Seeing Ourselves

Ni! Nguny wangkiny bardip ngoongoorl noonook.
Djinang kadadjiny.

Hey! Let me tell you a story.
See, and understand.

In the late twentieth century the topic of critical writing for and about First Nations visual arts started to gain momentum. This corresponded with Australian arts institutions and artists taking the practices of First Nations artists seriously as contemporary art. White art critics, however, have consistently struggled with critically responding to the themes, invitations and provocations inherent in the practices of the vast array of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists across the country. Blak art critics have struggled – not to write about works of art – but to try to fit that critique into the western canon of arts criticism so that it can effectively be ingested, read or heard by non-Blak bodies. In the last decade there has been an upswell of writers who are now choosing not to try to conform to critical art writing ‘norms’, to carve out sovereign spaces of critique unrelated to other annals of writing practice.

Important as this is, the question legitimately could be asked: What is the value of Blak arts criticism and why does it matter, except to those in the very specific and contained worlds of contemporary art?  What can it do when it is at its best, and what happens if it doesn’t exist?

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in early colonised so-called ‘Australia’, and First Nations people globally, were prohibited from speaking their own languages, through the threat of – and actual – violence. When a person is learning a language, the way in which the brain is required to organise, interpret and assimilate that language is cognitively developed as ‘schemas’. Schemas, the mental building blocks for cognition and the way in which we understand the world around us, is in very complex ways, related directly to language.¹ Being forced to learn and speak English – the language of the coloniser – was a brutal tool of assimilation. It changed the very brain chemistry of First Nations people, rendering our ability to represent our world view through the mechanism of oral narrative compromised, and in some cases, demolishing it entirely.

It was crucial then, and even more so now, to retain, recreate and represent our own world views and schemas to maintain cultural and personal sovereignty as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. A wise soul once wrote that the pen is mightier than the sword (Edward Bulwer-Lytton), and when we see people in otherwise first world countries burning books and waging propaganda wars across all forms of media, we see how powerful cultural representation becomes. This tool has not always been available in mainstream media, and it is helpful to understand how we frame the mechanism of critical arts writing to understand why it works to counteract or replace, and in some cases weaponise representation and agency.

Critical arts writing is an expression of judgement, at its core.² But in this writer’s opinion, it requires more than just educated positioning and declaration. Arts criticism most often shaped within the western canon expresses approval or disapproval of a work, or a performance – but there is an important argument that suggests these cannot just be conclusions supported by reason, without insider knowledge of the works’ meanings and locus. Most colonial and post-colonial critique seeks to impose some type of order that is understood and arranged in advance of the encounter with a work, which subsequently locates thoughts about the context in very specific ways. Post-colonial critique looks ‘for’, rather than co-responds ‘with’.³ This is hugely important, in that there is very rarely a declaration by a non-Indigenous person about their cultural background when they are critiquing Blak art forms, and what they bring to bear knowingly and unknowingly in their approach to Blak work. As David Garneau states, “you can’t just ‘believe’ you have enough in common with the reader to assume that you share an assumed meaning and context and that the intent will not be misconstrued.”⁴

It is worthwhile clarifying that when this author speaks about First Nations or Blak art and art-making practice, what I am really speaking about is multi-form expression: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander storytelling. These forms may differ in their final destination or arrangement, but the cultural framework in which they are positioned are the same. They are cultural narratives or accounts which are personal, significant and are inclusive of protocols around who is permitted to be the storyteller. The intersection of the colonial viewer or perceiver of the work and the meanings of works themselves has created a third space, a site of potential sovereignty within settler territories.⁵ The intent of good critical art writing should be about understanding how specific works of art functions in these third spaces, and how they may offer resistance, healing or representation, quite aside from what they may do to educate or inform.

It often feels incredibly difficult as an Aboriginal person to critique Blak work, particularly historically, as we have been forced to utilise non-Indigenous modalities of criticism. Our languages were and continue to be consistently oral and aural, and hugely diverse in form, but critical arts writing is always in English – the language of the coloniser. What would it feel and look like to be able to utilise our own languages in the critique of work? And who would be able to discern meaning when Indigenous Australia does not share one language set, let alone non-Indigenous people?  Making meaning has, for much of the history of contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander visual art, been about explaining a story to a white audience. This transactional, one-way learning is not a discourse but a dialogic representation that assumes Indigenous narratives are fixed, an artefact, a commodity.⁶ Contemporary First Nations art in Australia is multi-faceted and far more elusive.

A significant aspect of Blak critical arts writing is to develop the audience and to grow their understanding: not of the artwork or practice itself necessarily, but about why that form of representation is critical, how it operates, and for the audience to understand what they are consuming (and who!).  There is an opportunity within critical arts writing to debate and reframe the post-colonial forms of reductive classification related to works of art and practice,⁷ and to diminish the insatiable need to make meaning in digestible forms without understanding the transactive nature of that need, and what it takes from the energy and time of First Nations people. It takes a great deal of emotional, mental and spiritual labour to consistently educate non-Indigenous people about our cultural outputs, and it remains the greatest challenge in the arts sector to persuade non-Indigenous people to understand how deeply challenging and personal this is.

All of this is why it feels almost unholy, as a Blak critic, to wield colonial language to dissect and decontextualise practice in an arts sector where everyone is known to you, and personal relationships abound. We all share the challenge of existing as Blak bodies in these spaces, and we have all had to undertake much transactional labour for others to be heard. There is enormous empathy around our respective positionality. This author moderated a panel some years ago about the topic of critical arts writing for the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and the Power Institute, and Kimberley Moulton, Adjunct Curator of Indigenous Art, Tate spoke about how this feels:

“To critique each other’s work without being violent, it is about being informed and sensitive… I have had issues when I write about an artist (and am forced to use the art history conventions) – and I have a personal relationship to them – so I don’t like using their last name. It is very dislocating, and I always get a lot of push back when I don’t use it, but that is a methodology I am personally trying to embed and change…”⁸

When we are forced to use colonially-framed critique we decontextualise full and embodied expressions of storytelling. This framework can’t hope to answer questions important to First Nations people such as – custodially, was that expression of storytelling accurate? Would your ancestors see this story and recognise what you were trying to say? Did your work contribute to broader aspects of recognition and representation, and who else’s voice from your community was elevated? Did the work contribute to the narrative around structural change and sovereignty? To be clear, sometimes a work of art does not need to be loaded with these questions, but sometimes it does, and we must at least have the option to choose.

The vernacular of the non-Indigenous critic – the use of inappropriate, dated language and phrases/terms often has little currency in the community whose work is being critiqued. As an example, a critic might say a work is not ‘resolved’ enough, but the artist might only be concerned about whether their output felt effective in doing justice to a custodial story for which there have been multiple ‘owners’, and which the current storyteller is only one.  The narrative – often for the artist the most important part of the work – may never be effectively ‘resolved’ as it is endlessly iterative in terms of its function as cultural semaphore, in which the artwork functions as the symbol. What is required is an ‘evolved critical language’ to support how a work functions culturally.⁹

Good critical arts writing and criticism should, however, at least attempt to explain why one particular work, body of work or practice is worthy of attention, and exemplary in its field of context.  This is important because fundamentally it carries with it the implication that we are interested in sustainable improvement in practice and work, and that we understand how to differentiate (from our own community standpoint) why one thing can be elevated over another. This territory is possible to claim, and significant. Non-Indigenous critique of Blak work could be read, at times, as a form of control and categorisation, but Blak critique could function as a form of world building – a space where we are able to completely Indigenise every frame of reference and schema.¹⁰

Imagine if every work of art had personhood, and we understood it as able to be animated by proximity and context. What would that require of us and how would we then speak about its ability to be read, enacted and breathed into life simultaneously, by both the viewer and the creator?

The demand to build our own worlds, in this highly contested space, is a clarion call embodied in the words of Blak writers everywhere.