From Tourist Trinkets To The Top Of The Tree ... The Path Of Indigenous Art
Sydney Morning Herald
Wednesday February 21, 2001
When Brian Robinson was born in the '70s, the art of his Torres Strait Island heritage wasn't really considered art at all.
Even in 1981 when the Australian National Gallery (as it was then known) opened in Canberra, it would have put the stuff in its department of ``primitive art".
But those ``primitive" works have since surfaced at the pinnacle of the international art market, with wealthy collectors and scholars at last taking seriously what once were treated as tourist trinkets.
Now Robinson, a Cairns-based artist, and the National Gallery of Australia's senior prints curator, Roger Butler, have put together a showcase of art produced throughout Oceania during this breathtaking political, cultural and intellectual shift.
``We could not have done this show when the [NGA] opened," Butler laughs as he surveys more than 100 prints being hung there for Islands in the Sun: Prints by indigenous artists of Australia and the Australasian region.
``There are still some galleries in the world where Aboriginal art, for instance, is not collected by the art gallery but is still in ethnology in quite large cultural institutions overseas," he says, discreetly refusing to name names.
``It is still a difficult problem for a lot of people to allow this work to be seen as art. They still want to see it as exotic, as something else."
Artistic prejudice in far-flung institutions is, of course, the legacy of the same colonial attitudes that formed the springboard for the cultural renaissance across the Pacific.
``The generation of indigenous artists, writers and politicians that matured in the 1960s intensified their campaigns to reclaim their lands and cultures," the catalogue says. Aboriginal people became eligible to vote in 1967.
Western Samoa became independent in 1962, while Tonga, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Kiribati all achieved independence in the '70s.
Butler notes that the legal status of the Treaty of Waitangi, originally signed in 1840 between the New Zealand Maoris and Pakeha, was upheld in 1987, while the next year Eddie Mabo won native title rights in the Australian High Court.
Robinson, 26, tucks his long brown curls behind his ear and talks about the impact of such landmark events on his generation of artists, who work in the print-making facilities that have sprung up in community arts centres such as Cairns and Auckland and, very recently, in the Torres Strait Islands.
``People are regaining cultural knowledge which has been left aside over many years ... they are actually reaffirming their identity through this, through these prints," he says.
``They're regaining their identities and trying to set back in place a lot of traditional ways reclaiming land and heritage and saying, `We were here first and just basically we want some recognition."'
The NGA's Butler recognises something meaningful in the results.
``Some of the most exciting prints being produced in Australia and the Australasian region are prints by Torres Strait Islanders, by Maori artists, by Aboriginal artists," Butler says. ``The work that is being produced is extraordinary, I think, in many cases because there is a real reason for doing it.
``I hate to say it but much of the art produced these days is fairly slim once you get past the surface. Here, there is something more happening ... you feel that in the works, and it can be quite intense."
Islands in the Sun runs at the NGA in Canberra until May 27 before travelling to Cairns and Darwin.
© 2001 Sydney Morning Herald
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