Background

In 1998 there was a major national touring retrospective about the work of Aboriginal artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye. After opening at the Queensland Art Gallery, the originating gallery, it travelled to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria. This was the first opportunity for people to see a large body of her work and to witness the extraordinary development of this artist's eight-year exhibition career.

It also provided the first opportunity to analyse her work critically and to position it within the context of contemporary Australian art - that is, to advance the discussion about her work beyond the descriptive circumstances of its production, reception and marketing, and the artist's Aboriginality.

Today, 10 years on, Emily holds a unique position in the world of Australian art, being the first Australian artist to be offered an international exhibition of this scale and significance. Yet during the intervening years her work was not, as anticipated, subjected to the same sustained analysis as the work of other Australian contemporary artists. The critical discourse has not moved far beyond the descriptive and safe.

This symposium, within the context of the recent international showcase of her art, provides both an informative and analytical discussion about Emily and her work, intended to provoke a new dimension of thinking.

It will re-visit old thinking, noting changes and explore new approaches and directions.

Untitled 1993
synthetic polymer paint on canvas
232.4 x 80.4 cm
Collection of Phillip and Jenny Lawrence
© Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Licensed Viscopy 08.

• How does one talk about her work in international contemporary art terms without denying her Aboriginality?
• How do we reconcile the abstract canvases from an elderly black woman from the desert with the Western conception of modernism? Do we need to? Are they abstract? If so, who reads them as abstract?
• How do we deal with the apparent gulf between the zone of production and the zone of consumption? Is it relevant?
• How do we present her work using a European model of the monograph in white spaces within a tradition that is alien to the lineage of the artist whose work is being represented? How does this matter and is it still an issue?
• How do we fully acknowledge the differences - the cultural traditions that inform the work; the living environment; the work practices; and the artist's community at Utopia of which she was an integral part, yet still produce a successful show of great contemporary Australian art which is not marginalised through cultural difference?
• How do these paintings function simultaneously as cultural narratives without becoming objects of anthropological scrutiny, and as works of modernist abstract art without being sanitised of cultural content?
• How does the country where an exhibition is sited affect the way we read her work? What are the cultural correspondences and contradictions?

Ten years ago people shied away from making comparisons between Emily and non-Indigenous modernists like Pollock and Monet. But today at least two major shifts have occurred, related to globalisation and the processes of decolonisation.

First, the idea of thinking only in terms of the dominant European modernist model is increasingly being replaced by the understanding that there are multiple modernities ranging from New York to Paris, from Utopia to Tokyo. As historian Dipesh Chakrabarty observed when writing about Indian modernism:

How could one write of forms of modernity that have deviated from all canonical, that is Euro-centric, understanding of the term? How do we envision or document ways of being modern that will speak to that which is shared across the world as well as that which belongs to human cultural diversity? [1]

Comparing Emily's work with European modernists or others in the context of multiple modernities no longer needs to be seen as a defensive position by seeking validation, which is seen to diminish Emily's Aboriginality and authenticity.

The second shift, related to the first, is that there is now a global climate in which people have a strong desire to look beyond their own cultures and find common ground with other people - to find human connection in cultural difference. It is these cross-cultural comparisons that enable us to devise a language that can speak across cultures.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

¹ Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2002, n.p.