From something singular... to something more
I
There has been a distinct unease regarding the use of terms and concepts drawn from Western aesthetics in much contemporary Australian art writing. It has been variously argued that the Western aesthetic tradition serves ideological ends, that it is hostile to cultural difference, that its application to our conflicted, postcolonial present is symptomatic of an aggressive-or regressive- Eurocentrism. The prevalence of this view is seen nowhere more conspicuously than in the writing on Aboriginal art. To impose the discourse of beauty, form, quality, aesthetics--even, for some, the word ' art'-on the work seems inevitably to do it an injustice, failing to account for the context in which it is made, refusing to understand it in its own terms. Conversely, it is also true that anthropological or ethnographic studies of Aboriginal societies and art are no less entangled in questions of ethnocentrism, that is, in the necessarily European premises of their discourse and its historical claims to scientificity. There seems therefore no appropriate way of discussing Aboriginal art. And it seems that often a preoccupation with the problematic of cultural identity and difference in the critical writing on Indigenous artists in Australia works to displace- if not actually rule out- aesthetic considerations. What follows from this may be a demand for the meticulous reconstruction of the specific social and religious context of an artist's practice; it may be an affirmation of the hybrid subjectivities and cultural forms that are demonstrated in an artist's work; it may be the argument that there is no possible rapprochement between different cultures. What we are frequently left with is a discourse of cultural relativism, accompanied by a recognition of the more or less impassable... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline