On the reception of aboriginal art in German art space

German art history and ethnology have led to a binary reading of art that has inhibited the exhibition of Aboriginal art as contemporary art in the twentieth and early twenty-first century. This thesis addresses the question of how Australian Aboriginal art is displayed in the institutional spaces of art galleries and museums in Germany. I argue that there is an underlying current in Germany that divides the representation of art into European and “other”, particularly Aboriginal art. Within German culture, ethnological museums are ranked differently from art institutional spaces. The art museum or gallery is at the top of the hierarchy, enhancing the self-reflexive notion of culture, while the ethnological museum provides the context against which European, specifically German, identity and culture are pitched. Aboriginal art that is contextualised as ethnographic and not as contemporary continues a Modernist perspective on cultural exchange, one that emphasises an essential difference between European and non-European art in a universal progress of humanity. This essentialising of culture in Germany does not reflect the globalised situation that evokes regional cultural inflections based on experiences and expressions of hybridity and fragmentation. In order to understand how German art institutions and ethnographic museums stand for a Eurocentric art discourse, the thesis analyses the cultural parameters of nineteenth century Germany, the socio-political cataclysm of the Third Reich in the twentieth century, and the reversion to Modernism in its aftermath. In comparison, I outline the exhibition history and reception of Aboriginal art in Australia where the positioning of Indigenous and European traditions has shifted markedly into a postcolonial, postmodern situation since the1980s. My study investigates this categorisation into two entities through Western concepts of literacy and orality. Since the Enlightenment, the Western emphasis on alphabetic literacy as a system superior to oral transmission of knowledge has governed the way we make sense of the world around us. The written word underpins modes of exhibition display and reception, so that representation is read as text. As a consequence, institutions and galleries, as part of visual culture, treat knowledge that is transmitted orally as inferior. This thesis explores strategies that allow the viewing of art outside the conventions of the written word. I examine the modes of display and reception of Aboriginal art through fundamental ideas first put forward by Edward Said in Orientalism (1978), and also through Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (1970). My main focus, however, relates to Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts surrounding Cultural Capital, Symbolic Capital and Symbolic Violence in his publications The Field of Cultural Production (ed. Randal Johnson 1993) and Language and Symbolic Power (trans. by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson 1991) which allow an analysis of power relations in cultural exchange within the hierarchies of art institutions

The virtual museum of the Pacific: new context, new knowledge, new art

In a post colonial world, traditional representations of cultural artifacts in museums are challenged by rapidly proliferating online presence of collections and associated narratives. The Virtual Museum of the Pacific (VMP) project, which can be characterised as a digital ecosystem, is developing a social media platform designed to enable a variety of user communities to engage with the Pacific Collections of the Australian Museum. This engagement has the potential to disrupt the museum’s control over the display and interpretation of its ethnographic collections. There is a growing trend for artists from Indigenous or creator communities, whose cultural heritage is heavily represented in museums, to explore collections to rediscover their ancestral heritage. In contrast to the primitivist assumptions that informed Modernist artists who drew on collected artifacts in their work, the work of these artists renews and re-contextualises processes of creating objects or challenges assumptions about museum displays and how they frame knowledge. The VMP is an interdisciplinary Australian Research Council Linkage Project developed by a University of Wollongong research team in partnership with the Australian Museum. Based on a system known as Collection Web, it combines content management systems for objects with accessible social media user interfaces and aims to support users to extend the annotation of objects in culturally specific ways. Currently, user evaluations are being used to inform the system’s development and foster a more dynamic exchange of knowledge between institutions and communities of users. A survey of staff working in education and community access at the Australian Museum shows that the potential of such a forum has been identified by staff working in education and community access at the Australian Museum. There is also a strong view that collaboration with artists from creator communities is the key to transforming the VMP into an innovative access tool for the Museum’s Pacific Collections

Intersections: What is the current climate in which we work and live?

For many, the events of 11 September 2001 predisposed Western societies to collective fear not dissimilar to that felt at other moments of crisis in history. A few years on, the shockwaves have flattened and the notion of terror has institutionalised fear on several levels: the emotional, the social and the political. Fear, it seems, justifies varying degrees of administrative arbitrariness; as long as there is a commonly acknowledged threat like terrorism, public opinion (when informed by fear rather than knowledge) can be swayed to overlook the politicised abuse of the law. The protection of law from arbitrariness and from the fear that makes arbitrariness possible is, then, a pressing issue in the current climate. This paper explores intersections of visual culture and a general rhetoric of terror as myth-making processes to see how these translate into public opinion. First I examine some historical evidence for the political management of fear in Socratic philosophy, while the second part looks at visual and literal rhetoric

Ditto - Images in Print

Ditto is an initiative of the School of Art and design\u27s Centre for the Printed Image (CPI) which was formed to coordinate research activities in photographic, digital and autographic print processes. The exhibition exhibited demonstrated some of the relationships of printed image to individual research interests as well as the multiplicity of techniques and print media now available