Aboriginal painting: Identity and authenticity

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 59, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 385-402

  Coleman, Elizabeth Burns ^a  

^a AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049116800     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0021-8529.00040     Document Type: Review

References (69)

1. Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), "Art from the Heart?" Inside Story (May 25, 1999). By the term "Aboriginal" I am referring to Australian Aboriginal peoples. None of the evidence I use is from Torres Strait Islander communities, and I am not subsuming Torres Strait Islanders under this term
2. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 223-226
3. Richard Handler, "Who Owns the Past? History, Cultural Property, and the Logic of Possessive Individualism," in The Politics of Culture, ed. B. Williams (Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1991), p. 66, note 73
4. Larry Shiner, "'Primitive Fakes,' 'Tourist Art,' and the Ideology of Authenticity," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52 (1994): 228-230
5. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art, pp. 196-200
6. For different ways in which this project might be attempted, see Winifred van Damme, "Do Non-Western Cultures Have Words for Art? An Epistemological Prolegomenon to the Comparative Study of Philosophies of Art," in Proceedings of the Pacific Rim Conference in Transcultural Aesthetics, ed. Eugenio Benitez (University of Sydney Press, 1997), pp. 96-113
7. David Novitz, "Art by Another Name: The Identification of Art Across Cultures," in Proceedings of the Pacific Rim Conference in Transcultural Aesthetics, pp. 67-80
8. Dennis Dutton, "Tribal Art and Artifact," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51 (1993): 13-21
9. Shiner, "'Primitive Fakes,' 'Tourist Art,' and the Ideology of Authenticity," p. 228
10. Amiri Baraka, "Blues, Poetry and the New Music," The Music: Reflections on Jazz and the Blues (New York: Morrow, 1987), p. 262
11. cited in Joel Rudinow, "Race, Ethnicity, Expressive Authenticity: Can White People Sing the Blues?" The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52 (1994): 130
12. Melina Mercouri, Sunday Times (London), May 22, 1983, p. 15, col. 1
13. Melina Mercouri, Sunday Times (London), May 22, 1983, p. 15, col. 1, cited in John Moustakas, "Group Rights in Cultural Property: Justifying Strict Inalienability," Cornell Law Review 74 (1989): 1199, note 83
14. Rosemary J. Coombe, "The Properties of Culture and the Politics of Possessing Identity: Native Claims in the Cultural Appropriation Controversy," Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 6 (1993): 253
15. Robert Egginton, speaking on Insight, Special Broadcasting Station (SBS) television (March 23, 1998)
16. Handler, "Who Owns the Past? History, Cultural Property, and the Logic of Possessive Individualism," pp. 63-74. Handler thinks we should give indigenous and minority peoples property rights in culture not because of the truth of their claim that their art constitutes their identity, but on the basis of fairness
17. James O. Young, "Against Aesthetic Apartheid," Rendezvous 30 (1995): 76
18. Howard Morphy, Aboriginal Art (London: Phaidon, 1998), p. 315
19. Despite this, bark paintings were not collected by museums and galleries on the basis that they were tourist art, "contaminated" by Western influences. Howard Morphy, "Aboriginal Fine Art - The Creation of Audiences and the Marketing of Art," in Aboriginal Arts and Crafts and the Market, ed. P. Loveday and P. Cooke (Darwin: Australian National University North Australia Research Unit, 1983), p. 39
20. Terence Maloon, "Introduction," in Margo Neale Yiribana, 2nd ed. (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1998), p. 14
21. Anthony Hoy, "Desert Vision," The Bulletin (April 18, 2000), p. 48
22. Morphy, Aboriginal Art. Bark paintings are exceptions. They have been subject to a process of metamorphosis from tourist art to fine art
23. While some bark painters, for example Yolngu painters, produced work outside ceremonial contexts, these were not produced for sale prior to contact with anthropologists
24. By "autographic" I mean, with Goodman, that a work's identity is determined in terms of the person who produced the work. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), pp. 113 and 116
25. S. McCulloch-Uehlin, "The Hand That Signed the Paper," The Weekend Australian (April 24-25, 1999), Review, p. 5
26. ABC, Four Corners (May 31, 1999)
27. The Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award. A reproduction of the painting may be found in Morphy, Aboriginal Art, plate 209
28. J. Morgan, "Capon Calls for More Validation," Sydney Morning Herald (November 17, 1997), p. 16
29. D. Jopson and K. Burke, "Painting Hoax Has Art World Divided," Sydney Morning Herald (March 8, 1997), P-5
30. In fact there is an argument that the artist's moral right of attribution includes the right to be known under whatever name an artist chooses. This is explicit in Scandinavian law. See S. Stromholm, "Droit Moral: The International and Comparative Scene from a Scandanavian Viewpoint," International Review of Industrial Property and Copyright Law 14 (1983): 36
31. (see Leon Deutsch, "Aboriginal Art Today," Fein Kunst International, 1996)
32. Durack's family were among the early pioneer settlers of the Kimberley region and are deeply implicated in the dispossession of Aboriginal land. It would be understandable if some Aboriginal people considered Burrup/Durack's presentation of the issues as similar to a suggestion that the victim enjoyed it by the perpetrator of the crime. The Deutsch article, Burrup's statements, and reproductions of the paintings may be found at http://www.ozpages.com/ eddieburrup
33. Jopson and Burke, "Painting Hoax Has Art World Divided."
34. I am not suggesting that only non-Aboriginal people hold this point of view, or that only Aboriginal people hold what I have termed the "Aboriginal" perspective. (Western collectors of Aboriginal art who bought Durack's paintings because they thought she was an Aboriginal may well believe that Durack's paintings are inauthentic.) I have given the different perspectives these names because one seems to be clearly informed by Western art theory, while the other is informed by Aboriginal artistic practices
35. McCulloch-Uehlin, "The Hand That Signed the Paper."
36. W. E. Kennick, "Art and Inauthenticity," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 44 (1985): 4-5. The word "fake," in this context, means inauthentic
37. Arthur C. Danto, "Artworks and Real Things," Theoria 39 (1973): 1-17
38. "Cultural Sustainability," Marketing Aboriginal Art in the 1990s (Aboriginal Studies Press, 1990), p. 52
39. cited in K. Puri, "Cultural Ownership and Intellectual Property Rights Post-Mabo: Putting Ideas into Action," Intellectual Property Journal 9 (1995): 300
40. Copyrites, television documentary, producers C. Eatock and K. Mordaunt (Australian Film Finance Corporation, 1997)
41. G. Yunupingu, "The Black/White Conflict," in Windows on the Dreaming: Aboriginal Paintings in the Australian National Gallery, ed. W. Caruana (Australian National Gallery and Ellsyd Press Australia, 1989), p. 16
42. Brute facts, for example that water is H2O, might be said to exist independently of human culture and society. In contrast, an institutional fact or object relies on human culture and society to exist. One sense in which it relies on culture and society to exist is that it has a language-like structure, or status function. For example, a line of stones might be a border: that is, the stones signify something about property or nationality. An institutional fact or object exists within a system of constitutive rules. The rules are constitutive because they create the possibility of the fact or object. For example, "checkmate" in chess is an institutional fact. The rules of chess do not regulate an antecedently existing game, but create the possibility of the game, and the move of checkmating an opponent. Similarly, the rules concerning the use of money (including those that govern who produces it, that it is legal tender in a certain territory, etc.) create the possibility of paper or metal disks being "money." For a more detailed explanation, see J. R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (London: Penguin, 1995), pp. 27-17
43. At the turn of the last century, Emile Durkheim suggested that totems and insignia function in much the same way: "The totem is not merely a name; it is an emblem, a veritable coat-of-arms whose analogies with the arms of heraldry have often been remarked.... The nobles of the feudal period carved, engraved and designed in every way their coats-of-arms upon the walls of their castles, their arms, and every sort of object that belonged to them; the blacks of Australia and the Indians of North America do the same things with their totems." E. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 1912, trans. J. W. Swain (The Free Press, 1965), bk. 2, chap. 1, sect. 2, p. 134
44. Originally published as Les formes elementaires de la vie religieuse: Le Systeme Totemique en Australia (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1912)
45. M. Nelson, Sydney Biennale 1986, cited in F. R. Myers, "Representing Culture: The Production of Discourse(s) for Aboriginal Acrylic Paintings," in The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, ed. G. E. Marcus and F. R. Myers (University of California Press, 1995), p. 89, note 32
46. R. Dennys, The Heraldic Imagination (Barrie and Jenkins, 1975), p. 173
47. Cited in V. Johnson, Copyrites: Aboriginal Art in the Age of Reproductive Technologies, Touring Exhibition 1996 Catalogue (National Indigenous Arts Advocacy Association and Macquarie University, 1996), p. 15
48. Reproductions may be found in Copyrites, p. 16, and Morphy, Aboriginal Art, Figure 140
49. Michael McMahon, Copyrites Forum, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, August 20, 1996
50. A reproduction of a wititj painting by Paddy Lilipiyana may be found in Johnson, Copyrites, p. 48
51. House of Representatives Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, The Use of the Coat of Arms: Armed with National Pride (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1994), p. ix
52. H. Morphy, Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 171
53. Dennys, The Heraldic Imagination, p. 135
54. Goodman, Languages of Art, pp. 130-141
55. J. McDonald, "Eyeing the Dots," Sydney Morning Herald (April 4, 1998), Spectrum, p. 14
56. Puri, "Cultural Ownership and Intellectual Property Rights Post-Mabo: Putting Ideas into Action," p. 299
57. but my model is closer to Paul Thorn's model in For an Audience: A Philosophy of the Performing Arts (Temple University Press, 1993), pp. 30-32. Thom categorizes arts according to their teleology
58. The Royal Warrant, dated September 19, 1912, from King George V
59. Directed and produced by Mika Nishimura, 1998
60. Morphy, Ancestral Connections, p. 153
61. The best source of reproductions for different interpretations of the Wagilag Sisters story is W. Caruana and N. Lendon, eds., The Painters of the Wagilag Sisters Story 1937-1997 (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 1997, distributed by Thames and Hudson, Aust.). See plates 2-8, 10, 14-15, 23
62. M. Clunies Ross and L. R. Hiatt, "Sand sculptures at a Gidjingali burial rite," in Form in Indigenous Art: Schematisation in the Art of Aboriginal Australia and Prehistoric Europe, ed. Peter J. Ucko, Prehistory and Material Culture Series No. 13, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (Gerald Duckworth and Company, 1977), p. 133
63. According to Searle, a test for whether something is an institutional fact or object is whether or not we can codify the constitutive rules that govern it. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, p. 27. Clearly, we can codify the rules that surround the use of Aboriginal art and constitute it as insignia; this has been undertaken in numerous ethnographies
64. This example is from T. Mautner, ed., A Dictionary of Philosophy (London: Blackwell, 1996), p. 429
65. McCulloch-Uehlin, "The Hand That Signed the Paper," p. 5
66. N. Wolterstorff, "Ontology of Artworks," p. 315
67. Ronald M. Berndt, "A Living Aboriginal Art: The Changing Inside and Outside Contexts," p. 30
68. The optical shimmering of Aboriginal art is considered beautiful and is valued in Aboriginal cultures as a sign of the religious power of the painting. Morphy, Aboriginal Art, pp. 183-199. In the Western art world, the optical shimmering and brilliance of Aboriginal paintings are valued because they are beautiful rather than because their beauty is a sign of something else
69. School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Australian National University. I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for the JAAC, Professor Paul Thom, Dr. Larissa Behrendt, and graduate students in the Philosophy Program of the School of Humanities for their helpful comments on drafts of this paper. Versions of this paper have been presented at the ANU Philosophy Society and the Australasian Association of Philosophers 1999 Conference