Corporate Art Collections in Australia: The Influence of Aboriginal Art on Corporate Identity

This study is the first to investigate the use of Aboriginal art for marketing purposes. Over 2000 major enterprises in Europe and North America collect art, but in Australia relatively few do. Research has established that art collections contribute to corporate identity, but this has not been studied in Australia. Using a qualitative case study approach, this exploratory study investigates how art collections are used to support the work of three Australian banking and law firms whose collections include Aboriginal art. We asked respondents from each firm how and why they collected Aboriginal art and their perception of the role of art in symbolizing their firm’s values and culture. Aboriginal art was found to contribute to a firm’s identity and corporate social responsibility, especially when collections included the work of emerging artists and more challenging political content. It also presented a friendly face to Aboriginal clients. For firms in overseas markets, Aboriginal art served to signal a firm’s Australianness.

Source to Subject: Fiona Foley’s Evolving Use of Archives

Since the 1980s, multidisciplinary artist Fiona Foley has created compelling art referencing her history, Aboriginal art, and her Badtjala heritage. In this brief essay, the author discusses an early series of Foley’s work in relation to ethnographic photography. This series connects to the wider trend of Indigenous artists creating art out of 19th century photographs intended for distribution to non-Indigenous audiences. By considering this earlier series of her work, this text considers Foley’s growth as a truly contemporary artist who uses the past as inspiration, invoking complicated moments of encounter between Europeans and Aboriginal Australians and their afterimages.

Interlude 4

IN 2009, AN AUSTRALIAN art historian meditated on the prospect of contemporary Aboriginal art being used to mark a nuclear waste repository that might be built in that country. He began his essay with a summary of the plan for marking nuclear waste in the US:...

Australian Aboriginal Art

Outside Australia, “Australian art” is often taken to mean Indigenous art produced in remote regions of the continent, even though Indigenous Australians comprise only 3 percent of the population, and less than 10 percent of this 3 percent live in the remote communities where most of this art is produced. Inside Australia, which is where nearly all histories of Indigenous Australian art are written, the relationship between the categories of Indigenous and Australian art is more complex due to unresolved legacies of colonialism. The category of Indigenous Australian art includes the Melanesian culture of the Torres Strait Islands and the Aboriginal art of mainland Australia, Tasmania, and several other islands. Indigenous art encompasses everything from late Pleistocene rock art to moving image and digital technologies of the contemporary age. It is made in all regions of Australia, from the urban to the remote, and unlike non-Indigenous Australian art, it has great regional variation. Despite long continuous Indigenous cultural practices, there is no recognizable Indigenous art historiographical tradition and until recently art historians showed little interest in retrieving the oral histories of its various schools. This is because the paradigm of primitivism had locked Indigenous art out of the discipline’s underlying assumptions, leaving its study to archaeologists and anthropologists. As the art world critique of primitivism only began to take hold in the 1980s, Indigenous art history is a new field of study in the discipline. Interdisciplinary in its formation, it has drawn significantly from anthropologists, who remain leaders in the study of Indigenous art. Due to their fieldwork approach, anthropologists also led the way in developing methodologies that could account for Indigenous worldviews, which are becoming more prominent in art world discourse, with Indigenous artists, curators, and scholars making an increasingly significant contribution since the 1990s. However, connections with archaeology are poorly developed. While archaeological research into rock art is booming in Australia, it is focused on conventional analysis of dating in order to develop largely speculative historical narratives about the origins of various cultures. This lies outside the main current of Indigenous art history, which has a contemporary focus. Indigenous art history is yet to articulate a substantial historical narrative of its subject. Nevertheless, traditional art history genres such as biography, regional art histories, and issue-based thematic subjects are serving the field well. The place of Indigenous art in the Australian national tradition is an issue with which the discipline is currently grappling. Finally, curators have been important instigators in transforming what had largely been a subject of anthropology into art history. This is reflected in the bibliography, in which exhibition catalogues outnumber scholarly books by art historians.