International Political Sociology (2016) 10, 56–74
Radical Dreaming: Indigenous Art and
Cultural Diplomacy
ROLAND BLEIKER AND SALLY BUTLER
University of Queensland
We examine links between art and foreign policy through two important
instances of cultural diplomacy in Australia’s history. Each time—in 1941–
1942 and in 2009—the government staged an extensive exhibition in the
United States. Each time, the exhibition displayed Indigenous art with the
explicit purpose of increasing Australia’s political legitimacy and influence.
But in each case, the artworks in question resisted and subverted this form
of diplomatic instrumentalization. Art managed to insert and communicate
political claims that highlighted—against governmental intentions and policies at the time—the suppression of Indigenous rights and demands
for sovereignty. In doing so, art challenged not only legal and political
norms but also an entire verbal and visual narrative of nation building
that emerged out of colonialism. Art thus became political in the most fundamental way, for it directly interfered with what Jacques Rancière called
the distribution of the sensible: the boundaries of what is visible and invisible, is thinkable and unthinkable, and thus, can and cannot be debated in
politics.
States have long used art and other cultural products to promote either domestic
or foreign policy goals.1 Numerous cases stand out. Nazi strategists employed the
filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, to lend aesthetic appeal to the government’s racial
agenda (Sontag 1975; Spotts 2003; Bach 2007). During the Cold War, the United
States promoted abstract expressionism in an effort to demonstrate cultural vibrancy and superiority over the Soviet Union (Cockcroft 1985, 125–33).
The purpose of this article is to examine a particularly revealing, but so far underappreciated, case of cultural diplomacy: how Australia used Indigenous art to
promote foreign policy agendas in two highly symbolic instances. In each case, extensive exhibitions were staged in the United States in an explicit attempt to gain
cultural and political legitimacy and influence. In 1941–1942, an exhibition called
Art of Australia, containing several Aboriginal art works, was staged to promote
Australia’s alliance with the United States and to gain credibility with a nascent
United Nations. In 2009, an exhibition called Culture Warriors,2 consisting entirely
of Indigenous art, was staged in the context of a bid for a United Nations (UN)
Security Council seat. The aim was to bolster Australia’s human rights credentials
1
A previous version of this paper was presented at the General Conference of the European Consortium for
Political Research, Glasgow, September 5–7, 2014. For insightful feedback on earlier drafts, we would like to thank
Morgan Brigg, William Callahan, Alex Danchev, Constance Duncombe, Emma Hutchison, Iver Neumann, Nilanjana
Premaratna, and Holly Ryan. Thanks also to the editors of IPS and to two exceptionally thorough referees, who
pushed us further than we otherwise would have gone.
2
The full exhibition title was The National Indigenous Art Triennial: Culture Warriors, showing at the Katzen Art
Center, American University, Washington DC, September 8–December 6, 2009.
Bleiker, Roland, and Sally Butler. (2016) Radical Dreaming: Indigenous Art and Cultural Diplomacy. International Political
Sociology, doi: 10.1093/ips/olv004
C The Authors 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Studies Association.
V
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]
ROLAND BLEIKER
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in the context of a United Nations increasingly concerned with the treatment of
indigenous populations.3
The kind of cultural diplomacy at play here was rather different to how it is
sometimes seen: as an exchange of cultural artifacts and ideas in the spirit of increasing cross-cultural understanding (Arndt 2006). Cultural diplomacy, in the
case of Australia, was targeted, pragmatic, and political. It had less to do with facilitating understanding than with advancing a calculated strategic effort to promote
the national interest.
We show that in each case—in 1941–1942 and in 2009—the displayed artworks
resisted and subverted this form of diplomatic instrumentalization. Art managed
to insert and communicate political claims that highlighted—against governmental intentions and policies at the time—the suppression of Indigenous rights and
demands for sovereignty. We employ Rancière’s (2004) concept of the “distribution of the sensible” to show how art became political and politically disruptive in
the most fundamental way: by challenging the boundaries of what is visible and
invisible, is thinkable and unthinkable, and thus, can and cannot be debated in
politics. In each of the two cases, this politically subversive artistic interference
took time to develop, and in each case, it manifested itself differently.
The very idea of including Aboriginal art in an exhibition staged in the United
States in 1941 was radical. At that time, Aboriginal people were not recognized as
Australian citizens.4 Aboriginal visual culture was not considered as an art and was
not held in public art collections or exhibited in public art galleries. Regarded as
ethnographic remnants of an all but extinct culture, the inclusion of Aboriginal art
was thus not made in the spirit of recognizing Indigenous life and culture. The purpose of the exhibition was to stress to the United States and the nascent United
Nations that Australia was an independent and culturally distinct country, set apart
from the British Empire and displaying parallels with the settler-society mentality in
the United States. But even if unintended and largely unrecognized, the Aboriginal
artworks fundamentally challenged the very foundations of this settler-society mentality. Bark paintings, for instance, were displayed for their decorative appeal but, in
fact, contained highly complex symbolic representations of the relationship between
Aboriginal culture, spirituality, and land. These artistic representations advanced an
implicit but radical political claim to land and self-determination. Art was thus political in the most profound way, for it challenged not just legal and political norms
but an entire verbal and visual narrative of nation building that emerged out of colonialism. Alternative ways of seeing, sensing, and engaging politics became possible,
thus paving the way for later recognition of Aboriginal life and culture.
The 2009 exhibition, called Culture Warriors, contained more explicit political
messages: it visually narrated the violent encounter between the Indigenous population and the settlers. The Australian government staged the exhibition in
Washington DC in an attempt to gain credibility with a United Nations deeply
concerned with human rights and with indigenous rights in particular. But here
too, the artworks managed to transcend attempts by the Australian government to
instrumentalize art for foreign policy purposes. Indigenous artists and people are
seen at war with Australian history, politics, and racism. They depict a violent colonial past that the government was not—and still is not—willing to admit publicly.
And here too, art challenged more than just legal and political norms: it offered
viewers a visual vocabulary that fundamentally reoriented the prevailing political
narrative. Art took on what Indigenous people might call a radical Dreaming
3
We use two terms to refer to Australian Indigenous art in this essay. “Indigenous art” is the collective term for
both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. The Torres Strait Islands form part of the Australian nation,
but their indigenous population does not identify as Aboriginal. When we use “Aboriginal,” we refer to the mainland indigenous population only.
4
The Aboriginal population became Australian citizens under the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1949.
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function: a way of telling and re-telling past, present, and future in a processthat
opens up opportunities for alternative political claims and forms of community. 5
Art, Cultural Diplomacy, and the Distribution of the Sensible
A major objective of this article consists of empirically documenting two important,
but so far largely neglected, episodes in Australia’s history of cultural diplomacy. A
reasonably big part of this article is thus devoted to introducing and interpreting
the details of these historical moments. But we also ground our empirical examination in a conceptual framework that allows us to understand the links between art,
diplomacy, and politics. This is why we spell out the assumptions of this framework
before we begin our analysis.
It is not surprising that states rely on art and other cultural products to advance
their national interests. In many ways, states behave similarly to people.
Individuals put on nice clothes, style their hair, or wear make-up. They do so to
feel better, to project a certain positive image of themselves to others, and to gain
strategic benefits. In a compelling study, Steele (2010) shows that states, too, care
about their aesthetic- and their self-image. Staging a military parade and celebrating a national holiday are examples of countless aesthetic practices designed to
make a collective feel better, more secure, and in control. Political aesthetics,
then, has the function of make-up: to let a state appear differently than it otherwise would (for instance, more united, more ethical, or more powerful). This is
why the resulting aesthetic practices are far more than merely “cosmetic.” They
are, as Steele (2010, 9) shows, part of how a state uses its power to “deploy its material and strategic resources in global politics” (see also Bleiker 2009).
Practices of cultural diplomacy become particularly complex when art comes
into play. To investigate and understand this complexity, we rely on Rancière’s
theory of political aesthetics. This explores how we negotiate the sensible world
and how an epoch’s “distribution of the sensible” determines what is arbitrarily
but self-evidently accepted as thinkable, reasonable, and doable. Rancière writes
of a struggle to determine “what is seen and what can be said about it, around
who has the ability to see and the talent to speak” (Rancière 2004, 13; see also
Rockhill 2009, 199–200).
Important consequences emerge from such a perspective on politics. Narratives
of identity and nationhood, for instance, are no longer just linked to explicitly legal and political forces. Neither are they limited to how language frames the processes of inclusion and exclusion that make up the political. Here, Rancière
(2004, 12–30) explicitly moves beyond Foucault and stresses that these hierarchies
operate not only though language but also through broader collective sensory experiences. The content and contours of politics are inevitably linked to how we—
as cultural collectives—speak, visualize, and feel about ourselves and others.
These cultural practices frame what is thinkable and doable and are thus political
at their very core.
Art plays a key role in these political processes because it is part of how individuals and collectives view and sense the world. Art is a site that produces collective
meaning and orchestrates public awareness of societal issues (Rockhill 2009, 207).
Works of art held in museums, for instance, can shape and reshape public taste
and modes of perception and collective expectations. Rancière (2004, 9) even
goes a step further and sees art as a meeting ground between existing configurations of the sensible and attempts to reconfigure our sensory experience of the
world (Rancière 2004, 9; Rockhill 2009, 200). That is to say, he attributes to art
5
The Dreaming is a term used to describe Aboriginal cosmology and the mythological narratives (ritualized as
song cycles), which encode their laws, social organization, and moral order. See Strehlow (1971).
ROLAND BLEIKER
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the ability to challenge existing political narratives and push the boundaries of
what can be seen, thought, and done. We now seek to retrace exactly how art’s
transformative potential unfolded during two crucial moments in Australia’s history of cultural diplomacy.
Appropriating Aboriginal Art: Australia’s Early Cultural Diplomacy Initiatives
When Australia found itself militarily isolated during the Pacific theatre of World
War II, the government instigated its first diplomatic moves independent of the
British Empire. In 1940, the Australian government opened its first overseas missions and took over governance of its international relations, or what was then
termed “external affairs,” from the British Empire’s headquarters in London
(Booker 1996, 2–11). This move was symbolically and politically important, for it
signified the advent of a mature and truly independent nation. Driving this initiative was Doc Evatt, Deputy Prime Minister, Attorney General, and Minister for
External Affairs. A key imperative, for him, was to profile Australia’s newly independent policies on international peace and security as well as on social and economic development.
Two elements were crucial to his move. First was an attempt to build a stronger
bilateral alliance with the United States. The second was to establish Australia’s international credentials by participating in the formation of the United Nations. It
must be remembered that these negotiations started several years before the formal establishment of the United Nations in 1945. Being part of these negotiations
was seen as crucial for Australia since a revitalized global institution—in addition
to an alliance with the United States—would offer more security than the old association with the British Empire.
Cultural diplomacy was an integral part of Australia’s drive for international political legitimacy. The idea was to showcase an independent Australian way of life,
which ostensibly underpinned the nation’s policy framework.
Art was at the core of this cultural diplomatic initiative. In 1941, the Australian
government organized the first comprehensive exhibition of Australian art to
tour the United States. The exhibition was titled Art of Australia and appeared at
twenty-nine locations across the United States and Canada, including several key
public art institutions, where core values of the state are symbolically validated:
The National Gallery of Art in Washington, the National Gallery of Canada in
Ottawa, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Department of Fine Art
at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh (Ryan 2008). The collection was then expanded into a broader Australian art, science, and history exhibition, held at the
Los Angeles County Museum in 1942. The location on the West Coast was crucial,
for at the time of the Pacific crisis, art exhibitions offered an ideal platform to
forge cultural bonds aimed at strengthening the US–Australian political and military coalition.
We now empirically document—in relative detail—how these artworks provided
a context within which political positions were articulated and rearticulated.
The inclusion of Aboriginal artworks in the exhibition—14 out of a total of
134—was both historic and radical. Two reasons stand out. The first one is of a
cultural nature. The exhibition marked the first international occasion where
Aboriginal visual culture was represented as fine art. Previously, Aboriginal visual
material had been regarded almost exclusively as ethnographic artifacts.
Respective artworks were held not in art galleries but in Australian and international anthropological collections. The inclusion of Aboriginal art works in this
major international exhibition put Aboriginal art on the world map. Consider
how The Washington Post drew particular attention to the bark paintings, stressing
that “nothing like them has been shown before” (Rainey 1941).
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Figure 1. Catalogue Cover for 1941 Art of Australia Exhibition (Barnard, 1941).
The shift of status from craft to art entailed a range of highly significant, but at
the time largely underestimated, consequences. As opposed to craft, art is recognized as being part of human culture and history. It is seen as being imbued with
symbolism and meaning and, ultimately, politics. It is in this sense that the public
recognition of Indigenous art as art amounted to a recognition of Indigenous culture and a range of associated political claims.
The second significant aspect of the exhibition is of a more direct political nature.
The inclusion of Aboriginal art stands in stark contrast to how the Indigenous population was treated at the time. Federal and state governments during the 1940s maintained a policy of protectionism for a race that was believed to be all but extinct and
incapable of survival in the modern era (see Attwood and Markus 1999). A series of
state-governed protection or welfare boards oversaw all fundamental matters of
Aboriginal life including housing, employment, and education. Aboriginal people
were distinguished as either “full-blood” or “half-blood” (and on that basis were restricted to government reserves or religious missions) or as disenfranchised nonentities living on the fringes of towns and metropolitan centers. Up until 1949,
Aboriginal people were not eligible for citizenship and had no right to vote in political elections. Many of the Christian missions involved in Aboriginal welfare encouraged, and often forced, Aboriginal people to assimilate into white society and
relinquish most, if not all, traditional practices, beliefs, and languages.
The 1941 cultural diplomacy initiative was thus clearly not intended to advance
the rights of Indigenous peoples. Indeed, it is rather ironic that at the very time
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when Aboriginal cultural traditions were virtually outlawed, the Australian government was introducing traditional Aboriginal art to the world as the emblem of its
unique national character. The exhibition’s catalogue even speaks of Australia as
a “Terra Incognita” and “a last continent to be discovered,” as if there had been
no Indigenous population prior to the arrival of the settlers or as if it was all a
matter of the white man’s “taming of a vast continent” (Barnard 1941, 9).
The inclusion of Aboriginal art had much more to do with the careful orchestration of a diplomatic narrative focusing on a tacit bond between Australia and the
United States through shared settler and frontier origins. Both countries were meant
to be seen as sharing British cultural antecedents and a history of dealing with an apparently “defeated” “ancient race” of Indigenous inhabitants. In the catalogue’s
Foreword, Casey (1941, 5), the Australian Minister to the United States, puts race relations and the status of art in very clear terms: “Against the background of the bark
paintings left by the world’s most primitive aborigines, the art in the present exhibition records the progress of European, and particularly British, people in this struggle.” Aboriginal art was thus presented as backward and in stark contrast to how
modern (white) Australia came of age in a new world modeled on US values. Casey
(1941, 5) stressed the need to promote an Anglo-American racial equivalence characterized by resourcefulness, industriousness, and stoicism.
The so-established aesthetic narrative of US–Australian cultural bonds circulated within the diplomatic community and in the public realm through opening
events, public speeches, and media reviews. The Washington Post (1941) reported
that a private viewing of Art of Australia was hosted by the Australian Minister to
the United States for 400 attendees, including “diplomats, Cabinet officers, and
just plain art lovers.” Casey’s Foreword was quoted at length in a subsequent article in The Washington Post, featuring those sections emphasizing US–Australian
similarities (Rainey 1941).
Art, Identity, and Politics
The inclusion of Aboriginal art was also—and somewhat paradoxically—presented
as a means of distinguishing Australia from an otherwise very derivative British artistic presence. This is significant because the military and political break with the
British Empire at this time marked the beginning of an Australian identity crisis. As
late as 1967, the historian Serle (1967, 240–49) would write of Australia as still lacking any strong sense of nationality. Australia needed a unique cultural symbolism
that would help channel its political ambitions on the international stage, which is
why the organizers of the exhibition recoded Aboriginal artifacts as art and shipped
them abroad under a brand new banner of “Australian art.”
Aboriginal art thus provided a distinctive mark in an Australian art tradition
that was otherwise considered conservative and derivative of British influence.
Casey’s (1941, 5) Foreword to the catalogue fully acknowledged that a “tenacious
conservatism has until recently dominated the artistic scene in Australia.” He
went on to argue that this was due to “the relatively short time that the white man
has lived there, and to his natural nostalgia for the remembered old world.”
Except for the Aboriginal pieces, the exhibition featured purely figurative art in
conventional genres of portraiture, landscape, and still life. Such aesthetic themes
alone would not likely have impressed cultural elites in the United States, which
had become an international hub of avant-garde art movements. Abstract expressionism was at the forefront, signaling a new, radical national ethos of freedom
and opportunity.
Aboriginal art insinuated itself into other parts of the exhibition. Margaret
Preston’s (1940) Aboriginal Still Life included Aboriginal shields sitting on a table behind a bowl of native flowers and a palette, which echoed traditional Aboriginal
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ochre pigments in texture and color. A bronze portrait by Lyndon Dadswell (1939),
titled Aboriginal Head, appeared as the last image in the catalogue, with a caption
that stood in curious contradiction to the rhetoric of Aboriginal extinction pervading other text in the publication. The caption read, “Present-day Australians show a
lively interest in all phases of aboriginal life, which, owing to the unsuitability of
much of the country to white man’s exploitation, still survives in considerable extent and purity” (Plate 134, Art of Australia 1941).
The 1941 show was, then, redeveloped into a more general Australiana exhibit in
1942 at the Los Angeles (LA) County Museum. Now titled simply Australia, the LA
exhibit retained approximately fifty paintings from the original Art of Australia, but
they were spread across six of the museum’s galleries to include a panorama of
Australian history, maps, flora, fauna, geology, and marine life (Miller 1942, ch. 6).
The Australia exhibition opened in the months following the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor, and its LA location provided an ideal platform to consolidate the notion of a “Pacific alliance” between Australia and the United States. Australia’s new
Minister to the United States, Sir Owen Dixon, presented his inaugural public address to the United States when opening the exhibition, reiterating the geographic
bonds between the two “Pacific” nations. The subject of the exhibition was ostensibly “Australia,” but the diplomatic overlay of the event clearly demonstrated that
this exhibition was all about war in the Pacific. A military guard featured at the exhibition opening, which was attended by international diplomats and civic leaders,
including Major General Maxwell Murray, Commanding General of the US Army’s
Southern Californian Sector; Rear Admiral Ralston S. Holmes, Commander of the
11th Naval District; L.A. Mayor Bowron; and Eric A. Cleugh, British Consul to Los
Angeles. In his speech, Dixon was emphatic about the diplomatic intentions of the
exhibition, stressing the need to jointly face enemies that threaten “the civilization
of all Anglo-American peoples” (Los Angeles Times 1942a, 1, 3).
The political content of this cultural diplomacy initiative was unusually clear
and overt. And it worked. US media coverage of the Australia exhibition disseminated Australia’s public appeal for US aid in the Pacific. Reiterated as well were
cultural bonds articulated in the exhibition’s rationale (Linn 1941; Rainey 1941;
Los Angeles Times 1942b; Miller 1942, ch. 6). Consider an article in the Los
Angeles Times, which advertised the exhibition as such: “Would you like to learn
lots about Australia—the continent-nation “down under” where Gen. MacArthur
and his American boys are fighting a war and learning a new brand of slang?”
(Miller 1942, ch. 6). Inevitably linked to the task of forging Australian–US wartime bonds was Australia’s ambition to be involved in the emerging United
Nations. Though its official inauguration was still three years away, the theme of
the United Nations regularly recurred in public discourses associated with the exhibition. In his opening address, Dixon leaves little doubt about the key focus of
this cultural diplomatic effort, stressing that Australia “must look for help from
the resources of the United Nations” and “that without them we cannot hope to
restore civilization and security to mankind” (Miller 1942, ch. 6). The Los Angeles
Times, in a discussion of the exhibition, described Australia as the “United
Nations headquarters in the South Pacific” (Miller 1942, ch. 6).
Bark Paintings and the Visualization of Indigenous Rights
Australia’s cultural diplomacy initiative was clearly a big success, creating awareness
of Australia’s cultural and political presence. But art cannot be as easily controlled
as a press conference or diplomatic reception. Indeed, the Aboriginal art displayed
in the 1941–1942 exhibitions fundamentally and radically challenged the very message that the government was trying to convey. The artworks advanced claims to
Indigenous rights and sovereignty that directly undermined the government’s
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narrative of a terra incognito and a country moving forward into an AngloAmerican cultural alliance. Art, then, exposed what Carter (1987, xx) termed the
blindness of imperial history as a cultural discourse: that Indigenous people were
physically visible, but not culturally so. The fact that the exhibition provided
Indigenous “craft” with a new status of “international art” further accelerated a process that would see a fundamental public reorientation about the nature and rights
of Indigenous peoples.
The radical nature of the Aboriginal artworks exhibited in 1941–1942 was, however, not initially recognized. Nor was it, of course, the intention of the government to promote subversive art. The political symbolism of the artworks
displayed, including claims to rights, autonomy, and land, would come to light
only later, when outsiders gained an improved understanding of how Aboriginal
political organization is communicated through a complex visual symbolism.
The exhibited Aboriginal artworks consisted principally of bark paintings belonging to particular communities of Aboriginal people living in a far northern
region known as Arnhem Land. This is an area where colonization had less impact on Aboriginal traditional life because of the extremely remote and inaccessible nature of the wetland terrain. These conditions of a somewhat untouched
traditional life attracted anthropological studies throughout the twentieth century, resulting in an almost forensic study of the art and its semiotic function.
Luke Taylor (1989), in particular, provides close analysis of structures of meaning
in bark paintings very similar to those in the 1940s exhibition. Aboriginal people
maintain an unusually holistic mind-set that highlights the interrelationships of
all aspects of life. Their art plays a vital role in symbolically anchoring this interconnectedness (Butler 2009). This is why it is impossible to dissociate the secular
from the sacred, culture from politics, life from land.
The paintings included in the 1940s exhibitions stem from 1912 and belong to a
particular tradition of x-ray style painting that has a highly structured system of multiple meanings, or what might be termed a system of structured ambiguity. This is
because the meanings of the images, or elements of the imagery, are contingent on
the identity of the viewer and the context of viewing. The basis of this x-ray style is a
concept of what Taylor describes as the “divided body,” through which anatomical
features of human, animal, or spirit figures are exposed. The meaning of the image
or elements depends on one’s degree of ritual knowledge or, more accurately, the
degree of one’s right to this knowledge. Rights here are defined by an individual’s
status in terms of age, gender, family, marriage, and stages of spiritual education
through ritual initiation. In this way, the shifting scale of what Taylor describes as
inside and outside (private and public) meanings assists in maintaining social organization, moral order, and a system of law.
Consider, as an example, one meaning associated with these “flesh paintings:”
They instruct hunters how to dissect the kill, avoid bones, and keep good cuts of
meat intact. The act of creating these paintings thus helps novice hunters to memorize the internal structures of various animals. Another dimension of meaning
for the same image determines who has the rights to various part of the kill, yet
another dimension envelops all of these meanings within an Aboriginal cosmology, whose significance is only ever fully disclosed to spiritual elders of the
community.
The crosshatched patterns unique to bark painting, called rarrk, also have a significant semiotic structure and are in no way simply decorative. Rarrk’s arrangement of linear composition and contrasting colors encode distinct kinship
identities and their relationships to various totems, mythological narratives, and
rights to particular areas of land.
Particularly significant is that these patterns and symbols visually signal a
group’s sovereignty over a particular area of land and, as such, compare to the
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Figure 2. Kangaroo and Hunter circa 1912. Artist Unknown, Kakadu, Oenpelli, Spencer
Collection, Museum of Victoria Source: http://nga.gov.au/ABOUTUS/press/pdf/
NIAT.pdf, (Accessed June 2, 2015).
concept of nationhood in Western traditions. Indeed, kinship groups today often
refer to their country as their “nation” (see Muecke and Shoemaker 2004). Land
rights within Aboriginal customary law are not vague, but in fact are demarcated
by distinct geographical boundaries and complex structures of kinship status.
Visual art has a central role in Aboriginal culture in providing memory anchors
for an oral tradition, where customary law has no other permanent record. The perpetual encoding of law in rock art and in the continuing practice of painting as an
act of remembering is thus key to the authority of the system. In this way, rarrk is
the metaphoric glue for an Aboriginal concept of “country” that underpins their
worldview. “Country” situates particular groups of people, spiritual figures, and an
area of land together with its entire natural ecology into a relationship of reciprocal
obligation and power. It is these structures of reciprocal obligations between people
and place—embedded in the art—that in later decades would authenticate
Aboriginal land rights and claims for political self-determination under Australian
Crown law (Attwood and Markus 1999).
Numerous highly significant political consequences follow from how the Art of
Australia exhibition of 1941 elevated the status of Aboriginal craft to that of art. A
work of art is widely seen as being imbued with cultural symbolism and history.
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But the kind of cultural symbolism and history represented in the bark paintings
advances notions of Indigenous sovereignty that directly contradicted and challenged the prevailing political concept of sovereignty at the time, that of terra nullius: the notion that settlers arrived in a territory that belonged to nobody.
The encounter between the bark paintings and Australian foreign policy thus
symbolized a clash between two very different notions of identity and sovereignty.
The prevailing narrative of nation building, emerging out of colonialism, became
exposed—not just verbally, but also visibly. It is important here to remember that
colonialism was not just about the occupation of space. It was just as much about
the imposition of a cultural narrative. In Australia, as elsewhere, this involved anything from naming new places to depicting the settler society through particular
European-style landscape paintings. This all-encompassing and well-entrenched
colonial narrative of nation building rendered Indigenous people—and their
culture—all but invisible (see Shapiro 2004, 119–26). The Indigenous artworks in
the 1941 exhibition directly confronted such forms of cultural violence. They offered a fundamentally different way of seeing and sensing political rights—one
that places Indigenous peoples and their struggle for recognition—and self-determination at the center.
There is a long-standing link between bark paintings and Aboriginal protests
against colonization and assimilation. In 1938, the Aboriginal Progressive
Association declared a Day of Mourning to mark 150 years of European occupation. The subsequent protest movement endures to this day and revolves around
the status of Indigenous land rights, social inequality, injustice, and governance.
From this point in time, the Aboriginal population of Australia maintained a public program of political protest against the negligible recognition of Indigenous
rights. From the outset, art played a vital role in this movement. Aboriginal protestors began sending petitions for recognition of their rights to British and
Australian political representatives as early as 1935, but the first to be formally recognized was the bark petition of 1963. This consisted of three traditional bark
paintings from Arnhem Land and included a list of their demands for land rights
and the power of determination regarding the burgeoning uranium mining on
their land. These three bark paintings feature similar symbolism to that included
in the 1940s exhibitions. Additional bark petitions were sent to the Australian parliament in 1968, 1988, 1998, and 2008. The original 1963 bark petition is now displayed in the ceremonial hall of the Australian Parliament House together with
the nation’s founding documents—the Magna Carta and Australian Constitution.
Neither the organizers of the 1941–1942 exhibition, nor the general public,
had any idea of the radical political nature of the Aboriginal artworks that were
included. Margaret Preston, one of the non-Aboriginal artists in the exhibition,
came closest to guessing that the symbolism in the bark paintings held deeper
meanings than it seemed. She wrote that “aboriginal art represents not only objects but essential truths which may or may not be visible to the human eye”
(Preston 1941, 16). But Preston had little interest in exploring the meanings of
these symbols, focusing more on how the respective “limitless possibilities” provided inspiration for her own art. Little did she know that, within twenty years,
bark paintings as political petitions would start arriving at Parliament House.
Though the Aboriginal artworks fundamentally challenged the prevailing narratives of nation building, political identity, and sovereignty, it would take years until this challenge filtered through and had an impact on public perceptions and
political discussions. Art works differently compared to more direct forms of political activism. A painting might function in the way Celan (1986a, 186; 1986b, 198)
described the journey of a poem: as a “message in a bottle,” a plea that is sent out
with the hope that someday it will be washed onto a shore, onto something open,
a heart that seeks dialogue, a receptive political reality. Danchev (2009, 3) speaks
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Figure 3. Two representatives of the Yolgnu nation from Arnhemland with the 1963
Bark Petition. Source: https://www.givenow.com.au/news/articles/news-naidoc
(Accessed October 12, 2015).
of the artist as a “moral witnesses” who thrives on hope—hope that “there is, or
will be, an audience of sentient spectators, viewers, readers.” In 1941–1942, nobody knew how to read the bark paintings. At this point, there was no collective
knowledge among non-Indigenous people to make sense of a work of art and the
moral message it contained about Aboriginal culture, governance, and land
rights. But the radical political content did not stay bottled forever. Indigenous
rights became a major political issue and art, such as that displayed in the 1940–
1941 Art of Australia exhibition, played a key role in getting to this point.
Culture Warriors and the Australian Campaign for a UN Security Council Seat
We now move from Australia’s first symbolically important engagement in cultural
diplomacy to an equally important recent event. There are, of course, numerous
activities that took place in between. Indeed, throughout the latter half of the
twentieth century, Australian cultural diplomacy continued to employ Aboriginal
art exhibitions to advance the nation’s status as a unique state distinct from the
British Empire. But in 2009, there was a major shift in the use of Indigenous art
in cultural diplomacy. Until then, exhibitions highlighted the cultural aspects of
art even when, as in 1941, the art was deeply political in nature. All of a sudden
things turned explicitly political.
One of the most explicitly political cultural diplomacy initiatives started in
September 2009, when an Australian-sponsored exhibition of Indigenous art, entitled Culture Warriors, opened in Washington DC. The exhibition originated in 2007
as the National Gallery of Australia’s first installment of a triennial survey of recent
Australian Indigenous art. It is rather remarkable how the staging of this exhibition
in the United States was officially linked to very pragmatic political objectives.
Dennis Richardson, then Australian ambassador to the United States, hoped that
this high-end arts program would “put Australia front of mind for the Obama administration” (Richardson cited in Davies 2009b, 9). Australia’s Department of
Foreign Affairs and Trade (2009–2010) stressed that this act of cultural diplomacy
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was “designed to shape international views of Australia. Its pitch and direction were
guided by the foreign and trade priorities of the Government.”
Culture Warriors was political not only in intent but also in content, which made
it highly unusual and different from anything seen before. The theme of the exhibition could not have been more radical: to visually document the racial discrimination of Indigenous people and their struggle against colonialism and its legacy
of oppression. The extraordinary and paradoxical feature here is that the
Australian government provided an international platform for radical political
ideas at the very time when Indigenous relations with the Australian government
were at their lowest point since the end of the assimilation policy in the early
1970s.
Although different in nature, the Australian government used Indigenous art
in 2009 just as strategically as in 1941. Here too, the exhibition was part of a
broader Australia Presents cultural diplomacy initiative explicitly aimed at bolstering Australia’s foreign affairs and trade relations with the United States. And here
too, improving relations with the United States was taking place at the same time
as trying to gain more international credibility, particularly with the United
Nations.
The staging of Culture Warriors must be seen in the context of Australia’s campaign for a UN Security Council seat, launched in March 2008 by Prime Minister
Kevin Rudd.6 This context is crucial but so far largely neglected, even by scholars
who offer otherwise detailed and insightful analyses of the exhibition (see
McDonald 2013). There are, indeed, numerous, very direct ways in which the exhibition was meant to increase Australia’s reputation with regard to the treatment
of its Indigenous population. Non-permanent UN Security Council members are
elected by the members of the UN’s General Assembly. Australia had a major reputation problem with many members, particularly with regard to the treatment of
its Indigenous population. This is the case because Australia was one of only four
nations that voted against the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous
People, which in September that year was adopted by the UN General Assembly.
The four negative votes were overwhelmed by 143 nations voting in favor of
adopting the Declaration.
A newly elected government in Australia now had to regain its international
reputation and legitimacy. The rejection of the Declaration by the previous government ostensibly amplified Australia’s ongoing racist reputation. Memories returned of Australia’s first campaign for a UN Security Council seat in the 1940s—
a time when the openly racist “White Australia” policy was still widely practiced
(Booker 1996).
Events earlier in 2007 compounded Australia’s racist reputation when the federal government attracted widespread national and international criticism for
launching the Northern Territory (NT) National Emergency Response (see
Calma 2009). Referred to as “the intervention,” this initiative instigated an escalated level of government control over Indigenous welfare provision, law enforcement, and land tenure—all in response to allegations of child sexual abuse and
neglect in NT Aboriginal communities.
Media coverage of “the intervention” entailed extraordinary front page photographs of the deployment of 600 soldiers from the Australian Defense Force moving
into Aboriginal communities. The military were shown enforcing new restrictions
on alcohol, pornography, welfare benefits, customary law and cultural practices, and
permits to Aboriginal land. At the same time, the government enforced compulsory
acquisition of Aboriginal townships, using legislation that negated existing title
6
Australia had previously launched eight attempts at a UN Security Council seat. Four of them failed (1951,
1990, 1994, and 1996), and three of them succeeded, leading to tenures from 1956 to 1957, 1973–1974, and 1985–
1986.
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Indigenous Art and Cultural Diplomacy
provisions. For many Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, this “intervention” was a return to the protectionist era of the early twentieth century and a shocking example of home-grown inequality and prejudice. These restrictions stayed in
place after a new federal government took office in 2007. The military presence was
removed only in late 2008. An investigation by UN Special Rapporteur, Anaya
(2010, 25–41), later found the Emergency Response to be racially incriminating and
an infringement of human rights.
The government clearly had to do something to counter its highly problematic
reputation with regards to the treatment of the Indigenous population—
otherwise, a campaign for a UN Security Council seat was unlikely to succeed.
The government identified a “special commitment to the Indigenous peoples of
the world” as one of eight key elements of the campaign, stressing that Australia
is “home to one of the oldest continuing cultures in the world” and that it “seeks
to advance the interests of First Peoples around the world” (Australian
Government 2012, Commitment No. 7). Substantiating such claims was not easy,
given Australia’s history, so the government took initiatives on both the domestic
and international levels.
The standout event at the domestic level took place in 2008, when Prime
Minister Rudd made headlines with an official “Apology” to the “Stolen
Generation”—Indigenous people who had been forcibly removed from their families under the protectionist and assimilation phases of government policy. This
was a radical and widely applauded move. In the candidature brochure for the
UN Security Council seat, the government highlighted the apology as “a turning
point in Australia’s history” (Australian Government 2012, 27). But criticism soon
followed, in part because of lacking implementation. Indigenous commentators
appealed for more than symbolic moves and “token gestures,” calling for political
recognition such as official acknowledgement of them as the first Australians in
the Australian Constitution; the drafting of a formal treaty; and a new deal on political self-determination (McMahon 2008).
At the international level, one of the key responses was the use of the Culture
Warriors exhibition as a way to highlight Australia’s willingness to confront and deal
with its problematic past. Other efforts to promote Indigenous art—not just paintings
but also music, dance, and literature—took place at the same time and included
smaller exhibitions and performances at Australian embassies and Consulate
Generals, as well as museums and galleries in different parts of the United States and
around the world (see McDonald 2013, 18–31). The need for such initiatives became
all the more compelling when, in 2008, the United States was in the midst of a political campaign that would see the first African American take office as the US
President. The subject of civil rights thus offered itself as a timely, although unusual,
diplomatic approach to bolstering US–Australian relations.
Culture Warriors and the Continuous Quest for Indigenous
Recognition and Sovereignty
Culture Warriors can be seen as a major attempt at offering a new vision of
Australia’s history, not one revolving around a peaceful settler society progressing
forward, but one steeped in violence and exclusion. The exhibition presented a
history of civil rights protest in Australia. As the title of the exhibition suggests, it
focused on how Indigenous culture is a weapon in the fight for rights.
The result was nothing short of a radical and major political statement of
Australian Indigenous perspective, particularly how the exhibition politicized the entire field of Australian Indigenous art. The exhibition included only Indigenous artworks and was produced by an Aboriginal curator. The majority of the essays in the
exhibition catalogue were written by Indigenous authors. The exhibition also
ROLAND BLEIKER
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Figure 4. Julie Dowling, Walyer, 2006. Synthetic polymer paint and red ochre on
canvas 200 1.
marked the 40th anniversary of the 1967 referendum, which bestowed Indigenous
Australians with political status equal to the rest of the Australian population.
Many of the artworks in the exhibition confronted and explicitly critiqued the
racism and injustice that the Indigenous population suffered since the arrival of
European settlers. Artworks that did so included Daniel Boyd’s 2007 portrait series of governors of early Australian colonies. He depicted them as lawless pirates,
featuring eye patches and parrots perched on their shoulders. There was Judy
Watson’s 2007 Under the act (frontispiece) that featured her grandmother’s “exemption card,” which Indigenous people required to get permission to leave government reserves. Richard Bells’ Psalm singing (2007) art work included the
words, “I live in the valley of the shadow of death” and “there is no hope.”
Christopher Pease’s Target (2005) superimposed a bull’s eye target over a scene of
early European arrival on the Australian landscape. Julie Dowling’s Walyer was a
portrait of a young Aboriginal woman, represented above, depicted in traditional
dress and armed with a rifle and handgun.
The government’s media release makes no mention of the highly political nature of the exhibition, preferring to present the initiative as “an important cultural exchange between Australia and America” (Australian Government 2009).
But the artworks themselves leave little doubt about the anger, the critique, and
the political call for action depicted in the exhibition. This political position was
then reinforced by Artist Statements published both in the exhibition catalogue
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Indigenous Art and Cultural Diplomacy
and on the wall next to the art. Take this text by Wedge (2007, 173), whose naı̈ve
style painting conveyed the psychological trauma of modern Indigenous life:
When Captain Cook came and landed and called it a new country in British justice
or whatever you want to call it . . . I can’t help thinking . . . what it would be like if
the native people did start to spear them, frighten them and kill them all . . . You
know this land was ours, but it’s yours now. But there’s still a lot of people out there
fightin’ for us so that we can get it back one day, maybe in one lifetime.
The strength of the exhibition and its political significance emerge from the
combined presentation of all artworks within a consolidated political front. Culture
Warriors made no distinction between the politically explicit artworks referred to
above and the abstract imagery of desert painting or bark paintings from Arnhem
Land—artworks normally featured in Australia’s cultural diplomacy program. The
exhibition featured a 2005 bark painting by an Arnhem Land artist that was remarkably similar to those included in the 1940s exhibitions. But by now, this bark
painting is no longer seen as a mere decorative art piece, void of political meaning.
In the 1940s, the bark paintings provided Indigenous art with a foothold in
Australia’s cultural symbolism that would, in later decades, transform into an icon
of political accountability. Today, the same decorative art piece is read as an explicit
political claim for Indigenous law and Indigenous self-determination. This is why
the curator’s essay anchored the entire exhibition in a tradition of art and political
activism, commencing with bark paintings and highlighted by the 1963 bark petition that enjoyed a full-page reproduction in the catalogue (Croft 2007, x–xxvii).
Artistic diversity is now presented in the context of Indigenous solidarity about the
need to rework prevailing understandings of history since the European “invasion.”
Whilst the meaning of each individual piece of art remains unique and ambiguous,
the overall presentation of the exhibition clearly contained an unmistaken visual
demand for Indigenous rights.
Culture Warriors gave shape to radical political ideas about privileging First
Nation Australians in the Australian Constitution; the formation of a treaty; and
the possibility of Indigenous sovereignty—all at a time when Indigenous rights appeared to be going backwards. Indeed, the Australian government is far from contemplating any of the radical ideas that the exhibition highlights. And yet, by
sponsoring the exhibition, it could highlight to the world its human rights credentials while actually being able to refrain from implementing them.
Reactions in the United States to the Culture Warriors exhibition were mixed. We
do not have the space here for a comprehensive review, so we are only pointing to
the two main trends. On the one hand, there was admiration of the complexity and
diversity of the art, for the radical nature of the initiative and the insights about
Figure 5. H. J. Wedge Taking the Land Away, 2002. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas
71 178 cm. Sources: The Big River Collection, Tasmania and the Artist and Gallery
Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne.
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Indigenous Australians and a hitherto unknown history (see Acharya 2009; Tischler
2009). On the other hand, there was considerable skepticism about the motives of
the Australian government in supporting a civil rights agenda. Complaints regarding
the poor quality of the venue for the exhibition reinforced the belief that the exhibition was more about diplomacy than promoting the art (Davies 2009a, 2009b). This
is why several prominent commentators saw the exhibition as a “run-of-the-mill cultural diplomacy exercise” (Davies 2009a, 9) or, at best, “a more mature approach to
the export of Indigenous Australian culture for diplomatic purposes beyond the
purely celebratory” (McDonald 2012, 41–42).
Australia did win a seat on the UN Security Council in 2012. Whether or not
Culture Warriors played a decisive role in this victory cannot be known. Cultural diplomacy does not necessarily work in causal ways. But it frames more conventional
diplomatic initiatives in a way that consciously or subconsciously conditions those
who encounter the respective artworks. We do know that Australia did make
Indigenous issues one of its prime priorities in the campaign for the UN Security
Council. We also know that in the first round of voting, 140 out of 193 states voted
for Australia. Finally, we also know, rather curiously but perhaps tellingly, that,
once elected, Indigenous issues no longer featured on the Government’s webpage
that outlines “our” approach to the UN Security Council (Australian Government
2013–14).
The last word has not yet been spoken. The Australian government may well
have been successful in using Indigenous art to increase legitimacy with the
United Nations. But, as Steele points out, if the power of a state is projected not
just materially but also through aesthetics, then this aesthetic construction can
also be challenged. Moments of counter-power often emerge by surprise and can
lead to important political dynamics (Steele 2010, 46). In 1941, the Australian
government declared Aboriginal culture and identity dead. Nobody in power expected the kind of concerted protest movement that Culture Warriors so powerfully
documented. For such a political movement to happen, there first had to be a different understanding of what is and is not visible, thinkable, and doable. The
1941 exhibition was part of a cultural process that started this process and made it
possible for Indigenous people to be seen as human beings with a history, a culture, and rights. The politics of art takes time to develop. The radical message of
the Culture Warriors exhibition, such as genuine recognition and sovereignty, may
indeed seem far-fetched at this point in history. But just as in 1941, Indigenous
art may also be ahead of its time today, paving the way for a more radical reorientation of what is, and is not, visible and thinkable.
Conclusion
We have sought to provide insight into the links between art and foreign policy. To
do so, we have examined two symbolic and important instances of cultural diplomacy in Australia’s history. In each case, an exhibition containing Indigenous art
was used to promote very specific foreign policy goals. In 1941–1942, the government aimed at forging closer ties to the United States and desired to gain credibility
with ongoing negotiations about the creation of the United Nations. Indigenous art
was included in the exhibition in the United States not as a radical gesture, but to
set Australia visually apart from the British Colonial Empire and increase its reputation as an autonomous actor in world politics. In 2009, the Australian government
staged an exhibition of Indigenous art in the United States in order to increase its
human rights reputation, deemed central in view of attempts to gain a seat on the
UN Security Council.
We demonstrated that there is much more at stake here than a mere use of art
as tools in cultural diplomacy. We argued that art plays an important political role
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because it can interfere with what Rancière called the distribution of the sensible:
the tacit and unquestioned societal conventions, which determined what is visible,
thinkable, and doable. Art interferes with these conventions because it seeks to
challenge what we see and accept as natural. It aims not to depict the world as is,
as a mimetic representation of realities out there. Instead, it “creates realities and
worlds” and in doing so triggers emotional and psychological reactions that allow
us to reorient what we see and know (Edelman 1995, 6–7, see also Bleiker 2001
509–33.).
In each of the cases we examined, Indigenous art conveyed a radical political message that subverted the government’s official objectives. In 1941, the
radical political message contained in bark painting was neither intended nor
recognized by the government. Deemed mere decorative crafts, bark paintings
included in the exhibition contained a range of visual allusions to narratives,
governance, and land, thus implicitly claiming a stake for Indigenous cultural
and political recognition far ahead of time. By elevating the bark paintings
to the level of art and presenting it as such to the international community,
the government implicitly recognized the existence of an Indigenous claim
to sovereignty. The 2009 exhibition engaged these political themes much
more explicitly. It advanced a visual narrative of Indigenous anger about, and
continuing resistance to, a long history of colonial occupation and racist governmental policies. But here too, the artworks expressed a claim for a radical
rewriting of history and to Indigenous sovereignty that are not yet in the
realm of the politically possible.
The fact that there is a certain ambiguity to art—that its meaning can never be
settled once and for all—renders its political dimensions even more unpredictable. There is always an excess to a work of art, a part of it that defies attempts to
define and categorize it. Jenny Edkins (2015, 59) writes of art as “objects that resist an easy narrativisation.” Gabriel Rockhill (2009, 208) sees art as “sites of contestation and negotiation in which meaning is dynamically produced and
reproduced.”
The two exhibitions that we examined exemplify this process of aesthetic politics. Because art works through symbols and plays with meaning, it cannot be easily controlled. Indigenous bark paintings survived the attempt of the Australian
government to manipulate them in 1941. More than anything, the hidden
but radical political message of bark painting anticipated, and to some extent
also initiated, a long struggle for Indigenous rights. We are still to see to what
extent the even more radical Cultural Warriors exhibition initiates a next round
in Indigenous activism. But one can already say that in both instances
Indigenous art offered a fundamentally different visual and cultural register than
the prevailing narrative of nation-building. Things become visible that had not
even existed before: a long history of violent suppression and resistance; new understandings of the relationship between land and culture and rights; and alternative ways of conceptualizing community and belonging. In Rancière’s terms, art
repartitioned the sensible. In Indigenous terms, art took on a radical Dreaming
function, for it merged past, present, and future through a visualization of alternative narratives to the ones that dominant political discourses promulgate. The
final word on this radical Dreaming is best left to Indigenous people themselves.
Dowling (2007, 96), sister of Julie Dowling mentioned above, in the Culture
Warriors catalogue:
With every breath, we wish to remain sovereign peoples. We struggle to maintain
our languages, our customary law, and our oral traditions. With the ratification of
the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous peoples, we dream that the
world will hear our call for justice and freedom as the oldest living culture on the
planet.
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