Aboriginal Art and Australian Society

Hope and Disenchantment

By (author) Laura Fisher

Publication date:

30 May 2016

Publisher

Anthem Press

Dimensions:

229x153mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781783085316

This book is an investigation of the way the Aboriginal art phenomenon has been entangled with Australian society’s negotiation of Indigenous people’s status within the nation. Through critical reflection on Aboriginal art’s idiosyncrasies as a fine arts movement, its vexed relationship with money, and its mediation of the politics of identity and recognition, this study illuminates the mutability of Aboriginal art’s meanings in different settings. It reveals that this mutability is a consequence of the fact that a range of governmental, activist and civil society projects have appropriated the art’s vitality and metonymic power in national public culture, and that Aboriginal art is as much a phenomenon of visual and commercial culture as it is an art movement. Throughout these examinations, Fisher traces the utopian and dystopian currents of thought that have crystallised around the Aboriginal art movement and which manifest the ethical conundrums that underpin the settler state condition.

Introduction; Part I: Governance, Nationhood and Civil Society; Chapter 1: New Intercultural Relationships in the Post-Assimilation Era; Chapter 2: Aboriginal People Mobilising Aboriginal Art; Chapter 3: Understanding Aboriginal Art Subsidy; Chapter 4: The State Mobilising Aboriginal Art; Chapter 5: ‘Aboriginal culture’ at the Nexus of Justice, Recognition and Redemption; Part II: Contemporary Aboriginal Art in the 1980s; Chapter 6: The Emergence of Aboriginal Art in the 1980s; Part III: Negotiating Difference; Chapter 7: Negotiation Aboriginal Difference; Chapter 8: The Art/Anthropology Binary; Part IV: Aboriginal Art, Money and the Market; Chapter 9: Ethics and Exploitation in the Aboriginal Art Market; Chapter 10: ‘Aboriginal Mass Culture’ and the Cultural Industries; Conclusion.

'Like any tightrope walker, Laura Fisher has a finely attuned sense of balance. Her clear-sighted analysis of the historical record takes her beyond the moral high ground and ideological posturing that for decades have stifled intelligent discussion of the mixed blessings of Aboriginal art’s success. This book should be essential reading for anyone to whom Indigenous art is more than a just a pretty picture.' —Vivien Johnson, former NewSouth Global Professor, University of New South Wales and author of 'Lives of the Papunya Tula Artists'