Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art

Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art. Fred R. Myers. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. 410 pp.

In the late 1970s Edward Said, quoting Marx ("They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented"), underscored the essential exteriority at the heart of orientalist discourse. Twenty-five years later Fred Myers, discussing the pivotal Dreamings exhibition of Australian aboriginal art in New York, confronts a rather different discourse, one that "revolves around a view that indigenous people (natives) should present themselves."

"This position," he continues, "once the oppositional critique of previous representational frames, tends to dismiss intercultural productions of identity" (p. 259). Painting Culture offers a richly documented exploration of the ongoing, and profoundly intercultural, production of identity for people who have shared their lives (and dreamings) with him over a 30-year period of friendship, study, and activism.

Working systematically through the entire cast of characters responsible for negotiating the transformation of an indigenous art system into an internationally recognized "fine art," Myers portrays the actors, various mixtures of representers and represented, who lie at the heart of the enterprise but who might easily have been passed over by an earlier generation of scholars. These include dealers, critics, scandal mongers, curators, patrons, politicians, and others, all depicted in their very human amalgams of...