Journal of Art Historiography (Dec 2015)
The hang and art history
Abstract
The 2013 Australia exhibition in 2013 at the Royal Academy, London, served at one level to demonstrate the ‘Aboriginal turn’ in Australian art history and curatorship. This paper traces some key exhibitions and texts that examine Aboriginal art as art, and traces the use by anthropologists and art historians of seminal texts such as Meyer Schapiro’s essay ‘Style’ published, significantly, in Kroeber’s Anthropology Today (1953). However, what promised to serve as a lingua franca of sorts across the disciplines has provoked contested, and at times heated, interpretations. Disciplinary differences were evident in the years immediately following Tony Tuckson’s 1960-61 Australian Aboriginal Art touring exhibition, and they persist today as evidenced by Howard Morphy’s claim (2011) for anthropological ways of ‘knowing about’ as distinct from art historical attempts at ‘appreciating’ Aboriginal art. So, apart from acknowledging and questioning the persistence of these differences, my question is: Based on the extant art historiographic literature, is there anything methodologically distinctive about the practice of art history when it grapples with exhibitions of Aboriginal art?
