Blackfellows & Modernists
 
The desire for ‘Aboriginality’ reverberates through visual cultures in Australia, though it was the modernist artist Margaret Preston who first made the notorious call to ‘be Aboriginal’, which has become a lightening rod for battles over appropriation and dispossession.  My talk will scrutinise several early modernist intersections with Aboriginal art at both the heart of Dada’s Cabaret Voltaire and on the periphery of the Pacific in suburban Australia, for disruptive signs that might challenge European discourses on primitivism. I ask how far cultural hybrids force into contention the segregation of ethnography and fine art. Or do we continue to employ categories like the ‘anthropological’ and ‘tourist souvenir’ to distinguish certain practices from ‘contemporary art’?