‘Pay Attention Mother Fuckers’: Outlining a Strategy of Wordplay in Australian Indigenous Text-based Art

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. Philip Glahn, ‘Estrangement and Politicization: Bertolt Brecht and American Art 1967–1979’ (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2007).

2. Perhaps related to the Indigenous Art degree first offered at the Queensland College of Art in the 1980s, or the influence of the Brisbane-based proppaNOW collective, the focus on Queensland-born artists is not deliberate, and an argument that only Queensland artists are employing text as a defamiliarising tool is not the intended conclusion of this article.

3. Penny van Toorn, ‘Indigenous Texts and Narratives’, in The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature, ed. Elizabeth Webby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 44.

4. Annie van den Oever, ‘Introduction: “Ostran(n)enie” as an “Attractive” Concept’, in Ostrannenie: On ‘Strangeness’ and the Moving Image; The History, Reception, and Relevance of a Concept, ed. Annie van den Oever (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 12.

5. Ibid., 11.

6. Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Device’, in Theory of Prose: Viktor Shklovsky, trans. Benjamin Sher (London: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991), 6.

7. Jurij Striedter, ‘The Formalist Theory of Prose and Literary Evolution’, in Literary Structure, Evolution, and Value: Russian Formalism and Czech Structuralism Reconsidered (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 23.

8. N. R. Norrick, ‘Humour in Language’, in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd ed., ed. Keith Brown (New York: Elsevier, 2006).

9. Ian McLean, ‘Gordon Bennett: The Joker in the Pack’, in Radical Revisionism: An Anthology of Writings on Australian Art, ed. Rex Butler (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 2005), 274.

10. Gary Foley, ‘The Power of Whiteness’, Farrago 7 (July 1998), http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_5.html (accessed 23 March 2017); Richard Bell, ‘Bell's Theorem – Aboriginal Art: It's a White Thing’ 2002, http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/great/art/bell.html (accessed 23 March 2017); Fiona Foley (ed.), The Art of Politics the Politics of Art: The Place of Indigenous Contemporary Art (Southport, QLD: Keeaira Press, 2006).

11. Marie McMahon, ‘You Are on Aboriginal Land’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, https://www.mca.com.au/collection/work/2007.18.145/ (accessed 5 February 2017).

12. Sharne Wolff, ‘It's Gotta be Proppa’, The Art Life, June 2012, http://theartlife.com.au/2012/it%E2%80%99s-gotta-be-proppa/ (accessed 11 September 2015).

13. Tony Albert, ‘Tony Albert’, in The Black See (Education Kit), ed. proppaNOW (KickArts Contemporary Arts, 2011), 8.

14. Benjamin Genocchio, ‘Dreaming in Urban Areas: Activism and Audience in Urban Aboriginal Art’, Eyeline: Contemporary Visual Arts 35 (Summer 1997): 35.

15. Marcia Langton, ‘The Politics of Aboriginal Representation’, in ‘Well, I Heard it on the Radio and I Saw it on the Television…’: An Essay for the Australian Film Commission on the Politics and Aesthetics of Filmmaking by and about Aboriginal People and Things (Woolloomooloo, NSW: Australian Film Commission, 1993), 34.

16. Roland Barthes, ‘Myth Today’, in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Vintage, 1993), 129.

17. Langton, ‘The Politics of Aboriginal Representation’, 35.

18. Barthes, ‘Myth Today’, 128.

19. Tina Baum, ‘Austracism’, in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art: Collection Highlights, ed. Franchesca Cubillo and Wally Caruana (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2010), 227.

20. Vernon Ah Kee, interview by Bruce McLean, Institute of Modern Art, 18 June 2015, https://soundcloud.com/instituteofmodernart/veron-ah-kee-and-bruce-maclean-in-conversation (accessed 21 July 2015).

21. Gillian Cowlishaw and Barry Morris, ‘Cultural Racism’, in Race Matters: Indigenous Australians and ‘Our’ Society, ed. Gillian Cowlishaw and Barry Morris (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1997), 1–8.

22. Tony Albert, ‘Tony Albert’, in unDisclosed: 2nd National Indigenous Art Triennial, ed. Carly Lane and Franchesca Cubillo (Canberra, ACT: National Gallery of Australia, 2012), 27.

23. Genocchio, ‘Dreaming in Urban Areas’, 35.

24. Ibid.

25. Wolff, ‘It's Gotta be Proppa’, http://theartlife.com.au/2012/it%E2%80%99s-gotta-be-proppa/ (accessed 11 September 2015).

26. Genocchio, ‘Dreaming in Urban Areas’, 35.

27. Ibid., 36.

28. Bruce McLean, ‘Dispersed’, in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art: Collection Highlights, ed. Franchesca Cubillo and Wally Caruana (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2010), 228.

29. Ibid.

30. Fiona Nicoll, ‘No Substitute: Political Art against the Opiate of the Colonising Euphemism’, in Fiona Foley: Forbidden (Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art; Brisbane: University of Queensland Art Museum, 2009), 61.

31. Timothy Morrell, ‘In Black and White: Text in Indigenous Queensland Art’, Artlink 27, no. 1 (2007): 34.

32. Pietro Bianchi, ‘The Word and the Flesh’, ed. Guillaume Collet, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 16, no. 3 (2011): 42.

33. Tim Griffin, ‘Notes on Jokes’, Artforum International 46, no. 5 (January 2008): 41.

34. Wally Caruana, ‘Into the Twenty-First Century’, in Aboriginal Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012), 245.

35. Simon Morley, ‘Creolization: Millenial Words’, in Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003), 190.

36. Merriam-Webster Online, s.v. ‘wit’, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wit (accessed 19 October 2015).

37. Robert Leonard, ‘Your Call’, in Vernon Ah Kee: Born in This Skin, ed. Vernon Ah Kee (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 2009), 13.

38. Ibid.

39. Wes Hill, ‘Archie Moore: In Conversation with Wes Hill’, Eyeline: Contemporary Visual Arts 82 (2015): 28.

40. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. George Van Den Abeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

41. John E. Joseph, ‘Introduction’, in Language and Identity: National, Ethnic, Religious (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 12–13.

42. Van Toorn, ‘Indigenous Texts and Narratives’, 45.

43. Carly Lane, ‘First, Sight; Then, Acknowledge: Building Indigenous Visibility through the Undisclosed’, in unDisclosed: 2nd National Indigenous Art Triennial, eds. Carly Lane and Franchesca Cubillo (Canberra, ACT: National Gallery of Australia, 2012), 18.