Aboriginal art in the museum context
Seems like a Freeze Out
Not withstanding the exhibition's original title, The Returning Boomerang, Aboriginal Art was excluded as a category from the 1990 Biennale of Sydney. Apart from a last minute name change to Art is Easy, the Biennale's European director, Rene Bloch, appeared oblivious to the insult of using the boomerang, the prime example of settler culture's appropriation of Aboriginal imagery for the construction of a national Australian identity, to frame the concept of the exhibition, while ignoring contemporary Aboriginal art. But his Australian advisers must have been mindful of the absurdity of excluding the only internationally recognised art movement which Australia has yet produced from the country's major international art event. Bernice Murphy showed more awareness of the local context in an essay written for the Biennale catalogue, in which she argued that Aboriginal Art, and especially "evolving urban forms of the indigenous cultures", required ethnographic contextualisation to prevent erasure of their "unaccommodatable difference"[1] from Western culture. Ironically, the same criticism of Aboriginal art's acceptance into the mainstream of Australian art as tokenistic misrepresentation was made of Bernice Murphy's pioneering inclusion of Western Desert acrylics in the 1981 Perspecta at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In that case, however, protectionist practices were eschewed and in the event, the juxtaposition of the Papunya paintings with the work of their non-Aboriginal contemporaries was demonstrably capable of opening the doors of perception for many. While it is appropriate to direct criticism towards the failure of the internationalist art scene to accommodate post-colonialist art forms, Murphy's convoluted avoidance of the word "Aboriginal" in her characterisation of urban art conveys rather more sinister overtones.
Meanwhile, inside the museums, there... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline