Throughout the twentieth century, indigenous art forms have gained popularity in the Western world, producing various consequences. Specifically, the recognition of Australian Aboriginal paintings has not only transformed the art form itself but has also influenced the way Westerners view Aboriginal culture. Before white influence, what is now considered art was an impermanent ritual intrinsic to everyday life and entwined in past myths and inherited knowledge. Aboriginal 'art' was first acknowledged and produced as tourist art, but recently large acrylic paintings considered fine art have gained value and visibility on the market.
Aboriginal presence in Western markets and institutions has prompted questions concerning the implications this may have for Aboriginal culture. Many translations and interpretations of the culture come from these representations of 'Aboriginality'. Australian Aboriginals are working with the figurative frameworks of their own domination (i.e. within Western configurations) to gain recognition in these controlling structures. Although the paintings are being made to enter the market place, Aborigines are still attempting to define the paintings in terms that are meaningful to their own culture. They risk mistranslation, assimilation and appropriation in hopes of gaining autonomy and a voice within the controlling discourses. I want to examine the Western concepts through which Aboriginal art is given meaning and what these interpretations mean for Aboriginal culture. The ability of capitalist institutions to produce and give value to other cultures, reproducing cultures through its own structures of value, has made Aboriginality a recontextualized culture positioned within Western frames of meaning. What happens when a marginalized culture finds its way into dominant discourses? What are the ways recontextualized cultures resist domination and find empowerment? How does recontextualization consume, erase, homogenize, and dominate cultures on the periphery?
To answer this, first I will explore the Western constructs of art, Otherness and authenticity through which Aboriginal culture is translated in order to be understood and acknowledged in the Western world. Then, I will examine how Aboriginal paintings were made into commodities and the results of this cultural commodification. The recontextualization of Aboriginal paintings through the constructs and systems encompassed within Western thought results in a slew of consequences, generating questions about the various benefits and predicaments involved in the representation of Aboriginal culture. By examining these aspects surrounding the recontextualization of Aboriginal paintings, we can perhaps come to know the implications and consequences posed for Aboriginal culture in its circulation within Western knowledge.
My first encounter with this subject was when I went to school in Australia beginning in January 1996. A large component of our classes was Australian Aboriginal culture, but my only knowledge of Aboriginal paintings came from seeing them in art museums and tourist shops. I only began to question the issues behind these representations as I was thinking about the cover of my Lonely Planet travel book, on which there was an Aboriginal painting. I wondered how this painting had come to stand for a visual representation of Australia, when clearly, in many encounters with white Australians there had been negative feelings toward Aborigines. There was a tendency to judge them negatively as drunk, belligerent and lazy.1 People seemed to feel that dealing with Aboriginal people was difficult, both communicating, and understanding Aboriginal values. It really just came down to a refusal to understand difference.
I recall late one night, after a bit of drinking, some friends and I started talking on the street to a couple of Aboriginal men in Cairns, who also had done their fair share of drinking. Among other things, they began talking about the misconceptions of Aboriginal culture and the problems this had caused through time. Nothing made it clearer then when a white Australian2 walked up and told the men that the reason they were so down and out was because they were lazy: "The government gives you so much, even more than whites, and you do nothing with it. Its your own fault." Even after thirty minutes of trying to explain to him that what white Australia values, is perhaps not the same as what Aborigines value, he never once got the message. All throughout the conversation, he was the angry, accusatory and defensive one, while the Aboriginal men were the ones comfortable believing in what they knew, not having to argue about it.
Similar instances and beliefs came up time and time again in my travels, and it just made me think about issues of appropriation, domination and empowerment of the Aboriginal culture. The Aboriginal image was most visible in their art work, in the tourist shop and art galleries. I wondered what was happening when a country acknowledged and used a marginalized culture and its products but still had wrong ideas about the individuals of that culture.
I focused mainly on journal articles and books written on Australian Aborigines. There was quite a bit of specific resources out there. My experiences gave me some background on the project, but I found most of my information written by anthropologists and art critics. Many of the books and articles take a side by defining the acrylic paintings as either a sign of Aboriginal exploitation or Aboriginal empowerment. I have not wanted to, and haven't yet, formed an opinion on whether the effect of the popularity of Aboriginal art is either beneficial or detrimental. I think it is more constructive to realize that there are consequences both good and bad. It is not a case of either/or. Instead, there is more to be learnt by following the ways these paintings act in our world, the connections they create, the boundaries the paintings surpass and, in these same ways, the structures which confine them and the new restraining boundaries the paintings create. This can tell us more about ourselves and the systems we control (or don't control) and the ways in which other cultures fit into these structures of understanding.
Throughout my research and writing, all I've seen, heard and read involves westerners and intellectuals speaking for others. Anthropologists, art critics and students (not unlike myself) looking at a life, a culture and trying to interpret it into our own language. Though I know no other way of going about this, it is important to remember that as we shift worlds and meanings, it will only be us speaking for them. I get sick of these elitist claims of having the ability to define and interpret the changes, the representations and factors affecting their culture, but I see no other way around it. Perhaps, the most important knowledge we can take from our intricate analyses and reports is not the hard facts of what is happening to them, but the multiple ways we interpret what is happening to them. Through all our efforts of being just and aware of our ethnocentrisms, it is still us who have the time and who think we have the knowledge to write about them. Peter Sutton sees our job as "interpret[ing] in the language of the powerful what it is that the marginal have to say" (Sutton 1994:37). If we take this position of the almighty interpreter, there can be no claim to objectivity, and there must be great fear of universalism because both are nearsighted and lost. I will try to retain the position of interpreter, not of how Aborigines understand their culture, but of how we understand their culture by manipulating and altering it to fit into our frame of comprehension.