Outspoken Australian writer Germaine Greer sparked controversy when she declared that the Aboriginal art movement in that country “may have run its course” in late 2005. “The punters may have realised that Aboriginal art, in common with all other art, is mostly bad,” she said.
The expatriate’s sentiment was nothing new. For many years she has openly condemned the commercialisation of Aboriginal art as crass and deplorable. But the attention directed at Australia’s Indigenous art movement only seems to intensify. Since Greer’s comments there has been a renewed push to defend the Aboriginal visual arts industry in Australia, all the while increasing examples of shocking fraud and exploitation come to light. The contradictions highlighting a woeful disparity between the world of high art and the third-world many Indigenous artists occupy.
Indigenous affairs Minister Amanda Vanstone recently dubbed Aboriginal arts “Australia’s greatest cultural gift to the world” (The Australian, 24 January 2006). France’s new Musee du Quai Branly has a dedicated wing for Aboriginal work, and, as the Australian Arts Review observed: “the musee enjoys the personal patronage of President Chirac (after whom it may well come to be named), this is a creation like the Centre Pompidou or the Louvre Pyramid. It will be noticed.”
Yet many, such as art professor Clive Barstow (of Western Australia’s Edith Cowan University), argue that the institutionalisation of Indigenous art remains one of the greatest issues for the sector: “It could be said that the history of the Australian Indigenous art market is a history of exploitation and abuse, and a reflection of the colonial attitudes that created it. The market has been built on the foundations of cultural practices such as the constructed image of the ‘noble savage’ as depicted in early colonial photographs of the late 19th century.”
It’s a market culture where fraud can run rampant, illustrated by a recent expose by The Australian that revealed a ‘lawless’ Aboriginal art scene dominated by unscrupulous dealers and individuals, who trade alcohol and viagra for paintings en masse.
A voracious international market means there’s considerable profit to be made by these carpetbaggers, and an ill-equipped legal system makes it near impossible to prosecute the culprits. In fact, only one Australian has ever been held to account for Aboriginal art fraud despite numerous claims – dealer John Douglas O’Loughlin, convicted in 2001 for signing works as legendary Western Desert dot-painter, the late Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri.
Former Aboriginal art director at Sotheby’s auction house, Tim Klingender, believes ignorance makes for lazy economics: “Where there’s the money, there’s the fakers. It’s a field where people don’t have an enormous amount of expertise so some of the unscrupulous agents can sell third quality work dressed up as first-rate work.”
Other experts, such as desert art scholar Dr Viven Johnson point to the greater cultural implications of fraud: “For a lot of Aboriginal people, copyright is a kind of shorthand for cultural and intellectual property issues,” she told the Sydney Telegraph in 2004. “Forgery is much more personal because in that case someone is creating something that is not yours, and which may be an inaccurate representation of your dreamings.”
Many Indigenous artists are equally uncomfortable pursuing abuse with European authorities. And little wonder why, when, though their paintings inspire applause, their living standards are under scrutiny by the UN.
Beverly Knight, Director of Alcaston Gallery in Melbourne, points to the ‘frenzy’ over Indigenous art and the resulting dervish of corruption. “It’s almost like a fire burning out of control, with people thinking they’re going to make money out of Indigenous art,” she said. “People who normally make good decisions with investment suddenly don’t make good decisions.” Knight says today’s cult of ‘branding’ also has an impact. “It’s not peculiar to Indigenous art, it’s peculiar to anything that reaches a certain value and becomes fashionable,” she says. “People want to buy a Clifford Possum, they don’t want to buy a good dot painting. Just like they want to buy a Coke, not a no-name cola. But of course the effect on Indigenous artists is just devastating.” It’s also cruelly ironic that the race to package and export native culture often damages that culture in reality.
In 2002, Indigenous Senator for the Australian Democrats, Aden Ridgeway, called for a level playing field in the protection of Indigenous arts. Speaking at the National Gallery of Australia, the Senator asked the Australian Government to protect the copyright of master artist Albert Namatjira in the same manner that they had protected the name of famous Australian cricketer Donald Bradman: “The Prime Minister, Mr Howard personally intervened at the request of the Bradman family to amend the regulations of the Corporations Law to stop commercial exploitation of the Bradman name,” he said. “Sir Donald is an exceptional Australian, for whom I have the greatest respect, but will we see the same level of concern shown for other exceptional Australians who have earned their status as national treasures – such as someone of the status of Albert Namatjira?
In January 2006, a tragic event demonstrated all too clearly the persistent disparity between the treatment of Aboriginal art itself and the real-world artists who create it. Albert Namatjira’s great grand-daughter, 15-year old Jenissa Ryan, was brutally raped, bashed, and left for dead in Alice Springs, the heart of Australia’s desert centre, while tourists passed by oblivious. It’s this region that generates some of the country’s most collectIble artwork (including that of Jenissa’s great grand-father), yet the communities that spawn them are treated with contempt. Editorialised Australia’s The Age newspaper: “Every Australian has heard of Jenissa’s great-grandfather. Jenissa, however, has become just one more statistic in the spiralling violence that afflicts indigenous communities, and which may be worst of all in the camps of Alice Springs, where a floating population of about 2500 Aborigines live in Third World squalor.”
This deplorable incident cuts to the heart of Greer’s controversial charge that things have ‘run their course’ – the chardonnay set toast record sales of Indigenous art, while the situation appears only to worsen for the artists. But Greer concluded her assessment on an optimistic note, insisting that dealers, galleries and customers alike educate and empower themselves by learning “how to recognise the relatively high proportion of Aboriginal art that is not just good but sublime.” That’s no easy task for politicians, stakeholders, and occasional crooks who see opportunities beyond the cultural in Aboriginal art. But it’s the only path to real equality.
