Rethinking Australia’s Art History

Rethinking Australia’s Art History
Author: Susan Lowish
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2018-05-30
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351049976

This book aims to redefine Australia’s earliest art history by chronicling for the first time the birth of the category "Aboriginal art," tracing the term’s use through published literature in the late eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Susan Lowish reveals how the idea of "Aboriginal art" developed in the European imagination, manifested in early literature, and became a distinct classification with its own criteria and form. Part of the larger story of Aboriginal/European engagement, this book provides a new vision for an Australian art history reconciled with its colonial origins and in recognition of what came before the contemporary phenomena of Aboriginal art.

Rethinking Australia's Art History

Rethinking Australia's Art History
Author: Susan Lowish
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2018-06-18
Genre:
ISBN: 9780815374176

This book aims to redefine Australia¿s earliest art history by chronicling for the first time the birth of the category "Aboriginal art," tracing the term¿s use through published literature in the late eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Susan Lowish reveals how the idea of "Aboriginal art" developed in the European imagination, manifested in early literature, and became a distinct classification with its own criteria and form. Part of the larger story of Aboriginal/European engagement, this book provides a new vision for an Australian art history reconciled with its colonial origins and in recognition of what came before the contemporary phenomena of Aboriginal art.

UnAustralian Art

UnAustralian Art
Author: Rex Butler
Publisher: Power Publications, Sydney
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2022-06-16
Genre:
ISBN: 9780909952105

UnAustralian Art: Ten Essays on Transnational Art History proposes a radical rethinking of Australian art history. In a collection of ten essays, Rex Butler and ADS Donaldson argue against flatfooted accounts of Australian art, which continue to identify a distinctive national sensibility arising from a combination of place, people and history. The authors demonstrate that Australian art and artists have always been engaged in struggles and creative exchanges with the rest of the world. Examining Australian art as much from the outside in as the inside out, Butler and Donaldson's account includes a multitude of hitherto excluded stories of Australian expatriates who lived and worked overseas, as well as artists who came from elsewhere and continued to make art in Australia. Beginning with the Impressionist John Russell at the turn of the century in France and ending with the great Anmatyerre artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye in the late twentieth century, the book presents original and encyclopaedic research detailing the artistic connections between Australia and New Zealand, France, Britain, Germany, Asia, North America, South America and the Pacific, while also examining the work of artists from around the world who have made art inspired by Australia. UnAustralian Art asks us to reconsider who an Australian artist is and has been.

When Modern Became Contemporary Art

When Modern Became Contemporary Art
Author: Charles Green
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2024-09-19
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1040144969

This book is a portrait of the period when modern art became contemporary art. It explores how and why writers and artists in Australia argued over the idea of a distinctively Australian modern and then postmodern art from 1962, the date of publication of a foundational book, Australian Painting 1788–1960, up to 1988, the year of the Australian Bicentennial. Across nine chapters about art, exhibitions, curators and critics, this book describes the shift from modern art to contemporary art through the successive attempts to define a place in the world for Australian art. But by 1988, Australian art looked less and less like a viable tradition inside which to interpret ‘our’ art. Instead, vast gaps appeared, since mostly male and often older White writers had limited their horizons to White Australia alone. National stories by White men, like borders, had less and less explanatory value. Underneath this, a perplexing subject remained: the absence of Aboriginal art in understanding what Australian art was during the period that established the idea of a distinctive Australian modern and then contemporary art. This book reflects on why the embrace of Aboriginal art was so late in art museums and histories of Australian art, arguing that this was because it was not part of a national story dominated by colonial, then neo-colonial dependency. It is important reading for all scholars of both global and Australian art, and for curators and artists.

Art History: The Basics

Art History: The Basics
Author: Diana Newall
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2021-03-28
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1317541162

Now in its second edition, this volume is an accessible introduction to the history of art. Using an international range of examples, it provides the reader with a toolkit of concepts, ideas and methods relevant to understanding art history. This new edition is fully updated with colour illustrations, increased coverage of non-western art and extended discussions of contemporary art theory. It introduces key ideas, issues and debates, exploring questions such as: What is art and what is meant by art history? What approaches and methodologies are used to interpret and evaluate art? How have ideas regarding medium, gender, identity and difference informed representation? What perspectives can psychoanalysis, semiotics and social art histories bring to the study of the discipline? How are the processes of postcolonialism, decolonisation and globalisation changing approaches to art history? Complete with helpful subject summaries, a glossary, suggestions for future reading and guidance on relevant image archives, this book is an ideal starting point for anyone studying art history as well as general readers with an interest in the subject.

Crosscurrents in Australian First Nations and Non-Indigenous Art

Crosscurrents in Australian First Nations and Non-Indigenous Art
Author: Sarah Scott
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2023-08-11
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000924742

This edited collection examines art resulting from cross-cultural interactions between Australian First Nations and non-Indigenous people, from the British invasion to today. Focusing on themes of collaboration and dialogue, the book includes two conversations between First Nations and non-Indigenous authors and an historian’s self-reflexive account of mediating between traditional owners and an international art auction house to repatriate art. There are studies of ‘reverse appropriation‘ by early nineteenth-century Aboriginal carvers of tourist artefacts and the production of enigmatic toa. Cross-cultural dialogue is traced from the post-war period to ‘Aboriginalism’ in design and the First Nations fashion industry of today. Transculturation, conceptualism, and collaboration are contextualised in the 1980s, a pivotal decade for the growth of collaborative First Nations exhibitions. Within the current circumstances of political protest in photographic portraiture and against the mining of sacred Aboriginal land, Crosscurrents in Australian First Nations and Non-Indigenous Art testifies to the need for Australian institutions to collaborate with First Nations people more often and better. This book will appeal to students and scholars of art history, Indigenous anthropology, and museum and heritage studies.

Histories of Australian Rock Art Research

Histories of Australian Rock Art Research
Author: Jo McDonald
Publisher: ANU Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2022-09-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1760465364

Australia has one of the largest inventories of rock art in the world with pictographs and petroglyphs found almost anywhere that has suitable rock surfaces – in rock shelters and caves, on boulders and rock platforms. First Nations people have been marking these places with figurative imagery, abstract designs, stencils and prints for tens of thousands of years, often engaging with earlier rock markings. The art reflects and expresses changing experiences within landscapes over time, spirituality, history, law and lore, as well as relationships between individuals and groups of people, plants, animals, land and Ancestral Beings that are said to have created the world, including some rock art. Since the late 1700s, people arriving in Australia have been fascinated with the rock art they encountered, with detailed studies commencing in the late 1800s. Through the 1900s an impressive body of research on Australian rock art was undertaken, with dedicated academic study using archaeological methods employed since the late 1940s. Since then, Australian rock art has been researched from various perspectives, including that of Traditional Owners, custodians and other community members. Through the 1900s, there was also growing interest in Australian rock art from researchers across the globe, leading many to visit or migrate to Australia to undertake rock art research. In this volume, the varied histories of Australian rock art research from different parts of the country are explored not only in terms of key researchers, developments and changes over time, but also the crucial role of First Nations people themselves in investigations of this key component of their living heritage.

White Vanishing

White Vanishing
Author: Elspeth Tilley
Publisher: Brill
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2012-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9401208700

The story of the vulnerable white person vanishing without trace into the harsh Australian landscape is a potent and compelling element in multiple genres of mainstream Australian culture. It has been sung in “Little Boy Lost,” brought to life on the big screen in Picnic at Hanging Rock, immortalized in Henry Lawson’s poems of lost tramps, and preserved in the history books’ tales of Leichhardt or Burke and Wills wandering in mad circles. A world-wide audience has also witnessed the many-layered and oddly strident nature of Australian disappearance symbolism in media coverage of contemporary disappearances, such as those of Azaria Chamberlain and Peter Falconio. White Vanishing offers a revealing and challenging re-examination of Australian disappearance mythology, exposing the political utility at its core. Drawing on wide-ranging examples of the white-vanishing myth, the book provides evidence that disappearance mythology encapsulates some of the most dominant and durable categories at the heart of white Australian culture, and that many of those ideas have their origin in colonial mechanisms of inequality and oppression. White Vanishing deliberately (and perhaps controversially) reminds readers that, while power is never absolute or irresistible, some narrative threads carry a particularly authoritative inheritance of ideas and power-relations through time.

Art and migration

Art and migration
Author: Bénédicte Miyamoto
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 449
Release: 2021-06-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1526149699

This collection offers a response to the view that migration disrupts national heritage. Investigating the mediation provided by migrant art, it asks how we can rethink art history in a way that uproots its reliance on space and place as stable definitions of style. Beginning with an invaluable overview of migration studies terminology and concepts, Art and migration opens dialogues between academics of art history and migrations studies through a series of essays and interviews. It also re-evaluates the cultural understanding of borders and revisits the contours of the art world – a supposedly globalised community re-assessed here as structurally bordered by art market dynamics, career constraints, gatekeeping and patronage networks.