Aboriginal Art and the Museum: indigenising a colonial space
To prove their commitment to anti-racism museums must reconcile with their past.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that the following article may contain images of people who have died.
As tens of millions of people across the world have taken to social media and then to the streets in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, art world institutions have come under scrutiny for their responses. Critics have denounced museums and galleries for silence, for hesitating to respond, and for posturing.
The lack of diversity in the collections, programming and even the workforces of public museums and galleries, large and small, has been a conversation for the better part of 50 years. Despite some agonisingly slow progress, the art collections of most museums remain dominated by white, male artists.
The fact is: the histories; the collections; the very existence of museums is inherently colonial. Today many museums take great care to collect diversely but to be truly anti-racist, museums must reconcile with their past.
Until the 1930s, there existed an anthropological paradigm in which “Aboriginal samples” of people from Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas were brought to the Western world for “aesthetic contemplation, scientific analysis and entertainment, serving as proof of the natural superiority of European civilisation” [1].
Meaning, colonised people were captured, imprisoned, and exhibited in imperial institutions.
Until the 1930s.
This practice occurred for hundreds of years and constitutes what the performance artist Coco Fusco dubbed “the other history of intercultural performance” [2]. These experiences comprise the first interactions between Indigenous people and the imperial museum space. Therefore, not only has the museum perpetrated the construction of the Other since the dawn of colonisation, it has also legitimised cruelty and racism.
The colonial knowledge paradigms of the museum and the racism that accompanies this renders the relationship between Indigenous art and the colonial museum inherently problematic. Yet little has been done by museums and galleries to reconcile their bloody histories and many continue to profit off the artefacts and art of the very people they once caged.
The work of Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña offers a particularly poignant example of how quickly a relationship of difference can be constructed within the gallery space. In 1992 the artists set out to examine the “legacy of performing the identity of the Other for a white audience” in the prolific performance Two Undiscovered Amerindians visit…[3]. Fusco and Gómez-Peña visited several major institutions including the Whitney in New York, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, Covent Garden in London and the Australian Museum of Natural History in Sydney, performing as subjects of a colonial-era human exhibition [4].
In each performance, the pair were locked in a golden cage for three days undertaking “traditional tasks” and performing special assignments for a small fee. Two “zoo guards” stood on hand to talk to the audience and escort the artists to the toilet on a leash [5].
The artists intended to create a “satirical commentary on Western concepts of the exotic, primitive Other” but made interesting discoveries when forced to confront unexpected audience reactions from members of the public and art industry professionals alike. Over half of the public believed the artists’ fictional identities were real, and a “substantial number of intellectuals, artists and cultural bureaucrats… sought to deflect attention from the substance of [the] experiment to the ‘moral implications’ of [the] dissimulation” or in the words of these critics “misinforming the public”[6].
According to Fusco, as the artists “assumed the stereotypical role of the domesticated savage, many audience members felt entitled to assume the role of the coloniser” [7]. The apparent believability of the work and the willingness of audience members to participate demonstrates how rapidly the gallery space can create a seemingly legitimate relationship between the colonial power and the colonised Other, even within a contemporary context.
The conscious decolonisation of gallery and museum spaces is therefore essential. Problematically, the pervasiveness of colonialism in Western knowledge structures and cultures is at times “difficult to discern and much more insidious to overcome,” meaning decolonisation is frequently discussed in abstract terms [8].
So, what are the practicalities of decolonising a museum space?
In answer, let us explore the interventions of Australian artist Brook Andrew, who attempted to disrupt colonial exhibiting practices by unseating traditional curatorial methods in his 2017 exhibition The Right to Offend is Sacred. Curated by Judith Ryan, The Right to Offend is Sacred was held at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) and incorporated 25 years of Andrew’s work along with his personal archives and those from the NGV’s collection. The exhibition was a “transit through the archives of colonialism … not aimed at setting things straight or establishing a new order, but at discovering a postcolonial ethic”[9].
In the exhibition, Andrew, challenged postcolonial understandings of Indigenous cultures and societies and called into question the role that galleries and museums have played in perpetrating ideas of the Other. Customary methods of curatorship were abandoned: Andrew and Ryan forewent placards of curatorial information; some artworks were removed from the wall and instead placed in the centre of the room while others were exhibited well above eye height so the ease of viewing afforded to a visitor in a conventional exhibition was abandoned.
Meanwhile, the gallery walls themselves were significant to the intervention, formerly white walls were painted solid black, or covered in thick diagonal stripes of blue, red, yellow and white. Another wall was covered with a wallpaper designed by the artist and gave the effect of seamlessly incorporating the art into the gallery space.
To understand the significance of curating in the decolonisation of exhibiting spaces, it is worth considering Margo Neale’s take on the “white cube” of galleries and museums. Neale describes white cube curatorship as a style that “conforms to the connoisseurship model of modernism,” that despite exhibiting ethnographic art, “displays attributes of minimal context and dominant curatorial direction over Indigenous agency” [10]. It can be argued then, that in disrupting this “white cube” model of curatorship through unconventional methods of exhibiting art, Andrew took agency over the gallery space, breaking down traditional curatorial methods and therefore indigenised the exhibition design.
With this in mind, the exhibition can be considered in relation to a broader movement towards the decolonisation of attitudes concerning Indigenous cultures and societies, a mission that is integral to decolonising museum and gallery spaces.
Among the works in The Right to Offend is Sacrad, the indigenisation of the museum space was, arguably, most explicitly addressed in Beyond Tasmania, an archival work that includes a human skeleton laid out in a glass cabinet. The skull of the skeleton is facing an enormous wooden megaphone that is attached to the cabinet, suggesting the skeleton is speaking. The artist thus gives his Aboriginal ancestors, who in all likelihood suffered terribly under colonial rule, a voice which is exerted onto the art around it.
This Right to Offend is Sacred is demonstrative of the role that art can play in disrupting the colonial lens through which Indigenous people and their art have been viewed for hundreds of years. When facing a history where Indigenous objects and in some cases their very bodies were displayed and commodified, reclaiming the right to expression and exhibiting Indigenous art through the lens of Indigenous people is integral to indigenising museum and gallery spaces.
It is not enough for museums to collect and exhibit work by artists who are racially and ethnically diverse, this should be a given. To truly dismantle the systems of inequality, the racism, embedded in their histories, museums must support institutional critique and facilitate exhibitions which call into question and challenge their very existence. For museums and galleries, decolonising their spaces, being actively anti-racist, means acknowledging and reconciling with the atrocities of their past.
Notes:
[1] Coco Fusco, “The Other History of Intercultural Performance” The Drama Review, 1994, 146.
[2] Coco Fusco, “The Other History of Intercultural Performance” 146.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] ibid, 145.
[6] ibid, 143.
[7] ibid.
[8] Ivan Muniz Reed, “Thoughts on Curatorial Practices in the decolonial turn,” Broadsheet, 45, 2016, 14.
[9] Ian McLean, “Brook Andrew: The Right to Offend is Sacred,” Artlink, April 28, 2017.
[10] Margo Neale, “The ‘White Cube’ Changes Colour: Indigenous art between the museum and the art gallery,” Museums Australia magazine, 23 (2015): 18–19.
