Remote Avant-Garde: Aboriginal Art under Occupation by Jennifer Loureide Biddle (review)

Remote Avant-Garde: Aboriginal Art under Occupation, by Jennifer Loureide Biddle, is a welcome addition to the literature on Indigenous Australian art, and more broadly to anthropologies of art, Indigenous Australia, and global Indigenous arts and aesthetics. I heartily recommend it to anyone in those fields, and would happily teach with it in anthropology, art history, art/artworlds, and museum studies.

The monograph's main theme is the revelation of tradition via experimental art practice in Australia's Western Desert. Biddle asserts that contemporary production—in all its myriad forms—is a form of life-making for Aboriginal people (205) in a nation-state that not only refuses to recognize them on/in their own terms,¹ but in fact is currently exerting an unprecedented level of intervention in their lives. The juxtaposition of terms in her title, "Remote Avant-Garde" seeks to obliterate the division between "remote" and "urban" that has persisted in analyses of Indigenous Australia(3), elevate innovative expressions to a register and regime of value in the artworld (the avant-garde), and, indeed, expand our imaginings of what that category might include.² She highlights the importance of art centers as hubs of community health and well-being (15–17, 199), and emphasizes that Aboriginal arts are profoundly, unabashedly intercultural (36, 52–55, 94–95, 127–132, 141–144, 190, 205). As a frame for exploring Indigenous/non-Indigenous collaboration, the "intercultural" is something that has received intense anthropological attention in Australia in the last two decades,³ and I would have liked to see Biddle delve further into the stakes of this debate.

Biddle argues that art in central Australia is more performative than representational (198), art is inseparable from the bodies and lifeworlds from which it originates (153), and is (or, at least, can be) more about process than about the production of commodities for a market (142, 160). These are profound insights in the context of a global art movement objectified in the form of exhibition at the new Australian Parliament House in Canberra, the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, the Venice Biennale, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; and sale through auction houses such as Sotheby's, Christie's, and Bonham's—all sites through which value and virtuosity accrue in/on art objects. As Myers writes in his landmark ethnography, Painting Culture (2002), for the earliest painters at Papunya (an Aboriginal settlement that became the origin site of Western Desert acrylic painting), their works had value separate from that negotiated in the marketplace; they had value because they were "from the Dreaming." Biddle's work is very much in dialogue with Myers, and she strives for an emic perspective and a representational practice that honor the messiness and multifaceted nature of contemporary experimentation.⁴ Slippage between sacred and secular (see 124–125) is characteristic of many of these works, crucially challenging those who might read/receive/consume Aboriginal arts in search of an authentic other(ness), and thereby forging a more expansive understanding of what it means to be Aboriginal, as Biddle says, "in the contemporary" (see 33, 44, 61, 69, 71, 112, and throughout).

Biddle has a delightful turn-of-phrase and poetic control of her prose. "How does aesthetic emergence relate to emergency?" (43) she asks, powerfully illustrating the collision of lifeworlds and meaning-making in central Australia, where Aboriginal people must live their lives "under occupation." She refuses an authoritative voice—"whatever history is, it has to be activated and reactivated by humans in the now and in the know" (193)—simultaneously communicating the potency of art practice and revealing her deep knowledge of Aboriginal cosmologies, such as the "everywhen" of Jukurrpa/Tjukurrpa/Tjukurpa.⁵ Art is many things, an "agent; an evidentiary potentiality; catalysts of activation and activism both" (201). The making of the works she analyzes is a form of (cultural, existential) survival, and the forging of resistance to ongoing oppression. Chapter 1, "Humanitarian Imperialism...