Aboriginal Art Identity And Appropriation

The belief held by Aboriginal people that their art is ultimately related to their identity, and to the continued existence of their culture, has made the protection of indigenous peoples' art a pressing matter in many postcolonial countries. The issue has prompted calls for stronger copyright legislation to protect Aboriginal art. Although this claim is not particular to Australian Aboriginal people, the Australian experience clearly illustrates this debate. In this work, Elizabeth Burns Coleman analyses art from an Australian Aboriginal community to interpret Aboriginal claims about the relationship between their art, identity and culture, and how the art should be protected in law. Through her study of Yolngu art, Coleman finds Aboriginal claims to be substantially true. This is an issue equally relevant to North American debates about the appropriation of indigenous art, and the book additionally engages with this literature.

A story of magic, family, a mysterious stranger . . . and a band of marauding raccoons. Otter Lake is a sleepy Anishnawbe community where little happens. Until the day a handsome stranger pulls up astride a 1953 Indian Chief motorcycle – and turns Otter Lake completely upside down. Maggie, the Reserve’s chief, is swept off her feet, but Virgil, her teenage son, is less than enchanted. Suspicious of the stranger’s intentions, he teams up with his uncle Wayne – a master of aboriginal martial arts – to drive the stranger from the Reserve. And it turns out that the raccoons are willing to lend a hand.

This highly original book shows that Australian art, and the writing of its history, has since settlement been in a dialog (although often submerged) with Aboriginal art and culture; and that this dialog is inextricably interwoven with the struggle to find an identity in the antipodes. McLean argues that the colonizing culture invested far more in indigenous aspects of the country and its inhabitants than it has been willing to admit. He considers artists and their work within their cultural context, and in light of contemporary theory.

This book is an investigation of the way the Aboriginal art phenomenon has been entangled with Australian society’s negotiation of Indigenous people’s status within the nation. Through critical reflection on Aboriginal art’s idiosyncrasies as a fine arts movement, its vexed relationship with money, and its mediation of the politics of identity and recognition, this study illuminates the mutability of Aboriginal art’s meanings in different settings. It reveals that this mutability is a consequence of the fact that a range of governmental, activist and civil society projects have appropriated the art’s vitality and metonymic power in national public culture, and that Aboriginal art is as much a phenomenon of visual and commercial culture as it is an art movement. Throughout these examinations, Fisher traces the utopian and dystopian currents of thought that have crystallised around the Aboriginal art movement and which manifest the ethical conundrums that underpin the settler state condition.

Catalogue of an exhibition originally held in the First People's Hall of the Canadian Museum of Civilization, curated by Gerald McMaster.

In recognizing the established intellectual and institutional authority of Aboriginal artists, curators, and academics working in cultural institutions and universities, this volume serves as an important primer on key questions and issues accompanying the changing representational practices of the community cultural center, the public art gallery and the anthropological museum.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art explores the effects of Queensland government policies on urban First Nation artists. While such art has often been misinterpreted as derivative lesser copies of ‘true’ Indigenous works, this book unveils new histories and understandings about the mixed legacy left for Queensland Indigenous artists. Gretchen Stolte uses rich ethnographic detail to illuminate how both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists understand and express their heritage. She specifically focuses on artwork at the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art studio in the Tropical North Queensland College of Technical and Further Education (TNQT TAFE), Cairns. Stolte's ethnography further develops methodologies in art history and anthropology by identifying additional methods for understanding how art is produced and meaning is created.

Master's Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject Communications - Intercultural Communication, grade: 1.2, University of Kaiserslautern, language: English, abstract: Politics of Space ́s idea is to present a body of work that address some of the key questions that have held my attention over several years in relation to the nature and peculiar concerns of contemporary non-Western art, especially on how Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Art is perceived, received and read in significant parts of the public where cross-cultural exchange occurs. Significant areas of research in relation to Contemporary Indigenous Art are not only certain institutions within the art world such as art centres, art galleries and museums but also public areas like universities, government bureaus and particularly touristic institutions, as a vast majority of non-indigenous people experience non-Western art in this context only.