The Fourth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

FORKING TONGUES Michael Nelson Jagamara Australia b.c.1946 Warlpiri language group Lightning 1998 Synthetic polymer paint on linen canvas 201 x 176.5cm Purchased 1998 Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant Collection: Queensland Art Gallery © Copyright courtesy Aboriginal Artists Agency, Sydney Hetti I don't necessarily think that the problem lies with the artist - although they may become complicit in the process. It is more in the marketing exercise that surrounds the production of Indigenous or minority art. I wonder about a kind of reward system that operates to tempt certain artists along particular paths. So, it's not about condemning the artist, but rather condemning the system that covertly encourages artists to break with their origins and become part of an overheated art world operating in the United States and Europe. An art world that can dismiss bark painters, for instance, as folk artists. I think, in positioning themselves at odds with their context, artists who deliberately abandon their identity are in danger of being regarded merely as fascinating curiosities, much like those Indigenous people who were forced to travel and be exhibited in those ghastly circuses years ago. I don't have a particular gripe w ith any artist; whatever they want to do is up to them. I just think they do themselves and their peers a disservice, in that they affirm the assimilationist practices of the mainstream art world. They don't challenge the status quo. It's a question that arises often in my role as a curator, where people suggest that I must feel ghettoised by curating only Australian Indigenous art. I find that completely offensive, actually. Nikos I think the case of identity politics in contemporary art is more complex than much of the moralising and name-calling permits. It is easy to dismiss ethnicity as a boring anchor hanging around the necks of minority artists, but at what cost do we ignore the role of culture and experience in defining the context of artistic production? It is one thing to condemn an artist for turning their back on the community that they emerged from, but another to consider the subtle ways through which they return and remain in touch. Who is to judge over these questions of continuity and distance? Surely these questions demand new methods of figuring out the role of everyday experience or historical memory in the production of art. In this sense I don't think we have quite developed the intellectual tools to do the very work that our contemporary life and art demands. We haven't figured out these questions of attachment to and detachment from place and culture. I am not convinced that the argument can be resolved by repeating the binary that confines an artist to a particular ethnicity, or elevates them to the universal. This was the way of differentiating artists and cultures in the days of early modernity. I don't think this works any more. One of the stunning leaps and also baffling limitations of the Mabo case was the right to claim possession to land through the rubric of cultural and physical attachment. 6 What is more limited in our perspective is how attachments persist even after we leave. They exist in a deterritorialised zone; attachment today is formed through the invisible but pervasive technologies of communication systems, like the very ones we are using in this circle of response and contribution . I am in another city but I feel closer to the people inside this circle than to most of my neighbours and colleagues. What claims would I have to such a community, and what responsibilities do we have to each other? I am very conscious of the limitations of transferring a sense of identification with others and with the shortcircuiting that exists in various energy fields. Why did the Australian public show such a wonderful w illingness to open its heart to issues of reconciliation; why did all the progressive and liberal (in the old sense of the word) minded people make the effort to march in open protest to the government's policy on Aboriginal history and politics;7 and then why such silence, reticence, and downright complicity with the hostility that this government shows to refugees? The stranger is always wrapped in the conflicting myths of magician and monster. Why did the polity accept the story that these strangers, who supposedly throw their children overboard, are monsters who act against nature and defy the order of the queue? 0 117