No more of these "settlement" lies..
Oct 22nd, 2008 by ron dowd
I’m watching the brilliant First Australians series at the moment on SBS television and last night in Episode 4 was struck by the intelligence and artistic sophistication of the Arrernte people in their nightly ceremonies which they have conducted for many thousands of years, and continued to conduct in the face of dogged manipulation and disrespect by (so-called) Christian missionaries.
(This blog title is taken from a reader’s comment on the episode. Scroll down on the SBS page for many heart-felt responses from viewers to Episode 4.)
Outsider art is probably one of the nearest things we in the West have to such rich psychic revelation as Arrernte ceremonies. Outsider art, for me, is a name for an art unmediated by the strictures of current artistic and philosophic ideologies and critical fashion. It is an art much more significantly distinct from the current mainstream than some commentators imply (the supposed distinction often being between an art of the “uneducated” and that of the “educated”.) What many outsiders do is a Western version of the evening ceremony, the ritual of “singing up” the cultural and spiritual energies of the psyche and of life itself.
