tag:theconversation.com,2011:/au/topics/next-wave-9918/articlesNext Wave – The Conversation2014-05-08T02:56:03Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/262222014-05-08T02:56:03Z2014-05-08T02:56:03ZWhite Face – some notes from a fair-skinned Aboriginal<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/48001/original/6ffnb43d-1399505202.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Carly Sheppard is performing in Melbourne as part of Next Wave.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Gregory Lorenzutti</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Carly Sheppard’s latest work, <a href="http://2014.nextwave.org.au/events/white-face/">White Face</a> playing as part of Melbourne’s Next Wave festival this week, is a contemporary performance addressing personal experiences as a fair-skinned Aboriginal person based in Melbourne. It’s a topic that gives plenty of scope for discussion. </p>
<p>Since European settlement of Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups have used public performances as a way to incorporate European audiences and engage with settler colonial economy. In this way artistic performance has functioned as both resistance and response to colonisation.</p>
<p>Traditionally, Indigenous public performances have been offered as a form of entertainment or cultural curio, and have acted as part of economic exchange. Dance has been a means to assert identity and political power as well as social status. </p>
<p>Performances have acted as an important focus within Aboriginal communities for the expression of cultural adaptation as well as innovation. New ways of knowing, ways of being, and ways of sharing information have thus been incorporated and re-presented to non-Indigenous audiences.</p>
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<span class="caption">Carly Sheppard, White Face.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image Gregory Lorenzutti</span></span>
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<p>Negotiating the spaces between non-Indigenous and Indigenous communities has become increasingly difficult as so many Aboriginal people now belong, at least in part, to both. I myself am a fair-skinned Aboriginal person who embraces hybridity at the core of my identity and thus have experienced these difficulties first-hand. </p>
<p>There are few Aboriginal families in settled areas that have not felt the impact of what is in the popular discourse described as the “stolen generations”.</p>
<p>Consequently experiencing life as a contemporary Aboriginal person in Australia can be fraught with challenges to identity, authenticity, and legitimacy. </p>
<p>As Indigenous author Anita Heiss wrote in her 2012 book <a href="https://www.overdrive.com/media/875661/am-i-black-enough-for-you">Am I Black Enough For You?</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Australian media have discovered a new crime, to charge them with: being too “fair skinned” to be Aboriginal.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In September 2010, nine Aboriginal people began legal proceedings in the Federal Court against shock jock Andrew Bolt and the Herald Sun over two posts on Bolt’s blog. Bolt’s articles proposed it was fashionable for fair-skinned people of diverse heritage to cherry-pick Aboriginality as a racial identity for the purposes of political and vocational influence. </p>
<p>Bolt was found to have contravened section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. The fallout from this can now be seen in the <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/george-brandis-releases-planned-sweeping-changes-to-race-hate-laws-20140325-35fe3.html">changes being proposed</a> to 18C by Attorney General George Brandis and his <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-30/george-brandis-ill-informed-on-right-to-be-bigots/5375302">recent claim</a> that Australians have the right to be bigots.</p>
<p>Dance and choreographer Carly Sheppard is a descendant of the Wallangamma and Takalaka Tribes of North Queensland who has been training and working professionally in the dance industry for over eight years.</p>
<p>White Face is intended as an exploration of the experience of being a fair-skinned Aboriginal person in contemporary Australia. </p>
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<span class="caption">Carly Sheppard, White Face.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image Gregory Lorenzutti</span></span>
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<p>Highly personal and deeply intellectual, Sheppard’s two-years-in-the-making project still requires some refinement. While being a crafty take on a post Bolt-case Australia, Sheppard’s performance at times resembled <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilates">Pilates</a> meets <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frantz_Fanon">Frantz Fanon</a>, the French-Caribbean author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Black-White-Masks-Frantz-Fanon/dp/0802143008">Black Skins White Masks</a>.</p>
<p>Sheppard’s character, having re-enacted her discovery that she was of Aboriginal descent onstage, performs a monologue about her experience using an accent and mannerisms which indicate a low socio-economic background. </p>
<p>In this way, she equates poverty and disadvantage with her Aboriginality. It is as if she could never have found out she were Aboriginal, had she been born in Melbourne’s Toorak or Sydney’s Point Piper.</p>
<p>Sheppard’s piece is a clever and original exploration of Aboriginality in contemporary Melbourne. While attempting to make the audience think their way outside the tropes of black equals Aboriginal, this performance unfortunately, and somewhat ironically, replicates the paradigm of Aboriginal as interchangeable with disadvantaged. </p>
<p>Its shortcomings emerge not from the subject matter itself, but rather its execution and reinforcement of negative stereotypes.</p>
<p>Yet again we have witnessed an attack on the colour barrier; perhaps in time we might also begin to dismantle the class barrier.</p>
<p><br></p>
<p><em><a href="http://2014.nextwave.org.au/events/white-face/">White Face</a> runs at Footscray Community Arts Centre, as part of Next Wave, until Sunday May 11.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/26222/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Myles Russell Cook does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Carly Sheppard’s latest work, White Face playing as part of Melbourne’s Next Wave festival this week, is a contemporary performance addressing personal experiences as a fair-skinned Aboriginal person based…Myles Russell Cook, Doctoral candidate, Swinburne University of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/256432014-04-30T20:29:57Z2014-04-30T20:29:57ZOlfactory art makes scents – and who nose where it might lead us?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47194/original/vb6v58zk-1398733188.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Outside of perfume-makers, there are few artists trained in the art of smell.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image: Jessica Eucalyptus Quinnell</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Roses and rotten eggs, teen spirit or napalm in the morning: smells can both delight and horrify. Some scents are so bewitching that humans have gone to great lengths to obtain them. Take ambergris, essentially hardened whale vomit, which is highly prized in perfume making. Or musk, the complex scent of secretions harvested from a gland situated near the rectum of the male musk deer. </p>
<p>Of the five senses, sight and hearing are privileged in artistic endeavours, with touch, smell and taste often relatively disavowed. “Olfactory art” – art concerned with smell – is currently a relatively minor field. </p>
<p>But a growing number of contemporary artists are starting to explore the potentials of olfactory art. This year’s <a href="http://2014.nextwave.org.au/">Next Wave</a> festival in Melbourne presents <a href="http://2014.nextwave.org.au/events/smell-you-later/">Smell You Later</a> (May 1-11), a series of “scent-based encounters” in bathrooms, corridors, lobbies and stairwells of various festival venues. </p>
<p>We’ll return to Smell You Later shortly but first, how exactly does olfactory art work on our senses and brain? And where are the different explorations of olfactory artists taking us?</p>
<h2>Olfactory capabilities</h2>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Zachary Veach</span></span>
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<p>Smell is a complex sense which, compared to sight and hearing, is still relatively mysterious. How olfactory processes work – the science behind sniffing – is still under exploration. As adults we can detect on average approximately 10,000 different smells, and yet our olfactory capabilities differ significantly. </p>
<p>Different types of “smell blindness”, or “anosmia”, are quite common. For instance, <a href="http://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-do-we-smell-rose-eveleth">75% of people</a> can’t detect the distinctive grassy tang of urine produced following the ingestion of asparagus.</p>
<p>The olfactory bulb of a human may be smaller, relatively, and less powerful than that of a dog or a bee but an enormous proportion of the human genome (approximately 2%) is devoted to smell. </p>
<p>The complexity of the olfactory system continues to interest scientists such as the Americans Richard Axel and Linda B. Buck, who were <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2004/">jointly awarded</a> the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their new understanding of the intricacies of the olfactory system. </p>
<p>The olfactory system has a direct line to the hypothalamus, the brain’s major control centre for emotional responses and instinctive behaviours. Smell is closely intertwined with the functions of memory and emotion. As <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/9042019/Smells-can-trigger-emotional-memories-study-finds.html">Marcel Proust well knew</a>, smell is capable of sending us – whether we like it or not – into an oneiric daze by awakening memories of the long-gone past.</p>
<h2>Smell Me</h2>
<p>New York artist <a href="http://www.martynka.com/">Martynka Wawrzyniak</a>, in her 2012 project <a href="http://www.martynka.com/Smell%20Me-project-details/">Smell Me</a>, worked with a chemistry professor over the course of a year to extract and distill the odours of, for instance, a vial of Wawrzyniak’s tears and her sweaty workout t-shirt.</p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Martynka Wawrzyniak’s ‘Night Shirt #1 (NS1)’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy of the artist and envoy enterprises, New York</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The various <em>eaux de Wawrzyniak</em> that resulted were, for the artist, a contribution to the lineage of self-portraiture, albeit in an unusual form. For Wawrzyniak, this form of self-portrait <a href="http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/18/vain-glorious-get-a-whiff-of-this-girl/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=1">was hyper-personal</a>, more so than anything a visual mode could engender: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s taking the nude self-portrait to the next level of intimacy, I wanted to create something completely visceral without any visuals — and that could only be experienced through the primary, primal senses. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The process resulted in a series of perfume-based artworks with titles such as Night Shirt #1, Sweat #5, Tears #8 and Hair #1. The essential versions of these scents – the actual biological oils extracted from Wawrzyniak’s body – were presented in ten elegant hand-blown glass vials, stoppered to prevent evaporation. </p>
<p>Many essential oils are unstable and notoriously scant, and such was the case with Wawrzyniak’s oils. These scents, perhaps perversely, were only for looking at, but they nonetheless offered visual and alchemical interest. </p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Martynka Wawrzyniak’s ‘Sweat #5 (S5)’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy of the artist and envoy enterprises, New York </span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Audiences could “enjoy” Wawrzyniak’s body odours through inhabiting a scent chamber that was perfumed with synthetic versions of her “organic” oils. To create these synthetic versions, Wawrzyniak secured the help of the perfumer <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/hannahelliott/2011/05/05/names-you-need-to-know-yann-vasnier-the-man-inside-the-bottle/">Yann Vasnier</a>, creator of scents for American fashion designers Tom Ford and Marc Jacobs, and <a href="http://www.theaesthete.com/story/view.dT/heaven-scents">Dawn Goldworm</a> who is Scent Director at 12.29, an American company that works with brands to develop their “olfactive identity”. </p>
<p>In true perfumer’s fashion, Goldworm used appropriately floral language to describe Wawrzyniak’s scents:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Her nightshirt smell is deep and warm like a small, delicate animal in hibernation. Her hair smells like a memory from my childhood – civet, costus and musk with cumin, pepper, coconut water and spicy green galbanum.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Smell You Later</h2>
<p>Smell You Later’s curator <a href="http://nextwave.org.au/artist/katie-lenanton/">Katie Lenanton</a> told me she was drawn to olfactory art precisely because of its relatively unexamined nature:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Scent lacks a specific vocabulary. We don’t really have words to specifically describe scent and we fall back on metaphors linked to other senses: taste (sweet), texture (velvety), sight (bright). We lack the language to be able to confirm that my experience of smelling a cup of coffee is the same as yours. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Lenanton also enjoys scent’s ability to invisibly demarcate space and conflate the public and private:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Think about how you are suddenly enveloped in a smell when you walk past a Subway store: you can’t tell when it will hit and when it will pass. You are temporarily adrift in the experience. </p>
</blockquote>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Grace Gamage and Olivia O'Donnell. Perthume, 2013.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image: Jessica Eucalyptus Quinnell</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>With Next Wave celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, Lenanton decided upon the idea of “celebration” as the “scent narrative” underpinning the project: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I was considering non-traditional ways in which artworks and audience experiences could create potent and celebratory festival memories. Scent and memory have long been known to be intertwined – the olfactory bulb is next to the limbic system, which houses long-term memory and emotion, which is why we can catch a whiff of campfire smoke and be instantly transported back to a childhood camping trip in quite a startling and immediate way.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The artists have interpreted the concept of “celebration” quite differently.</p>
<p>Perth-based artists Grace Gamage and Olivia O’Donnell have focused on creating works reminiscent of natural botanical scents. </p>
<p>Their artworks will be configured as cast soap sculptures imbued with distilled essential oils, which house pomades created through <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enfleurage">enfleurage</a> – the oldest known technique for the preservation of scents. In enfleurage, botanicals are repeatedly pressed into a base (usually lard but swapped here for soy wax) until it is imbued with the fragrance.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47211/original/26fbhg3n-1398737957.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47211/original/26fbhg3n-1398737957.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47211/original/26fbhg3n-1398737957.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=336&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47211/original/26fbhg3n-1398737957.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=336&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47211/original/26fbhg3n-1398737957.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=336&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47211/original/26fbhg3n-1398737957.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47211/original/26fbhg3n-1398737957.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47211/original/26fbhg3n-1398737957.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bill Noonan. 'Diffuser’, 2014. </span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image courtesy of the artist</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Melbourne-based artist Bill Noonan’s encounters will be more unexpected. For Smell You Later, Noonan has “hacked” into Air Wick air-diffusers and replaced their aromas – which have fantastic names such as Crisp Vanilla and Sparkling Blossom, French Lavender and Shimmering Waters and, best of all, New Car and Ocean Drive – with the smell of smoke from a campfire. </p>
<p>In some sites, works by Noonan will mingle with Gamage and O’Donnell’s, giving a curious effect, which might, Lenanton says, be:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>akin to walking into a pungent function hall filled with ostentatious flower arrangements framing a wafting Weber barbecue!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Outside of perfume-makers, there are few artists trained in the art of smell, and art lovers are rarely asked to follow their noses to experience an artwork. </p>
<p>As a highly nuanced sense, with an enormous capacity to trigger human emotions, it is surprising that smell features so rarely in aesthetics. </p>
<p><br></p>
<p><em><a href="http://2014.nextwave.org.au/events/smell-you-later/">Smell You Later</a> runs as part of Next Wave from May 1 to May 11 at various festival venues.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/25643/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Phip Murray was Associate Producer for the 2006 Next Wave Festival.</span></em></p>Roses and rotten eggs, teen spirit or napalm in the morning: smells can both delight and horrify. Some scents are so bewitching that humans have gone to great lengths to obtain them. Take ambergris, essentially…Phip Murray, Lecturer, History/Theory of Art + Design, RMIT, RMIT UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/255882014-04-15T20:35:46Z2014-04-15T20:35:46ZThe art of seeing Aboriginal Australia’s queer potential<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/46293/original/mghqvymq-1397437719.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Aboriginal Mimi 'trickster' spirits are genderless.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Making Camp at 'Forest, Cunningham's Gap, 1856', 2009, pigmented inks on 310gsm Huhnemuble German Etching Paper, edition of 5, 29.5 x 42 cm (paper size). Courtesy of the artist, Troy-Anthony Baylis</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Since European contact Aboriginal people, such as myself, have been constructed as “straight”. This cultural default has contributed to the difficulty of proving so-called “real accounts” of sexual and gender diversity of Aboriginal people prior to European contact. </p>
<p>The sexual and gender diversity of Aboriginal peoples remains mostly absent in the recordings and interpretations of histories, and these absences reinforce a heterocentric reading of Aboriginal culture.</p>
<p>It is not inconceivable that homophobia and transphobia are practices introduced by the Christian missionaries. The social order of the missions, in an attempt to “civilize the natives”, limited Aboriginal expression. Anthropological research, most notably from the colonial settings of the early 20th-century, was evidently not interested in our sexual and gender diversity either. </p>
<p>Perhaps this is linked to the discipline’s quest for <a href="http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/Books/bid2283.htm">“pure” cultures</a> uninterrupted by European contact, including sexual behaviour that was being viewed (or rather explained away or “unseen”) as a European perversion.</p>
<p>The process of colonisation in Australia, as a living force, is deep-rooted – it is institutional and it is cultural; part of its destructiveness is that it institutionalises culture on its own terms. One of the most significant powers of colonisation is that it replicates itself within the culture it colonises. </p>
<p>In Australia that enactment has been so pervasive that Aboriginal people participate in the coloniser’s work, refuting the possibility that non-heterosexuality is culturally authentic.</p>
<p>It is as if history has constructed Aboriginality as being so pure and so savage, so purely savage, that if tainted by the complexity of sexuality, mixed ethnographies, mixed geographies and mixed appearances, the whole look would be ruined. Aboriginal people would be regarded as not pure, not savage.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/46295/original/645yhntx-1397437831.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/46295/original/645yhntx-1397437831.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/46295/original/645yhntx-1397437831.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/46295/original/645yhntx-1397437831.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/46295/original/645yhntx-1397437831.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/46295/original/645yhntx-1397437831.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/46295/original/645yhntx-1397437831.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/46295/original/645yhntx-1397437831.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Artist Troy-Anthony Baylis, ‘Modesty Set 1 (pink and apple green)’, 2013, knitted and hand-woven acrylic wool and jute.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo: Grant Hancock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>By highlighting the contingency of existence and engagement in his 1993 book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mimesis-Alterity-Particular-History-Senses/dp/0415906873">Mimesis and Alterity</a>, the Australian anthropologist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Taussig">Michael Taussig</a> emphasises the limitation of accepting the world as it is presented through a colonising gaze. </p>
<p>Herein lies the opportunity to look to pre-history and make-believe magical visions of spirits, that may be no less or no more real than the really real ways that colonisation imaged our lives. How much potential is there to be free from the shackling forces of colonisation by imbuing our world with new symbols through a language of Queer-Aboriginal creative expression, a creative expression that subverts all languages to imagine alter/native realities? </p>
<p>Maybe history is now ready for Aboriginality to celebrate its own diversities as subjects and objects produced by history and allow for alter/native histories in addition to those imposed through colonisation. </p>
<p>One way of circumventing the effect of colonisation is to draw upon all imaginings of history, including colonial history, to create new mythologies, new artifice that transforms the past, present and future. As French philosopher <a href="http://www.egs.edu/library/roland-barthes/biography/">Roland Barthes</a> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Image-Music-Text-Roland-Barthes/dp/0374521360">put it</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[M]yth consists in overturning culture into nature or, at least, the social, the cultural, the ideological, the historical into the “natural”. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Contemporary Aboriginal artists have the opportunity to tip the ways in which Aboriginality is constructed on its head and “mythologise” it with endless queer potential.</p>
<p>As a method to decolonise, or rather to challenge colonisation, the pre-historic, pre-colonial figure of “the trickster” – a small animal featured in traditional African folktales who uses its wits to survive encounters with larger creatures – may be a useful device to trick colonisation with its own implements or language. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/46294/original/kxs3d52f-1397437768.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/46294/original/kxs3d52f-1397437768.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/46294/original/kxs3d52f-1397437768.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/46294/original/kxs3d52f-1397437768.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/46294/original/kxs3d52f-1397437768.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/46294/original/kxs3d52f-1397437768.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/46294/original/kxs3d52f-1397437768.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/46294/original/kxs3d52f-1397437768.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hang On Installations for Tomorrow (hang on), 2011, pigmented inks on 310gsm Huhnemuble German Etching Paper, edition of 5, 70x100 cm.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy of the artist Troy-Anthony Baylis</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>UK-based art critic <a href="http://adri.mdx.ac.uk.contentcurator.net/fisher-jean">Jean Fisher</a> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Bodies-That-Were-Ours/dp/0415251745">supports</a> this idea by proposing that the trickster activates uncertainty through a play of excess, where circulating signs take on new meanings. The ace card held by tricksterism, she argues, is the knowledge that any authoritative discourse is a contingency, not a law of nature or object or truth.</p>
<p>American scholars <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/henry-louis-gates-jr/">Henry Louis Gates Jr</a> and <a href="http://www.itc.edu/dr-riggins-r-earl-jr/">Riggins Earl</a> have <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Symbols-Obscure-Signs-Community/dp/1572332174">identified</a> trickster figures in African-American literature: the fictional characters of the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Signifying-Monkey-African-American-Criticism/dp/019506075X">Signifying Monkey</a> and Brer Rabbit who overturn their oppressors by their wits alone. </p>
<p>The result is that the “master’s house”, as <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Literary-Theory-Anthology-Julie-Rivkin/dp/1405106964">identified</a> by Caribbean-American writer <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audre_Lorde">Audre Lorde</a>, is brought down by the rules of the game, or at least, its structure becomes vulnerable, destabilised.</p>
<p>Aboriginal Mimi spirits – tall, thin beings that live in the rocky escarpment of northern Australia – with their magical powers and trickster antics once mimicked human form and taught my ancestors to hunt, cook and paint. They are credited by my people for creating <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Anbangbang_gallery_Mimi_rock_art_cropped.jpg">the first rock paintings</a>, at Nourlangie in Kakadu National Park near Darwin, that are still visible up on the out-of-human-reach heights of tall rock formations. Also part of their subversive nature, Mimis are genderless spirits, not bound by the accruement of human definition.</p>
<p>The trickiness and slipperiness of Mimi spirits inspires my thinking and understanding of the artifice of the colonial depiction of Aboriginality – a depiction that somehow has managed to survive as one and the same copied image.</p>
<p>My expression draws upon the spiritual mythology of my cultural heritage. Like the Native American Trickster, Mimi spirits are <a href="http://www.ubcpress.ca/search/title_book.asp?BookID=5244">transformative figures</a> that have a gift with language, including visual language. As Gates said, they “luxuriate in the chaos of ambiguity”, and can be used to manipulate the double meaning, and more meanings, that words and other signs can produce to speak back to dominant culture.</p>
<p>There are many Aboriginal and/ or Torres Strait Islander artists, writers, scholars, poets and other creators of knowledge who identify as non-heterosexual. Some of us put our work and ourselves in the public domain, and by doing so assert that gender and sexuality is explicitly connected to our cultural identity. </p>
<p>Perhaps what is needed now is the establishment of a field of Queer-Aboriginal studies where we can create discourse to assert ourselves from our own knowledge position.</p>
<p><br>
<em>This is an edited extract from <a href="http://2014.nextwave.org.au/blak-wave-publication/">Blak Wave</a>, a new book published by Next Wave, as the keynote initiative of the <a href="http://2014.nextwave.org.au/">2014 Next Wave Festival</a>. Featuring 28 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists and curators exploring what’s personally, politically and artistically Next for Australia’s Indigenous peoples, Blak Wave is <a href="http://2014.nextwave.org.au/blak-wave-publication/">available here</a> from April 16.</em>
<br></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/25588/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Troy-Anthony Baylis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Since European contact Aboriginal people, such as myself, have been constructed as “straight”. This cultural default has contributed to the difficulty of proving so-called “real accounts” of sexual and…Troy-Anthony Baylis, PhD Candidate, University of South AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.