Reading the Yuendumu doors with Eric Michaels
One of the strangest and yet least remarked upon aspects of Eric Michaels' well-known essay 'Bad Aboriginal Art' is the fact that it seeks to define bad Aboriginal art without defining good . At the beginning of the essay , Michaels admits that commonsensically the two terms are linked, that it is difficult to speak of bad art without knowing what good is, or, more pertinently, of good art without bad. As he says: 'I want to consider the curious fact that almost nothing of this work [Australian Aboriginal art] is ever designated "bad"-a lacuna that would not seem to make it easy to sell anything as especially good either'.1 By the end of the essay, however, this commonsense perspective has shifted. If it is hard to say what good Aboriginal art is, or to set out any determinate criteria by which it might be defined, it is still possible to say what bad Aboriginal art is. Or, at least, if we cannot actually provide determinate criteria for it either, this judgement is nevertheless made all the time. As Michaels explains:
In practice it is probably easier, and more common, to identify a work of art as bad than to explain why another is good . Current criticism certainly does a better job of ruling out possibilities than specifying the 'rules beyond rules ' fantasised by [philosophers like] Lyotard and Rogozinski. In arriving at such a rejection again and again, the critic always risks confronting chaos, staring directly down the maw of the primordial dark. We seek strategies to plug that gap, to obscure that sight with various critical inventions: the Sublime (or divine) , rules beyond rules... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline