art history
Bronwen Douglas
Nicholas Thomas
Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture
Thames and Hudson $39.95pb, 304pp
0 500 28097 5
NICK THOMAS IS arguably the outstanding academic of international
repute at present working in the humanities and social sciences
in Australia, as attested by his receipt of the 1998 Royal
Anthropological Institute's Rivers Memorial Medal for
'exceptional achievement of publications'. He is certainly
prolific: Possessions is his eighth single-authored scholarly
book in thirteen years. Thomas' work is eclectic in discipline,
interests and style. His themes range from Pacific history, to
anthropological theory, to postcolonial cultural history and
critique, to art. The ambiguous intersections of local and
colonial histories and cultures are a persistent concern, with
increasing focus on material objects and the visual. He is
equally adept with academic arcana as with a prose style directed
to that publisher's ideal, the educated non-specialist.
Though not exactly light reading, Possessions will appeal to this
target audience: always contentious, it wears its undoubted
scholarship lightly - not overburdened with references or theory
- and is sumptuously produced and illustrated. It may not please
many conventional art historians and critics or some
anthropologists. And it will outrage conservatives for its
pro-indigenous politics and aspersions on white settlement and
nationalism in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. Yet this is
not another purely oppositional indictment of monolithic ongoing
colonialism, fed by elegiac regret for the death of the hapless
primitive. Thomas' self-proclaimed binary emphasis on 'the
intimate antagonism between settlers and indigenous peoples' -
the 'fraught and fertile' contradiction which defines antipodean
cultures - is altogether more subtle and ambiguous. It is
condensed in the slipperiness and inversions of a central
'and/or' relation, that of 'native and/or national identity',
connoting the complex 'interplay of dispossession and
repossession' in settler societies, whereby settler recourse to
indigenous reference in seeking to define a distinctive national
culture draws notice to the 'real natives', who may creatively
reappropriate such local signs to assert indigenous precedence
and sovereignty.
This book is unusual in scope and ambition, interweaving several
related narratives. It is a history of European primitivism, not
from metropolitan or global perspectives, but from the
'distinctive, local vantage point' of certain settler countries,
invoking a basic contrast between the eclectic, revitalising
logic of modernist primitivism and the localised, romantic
national mission of settler varieties. It is a 'cross-cultural
art history' of settler and indigenous works (plus, somewhat parenthetically, recent diasporic migrant art), signalling
moments of 'dialogue', 'exchange', and 'awkward if not
antagonistic intimacy', which destabilise colonial certitude and
qualify the general violence and dispossession of colonisation.
It is a comparison of different antipodean settings, notably of
the charged specifics of indigenous reference in colonial and
settler art: in bicultural Aotearoa New Zealand Thomas discerns
'a continuum connecting celebration and denigration', in contrast
to multicultural Australia's 'grotesque antithesis' of
'affirmation' of Aboriginal 'forms and motifs', and antipathy to
Aboriginal people. It is above all a sustained celebration of the
creative dynamic whereby Aboriginal and Maori artists have yoked
'traditional' and novel themes, media, techniques and
opportunities to produce art of astonishing variety and vitality,
transcending the conventional antinomy of 'traditional' and
'contemporary' in a vigorous 'co-presence' that challenges 'not
only...the categories that inform art-world hierarchies, but...
the invidious distinctions of settler-colonial culture itself'.
The author's heroes are mostly indigenous, including obvious
candidates like Gordon Bennett, Rover Thomas and Emily Kame
Kngwarreye, plus several Maori modernists, a raft of public and
popular Maori artists, the Niuean John Pule, and, less
fashionably, Albert Namatjira and the Hermannsburg school. Yet
there is also qualified sympathy for the ambivalent forays into
indigenous reference of some settler artists who have otherwise
evoked the diametric responses of nationalist hagiography or
radical/indigenous obloquy. They include Augustus Earle, Eugen
von Guérard and Margaret Preston in Australia - but not the
Heidelberg school, whose nationalist project to represent
'familiar bush', near towns, 'almost totally excluded Aboriginal
people' - and Colin McCahon and Gordon Walters in New Zealand.
For Thomas their 'lurching' between effacement of indigenous
people and appropriation/appreciation of elements of indigenous
culture betokens a basic, multifaceted ambivalence around the
denial and affirmation of the indigenous presence, around the
virtue and illegitimacy of colonial settlement, that runs deep
...[and] is foundational in settler culture
.
Though aesthetic quality is an implicit ground for qualifying
critique of the dubious politics of some white settler artists
(especially Preston and Walters), the author's interests and
intentions are political rather than aesthetic: 'aesthetic
issues' are only significant insofar as they enhance 'respect'
for indigenous culture and 'recognition' for indigenous political
claims. So far as indigenous and migrant art is concerned, the
tone ranges from sympathetic to celebratory of the purported
politics, and political affirmation is generally echoed in
aesthetic adjudications.