Images, Institutions and Evolving Nation: Transformations in Australian art, museums, and the cultural imaginary in the 20th century

Abstract

The thesis adopts a cultural framework, with a special focus on museums and art institutions in national life, to analyse the impact of enduring fractures within Australia's evolving nationhood in the twentieth century. These faultlines are traced through a continuing British Imperial legacy of denied colonial conquest of Aboriginal peoples and lands as the foundation of material wealth, dominant polity, law, and the social imaginary of national community since Federation. Analysing the deceptive self-image of a peaceful 'settler society', in control of a social and pastoral geography cleared of Aboriginal occupation or claims to alienated Country, the thesis identifies a deformed socius and disordered understanding of the nation's culture, society and history long into the 20th century - with effects continuing to the present. These effects are traced in their impacts across a range of institutional settings and practices, from museums, art-sites and galleries to curatorship, social sciences and art history. Visual artworks are adduced throughout the analysis as providing crucial evidence of broader cultural ideas and embodied concepts of social and historical experience. It is argued that the records provided by artworks, their interpretation, and their continuing experience accessed through museums, galleries and pictorial libraries, as well as their study as projected by varied academic communities, form important resources in the representation - and reimagining - of an evolving nation. At the beginning of the period of the thesis investigation, Indigenous art was not present in Australia's art museums, being institutionally confined by natural science and an emergent anthropology. By the end of the period studied, it had become a redefining presence in all museums, and a primary identifier of Australian museums' unique stance culturally in comparison with their peer institutions internationally. Throughout its inquiry and across all chapters the thesis is oriented to exploring and explicating the processes that variously inhibited or enabled such change in the 20th century. Each stage of the analysis aims to highlight the transformative potential of events and underlying historical dynamics of cultural creativity and engagement with visual images; to delineate the affirmative impulses and cartography of a transformed future for Australian cultural and social expression; and to argue for a reimagined national community as conveyed through Indigenous art's increasing presence, agency and public impact today. Show more