printable version PDF version

Cultural Genocide
by laurie Tuesday, Jan 22 2013, 1:56am
international / prose / post

"... it’s a fraud, like Barack Obama."

It is with much sadness that I read the AFP article on an Australian Aboriginal ‘Art’ exhibition in Paris; it reminded me of my days in the great Australian desert country, the ‘red centre’ or ‘outback,’ as it is known to the descendants of white invaders.

I learned from remaining tribals in those days that Aboriginal depictions are entirely totemic or a semiotic narrative form; totemic depictions not separate from the timeless REALITY in which indigenous Australians lived for millions of years until white colonisation.

Deprived of their living culture and totems today’s Aboriginal ‘artists’ paint commodity art on demand to be hung in museums and sold in white ‘Art’ galleries. These depictions lack the narrative of the tribal totems and the socially cohesive and culturally preserving power invested in the unbastardised original totem depictions. I still retain an original bark totem gifted me from a tribal of the northern gulf country.

I am indebted to the indigenous friends I made all those years ago for teaching me how to divest myself of the mental constraints, or straight-jacket to be more precise, of western culture. I learned to breach time and space without the aid of psychotropics and confront my own cultural past present and future all rolled into one reality. I eventually entered the continuum, the core creative principle or God, as the West prefers to name it. It was perfectly natural for tribals to live in this field until their departure into the ‘Dreamtime’ from whence they came; while whites deprive themselves, via religion, of the most important living principle in existence.

I was not initiated, I was not of their blood, but retain certain abilities peculiar to that culture and feel a great sense of loss when I see the prostituted, meaningless, non-totemic ‘Art’ that is now attracting ‘sophisticated’ Europeans to art galleries. But what do they prize in today’s Aboriginal art, which is an amalgam of western styles and tribal depictions but no vestige of totemic meaning and narrative power remaining? Dilettantes and Art connoisseurs subliminally recognise the western influence of composition, arrangement, colour combinations and above all the lyricism so prized by western Art collectors -- this novel art appeals as it is stylistically polluted but ‘wrapped’ in traditional looking representations. However, it’s a fraud, like Barack Obama.

Parisians flock to new exhibit of Australian Aboriginal art
AFP staff report

An exhibition of the largest collection of modern Aboriginal paintings to have gone on display outside of Australia has been a major hit with art lovers in Paris.

The exhibition, “The Sources of Aborigine Painting”, drew 133,716 visitors to the Quai Branly Museum in the space of just over three months, making it the 5th most popular exhibition the centre has hosted.

“We are delighted with the reception it has had,” a museum spokesman said following the end of the exhibition’s run on Sunday.

He noted that the success was particularly impressive given that the collection was competing for attention with blockbuster collections of the works of Edward Hopper and Salvador Dali as well as the recently opened new wing of the Louvre dedicated to the Islamic Arts.

“It was up against stiff competition in Paris this autumn so it is particularly pleasing that this art, previously unseen and little known in Europe, should draw so many visitors,” the spokesman added.

The collection of more than 200 pieces was originally put together by the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.

The Branly has ensured Aboriginal art will have a permanent and high-profile presence in Paris by commissioning Lena Nyadby to produce a 700-square-metre work to be displayed on a section of its roof.

The black and white work will be visible from different levels of the Eiffel Tower from June 6.

Nyadby has previously provided a mural for one of the museum’s external walls which can be seen from the French capital’s Rue de l’Universite.

© 2013 AFP

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/01/21/parisians-flock-to-new-exhibit-of-australian-aboriginal-art/