Public art between cultures: The Aboriginal Memorial, aboriginality, and nationality in Australia

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 27, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 629-659

  Smith, Terry ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 67249107490     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/449025     Document Type: Review

References (48)

1. Michael Jagamara Nelson, quoted in The Australian, 28 Sept. 1993, p. 3
2. Terry Smith, "The Governor-General and the Postcolonial: The Australia Day Address 1996," Continuum 11, no. 2 (1997): 75
3. See Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Commission, Submission to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, Enquiry into Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Culture and Heritage (Canberra, 1994), p. 24
4. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Commercial Art Galleries 1996-97 (Canberra, 1997)
5. and Jane Spring, International Visitors and Aboriginal Arts 1996 (Redfern, 1996)
6. Figures drawn from the following: Review Committee of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, The Aboriginal Arts and Crafts Industry, ed. Jon AItman (Canberra, 1989)
7. David Throsby and Beverley Thompson, But What Do You Do for a Living? A New Economic Study of Visual Artists (Redfern, 1994)
8. Australian Bureau of Statistics, National Centre for Culture and Recreation Studies, Artswork: A Report on Australians Working in the Arts (Redfern, 1997)
9. and H. H. Guldberg, The Arts Economy 1968-1998: Three Decades of Growth in Australia (Sydney, 2000)
10. Djon Mundine, "Aboriginal Memorial," in From the Southern Cross: A View of World Art c. 1940-1988, ed. Nicholas Waterlow (exhibition catalog, Sydney, 18 May-3 July, 1988), p. 230; hereafter abbreviated "A." This text subsequently formed the basis of National Gallery of Australia room information sheets and is reproduced in part as a pamphlet available at the NGA since 1990
11. See Ramingining Artists, Aboriginal Memorial (Canberra, 1990)
12. See Smith, "Second Person, First Peoples: Writing Post-Colonial Art," Art Monthly 64 (Oct. 1993): 8-11
13. See Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (London, 1987)
14. and Living in a New Country: History, Travelling, and Language (London, 1992)
15. See also Denis O'Brien, The Bicentennial Affair (Sydney, 1991)
16. For example, see Geoffrey Bardon, Papunya Tula: Art of the Western Desert (Ringwood, Aust., 1991)
17. Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia, ed. Peter Sutton (New York, 1988)
18. Wally Caruana, Aboriginal Art (London, 1993)
19. and Howard Morphy, Aboriginal Art (London, 1998)
20. By "Aboriginality" here I have in mind Aboriginal anthropologist Marcia Langton's three senses of the term, each of them being precise constructs of the exchange process itself. She understands Aboriginality as a set of white assumptions about Aborigines, as a set of qualities attributed by Aboriginal peoples to each other, and as the elements of negotiated, respectful exchanges between the races. See Marcia Langton, Well, I Heard It on the Radio and I Saw It on the Television (North Sydney, 1993)
21. Homi K. Bhabha, "Introduction: Locations of Culture," The Location of Culture (London, 1994), p. 7
22. See Arjun Appadurai, "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy," Public Culture 2 (Spring 1990): 1-24
23. and his book Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1997)
24. Bhabha, "Introduction: Locations of Culture," p. 6
25. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and the Inter-pretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (London, 1988), pp. 271-313
26. This is further explored in Smith, "Modernism, Modernity, and Otherness," Australian Journal of Art 13 (1996): 145-166
27. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi, 1983), p. 71
28. See Andrew Sayers, Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century (Melbourne, 1994)
29. and The Heritage of Namatjira, ed. Jane Hardy, J. V. S. Megaw, and M. Ruth Megaw (Melbourne, 1992)
30. Such a pot is referred to as a billy, or billy can, in Australian usage. Ronald and Catherine Berndt address this problem in their reflections on the Elcho Island Memorial, a key object/event of the Adjustment Movement there and an evident precedent to the Aboriginal Memorial. See, for example, their Aboriginal Australian Art: A Visual Perspective (Sydney, 1982), esp. pp. 82-88
31. Howard Morphy begins his reflections with a striking, related, Yolngu instance in his Ancestral Connections, Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge (Chicago 1991), p. 1
32. See Berndt and Berndt, Aboriginal Australian Art
33. and Benjamin Genocchio, "Edge of the Trees," Agenda 44-45 (Oct. 1995):35-38. This installation/sculpture, developed by Aboriginal artist Fiona Foley and non-Aboriginal artist Janet Lawrence, collected local tree-forms and treated them with the usages, markings, words, images, and sounds of the Aboriginal and settler peoples who have passed through its site, the actual location of the first Government House on Sydney Cove
34. See, for example, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, "What Is a Concept?" What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York, 1994), pp. 15-34; see esp. p. 18 on the ways in which all concepts have an aspect of always becoming in relation to concepts on the same plane
35. See Jonathan Bordo, "The Witness in the Errings of Contemporary Art," in The Rhetoric of the Frame: Essays on the Boundaries of the Artwork, ed. Paul Duro (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 178-202
36. Robert Smithson, "Cultural Confinement," The Writings of Robert Smithson, ed. Nancy Holt (New York, 1979), p. 132
37. See, for example, Nigel Lendon, "Visual Evidence: Space, Place, and Innovation in Bark Paintings of Central Arnhem Land," Australian Journal of Art 12 (1994-1995): 55-74
38. and The Painters of the Wagilag Sisters Story 1937-1997, ed. Lendon and Caruana (Canberra, 1997)
39. See Virginia Spate, "Remembering the Future: The Aboriginal Memorial," National Gallery of Australia Birthday Lecture, 10 Oct. 1991
40. See Meyer Schapiro, "Style," Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society (New York, 1994), pp. 51-101
41. Waterlow, "A View of World Art c. 1940-1988," in From the Southern Cross, p. 12
42. This case is strongly made by Ian MacLean in his White Aborigines: Identity Politics in Australian Art (Melbourne, 1998)
43. and in his essay "Being and Nothing: Figuring Aboriginality in Australian Art History," in First Peoples, Second Chance: The Humanities and Aboriginal Australia, ed. Smith (Canberra, 1999), pp. 105-129
44. See Victoria Lynn, "Judy Watson: Map/Dream/Journey," Antipodean Currents: Ten Contemporary Artists from Australia (exhibition catalog, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 21 June-6 Aug. 1995)
45. See Mundine et al., The Native Born: Objects and Representations from Ramingining, Arnhem Land (Sydney, 2000)
46. See Bordo, "Picture and Witness at the Site of the Wilderness," Critical Inquiry 26 (Winter 2000): 224-247
47. Bhabha, "Beyond the Pale: Art in the Age of Multicultural Translation," in 1993 Biennial Exhibition (exhibition catalog, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 24 Feb.-20 Jun. 1993), p. 68
48. If we recognize that objects such as the Aboriginal Memorial have the power to address us nonindigenous observers, they would be, for us, "becoming-beings" as well. On this power of images, see Mitchell, "What Do Pictures Want? An Idea of Visual Culture," in In Visible Touch: Modernhm and Masculinity, ed. Smith (1996; Chicago, 1997), pp. 215-232