The Political Future of Australian Indigenous ArtThe Art of Politics The Politics of Art, The Place of Indigenous Contemporary Art
Editor: Fiona Foley
Keeaira Press, Southport 2006.
The Art of Politics The Politics of Art, The Place of Indigenous Contemporary Art is a collection of essays edited by Brisbane-based artist Fiona Foley. Relatively few books have been published on this topic; a fact that speaks volumes about the reception of Indigenous art in this country. Foley’s book makes an important contribution to political understandings of Australian Indigenous art, particularly in terms of its inclusion of a transnational indigenous context. Where the local domain of Indigenous politics in Australia is choked by racism disguised as conservatism, this context of transnational indigenous activism is clearly the political future for Australian Indigenous art.
In her role as Adjunct Professor at Queensland College of Arts, Foley convened a conference bearing the same title as the book in October 2005 at the Queensland Museum. The Art of Politics consists of selected papers from this conference. There is a strong sense of the local-to-local dynamics of globalism in this book, drawing together contributions from Papua New Guinea’s Michael Mel; Fa’aoleole Sofine Maiava from Aotearoa (New Zealand); Subba Ghosh from India; and Native American artist Kelvin Yazzie. Nine Australian contributors complete the volume, including an essay by Foley titled ‘A Touch of the Tar Brush’. Foley discusses a wall of silence in Australian art establishments and institutions and a more general ‘type of cultural violence through silencing’ (24). This escalating progression of silencing is described by Foley as an effort to exclude political activism in Indigenous art over the past thirteen years, running concurrent with the fading promise of the Keating era’s ‘new partnership’.
It is in the context of this ideological and political silence that the book raises an emerging ‘noise’ and hope