Contemporary Aboriginal Art from Australia᾽s Desert: Context, Debates, and Analysis

The interest in Aboriginal art in Europe and in the whole Western world has grown exponentially since the late 1980s. Larger and smaller, more and less prestigious institutions and galleries are staging Aboriginal art, trying to simultaneously remove it from the ethnographic field, and introduce it into the global art market. Visual accordance between Aboriginal art – especially acrylic paintings from the Desert – and Western modernist painting makes the former desirable objects on the art market, but it also leads to laziness in learning about their real meaning within Aboriginal culture as well as to debates on their artistic and anthropological significance, interpretations, and values. In this article, I briefly present ongoing debates on the artistic character of Aboriginal artefacts and the aesthetic values of Aboriginal paintings from the Desert, in order to argue that the specific conditions of the painting production process should be considered in their interpretation. These conditions have their roots and explanations (I prefer narratives here) in Aboriginal traditions related to the Dreamtime, that is, their mythical past in which their ancestors created the land, which is not past history, but the continuous past-present influencing contemporary forms of life. I will address four important features of acrylic paintings from the region of the Desert. First, the change of medium – from coloured sand in the desert, to acrylic painting on canvas laid on the ground. Second, the realistic character of representing landscape in the form of painted topographic maps. Third, the importance of the use of traditional images and stories, and the simultaneous impossibility of using sacred images and symbols, which develops the discussion about the originality of Aboriginal paintings. Fourth, the collective method of artistic work. These issues are broadly discussed in Australian artistic research. However, they are sometimes overlooked in Western presentations of Aboriginal art. Our understanding of Aboriginal art should not devalue it by forcing it into our ready Western concepts of art, for example, those of modernist painting. Instead, we should explore its histories more deeply and examine Aboriginal within its own contex