Another Look at Social Dimension ( 8 of 8 )

The situation with regard to Australia, however, is less straightforward, since the major cultural export of that continent is today unequally represented, on the one hand, by a State-supported and marketed Aboriginal painting and, on the other, a more or less typical corpus of postmodern art. Representative of the best of the latter, Tracey Moffatt, herself of Aboriginal descent, negotiates the well-worn terrain between identity and difference which has become the mainstay of artistic otherness. Neither of these two trends could have been predicted during the 1970s by a staunch cultural nationalist such as Burn, although there is a clear interest in the way in which Australian aboriginal artists had historically intersected with White European aesthetic conventions. During the 1980s and early-1990s Burn, along with Ann Stephen, wrote convincingly on this issue, mainly in the context of a revaluation of the work of Albert Namatjira, an artist of the Western Aranda people in a region near to Alice Springs ("The transfiguration of Albert Namatjira," 1986, and "Namatjira's white mask," in The Heritage of Namatjira, Melbourne, 1992.)

The issue for the mid-1970s, however, was more sharply focused by the Museum of Modern Art's "Modern Masters," the fact that Jackson Pollock's "Blue Poles" had been recently purchased by a major Australian national museum for the unprecedented price of US$2 million and, finally, the undeniable devastation of Southeast Asia by the US military and its allies. The political aim was not at all a bid for a confident regionalism predicated upon "primitivism"; rather, a claim for autonomy and decentralization.

Burn was not one to overestimate the ability of art to overcome its own condition of commodification. Nor did he endorse the wish for art to become politics. Ultimately, Burn came to the understanding that class politics must always and everywhere supervene cultural politics. Thus, his turn to cultural activism during the 1980s in the context of the Australian labor movement, and his apparent "return" to art making during the 1990s represent two sides of the same coin. Looking back on Art & Language's Marxist-inspired analyses of culture and art of the 1970s, one might say that there were moments when the idealized institutional critique of Conceptual art was actualized. Insofar as such moments had no secure identity as "works of art" and were not firmly linked to political formations external to the world of art, that moment passed into oblivion. Which is to say, it became a negative example of how not to get ahead in the world of art.

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