Art in the Time of Colony

Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351957076
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

It is often assumed that the verbal and visual languages of Indigenous people had little influence upon the classification of scientific, legal, and artistic objects in the metropolises and museums of nineteenth-century colonial powers. However colonized locals did more than merely collect material for interested colonizers. In developing the concept of anachronism for the analysis of colonial material this book writes the complex biographies for five key objects that exemplify, embody, and refract the tensions of nineteenth-century history. Through an analysis of particular language notations and drawings hidden in colonial documents and a reexamination of cross-cultural communication, the book writes biographies for five objects that exemplify the tensions of nineteenth-century history. The author also draws on fieldwork done in communities today, such as the group of Koorie women whose re-enactments of tradition illustrate the first chapter's potted history of indigenous mediums and debates. The second case study explores British colonial history through the biography of the proclamation boards produced under George Arthur (1784-1854), Governor of British Honduras, Tasmania, British Columbia, and India. The third case study looks at the maps of the German explorer of indigenous taxonomy Wilhelm von Blandowski (1822-1878), and the fourth looks at a multi-authored encyclopaedia in which Blandowski had taken into account indigenous knowledge such as that in the work of Kwat-Kwat artist Yakaduna, whose hundreds of drawings (1862-1901) are the material basis for the fifth and final case study. Through these three characters' histories Art in the Time of Colony demonstrates the political importance of material culture by using objects to revisit the much-contested nineteenth-century colonial period, in which the colonial nations as a cultural and legal-political system were brought into being.

1
Mimesis of Tradition

The agency gained from sincere expressions of spirituality in Aboriginal art keeps it cosmologically at odds with the secular fine-art world. Contemporary global art after the postcolonial turn is often imagined to be embracing a promise it seems to offer Aboriginal artists of an escape from always being cast in the realm of the primitive subject of anthropology. In this chapter, I analyse the negotiations of old and new practices in both art worlds and the conundrums it creates for contemporary Australian artists through the Koori Possum Skins Cloak project. Koori is the name south-eastern Aboriginal people used to refer to themselves, and, to me, the title Skins Cloak refers to an inflexible barrier built up around an identity that is buttressed by the exclusion of influence from other skins - from those who are not kin.

Possum-skin cloaks have become the Kooris’ symbol of marking kinship and broader regional identity, in the way x-ray painting on bark is for the Northern Territory of Australia and dot-paintings on canvas are for the central desert. Here, I explore the extent to which political struggles for cultural recognition absorb the historical knowledge about traditional craft practices, thus allowing new cloaks to be made. The practice of possum skin-making had long ended by the late nineteenth century, but today another practice has begun to paint an altogether different image - for instance, of death as represented by the life-size figure of a skeleton on Vicki Couzens’ Massacre Cloak (Figure 1.1). in these cases, cross-cultural issues become subject and part of the objects.

This chapter is about the ways in which strategic essentialism is made useful, not as real or inauthentic, nor as contradiction solved in a conclusion. My method of open-endedness is used to tell all the different stories I learnt in the process of making a film about possum-skin cloaks. The film similarly does not privilege one argument but details divergent perspectives on the possum-skin cloak’s history and significance. A reception history of Blandowski’s encyclopaedia Australien

1.1 Vicki Couzens, Massacre Cloak, possum skins, various dimensions, 2009

1.2 Wilhelm von Blandowski, Plate 64, ‘Domestic life of the Natives’, Australien in 142 Photographischen Abbildungen, 1862. Composition by Müteel. ‘When the cold nights of winter begin, the Aboriginal people use fur blankets to keep warm. For this reason the entire possum is not placed in a fire but is skinned and the fur is stretched across a piece of bark to dry by the fire. The skins are treated late into the night and it is very lively in the camp. To illustrate how the possum is caught, in the background, Aboriginal people are using various techniques to climb tall trees.’¹

in 142 Photographischen Abbildungen is also explored through contemporary art projects which use his images as sources (Figures 1.2, 1.7 and 1.8).

Skin, Repatriation

In 1999 the Aboriginal artists Treahna Hamm, Lee Darroch and Vicki Couzens first saw possum cloaks collected from their ancestors at Lake Condah and Echuca in the nineteenth century, now fragile and in the possession of Museum Victoria.² In Blandowski’s drawings (Figures 1.2 and 1.7) the ‘old people’ are wearing these cloaks. In Figure 1.2 Blandowski illustrates how possums are caught in the trees and then prepared by the fire for the making of cloaks. Typical of his style, the foreground scene contains many parts of the process of possum-skinning, conflated into a composite space and time to illustrate the whole environment. Blandowski reports from his expedition that the daily meal provided by his Aboriginal friends and employees was possum meat.³ As protection against the cold and damp winters of southeastern Australia, families such as Yakaduna’s (discussed in Chapter 5) made cloaks from the fur of possums and kangaroos, burning designs into the hide. The image on the left in Figure 1.4 depicts eight panels of wafer-thin possum skins, damaged over time and transported to Germany by the renowned painter Eugene von Guérard in the mid-nineteenth century.⁴

In The Barter (Figure 1.3) Eugene von Guérard (1811-1901) depicts two prospectors acquiring possum-skin cloaks in an exchange from a family on the way to the gold fields. The cloaks are at the centre of the scene that features a wilderness of loopy eucalyptus trees as a backdrop on either side of the road. In echo, the wild nature into which the two opportunistic Europeans have entered has been cut like the branch in the foreground, at both ends. Hollowed and lying dead like some sea creature from another geological era, the trunk in the centre points to the cloaks and dramatises their severance in this moment of economic transaction with settlers. The tension between the artisan explaining the value of the work with both hands and the souvenir hunters pointing and haggling makes this a history painting of the inception of a tourist art market for Aboriginal Australians.

1.3 Eugene von Guérard, The Barter, 1854, oil on canvas, 46 × 75.5 cm

1.4 Left: possum-skin cloak collected by the painter Eugene von Guérard. Right: possum skins collected by Wilhelm von Blandowski in the 1850s

Over the past ten years, Couzens’ and Darroch’s cloaks have become a medium for a political project, culminating, for instance, in representative members of the Kulin nation, formed from an alliance of five clans Aboriginal to south-eastern Australia, wearing 35 cloaks at the British Commonwealth Games in 2006. Through their organisation of a state-wide project, elders from each of these different language groups performed during the opening ceremony of the 2006 Melbourne Commonwealth games, wearing their community’s cloak. The workshops led by Couzens and Darroch in which possum-skin cloaks are made in the south east today are important community-building exercises that strengthen people and bring them together, often for the first time. In addition, the workshops have given Aboriginal communities political strength by enabling negotiations of differences that otherwise often left the individual groups estranged from each other.

There is a hope that, beyond copying the old designs, the verisimilar objects they make might in time be traded with museums in exchange for a repatriation of the original cloaks to their descendants.⁵ Such an exchange seems plausible in light of the fact that anthropology museums have long displayed plaster copies of originals thereby avoiding issues faced by art museums when exhibiting precious originals.⁶ However, museums tend to remain resistant to de-accessioning their collections, even in the face of their often questionable colonial provenances.⁷ Although some repatriations have been made, which have opened relationships between museums,⁸ most museums prefer to grant access or loans to avoid the complicated bureaucracy of de-accessioning. Museum curators and academics in the field have often taken polarised positions in opposition to Indigenous people’s demands to return their sacred and secret artefacts. The counter-argument is that if artefacts are returned, future scientists will then no longer have access to such material and that reclamation is an unwarranted concession to current political demands, which will be regretted in the future if the material is reburied or destroyed.

Underlying many repatriation claims is the moral authority of Indigenous people to control their material culture. However, repatriation has often solved little, and there are volumes written about individual cases.⁹ The possum-skin cloaks are a case in point as they have moved from being a kin wrap to a weapon of cultural recognition battles in which the object remains, while the thing is an altogether new instrument.

Couzens has, through her Possum Skins Cloak project, lobbied for the Aboriginal communities to take responsibility for their cultural heritage, to develop protocols for the use of designs. With a mixture of old and new tools - mussel shells and possum jaws, thread rather than kangaroo sinew and with a herringbone blanket stitch - she has refashioned a family tradition.¹⁰ Along with her stitching together of methods comes not only a fresh set of designs, but a revitalisation of familial ties sung in the Aboriginal languages that can be retrieved from language lists.¹¹ There are mourning songs for the cloaks when they are hung over a coffin and naming songs for specific days, and stories are accompanied by clap-sticks.

Stretched between the crossed legs of seated observers, the south-eastern Australian possum-skin cloaks make a drum designed to accompany corroborees (dances detailed in Chapters 3 and 5). They could also be worn during long walks, as the smoothness of the fur allows the cloak to slide about the wearer, as it is slung over the shoulder (see Figures 1.2, 1.7 and one of Yakaduna’s many hunters wearing cloaks in Figure 5.11). The fur side worn on the skin gives greater warmth, and the sensation of an animal’s skin weighs on every step.

Figure 1.5 is a still from the Skins Cloak film that shows how, beginning with one soft pelt, the newborn Koori baby is wrapped in its possum-skin cloak. Vicki Couzens (1960-) and Lee Darroch (1959-) tell his stories as they sew. One pelt is sewn to another as the cloak grows with their grandchild’s body; around 30 possum skins will be sewn together to make an adult cloak. In the image, the baby cloak just covers his nappies, which peek out, plasticky in contrast to the possum fur.

1.5 Skins Cloak, film still, 2011, Vicki Couzens, Keanu Bundle Bell, Robert Bamblett Jr with Anjee Lee Soloman and Lee Darroch

The three women sewing are the core group of elders, who drew 30 of their family members into the Skins Cloak project.¹² Skins Cloak was the outcome of an ongoing collaboration (2007-) with a film team from LOOK Exhibition Design, proposing to move the women’s cloak-making into the discursive spaces of contemporary art.¹³ Our analysis of the exhibitions of the cloaks critiqued the ways in which curators had hung them on the wall or put them in vitrines, thereby loosening their vital relationship to their owner’s body.¹⁴ As a response, Skins Cloak rehearsed performances for the camera, enacted by different agents in the cloaks’ story. What follows is an analysis of the process of making Skins Cloak (2011), a multichannel video installation...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Mimesis of Tradition
• 2 The Picture Proclamation
• 3 The Encyclopaedia Terra Cognita
• 4 Anachronistic Mapping
• 5 Telling Race in Silhouette
• Conclusions and Other Performances
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Themes