Collecting Aboriginal Art in the Australian Nation: Two Case Studies

Visual Anthropology Review, Volume 21, Issues 1 and 2, pages 116-137, ISSN 1053-7147, online ISSN 1548-7458. ©2006 by the American Anthropological Association, all rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press; Journals Division; 2000 Center Street, Suite 303; Berkeley, CA 94704-1223. By now, it is well known that Aboriginal Australian acrylic painting has received a remarkable degree of recognition. What remains less known are the social and cultural processes through which what I have discussed elsewhere as a movement between different “regimes of value” occurred (Myers 2001, 2002; see also Appadurai 1986; Thomas 1991). How is it that acrylic paintings have become available to viewers, rather than simply dispersed into an anonymous market? As objects of visual anthropology, I want to argue, acrylic paintings have properties that distinguish them from other media. They are hand-made, unique objects, produced in substantial numbers and at relatively low cost to the producers, and as such they enter into a diverse market—and in this way, they threaten to be scattered or distributed promiscuously, leaving little trace. Collectors, conversely, select and gather paintings together, offering their combinations for sustained consideration—opposing unrestrained circulation and proposing evaluative distinctions. In this essay, I am concerned with one dimension of the reframing of Aboriginal acrylic painting in the category of “high art” in 1980s. The growing frequency of exhibitions of Aboriginal Australian acrylic painting and the increasing emphasis on the framework of “fine art” and “contemporary fine art” in these exhibitions is well known (see Myers 2001, 2002; Perkins and Fink 2000). Importantly, in such processes, individual artists came prominently into attention, both in the press and also—eventually—with the one-person exhibitions that are the sine qua non of fine art recognition’s emphasis on individual artistry and singular masterpieces (see Clifford 1988:210). In my own previous writing on this transformation, I have focused mostly on two dimensions of this emerging field of cultural production (see Myers 2001, 2002), exploring (1) the development of the “industry” of Aboriginal arts and crafts and marketing, as components of governmental policy and (2) the rise of art criticism (Myers 1994; see also Altman et al. 1989; Altman and Taylor 1990). In this article, I take up the consideration of collectors and the formations of collections that serve to legitimate COLLECTING ABORIGINAL ART IN THE AUSTRALIAN NATION TWO CASE STUDIES