feature Australian aboriginal art T
The Art of Everywhen
Australian Aboriginal art is increasingly popular with American collectors, and has recently featured in a number of major exhibitions. While it draws on ancient traditions, it is often insistently contemporary in its memorable responses to current and recent times
Writer brian p. kennedy he rise of a commercial market for works of art made by Aboriginal Australians has increasingly been recognised in recent years.1 There have been numerous exhibitions in Europe, among them ‘Remembering Forward: Australian Aboriginal Painting Since 1960’ at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2010–11) and ‘At the Source of Aboriginal Painting’ at the Musée du quai Branly, Paris (2012–13). Aboriginal artists first represented Australia at the Venice Biennale more than two decades ago, but in spite of many exhibitions, indigenous art from Australia has taken time to gain acceptance within museum collections of contemporary art. The valiant effort by the Melbourne-based art dealer Gabrielle Pizzi to have Aboriginal art accepted in the Cologne Art Fair during the 1990s is now a historical marker, because many international art fairs have since included indigenous artists from Australia, most recently Documenta 13 at Kassel, Germany, in 2012. This autumn, the Royal Academy of Arts in London, in partnership with the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), Canberra, will host a major show of works by indigenous and non-indigenous Australian artists, titled simply ‘Australia’, and drawn from the most significant Australian collections (21 September–8 December).
Asked when Australia and the world first became seriously interested in Aboriginal art, Ron Radford, Director of the NGA, has said that: ‘You can pinpoint it to the 1988 Bicentennial [of permanent European settlement in Australia]. That’s when people would come up to the front desk [at the Art Gallery of South Australia, where he was then
Director] and say, “Can you direct me to the Aboriginal art?” ’2 State galleries in Australia had been collecting Aboriginal art since the 1950s, but the Bicentennial encouraged serious reflection about the wrongs done to indigenous people. The NGA commissioned an extraordinary work made up of 200 memorial poles, hollow log coffins painted by artists from Arnhem Land in the Australian Northern Territory. Probably the most studied Aboriginal artwork, the Aboriginal Memorial is today the centrepiece of some 600 works in 11 galleries in the NGA’s $107million new wing, which opened in October 2010. The gallery, whose collection of around 8,000 works of Australian indigenous art is the world’s largest, has organised indigenous art exhibitions in many countries over the years, and in 2009 sent a major show, ‘Australian Indigenous Art
30 apollo july/august 2013
