Re-collecting, re-classifying, re-ordering : Indigenous art and the contemporary Australian art field

There is a significant diversity in the practices that fall under the heading of Indigenous art, a diversity that is best understood in terms of its positioning as a relatively autonomous art field that operates athwart the relation between the Australian art fields and international art fields. My concern has been mainly with its distinctive position in relation to the Australian art field. It is distinctive, I have argues, in its differentiation from the forms of diversity associated with multicultural arts policies and practices; distinctive in the connections that it establishes with collective forms and traditions of arts production which eschew the claims to individualistic forms of artistic creation characteristic of Western art traditions; distinctive in its contemporary repositioning from its early twentieth-century ethnographic farmings as worthy only of preservation as a momentous of a dying culture to its claims to providing a basis for a redefinition of Australian culture that acknowledges the historical primacy, resilience, and dynamism of Indigenous cultures; and distinctive in formal aesthetic strategies through which such political and pedagogic aims are pursued.