves) with letters of the alphabet projected onto them.
The South Australian Museum mounted a display of the Ngurrara canvas, a huge painting measuring 10 metres by 8 metres, presented along with artefacts, crayon drawings and maps from a 1953 anthropological expedition. Ngurrara was painted by senior traditional owners of the Great Sandy Desert of north western Australia as an emotionally and politically charged expression of their links to their country, for presentation to the National Native Tribe Tribunal in 1997.The abstractions were difficult to interpret.
The slow burn was the assimilation videos in the school room--- assimilation here meant merging blacks into the whiter community so that they would forget that there were Aboriginal Australians. The images showing this, coupled with archival footage of the Black and White Ministerial Show on another television in the same room was chilling. This was an attempt to make a people disappear from history and to ensure a forgetting of their existence in Australia.
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Gary,
The Quadrant conservatives--- Leonie Kramer, Les Murray, David Armstong, Christopher Koch, Paddy McGuinness, Keith Windshuttle--- chose the question of the Stolen Generation and the apology as their key battleground in tthe Culture War.