Vernacular
Terrain II
One Night the
moon
Came a’rollin
by
Drove a big cart
across the night
sky
One night the
moon
Came a’rollin
by
Called all the
dreamers
To come for a
ride.
One Night the
Moon, Rachel Perkins Director, 2001.
Christine
Peacock and John Graham’s animation ‘Boy and Moth’ tells a type
of classic morale tale of where knowledge; enlightenment and special
powers of perception are placed on an unwitting unsuspecting innocent
hero for them to wonder at, enjoy, and rationalise and come to terms
with. Aboriginal art is art made by Aboriginal people whatever its
form, scale, practice, or material. Certain inherent features of a
technology can shut particular people out from access to it; from
knowledge or a system of power associated with it.
Our world is
aptly described within the title Vernacular Terrain; a moulded
landscape of pathways, sites of aggregation, collection, and
settlement. A variegated terrain of the personal and social, more so
than spatial. Where information, ideas, expressions, feelings and
concepts are ambiguously connected to sites and people and yet
exchanged or discarded; overpowered and subsumed or escaping to fly
free; in a constant state of flux, a temporal and spatial state of
being.
Our landscape is
strewn with sites of specific actions, people and their stories both
creative and destructive. Aboriginal people have always sat
uncomfortably in Australian colonial history and Aboriginal art sits
somewhat incongruously in ‘white-Australian’ western art history,
our very contemporary existence a challenge to both.
This land is
mine
All the way to the old fence line
Every break of day
I'm working hard just to make it pay
All the way to the old fence line
Every break of day
I'm working hard just to make it pay
They won't take
it away from me Father
[Written
by Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody],
One Night the
Moon, 2001.
Some would tell
us that new technology is supposedly race, gender and politically
neutral yet we know how by its very ‘newness’ it reinforces; the
stereotypes it supposedly refutes. Are we making old art with new
technology? Certainly it appears cyber art forms move faster than
laws, experiences and concepts than people can keep pace with.
Jason Davidson’s
mechanical, heavy metal, graffiti X-ray animals jar the eye yet line
up with the Wadeye [Port Keats] traditional society’s youth
culture. Here the community is dominated by two warring extremely
visible street gangs ‘The Judas Priests’ and ‘The Evil
Warriors’ despite an intense Aboriginal religious life, language
retention and many other ‘traditional’ practices. It is in these
communities that Asian ‘Kung Fu’ action movies were the most
popular films. Where the language of the script was rendered
irrelevant, and the constant fight sequences; where the small defeat
the powerful, good overcomes evil and those aggrieved achieved some
form of justice is were the meaningful connections made between the
movies and the communities.
This land is me
Rock, water,
animal; tree
They are my song
My being’s
here where I belong
This land owns
me
From generations
past to infinity
We’re all but
woman and man
You only fear
what you don’t understand
Tracker Albert
Riley, [Written by Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody],
One Night the
Moon, 2001.
Franz Fanon
wrote of how colonialism and racism are a form of violence that is
embedded through every facet of colonial cultural expression, so
subtle and pervasive as to be invisible. To make his point he
described the cruel disjunction of a black man [himself] watching the
film ‘Tarzan’ [1932] with a black audience in French colonised
Martinique, watching the same film in a ‘white’ audience in
Paris. Overcoming racism through the appropriation by coloured people
of film histo-graphies and critique lies in the roll-call of Jenny
Fraser’s wittily titled work ‘name that movie’ vignettes of
Hollywood films.
Postcards were
already a ‘holiday item’ when the ‘Box Brownie’ camera
technology democratically liberated photography for the masses
[including some yet to be identified Aboriginal people] in 1900.
Popular among a myriad exotic postcard images were those of the
stereotyped primitive other. Andrew Hill’s composition reverses the
gaze to unveil the stereotype of the westerner we see exposed in all
its true ugliness.
Our historical
landscape; our terrain; pathways to enrichment and positive
adventures, through British colonisation became unguarded openings to
the heart of our societies and our dreams. R E A’s dream sequences
alternate from soft pleasurable, ‘prenatal’, almost indescribable
experiences and memories to the jarring equally unbelievably brutal
inhuman colonial violence - ‘Maang [Message Stick]’.
When the British
visited the Australian continent in 1770 there were at least 250
distinct languages living in a myriad of ‘vernacular’ groups and
differing cultural and physical environ-niches across Australia.
Through the colonisation processes, over the last 200 years, a
flattening of this terrain, to some extent, has happened. However
Aboriginal people continue to still live, work, create and dream in
an extended number of ancient and new pathways, lifestyles,
expressions, contemporary dreaming tracks and song-lines. We remain
in a persistently optimistic, confident and extremely visible outlook
on our futures as part of a modern vibrant contributing Aboriginal
culture life.
essay by Djon Mundine OAM
April 2008
For VT2, an
international digital touring exhibition by IDA
(International Digital Art Projects)
opened at QUT, Brisbane, May 2008.
the Blackout contribution to VT2 was co-curated by Jenny Fraser and co-presented by cyberTribe
Download the Catalogue here
VT2 presented vibrant, innovative screen-based and photo-media works from international artists alongside Indigenous Australian new-media artists, building on 2007’s Vernacular Terrain exhibition.
For the first time a group of Aboriginal New Media Artists are included in the annual tour of International Digital Arts courtesy of Artist / Curator Jenny Fraser (QLD), also including work from: r e a (NSW), Jason Davidson (NT) and Andrew Hill (QLD) and a collaboration by Christine Peacock, John Graham & Rebekah Pitt (QLD) with Djon Mundine (NSW) offering the Curatorial Essay for the tour.Founded by Stephen Danzig in 1999, IDAprojects was the first nexus of its kind providing a platform for academia, research technologies and professional art practices in building a new discourse. For the past eight years the IDA program has grown to feature a national and international touring exhibition with an aim to present leading artists from around the world who engage in new media arts and research technologies. Launched in Brisbane on May 1, the project reflects a global commitment to exploring cultural identity through leading professional arts practice in digital media from Curators Stephen Danzig, Lubi Thomas, Xu Da Wei, Matthew Perkins and Pauline Doutreluingne along with cyberTribe / blackout curator Jenny Fraser. QUT, in partnership with IDAprojects and the Beijing Film Academy has developed this international touring exhibition which was also presented throughout Asia – including the Beijing Olympics Cultural Festival – and later included a tour of regional Australia.
VT2
