Читать книгу A Companion to Australian Art - Группа авторов - Страница 37

One of the most significant museological developments of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been the response to the rise of a globally relevant and recognized contemporary Indigenous art movement. The process of Indigenous visual culture leaping the fence dividing museums of ethnography, natural history and science from fine art museums has an early history, with the AGNSW, closely followed by the NGV, leading the way in the mid twentieth century, collecting and exhibiting customary objects with ritual meaning such as Tiwi and Arnhem Land funerary poles,²⁷ and including paintings on bark.

A number of early-mid twentieth century exhibitions in Australian art museums sought to demonstrate the inherent aesthetic value of such works, but no-one had predicted that the process begun at Papunya Tula in the central desert from 1971 – when a local teacher, Geoffrey Bardon, encouraged adult indigenous men to make visual representations of their country and myths on boards, and soon canvas, using non-traditional paint materials such as acrylic – would blossom into the single most important development in Australian art practice, and Australian visual culture generally, since the period of Federation. It is hardly a coincidence that this process developed in parallel with the early phase of a considered national program to deliver to indigenous people appropriate legal and civic status, and in due course land rights. Whatever indigenous and non-indigenous Australians may feel about the success or otherwise of a whole raft of government policy initiatives aimed at improving indigenous access to fundamental rights and opportunities, it cannot be denied that awareness of, and deep pride in, the trajectory of contemporary indigenous visual culture is shared by all Australians, and binds us together.

Exhibitions of indigenous art have proliferated, touring not only around Australia but, increasingly, internationally.²⁸ At the time of writing (July 2018) a major indigenous exhibition drawn from the collections of the NGA in Canberra, had just concluded in Berlin, where it drew large crowds, and subsequently opened in New Delhi’s National Gallery of Modern Art. Australian indigenous art has always been included in the Queensland Art Gallery’s Asia-Pacific Triennial, and the National Gallery in Canberra has an established Triennial exhibition of contemporary indigenous art, the most recent being the third in the series, Defying Empire, to which 30 invited indigenous artists contributed work which addressed issues of colonization and confrontation between indigenous communities and settlers, on the 50th anniversary of the 1967 referendum which at last gave indigenous Australians legal recognition under the constitution. All visitors to the NGA enter the building passing the Aboriginal Memorial, an installation created by nine groups of indigenous artists in 1988, at the time of the 1988 Bicentenary events, celebrating (from a non-indigenous perspective) 200 years of British settlement and national progress. Each of the 200 poles, carved and painted to reflect the style of the hollow log coffins of Central Arnhem Land, commemorates one year of post-settlement conflict and indigenous suffering and loss.

Each of the state galleries has its own history of engagement with indigenous visual culture, and how and when indigenous art was first collected and exhibited. It took a decade for the first serious art museum responses to the new movement. The still relatively small Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT) in Darwin was effectively, and appropriately, the first to collect and exhibit contemporary indigenous art, especially from Papunya Tula from its establishment in 1971. In 1981, the NGA director James Mollison decided that the national collection must begin to acquire this art, appointing a full-time curator in 1983. In the same year, the AGNSW began a considered collecting program, followed by the NGV in 1984. In 1989 the nascent MCA in Sydney developed a curatorial policy which gave special priority to indigenous contemporary art, and the other major state galleries followed suit. At first, it often proved difficult to identify suitable spaces for these new, growing collections, and in some institutions such as the NGV they were constantly on the move, but during the 1990s most public art museums provided permanent spaces, though rarely of suitable size.

All of this changed with the opening of the NGV’s new building in Federation Square in Melbourne in 2002, with the entire suite of ground-floor galleries dedicated to indigenous practice. This prominence, as the first galleries encountered by visitors, fundamentally changed attitudes nationally. In 2010, the NGA in Canberra opened its new wing, which provided a suite of six large galleries, plus two smaller, for its indigenous collections, considerably larger than the space allocated at the NGV. Most recently, as noted above, a plan has emerged for the construction of a “National Aboriginal Art Gallery” in Alice Springs which, when delivered, would for the first time bring masterpieces of contemporary indigenous visual culture back to the central desert – providing both a cultural focus for indigenous Australia, and a major driver of tourism, with obvious economic impact – and reversing the well-established process whereby most of the best art produced by indigenous artists and art-producing communities inevitably finds its way into public and private collections remote from the point of production. The future of the movement, which depends heavily on the commercial market systems which have evolved – with individual art-producing centers becoming increasingly astute and business-like in marketing their work – suggests many challenges. At a time of generational change, with the majority of the great early masters of the movement (Emily Knamwarre, Clifford Possum, Rover Thomas and others) now deceased, and the emergence in urban centers of academy-trained indigenous artists, whose practice, and often politically charged imagery, has little or nothing to do with the first generation of desert artists, museological practice will need to adapt. The overriding principle until now has been to maintain both a physical and cultural separation between the indigenous and non-indigenous collections in the museum of art, though with an increasing desire to introduce indigenous material into non-indigenous installations. How and when this practice might evolve in the other direction will be increasingly debated.