Aboriginal Australian Art at the Fogg: Now, Then, and Everywhen
One would be hard-pressed to conceive of an institution that better captures the culture of a period, place, or movement than does a museum. Not only does a museum serve as a repository of cultural objects in the exhibits it contains, a museum itself can be an object of culture--such as if its architecture or physical placement speaks to trends about greater society. This same layered relationship is true, however, of a museum exhibit and the artifacts or objects that comprise it. While each artifact is its own cultural object, so too is the larger whole with which the viewer interacts in a narrative way. It is this relationship on which this short essay will focus, adopting as its case study the current Harvard Art Museum exhibition of contemporary aboriginal Australian art and related objects, entitled “Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia.”
The exhibit serves as a cultural arbiter in its selection of objects, particularly in its intermingling of paintings and physical objects. Both the paintings and the objects vary drastically in what they purport to depict and how literal those depictions are. For instance, the painting entitled “Wipu Rockhole” demonstrates a scene from Australian nature with a collection of amorphous, stone-like images arranged like a whirlpool; “Two Women Dreaming,” on the other hand, represents its title abstractly, with four panels each of several concentric squares. Similarly, some of the objects is utilitarian, such as the 2008 replica of an aboriginal necklace bound with differently shaped black stones or the wooden vessel; another, however, is a tall, pigmented wooden stick with no apparent function. That these paintings and objects are placed together in the same barren space, with white walls and concrete floors, leads the viewer to focus solely on the question of what they share in common. However, the answer to this question is not immediately--or even necessarily eventually--apparent.
Another sense in which the exhibit emerges as a cultural object is through its title and the introductory text that accompanies it. As readers enter the exhibit space, they are, for all intents and purposes, beckoned to read the title and text by its conspicuous, front-and-center placement. Viewers are then told that for indigenous people, “the past is understood to be part of a cyclical and circular order known as the everywhen,” in which “conceptions of time rely on active encounters with both the ancestral and natural worlds.” Whether or not the viewer perceives this relationship himself in the exhibit’s objects, he or she will examine them with this lens and will look for ways in which the objects bear out this sense. As such, the curator’s choice to focus on a particular aspect of indigenous or aboriginal belief might either open new possibilities for thought on the part of viewers, or may actually limit the viewer’s cultural sensibilities of aboriginal art, restricting them to the scope of the description provided.
It has become commonplace in museums to read texts or plaques that accompany exhibits, for a description of what the exhibit’s objects are and for historical context. However, individual objects in the exhibit contain virtually no description, just the title, creator, and date of creation, if known. Viewers can thus grasp on only to the description offered of the exhibit as a whole. As a result, viewers must simply accept the relationship posited by the exhibit’s curators, that the objects demonstrate that “time is embedded within indigenous artistic, social, historical, and philosophical life.” Viewers then explore the objects in the exhibit with an interpretive conclusion already provided for them.
In thinking of the implicit overall message of this exhibit, it is important to note that while each of these paintings and objects was created by an aboriginal Australian individual, these objects have never before been placed together. Each was created independently, and each was created with the express purpose of contributing to a culture of understanding of aboriginal life. It was the curator of the exhibit, rather than any of the creators of the objects contained therein, who developed the narrative that the exhibit displays. Of course, the creator of each object has his or her own message to reveal. Thus, the viewer is presented with the multiple tasks of decoding not only the discrete story of each object, but also the interwoven narrative of the curator, and the narrative of the objects in their own mind.
At least to this viewer, there does not seem to be a clear narrative present above and beyond the statement introduced with the title of the exhibit. Like a ripe Kafka story, the exhibit eludes a definitive interpretation aside from the internal reflection it prompts within each viewer. That this might frustrate some viewers, who may then cling to the blurb provided by the curator with the title of exhibit, speaks to the part of our culture that is continually seeking explanation and causation. This exhibit reminds the reflective viewer to take a step back, to think critically, and accept that we do not know it all, and that we will never know it all. And while at first that might gnaw at us, or taunt our sensibilities, it will always be the case--it is “everywhen” for people “everywhere.”