2009 AAANZ Conference Abstracts - The Art Association of Australia ...

touring exhibition of the same name. Other recent publications
include “Translating the Spectacle: the intercultural aesthetic of
John Mawurndjul” (Between Indigenous Australia and Europe:
John Mawurndjul, Reimar Publications, Berlin & Aboriginal
Studies Press, Canberra, 2008). Butler is one of the current
editors of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art and
former Associate Editor of Art Collector Magazine. Current
projects include curating an exhibition of contemporary art from
Aurukun and editing an anthology of essays on the same topic.
3. Collaboration between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous
Artists
Professor Ian McLean
Why is collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous
artists such an issue in visual art—when it is less of an issue
in other art forms, such as music, dance and cinema In
addressing this question, this paper will develop a theoretical
approach based on a typology of such collaboration and its
historical contexts. At the centre of the paper is a critique
Richard Bell’s Bell’s theorem: Aboriginal art is a white thing
Ian McLean is Discipline Chair of Visual Arts at the University of
Western Australia. He has published extensively on Australian
art and particularly on the intersections of indigenous and settler
art. His books include The Art of Gordon Bennett (with a chapter
by Gordon Bennett) and White Aborigines Identity Politics in
Australian Art, and an edited anthology of writing on Aboriginal
art since 1980, titled How Aborigines Invented the Idea of
Contemporary Art, to be published in 2010.
4. “How can this be art” On the Reception of Aboriginal
Art in German Art Space
Friederike Krishnabhakdi-Vasilakis
My PhD research into the reception of Aboriginal art in German
art space looks at the historical development of art history and
anthropology in Germany which have led to the binary reading
of art as a part of nation building processes. As a consequence,
Aboriginal art from remote areas has been widely excluded
from art institutions of contemporary art and interpreted
through ethnographic frameworks. Such a dual approach to
art is culturally motivated and often implies an insurmountable,
essential difference. The implications are manifold: for example,
while “contemporary” art is actively involved in the present,
“ethnographic” art is seen as a witness of the past.
This paper explores underlying currents for the general
resistance of German art institutions to exhibit remote Aboriginal
art by looking at specific historical issues - such as historicising
European art – that still delineate ideas of the place of Aboriginal
art in modernity. Since the 19th century, art and ethnographic
museums have been spaces which implicitly tell what the
objects are and why one is looking at them. Art that is tied to
oral culture seems to be stuck in the ethnographic frame due to
the absence of written art documentation of most periods of its
production.
Since the 1990s, Non-Aboriginal artists, dealers and curators
such as Bernhard Lüthi and Elisabeth Bähr have had a great
effect on the visibility of Aboriginal art as art in Germany through
exhibiting and publishing Aboriginal artists. Events such as
John Mawurndjul’s retrospective exhibition Rarrk 2005 and its
symposium in Basel, Switzerland, which brought art historians
and anthropologists together, are crucial in breaking away
from the often oppositional 19th century binarism, towards an
interdisciplinary and cross-culturally approach to Aboriginal art.
Friederike Krishnabhakdi-Vasilakis studied Ethnology, Art
History and Media Science at the Philips University of Marburg,
Germany, where she received a Master of Arts degree in
Ethnology in 1994. Friederike has been lecturing part time in
Visual Art Theory at the Faculty of Creative Arts at the University
of Wollongong (UOW) since 2005. She recently commenced
teaching in Aboriginal Studies at Woolyungah Indigenous Centre
at UOW. Her PhD, which is currently under examination, is titled
On the Reception of Aboriginal Art in German Art Space and
focuses on the institutional framing of Aboriginal art through the
humanist disciplines of Ethnology and Art History.
5. A Dead Art Sustainability in the Aboriginal Art Market
Dr Meaghan Wilson-Anastasios
Sotheby’s estimates that between fifty and seventy percent of
the Aboriginal art it sells goes to buyers outside Australia. How
do those buyers view that art If you search for the Aboriginal art
department on the Sotheby’s website, you will not find it listed
with ‘Australian’ and ‘Contemporary Art’ under the ‘Paintings,
Drawings and Sculpture’ category. Aboriginal art falls under
the classification ‘Ancient and Ethnographic Arts’, alongside
‘Antiquities’ and ‘Pre-Columbian Art’.
Ethnographic art is inanimate, contained in a state of suspended
animation. Its primary value to collectors is measured by its
‘authenticity’ and connection to a culturally untainted, semimythical
point of genesis. Whereas a contemporary artwork
is understood by the market to be produced by an artist
working within a dynamic society, an object has the greatest
ethnographic value if it emanates from a static, isolated society.
The vitality and vigour of the Aboriginal desert art movement
notwithstanding, by classifying Aboriginal art as ‘ethnography’
the message communicated to Sotheby’s collectors is that it is
primarily a scientific and cultural curio.
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