welcome … farewell … and everything in between
Since that critical moment, when our leaders decided that we would survive and that we would endure, we have learnt new ways of holding knowledge and communicating our stories to others. We have also learnt much about the world beyond our own tribal lands and we have learnt that there is much power out there - a power that is greater than the blood-lust of the white men who still want to hunt us. That is why we write, that is why we dance, that is why we make films and act on stages - and that is why we paint.
- Sam Watson, Voices of the Land Denied
I wish to acknowledge and pay my respects to the traditional custodians of the area where the greater Brisbane area is sited; this is Turrubul and Jagera country.
Did you hear about the new Aboriginal art website? It’s at www.aboriginalart dot dot dot dot dot dot … I don’t know if this is funny but I do know that it says something about the way Aboriginal art is thought about and written about; that there is an ideal about Aboriginal art that can be reduced to or revered as a stylistic trope like the dot. Yet dots are everywhere in other artforms - as pixels and punctuation - so the reference must allude to particular kinds of dots – painted dots or dot paintings. These dot paintings are regarded as the ‘real Aboriginal art’. I’m not the first person to say this and most recently heard Djon Mundine address appropriation and the way in which non-Indigenous people, as buyers and collectors of particular kinds of Aboriginal artworks, perceive them as a kind of spiritual salve.
In talking with about half the participating artists of the Australian Network for Art and Technology's Indigenous New Media Lab about new media writing, I have expanded my brief to include text-based art because I have a research interest in this area. I’m not talking on behalf of anyone or for anyone – these are just my encounters and perceptions as a kind of writer-in-residence.
Michael Aird has just spoken and Jenny Fraser thanks him for coming to talk saying that “we haven’t had the opportunity to be blackfellas together in the Lab”. Others have commented that they would have enjoyed talking with other Indigenous artists about their work and their lives – it doesn’t matter that their work is not new media as such because it’s the stories that take precedence. A few days ago, the Lab artists visited an art centre at the Sunshine Coast for a bush tucker lunch prepared by Dale Scott of The Dilly Bag and a performance from The Gubbi Gubbi Dancers before heading off to the beach. Talking space. Word space. Sharing space. Cultural space. Listening space. In the following week Maori artist Lisa Reihana talks about the Meeting House in Maori culture and how in that meeting space and in sleeping, eating, talking and listening together, collective knowledge is both maintained and created. Culture lives and breathes through these interactions. What everyone says matters and matters deeply. At the closing of the photomedia exhibition Out of the Dark at Wisearts, where the visiting artists to the Lab were welcomed and introduced by Jenny, the exhibition curator, visiting Aotearoa artist Lonnie Hutchinson spoke a Maori proverb – I can’t recall the full translation but the second half was something like ‘… what is most important? The people, the people, the people.’
In his talk, Michael discusses, among many things, his book Brisbane Blacks which tells the history of the Indigenous community in this city, drawing on oral account and photographic heritage. I am reminded of many events and many people who have shaped a community and lived their lives and raised their families and maintained a living culture in this place. He’s talking about respect and pride and belonging and much, much more. So when people talk about ‘dot paintings’ and talk about them as the ‘real Aboriginal art’, I can’t help but wonder if they are not also saying that this ‘real Aboriginal art’ can only be produced by the ‘real Aborigine’ who lives in the central desert [See Richard Bell, ‘ WHAT. CHEW. GUN. ADO?’, LOCAL ART , Issue 5 July 2003]. It’s another kind of dispossession from cultural space and locale by holding up an ideal type of Aboriginality, from a non-Indigenous perspective. It’s apparent that predominantly non-Indigenous critics and institutions have played a role in perpetuating the myths of Aboriginality in this country. But peel away one stereotype and there’s another and another and another.
So when Michael talks about the white historian who has sought to discredit the rigour of his work, when the white historian defers to the archive and the written document as the only truth, when the white historian misquotes and misrepresents Michael’s research, when the white historian says oral account and tradition are meaningless and without value, we encounter another entrenched myth and we see racism unfold in a most wretched, bald and vapid way. To say these things is to say that there can be only one history and only one way of telling and writing history. It is to say that the words of Indigenous people cannot be believed. So words do matter.
Michael’s remarkable efforts to write history over the last 20 years has seen him develop a personal archive of hundreds of thousands of photographs and newspaper clippings relating to Indigenous history and culture. He explained that he is of the generation that could make a choice to be a historian or an artist or a filmmaker or a writer or a broadcaster or a designer or a new media artist or an actor. Prior to the 1980s, communities struggled to set up basic services and infrastructure of the life sustaining variety – healthcare, legal services, housing and education. Cultural rights mean different things to different people at different times. As Michael explained, in Queensland, the 1982 Commonwealth Games was a watershed moment. Gradually barriers have broken down but not without persistence and fortitude. Self-determination requires determination first and foremost!!
I've watched this history as a kind of implicated observer. It’s taken more than two decades for a cultural centre to get the necessary approval to be constructed in Musgrave Park, an important gathering and meeting place for Murri people. Murri Radio, which ultimately evolved to 4AAA, started as a two hour program on public radio station 4ZZZ-FM. Then there’s the song Brisbane Blacks written by Dennis Conlon and performed by him with his band Mop and the Dropouts for decades. Performed everywhere, I am told, as the anthem of this community and when the radio airwaves opened up, it was played incessantly, much to the consternation of elements within the predominantly white radio station collective who argued about ‘good radio and bad radio’ (as a member of that collective, the words echo in my memory because they were so accusatory, so biased, so shameful), but Aboriginal people could turn on the radio and finally hear something affirming about and for them and it was deadly radio! This is a history that sings. The Balance 1990 exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery was the first exhibition of contemporary Aboriginal art in a public institution. Michael’s exhibition, Portraits of our Elders was also a first for the Queensland Museum. Carl Fisher, one of the participating artists in the Lab, together with partner Christine Peacock set up Murriimage in 1985 and has worked since recording the goings-on of this place, this community, this culture. Carl says that when the museum was in its old premises, Aboriginal people couldn’t go in there because the remains of the dead were on display. Disciplines like history and anthropology and archaeology exclude through their alleged scientism and objectivity. All this only happened in the last two decades and it is what we walk into when something like the Indigenous New Media Lab is held/hosted in Brisbane. Read Brisbane Blacks to get the full picture.
Michael, through his approach to writing history, makes the point that many stories and many people make a community and make a culture. But that there are also many ways of telling a story. So this issue - this question posed by non-Indigenous institutions - of who are the ‘real Aborigines’ and what is the ‘real Aboriginal art’ is a question that’s just insulting and demeaning and derogatory. Jenny also says that urban and contemporary arts and new media arts suffer as a result of this most revealing question – in survey exhibitions, these works receive the least attention, the least space and least critical attention. Apparently, urban artists and new media artists are not producing the ‘real Aboriginal art’.
I started off, here, talking about me talking with this group of about half the participating artists at the Lab: Kye McGuire, Jilda Simpson, Roseanne Viney, Jenny Fraser, Michelle Blakeney, Tony Albert, Carl Fisher and Michael Torres; Alan Warrie, Charmaine Wharton Wall and Lisa Reihana drop in towards the end. This isn’t about me, not my whiteness (as a non-Indigenous woman) or brownness (as an ethnic woman). But because all things have multiple edges, these things - bla[c]kness, whiteness, brownness - are also unavoidable, inextricably woven into our listenings and talkings. Charmaine generously explained to me something about language after a discussion about naming the Lab as Binnung Woolah Dahgo (translated as ‘ listen talking together’). Charmaine said that many words in Indigenous languages have multiple meanings – ‘binnung’ for example means both ‘ears’ and ‘listening’ – and that the intention of a speaker can only be ascertained from the way the words are spoken. Listening requires a face-to-face exchange because this is an oral culture and a spoken language. And language, keeping language alive, is vital: Jenny Fraser’s work has focused on mapping language groups and traditional lands while Robert Paul is working on an interactive cdrom that aims to preserve the Indigenous language and culture of north Queensland Aboriginal people as well as explore language, family, food, environment and general information about the clans of this area.
Rather than speak about new media writing, because none of the artists have stated that they are interested in this area, I have shifted the emphasis of my talking to ‘doing things with words’ so as to explore image, language, text and story within media and artistic contexts. And we explore some of the many artworks by contemporary Indigenous artists working with text as well as take a look at new media based approaches to writing and story. Computing has its own languages too. Generally, virtual space is a textual environment that’s culturally specific and located, virtual space, as we experience it, is written. I bring to this discussion my own sensibilities as an arts writer but also want to look at some of the ways visual arts practices and text leverage off each other through criticism, didactic labels, catalogue essays and the like. Because I am currently researching this field of practice, I am kind of thinking out loud. Formally at least, there is no visual arts practice without a range of texts that both elucidate and extend the meaning of those artworks. It’s through this writing, to some degree, that an artwork becomes art.
It has struck me recently that many contemporary Indigenous artists are working with and using text. In fact, exhibitions of contemporary Indigenous artwork, like Blak Insights at the Queensland Art Gallery or 1 Square Mile at the Brisbane City Gallery, increasingly seem to include text-based works by Indigenous artists. Those of us who like to get theoretical can wheel out postmodernism and postcolonialism to unpack some aspects of this. And so, this [re]working of text evokes many concerns and processes: word as image or sign, word/s as label or representation, word/s as utterance or articulation, word/s as instruments of colonisation and power, word/s as translation, word/s as identity ... Or language as community, language as home, language as land, language as story, language as culture …
Postcolonialism, Indigenist thinking and the artists themselves have provided us with many ways of addressing such practices. My preference is always to hear what the artists are saying. Critics and reviewers continue to dismiss these imaged words as eruptive outpourings from the ‘angry black man’ like so much fear and loathing of Jimmy Blacksmith or the late Charles Perkins or Murrandoo Yanner or Gary Foley – Richard Bell, Gordon Hookey, Vernon Ah Kee, Gordon Bennett and others described as ‘angry’ because they make direct statements and demand a response from their audiences. Then words like ‘confronting’, ‘offensive’ and ‘provocative’ are penned. The first words in a newspaper article the following weekend about Gordon Bennett - ‘Gordon Bennett is an angry artist …’. It would appear that ‘black anger’ – usually gendered (and it hasn’t escaped my attention that I’ve only named men here) – is another cultural stereotype perpetuated through the language games of reviewing and media. Or worse still, one-liners in reviews that reduce the imaged word to form – Vernon Ah Kee’s work described in a newspaper review as ‘concrete poetry’ and nothing else (‘whydidn’ttheracistcrosstheroad?becausehedidn’twanttoseetheotherside’, 2003). Or worse still, contemporary and urban Indigenous art characterised as ‘identity art’ or ‘overtly political’.
However, there is more going on than what critics would have us believe. Passions, like culture and history, run much deeper. I don’t doubt for a second that there is anger in some of the work of the artists mentioned here – just as there is sadness, reason and joy, just as there is conceptual, artistic and intellectual acumen and rigour - but I do not believe that anger is what characterises these artworks just because they are direct statements or because they talk back or because they occupy cultural space. Is self-reflexivity too much to ask of critics and reviewers? This way of reviewing or describing these artworks says more of whiteness than of blackness. The appropriation of ‘black anger’ by critics and media perpetuates yet another stereotype with no interrogation of the cultural specificity of works by urban Indigenous artists – and its very much like the debate about ‘real Aboriginal art’ where Aboriginality becomes a category for contestation by, of all people, art critics.
I ask the artists about this – the looks on their faces say it all. ‘Whhhaaaattt?’ Tony Albert points out that this perception of the work being ‘angry’ is wrong-headed because the work speaks on many different levels. Others in the room are nodding. The works are considered, considerate and founded on fact. We also talk a little about Richard Bell’s essay, ‘Bell’s Theorem: Aboriginal Art is a White Thing’. I recall reading a sniping response to this text from a prominent ‘expert’ on Indigenous art who claimed that Bell’s analysis of the art market was outdated (and therefore, one might conclude, irrelevant and inauthentic). Bell’s analysis draws on his own experience and observations so it’s extraordinary to question his experience from the perspective of being outdated. The works are telling about stakes far greater than a critic’s discomfort or need to question authenticity and far greater than shrill heckling sprayed with white moralistic overtones in the guise of critical response. There are other considerations too and Michael Torres said, in response to Michael Aird’s talk, that his culture is an oral culture and that while words and language are important, writing is not necessary to telling stories and sharing knowledge.
Later. At home. I am flipping through Brisbane Blacks and as I read and look at the photographs again, I realise, although am not surprised, that many people are wearing political t-shirts or carrying banners or placards. Protest - taking back and talking back - has also been a necessary and significant part of community life. I realise the words are everywhere and these words have been integral in shaping the contours of contemporary Indigenous society: ‘We have survived’; ‘Thou shalt not steal’; ‘Land rights now’; ‘We are hungry for our land’; ‘Always was, always will be Aboriginal land’. The words are imaged in photographs, films and news reports as well as worn on t-shirts. So the words – as images - have become part of the visual culture and visual record of this urban community (like the anthropological and ethnographic photographs in the libraries and museums which Indigenous artists have ‘reclaimed’). Many of the artists involved in the Lab (including locally based artists Jenny, Tony and Carl) work in this way – printing t-shirts, designing stickers and posters, video recording gatherings as well as using text and wordplay as part of their image and art making and this was evident in the showcase of works emerging from the Lab. While this is certainly not the full story and while some may fail to see the texture of community life in relation to the artworld, it is perhaps one way that a specifically Aboriginal community life and Indigenist community history has shaped and influenced the work of contemporary urban artists.
