Collecting Aboriginal Art in the Australian Nation: Two Case Studies

Journal of Art Historiography , 2012

This paper documents and analyses the exhibition history of Aboriginal painting in Australia’s public art galleries over a two-decade period. It concentrates on Western Desert acrylics but is not confined to this movement or region alone. Based on a review of catalogues from key exhibitions, it identifies three interpretative frameworks used by curators to validate the presence of Aboriginal painting in the contemporary art realm. These modes of interpretation are called the aesthetic, ethnographic and the ownership discourses. Despite being a problematic art at odds with conventional art-historical classifications, Aboriginal painting was elevated to a position of prominence in Australian art history. Institutionally, Western Desert painting found legitimacy in the dominant aesthetic legacy of modernism. This modernist art historiography overrode the minority interests of cultural pluralism and critical postmodernism.

2018

In her ambitious Rethinking Australia’s art history: The challenge of Aboriginal art, Susan Lowish tackles an issue that sits at the very epicentre of art historical thinking in Australia, but one that until now has eluded the kind of singular attention it receives in this timely book. Much Australian art history and art historiography has sought to acknowledge and account for the transformation of the field as a result of the flourishing of Aboriginal art and art exhibitions, especially since the late 1980s. International scholars who are interested in contemporary challenges to the Eurocentric origins of art history and who are familiar with Australian art historical contributions to the field1 or some of the major international exhibitions in recent decades,2 will be aware that art historians and curators have sought to grapple with the challenges and opportunities provided by Aboriginal art. In this book Lowish seeks to investigate early thinking on the topic in the belief that ...

2009

Introduction to volume edited by Susan Cochrane, Aboriginal Art Collections: Highlights from Australia's Public Museums and Art Galleries, Sydney: Fine Arts Publishing 2001, pp 81-2. Illustrated volume contains another fourteen essays, all by authors who were the curators of the Indigenous Australian collections in their respective museums at the time of publication.

Australian Historical Studies, 2023

The subject of this article is the absence of Aboriginal art during the period that established the idea of a distinctively Australian modern art. It is intended as a contribution to the historiography of modern and contemporary Australian art history. The period discussed is the two decades between 1962, when Bernard Smith published Australian Painting, 1788–1960, and 1988, the year of the Australian Bicentenary. The article explores what changed in these years when art historians, critics, and curators, albeit belatedly and reluctantly, finally began to acknowledge the great contemporary Aboriginal painting that had long been in many artists’ sights as inspiration and model, and in plain view on display in the so-called primitive cultures’ sections of state museums. It argues that this was because it did not seem part of the national story of art.

reCollections, 2010

This paper focuses on several Aboriginal art exhibitions held since 1988 and includes a broad discussion of participating artists and their artworks. Taking this broad approach, rather than discussing individual artworks, illustrates the interconnectivity of art and culture and the importance of applying an integrated worldview to the exhibition process. Aboriginal-determined art exhibitions are part of an ongoing 'culture-making', where art, history and culture are made and remade as new ways of experiencing Aboriginality.[1] They have influenced a paradigm shift beyond the confining Western categories applied to Aboriginal people and their art styles, forcing a rethinking of the categories of fine art and high culture.[2] https://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/vol_5_no_1/papers/we_have_survived

The lack of a coherent understanding of what constitutes art in Aboriginal Australia has dogged curation and criticism for many years. While there have been a number of calls to rationalize this problem, all have gone unheeded. This paper is submitted as a first attempt at this rationalization.

Humanities Research, 2009

More sophisticated equivalences are starting to be made between works of Aboriginal art and the rest of the objects that inhabit the art world; as such, this is an exciting time for the discipline of art history. It is also a dangerous time, as it negotiates pathways through different narratives and is confronted with the dynamic interface of Indigenous and settler art histories. This paper discusses some of the problematic methodological approaches adopted by art historians and anthropologists in several major publications that have become standards in the fields of Australian and Aboriginal art. It examines the use of the label ‘Aboriginal art’ as an identifier of a category the contents and borders of which are currently racially defined and argues that a temporal emphasis be adopted that would see ‘Aboriginal art’ understood more as a period style. It argues that different kinds of primitivism have contributed to and maintained the difficulties in relating Aboriginal art to Australian art and vice versa. Finally, this paper considers how Aboriginal art can be written about in the future and asks how best to proceed. How do we write (or right) the history of Australian Aboriginal art?