This post links back to this earlier one. The painting works with the ancient and the modern and breaks down the boundaries between the two: traditional knowledge and modern form:

Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Love Story, 1992, Acrylic on canvas

Colonial tropes of the ‘native’ were often expressed in terms of the divide between orality and literacy, so that ‘for imperialism, the idea of literacy and education, even where these were imposed on already literate societies, represented a defining separation between the civilised and the barbarous nature’.Writing is represented as succeeding orality in time and superseding it as the primary currency of social and cultural organisation, particularly in the context of expanding imperial formations and the nation-state.

Those aspects of oral indigenous culture that remain or persist in societies where literacy has assumed dominance are seen as ‘residual’ remnants of a prior, pre-modern order of knowledge and communication. Similarly, the indigenous peoples or communities who use primarily oral modes of communication to make social identities meaningful are constructed as culturally marginal in relation to modernity’s well-documented self-identification with literacy and textuality. Within this framework, the oral is invariably figured as doomed to extinction by writing.

The repressive rhetoric that locates Indigenous peoples and cultures in various formations of ‘pastness’ has traditionally been shored up in educational and literary contexts by the strength of the split posited between orality and literacy. This split is most pronounced when it is encountered as part of the logic of modernity’s distinction between ‘the imperial centre and the illiterate, barbarous, childlike races of empire’