Human drives align over Aboriginal art to produce a monster

Works such as this by Emily Kngwarreye can be simultaneously a spiritual icon and a speculative investment.

Nicolas Rothwell has raised some important questions in the essay that appeared in last Saturday’s Review. Clearly it has done Aboriginal art no good to develop in an environment segregated from critical discussion and assessment. Relentless promotion has contributed to an enormous oversupply of product, often of questionable quality, and to an inflation of prices which have little relation to the intrinsic value of the work.

Why don’t serious critics discuss Aboriginal art more often? I suppose the short answer is it has become a sacred cow. Admirers see intimations of the sublime in almost anything, and to express reservations about some new body of work is as disobliging as complaining about the kitsch religiosity of contemporary Bible illustrations.

Making matters much worse is the market commodification of Aboriginal art. From the commercial discovery of the “new’’ Aboriginal painting — in which formerly ephemeral patterns were reproduced with Western materials in a form that could be bought and sold — the market fell in love with this new manifestation of primitivist authenticity, as though it had discovered the last source of pristine culture welling up uncontaminated from the deepest layers of the Stone Age.

Collectors were and remain willing to pay very large sums of money for such authenticity, as the massive catalogues for Aboriginal art auctions attest. It is not often today that piety or sentimentality and monetary greed coincide, but when these powerful human drives align, the momentum they generate is considerable. A painter such as Emily Kngwarreye, whom Rothwell rightly considers overrated, can be simultaneously a spiritual icon and a speculative investment. It’s even better when the authenticity talisman — at the same time a valuable asset and thus a status symbol — can also serve as a colourful piece of interior decoration. One of the myths about the new popularity of Aboriginal art in the past few decades is that it is owing to our discovery of a universal aesthetic appeal beyond the specific cultural meanings of its iconography; to insist on that could now seem a reductively anthropological approach.

Of course it is only the cultural meanings that give the works substance and authority; but those meanings are often obscure if not deliberately concealed, especially in work made for sale. The new way of looking at Aboriginal painting let it be assimilated, however fallaciously, to abstraction; instead of being arcane and serious, it was easy-listening art with feel-good political associations. Plenty of semi-abstract decorative work was produced to satisfy this market.

As I write this, an email has just arrived hawking a new book on the even more overrated Sally Gabori, headed with the tag “between Rothko and Pollock’’. It’s hard to imagine anything more nonsensical, irrelevant, and disrespectful to the real concerns of Aboriginal culture.

Christopher Allen is The Australian’s national art critic