The main points being for me were:
".....Aboriginal art lives out a contradiction: it has been a constructive means by which Aboriginal cultures have stated their claim within Australian culture and yet it is only within culture qua culture that they are able to serve."
"The Western response has been to embrace this identity with a desire to correct former colonialist injustices, only on the unspoken condition that the 'Other' never forgoes his or her 'Otherness'."
How I felt about these points were that they are quiet correct from where I stand looking at the position of Aboriginal art. Whether we like it or not the fact is, as stated in this diagnostic, that yes Indigenous people were told in the early 1970's that their 'art and culture' was in fact an 'art and culture', and not just of the anthropological category. And also that the success of Aboriginal art today does have a lot to do with a Western culture that deems it's 'authenticity' and 'difference' as a way of giving it this successful status as part of an Australian identity. To study, critique or collect Aboriginal art as a non-indigenous person is to promote this situation, and may still pivot on this idea of 'fashionability' and 'progressiveness' that comes to establish the art world. I think the acknowledgement and purchasing of Aboriginal art may also still have undertones of 'charity' and 'anxiety' attached to it as well, whether it's selling for millions and considered a 'masterpiece' or work selling for hundreds in a small rural or inner-city gallery. I began to wonder to what extent and to what criteria our culture deems a work done by an Indigenous artists as 'successful' or worth a certain amount of money? Does this have anything to do with or give it more or less meaning and understanding when an Indigenous person makes it or looks at it? How much of a say and position do Indigenous people have when it comes to what is 'good' art?
Whilst I do agree with most of the arguments made in the diagnostic, that's not to say I think that a contemporary Australian culture and society would be better if we looked the other way to Indigenous art and culture. Although it was originally one culture telling the other what was and wasn't art, and today it is primarily still white Anglo-Australian's behind this, at least we are able to see it, buy it and make the effort to understand and appreciate it whether we are in the correct position to do so or not. There are many Indigenous or part-Indigenous Australian critiques, theorists, educators and curators like Hetti Perkins, Brenda Croft and Franchesca Cubillo that do have a say in what is what in the art world.
It is quite confronting and honest what Hill and Geczy have done in this diagnostic by stating the words like 'authentic', 'dog', 'nepotism' 'prison', 'leech', etc., and giving them a meaning based on how they 'really' applied to Aboriginal art and how its positioned represented today. However I think they are quite correct in this respect, and at the end of the day it is another opinion or theory about art which is inescapable for artists and people in the industry. I'm still glad that Indigenous art and and culture is part of Australian culture at large no matter the issues, positions and opinions that have constituted it.
References:
- Adam Hill and Adam Geczy, "Aboriginal Art Diagnostic", Contemporary Visual Art + Culture Broadsheet 40.2 (June 2011): 133-35
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