ARTS228 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: John Batman, Hills Hoist, Rover Thomas
Katherine Paterson
ARTS228 Art Theory & Art History 3
Week 6 - Australian Indigenous Art in the 1990s-early 2000s
-Urban Indigenous Art
-Map > different customs different languages
-Death Marker > like a decorated grave stone but as a hollowed out tree
-Dots aren't decorative, they have meaning > represent more than just the surface
-Michael Neilson Tjakamarra
-Traditional Aboriginal art acts as a map of a country or song lines (routes of walking to
get food and water, carried to the next generation through song), a personal kinship
history, family or tribal history, or special access knowledge to those who are initiated
to know it
-Wally Caruana "Aboriginal Art" 1993 or 2000 > The Dreaming: cosmology
encompassing the creator and ancestral beings, social and religious law, the land,
spiritual forces which sustain life and the narrative which concern these
-Songlines, Skin Names (based on the clan you're from), Body Stories (paintings on
the )
-Johnny Tjupurrula "A Bush Tucker Story"
-Ada Bird Petyarre "Sacred Grasses"
-Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri "Old Woman Travels"
-Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi "Children's Water Dreaming" > certain people get
knowledge as they grow up, they get it as they grow up and as they need it and are
initiated to get it
-Aboriginal people got to vote in 1967
-First indigenous Venice biennale 1990 Rover Thomas > moving away from
representing their own dreamings > from the kimberly > "Cyclone Tracy" 1991, using
his traditional artmaking to commemorate the cyclone, the blackness is the big mouth
of the wind that destroyed everything > also made paintings about the killings "Ruby
Plains Killing I" and "The Burning Site" 1990 > not a direct graphic painting but an
aerial circle to commemorate the collective memory of the event > "All that big rain
coming from top side" 1991 where dots represent the rain
-^^and Trevor Nickols > fusing his own Dreaming with politics > "Cultural Terrorist"
1987 > fusing a white face with a black face > 1990 featured on TIME magazine >
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