Research Catalog

Title

Possessions : indigenous art, colonial culture / Nicholas Thomas.

Author

Thomas, Nicholas, 1960-

Publication

London ; New York, N.Y. : Thames and Hudson, c1999.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

304 p. : ill. (some col.); 24 cm.

Summary

"Tribal art has been one of the great inspirations of 20th-century Western art. Europeans such as Picasso, Matisse, Ernst and Brancusi created their own responses to masks, sculpture and other forms of African, Oceanic and American art. But is this a cross-cultural discovery to be celebrated, or just one more example of Western colonial appropriation? This work seeks to prove that both viewpoints are too simplistic. It focuses on the distinctive situation of the settler society - countries such as Australia and New Zealand in which large numbers of Europeans made their home, displacing but never entirely eclipsing native peoples. Settler artists and designers have drawn on indigenous motifs and styles to create art. Yet powerful indigenous art traditions have also been used to assert the presence of native peoples and their prior claim to sovereignty. Cultural exchange proves to be a two-way process, and an unpredictable one: much contemporary indigenous art draws on modern Western art, while affirming ancestral values and rejecting the European appropriation of tribal culture."--Amazon.

Series Statement

Interplay, arts, history, theory

Uniform Title

Interplay (London, England : Thames and Hudson)

Alternative Title

Indigenous art, colonial culture

Subject

• Folk art > Australia
• Folk art > New Zealand
• Indigenous peoples > Colonization
• Indigenous peoples > Ethnic identity
• Aboriginal Australians > Ethnic identity
• Māori (New Zealand people) > Ethnic identity
• Primitivism in art
• Art, Australian > Aboriginal Australian influences
• Art, Aboriginal Australian > Western influences
• Art, New Zealand > Māori influences
• Art, Māori > Western influences
• Aboriginal Australians in art
• Māori (New Zealand people) in art

Genre/Form

• Art
• History

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 282-292) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Beginnings -- Landscapes: Possession and Dispossession -- Objects: Indigenous Signs in Colonial Design -- Artworks: Indigenous Signs in Colonial Art -- Presences: Indigenous Landscapes, Artworks and Exhibitions -- Hierarchies: From Traditional to Contemporary -- Situtations: Indigenous Art in Public Culture -- Identities: Diasporas, Nations and Transactions -- Endings -- Index.

ISBN

0500280975 (pbk.)

LCCN

^^^98061288^

OCLC

• 44634576
• SCSB-12087068

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library