"LIFE" by Angel of Rage
The art created by Australia's Aboriginal artists is so much more than those of us schooled in the artistic traditions of the West are used to that its meanings are all but indecipherable to most of us.
“Aboriginal visual art,” poet Les Murray has said, “is Australia’s equivalent of jazz: a major new art style arising from the most oppressed group in our nation.”
More than a representational image, it is intended to be a 4-Dimensional map that represents not just the land and its inhabitants but the meaning and story of the land itself.
Despite having astonishing rock etchings that predate France’s Lascaux Caves paintings by more than 20,000 years, much of Australia’s indigenous art was deliberately impermanent. Bodies were painted with ochre, drawings made in sand, and the traces removed once a ritual finished.
Most of what we call Aboriginal art is a modern solution to the desperate problem of communicating with an uncomprehending world.
When land rights first became a topic of legal discussion in Australia in the 1970s, many Aboriginal people turned to art to explain their form of ownership. These paintings went to court, as a form of deposition in native title claims, and some of them succeeded.
It is a concept that for me, as an artist and historian, is still hard to wrap my head around despite this excellent analysis by Nina Caplan for
Newsweek.
My Next step towards a greater understanding of that concept will be picking of a copy of The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
Which I just did through Better World Books the progressive's answer to Amazon.