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Fig. 16 Kangaroo and Shield People Dreaming at Lake Mackay by Timmy Japangardi, Papunya, 1980, acrylic on canvas. (Sutton 1988:108) |
The dilemmas and questions involving Aboriginal art, contain something much more than the concept of commodification. Aboriginal paintings are translated in the context and through the systems of Western culture and, in the end, it all comes together to form a image, a way of knowing these paintings. It is through this process of representation that interpretations of meaning, the delegation of power, myths of culture and the formation of identities evolve.
"Stereotypes, however inaccurate, are one form of representation ...They are an invention, a pretense that one knows when the steps that would make real knowing possible cannot be taken...are not allowed" ---bell hooks (Langton 1994:102)
Identity is constantly being reformed, and for Aboriginals, their paintings are one way to circulate and define Aboriginality. Creating a distinct identity is a hard predicament to resolve.
Identity for those in control is not a problem, that is to say, through the self-proclamation of identity which their own power alone sustains; whereas, for those on the periphery the problem of identity is confused with that of survival itself, with the dim hope that one day they might obtain their autonomy (Davila 1987:56).
Aboriginal
identity relies more on social meanings and the subjective experience
of both non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal people and their experiences
with Aboriginal culture.
Fig. 16
Kangaroo
and Shield People Dreaming at Lake Mackay by Timmy
Japangardi, Papunya,
1980, acrylic on canvas. (Sutton 1988:108)
Originally,
the identity of Aboriginal was externally exposed by the colonizers
need for differentiation and exclusion. Since then, many white
Australians still hold Aboriginality in negative
terms.
To Aborigines in contemporary times this collective identity seems to constitute a road to Aboriginal empowerment. These paintings, perhaps, hold the power to circulate another notion of Aboriginal identity. Nonetheless, these reflections of identity have to be interpreted through the systems and within the boundaries of the dominant culture's understanding. The paintings have also entered a world were prejudices abound. The difficulty of forming a distinct collective identity in a world where stereotypes are already present and objects presenting identity must be redefined in the language of the dominant culture is what puts these paintings in such a precarious position.
"The Aborigines will become all the more that obstacle which the white subject has always surmounted by his traditional ability to absorb every single object, surface, body or economy that is not his own" (Davila 1987:56).
As seen in the production of Aboriginal acrylic paintings, a marginal world is being produced within the context of a dominant world. Aboriginal culture is taking on features of another culture in order to be recognized. While the white world is getting a glimpse of Aboriginal tradition and history, Aboriginals are entering systems and circuits of commodification and marketing. The use of acrylic and canvas is united with traditional beliefs forty to sixty thousands years old. The wild, desolate outback is appearing in urban jungles, just as ancient knowledge of the land and spirits is being translated within another context. The manipulation of the paintings allow Aboriginals to permeate the boundaries of dominant culture, but is this causing Aboriginals to compromise the distinctiveness of their culture? For these paintings are not truly representations of Aboriginality if altered into the language of the viewer, but this is what the viewer interprets. What happens when recontextualization becomes cultural fusion?
The drift toward cultural homogenization can be a dangerous one. Pierre Clastres uses the word ethnocide to describe the destruction of another's culture. Instead of genocide, the intolerance and slaughter of difference, ethnocide is the destruction of a people's culture by "obliging them to transform themselves to a point of total identification" (Clastres 1988:52). By incorporating Aborigines into commodity production using Western standards of art and value, the singularity and boundaries distinguishing Aboriginal culture may be destroyed. Willis and Fry see this by
Looking at the art of fringe-dwelling Aboriginals outside this system of valorization and viewing it instead through the discourses of race politics, it can be concluded that what has been achieved is not cultural intervention or resistance, or a place from which to speak 'their' cause, but rather, moderately successful assimilation. A shift has taken place from overt racism to cultural ethnocide. And control rests ultimately with 'white' institutions (Willis and Fry 1989b:14).
By using tools and systems of the dominant culture, Aborigines risk being swallowed up by the larger world in a systematic way of controlling, redefining and destroying culture.
"Contemporary Aboriginality is an original voice to sing of the sad wounds of a whole people, of hundreds of mouths forced into shaping the harsh sounds of alien speech" (Lattas 1993:253).
The fact of the matter is that something else could be happening. In order for cultures to not wither away and fade into history, change is necessary. Change, in the form of ethnic reorganization, challenges the myth that 'traditional' people are stagnant, never changing, never evolving. Ethnic reorganization "occurs when an ethnic minority undergoes a reorganization of its social structure, redefinition of ethnic group boundaries, or some other change in response to pressures or demands imposed by the dominant culture" (Nagel and Snipp 1993:203). Instead of looking at ethnicity as a solid, non-transformable entity, this idea views it as
emergent, situational and to some extent volitional. In this view, ethnicity -its content and membership- is a negotiated social status, the terms of which are arrived at through an interactive process of identification (by members of the group) and ascription (by members of the dominant culture) (Nagel and Snipp 1993:205).
Ethnic reorganization is a response to forced, externally imposed elements. For example, Australian Aboriginals are affected by many pressures to modify cultural practices, in the forms of political disfranchisement, racism, and economic hardships. Ethnic reorganization is a strategy which facilitates ethnic survival in the presence of these pressures. Reorganization of ethnicity is achieved in the mixing of two cultures (cultural blending) or in the invention of tradition (cultural revitalization). In the instance of the Aboriginals, both of these processes are occurring. The stories and significance of the acrylic paintings are traditional, but the styles and the materials have been added into the culture in order to be 'made available' to Western understanding. In some ways, too, the paintings constitute a new tradition because the new techniques are being passed on to the young. Invention within cultural production reorganizes cultures in order for them to find spaces within modern time.
The acrylic paintings are a form of cultural production "by which people construct and maintain themselves as distinct 'ethnic' entities even in the face of evidence that draws attention to the inventedness or imitativeness of their cultural productions" (Neuenfeldt 1995:26). In this situation, the act of representing culture though altered tradition is a way to resist cultural homogenization by maintaining a sense of a collective spirit.12
As an invention, both of tradition and ethnicity, contemporary Aboriginality is syncretic and operates across time, space and situation, endeavoring to meld a sense of group and self for Aboriginal consociations and individuals in the face of persistent degradation by powerful vested interests in the dominant culture" (Neuenfeldt 1995:25).
In this lies the difficulty of having the power to define the boundaries of who you are, but more importantly who you are not. It is questionable that the Aboriginals have this power because they are not in control of the representations of their identity. The real issue lies in who ultimately decides these boundaries of whether ethnicity is distinctly defined. Perhaps the distinction between ethnocide and ethnic reorganization lies on this critical line. In many ways, it also has to do with the varying definitions of resistance.
"The tendency to see politics as being only organized collective action renders apolitical all the spontaneous, more atomized resistances and individual protests of everyday life which draw people into continuous conflicts with state power" (Lattas 1993:241).
Once the paintings are out of the painters hands, Aborigines no longer have control over the meanings. Many people argue that these paintings represent empowerment for the culture and a way to resist white domination. The idea of resistance is an arguable one, and the boundaries and definitions of what counts as power and resistance are breaking apart (Lattas 1993:240). For example, some Aborigines refusal to adapt to Western standards (such as working, keeping relatively sober and contributing to society) in some eyes would seem self defeating and problematic, yet, it can also be interpreted as a protest against white hegemony and a refusal to incorporate into a forceful world (Lattas 1993:242). John Von Strumer makes this similar point.
One senses that there is..[a] destructivness directed at Aboriginal societies, that they... can only be treated as a spectacle, as tableau. Is it because they lie beyond the possibility of a truly lived engagement? Is it the case, as it has been from the very beginning, that they do not live according to 'civilized' notions of society, refinement, propriety, group welfare or personal well-being. They fight too much, they drink too much, fuck too much, they are too demanding, they waste money and destroy property. But a lack of restraint, caution, or calculation is not necessarily an absence or a failing. It can be a superfluity. A refusal: a refusal to accept the repressive principle (Von Strumer 1989:139).
Establishing just what counts as a resistance strategy is a difficult. Fitting into dominant conceptions of success does not necessarily mean cultural empowerment. The white discourses have created a dichotomy of what counts as good 'Aboriginality' and bad 'Aboriginality' but this is only according to the values of the dominant world and not Aboriginal standards. The political process of resistance strategies are narrowly defined.
Some critics contend that ties with the past (as seen in traditional Aboriginal art) "have minimal active cultural or political significance, but are constructed from the residue of other social formations, located elsewhere in time or place" (Miles and Eipper cited in Lattas 1993:246). What this ignores is that the culture itself is constructed out of the past and no political platform can be constituted without a unifying past. It is a "necessity to have an image of the past if one is to have a sense of ownership of ones self" (Lattas 1993:247). There is power in memories, ancestry, and myth which greatly influence the construction of the present. Though the ties of Aboriginal art to tradition can be contested as non-progressive, this denies the painting's possibilities as a "cultural explosion showing strength and creativity opposed to the images of an Aboriginal as unchanging and destined to extinction" (Isaacs cited in Myers 1991:39). Aboriginal paths to empowerment and resistance are twisted each and every way and depend on a great many factors.
Fig. 17
Jila
Japingka by Peter Skipper,
Western Australia, 1987, acrylic on canvas. A map of the
land: clouds, sandhills and rain (Sutton,
1988:100).
The paintings are a voice that asserts Aboriginal culture. Never
before has there been such recognition and presence of Aboriginality
internationally or even in Australia. The easiest form of racism in
representation is to make the Other invisible (Langton 1994:94).
Aboriginal painters are refusing to be invisible by finding a voice
which the Western world can recognize. Aborigines are the most
marginalized group in Australian culture, but they have taken the
tools of domination and are using them to speak for their own
culture's history and beliefs.13
These paintings are a cultural accomplishment and a way to capture
white Australia's respect. For example,
Many Australians have been taught that Aboriginal people have no traditions, no culture...When they come to understand the depth of tradition and skill that's involved in this [art], its a very significant factor in changing attitudes" (Myers 1991:36).
Art functions as a political voice. The paintings, symbolic of stories, and beliefs, all tie back to the land (see Fig 17). For example, Michael Nelson Tjakamara, the artist who did a mosaic for the new Parliament house and a painting for the Sydney Opera House, had reasons behind agreeing to do these projects:
Now we want to show our paintings to everybody: Show them to the world. We want to tell people that this is a most important place to us. This is land! They have taken it away from us and they didn't even think about it! This is the reason why we now want to show the world our dreamtime culture, so that they can understand our way of life...it will make people think (Isaacs 1989a:19).
To recognize these paintings is to recognize Aboriginal ties to the land. As Jon Stratton puts it,
The representation of the land [is] a political act ...where Forth world peoples are being driven off their land as colonials appropriate it and incorporate it as agricultural land into the capitalist market economy (1994:119).
The paintings assert Aboriginality and their rights to stolen land, but it is asserted in a subtle, almost subliminal way. In this sense, political ideas of Aborigines connected with land are more easily accepted and thought about than if the paintings were up front and accusatory. This is how Aboriginals are using Western modes of appropriation for their own purposes and
have begun to mobilize their own exclusion, peripheralization and marginalization to subvert the dominant system and place the old Western certainties in doubt, bettering their own position in the process by using elements of that system to their own advantage" (Stratton 1994:125).
The seemingly passive presence of these paintings in the institutions of domination, in fact is a way to gain power and spread knowledge which otherwise would not have been accepted or recognized. Aborigines are placing the paintings in points of power. The painting's political message cannot be disputed when noted that these paintings have been used in land disputes. In 1976, Australian courts approved and acknowledged certain paintings of sacred Aboriginal sites as evidence to Aboriginal land ownership (Morphy 1991:18, Benjamin 1990:75).
"The words spoken do not necessarily correlate with the color of the skin of the speaker" --Frantz Fanon (Willis and Fry 1989b:5).
Fig. 18 Trespassers Keep Out by Avril Quaill, 1982, silk screen. "She links obvious images in the Aboriginal flag with more subtle notions -- the expulsion of Aboriginal people from the white ideal of the English cottage home and the flower garden with a picket fence" (Isaacs, 1989b:97).
Western markets and museums promote traditional artists, who paint these landscapes, but urban Aboriginal painters struggle to become noticed. It seems that the institutions of domination have only accepted Aboriginal art where the meaning is ambiguous, neglecting the more visibly political art of urban artists. Both urban and traditional art carries with it sincere political meaning but since
meaning is not made exterior to [traditional art's] representation, and the message is not distinct from the myth or image itself, urban art is by comparison more outwardly understood as political (Langton 1994:93).
Fig. 19
Roped
off at the Picture by Robert Campbell
Jr.,
acrylic on canvas. "When we were on the mission, the old
people were not allowed to talk the lingo -- not allowed to
teach us...I'm 45 years old now and yet, I'm still searching
for that Aboriginal identity that I've lost" (in Isaacs,
1989b:15)
The urban
art is more accusatory, more blatant with political issues (see Fig.
18-20). Much of the urban art is influenced by traditional images and
themes, but it also "tackles social issues and expresses the feelings
and dilemmas of modern indigenous people" (Isaacs
1989b:9).
The urban artist not only challenges viewers with issues, but also challenges white audiences in their own private spaces. For example,
The acrylics of 'traditional' people represent the 'good' Aborigine - a spirituality, respect for the land and so on of people at a distance rather than people who are seen as contemporaries competing for the same life space" (Myers 1991:44).
Fig.
20
Dreaming in the Wrong Place by Leslie
Griggs,
1980s, acylic on canvas. "I use symbols that are readily
identifiable to non-Aboriginal people so that they can
relate to and understand the content of my work and learn
that Aboriginal art is more than decoration" (in Isaacs,
1989b:110).
Traditional
Aboriginal art is permissible art in the eyes of the Western world.
The Australian nation favors art contributing to the "national story"
or as a "supplement for the soul" not art which blatantly questions
Australian politics (Davila 1987:54).
In addition, traditional artist fit the Western world's standards for the simple, spiritual Other, in contrast to the urban artist who is not Other enough. In some sectors, a stereotypical dichotomy between non-urban traditional art versus non-traditional urban art has become a division of products from the 'real' versus 'unreal' (Neuenfeldt 1995: 23). The urban Aborigine is somehow too incorporated within the 'modern' world to be considered an authentic Aborigine. Only the traditional Aboriginal is still considered tied to an authentic Aboriginal past and "meets the approval of the of the dominant white society's notion of a 'common humanity'" (Myers 1991:35).
