Deserting Aboriginal Art Discourse

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. I revisit these connections more explicitly through Jennifer Biddle and Elizabeth Grosz's analyses of desert art below.

2. The term ‘desert’ is being left conceptually open in its use throughout this paper, in order to facilitate a concrescence between art, geography and consciousness.

3. Howard Morphy, Becoming Art: Exploring Cross-Cultural Categories (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2008), 144.

4. Fred Myers, Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 352.

5. Marshall McLuhan, ‘The Emperor's Old Clothes’, in The Man-Made Object, ed. Gyorgy Kepes (New York: George Braziller, 1966), 90. McLuhan uses the term ‘anti-environment’ to describe art's essential capacity to render its techno-social milieu perceivable, since ‘environments, as such, are imperceptible’.

6. Jana Sawicki, ‘Identity Politics and Sexual Freedom: Foucault and Feminism’, in Feminism & Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, ed. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (Lebanon, NH: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 185; italics added.

7. See Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982): 789.

8. Ibid., 790.

9. Ibid., 790–2.

10. Ibid., 794.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., 793.

13. Ibid., 227.

14. Ibid., 216.

15. Michel Foucault, ‘The Discourse on Language’, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 228.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid., 215.

20. Quoted in David Horton, ed. The Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander History, Society and Culture (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1994), 3.

21. Fred Myers, ‘Disturbances in the Field: Exhibiting Aboriginal Art in the US’, Journal of Sociology 49, nos 2–3 (2013): 170.

22. Eric Michaels was one of the first anthropologists to remark on this fact in his study of media uses and production in Central Desert communities. See, for instance, Michaels, For a Cultural Future: Francis Jupurrurla Makes TV at Yuendumu (Sydney and Melbourne: Art & Text Publications, 1989). See also Ian McLean's remarkable argument for the invention of the category of ‘contemporary art’ as incepted by Aboriginal art: McLean, ed. How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art: Writings on Aboriginal Contemporary Art (Sydney: Power Publications, 2011). Jennifer Biddle's ongoing projects also address how this reorganisation has spurred an avant-garde movement within remote communities.

23. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 381.

24. Walid Hamarneh, ‘Welcome to the Desert of Not-Thinking’, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 41, no. 1 (2014): 91–2.

25. Ibid., 93–4.

26. Ibid., 96.

27. Quoted in Glenn Barkley, Volume One: MCA Collection, exhibition catalogue (Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2012), 62.

28. Elina Spilia, ‘Objects of Knowledge: Revelations at the Edges of Art and the Limits of the Known Universe in the Work of Gulumbu Yunupingu’ (paper presented at the 32nd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art, University of Melbourne, 13–18 January 2008).

29. Marcia Langton ‘Sacred Geography: Western Desert Traditions of Landscape Art’ in Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius, eds Hetti Perkins and Hannah Fink (Sydney: Art Gallery of NSW, 2000), 259–67.

30. Howard Morphy, Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 146.

31. Jennifer L. Biddle, ‘When Not Writing is Writing’, Australian Aboriginal Studies 1 (1996): 25.

32. Jennifer L. Biddle, ‘Country, Skin, Canvas: The Intercorporeal Art of Kathleen Petyarre’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 4, no. 1 (2003): 71.

33. Rex Butler, ‘“Bright Shadows”: Art, Aboriginality, and Aura’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 3 (2002): 506.

34. Ibid., 503.

35. Ibid., 508.

36. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2004), 185.

37. Quoted in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 296.

38. Vivien Johnson, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri (Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 2006), 74.

39. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Michel Tournier and the World without Others’, trans. Graham Burchell, Economy and Society 13, no. 1 (1984): 61.

40. Ibid., 59.

41. ‘Consciousness of x=x’ is not the only illustration of the operation whereby consciousness and its object become enfolded during the collapse of the Other-as-structure. It is also abstracted from the following obscure statement: ‘Robinson is but the consciousness of the island, but the consciousness of the island is the consciousness the island has of itself’. Ibid., 61. The formula ‘consciousness of x = x’ is proposed as a means of capturing this non-phenomenological matrix.

42. Ibid.

43. This is confirmed by Grosz's argument that ‘Art enables matter to become expressive’. Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 4.

44. See ibid., 63–4.

45. Howard Morphy, ‘From Dull to Brilliant: The Aesthetics of Spiritual Power among the Yolngu’, Man 24, no. 1 (1989): 35–8. Morphy has extensively studied the production of bir'yun – the brightness associated with and transmitted by ancestral power – in Yolngu bark paintings.

46. Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 192–3.

47. The notion that a nonhuman, geologic ‘subjectivity’ underpins human life is also the crux of Kathryn Yusoff's analysis of cave painting both in France and Australia. See Kathryn Yusoff, ‘Geologic Subjects: Nonhuman Origins, Geomorphic Aesthetics and the Art of Becoming Inhuman’, Cultural Geographies 22, no. 3 (2015): 383–407.

48. Grosz, Becoming Undone, 201.

49. Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art, 96.

50. Rod Moss provides a dramatic explanation for how desert time is decoupled from the historical. His painting Pushing up River, 1993, ‘recreates a common scene in the Todd River. Blackfellas, Arrernte and others, have sat in this river for thousands of years. It is an expressed view of Arrernte people that the town that has grown along both sides of the river is “rubbish”’. This is a perspective given over to geological timespans, reading any manmade structures as ephemera. Moss, ‘Dwelling in Arrernte Country: Paintings 1986–1994’ (M.A. diss., Monash University, Gippsland, 1994), 104.

51. This is not an avant-garde positioned with respect to telos, modernism or any notion of a Bloomian ‘anxiety of influence’. Rather, it is an avant-garde that synchronises with the lived ontology of ancestral forces and how these forces can be taken up through repetition. See Biddle's statement that ‘Tjanpi [art] is counter-history’ in Biddle, ‘A Politics of Proximity: Tjanpi and Other Experimental Western Desert Art’, Studies in Material Thinking 8 (2012): 15. See also Biddle, ‘“My Name is Danny”: Indigenous Animation as Hyper-realism’, Angelaki 20, no. 3 (2015): 105–13.

52. Jennifer Biddle, ‘Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route – Making (Not Taking) History’, Art Monthly Australia 252 (2012): 34.

53. Grosz, Becoming Undone, 188.

54. Ibid., 190.