Spirit and place: Art in Australia 1861-1996
Perhaps, just perhaps, the exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art curated by Nick Waterlow and Ross Mellick might begin to end the buffeting of Aboriginal Art across a number of different ideological planes. But from the very outset, distinguished and less distinguished, but nevertheless voluble observers busied themselves with souring the exhibition before it had even existed as a memory. To risk another generalisation, much of the immediate cultural criticism in this country, that is, the direct responses to cultural events, is tame and ungenerous. The tameness springs from a reluctance to bring one's peers to task in a mercifully brutal way (and I am not counting the truculence that comes from the nee-conservatives currently writing tor some of our main newspapers). And when it is ungenerous, criticism arising from sympathetic consideration is traded tor a series of glib quibbles. As an example, Spirit and Place was often decried as too compendious and therefore incoherent; the works were too close and so the arrangement seemed slipshod- falling tar short of the 'visual poem' intended by Ross Mellick. A curator, like an artist, must cope with immediate and foreseen constrictions, be they financial or architectural. But sometimes there are just exigencies of space. The viewer is tacitly asked to be generous-that after all, was already implicit in the title of Spirit and Place: a humble and patient receptivity to site. Perhaps, then, the exhibition's detractors were not sufficiently attentive to what the exhibition sought to inaugurate: namely, a dialogue between an Aboriginal practice forced to remove itself from forty-thousand-year-old traditions, and a staggering upsurge of non-Aboriginal practitioners who can no longer be accurately referred to as Western or Occidental. Therefore