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Seeing More than Black and White: Picturing Aboriginality at Australia’s National Portrait Gallery

2010; ANU Press; Volume: 49; Linguagem: Inglês

10.22459/ahr.49.2010.01

1835-8063

Melinda Hinkson,

Anthropological Studies and Insights

In December 2008 Australia’s National Portrait Gallery opened to the public in a new building prominently positioned in the parliamentary triangle in the nation’s capital. In this essay I explore depictions of Aboriginality in the Gallery’s opening hang. The Gallery’s development since 19921 has coincided with a tumultuous period in relations between Indigenous and other Australians and a clash of interpretations over the past, present and future place of Aboriginal people in Australian society. Simultaneously over the same timeframe Aboriginal cultural production has continued to gain increasing recognition and prominence within the terms of fine art both nationally and internationally, and to be widely mobilised in support of a range of nationalist projects. The majority of non-Aboriginal Australians have little opportunity to interact with Aboriginal people and form their perceptions via media imagery that tends to deal in starkly negative or (less often) positive representations. What kind of visual experience of Aboriginality has been unveiled before the Australian public in this new cultural institution? Here I am interested to consider what kind of recognition the Gallery works with—does it include the work of Aboriginal cultural producers and subjects in support of a unified idea of the nation? Does it embrace difference procedurally, a kind of recognition identified by political philosopher Charles Taylor, that simultaneously denies the substantive claims associated with that difference? Or, does the Gallery have the capacity to foster recognition with transformative potential? Taking seriously the idea that interactions between visitors to the Gallery and the pictures they encounter will be influenced by the associations they bring with them, I interpret my own visits against a backdrop of a series of relevant events that unfolded in Canberra in February 2009.