Painting Culture

The Making of an Aboriginal High Art

by Fred R. Myers

Published by: Duke University Press

Series: Objects/Histories

Imprint: Duke University Press Books

440 Pages, 156.00 × 235.00 mm, 8 color photos, 46 b&w photos, 78 line drawings

Paperback
9780822329497
Published: December 2002

£35.00

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Hardcover
9780822329329
Published: December 2002

£104.00

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Description
Contents
Authors
Praise

Painting Culture tells the complex story of how, over the past three decades, the acrylic "dot" paintings of central Australia were transformed into objects of international high art, eagerly sought by upscale galleries and collectors. Since the early 1970s, Fred R. Myers has studied-often as a participant-observer-the Pintupi, one of several Aboriginal groups who paint the famous acrylic works. Describing their paintings and the complicated cultural issues they raise, Myers looks at how the paintings represent Aboriginal people and their culture and how their heritage is translated into exchangeable values. He tracks the way these paintings become high art as they move outward from indigenous communities through and among other social institutions-the world of dealers, museums, and critics. At the same time, he shows how this change in the status of the acrylic paintings is directly related to the initiative of the painters themselves and their hopes for greater levels of recognition.

Painting Culture describes in detail the actual practice of painting, insisting that such a focus is necessary to engage directly with the role of the art in the lives of contemporary Aboriginals. The book includes a unique local art history, a study of the complete corpus of two painters over a two-year period. It also explores the awkward local issues around the valuation and sale of the acrylic paintings, traces the shifting approaches of the Australian government and key organizations such as the Aboriginal Arts Board to the promotion of the work, and describes the early and subsequent phases of the works’ inclusion in major Australian and international exhibitions. Myers provides an account of some of the events related to these exhibits, most notably the Asia Society’s 1988 "Dreamings" show in New York, which was so pivotal in bringing the work to North American notice. He also traces the approaches and concerns of dealers, ranging from semi-tourist outlets in Alice Springs to more prestigious venues in Sydney and Melbourne.

With its innovative approach to the transnational circulation of culture, this book will appeal to art historians, as well as those in cultural anthropology, cultural studies, museum studies, and performance studies.

“Aside from being an extraordinary feat of scholarship at the intersection of art, anthropology, and the renewed interest in material culture, this long-awaited study is equally a fulfillment of the many recent envisionings of an ethnography of movement and circulation. Only an anthropologist with as keen a sensibility as Fred R. Myers’s for the present epoch of change in both anthropology itself and the peoples it has long studied could produce a work of such focus and scope.”-George Marcus, Rice University

“Fred R. Myers has been in a unique position as a participant-observer of an art movement from its local beginnings to its international recognition. This book is a work of enormous significance, relevant to debates in contemporary art theory and cultural studies as well as in anthropology.”-Howard Morphy, Australian National University

"Rich, detailed description and penetrating thoughtful analysis. . . . The book delivers on its implicit promise to make it worth one's while to learn about all of that background and pays off in a deep understanding of how art gets to be art. . . . Most of all, Myers's book shows that there is just no substitute for solid fieldwork."
- Howard S. Becker (American Ethnologist)
"One of the many virtues of this book is its vigorous review of the literature that informs the analysed data. . . . Painting Culture reminds us of the rich and subtle virtues of scholarship that engages its material with meditative and patient eye. Here is a challenging book about a sensational subject, which has avoided the twin demons of shallow journalistic imperative and disaffected, disengaged academic obscuration. This is a landmark contribution to the subject of Aboriginal art."
- Françoise Dussart (Anthropological Forum)
"Theoretically, this book is state-of-the field, engaging frequently with prominent analysts of cultural dynamics. . . . This book bears the fruit of sustained ethnographic commitment of a sort that is becoming increasingly rare in anthropology. . . . Painting Culture makes a monumental contribution to understandings of the cultural, political, and economic dimensions of an increasingly globalized world."
- Sally Price (American Anthropologist)
"Years before its much-awaited publication, Painting Culture had cast its shadow, like some spectre of mingled threat and promise, across the fractious institutions of the Australian art market. Word, from time to time, would scurry around: Fred Myers, the renouned, long-silent American anthropologist who knew everything about the Centre, was writing a book that would be definitive-the necessary account of Western Desert Aboriginal art, its origins and trajectory, its marketing, its flowering and contemporary fate. . . . Here, at last, it is, brought to the light of day by theory-loving Duke University Press, clotted with radical insights and festooned with praise from leading lights in the anthropological world. . . . These rich, closely observed passages in Painting Culture are unique explorations of intent and virtuosity among the first-generation Pintupi painters; they have a wondrously persuasive, interlocking tone of detail."
- Nicolas Rothwell (The Australian)