Sacred Exchanges

As the international art market globalizes the indigenous image, its identity, status, value, and purpose changes in local and larger contexts. Focusing on a school of Australian Aboriginal painting that has become popular in the contemporary art world, Robyn Ferrell traces the influence of cultural exchange on art, the self, and attitudes toward the other. Aboriginal acrylic painting, produced by indigenous women artists of the Australian Desert, bears a superficial resemblance to abstract expressionism and is often read as such by viewers. Yet to see this art only through a Western lens is to miss its unique ontology, logics of sensation, and rich politics and religion. Ferrell dives deep into the culture producing these paintings and connects its aesthetic to the brutal environmental and economic realities of its people. From here, Ferrell travels to urban locales, where museums and department stores traffic interchangeably in Aboriginal art. Ferrell ties the history of these desert works to global acts of genocide and dispossession, rethinking the value of the artistic image in the global market and different interpretations of the sacred. She considers photojournalism, ecotourism, and other sacred sites of the western subject, investigating the intersection of modern art and postmodern culture. Questioning the nature of the "European gaze" and its fascination with sacred cultures, Ferrell attempts a more balanced intercultural dialogue that relies less on an aesthetic of the real championed by the European art elite.