Draft symposium program

The impossible modernist
Professor Akira Tatehata presents via video

An 'outsider' view

Japanese curator, critic and academic Akira Tatehata explores the ironies inherent in this title from the position of another cultural space - as both a Japanese man steeped in his own culture and as an international contemporary art curator and academic. His 'other' status allows him be distant from the Australian context and the 'baggage' of the past, enabling him to draw insightful and novel connections, and contradictions, between elements in Emily's work and that of other artists from Japan, America and Europe.

The possible modernist
Dr Ian McLean

An 'insider' view

Art historian Ian McLean offers a view based on the Australian post-colonial experience. He overrides the need to articulate seemingly opposing positions or the need to reconcile the irreconcilable, arguing instead that Emily's form of modernism is indeed different from international modernism in both source and history, but that it is not unique to Emily. Rather it is the consummation of a long post-contact Aboriginal history.

Late-style modernist
Djon Mundine

A 'boundary rider' view

Indigenous art curator Djon Mundine speaks from a space between the inside and outside views: a place on the sidelines that draws parallels with other late-style female artists such as the American artist Georgia O'Keeffe who painted in the desert and also synthesised abstraction and representation in paintings of the land. The parallels reveal differences that deepen our understanding of Emily and her work beyond the local.

An artist first and foremost
Christopher Hodges

Artist and gallery owner Christopher Hodges, who had a close association with Emily during her career, affirms Emily's position as an abstract artist. He provides insights into her thinking and practice and the way these were reflected in the exhibitions in Japan. The title of the symposium derives from Hodge's account of Emily's reaction to a striped painting by Sol LeWitt.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye: her place in Australian art
Susan McCulloch

Art writer and critic Susan McCulloch has written extensively on Australian and Indigenous Australian art. She has visited the Utopia region many times since the early 1990s and charted Emily's rise to fame and the complexities of her life. McCulloch speaks about the broader context of contemporary Australian art and Emily's positioning within it. She will discuss the significance of Emily in 20th-century Australian art, her contribution to its development and the stylistic breakthroughs of her art.

Emily as located historian: the Camel Lady narrates a history of discovery without 1788
Professor Ann McGrath

Aboriginal historian Ann McGrath, who attended the openings of the Emily exhibition in Japan, has written and published extensively on Indigenous history and cultural traditions. She discusses the concept of paintings as agents of history. They bring history into the present as a living experience. She investigates how, depending on the place in which the paintings are presented, they tell different stories.

Emily Kngwarreye's practice of painting: an international perspective
Professor Terry Smith

'A global view'

Getty scholar and art historian from the University of Pittsburgh, Terry Smith views Emily's achievement as an individual artist in relationship to a communal culture, responsive to contemporary conditions. He explores how her work operates between the evolution of Indigenous and non-Indigenous art in Australia and draws comparisons with the singular achievement of select contemporary artists working elsewhere, mainly in Europe.

Beyond the local: the zone of reception (TBC)
Associate Professor Rex Butler (proposed)

Rex Butler has been the most consistent academic writer on Emily and challenges the view that the reception of her work lies in the past as intended by the maker, but instead argues that its meaning is derived from how it is encountered in the present.

Just as the meaning of a work of art lies not in any intention by its maker but how it is received by its spectator, so it is to be found not in the past when it is produced but in the present in which it is encountered.

He takes an uncompromising stance believing that:

the most productive way to speak about Aboriginal art is not to attempt to be 'faithful' to it, to reconstitute in as much detail as possible its original tribal context, but to take it as far away from itself as possible, to subject it to the most sophisticated finesses of Western philosophy and critical theory.

(To be confirmed)

Japanese responses
Chair: Andrew Pike

Vox populi - footage of Japanese visitors responding to the Emily exhibition.

• Chiaki Ajoika, Art historian
• Mayumi Uchida, Japanese consultant on Aboriginal Art
• Hitomi Toku, Australian Embassy, Tokyo
  

New directions
Chair: Professor Roger Benjamin (proposed)

Panel: Chrischona Schmidt (PhD, Australian National University) and Gwen Horsfield (PhD, Australian National University)

(To be confirmed)

Discussion
Discussants: Professor Roger Benjamin (proposed) and Tess Allas

(To be confirmed)

Closing

Margo Neale, Principal Curator, National Museum of Australia