Arts-nobbling catfights are almost always pass-the-popcorn entertainment. Not least because they end up exposing only the sheer vacuity, simple-minded greed, and schoolgirl-bitchiness of the pseudo-intellectual elite.
A great case in point was the “Demidenko Affair”. Although the putative expose of the affair was a young Helen Dale pretending to be Ukrainian, what it really exposed was the intellectual vacuity and incestuousness of the whole Arts grants-and-awards industry.
The latest arts scandal, centred around the “Indigenous Art” industry, is doing the same.
At heart is a series of videos and testimonies that allege that white “studio assistants” are in fact largely churning out canvasses supposedly by famous — and high-charging — Aboriginal artists.
The artist who created the exhibition Aboriginal Memorial, now on permanent display at the National Gallery of Australia, has described painting on Indigenous canvases by white studio staff as “immoral”.
Which begs the question: Why? It’s a tradition going back to at least the Renaissance for studio assistants to perform at least minor work on a master’s canvas.
The video was obtained during a four-month investigation by The Australian in which five Indigenous artists and six former studio staff made claims that substantial sections of Indigenous canvases were interfered with by white gallery staff at the collective’s studio in South Australia.
Ah, but it’s different when the assistant is white and the putative master Aboriginal? Note the wording: “interfered with”. Not “assisted”. As with all such arguments, try flipping it: is it immoral for a black assistant to do “white” art? Good luck with that one.
Djon Mundine described the practice as “the ultimate bloody sin”.
“For (a white person) to say, ‘Oh put a circle over there’ is totally unacceptable,” he said about a comment made in the video.
“Because all these circles are actually places, they are sacred sites, and how they are arranged in a composition is to do with fact, and a spiritual journey. And for someone who (doesn’t have the knowledge) to be saying, ‘Oh put a circle over there’ because it will make it look flasher is bloody immoral and it is the ultimate bloody sin to do that.”
While this argument has some merit, what does it say about modern art which appropriates, say, Christian religious imagery to decidedly non, or even anti-Christian ends? What about African artists depicting the Semitic characters of the Bible as negroid Africans?
But then the bog-standard whining about “colonialism” starts…
He described painting on Indigenous canvases being like the last phase of the colonial process. The colonisers cut down the trees, he said, they got rid of the native animals and then they hunted the Aborigines so they could run cattle and sheep.
“Then comes the third phase of colonialism,” Mr Mundine said.
“The third thing they take is the intellectual property – the Dreaming, the spiritual story of the land – and that’s what’s being taken away now by (white people) thinking ‘oh we can paint how we want to paint and how we want to interpret it’.
“You may as well have these desert paintings painted in Bali to a formula.”
Instead, we’re getting them painted in Papunya to a formula?
But the “colonialism” argument is ludicrous at best, mendacious at worst. Mostly because, if it weren’t for British colonisation, the whole, multi-million dollar industry of dot-painting wouldn’t even exist. Not just because of the white culture-vultures with too much money to spare. The dot-painting on canvas technique in question owes its very existence to “colonisation”.
As even the website Creative Spirits admits:
You believe that dots are the dominant and traditional Aboriginal art style.
But is dot painting really traditional Aboriginal art?
You’ll be surprised to learn that dot painting on canvas emerged in central Australia only in the early 1970s as a result of Aboriginal people working together with a white art school teacher, Geoffrey Bardon.
It was Bardon who gave his students acrylic paints and encouraged them to paint a mural. Their elders got interested, and, presto!, an entire, lucrative, industry was born.
[Senior Indigenous artist, Fiona Foley] said the APYACC was saturating the market and that it needed to feed its three commercial galleries in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. “They have to keep pumping this work out.”
The Australian
And that seems to be the real issue: people who are making an awful lot of money out of an industry invented by a white schoolteacher in the 1970s want to keep supply restricted to drive up prices.