Sunday, October 28, 2012
2011 Studio
These were the works I've done in my second year studio.
Few concepts I've come up with about a topic 'Australia', however I did a few concepts of Aboriginals.
First one (clockwise), I've made a clay Aboriginals wearing cowboy hats which was a strong symbol for outback white people.
Second one is the weather and the land representation. Using various fabrics, I made a panel which reminds of hot dessert weather of Australia (also strongly connected with the Aboriginal flag; the colours) as well as the representation of distrinution of land and the sea.
The last one is a mobil which is a combination of Aboriginal dotted art and the Japanese origami crane. (The idea of dotted art on the stick is from Lin Onus' painting)
Lin Onus
I love Onus' detail and delicate painting skills, the size of his art works, and his brilliant way of expressing and conveying ideas. From a beautiful landscape painting like the ‘Barmah Forest’ to a sculpture like the ‘Fruit bats’, Lin Onus displayed his interest and concern for the recognition of Aboriginal art and culture.
appropriation
the definition of the term 'appropriation'
noun
- 1. [mass noun] the action of appropriating something: dishonest appropriation of propertythe deliberate reworking of images and styles from earlier, well-known works of art: the hallmark of postmodernism has turned out to be appropriation2. a sum of money allocated officially for a particular use: success in obtaining appropriations for projects [as modifier]: the appropriation accounts
In his paper, Richard Bell has revealed that as the result of a concerted and sustained marketing strategy, Art of Aboriginals have been categorised into an Aboriginal Art Industry. There is, however, no Aboriginal Art Industry but an industry that caters for Aboriginal Art.
The key players in that industry are not Aboriginals but White people whose areas of expertise are in the fields of Anthropology and Western Art.
The problem arises out of the very nature of Western Art. Westerners need to sort and categorise everything in order to make sense of the World. That they do so in an ethnocentric manner is academic.Another issue Bell has revealed was the Art centre. Aboriginal Art forshadowed the establishment of community art centres throughout remote areas. These centres assist by providing advice, marketing opportunities/strategies, art supplies and documentation.
The Government's continued financial support of the Art Centre movement ensures some level of Government control over the industry that caters for Aboriginal Art.
- (Bell's thought on this) Their (the Government=White people) considerable contribution makes it look good. They think it justrifies their appropriation of Aboriginal imaginery in advertising campaigns, etc. They think that they have bought our culture. Well, sorry. It never happened.
Rabbit Proof Fence (2002)
If I was asked, then without any pause, I would say the Rabbit Proof Fence.
Brief story:
Western Australia, 1931. Government policy includes taking half-caste children from their Aboriginal mothers and sending them a thousand miles away to what amounts to indentured servitude, "to save them from themselves." Molly, Daisy, and Grace (two sisters and a cousin who are 14, 10, and 8) arrive at their Gulag and promptly escape, under Molly's lead. For days they walk north, following a fence that keeps rabbits from settlements, eluding a native tracker and the regional constabulary.
This movie reminds me of stories from my home country: South Korea.
When South Korea was under Japan's colonisation, there were also attempts to re generate generations. With all beautiful but fake titles and reasons, many of half caste children were born.
Saturday, October 27, 2012
The Ballad of Jimmy Governor
"Jimmy wanted to be white! He wanted to be white! He had more opportunities than any other Aboriginal man of his time!" This is what one of an Aboriginal curator said about Jimmy Governor. Would it be true? Would it be really what Jimmy wanted in his life?
The story of Jimmy Governor is a 'memory walk' across a physical and social terrain, evoking many emotions and feelings. It brings out and play on all our human qualities: sorrow, pain, hate, regret, expression, success, joy and optimitism.
Jimmy Governor was three quarters full blood black and one quarter Irish. His fiery red hair clearly established his Irish heritage, but his black body and flat nose declared his aboriginality. Jimmy was handsome, kind, brave and intelligent young man.
Jimmy knew his worth compared to the white men. He worked for them, he played cricket with them and was hired by the police force of the day as a tracker.
He achieved well at everything he did, but was treated with contempt by some of the white people because he did it so well and dared to declare he was their equal.
After his father's dearth, Jimmy married a white woman, Ethel Page. For Jimmy it was his right to marry a white woman, and he treated her with affection and acceptance, and love for the baby boy to whom she shortly after gave birth.
After he got married, Jimmy took his wife and new born baby with him to Breelong outside Gilgandra where he started to work for John Mawbey.
This was the beginning of the tragedy.
Ethel, Jimmy's wife, worked for no pay for the Mawbey family and suffered daily the taunts and ridicule of the entire family for marrying a black man. These insults she carried home to Jimmy, who daily suffered the jibes from his own people for his marrying of a white woman.
Ethel, young and inexperienced, grew ever angrier about her conditions compared with the fine home and benefits enjoyed by those who considered themselves her betters.
I won't post the whole story of Jimmy Governor here (I assume it is one of the well known story among Australian), but just briefly, members of Mawbey family continued to taunt Ethel and Jimmy and it triggered Jimmy to expose and ended up murdering them as well as nine other victims.
My question here is that was it just a simple exposion of anguish? that Jimmy couldn't control himself in the end and ended up murdering so many white people among the Mawbey's?
The answer I found and it probably isn't an answer but it was a lot convincing than any others.
The person who wrote drew this conclusion out from Jimmy's background.
Jimmy was born on a Mission run by the Anglican Church, baptised at an early age, and had white values instilled into him, along with an entirely false assertion that to be accepted by the whites, you only had to behave like them.
Jimmy's open and accepting manner led him to believe this, and to spend his life in an attempt to belong to that elusive group, but even as he struggled to belong, he was breaking their moral code.
What the Aboriginal curator has said in the beginning of the post, I believe for Jimmy, there is no doubt that he wouldnt love his own race and his own brothers and sisters (the Aborignal tribe he belonged to), what he probably wished was rather than becoming one of the white, the acceptance and respect from the people he respected.
The story of Jimmy Governor is a 'memory walk' across a physical and social terrain, evoking many emotions and feelings. It brings out and play on all our human qualities: sorrow, pain, hate, regret, expression, success, joy and optimitism.
Jimmy Governor was three quarters full blood black and one quarter Irish. His fiery red hair clearly established his Irish heritage, but his black body and flat nose declared his aboriginality. Jimmy was handsome, kind, brave and intelligent young man.
Jimmy knew his worth compared to the white men. He worked for them, he played cricket with them and was hired by the police force of the day as a tracker.
He achieved well at everything he did, but was treated with contempt by some of the white people because he did it so well and dared to declare he was their equal.
After his father's dearth, Jimmy married a white woman, Ethel Page. For Jimmy it was his right to marry a white woman, and he treated her with affection and acceptance, and love for the baby boy to whom she shortly after gave birth.
After he got married, Jimmy took his wife and new born baby with him to Breelong outside Gilgandra where he started to work for John Mawbey.
This was the beginning of the tragedy.
Ethel, Jimmy's wife, worked for no pay for the Mawbey family and suffered daily the taunts and ridicule of the entire family for marrying a black man. These insults she carried home to Jimmy, who daily suffered the jibes from his own people for his marrying of a white woman.
Ethel, young and inexperienced, grew ever angrier about her conditions compared with the fine home and benefits enjoyed by those who considered themselves her betters.
I won't post the whole story of Jimmy Governor here (I assume it is one of the well known story among Australian), but just briefly, members of Mawbey family continued to taunt Ethel and Jimmy and it triggered Jimmy to expose and ended up murdering them as well as nine other victims.
My question here is that was it just a simple exposion of anguish? that Jimmy couldn't control himself in the end and ended up murdering so many white people among the Mawbey's?
The answer I found and it probably isn't an answer but it was a lot convincing than any others.
The person who wrote drew this conclusion out from Jimmy's background.
Jimmy was born on a Mission run by the Anglican Church, baptised at an early age, and had white values instilled into him, along with an entirely false assertion that to be accepted by the whites, you only had to behave like them.
Jimmy's open and accepting manner led him to believe this, and to spend his life in an attempt to belong to that elusive group, but even as he struggled to belong, he was breaking their moral code.
What the Aboriginal curator has said in the beginning of the post, I believe for Jimmy, there is no doubt that he wouldnt love his own race and his own brothers and sisters (the Aborignal tribe he belonged to), what he probably wished was rather than becoming one of the white, the acceptance and respect from the people he respected.
Spiritual concept
Spitit conception creates an initial link with the ancestral world which is then stregnthened during a person's life. As people grew older they perform in more and more ceremonies and pass through different stages of initiation. At each stage they will have paintings placed on their bodies, be rubbed by sacred objects, see ceremonial sculptures and have songs sung over them.
All these actions associate them with the ancestral beings and result in the accumulation of spiritual power. By the time they have reached old age they are thought increasingly to resemble the ancestral beings themselves; they have absorbed the substance of the ancestral past and are about to move once again into the dimension of the Dreaming.
On a person's death it is necessary both for their own spiritual survival and for the continuity of the Dreaming for their spiritual power to become once again a part of the ancestral dimension. Part of the objective of mortuary rituals is to ensure that the soul returns to the ancestral past to rejoin those reservoirs of spiritual power whence it came. Once its journey has been completed, it becomes a source of spiritual power and many returns as new conception spirits to initiate the birth of a new generation.
Aboriginal conceptions of the spirit world are complex, as in most human societies. Myths and ritual practices represent ways of grasping at the problems posed by death and in their details are of necessity inprecise. As the Yonlngu artist Dundiwuy Wananmbi said to me: "We will only find out when we die." The apparent contradictions that exist in Aboriginal religion-conflicting theories of spiritual existence and the fate of the soul, how the soul of the dead can have more than one destination, how a person may or may not be a reincarnation of another, and how a person may reflect the identity of multiple Dreamtime ancestors or be the product of what might be the case, attempt to create concrete images of processes that only occur on the edges of the imagination and are never fully part of human experience.
-continue from the book 'Art, Religion, and the Dreaming'
All these actions associate them with the ancestral beings and result in the accumulation of spiritual power. By the time they have reached old age they are thought increasingly to resemble the ancestral beings themselves; they have absorbed the substance of the ancestral past and are about to move once again into the dimension of the Dreaming.
On a person's death it is necessary both for their own spiritual survival and for the continuity of the Dreaming for their spiritual power to become once again a part of the ancestral dimension. Part of the objective of mortuary rituals is to ensure that the soul returns to the ancestral past to rejoin those reservoirs of spiritual power whence it came. Once its journey has been completed, it becomes a source of spiritual power and many returns as new conception spirits to initiate the birth of a new generation.
Aboriginal conceptions of the spirit world are complex, as in most human societies. Myths and ritual practices represent ways of grasping at the problems posed by death and in their details are of necessity inprecise. As the Yonlngu artist Dundiwuy Wananmbi said to me: "We will only find out when we die." The apparent contradictions that exist in Aboriginal religion-conflicting theories of spiritual existence and the fate of the soul, how the soul of the dead can have more than one destination, how a person may or may not be a reincarnation of another, and how a person may reflect the identity of multiple Dreamtime ancestors or be the product of what might be the case, attempt to create concrete images of processes that only occur on the edges of the imagination and are never fully part of human experience.
-continue from the book 'Art, Religion, and the Dreaming'
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