Full Description
This edited collection examines art resulting from cross-cultural interactions between Australian First Nations and non-Indigenous people, from the British invasion to today.
Focusing on themes of collaboration and dialogue, the book includes two conversations between First Nations and non-Indigenous authors and an historian's self-reflexive account of mediating between traditional owners and an international art auction house to repatriate art. There are studies of 'reverse appropriation' by early nineteenth-century Aboriginal carvers of tourist artefacts and the production of enigmatic toa. Cross-cultural dialogue is traced from the post-war period to 'Aboriginalism' in design and the First Nations fashion industry of today. Transculturation, conceptualism, and collaboration are contextualised in the 1980s, a pivotal decade for the growth of collaborative First Nations exhibitions. Within the current circumstances of political protest in photographic portraiture and against the mining of sacred Aboriginal land, Crosscurrents in Australian First Nations and Non-Indigenous Art testifies to the need for Australian institutions to collaborate with First Nations people more often and better.
This book will appeal to students and scholars of art history, Indigenous anthropology, and museum and heritage studies.
Contents
Introduction
1. The Weight of Grief - Maree Clarke and Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll on Artist-centricity
2. On Working as an Aboriginal Museum Director and Curator of the Berndt Museum
3. Price and Provenance: William Barak as an Artist in the Market
4. The Duplicity of Emus and Kangaroos: Coats of Arms from the Australian Frontier
5. The Toa of the Dieri
6. 'The Arts are where Cultures Meet': A Cross-cultural Analysis of Aboriginal Art in Fashion and Textile Design
7. Aesthetically Similar but Politically Far Apart: The Art and Designs of Bill Onus and Byram Mansell during the Assimilationist Era
8. Shared Motives: New Art and Curatorial Collaborations in the 1980s
9. Decolonisation and Conceptual Art: Collaboration, Appropriation, Transculturation
Ian McLean
10. Widening the Aperture: Cross-cultural Collaboration - A Perspective from Borroloola
11. Wrecking Culture: Australian Iconoclash 2020
