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SUZANNE SPUNNER: "Wijay Na?", the conference, did not exactly tell us 'Which Way Now', but it lived up to the expectations of its instigators, Steve Fox, Thelma John and Marcia Langton, by ventilating if not fanning the flames of current controversies: the issue of collaboration between Black and White artists; the problematic representation of Aboriginal people by non-Aboriginal artists – racist stereotype or contemporary ideological romanticism?; and the issue of who owns styles, symbols and images – what, if any, is the difference between copycatting, appropriation and homage?
Over 140 people attended the weekend and there were some twenty-five speaker/presenters and plenty of comment from the floor. It all happened in the intimate confines of the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory Theatrette and there were no parallel sessions – in other words everyone stayed together for the entire weekend so all the splintering and fracturing remained fairly transparent. Until the transcripts are available, what actually happened at a conference may be different in the minds of the various conferencees. To test this theory Edwin Ride and I have "discussed" what we decided were the four hot issues. We agreed beforehand to write our responses independently and only then to put them side by side.
SS: COLLABORATION was raised as a potential capital sin. The assumption was that collaboration arose exclusively as an unequal power relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal artists, that it was usually initiated hy the White, who was the weaker, less well known and by definition waning artist who harassed the Black artist who was the rising or established artist but nonetheless was the one put... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline