重新思考澳大利亚艺术史:土著艺术的挑战

D. Jorgensen
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摘要

在《重新思考澳大利亚艺术史》一书中,苏珊·洛伊什根据19世纪探险家、民族志学家和爱好者的著作,对土著艺术进行了论述。这本专著的质量在于把早期作家的主题放在一个连贯的故事和背景中。这里有一些熟悉的名字,但这些新生学者中的许多人在澳大利亚专家的小圈子之外鲜为人知。洛伊什认为,他们对人工制品制作和岩石艺术的不同描述为20世纪土著艺术的收集和展览奠定了基础。土著艺术是一个出了名的困难的概念,它产生的问题比解决的问题要多,因为它以种族而不是作品来定义一代又一代的艺术家。洛伊什的史学从艺术家和作品中退了一步,将土著艺术视为“一个时期风格的变体”,但“不是根据风格或肖像来定义的”(13)。自20世纪70年代的新艺术史(New Art History)以来,时期划分就不再流行了,它对横扫时间的概括与曾经主宰学校和大学的大人物历史有着密切的联系。在这里,洛伊什想要拯救这个词,但他仔细挖掘了戴着皮帽探险、戴着教堂领的人们的作品。正是这些人将长矛和盾牌安排在展览和发展图中,为接受土著艺术奠定了基础。其结果是一种由进化和推测所定义的艺术,在被想象为接近原始自然的生活中。乔治·格雷(George Grey)和鲍德温·斯宾塞(Baldwin Spencer)等名人的写作和收藏在这里发挥了重要作用,然而,尽管他们的影响很大,但他们对其他事情更感兴趣。格雷当时正在对澳大利亚西北部进行调查,而斯宾塞热衷于交易树皮画、冷藏箱、盾牌和其他一切他可以讨价还价的东西,这使得他的藏品基本上没有记录。他从来没有真正抽出时间来写他曾经想象的关于土著艺术的书,在这一点上,他是大多数早期作家的典型,他们涉猎而不是专注于这个主题。然而,正是这种涉猎引发了对话和歧视,构成了20世纪土著艺术的成熟。在洛伊什在这里描述了一些奇怪的分析之后,土著艺术在澳大利亚公众中获得了任何吸引力,这是一个奇迹,最臭名昭著的是格雷的理论,即旺吉纳岩石艺术是由澳大利亚海岸以外的人绘制的。这引发了一系列对西北视觉文化的误解,包括牧民约瑟夫·布拉德肖(Joseph Bradshaw)对《
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Rethinking Australia’s Art History: The Challenge of Aboriginal Art
In Rethinking Australia’s Art History, Susan Lowish makes a discursive history of Aboriginal art out of the writings of explorers, ethnographers and enthusiasts during the nineteenth century. The quality of the monograph is to put early writers on the subject into a coherent story and context. There are some familiar names here but many of these nascent scholars are little known outside small circles of Australian specialists. Lowish makes the case that their varying accounts of artefact making and rock art laid the groundwork for the collection and exhibition of Aboriginal art in the twentieth century. Aboriginal art is a notoriously difficult concept, one that created more problems than it solved as it defined generations of artists by their race rather than their work. Lowish’s historiography takes a step back from both artists and work in order to think about Aboriginal art as a ‘variation on a period style’ but one that is ‘not defined according to style or iconography’ (13). Periodisation has been unfashionable since the New Art History of the 1970s, its generalisations about sweeping swathes of time all too implicated in the big man histories that once dominated schools and universities. Here Lowish wants to rescue the term, but in a careful excavation of writings by men on pith hatted expeditions and wearing Church collars. These were the men who laid the foundations for the reception of Aboriginal art by arranging spears and shields into exhibitions and diagrams of development. The result is an art defined by evolution and speculation, in lives imagined to be close to rudimentary nature. The writing and collecting of personalities such as George Grey and Baldwin Spencer play a powerful part here, and yet for all of their impact they were more interested in other things. Grey was doing a survey of north-west Australia, while Spencer’s ardent trade for bark paintings, coolamons, shields and everything else he could parley for has left a largely undocumented collection. He never quite got around to writing the book he once imagined on Aboriginal art, and in this he is typical of most of these early writers as they dabbled rather than focused on the topic. Yet it was this dabbling that set into motion the conversations and discriminations that constituted Aboriginal art’s coming of age in the twentieth century. It is a wonder that Aboriginal art gained any traction at all with the Australian public after some of the oddball analyses Lowish describes here, most notoriously Grey’s theory that the Wandjina rock art was painted by people from beyond Australia’s shores. This set into motion a series of misinterpretations of the visual culture of the north-west, including pastoralist Joseph Bradshaw’s reading of the
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