South of the Heart: Koorie art and the Western Gaze
Eden Fiske is a Writer and Art Curator. His research is primarily concerned with contemporary Aboriginal art, and the notion of alternative histories, with a particular focus on creating new curatorial models for understanding and displaying this work.
Andrew Brook, KILL PRIMITIVISM, 2017
Neon
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, NSW 2000 Australia
Koorie/ Koori/ Gurri
Koorie/Koori/Gurri is a generic term used by contemporary Aboriginal people and communities of Victoria and Southern New South Wales to identify and differentiate themselves from Aboriginal groups from other parts of Australia. Aboriginal people and communities in Queensland refer to themselves as Murris, Nunga in South Australia and Nyoongar in southern Western Australia. Source
The current state of Koorie art can be understood as a resistance against a colonial framework, a framework that seeks to dismantle any nuanced form of Aboriginality.
It is a conversation about the past, the self, and the future, supported by the foundations of a culture that stretches back before Western art was in its infancy. The history of assimilation, Christian missions, and the Stolen Generation are key to understanding the legacy from which Koorie art hails, and why the subjects, methods and materials of artists who are working in a contemporary context, do not mirror the more accepted notions of what society may deem “authentic” Aboriginal art.
The “authentic” art this essay will refer to specifically is the most prominent and internationally renowned, the ‘Western desert dot and circle painting,’ acrylic on canvas paintings from North West of Alice Springs. These paintings have obtained a status seldom granted to works by Aboriginal people, and have in a sense become the canon from which other forms of art made by Aboriginal people must separate or evaluate themselves. This is a product of colonialism and not of some inherent valuing system.
This essay will look at contemporary artists who have a Koorie heritage, most prominently Vicky Couzens, Lin Onus and Brook Andrew, to excavate the nuances of contemporary art and Aboriginality in the South East of Australia, whilst placing this in a larger context of the history that precludes it.
Western desert painting will be treated in relation to Koorie art, as this essay seeks to navigate the hierarchy imposed by the western curatorial model.
However, most importantly, this essay will examine how the fracturing of language, tradition, family and country by white settlement has been told through the work of these artists with Koorie heritage, and how it has altered the practices of the artists themselves.
I recognise that not all artists of Aboriginal heritage seek to be regarded as ‘Aboriginal artists’, and instead prefer a more robust understanding of themselves simply as ‘Artists’, as many prominent figures like Tracy Moffatt, Gordon Bennett and Brook Andrew have outlined in theoretical and practical ways; this essay will however, use the term Koorie art, South Eastern art or Koorie Artist, as a means of differentiating this school from that of the Papunya and Western Desert artists who shall also be referred to throughout the text.
Before seeking to understand the nuances of identity and practice in Koorie art, it is crucial to examine the past, as well as the continuing colonial structure from which the artist works.
The Aboriginal people of the South East of Australia and the areas from which we derive the term Koorie — an originally Awabakal word that has gone through a number of etymological changes postinvasion but is translated as meaning ‘People’ — have experienced some of the most culturally destructive and ongoing forces of colonialism in the form of organised massacres, spreading of diseases, imposed lateral violence and The Stolen Generation.
Vicky Couzens, ‘Birrarung Willam Shields’, 2006, Stainless Steel, Public Art Naarm/Birraranga/Melbourne
It is clear that, in these areas, Aboriginal people suffered not only some of the most intensely traumatic measures of invasion, but also that the impact of these measures has consistently remained, and has been proliferated by a destabilisation of culture and country due to assimilation forced on First Nations people. As Wolfe states, invasion itself is a structure rather than an event, therefore the enduring presence of the colonizer becomes a constant fact of life for First Nations people.
In the case of Koorie artists, we can see the expression of this omnipresence in the work. Vicky Couzens, a Gunditjmara Keerray and Woorroong artist displays these wounds of colonialism, as well as the embodiment of strength and resilience inherent in many Aboriginal people, through her eclectic art practice. Vicky Couzens’ work draws both from contemporary articulations of her culture, as well as the rich and specific traditions of her clan and language group. She has created paintings and etchings that have been collected by the National Gallery of Victoria, and has made significant strides in representing first nations country in public art, as well as building ways of reclaiming cultural practice in the Possum Skin Cloak Project.
Vicky Couzens, ‘Alam meen pang ngorteen weeng’, 2000, etching, National Gallery of Victoria
The Possum Skin Cloak Project in particular captures an important cultural practice in which traditional knowledge of country is inscribed so as to tell a story of personal connection to clan and country. This practice was thought to have completely perished, and the knowledge lost due to invasion and assimilation policies, which dispossessed and displaced aboriginal people in an attempt to destroy traditional custom and Lore.
McGaw states that, when looking at this practice, it is possible to see it not only as a traditional way of inscribing knowledge, but that the “complex relationship between knowing and making” displays a critique of western mapping of stolen land, and that newly made Possum Skin Cloaks from this project led by Couzens could serve as new state maps.
Through both traditional and contemporary means Couzens acknowledges and elaborates on the conflict between aboriginal and colonial histories, but also creates a vision for the future, giving “life to memory”.
This complex dialogue of sacred culture and colonial destruction is a consistent influence in Koorie art, and must be addressed in order to understand the myriad of practices that Koorie artists use to convey meanings or identities through artwork.
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Eden Fiske is a Masters student at the University of Melbourne with a background in Art History and Curatorship. His research is primarily concerned with contemporary Aboriginal art, and the notion of alternative histories, with a particular focus on creating new curatorial models for understanding and displaying this work. In his writing, research and painting, Fiske explores the canon of art history through the vessel of appropriation of decolonisation, against a backdrop of local and personal histories.
