Mick Wallangkarri Tjakamarra Kukatja/Ngalia c.1905-96 Bush tucker story 1972 synthetic polymer paint on composition board 72.0 x 77.0 cm Hugo Le Roux Guthrie, Melbourne © artists and their estates 2011, licensed by Aboriginal Artists Agency Limited and Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd

The next Aboriginal Art Reading Group meeting will be 16 January 4:30-5:30pm in room 106, John Medley Building, University of Melbourne.

We will be reading a number of selections from Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Art, including Philip Batty’s “‘Artefacts’ as Art: ‘Art’ as Arefact” and “Catch a Fire” by John Kean. If you have not yet seen the exhibition please try to do so before the meeting. A copy of the reading will be circulated to the electronic mailing list.

Looking forward to seeing you then!  ~ Kira

We will be reading Chris Healy’s Forgetting Aborigines “Chapter 3: Old and New Aboriginal Art.” I will email members of the reading groups’ electronic mailing list a PDF of the reading. Looking forward to seeing you then!   ~ Kira

Garrnyal Bukulatjpi and Djawa Dhaawiringu, Milingimbi, NT, September 1935 Source: Courtesy of the Thomson family and Museum Victoria (TPH363)

A symposium hosted in association with the exhibition, Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic.

This symposium presents a series of papers with a diverse group of experts from Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane and Paris, who are prominent in their area of Aboriginal art practice and passionate about the importance of Yolngu art from Arnhem Land, and particularly bark painting.

Professor Howard Morphy, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Research School of Humanities and the Arts at the Australian National University, will deliver the keynote address.

The exhibition, Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic: Arnhem Land Paintings and Objects from the Donald Thomson Collection is now showing at Melbourne Museum until 12 February 2012.

We will be reading the introduction of Ian McLean’s recent book: How Aborigines Invented The Idea Of Contemporary Art: An Anthology Of Writing On Aboriginal Art 1980-2006.

I will email members of the reading groups’ electronic mailing list a PDF of the reading. Alternatively, you may make a personal photocopy from the copy  posted on the bulletin board outside of the photocopier room on the third floor of the East Tower of the John Medley Building.

Listen to Ian McLean and Margo Neale interviewed on ABC Late Night Radio from 9 November, 2011 here.

2-day Symposium: Conflict and Conciliation Across Empires: Objects and Performances in Historical Perspective

Date: 17-18 November 2011

Location: Elisabeth Murdoch Theatre, University of Melbourne

Convenors: Professor Kate Darian‐Smith (Director, The Australian Centre, University of Melbourne), Dr. Julie Evans (School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne), and Dr. Penny Edmonds (School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne) in conjunction with the Department of Indigenous Cultures, Museum Victoria.

Hosted by the Australian Centre, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, The University of Melbourne.

Tjukurrtjanu
Speakers Fred Myers, Silver Prof & Chair, Department of Anthropology, New York University; Dr Philip Batty, Senior Curator, Anthropology (Central Australia), Museum Victoria; Dick Kimber, historian & catalogue contributor; Prof Paul Carter, Chair in Creative Place Research, Deakin University; Paul Sweeney, Manager, Papunya Tula Artists; Bobby West Tjupurrula, Papunya Tula artist

A range of speakers will discuss the origins and evolution of the Western Desert Art movement.
NGV International 180 St Kilda Road
Clemenger BBDO Auditorium
Level G

$75 Adult / $69 NGV Member / $72 Concession (includes lunch and afternoon tea, bookings essential)

Event Code
P11246

Information & bookings
Ph +61 3 8662 1555
10am-5pm daily

Don’t miss the inaugural, multidisciplinary Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Research Symposium on 3 November.

Date      Thursday 3 November 2011
Time      8.30am to 5.00pm
Venue    Law Building, 185 Pelham St., Carlton
The University of Melbourne

PUTTING ABORIGINAL & TORRES STRAIT ISLANDER RESEARCH TO WORK

The inaugural, multidisciplinary Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Research Symposium will showcase current Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander research by staff and graduate students from across The University of Melbourne. All are welcome and lunch is included.

The Symposium has a special focus on research bringing benefits to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. We invite you to register, attend and participate in the discussion.

There is no fee but registration is essential.

In honour of the passing of Emeritus Professor Bernard William Smith we will be reading  his 2006 paper, “Creators and Catalysts: The Modernisation of Australian Indigenous Art,” as well as Connal Parsley’s “Christian Thompson and the Art of Indigeneity,” in the first issue of Discipline.

I will email members of the reading groups’ electronic mailing list copies of both essays. Alternatively, the full text of Smith’s essay can be located in on the University of Melbourne’s Discovery Search database; and Discipline is for sale at these stockists.

Please see below for a tribute to Bernard William Smith by Dr. Sheridan Palmer.

Photo: Francis Reiss

Emeritus Professor Bernard William Smith, Art and cultural historian.
3.10.1916 —2.9.211

With the death of the art historian Bernard Smith aged ninety-four a chapter closes in Australian intellectual life. A rigorous historian of Australia’s cultural development and an astute critic of art and society, he was recognised as the father of Australian art history, an iconic distinction bestowed for the value and weight of his scholarship, his immense contribution to art and his far reaching influence on generations of art and cultural historians. His importance went well beyond those disciplines, with many anthropologists, cross-cultural historians and mainstream intellectuals considering him a ‘giant’ in their respective fields. The historian Greg Dening wrote ‘There is no other Australian scholar of whom I stand in as much awe as Bernard Smith. I can honestly say that I have never been anywhere in the field of our common scholarly interest, the ‘European’ encounter with Oceanic indigenous people, where I have not seen his footsteps ahead of me’. This sentiment was echoed by Bernard’s former student and colleague and now the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh, Terry Smith, who wrote,
No other writer on art in this country can match the totality of his range, depth or sheer output. Scholars of Australian art constantly find, as they begin to glow with the excitement of a discovery, or formulate a new interpretation, that Bernard Smith has been there before them. He is not only outstanding among the founders of the discipline [of art history] in Australia, he remains its most distinguished practitioner.
Moreover, as Terry Smith said, ‘everything I do is in response to his work’, and in some ways this extends to many other Australian art historians who use Smith’s work as a benchmark or a point of contention. Daniel Thomas, the distinguished art curator, considered Smith’s writing ‘engaged the readership’; was convincing and impressive; and as a public speaker he was accessible and displayed a good sense of humour. John Frow, Professor of English, when re-reading some of Smith’s work, wrote: ‘I was struck afresh by the wonderful clarity of his writing: the marshalling of a multitude of details within clear lines of argument, the lucid balance of logic and empirical evidence.’
For almost seventy years Smith worked and wrote at the coalface of contemporary socio-politics and cultural change, but it was his deep interest in Australia’s cultural identity, its ‘antipodeanism’, that pre-occupied him. He entered Sydney’s intellectual and artistic scene in late 1939 as a young painter and Marxist critic, but he jettisoned the artist’s life in favour of writing about art. The switch was due in part to his cultural crossings with a number of exiled European intellectuals and artists in 1940, whose ideas and vigorous debates excited and stimulated Smith to organise a series of public art lectures, which he claims, were the beginnings of art history in Australia. Initially self-trained — he incarcerated himself in the Mitchell Library in the evenings — he wrote a history of Australia’s cultural development, Place, Taste and Tradition (1945). What mattered to him was how Australia emerged from its colonial cradle and got to its modern position, but it was his second book European Vision and the South Pacific (1960) that international and Australian scholars unanimously agree is his masterpiece. This contextualised Australia’s historical roots and gave Smith his credentials as an impressive historian and a major authority on the art of Captain Cook’s voyages. Smith saw the art of imperial discovery as a means of understanding the past, defining origins, and as he said ‘art as information’. Because of his ‘anti-hierarchical leanings’, he was predisposed to taking differing positions and his interest in the power relations of ‘centre’ and peripheries, especially the duality of the dominant and subordinate, profoundly interested him. But it was his mapping of events from their origins to embedding them contextually and conceptually as products of culture (language, politics, scientific and empirical knowledge, myth, art and religion) and, in particular lifting art out of its narrow confines towards an historical constituency, that is possibly Smith’s most important legacy. It is why Ernst Gombrich thought so highly of him and, in particular, European Vision and the South Pacific.
Bernard Smith was born illegitimate to a young Irish immigrant woman in a small worker’s cottage in Balmain, Sydney. Fostered out and raised by a caring family — he met his father Charles Smith on a couple of occasions but corresponded regularly with his mother Rose Anne Tierney — he learnt the lessons of economic, social and emotional distance; ‘poverty is a hard master’, and ‘a state ward can’t expect much’ he said. In a letter to Vincent Buckley, he wrote ‘many illegitimate children who do not succumb to self-pity experience a kind of distancing from society. One sees oneself almost as a kind of witness figure’. Smith’s autobiography of his childhood, The Boy Adeodatus: A story of a lucky young bastard. (1984) won both the Victorian Premier’s Award and the National Book Council Prize. Trained as a primary school teacher, Smith was seconded to the New South Wales Art Gallery as an education officer in 1944, where he organised large touring exhibitions to regional NSW, often borrowing contemporary art works from artists because the Gallery had so few in their collection. Bernard also suggested ‘contemporary’ acquisitions to the Gallery Trustees and acted as that institution’s temporary director while awaiting the incoming director Hal Missingham in 1945.
In 1941 he married Kate Challis, referring to her as his ‘civilising influence’; she also acted as his research assistant, translator and gate-keeper. In 1948 Bernard won a British Council scholarship to study at the Courtauld and Warburg Institutes at the University of London, a period that consolidated his education and confirmed his intellectual focus. Attending lectures by some of the most brilliant British and European minds, it was Charles Mitchell, Ernst Gombrich and Rudi Wittkower who became key figures in his scholarly development.
On his return to Australia in 1951, the climate of the cold war and his past activity as a communist affected his career prospects, but with the assistance of Mary Alice Evatt, the first woman Trustee of the National Art Gallery of NSW, and wife of the Labour politician and foreign minister, Bert (Doc) Evatt, he managed to retain his position at the Art Gallery and produce a catalogue of its Australian paintings. When Smith resigned from the Education Department and left the Gallery, Tony Tuckson and Daniel Thomas continued Smith’s legacy with annual acquisition catalogues. Importantly, he was awarded a research scholarship at the newly established Australian National University in Canberra, completed his doctorate within two years and commenced as a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne’s Fine Arts department in 1956. With his colleagues Professor Joseph Burke, Franz Philip and Dr Ursula Hoff, Smith consolidated art history as an academic discipline in Australia.
In 1959, Bernard Smith convened a group of seven emerging figurative painters known as ‘The Antipodeans’. True to form, he introduced a political agenda directed at international abstraction and what he saw as American cultural imperialism. It was also his way of illuminating Australia’s identity within the new post-war internationalism. Many art historians see Smith’s attachment to figuration and social realism and his opposition to abstraction as reflecting his staunch attachment to a Eurocentric and traditional view of weltgeist, but it also had to do with his rejection of any avant-garde movement that threatened to dismantle a historical perspective. As he said ‘we still have to interrogate images for their validity and intention’. By challenging the cultural centres Smith gained the reputation as ‘policeman of the arts’, but the Antipodean Exhibition also divided the Australian art community and was pivotal in launching him into the battlefield of contemporary and global art politics.

By 1962 his major survey Australian Painting was published, a book that ‘furnished’ the minds of many art historians and still provides currency today. In 1967 he was appointed the inaugural Director of the Power Institute and the Power Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Sydney, a post in which he shaped that institution for a decade. During that time he established the Power Lectures with Clement Greenberg giving the inaugural lecture. It was however, a difficult period for Smith, whose ideologies were often considered anachronistic and at odds with a number of his staff. Peter Beilharz considers ‘Modernism is always looking backwards. Part of its identity precedes it, existing as … a reference’. In many ways Bernard Smith epitomised modernism’s traditions and relished looking backwards.

Bernard Smith achieved many things in his long life. He was a foundation member of the Australian Academy of Humanities; The Age art critic; he helped establish the Australian studio at Cité International des Arts in Paris; was involved in saving the suburb of Glebe from freeway destruction; was active in anti-Vietnam and anti-nuclear protests; and received awards in recognition of his contribution to the Arts. As much as he resisted criticism of his work he knew he had to step aside for new generations of art and cultural historians, many of whom he had trained. As art history’s eminent grise what concerned Smith, even when his ‘vision was lacking’, was to keep the dialogue open, the arguments alive and the disciplines defined.

On retiring in 1977 he and Kate returned to Melbourne where he continued to lecture, mentor and publish extensively on colonialism and post-colonialism, life writing, native dispossession, art and modernism. His final book The Formalesque (2007) was a determined revision of a style cycle belonging to modernism, as well as his way of clearing the ground for a better reading of the post-modern condition. Claude Levi Strauss said ‘There is no history without dates … for history’s entire originality and distinctive nature lies in apprehending the relation between before and after’. It was precisely these pressure points in historical change that were important to Bernard who sought to make art and its history as accessible and comprehensible as possible. As he was fond of saying  ‘Art history is not a kind of art it’s a kind of history’. But it was as an Antipodean outsider, as the ‘other’, that enabled him to see a ‘reverse perspective’, distance himself from the norm, challenge orthodox views and assess the ‘big picture’ with striking clarity.  This is what made him such a distinctive scholar.
In 1989 Kate died, and Bernard remarried in 1995. In his last years there were many admirers who visited and paid homage. One thing remains undisputed, he was not only a major player in the course of Australian art history; he defined it.
Baptised Catholic he also specified a Catholic funeral service, stressing however that, ‘I will die an atheist’. Bernard Smith was a Marxist to the end, one who had tempered his politics with the sage knowledge that in life we are measured by our achievements. He is survived by his son John Smith, daughter Elizabeth Heathcote, four grandchildren, four great grandchildren, two half brothers and his second wife Maggi Smith.

Dr Sheridan Palmer.

On view: August 11 – November 6, 2011
Press Preview: September 22, 2011 6-7:00 PM
Opening Reception: September 22, 2011 7-9:00 PM
Guest curated by Bindi Cole

The word “No” does not exist in the majority of the over 200 Australian Aboriginal languages, and where it does exist, this powerful word is reserved for the elders and is used with great care and ceremony. As these languages reach the brink of extinction, indigenous Australian artists are using contemporary art to assert their identity and culture and say no to racism, land theft and colonialism in an urban world. With this, MoCADA announces the opening of the highly anticipated international group exhibition entitled, Saying No: Reconciling Spirituality and Resistance in Indigenous Australian Art.

The exhibition is guest curated by Bindi Cole, and will be on view from August 11 through November 6, 2011 in the museum’s main gallery at the James E. Davis 80 Arts Building in Brooklyn, New York. Saying No features sculpture, installation, painting, photography, video and mixed media works that highlight the use of visual art as a form of social and political protest in the current Australian Aboriginal struggle for the right to representation.

This is the first international group exhibition of this kind to debut in New York City and the United States. The show will feature an array of works in a variety of media from a group of contemporary, indigenous, Australian-based artists. The opening reception will take place at MoCADA on September 22 from 7-9PM. The reception is free and open to the public. A press preview will be held on the same evening from 6-7PM.

Bindi Cole, the exhibition’s curator states, “The role of a contemporary Aboriginal artist, in my opinion, is to provoke.” The indigenous population has been subject to state sanctioned land displacement, ethnic cleansing and segregation – impoverishing their quality of life and relegating their culture to the margins of Australian society. Only recently has the government taken steps to apologize for the inhumane systems of oppression inflicted upon Australia’s native peoples. Saying No was organized through extensive travel between Australia and New York City to increase the visibility of contemporary Aboriginal artists and to reaffirm artistic practice as a site for civil dissonance for disenfranchised populations around the world.

Exhibiting artists include Tony Albert, Daniel Boyd, Maree Clarke, Bindi Cole, Vicki Couzens, Fiona Foley, James Henry & Oliver Winter-Irving, Dennis Nona, Zane Saunders and Yhonnie Scarce.

About the Curator

Bindi Cole is a Melbourne based award-winning photographer and artist of Wathaurung and Australian heritage. Cole’s work exposes the latent and unspoken power dynamics of Australian culture in the here and now. She subtly but powerfully reveals some uncomfortable truths about the fundamental disconnection between who we are – the communities and identities by which we shape our sense of self – and how the prevailing culture attempts to place and define us. In 2011, Cole appeared nationally on Australian television (ABC) in the documentary, EYE that traced her journey creating a series of stylized portraits of a community of Aboriginal transgender women called the Sistagirls.

In 2009, Cole won the Victorian Indigenous Art Award and has been a finalist in numerous art awards including the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards and the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize. Recent projects include curating Nyah-bunyar (Temple) at the Arts Centre as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival, projecting Whitewash onto the water wall at the National Gallery of Victoria, Not Really Aboriginal at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Just Can’t Get Enough at Linden Gallery, A Time Like This at the Victorian College of the Arts Margaret Lawrence Gallery and Post Us at Boscia Galleries. In 2004, Cole completed a Diploma in Applied Photography at Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE (NMIT), and in 2008 she commenced a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Fine Arts) at Ballarat University. Cole is currently represented by Nellie Castan Gallery.

Public Programming

In conjunction with the exhibition, the museum will offer 8 public programs, all free and open to the public:

July 21 – August 11: Museum hours – Saying No Film Festival, MoCADA
August 11: 7:00-9:00pm – Screening of art + soul at Big Screen Plaza, btwn 29th & 30th St at 6th Ave, NYC
September 22: 9:30-10:00am – Interview with curator and artist Bindi Cole on First Voices Indigenous Radio, tune in to WBAI 99.5FM in New York
September 24: 1:00 – 3:00pm – Children’s storytelling program with Dr. Joyce Duncan, MoCADA
September 29: 7:00-9:00pm – Curator’s Talk with Bindi Cole, MoCADA
October 6: 7:00-8:00pm – Guided exhibition tour with curator Bindi Cole, MoCADA
October 8: 1:00-2:00pm – Guided exhibition tour with curator Bindi Cole, MoCADA
October 29: 1:00-3:00pm – Children’s art making program, MoCADA