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October 13, 2010
Susan Lowish in European Vision and Aboriginal Art: Blindness and Insight in the Work of Bernard Smith Thesis Eleven August 2005 argues that Bernard Smith is unable to engage with indigenous/ aboriginal art in an art historical context. Smith barely mentions Aboriginal art. The reason, according to Lowish:
The logic of the argument in Place, Taste and Tradition and in Australian Painting excludes art by Indigenous Australians by virtue of the fact that it is constructed around the model of centre/periphery. As Bernard writes in Place, Taste and Tradition, ‘this study is largely concerned with the mutations which have occurred in styles and fashions originating overseas as they have been assimilated into conditions . . . existing in Australia’ (Smith, 1945: 21). Smith is not concerned with Aboriginal art because it is outside the margins. His ‘marginalised other’ already exists as Australian painting itself.
Smith accentuate Aboriginal art’s difference from Australian art as the reason for its exclusion instead, of points to an inability on the part of settler and modernist Australians to recognize Aboriginal art as art. Australia’s art history as characterized by the non-recognition and non-acceptance of Aboriginal art.
Lowish says:
Without resorting to creating further divisions within art, what is required is a broadening of perspectives. In Place, Taste, and Tradition, Smith writes of ‘the habit of vision’ by which early colonists viewed the Australian landscape; these colonists had a distinctly European vision of Aboriginal art. Smith also writes of distortion of vision, ‘found most strongly in the depiction of objects about which visual habits or mental preconcep- tions had established an image that possessed considerable resistance to change’ (Smith, 1945: 19–20). Is not a similar distortion possible in the perception of Aboriginal art?
She says that Smith’s works European Vision and the South Pacific (1960) and Imagining the Pacific (1992) demonstrate his skill at producing a critique of the established norms of art history and the use of art by scientists and explorers. In both these works, Smith identifies different aesthetic tastes that dominated European perceptions in different epochs. He uses them to define the limits and constraints of European understanding of other lands, peoples and cultures. How disappointing then that Smith’s insight does not extend to his perception of Aboriginal art.
Smith's great insight lies in recognizing that aesthetic conventions shape perception and it it is only a small step further to apply this logic to the reception of Aboriginal art.
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An interesting post on a difficult and nuanced issue. Of course, many non-Aboriginal Australians - and I'm an American writing this - look at contemporary Aboriginal art without being able to see past the gut-wrenching and largely undigested history of institutionalized racism that still marks the nation. Many white Australians are incapable of accepting that descendants of the nation's first inhabitants might actually be creative giants capable of producing masterpieces only tangentially related to the dominant mass culture.
But is it also possible for contemporary aboriginal art to be positively received through criteria of taste inappropriate to the art? When, as in the case of certain Western desert works, the content of the work can't be divulged to a ritually uninitiated audience, and the biography and creative impulses of the artist are all but unknown (as in the case of almost every major Papunya Tula artist, for example), by what criteria, exactly, can such work be assessed? It always boils down to formalist evaluations based on Western modernism. Is that really enough, or does contemporary Aboriginal art ask more of its viewers - given the 'black box' that surrounds content and artistic implulse, perhaps even more than a non-initiated viewer could ever supply?