Aboriginal Art

Art & Ideas (Phaidon)

by Howard Morphy, Jacques Guiod (Translator)

For thousands of years, Australian Aborigines have been making art. A manifestation of the creative forces of Dreamtime, art is also a fundamental means of expressing individual and group identity. Howard Morphy surveys the great variety in Aboriginal art, showing the inter-relationships between such diverse art forms as body painting, dance, the decoration of weapons and utensils, and painting on bark and canvas.

Genres: Art, Anthropology, History, Australia

448 pages, Paperback

First published October 11, 1998

Reviews

[AHW]

The art covered and the information about it are 5 stars, no question. 3-star review is for Morphy’s contextual analysis of the work and its history, which is a damned liberal mess. Morphy has no coherent social analysis of settler colonialism in which to base his understanding of cultural production by Aboriginal people; he condemns colonialism but writes about it in passive voice, like it were a natural disaster not perpetrated by any particular people or social forces. This anthropologist goes on about “good whites” - anthropologists, art collectors, magnanimous missionaries - more than he mentions individual or group perpetrators of colonial oppression. He closes the book by suggesting that the category of “aboriginal art” should be dissolved into the liberal-nationalist category of “Australian art” - as though the very existence of Australian nationhood weren’t inherently anti-Aboriginal.

The art itself is absolutely spellbinding, obviously very important and deserves your sustained and thoughtful attention.

If there are better books about either Aboriginal art history in general or specific Aboriginal artists/art movements, please let me know! I’d like to read them.

[Chris Lewis]

Beautifully illustrated, but a shockingly difficult read. Academic writing at its worst. There is no doubting the author's expertise. But the writing presumes a familiarity with Australian geography, Aboriginal history, and even Aboriginal art, the very topic the author is supposed to be introducing. Really, this book discredits the whole series. It's scandalous that the publisher didn't assign an editor to hack through this manuscript and make it more readable for a non-expert audience.

[Rose]

Excellent text, beautiful and abundent illustrations.

[Blanche]

Interesting. I wanted to find out about the subject and although not the most riveting to book still did the job.