Art In Aboriginal Society

Outsiders’ preference to relegate Aboriginal life to the primitive and simplistic, a recurring theme in the history of the Aboriginal people, does not leave the world of Aboriginal art unscathed. However, just as anthropologists such as W.E.H Stanner have exerted that The Dreaming is more than just a land-based religion (Stanner, 36), the world of fine art by the likes of Tony Tuckson has come to realize that Aboriginal art is much more than belonging to an ethnological collection (Morphy 2001, 40). Diving deeper, Western society has also come to recognize Aboriginal art as more than the child of creativity and self-expression; instead it is a subject with functions beyond aesthetics. Indeed, Western society has come a long way since the likes

Ever since the first settlements of the Australian continent, Aboriginal society has been engaged in ongoing dialogue with Western society. On the subject of morality, Deborah Bird Rose writes that, using the Yarralin people as example, the Aboriginal people hope to illuminate the Western world to the rectitude of Aboriginal moral law (Rose 1984, 78). Similarly, a not so unfamiliar theme arises when one divulges the motivations behind the creation of art in Aboriginal society. As Dussart explains using the Warlpiri as example in A Body Painting in Translation, acrylic paintings are “a means by which the Warlpiri undertake a form of social dialogue with the world outside” (Dussart 1997, 190). Aboriginal artists are motivated to create art by, amongst other reasons, the potential for their art to illuminate their own culture. The Aboriginal people believe that their paintings do more than just speak to their audience creatively; instead as Wally Caruana puts it in Aboriginal Art (World of Art), the Aboriginal people see “art as a means of persuading outsiders the value of their life” (Caruana 1993, 10). Moreover, the Warlpiri are not alone. Elsewhere in Australia, the Yolngu and their painting traditions of Northeastern Arnhem Land, as chronicled by Howard Morphy, speak to this point. The Yolngu from the 1930’s to the 1950’s underwent a transition towards painting patterns associated with ancestral beings with the goal of “educating Europeans about Yolngu religious life” (Morphy 1998, 242). This active decision by Yolngu painters to paint towards education shows not only that they prescribe to this view about the functionality of their art but also that the action was deliberate, thereby legitimizing art as a method for cultural education. Likewise, The Aboriginal Memorial was also created