{"id":4424,"date":"2013-08-08T13:56:34","date_gmt":"2013-08-08T03:56:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/?p=4424"},"modified":"2013-08-12T16:23:32","modified_gmt":"2013-08-12T06:23:32","slug":"article-make-it-new-make-it-now-just-what-is-it-that-makes-australian-aboriginal-art-so-appealing-so-contemporary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/article-make-it-new-make-it-now-just-what-is-it-that-makes-australian-aboriginal-art-so-appealing-so-contemporary\/","title":{"rendered":"ARTICLE: Make It New \/ Make It Now – \u201cJust What Is It That Makes Australian Aboriginal Art So Appealing, So Contemporary?\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a conclusion of the series of events related to the exhibition Crossing Culture at the Toledo Museum of Art (US), IDAIA is sharing a relevant article written by Will Owen reporting his conversation with Henry Skerritt converation on \u201cWhat Is It That Makes Australian Aboriginal Art So Appealing, So Contemporary<\/i>?\u201d. The two men interrogate Indigenous art in a broader sense, of world art – including the Western canon.<\/p>\n

\"Make<\/a>

Paddy Bedford, l. to r., Emu Dreaming at Mt King; Two Women Looking at the Bedford Downs Massacre Burning Place; Bedford Downs Massacre
Photo \u00a9 Will Owen<\/p><\/div>\n

Make It New \/ Make It\u00a0Now
\n<\/b>By Will Owen, 4 August 2013<\/p>\n

\u201cOn July 12, at the opening of the final weekend of the Crossing Cultures<\/i> exhibition at the Toledo Museum of Art, Henry Skerritt came into town from Pittsburgh to join me in a conversation that Henry aptly titled (appropriating a line from the British artist Richard Hamilton), \u201cJust What Is It That Makes Australian Aboriginal Art So Appealing, So Contemporary<\/i>?\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a pleasure to finally share the stage with Henry. \u00a0His knowledge not just of Aboriginal art, but of Indigenous art in a broader sense, of world art (including the Western canon), and the philosophical underpinnings of contemporary art history, theory, and criticism is fairly staggering. \u00a0It\u2019s been a long time since I was in graduate school reading Gadamer and Derrida and I turned away from my studies into librarianship before theory became core to humanistic studies. \u00a0So sometimes I have a hard time keeping up with Henry, and if I misrepresent him here, I beg his forgiveness and his corrections.<\/p>\n

The theme of Aboriginal art as contemporary<\/i> art (and not just fine<\/i> art) is one that has been bandied about over the course of the ten months that Crossing Cultures<\/i> was on display at the Hood Museum and in Toledo. \u00a0In order to discuss the concept, though, Henry backed up to talk first about modernisn. \u00a0Showing photographs of work by the likes of Damien Hirst and Marina Abramovic, Henry argued that these works, although created quite recently, are actually engaged with modernity, a period he defined as beginning around the sixteenth century. \u00a0It is characterized by \u201cindustrialization, nationalism, mass media\u2014the invention of the printing press, [and] historical time.\u201d \u00a0Modernist artists, in one way or another, grapple with those themes in their work.<\/p>\n

The contemporary period, in contrast, is characterized by globalization and the rise of Third World powers. \u00a0The issues raised by the changing perspectives brought to bear by an increasingly interconnected world are the proper subject of what Henry would argue is truly contemporary art. \u00a0I\u2019ll put words in Henry\u2019s mouth and say that I understood modernism to be a somewhat insular reaction to rapid cultural change in the Western world. \u00a0Its products represent the artist\u2019s attempt either\u00a0to understand that change, or to fall back onto a psychological analysis of the inability to understand that change given conventional structures of thought. \u00a0I can relate to this somewhat more easily in literature, my area of graduate study. \u00a0There, the rise of the interior monologue and stream-of-consciousness narrative among the literary Moderns\u2014Joyce, Woolf, Proust\u2014mirrored the fracturing of the world afflicted by the trends that Henry identified: particularly the invention of historical time with its attendant demon of progress.<\/p>\n

In contrast, contemporary artists are acutely aware of intercultural or even transcultural issues. The necessity to operate across conventional cultural bounds forces them to invest in the struggles of the moment. \u00a0Quoting from Terry Smith, Henry asserted<\/p>\n

Contemporary art is\u2013perhaps for the first time in history\u2013truly an art of the world. \u00a0It comes <\/i>from the whole world and frequently tries to imagine the world <\/i>as a differentiated yet inevitably connected whole. (Terry Smith, <\/i>Contemporary Art: World Currents, Laurence King Publishing, 2011).<\/i><\/p>\n

For the inward-facing Moderns, painting became an end in itself: Monet\u2019s inability to capture even the most fleeting impression of external reality led to the likes of Rothko, for whom the painting is a thing unto itself, without external referents at all. \u00a0The contemporary artist, in contrast, is always reaching out beyond local convention and casting his work into the space where value systems confront one another.<\/p>\n

The Modernist worldview, says Henry, was captured best by Ezra Pound\u2013the Modernist sans\u00a0\u00e9gal<\/i>\u2013in his dictum \u201cmake it new.\u201d \u00a0The challenge for the contemporary artist is rather, \u201cmake it now.\u201d \u00a0Engage with the other. \u00a0And this is precisely what Aboriginal artists have been doing since they made the first contemporary paintings in 1912. \u00a0Yes, over one hundred years ago, when bark painters took up their brushes to reach across the chasm that separated them from that \u201cother\u201d we know as Baldwin Spencer.<\/p>\n

This concept strikes at the heart of another theme that has resonated throughout all the discussions of Aboriginal art that took place over three months in Toledo. \u00a0That is the precept that the art which hung on the gallery walls was created to instruct, and specifically to instruct \u201cthe other,\u201d the whitefella, about the values and traditions of Aboriginal society\u201d… [Read more]<\/i><\/b><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a conclusion of the series of events related to the exhibition Crossing Culture at the Toledo Museum of Art (US), IDAIA is sharing a relevant article written by Will Owen reporting his conversation with Henry Skerritt converation on \u201cWhat Is It That Makes Australian Aboriginal Art So Appealing, So Contemporary?\u201d. The two men interrogate Indigenous art in a broader sense, of world art – including the Western canon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4425,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[832,449,143,680,841,679,253],"class_list":["post-4424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-releases","tag-aboriginal-art","tag-contemporary-art","tag-crossing-cultures","tag-henry-skerritt","tag-idaia","tag-late","tag-will-owen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4424"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4427,"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4424\/revisions\/4427"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}