by Jon Lackman | 15 November 2011 | Books
Without my noticing, my minivacation from blogging turned into a multi-month hiatus. Well, I’m now feeling excited to get back to it, so without further ado I’ll begin what I hope will be the first of many posts this fall. How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art is a new, provocative anthology of writings on Aboriginal contemporary art, edited by Ian McLean. In his introduction, he writes:
While the artworld revolution of the 1980s was momentous, the impact of Aboriginal art should not be overestimated … [In the 1990s] Aboriginal art occupied about 10 per cent of Australian art world discourse when it probably accounts for nearly 50 per cent of production, be this measured in dollar value or number of artists … Andrew Sayers’s Australian art (2001) was the first survey to give Aboriginal art a significant place … [I]ts place in the larger artworld is less certain. Australia, like other places distant from the larger artworld centres, was well positioned to anticipate the radical shifts that occurred in the last decades of the twentieth century. However, this new landscape is only slowly dawning on the old centres of Paris and New York. Take the massive scholarly project, Art Since 1900 (2004) … [At the end] the authors make a devastating confession: namely the obsolescence of the previous 700-odd pages. The critical methodologies they employed no longer work, as the Eurocentric world they were designed to access ‘has irretrievably disappeared.’ … [By contrast, Australian critics have found in Aboriginal art] a new way of conceiving and living with difference that is the matrix of today’s globalised world. Thus, these days, Aboriginal art is exhibited effortlessly with other contemporary art. This is the enduring legacy of Aboriginal contemporary art: it has invited us to enter a global world.
