ABSTRACT
In a reception history, the challenges in making a contribution to the history of Aboriginal art – as well as to the way in which it was perceived from ‘outside’ – begin in the process of peeling back the layers of reception to ‘the thing itself’ (Ding an sich): namely, carvings in bark, paintings on the body, movements and drawings in the sand. If, by taking Blandowski’s archive as a beginning in the reception of such markings, we review the material that was extracted from an Aboriginal order and reclassified by museums, we will eventually create very different terms with which to understand the objects.
