Art as knowledge and authority

The following entry is a "free write" - 20 minutes spent writing in response to a question, following discussion with my group members, Hannah and Liz. The question was: "How do Aboriginal visual/performing/expressive art forms present an Aboriginal Approach to knowledge?"

This was my first "free write" after our triad discussion today.

Liz raised the point that Aboriginal knowledge is about a process that is shared among the community; the process is the knowledge. The end product is not the knowledge. Art in my culture is usually thought of as the end process: the painting, or the play, or the piece of music. Taking this perspective on Aboriginal knowledge as process, then the knowledge in art would be the process that created it, the ritual, spiritual, community context that created it as well as the act of creation, from the first germ of the idea through to the “product.” So when an Aboriginal painting is displayed in a gallery, only the end product is displayed, not the process.

This leads us back to the concept of "inside" and "outside" knowledge in art. Only certain understandings and interpretations are available to outsiders who view the end product in a gallery. White Australians will only have outside knowledge of what some of the images, symbols, and designs mean. Only people who participated in the process that led to the end product will have inside knowledge of the art. So, as Wally Caruana said in his piece, the art contains many levels of knowledge, both inside and outside. The problem is that many Westerners don't recognize that they have only outside knowledge. True ignorance is not understanding your own ignorance, your own status as an outsider to certain knowledge.

We also talked about knowledge as a form of authority and status in Aboriginal culture. To produce art is to make a statement of authority: I am an insider for this knowledge. Therefore when Westerners copy Aboriginal images and print them up on a t-shirt for sale, for example, they are doing (at least) two things wrong. The t-shirt producers are stealing the copyright ownership of the art, and denying the ownership rights to money made from the sale of that art to the indigenous artist. They are also falsely asserting authority over the knowledge embodied in the art. When white Australian painters use "indigenous" designs in their art, saying that they're embodying a "new Australian aesthetic", are they not doing the same thing? Asserting authority to use such designs and images, falsely asserting authority over that knowledge? But then white Australian artists come from a culture that doesn’t see art and knowledge as being so intimately related.

How does one understand categories like "traditional" Aboriginal art vs. "contemporary" or "urban" Aboriginal art? If a painting does not use traditional images, does it assert the same kind of ceremonial, spiritual, and cultural authority that a "traditional" painting does? There is still a process that led to that painting, and that process includes the experience of what it's like to be an Aboriginal person living in an urban, contemporary society. There is still a history to that painting, and we don't always know what the history of that painting is. Hannah pointed out that that is true for any art, not just contemporary Aboriginal art – all paintings have a process and a history that someone viewing them in a gallery won't know. So my question about contemporary Aboriginal painting is this: Is the painter the only person with inside knowledge of what the full meaning and history and context of the painting is? Or are there other contemporary Aboriginal people with that kind of inside knowledge? Is there any ceremony or ritual or cultural process in which other people besides the artist participate that leads to the production of the painting? I think that for Western artists, the answer to that question is no. It's just the individual who has inside knowledge of the process that led to the painting. As an outsider to contemporary (or any) Aboriginal art, I realize that I don't know the answers to these questions about contemporary Aboriginal art.

Caruana's piece also talked about art being a process of moving an object from the mundane world into the sacred world, changing its state. Does contemporary Aboriginal art do the same thing? Does it represent a changing of state from the mundane to the sacred? Or is it a different kind of process, say, a cultural critique? Does putting a cultural critique into a painting move that critique from the mundane world to the sacred world? Are these different categories of art even sensible?