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'Aborigines are wrong about Harry
The prince's art is ridiculous, but it derives from the modernist sublime

Jonathan Jones

20 August 2003 - The Guardian (UK) - It's not exactly difficult to pick sides in the dispute between Aboriginal artists and the British royal family. On the one hand is a culture whose very existence was denied for centuries by European invaders who kept repeating the monstrous caricature of Australia's indigenous people as lacking art or meaningful beliefs of any kind, as being, in the words of the 17th-century traveller William Dampier, "the miserablest people in the world". On the other side here is Prince Harry, a representative of the very royal house in whose name Aboriginal society was dispossessed and acculturated, blithely producing, for his art A-level, bland rip-offs of Aboriginal art to which some cretin has affixed a £15,000 price tag.

It's easy, but mistaken, to empathise instantly with the complainants. In reality, they have no better case than the pious Christians who accused Michelangelo, nearly 500 years ago, of subordinating religion to art in his painting The Last Judgment - the historical moment when "art" was recognised as a category, aesthetic pleasure as something different from religious belief. There was a time when no one spoke of "art" in the way we do now - as a secular territory of imaginative freedom. In a farcical way, the row over Prince Harry's art embodies a fundamental worldwide conflict between modernity and religion, the secular and the spiritual. It's a struggle in which the devil - modernity - could do with some better tunes.

The case against Harry is not simply that his pictures are a pastiche, in their banally decorative way, of Aboriginal art, but that he has appropriated symbols with specific cultural meanings. Intellectual property is an unusually powerful concept in Aboriginal culture. In pre-European Australia, where material possessions were few, identity was defined through relationships with the imaginative realm, the Dreamtime, whose mythic beings have been represented, for millennia, in paintings on rock and bark and still structure contemporary Aboriginal art. Artists in this living tradition cannot represent just anything: you inherit specific rights to particular Dreamings.

This is the terrain into which Prince Harry has blundered. And yet, although every republican post-colonial instinct shouts otherwise, he deserves a bit of sympathy. He's not a professional artist - he's not an artist at all - just an A-level student. But even taking his "art" seriously for a second, how many contemporary artists could be accused of stealing by the same criteria? Chris Ofili paints matrices of dots - in fact derived from African art - that look suspiciously like some Aboriginal paintings. Jackson Pollock openly claimed influence by native American sand paintings. Pablo Picasso invented Cubism after seeing African masks.

And this is the rub. Harry's art is ridiculous but it derives ultimately from the modernist sublime. Modern art was born in the late 19th century partly out of the frisson between imperialist European powers and the cultures to which they suddenly had unrestricted, and for those cultures often catastrophic, access. Art which its makers would never have described as "art" but as religious symbol and ritual artefact was seized upon by Europeans in their quest for release from their own stale aesthetic habits. Plenty of people argue today that Gauguin, Picasso and the rest were imperialists consuming the exotic. And yet you only have to visit the Musée Picasso in Paris and see the scope and intensity of Picasso's collection of tribal art, and his passionate, ecstatic response to it in his work, to recognise that something more creative and ambiguous than pejoratively labelled "primitivism" is going on here.

Modernism is something from which Aboriginal art in particular has directly benefited. It is the reason this art is currently respected, collected and, in Harry's case, lamely emulated worldwide. The first exhibition of Aboriginal art, called Dawn of Art, was held in Adelaide in the 1880s, contemporary with Van Gogh's love of Japanese art and just before Gauguin went to Oceania. It was an overdue recognition that Australia was not culturally "empty" when the British arrived.

Modern art is aggressively secular, yet has repeatedly drawn energy from the imaginative kingdoms of religion and ritual. In doing so it gives what were once exclusively religious artefacts an aesthetic, secular significance. This is what has happened with indigenous Australian art. There are all kinds of paradoxes here, but they have positive as well as negative consequences. The international market in Aboriginal art can result in exploitation. But it makes this culture, today, universally accessible and universally respected. To deny that this art can be enjoyed around the world as art (which includes imitating it) would be to cut short a conversation that has just begun.

Jonathan Jones writes about visual art for the Guardian.

Source: The Guardian

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