In May 2015, The Weekend Australian’s ‘Review’ headlined a thought-provoking essay by Nicolas Rothwell challenging the ‘reluctance to criticise and evaluate’ Indigenous art, resulting in a ‘crisis of authenticity’ in both the artform and the market. Intriguingly with Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art bringing out the Turner Prize-winning artist (and columnist) Grayson Perry last summer, I was reminded that Perry raised similar doubts in The Times regarding a 2008 Maningrida art show in London. This is how I described his colourful argument then: ‘For his mob, neither spirituality nor hidden meaning can actually take Aboriginal artists past the key gate-keeping tests of “aesthetic and intellectual complexity” which they have established. Consequently, any collective and historical standards of legitimacy in Indigenous art are well below “the authenticity bestowed by connoisseurs” in his tribe!’
However, within the Rothwell essay was a clear understanding of the problems involved in establishing the sort of ‘aesthetic and intellectual complexity’ that Perry would appreciate. Rothwell cites the Spinifex artist, Carlene West, showing at Raft Gallery in Alice Springs, as having ‘an exhibition of outstanding significance’. But he goes on to reveal why criticism of it in Western art terms is so hard: ‘Because the sense of desert law was so strong in the works, because the traditional symbols conveyed a sense of solemnity and calm, because the scale of the colour fields gave so clear a sense of the still, austere spinifex world’.
Rothwell can intuit all that after years of exposure to the Indigenous. But it has to be asked, could any purely Western-trained art observer critique that? For, as the insulting level of ‘criticism’ of Aboriginal art by a posse of London’s leading... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Warlimpirrnga Tjampitjinpa, Marawa. Dennis Scholl Collection, USA.
Robert Fielding, Milkali Kutju, 2015. Screenprint on fine art paper, edition of 5.
