‘Aboriginal mass culture’: a critical history

Abstract

In Australia, some Aboriginal art objects are celebrated as fine art of great cultural, aesthetic and economic value, while the vast majority are judged to be stylistically derivative and intrinsically compromised by overtly mercenary market forces. This article introduces the concept ‘Aboriginal mass culture’ as a means for understanding the significance of the often maligned forms of the Aboriginal art and culture industry in Australia and to address the problem of why it continues to be difficult to demarcate the space of Aboriginal fine art. While a canonical and connoisseurial art history approach must disavow the vast majority of ‘Aboriginal art’, this article embraces a sociological perspective and turns an analytical eye upon the Aboriginal art and culture industry in its entirety, treating it as a phenomenon of visual culture that mediates Indigenous/non-indigenous relations within national public culture. It offers a critical history of ‘Aboriginal mass culture’ from the market for ‘Aboriginalia’ in the post-Second World War era through to the unruly Aboriginal art market of the present day. In so doing, it illuminates some of the drivers of these cultural forms across commercial, governmental and civil society domains. Its analysis reveals the way in which ‘Aboriginal mass culture’ manifests the unique social and economic circumstances that underpin Aboriginal art practices and the ways in which Aboriginal art is entangled with a redemptive political and civic project in Australia that has sought to affirm a resilient Indigenous presence and stimulate new visions of nationhood, heritage and intercultural fellowship.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author wishes to thank Paul Jones, Vivien Johnson, Jamie Roberts and the two anonymous reviewers for very helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this article and fruitful discussions on the themes explored within it.

Notes

1 See, for example, Burn (1983), Johnson (2000) and Perry (2007). These negotiations have been central to the constitution of Aboriginal ‘fine’ art over the past several decades. This is because they have entailed the shaming of prejudicial or neglectful art institutions and critics, for example, and generated a set of normative discourses underpinned by critiques of ethnocentricism and racial inequality that now guide professional conduct across the Australian art world.

2 See Black’s (2008, 165–167) discussion of the role of Aboriginal themes and design in Qantas Airways’ highly nationalistic branding and marketing projects of the 1950s and 1960s. For other examples, see Franklin (2010), Factor (2000), Black (1964) and Jones (1992a).

3 The Aboriginal artist Albert Namatjira, who established a remarkable career as a landscape watercolourist and achieved celebrity status in the 1940s and 1950s as a kind of exotic icon of assimilation, was an exception (French 2002; Hardy, Megaw, and Megaw 1992).

4 This transformation in social attitudes drove the successful campaign for the 1967 referendum, which led to the amendment of two sections of the Constitution so that Aboriginal people would be counted in the census and Aboriginal affairs would become a Commonwealth (in addition to state) responsibility.

5 This argument rings true in relation to government-funding announcements and media releases about the allocation of monies to Indigenous art, culture and heritage projects. This is exemplified by the Minister for Environment Protection, Heritage and the Arts’ press release on 9 June 2010, “$42 Million Supports Australia’s Indigenous Arts”. In it, Minister Peter Garret tied such funding to the ‘important position Indigenous history and expression occupies in Australia’s cultural life’ and the need for the nation to ‘continue to protect, preserve and promote Indigenous arts, culture and heritage to help build a diverse and dynamic Australia’ (Garrett 2010).

6 Carter makes the following incisive point regarding the significance of the 40 000 years to conceptualisations of Australian heritage during the 1988 Bicentenary: ‘The place of Aboriginality is no longer as the timeless or childlike prehistory of the nation … Instead the nation’s past is pushed backwards so that one of the newest societies on earth is given one of the longest histories’ (1994, 10).

7 What is excluded from the account below is the mobilisation of Aboriginal art within Aboriginal activism campaigns, which also contributed to the dissemination of Aboriginal imagery in Australian public culture. See, for instance, the ‘we have survived’ series of posters produced in 1988 (National Museum of Australia 2012).

8 Balarinji has had a number of other corporate and government commissions, including Bank of America, British Airways, Lendlease, Renault France, Coca Cola Atlanta and City of Sydney.

9 See, for instance, Lander (2008) on ‘Badger’ Bates and Fisher (2011) on Mark Blackman.

10 This conviction is arguably also reflected in the fact that local and state governments established numerous Aboriginal Art Fairs, showcases, prizes and ‘strategies’ in the 2000s. Such projects suggest that these governments wish to mobilise the success of the Aboriginal fine art movement within their own jurisdictions and to demonstrate their support for their Aboriginal constituents.

11 This market dynamic is extremely adversarial and complex, particularly as the latter dealers are regularly accused of exploiting vulnerable artists for monetary gain. This was the subject of a government inquiry in 2007 (Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts 2007).

12 For instance, in 2010, Christopher Hodges’ fine art gallery Utopia Art Sydney held an exhibition titled ‘The Real Gloria Petyarre: An Honest Survey’. Gloria Petyarre is one of the most widely known and traded Aboriginal artists with an easily recognisable, decorative aesthetic. While Utopia Art Sydney has represented Gloria Petyarre since the 1980s, her work is sold through dozens of vendors. In addition, her particular style has been emulated by many other Aboriginal artists. The title of the show reveals an effort by Hodges to elevate a select few pieces above the multitude of works which he casts as false (not ‘honest’) and irrelevant (not the ‘real’ Gloria) (Meachem 2010).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laura Fisher

Laura Fisher completed her doctoral thesis Hope, Ethics and Disenchantment: A Critical Sociological Inquiry into the Aboriginal Art Phenomenon at the University of New South Wales in 2012. Her writings on Australian Aboriginal art have been published in journals such as Cultural Sociology, Artlink and Artist Profile. She is currently based at the National Institute for Experimental Arts, UNSW, where she is involved in research projects on public art and sustainability, electronic art and the history of international Aboriginal art exhibitions.