"Bright Shadows": Art, Aboriginality, and Aura

We should never forget that, from the beginning, Aboriginal works of art are reproductions. By this we mean not only that they are not "original" in the Western sense, being the copy of Dreamings that have long preceded the individual artist, but that they are produced for commercial reasons, to be bought and sold. And it is important to realize—for all of its provocativeness—that this is not a fate that has suddenly befallen Aboriginal art, and that therefore could be corrected. Rather, from the outset, Aboriginal works of art are "false," "inauthentic": no image of the Dreaming is the true or definitive one; the entire phenomenon of Aboriginal "art" is a European invention, and would not exist but for a desire for it on the part of a white audience.

In this regard, we are inevitably reminded of Walter Benjamin's famous essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in which he considers the extraordinary inversion that overtakes the image during the time in which he lives. It is not simply that works of art are reproduced—this has always been the case—but that they are intended to be reproduced. They are reproduced, we might say, before being produced. Benjamin writes, "To an even greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility." ¹ Accordingly, as Benjamin goes on to argue (and this is particularly relevant for any proper understanding of the role of Aboriginal art in Australian society today), "But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics." ²

It is this increasing influence of "mechanical reproduction" that Benjamin associates with what he calls the loss of aura in the work of art (and the replacement of its cult or ritual value with its exhibition value). What does Benjamin mean by this "aura"? In its most obvious sense, it refers to the uniqueness of a particular work of art: it is this, after all, that is foregone or done away with by its reproduction. Instead of a single work of art, we now have a "plurality of copies." The work of art is detached from its "tradition" and suffers a consequent loss of "authority"—an authority that ranges from its "substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced." ³ But in another, less well-known sense, aura refers to the investing of an object with human qualities and emotions. We imagine not that we are looking at an inanimate thing, but that this thing can look back at us. We become caught up in a reciprocal relationship with it, just as with another person. As Benjamin writes in another essay, citing Proust, "‘Some people who are fond of secrets flatter themselves that objects retain something of the gaze that has rested on them.' (The ability, it would seem, of returning the gaze.)" ⁴

Now, as we suggest, the usual reading of Benjamin's "Work of Art" essay is that what he is describing is the inexorable withering away of aura in an age of mechanical reproduction. In an extremely percipient way, he foresees the removal of the work from its original time and place by the then-emerging technologies of mass reproduction: telegraphy, photography, film, and—although he could not have known of them himself—television, the fax machine, and the Internet. Cultural traditions break down; it becomes harder and harder to distinguish the original from the copy or to speak about the "genuine" as opposed to the "counterfeit." The work loses its elusive quality of "presence" as things are brought closer through their reproduction. ⁵

Aboriginal art seems an exemplary case of this. For what else does its increasing economic and political success seem to indicate but the desacralization and commodification of...