Art: From the mundane to the sacred

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 second free write following further discussion.

We started off the 2nd discussion with the concept of art moving from the mundane to the sacred. Liz talked, as an artist, about her understanding of the process of art, by analogy to breathing. Breathing, you take something in, process it, and exhale something different. We are all, all the time, "inhaling" the world around us, our culture, our surroundings. Artists process what they inhale, and then the process of creating art is their kind of "exhalation." The painting or the song or the poem will then be "inhaled" by others, continually creating a changing reality. So, what does this have to do with the sacred and the profane? We didn't seem to come to a clear understanding of this, but we talked about one possibility being that "art" is when you consciously realize the power of what you're doing by exhaling something, and non-art is when you don't realize the power of what you produce that will be taken in by others. So an offhand comment isn't art because even though it might have a big effect on someone else who inhales it, it wasn't produced with any awareness of the power of the effect it might have. This got us to the concept of mindfulness vs. mindlessness. Liz said, and I think I wrote it down in close to her exact words: "When people aren't careful about their intent, then they're not careful about what they produce." This seemed very profound to me. Being careless about one's intent vs. being careful about one's intent might be one thing that distinguishes the mundane from the sacred: mundane=careless about intent; sacred=careful about intent. Liz talked about the sacred space of being mindful, knowing that you're creating art.

There were so many things we talked about, I'll just touch on another one. We talked about the interpretation and understanding of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal art, and contemporary vs. traditional art. Traditional Aboriginal art is understood as being one product or representation of a process of knowledge, which the culture and group participate in and manage. I said that I thought this wasn't true of non-Aboriginal art, that it's just the individual who’s owning the knowledge expressed in the art. But Liz pointed out that early paintings of Australia, of Cap Cook’s landing at Botany Bay, represented things a certain way: he was portrayed as tall, heroic, towering over the smaller natives, whereas in reality he was shorter and more scarred from disease than they were. So others besides the people who painted such works owned and managed the concepts that were expressed in those paintings. Some authority commissioned such a work, made decisions about who would see it and how it would be exhibited in Australia and around the world, and those authority figures were indeed owning and managing so-called "knowledge" about the reality of colonization of Australia. Whoever decided to reprint such paintings in textbooks for schoolchildren in Australia was continuing to further someone's cultural agenda about how Cook and Aboriginal people should be portrayed. School children don't know, parents don't know, teachers don't know, and I certainly don't know who such authorities were, how those decisions got made, how that art, imagery, and knowledge were managed. We are outsiders to that process. Wish I knew who the insiders were! So non-Aboriginal art can also be part of a cultural process of managing knowledge, in which there are insiders and outsiders. But in the case of propaganda art, inside-ness is a matter of who has power and control over others, it's an insideness of domination, and outside-ness is a matter of being controlled and dominated. That is not what "inside" and "outside" mean with respect to Aboriginal knowledge, as I talked about in my journal – it's not about power over.

We also talked about art as an expression of individual and group identity. We were discussing how traditional Aboriginal art is seen as representing a culture, whereas contemporary Aboriginal art might be seen as expressing more of an individual identity. Western art gets seen as expressing an individual identity, not as an expression of a culture. But then we also talked about whether contemporary Aboriginal artists can ever be seen as just producing art as an expression of individual identity, or whether white people always see an Aboriginal person as "speaking for Aboriginal people" generally, or speaking for their culture. But then, don't non-Aboriginal people also express their culture? Aren't they also speaking for their culture? When Quentin Tarantino makes some sick, violent film, isn't he expressing something of the pathology of American culture? Doesn't the creation of (and the fact that there's a market for) that kind of “art” show something about the culture that produced it? Liz said that white artists are "interpreted within a bubble that doesn't know that the art is an expression of a whole culture." So white artists are more often interpreted as individuals, and indigenous artists are not. I told a joke about this from an African American comedian, Wayne Brady, "What does the African American community think about this?" "I don't know, I'll ask them when we all meet next Friday."