ABSTRACT
There was never going to be a simple conclusion to this book. The topic I have chosen to write about is one of great complexity and is written in the context of rapid change. It is a book about art and the meta-theoretical issues of anthropology and art history, but it is also a book about the ethics of the colonial encounter and its consequences. It is a book about the importance of time in placing ideas and actions in a context that enables them to be understood; but it is also about the need to escape from the constraints of time and particular temporal orderings of things. The artists who seized on what they referred to as a ‘primitive art’ as a means of escaping from their place in time have much in common with the contemporary Indigenous artists of Arnhem Land who are using art to escape from the way the have been positioned, by recent intellectual and colonial history, as prior to the present in which they live. The dialogue over art remains an active and contested one.
