Sacred Exchanges

Robyn Ferrell's latest book is a powerful and evocative engagement with the complex of raced and gendered relationships produced by and exchanged through global economic art markets. She draws on her experience with Warlipi women artists from the Australian Tanami desert to challenge easy distinctions between art and artifact, nature and culture, and, in complicated ways, aboriginal art and Western art. Ferrell brings this aboriginal art to bear on Western aesthetics in ways that not only challenge that aesthetics and the meaning of color, shape, form, and art itself, but also trouble what is considered authentic aboriginal art. She discusses how much of contemporary aboriginal art is produced for Western markets that have in some significant ways transformed traditional practice. She also forges a conversation between aboriginal aesthetics and Western aesthetics that pushes contemporary debates beyond their usually comfortable boundaries. -- Kelly Oliver, Vanderbilt University, author of Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human

As the international art market globalizes the indigenous image, it changes its identity, status, value, and purpose 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 exchanges 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 explores the culture that produces these paintings and connects its aesthetic to the brutal environmental and economic realities of its people. From here, she travels to urban locales, observing museums and department stores as they traffic interchangeably in art and commodities. 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. She ultimately challenges the primacy of the "European gaze" and its fascination with sacred cultures, constructing a more balanced intercultural dialogue that deemphasizes the aesthetic of the real championed by western philosophy.