"these works have to be stunningly beautiful because of what they’re trying to do … to enact all of the power of the landscape, and it’s a power that they see in the shifting of the light, in the blossoming of the desert blooms, in the movement of the sand dunes; all of these things are enactments of this spiritual power of the landscape. It has to be beautiful because what it’s trying to do is occupy you…. These are not sentinels standing guard to protect their culture against the onslaught of colonialism. These are not defensive paintings, these are actually occupying forces and the point of them is to travel out into the world … to impress upon you with this purely affective visual power, to realize how powerful this landscape is."
henry skerritt
Does this
mean that placing an aboriginal painting in the modernist white house is like juxtaposing
the icey desert of Antarctica with the warm landscapes of Australia?
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