Epilogue

As far as art is concerned, Australia has been an exciting place to be over the past 30 years. ¹ Thirty years ago Australian art museums and galleries, though positioned in the Asia-Pacific region, operated as if they were firmly part of the Western art world. Certainly Australian art discourse had moments of separating itself off and differentiating its art practice from the art worlds of Europe and America, but it did so only in dialogue with them. ² At the beginning of the 1970s the only art gallery in Australia that contained significant collections of Aboriginal art was the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, whose major collections of Arnhem Land and Tiwi art had only been acquired a decade before. It was shortly followed by the Museums and Art Galleries of the Northern Territory. And although some institutions such as the National Gallery of Victoria have magnificent Asian collections, collections of contemporary Asian art were lacking. The explanation for that state of affairs lies in the recent history of Australia as a European colony, in the fact that fine art or high art as a segregated category was a development of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe, and that until recently the history of world arts had been biased towards the European canon. The dominant paradigm is strongly reflected in a letter from Brett Whiteley to Lloyd Rees written shortly before the latter’s death:

I know Lloyd that I will continue to be influenced by you until the day I too, come up to, giving in, and to giving over, and I know someone will pick up something of what I have done, and carry the mantle on into the 2000s, whatever shape and form that will take: so the profound thread, that leads its way back to Leonardo and back through the Millennium to Egypt, that wonderful line, the most precious club in the world, that occasionally gets new members and bids farewell to those whose innings of dreamings, are done. ³

The ‘innings of dreamings’ may add an Australian flavour but fundamentally it reflects a Eurocentric view of art history, in this case connected directly to art practice. And until recently this was the dominant view. Indigenous art, if it entered art history at all, was placed in the category of ‘primitive’, ‘ethnographic’ or ‘tribal’ art. Indigenous art was also part of world art history in as much as it influenced and connected with European art movements. After that influence was over, indigenous art ceased to exist as fine art, since it had become contaminated by the colonial encounter. It was no longer pure. The 1984 exhibition Primitivism in Twentieth-Century Art curated by William Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe in which indigenous artworks were exhibited in relation to the European works that they influenced is today seen to represent the apogee of that perspective. ⁴ I think it is fair to say that the criticism generated by the exhibition also made it a turning point in attitudes to non-Western art. While in many respects the exhibition itself was a magnificent achievement in drawing attention to the influence of indigenous art on Western art, as an exhibition it was really about Western art history more than, say, African or Oceanic art. It emphasized the neglect of indigenous art in its own right by art historians and the absence of exhibitions of indigenous art in art institutions. Australian Aboriginal art was absent from the exhibition and indeed hardly had a significant presence even in the primitive art category. Australian Aborigines as a hunter-gather society were not expected to produce art, and Australian society preferred to push its indigenous population into the past. Contemporary Aboriginal art was almost a contradiction in terms.