SPIRIT & VISION

Christian Thompson - - - Turning Tricks for Colonial Kicks

Australia has long been misrepresented in the fine art tradition by Europeans for Europeans. Colonial painters were so entrenched in the particular European style that it was almost impossible for them to render images of the land without applying this romanticism. Their motivation was to transform the Australian landscape from alien to familiar through an aesthetic vocabulary within which they operated. This imposition upon the landscape constituted a cultural conquest and manipulated the realities of Australia's population and geography.
The relationship between colonial representations of the landscape necessarily involved an editorial process equivalent to pornography. This practice of exclusion results in outcomes of self-gratification for Europeans and one of exile for indigenous people.
It was not until late 1800's that a uniquely Australian style would be born in Melbourne and championed as … the first identifiable national school. The Heidelberg School represented a new-found hope that was to untangle Australia's identity from the shackles of imperialism and its colonial past. The focus was on this new generation that would consecrate an absolute affinity with the land through their work. And yet, traditional cultural Aboriginal art had been doing this for time immemorial and remains the nations most distinctive movement.
The European framework of fine art reduced traditional cultural practice to an anthropological context. Aboriginal art was removed from communities and contained within the jurisdiction of national institutions. Indigenous people have been, like our art, exiled and contained under the jurisdiction of an alien authority. For indigenous people access to our culture must be negotiated through a European bureaucracy.
For indigenous persons to authenticate themselves we must conform to Eurocentric definitions. An Aboriginal cannot be an Aboriginal, you must be of Aboriginal extraction or descent. If we were to comply to aesthetic principles of Blakness inflicted by European imagination the solarium industry would boom, perming each others hair would be a popular cosmetic pastime and most of us would develop rheumatoid arthritis in one leg, due to forever assuming our one legged stance.
The Eurocentric assessment of Blakness for Aborigines is something that has permeated indigenous society, that to be Aboriginal you must suffer or have suffered within a Eurocentric system.
Adrian Piper, an African American Artist / Philosopher describes this phenomenon within America:
"I have sometimes met blacks socially who, as a condition of social acceptance of me, require me to prove my blackness by passing the Suffering Test: They recount at length their recent experiences of racism and then wait expectantly, sceptically, for me to match theirs with mine. Mistaking these situations for a different one in which an exchange of shared experiences is part of the bonding process.
This idea of Blakness is an 'either', 'or' policy and for Europeans it is easier to polarise Blak identity than to recognise contemporary indigenity as a multicultural concept.
It would not be until the culture wars of the 1980's and 1990's that the symbolism of the Blak/colonised body would enter great public debate and scrutiny on an international level, especially in America. However this trend translated to Australia as a new generation of urban Aboriginal artists entered the international fields of performance, photography and video.
This was an entirely new genre for Australian art and the placement of Aborigines in metropolitan areas in non-traditional context, Aborigines were making art for Aborigines by Aborigines.
To be 'urban', 'Aboriginal' and active in society but retain an indigenous identity is considered a volatile combination. Aborigines in urban environs are most political and dangerous to the establishment when we are simply 'ourselves'.

Christian Thompson 2003
Bidjara

Emotional Striptease 2002
Projected Dissolving Images
Courtesy of the Artist