Indigenous Contemporary Art in the Global Market: the case of Australia: course description
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The course will trace the emergence, development and commercialisation of contemporary Australian Indigenous visual art productions (including performance, film and new media) in the intercultural space of colonial and postcolonial Australia from the beginning of the 20th century to today. While Indigenous art productions maintain socio cultural continuities at local level (within a land tenure and political system expressed through a religious idiom), its significance emerges from the representations and reclassification of these “intercultural objects” into economic, political and aesthetic value spheres determined by Western definitions, and articulated by discourses and practices controlled by the dominant society and art market – the exotic, the authentic, the traditional, the spiritual ( Langton 1996; Myers 2002; and Marcus and Myers 1995). The meaning of Indigenous contemporary art will thus be explored and analysed not only through the decodification of its symbolism but also through a study of its “controlled migration” between two different systems of meaning: from ethnographic exemplar in a museum to work of art exhibited in an art gallery, from a collective cultural expression to individual creativity, from politics to aesthetics (Clifford 1988; Morphy 2008). Particular attention will be given to the representation and circulation of this art in Italy. Through a series of case studies, the course will critically discuss the ways in which Australian Indigenous art has been appropriated and valued in economic, and especially moral terms by Australian institutions, galleries, artists, and the public within the border logic of recognition of Indigenous peoples (concession of land rights, construction of a new national identity narrative, “modernist primitivism”, Davis 2007; Haebich and Taylor 2007; Langton 2003; Nicoll 1996; Rubin 1984). The course will also draw attention to the ways in which this art, in all its diverse expressions, remains one of the most efficacious tactics to voice Indigenous identity and political claims aimed at confronting and challenging Western framings, concepts and criteria (Biddle 2007; Deger 2006; Michaels 1994).
