Guest Author of May 2009
Intercultural Perspective as Context: Beyond Othering and Appropriation? The Case of John Mawurndjul
Introduction
Contemporary art from the so-called non-Euramerican world often finds itself in the awkward position of being sandwiched between practices of othering on the one hand and that of appropriation on the other by the various art institutions and media of the international art world. This issue is even more striking in the case of contemporary aboriginal art, an art practice that draws on a long tradition of representing culture-specific issues and concepts, but which at the same time reflects upon today’s world, in present-day contexts and debates. To outsiders, Australia’s Aboriginal art is therefore both alien and familiar; in the case of John Mawurndjul, indigenous materials are used and his subject matter reflects his home region of Mumeka, but as a form of representation, of communicating a distinct sense of ‘world-experience’, it opens up to interpretation and evaluation by a wider, international audience, including art historians and art critics. Accepting that challenge as an art historian means to discuss and interpret these works as art from specific art historical/theoretical frames of reference. Aren’t we, by doing so, appropriating these works, discussing them regardless of their cultural background? Or do we need to ‘other’ this work, not to exoticise it, but in order to get access to it by taking account of its proper context? Both options and their implications will be discussed in this paper. Is it possible to develop a feasible intercultural perspective that respects the ‘own-ness’ of the work in question without alienating or assimilating it? The challenge consists of extending the discipline of art history to an intercultural field of art histories. In this contribution, I will focus predominantly on the exposition of an intercultural perspective. I have taken John Mawurndjul’s work as my starting point and not as a case study, as the subtitle may suggest. In order to discuss Mawurndjul’s work as a case study, I first need a theoretical framework to be able to fairly elaborate upon the work, and I hope to present such a framework in this contribution.
Biases
How much one is biased became clear to me when in 1999 Mieke Bal asked me if I would participate in the PhD reading committee of Gerald McMaster’s thesis entitled ‘The New Tribe. Critical Perspectives and Practices in Aboriginal Contemporary Art’. I said yes, being greatly interested to learn more about the subject. I assumed that I was going to read a study on contemporary Australian aboriginal art associating the term ‘Aboriginal’ immediately and exclusively with Australia. It never even occurred to me that aboriginal meant something like ‘from the beginning’, ‘indigenous’ ‘autochthonous’. The study I was going to read was about aboriginal contemporary Canadian art, from artists we refer to as ‘Indian’, a denotation McMaster rejects in favour of the emotionally less charged term ‘aboriginal’. [McMaster 1999] I greatly enjoyed reading the thesis, being introduced to aboriginal contemporary installation art from a country that I have come to know very well over the past 25 years. Another bias, this time not on my part, surfaced when after the meeting of the committee, another member expressed her surprise at the question I had posed to the candidate. McMaster had discussed the installation works of artists such as Rebecca Belmore (participating in the 2005 Venice Biennial in the Canadian Pavilion), James Luna (also in Venice in 2005, in the collateral program, invited by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian), Edward Poitras, Mary Longman, Shelley Niro, and many more. He emphasized how the art works allude to a critical discourse related to issues such as identity, ethnicity, history, mythology, language, stereotyping, marginalisation, but rarely or hardly at all to other – perhaps I should say here – Euramerican contemporary art. My question was related to this artistic context and to a critical discourse regarding these art works. My fellow committee member was surprised that I viewed these works primarily as installation art, that is: as one example of this genre, and hence as a work of art in the contemporary context of a global art system. Working from a postcolonial perspective, for her it was an unexpected, even limited, contextualisation; for me as an art historian the apparent way of accessing this, or any, art. Not regarding these works as art would have left me bereft of a frame of reference, and me ‘jobless’. Was this an act of appropriation? I would like to discuss here the complex problematic of dealing with contemporary art – I use the word ‘art’ indiscriminately, merely to point out a group of objects that have been attributed a specific valuation (call it art) – contemporary art, then, that stems from cultures that until very recently have not been looked at from the point of view of the discipline of Art History. My thesis is that Art History is indeed equipped and could further equip itself in order to access and understand aboriginal art. What we need is an intercultural perspective.
Wrong both ways
Contemporary art from the so-called non-Euro-American world often finds itself in the awkward position of either being neglected completely, or being sandwiched between practices of ‘othering’ on the one hand and that of ‘appropriation’ on the other by the various art institutions, media, and venues of the international art world. The first option is not an option at all when taking seriously the creative practices of whatever people from whatever place. The other two practices are related to power structures and the institutionalisation of the art world, but at least they make us aware of the fact that the encounter with ‘other’ art is problematic. Why? From within the aboriginal culture that produced the work, there is no problem; problems arise when a viewer from without that discourse is stepping into the debate. I will always remain an outsider when art from a culture outside the West is concerned. I am Caucasian, female, North European and educated and working at a European university. The subject of my teaching and research is art. Not to sink into the quagmire of the question ‘what is art’, I take the position that art is what is introduced to me as art, by an artist or an art institution. Art is a valuation and is always institutionalised; it always comes to us mediated through some kind of discourse or institution. This also implies leaving the idea of art relatively open to be defined by the instances, the historical modalities. [Summers] Institutionalisation, art as valuation, and the ongoing globalisation are intrinsically connected to the history of the European expansion and domination of the world in the past centuries. Although many of us now look back very critically on these practices [Mosquera] , they did shape the world as we know it today. Australia is not an exception to this pattern. The aboriginal peoples of Australia have lived in the land for over 50.000 years and only from the 18th C. did they get into contact with Europeans; from that moment Australia started to become Europeanized. In 1606 a Dutch ship spotted the west coast of the continent but the Dutch were not much interested in such a remote and desolate a place. The British however ‘discovered’ the much more accessible and favourable east coast but initially used its posts mainly to ship to its criminals – a fate people, even children, suffered for the slightest offence. [Hughes] At present, the majority of the population is of European, mostly British decent, and only a mere 1 % is aboriginal. The country is considered to be a Western country; it is a constitutional democracy, and a member of the Commonwealth. The Aboriginal peoples are a small minority and their social circumstances contrast sharply with the attention and valuation their art now receives in the international art world. In a Leiden lecture series on approaches of contemporary art, guest speaker Ms. Annette van Ham, curator of the Aboriginal Art Museum in Utrecht, remarked that only since the 1970s Aboriginal art is designated as Art (with a capital A) and hence it became visible, that is, as part of an art system. Although it is an art practice that belongs to an age-old tradition of bark-, rock- and sand painting, body decoration and rituals, which for a long time has been referred to as art only within anthropological circles, it just recently became part of the art system and started to be studied from an art historical perspective. Leaving aside for the moment the economical aspect of a lucrative market, I would like to ask again: is this an act of appropriation? If we consider the international/global art system as being shaped only by the Euramerican art concept, then it is; if we take the art system as a domain that is still fuelled by practices that vary widely in form and content but have as common denominator the way people express and give surplus value to their being, it is not. Art is a concept that gives room to a wide scope of practices and interpretations, and it has been co-shaped for centuries by the impetus from various cultures. [Araeen] This observation however does not solve the problem of how to access, in this case, Aboriginal art. The paradox is that either way we approach it, as ‘alien’ or as ‘own’, we seem to be biased. Alienating means making Aboriginal art different, and that often means making it unequal or leading it to disregard; not paying attention to its differences however ignores the characteristics of this art and de-contextualises it. This would imply: wrong both ways. Nonetheless we have to proceed. In my opinion as an art historian, which implies being part of the institutionalised art world, we need to both include and ‘other’ aboriginal art in order to rate it at its merit.
From Euro centrism towards Art Histories
Rating Aboriginal art at its true value, though, is not an easy thing to accomplish – for what does it mean? In his article ‘The Marco Polo Syndrome’, Gerardo Mosquera, Adjunct Curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, critiques the attempts to overcome the problem of Eurocentrism and Western domination. For him, “Eurocentrism is the only ethnocentrism universalised through actual world-wide domination by a meta-culture, and based on a traumatic transformation of the world through economic, social and political processes centred in one small part of it.” [Mosquera: 219] Despite the Western world’s arising self critique, Mosquera still observes the perpetuation of the distortion that is produced by the West’s one-sided (unilateral) perspective and the existing circuits of power. If Third World cultures (Mosquera’s typification) want to take part in today’s dynamic, they should not isolate themselves into traditions, but instead – so Mosquera argues – make traditions work within the new epoch, by vigorously adapting them, by making contemporary art from their own values, sensitivities and interests. According to him, the de-Eurocentrism in art is not about returning to purity, but about adopting postcolonial ‘impurity’ in order for cultures outside the West to express themselves. This would result in a syncretistic contemporary culture that in each case connects to various context, be it local, national and international. Art for him, and I agree, is linked to cultural specificity but possesses a polysemic ambiguity open to diverse readings. He proposes that the West should take an equally pluralistic view on its own art and by doing so it will revise Western culture. For Mosquera, intercultural involvement implies a critical evaluation of art practices from both sides. Intercultural communication includes not only seeing but also listening. [Mosquera: 221-3] What Mosquera is pointing at in his critique, is the cultural asymmetry implied. The West set the standard, and the Rest could either adapt, or was traditionalised and exoticised in institutional settings, such as ethnological museums. Mosquera critiques the apparent obviousness of this standard as well as its claim of being entirely of Western descent. I tend to agree with Mosquera that the idea of a purely ‘Western’ art setting the standard is a misrepresentation of such a multifarious complex as is the prevailing international art. For centuries art has been fed by a diversity of cultural sources and impulses, and it can never be tracked down to only one point of origin. We cannot however un-write the art history that has been written, nor deny Western Europe’s importance for the emergence of the modern art concept as we know it now. What we can do, and what is already happening for the past decade, is re-evaluating how art history has been written and questioning why it happened in such a way, and subsequently re-interpret the past from a multicultural point of view and work towards the writing of art histories, of systematic as well as historical studies on the scope of art. As point of departure, two issues are important: first, to take art as a panhuman specification, and second, to take into account art’s openness to diverse readings and the generation of meanings. I will now elaborate somewhat on these matters: Art is a specific form of making the world your own, of acquiring, getting hold of the world (in German Weltaneignung), and we do that by creating symbols. The use of symbols is a unique characteristic of humans and art therefore can be seen as a panhuman expression. [Kaiser] To turn to the second point, an art work never has just one meaning attached to only one context; that would make it being either historical documentation or merely decoration. A key characteristic of art is that it opens up to (new) interpretation time and again. Otherwise, it would be a self contained ontological entity enclosing its one and only meaning, denying both the interpreter’s share in the generating of meaning, as well as the role of changing contexts in the interpretation of art. To paraphrase Norman Bryson, artworks have a potential of meaning that is generated by different frames. Context, or as he proposes a ‘frame’, is not naturally given but something that we as researchers make. [Bryson] My frame relates to an intercultural perspective.
Intercultural perspective
How do the above stated arguments help us to formulate an intercultural perspective? I understand the term ‘intercultural’ as in the Latin meaning of ‘inter amicos’ among friends: ‘inter culturas’, among cultures. As a strategy that relates to a diversity of art forms and cultures, consequently an intercultural perspective is based upon a multidisciplinary approach. It addresses art history, philosophy, anthropology, language and culture studies, sociology, even bio-evolutionary and neuroscience. No researcher covers this entire field of academic studies alone; rather, we participate in it, each starting from his/her own expertise. Consequently, the research starts by the researcher’s clarification from which point of view s/he operates. Thus ‘showing your colours’ makes clear where one comes from, academically as well as personally, what position one takes, and what the aim is of the research. It makes equally clear that conclusions drawn from the research are expertise-bound, and thus limited, relative and not absolute, and therefore dynamic. Thus, for me, key issues for the formulation of an intercultural perspective with a strong art historical, art theoretical (in German: kunstwissenschaftlich) emphasis centre around the following concepts that I will briefly discuss – there is no hierarchy in this listing, nor is it exhaustive:
1. World Art Studies. the concept is taken from John Onians, who was the first to use this term to open up the study of art history to a global scope. [Onians] At Leiden University we have adopted John’s phrasing, and ‘World Art Studies’ is now used to designate a field of study that covers contingent art histories (of the ‘non-Western’ world) [Van Damme 1996] and at the same time aims at developing the concepts and approaches to an integrated, i.e., multidisciplinary study of art, as a panhuman phenomenon [Zijlmans/Van Damme]. These two strategies do not exclude each other; rather they keep in balance the ‘inclusion/othering’ dichotomy.
2. Inclusion & othering. I connect the two by taking seriously what has been presented to me as art – how unfamiliar the works may seem – and thus include it into my research, but at the same time being aware of the ‘own ness’, ‘otherness’ (in German: Andersartigkeit) of the art works. Including/othering then, are two sides of one coin. ‘Othering’ implies connecting art to its cultural background; one of the accesses to a work of art is its cultural background, which can play a larger or smaller role. Hence, ‘other’ artistic practices are incorporated, and by doing so art history will be revised and extended too.
3. Cultural diversity and syncretism. We all share culture, but the (concept of) culture differs greatly, or rather, the term ‘culture’ is used in various ways and contexts. It is not just connected to a people, a tribe, or a nation, but also to the metropolis, specific areas or provinces, to social stratification, specific groups or scenes, and the like. The one word covers a plethora of meanings and attributions, so we have to handle the notion of culture with care. What, for example, is meant by John Mawurndjul being an Australian Aboriginal artist? His social and cultural background is related to an indigenous people of Australia, and this matters, I would say, only when by the art works themselves the connection to that context is made. In the case of John Mawurndjul this is obvious, and hence relevant. However, it does not make Mawurndjul or his work a synecdoche, it still matters how his work relates to this, and other contexts. I will come back to this later. The other term mentioned, syncretism, refers to the assumption that in the course of time all cultures (I almost hesitate to use the word) in one way or the other have been influenced and changed by intercultural contacts and exchange, and therefore are syncretistic. This is an ongoing process and for that reason dynamic. International contemporary art is a strong example of syncretism, John Mawurndjul’s work may prove to be far less so.
4. Centre/periphery. The centre/periphery model is taken as a flexible one. There is no fixed centre, the centre is (or in historical research, was) where the action is (was), seen from the perspective of the art in question. In some (many?) cases, the West may well be the periphery. Centre/periphery can also apply to the canon. An intercultural perspective rejects the idea of a fixed canon, it is neither static in place nor in time.
5. Frames and contexts. Different framings will produce different readings, different interpretations. To determine what the relevant context is in which to study an artwork is one of art history’s most difficult problems. Art historical research mostly deals with historical topics. The historical past as such is gone, only all sorts of material objects, texts and data remain. To determine what facts, historical events and aspects are significant largely depends on what the researcher is aiming to elucidate. This applies to research to the past as well as to the present. Except for being aware of one’s own practices of framing, part of the research is to critically evaluate the existing discourse (framings) on the subject, to trace norms and values behind it, and take into account possible cultural differences. [Schipper]
6. Role of technique and materials. Art comes as a material and is created by a technique; obvious as they are, these aspects are often overlooked as agents for the production of meaning in both creation and interpretative practices. [Westgeest]
7. Materiality versus immateriality. In his dissertation entitled ‘Condensed Reality’ [University of Leiden 2005], the anthropologist Pieter ter Keurs (National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden) emphasises the importance of the study of material culture, that is to say: the materiality of the objects. in his case from two small island groups of Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. He understands the mere material presence of an object as a cultural fact and introduces the concept of ‘material complex’. For Ter Keurs, a material complex is a “material object with the meanings condensed in it or evaporated from it” (75); it refers to the object and its socially constructed meanings (187). The subject’s activities towards the creation or construction of meaning condenses into the material object but in the course of time evaporate from it due to changing contexts and functions, and in that process will have new meanings attributed to them. In Ter Keurs’ view, “the subject is changing in the way it deals with objects and …. although the physical object seems to remain the same, the material complex (the material object and the ideas condensed in and evaporated from it) is also changing”. (182). In my opinion, Pieter ter Keurs’ ideas towards material objects as metaphors, as condensation cores for ideas, concepts and values in culture, address both the material object as such and the subject’s part (maker and recipients) in the generating of meaning, as well as the changes that occur over time (192). He stresses the importance of studying the materiality of the object together with the processes of condensation and evaporation of meaning. [Ter Keurs] This is a useful approach for art works as well. Where artworks are often seen as ‘concepts’, the potential for meaning production of the artwork’s materiality is often underestimated.
8. Art History. Last but certainly not least, there is the body of approved art historical methods and concepts. In my opinion, every artwork can be subjected to a formal analysis, placed into relationship with other artworks from the past/diachronic and from the present/synchronic, from its ‘own’ culture as well as others as long as it is relevant to do so, be appraised for its stylistic quality, eloquence and power of expression, for its technical skill, mastery of the materials, even aesthetics. In order to do so, one needs to be fully informed and aware of one’s own point of departure (in my case art history) and biases; only then we can contribute to the discourse, by sharing our knowledge, perception and insight.
Concluding remarks
I am not an expert on Aboriginal Australian art; the art I have seen was in ethnological and art museums, such as the Aboriginal Art Museum in Utrecht, and in art galleries; and for the rest information is acquired through TV (e.g. the 1990 documentary ‘The Quest of Jimmy Pike’, an artist from the Walmajarri), from internet (723 hits on John Mawurndjul alone!), specialist literature, and through book such as Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines [1987], that I really enjoyed reading, or the The Fatal Shore [1988] by Robert Hughes, the recounting of the gruesome fate of a large number of convicted men, women and children that were transported from Great Britain to Australia between 1787-1868. Of course I am influenced by all this and it plays a role when looking at John Mawurndjul’s art, the more so because it is contemporary traditional Aboriginal art. The two terms ‘contemporary’ and ‘traditional’ do not oppose each other, nor are they meant as valuation but merely to position: the works are produced now, in the present, and they show the traditional ways, techniques and iconography of a particular Australian indigenous art. To acquire insight into his work, his position in the Australian as well as the international art world, I need to proceed as I have outlined above. An intercultural perspective however, is a way of learning, of acquiring access to an unfamiliar art works. The final question regarding a chosen approach comes down to David Summer’s basic question posed in a recent discussion: does it work? [Summers]
References
Araeen, Rasheed, ‘A New Beginning: Beyond Postcolonial Cultural Theory and Identity Politics’, in: Araeen, R. , Sean Cubitt, Ziauddin Sardar (eds.), The Third Text Reader, on Art, Culture and Theory. London/New York 2002: 333-345
Bal, Mieke, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities. A Rough Guide. Toronto, Buffalo, London 2002
Bryson, Norman, ‘Art in Context’. In: T_he Point of Theory. Practices of Cultural Analysis_. (eds.) Mieke Bal & Inge E. Boer. Amsterdam 1994: 66-78
Dissanayake, Ellen, Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why. Seattle 1992
Hughes, Robert, The Fatal Shore. London 1988
International Journal of Anthropology, Vol. 18, Oct.-Dec. 2003, No. 4 (Special issue on the conceptualisation of World Art Studies)
Kaiser, Franz-W., Kunst ⇔ Wirklichkeit. Untersuchung von Arten der Weltaneignung. [Diss. University of Leiden, forthcoming 2006]
Keurs, Pieter ter, Condensed Reality. A study of material culture, with case studies from Siasso (Papua New Guinea) and Enggano (Indonesia). Leiden 2005 [Diss. University of Leiden].
McMaster, Gerald, The New Tribe. Critical Perspectives and Practices in Aboriginal Contemporary Art. Amsterdam 1999 [Diss. University of Amsterdam]
Mosquera, Gerardo, ‘The Marco Polo Syndrome. Some Problems around Art and Eurocentrism’ (1992/3), in: T_heory in Contemporary Art since 1985_. (eds.) Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung. London 2005: 218-225
Onians, John, ‘World Art Studies and the Need for a New natural History of Art’, Art Bulletin 78 (2), 1996: 206-209.
Onians, John (ed.), Atlas of World Art. London 2004
Schipper, Mineke, Beyond the Boundaries. African Literature and Literary Theory, London 1989
Summers, David, James Elkins in conversation with D.S. et al., University College Cork, Ireland (13.03.2005)
Tacon, Paul S.C., ‘Indigenous Modernism: betwixt and between or at the cutting edge of contemporary art’, Bulletin of the Conference of Museum Anthropologists, No. 27, 1996: 33-55
Van Damme, Wilfried, Beauty in Context. Towards an Anthropological Approach to Aesthetics, Leiden, New York, Köln 1996
Westgeest, Helen, ‘Identity and materiality – Cultural Studies in artistic practice’, in: The Reflexive Zone: Research into Theory in Practice. (eds.) Anke Coumans, Helen Westgeest, Utrecht 2004: 188-201
Zijlmans, Kitty, ‘Pushing Back Frontiers: Towards a History of Art in a Global Perspective’, International Journal of Anthropology, Vol. 18, No. 4 (2003): 201-210
Zijlmans, Kitty, ‘East West Home’s Best. Cultural Identity in the Present Nomadic Age / East West Home’s Best. Masalah Identitas Budaya dalam Era Nomad, Kini, in : Ang, T., Ekel, F., Jaarsma, M. & Jungerman, R. (Ed.), GRID, a collaborative project between the artists Tiong Ang, Fendry Ekel, Mella Jaarsma, Remy Jungerman. Yogyakarta: Cemeti Art House, 2003: 81-88.
Zijlmans, Kitty and Wilfried van Damme, eds., World Art Studies. Exploring Concepts and Approaches, Amsterdam: Valiz 2008.
