Laura Fisher

The Art/Ethnography Binary: Post-Colonial Tensions within the Field of Australian Aboriginal Art

An Art/Ethnography binary informs a range of discursive engagements with Australian Aboriginal art. Ethnography is usually associated with colonialism, primitivism and regarded as circumscribing the art, while Art is posited as unequivocally progressive and good. This article will discuss the activities of various Indigenous and non-Indigenous actors in the Aboriginal art world, and explore the way the Art/Ethnography binary’s reiteration by these actors instantiates the way this field is shaped by the tensions that arise from Australia’s condition as a settler state with a marginalized Indigenous population. It will show that the trope of Art versus Ethnography has a multifaceted operative power that reflects remote and urban Aboriginal artists’ differential participation within the field, and the complex relationship between two objectives that politicize it: the desire for recognition on the part of Indigenous actors, and the desire for post-colonial redemption on the part of non-Indigenous actors.

‘Aboriginal mass culture’: a critical history

In Australia, some Aboriginal art objects are celebrated as fine art of great cultural, aesthetic and economic value, while the vast majority are judged to be stylistically derivative and intrinsically compromised by overtly mercenary market forces. This article introduces the concept ‘Aboriginal mass culture’ as a means for understanding the significance of the often maligned forms of the Aboriginal art and culture industry in Australia and to address the problem of why it continues to be difficult to demarcate the space of Aboriginal fine art. While a canonical and connoisseurial art history approach must disavow the vast majority of ‘Aboriginal art’, this article embraces a sociological perspective and turns an analytical eye upon the Aboriginal art and culture industry in its entirety, treating it as a phenomenon of visual culture that mediates Indigenous/non-indigenous relations within national public culture. It offers a critical history of ‘Aboriginal mass culture’ from the market for ‘Aboriginalia’ in the post-Second World War era through to the unruly Aboriginal art market of the present day. In so doing, it illuminates some of the drivers of these cultural forms across commercial, governmental and civil society domains. Its analysis reveals the way in which ‘Aboriginal mass culture’ manifests the unique social and economic circumstances that underpin Aboriginal art practices and the ways in which Aboriginal art is entangled with a redemptive political and civic project in Australia that has sought to affirm a resilient Indigenous presence and stimulate new visions of nationhood, heritage and intercultural fellowship.

Ecologies of Land and Sea and the Rural/Urban Divide in Australia: Sugar vs the Reef? and The Yeomans Project (「オーストラリアにおける土地と海の生態学、地方／都市の分割 ：「サトウ対サンゴ？」と「ヨーマン・プロジェクト」」)

Australia is a markedly urbanised society, even though many of its most compelling cultural images and narratives are anchored to rural environments and the people and animals that inhabit them. In a country that has always been prone to floods, fires and droughts, there is growing awareness that Australia’s natural resources are under stress due to mining, industrial agriculture, urban development and the effects of climate change. When such issues are debated in the political arena, environmental conservation is regularly pitted against economic advancement in a very crude way, inhibiting cooperation. This essay discusses two art projects that engage meaningfully with the rural/urban divide in Australia: The Yeomans Project and Sugar vs the Reef?. Led by artists Lucas Ihlein, Ian Milliss and Kim Williams, these projects engage in practical and creative ways with rural food production and the individuals responsible for it. Specifically, they investigate innovative farming practices that have great potential to address environmental challenges but are rarely acknowledged in contemporary, city-centric culture. I will argue that by mingling different understandings of aesthetics, utility and ecology, these projects propose productive ways for the disparities between urban and rural Australia to be navigated.オーストラリアの文化的イメージの多くが、地方の環境およびそこに住む人々や動物に依拠しているのにも関わらず、この国は著しく都市化された社会である。つねに洪水や火事、干ばつを引き起こしやすいオーストラリアにおいて、石炭採掘や産業的農業、都市開発や気候変動の影響によって自然資源に負荷がかかっているということに、多くの人が気付き始めている。このような問題が政治の領域において議論される際、環境保全はいつも粗野な仕方で経済発展と対置され、両者の協働は禁じられている。本稿は、オーストラリアにおける地方／都市の分割に有意義な仕方で関わっている2つのアート・プロジェクトである、「ヨーマン・プロジェクト」と「サトウ対サンゴ？」について論じる。ルーカス・イーライン、イアン・ミリス、キム・ウィリアムズの3人のアーティストによって組織されるこれらのプロジェクトは、実践的かつ創造的な仕方で、地方の食物生産とそれに対して責任を負う人々に関与している。とりわけ、環境の危機に取り組むための大きな可能性を持ちながらも、現代の都市中心の文化においてはめったに注目されない、発明的な農業実践を彼らは調査している。私は、美学、有用性、生態学についての多様な理解を混ぜ合わせながら、これらのプロジェクトを都市的オーストラリアとと地方的オーストラリアとのあいだの不均衡を扱うための生産的な方法として提示する。This article is in Japanese.

From fluent to Culture Warriors: Curatorial trajectories for Indigenous Australian art overseas:

In recent decades, Indigenous artists have been strongly represented in exhibitions of Australian art offshore. This article explores two such exhibitions: fluent, staged at the Venice Biennale in 1997, and Culture Warriors, shown at the Katzen Arts Center at the American University in Washington, DC, in 2009. These exhibitions took place during an era in which issues around Indigenous rights and recognition were frequently the subject of domestic public debate and policy turmoil. They have also been significant staging posts on Indigenous Australian art’s trajectory towards contemporary fine art status – something that, while no longer questioned in Australia, continues to be precarious overseas. By considering how both political and aesthetic concerns were addressed by Indigenous curators Hetti Perkins and Brenda L. Croft, this discussion sheds light on the ways in which emergent political meanings associated with Indigeneity have driven new kinds of institutional practice and international cultural brokerage.