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‘Centring the Indigenous’

Postcommodity’s Trans-IndigenousRelational Art

Mark Watson

How might contemporary collaborative art practices facilitate newrelations between global Indigenous peoples? How would these globalIndigenous relationships connect to the wider context of contemporaryrelational art? This article examines these questions through a closereading of a collaborative Indigenous artwork: Postcommodity’s DoYou Remember When?, exhibited at the 2012 Biennale of Sydney.Created through intercontinental Indigenous collaboration between thePhoenix-based Indigenous art collective Postcommodity and Aboriginalmusicians in Sydney, the artwork underscores a shared Indigenousworld within the context of contemporary global relations, incorporatingan ‘alliance’ of Indigenous peoples and a concern with environmentalreciprocity within its relational form. Drawing on the work of Indigenousliterary theorist Chadwick Allen, we can contextualise this Indigenousrelational art in the broader field of ‘trans-Indigenous’ cultural practicesthat assert ‘centring the Indigenous has become a new standard’.1

Allen coins the term ‘trans-Indigenous’ to capture the particularity ofIndigenous-to-Indigenous cultural exchanges and collaborations acrosstribal and state borders.2 Intervening in the discourse on cultural globali-sation, he points to a counter-history of Indigenous-to-Indigenous art andliterary exchanges and collaborations since the 1960s, describing howthese projects have contributed a unique sense of a shared global Indigen-ous common ground, found through artistically ‘centring the Indigenous’through a range of artistic and literary practices.3 Distinguishing thesetrans-Indigenous relations from the ‘transnational’ links between non-Indigenous citizens and states, as well as from the strategic essentialismof ‘pan-Indigenous’ identities, ‘trans-Indigeneity’ designates site-specific‘lateral Indigenous connections’ and the ‘complementary’ elements of acommon Indigenous worldview that emerge through Indigenous-specificexchanges.4 In so doing, new routes are created for globalising Indigenous

Third Text, 2015

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2015.1076209

# 2015 Third Text

1 Chadwick Allen, Trans-Indigenous: Methodologiesfor Global Native LiteraryStudies, University ofMinnesota Press,Minneapolis, 2012; ‘ATransnational NativeAmerican Studies? Why notStudies That Are Trans-Indigenous?’, Journal ofTransnational AmericanStudies, vol 4, no 1, 2012,p 12, p 18

2 For a broader discussion ofglobal Indigenous studies, seeHsinya Huang, Philip JDeloria, Laura M Furlan,and John Gamber, ‘ChartingTransnational NativeAmerican Studies’, Journal ofTransnational AmericanStudies, vol 4, no 1, 2012, pp1–15 and Paul Lai andLindsey Claire Smith,’Introduction: AlternativeContact: Indigeneity,Globalism, and AmericanStudies’, AmericanQuarterly, vol 62, no 3,2010, pp 407–408.

3 Allen, Trans-Indigenous,op cit, pp 3–97

4 Allen, ‘A TransnationalNative American Studies?’,op cit, p 12, p 18

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cultures and for exploring what it means to be Indigenous in the contextof artworld globalisation.

TRANS-INDIGENEITY WITHIN ‘ALL OUR RELATIONS’

Centring the Indigenous in art and culture, as Allen notes, entails articu-lating ‘complementary’ values and priorities among multiple Indigenouspeoples in different global contexts. In Do You Remember When?, theIndigenous sense of land is recovered and asserted, involving both acommon respect for Indigenous sovereignty and an ethical focus onhuman–environmental reciprocity. This collaborative artwork took theform of a site-specific multimedia installation located on the groundfloor of the Gallery of New South Wales, Australia’s second-largestmuseum and one of the Biennale’s five exhibition venues. Concerned

Postcommodity, Do You Remember When? (Sydney), 2012, site-specific intervention and mixed media installation (cut con-

crete, exposed earth, light, sound), photo: Postcommodity and Ben Symons

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with articulating an Indigenous worldview at the Biennale, Do YouRemember When? transformed part of the museum into what the collec-tive called a ‘portal’ for transforming the relations between the viewers ofthe contemporary ‘public sphere’.5 Audience members encountered afour-foot square hole cut into the museum floor, the block of cementand marble having been removed prior to the show’s opening to exposethe foundations of earth supporting the building. Symbolically reclaimingthis square of land for Indigenous peoples, the artwork drew attention tothe contested status of land in Sydney, where multiple histories andperspectives overlap in tension.

Employing trans-Indigenous collaboration to reframe the exhibitionspace, Do You Remember When? used a soundtrack to ‘centre’ the reci-procal relations between the Aboriginal community and the Australianland. A microphone hung over the ground and a loop of audio broughtthe sonic presence of Australian Aboriginal musicians into the installa-tion, as if they were emanating from the recovered soil. Produced in col-laboration with members of the Sydney Aboriginal community, thesoundtrack combined rattle and didgeridoo with Aboriginal voices per-forming calls to the indigenous animals of the Sydney region. Represent-ing their knowledge and the relation to the land, maintained despitecolonialism, the collaborative Indigenous soundtrack re-centredIndigenous people in a reciprocal relation to the reclaimed land of theinstallation. In doing so, the work brought to light the continuingpresence of Indigenous people in Sydney, positioning viewers as listenersto a feedback loop of Indigenous voices in dialogue with the exposedearth.

By asking the more than 600,000 Biennale of Sydney viewers toacknowledge these Indigenous voices, and to remember the time ofAboriginal occupation of the land under their feet, Do You RememberWhen? ‘centred’ Indigenous people on this recovered fragment of land.Its counter-historical recognition of Aboriginal sovereignty counteredAustralia’s historical denial of Aboriginal sovereignty, confirmed by thedisavowal of Indigenous land title through the legal doctrine of terranullius. This principle of ‘empty land’ asserted that from the perspectiveof law there were no ‘owners’ of Australian land prior to British coloni-sation. Visualising this doctrine, early Australian landscape paintingentrenched a colonial mode of framing the Australian landscape that isunique among British colonies in its ‘level of absence of Indigenouspeoples’, and this remains a common antagonist for contemporaryAboriginal artists challenging their peoples’ erasure.6 The influence ofterra nullius began to recede with two High Court rulings in the1990s, which rejected the doctrine and acknowledged a need to refashionrelations with Aboriginal peoples, and in the years since other steps havebeen taken to develop a decolonised paradigm of relations in Australia.7

Seen in this context of the ongoing decolonisation of land and history inAustralia, the installation contributed by setting up an encounter with theIndigenous peoples, symbolically ‘centred’ on the soil under the museumspace.

As a trans-Indigenous artwork, Do You Remember When? pointedtowards a shared initiative to decentre the colonial paradigms ofhistory that have erased or marginalised Indigeneity, as Allen expressesit in his writing on the trans-Indigenous. Recounting how Indigenous

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5 Postcommodity, interviewwith the author, 14 April2014

6 Christine LaLonde,‘Introduction: at theCrossroads of Indigeneity,Globalization, andContemporary Art’, in GregA Hill, Candice Hopkins,and Christine LaLonde, eds,Sakahan: InternationalIndigenous Art, NationalGallery of Canada, Ottawa,p 27

7 Anthony J Hall, ‘ImaginingCivilization on the Frontiersof Aboriginality’, in Roger CA Maaka and Chris Anders,eds, The IndigenousExperience: GlobalPerspectives, CanadianScholars Press, Toronto,2006, p 252

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peoples have historically been boxed into ‘domestic’ and ‘static’ modes ofprimitiveness and dependence, he makes clear the necessity of transform-ing state-centred historical perspectives that have erased the dynamicinterrelationships, intercultural networks, and ‘artistic empathy’between various Indigenous peoples within and across contemporarystate borders.8 Accordingly, ‘centring the Indigenous’ involves workingagainst current historical understandings that have obscured the varietiesof Indigenous-to-Indigenous relations, such as that articulated by Do YouRemember When?. In this way, trans-Indigenous art is part of a longerhistory of what Indigenous art historian Shanna Ketchum has called‘Native American cosmopolitan modernisms’, which have devised artisticstrategies to ‘blast open the continuum of history’ as constructed inmodern settler states and dominant in art history.9

Contributing to the decolonial process of recentring Indigenous per-spectives in Australia, Do You Remember When? appeared in a bien-nial that took its inspiration from Indigenous ideas, and attempted torelate them to the prominence of relational, collaborative practices inart since the 1990s.10 Co-curated by Siksika First Nation curatorGerald McMaster and Dutch curator Catherine de Zegher, the exhibi-tion was entitled ‘all our relations’, a name borrowed from a well-known Lakota prayer of planetary interconnectedness, and relocatedin Australia as a kind of Native North American ‘lens’ on the collab-orations evident in the exhibition.11 Appropriated from an Indigenousspiritual context, the title implies the harmonious relations of allthings. The biennial focused primarily on the intersection of artisticcollaboration and ‘conversation’, with the refashioning of relationswith the environment as a major sub-theme. The name ‘all ourrelations’ echoed a major component of these themes, as well as theIndigenous worldview advanced in Do You Remember When?. Thephrase ‘all our relations’ is often associated with Indigenousenvironmental values, as the prayer specifically addresses non-humanbeings such as animals and plants as common kin in a single relationalcontinuum.12

Drawing attention to relations of various kinds, the Biennale artworksranged across media and practices, from abstract paintings by senior Aus-tralian artist John Worsley, whose works were hung in the same room asDo You Remember When?, to the Three Gorge Dam Migration ink scrollby Chinese artist Yun-Fei Ji, which depicts the displacement of the ruralpoor for the hydroelectric dam construction. The final exhibition, whichran from 27 June to 16 September, included works both from up-and-coming artists like Postcommodity, and from established artists fromevery continent, with a particular emphasis on the Pacific region (theSydney Biennale’s focus since its inception in 1973). It included over220 artworks by 100 artists, and forty-nine of the works were createdspecifically for the local context. Numerous Indigenous artists wereincluded in the show, including Mohawk artist Alan Michelson, whosework was shown in the same venue as Postcommodity’s. These Indigen-ous artists were exhibited as individual artists among non-indigenouspeers in the five venues of the Biennale, a departure from the 2010Biennale of Sydney, which exhibited Indigenous artists as a specificgroup and theme to be considered as a collective unit.13 McMaster’scurating mixed the Indigenous artists throughout the exhibition,

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8 Allen, Trans-Indigenous, opcit, p 146

9 Shanna Ketchum, ‘NativeAmerican CosmopolitanModernism(s): A Re-articulation of Presencethrough Time and Space’,Third Text 75, vol 12, no 4,July 2005, pp 357–364

10 Linda Tuhiwai Smith,DecolonizingMethodologies: Researchand Indigenous Peoples,Zed Books, London, 1999

11 Catherine de Zegher andGerald McMaster, eds, 18thBiennale of Sydney 2012:All Our Relations, Biennaleof Sydney, Wooloomooloo,New South Wales, 2012

12 Winona LaDuke, All OurRelations: Native Strugglesfor Life and Land, SouthEnd Press, Cambridge,Massachusetts, 1999

13 See the exhibitioncatalogue: David Elliot, ed,17th Biennale of Sydney2010: The Beauty ofDistance: Songs of Survivalin a Precarious Age,Biennale of Sydney,Wooloomooloo, NewSouth Wales, 2010.

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emphasising the multiplicity of relations and divergences between specificnon-Indigenous and Indigenous artists in a manner he had long advocatedas a curator. In his view, this is necessary in order to do justice to thediversity of Indigenous art practices and their respective engagementswith a variety of contemporary issues.14

Do You Remember When? appeared suitably, given its attention tothe reciprocity between Aboriginal people and the Earth, in a section ofthe show entitled ‘in finite blue planet’ at the Gallery of New SouthWales. Like Postcommodity’s work, this section focused on relationsbetween people and land. In particular, the section linked environmentalrelations with climate change, with a title inspired by a collage created byArgentine artist Jorge Macchi, Blue Planet (2003). Consisting of a globe-shaped map from which the artist had removed much of the continentalland masses, the collage created an appearance of a planet flooded byrising sea levels. Suggesting a future in which much of current civilisationhad destroyed itself, the exhibition’s focus on Macchi’s work gave all the

Jorge Maachi, Blue Planet, 2003, paper, 30×30 cm, photo: Jorge Maachi

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14 Gerald McMaster,‘Towards an Aboriginal ArtHistory’, in W JacksonRushing III, ed, NativeAmerican Art in theTwentieth Century,Routledge, New York,1999, pp 57–71 and pp81–96. This curatorialposition has solicitedcontroversy fromIndigenous critics who viewit as assimilative andunassertive.

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works a sense of urgency: there must be innovative practices in globalcollaboration, it implied, if we are to stop such a future destruction ofour finite planet.15 This was also underscored in the Biennale exhibitionguide, which described this section as expressing ‘a new consciousness ofthe finite – rather than infinite – nature of our blue planet and itsresources. The artworks present alternative perspectives for a globalisedworld . . . ’16

Asserting the relevance of Indigenous ideas as ‘alternative perspec-tives for a globalised world’, co-curator Gerald McMaster explainedthat in the light of climate change and the aesthetic and epistemologicallimitations of models of oppositional ‘critique’ in art, there is a need tolook ‘elsewhere, to older and traditional forms of thinking broken bymodernity’, particularly to those worldviews of Indigenous peoplesthat were rendered backwards in modernist progress ideology.17 Hiscatalogue essay for ‘all our relations’ likewise focused on Do YouRemember When?, as making a similar point about the formativeinfluence of Indigenous ‘alternative perspectives’. The artwork, hewrote, was:

. . . about listening, not to ancient voices but voices of today’s IndigenousPeoples, whose worldviews and knowledge systems can have a powerfulinfluence on how we listen to the Earth – especially at a moment whenwe are experiencing powerful climatic changes.18

Lending additional urgency to this exhibition, the highlighting of Indi-genous perspectives – not as a separate group unto themselves, but asdialogic participants in a wider search for a better way to live in a ‘glo-balised world’ – co-curator Catherine de Zegher ended her catalogueessay by situating the artworks of ‘all our relations’ as part of asearch for alternatives to the intellectual and social relations thathave provoked climate change and the ‘rapid melt-down’ of theglobal economy.19

What, specifically, is the content of the trans-Indigenous ‘alternativeperspective’ presented by Do You Remember When?, and how did itsituate itself in the multiplicity of both Indigenous and non-Indigenousrelations on display in ‘all our relations’?

RECIPROCITY OF LAND AND PEOPLE

At its heart, Postcommodity’s Do You Remember When? brought ideascurrent in Indigenous thought into productive tension with the environ-mental focus of its venue, ‘in finite blue planet’. Making visually andaudibly accessible the relational bonds between people and land, thehuman voices and the revealed earth situated viewers in an auditorycircuit between the Aboriginal people and the earth supporting themuseum. It redrew the border between the perceived and the invisibleoccupations of the space, offering an Indigenous sense of land from arecovered critical perspective on the ‘globalised world’. The artwork’sfocus on land is crucial in this respect, reminiscent of Indigenous intel-lectual Vine Deloria’s foundational 1972 book God is Red, in which heargued that one of the primary differences between Indigenous andWestern thought concerns the status and meaning of ‘land’ (a theme

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15 Catherine de Zegher, ‘ArcAre Ark Arm Art . . . Act!’,in Catherine de Zegher andGerald McMaster, eds, 18thBiennale of Sydney 2012:All OurRelations, Biennaleof Sydney, Wooloomooloo,New South Wales, 2012, p143

16 18th Biennale of Sydney2012, exhibition guide,p 15, http://issuu.com/biennalesydney/docs/18bos-guide-web, accessed 23November 2014

17 Gerald McMaster,‘Ntotemuk: Commonalitiesamong Great Differences’,in Catherine de Zegher andGerald McMaster, eds, 18thBiennale of Sydney 2012:All Our Relations, Biennaleof Sydney, Wooloomooloo,New South Wales, 2012,p 331

18 Ibid

19 Catherine de Zegher, ‘ArcAre Ark Arm Art . . . Act!’,in de Zegher andMcMaster, op cit, p 143

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developed by Deloria in later writings, as well).20 As Deloria under-scored, Indigenous peoples have developed thought and ethics withan emphasis on place, while Westerners have focused on a progressivistview of time and history, to the neglect of reciprocal land-basedrelations.21

As Indigenous political scientist Glen Coulthard recently unpacks,Deloria’s point is not simply to defend the importance of homelandsto Indigenous peoples in the context of settler colonialism.22 Rather,his book sought to ‘explicate the position that land occupies as an onto-logical framework for understanding relationships’ in Indigenous world-views.23 Land in Indigenous knowledge systems is not a ‘material object’but ‘a way of knowing, experiencing, and relating with the world; andsometimes these ways of knowing can guide forms of resistance . . .[including] the critique of colonialism and capitalism’.24 Coultharddescribes the dominant theme of ‘reciprocity’ in this way of relating,writing that:

. . . within this system of relations, human beings are not the onlyconstituent believed to embody spirit or agency . . . humans held certainobligations to the land, animals, plants, and lakes in much the same waywe have obligations to other people. And if these obligations were met,then the land, animals, plants and lakes would reciprocate and meettheir obligations to humans, thus ensuring the survival and well-being ofall over time.25

This basic belief in human–environmental reciprocity, as Indigenous phi-losopher Marilyn Notah Verney has observed, is a ‘common philosophythat is shared by all Indigenous people’.26 To understand Indigenouspeoples, Verney stresses, ‘one must first understand our spiritual relation-ship, our connection with the land’.27

It might seem that this Indigenous reciprocity ethic would be difficultto translate into far-flung global art exhibitions. However, Do YouRemember When? shows this is not the case by reaching out to thelocal Indigenous peoples in an act of cooperative solidarity that incorpor-ates the primacy of land into its relational form. In exposing viewers to anIndigenous ideal of reciprocal environmental relations, it challenged theone-way utilitarian relations dominant within a capitalist politicaleconomy.28 It brought this reciprocity to bear on what the curatorscalled ‘a new consciousness of the finite – rather than infinite – natureof our blue planet and its resources’, with the reciprocally sustainingrelations of Indigenous cultures comparing favourably to the dominantutilitarian ethos widely acknowledged to be a problem. This productivetension suggested significant questions in the context of ‘in finite blueplanet’ and ‘all our relations’ as a whole: Is it possible to re-create sub-stantial reciprocal connections between contemporary cultures and theland within advanced capitalist societies? What would this look like?Or is the absence of reciprocity, particularly evident in the contrastbetween Indigenous and dominant Western environmental relations, astructural feature of the dominant social system, as many critical ecologi-cal theories argue?29 McMaster pointed to the need to ask these questionsin his catalogue essay, writing that ‘the re-evaluation of reciprocalrelations amongst all our relations needs still more articulation by greatthinkers’.30

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20 Vine Deloria, God is Red: ANative View of Religion,Fulcrum, Golden,Colorado, 2006, pp 61–76

21 Ian McLean, ‘HowAborigines Invented theIdea of Contemporary Art’,in How AboriginesInvented the Idea ofContemporary Art:Writings on AboriginalContemporary Art, PowerPublications, Sydney, 2009,p 340

22 Glen Coulthard, ‘FromWards of the State toSubjects of Recognition?:Marx, Indigenous Peoples,and the Politics ofDispossession inDenendeh’, in AudraSimpson and Andrea Smith,eds, Theorizing NativeStudies, Duke UniversityPress, Durham, NorthCarolina, 2014, pp 56–98

23 Ibid, 70

24 Ibid

25 Ibid

26 Marilyn Notah Verney, ‘OnAuthenticity’, in AnneWaters, ed, American IndianThought: PhilosophicalEssays, BlackwellPublishing, 2004, Malden,Massachusetts, p 134

27 Ibid and see also: JosephEpes Brown with EmilyCousins, Teaching Spirits:Understanding NativeAmerican ReligiousTraditions, OxfordUniversity Press, Oxford,2011, p 84.

28 See in particular the Marxistcultural geography of NeilSmith: Neil Smith, ‘Natureas Accumulation Strategy’,in Leo Panitch and ColinLeys, eds, Socialist Register,vol 43, Merlon, London,2007, http://neil-smith.net/vectors/nature-as-accumulation-strategy,accessed 24 November 2014

29 See TJ Demos,‘Contemporary Art and thePolitics of Ecology: AnIntroduction’, Third Text120, vol 27, no 1, January2013, pp 1–9.

30 McMaster, ‘Ntotemuk’,op cit, p 331

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The theme of re-evaluating the reciprocity of people and land was, in asense, built into Do You Remember When? before the Biennale. In anexample of trans-Indigenous commonality, the work was first developedin Phoenix as an intervention in the settler occupation and view of land inArizona. Installed in ‘Defining Sustainability’, an exhibition at theCeramics Research Center of Arizona State University in 2009, thework engaged the theme of the Arizona State show, which was thecontribution of art to environmental sustainability. Concerned withrevealing the ongoing but suppressed conditions of settler colonialismthat often shape this discourse, the collective similarly cut out a blockof the floor in that institution, exposing the bare earth under theuniversity building. In this way, the work intervened in the local con-ditions of Arizona, where, as the collective put it, the buildings arebuilt into the graves of ancestors, and contemporary environmentalismtends to erase the long history of Indigenous sustainable communities

Postcommodity, Do You Remember When? (Tempe), 2009, site-specific intervention and mixed media installation (cut con-crete, exposed earth, light, sound), photo: Postcommodity

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in the region.31 It posed the problem of how to think about sustainability,while recognising the ongoing role of Indigenous dispossession in settlerstates, bringing a distinct sense of social tension into the environmentalfocus of the exhibition.

As in Sydney, the Phoenix installation of Do You Remember When?employed trans-Indigenous collaboration to facilitate an aesthetic focuson the Indigenous reciprocity ethic. Respecting the sovereignty of Indi-genous peoples over their homelands, Postcommodity invited musiciansfrom the traditional inhabitants of the university land, the Pee Poshpeople, to perform songs addressed to the land in a kind of culturalIndigenous reclamation of the territory and of its millennia of ownershipby the Indigenous ancestors of the Pee Posh and other regional tribes.32 Ineach case, the work articulated the sustaining, reciprocal relations ofIndigenous peoples with the land uncovered within the artwork.It raised significant questions about the relationship of the dominant

Postcommodity, Do You Remember When? (Tempe), 2009, site-specific intervention and mixed media installation (cut con-crete, exposed earth, light, sound), photo: Arizona State University, Ceramics Research Center

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31 Postcommodity, interviewwith the author, 14 April2014

32 Ibid

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sustainability discourse to Indigenous worldviews, emphasising recipro-city with the land. In a situation of settler colonialism, what are we sus-taining? What definition of sustainability incorporates Indigenousdecolonisation and self-determination? In both exhibitions, Do YouRemember When? cleverly turned the discourse of sustainability backupon itself, shifting the focus towards an alternative situation in whichIndigenous sovereignty and knowledge systems would be recentred andreactivated through trans-Indigenous collaboration.

Showing global trans-Indigenous similarities rooted in shared world-views and common experiences of living under settler colonialism, theartwork resonated in Australia, where environmental reciprocity is like-wise a sustaining aspect of art, identity and community. Describing theways in which this human–land reciprocity has shaped modern Aborigi-nal painting, Aboriginal curator Hetti Perkins relates a telling anecdote toexplain the Aboriginal view of land as an inextricable agent in Indigenouscommunity and culture, and the fraught situation of this worldview undersettler colonialism.33 She describes:

. . . an Aboriginal elder using the tarpaulin upon which they were sitting asa metaphor to explain the existence of parallel worlds in Australia. Thewhitefella world appeared as the laid out tarp, which, when lifted, revealedthe earth below – our country, Aboriginal land.34

Describing the misunderstandings between these overlapping, ‘parallel uni-verses’ as embodied in the colonised condition of land in Australia, Perkinsdescribes how Papunya Tula and Aboriginal Western Desert paintingshave functioned relationally, like a ‘door between the many worlds thatexist in Australia today’, depicting the ‘nexus between ceremony andcountry’ in their painted references to ancestral travels and interactionswith specific landscape features that recall Deloria’s descriptions of land-based Indigenous cultures.35 Perkins describes how Aboriginal artists,like Michael Nelson Jagamara, have used this style of painting as a provi-sional way to communicate the Aboriginal view of land as an animate,reciprocal agent of creativity and meaning in Aboriginal tradition.36

Seen in the context Perkins describes, Do You Remember When? con-veyed a similar point: by removing the ‘tarpaulin’ of the museum floorfrom the space of the artwork, it exposed the continuing reciprocitybetween land and people as a key feature of Indigenous community andculture in Australia. Through focusing audience attention on the artwork’srecovery of the reciprocal relation between land and Aboriginal people, DoYou Remember When? directly related to the fundamental distinctivenessof Indigenous thought. In this sense, Postcommodity’s interventionpointed toward what Perkins describes as the Indigenous ‘worlds beyondthe reach, or even imagination, of globalisation’.37 Yet in doing so, it alsopointed provocatively toward the ‘lateral Indigenous connections’ and‘complementary’ sensibility of a shared Indigenous world, facilitatedthrough the trans-Indigenous relational form, another kind of globalisation.

TRANS-INDIGENEITY IN RELATIONAL ART

Employing trans-Indigenous collaboration to ‘lift the tarpaulin’ of themuseum, Postcommodity’s artwork opened the possibility for multiple

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33 Hetti Perkins, ‘ParallelUniverses, Other Worlds’,in Nikos Papastergiadis, ed,Complex Entanglements:Art, Globalisation, andCultural Difference, RiversOram Press, Chicago, 2003,pp 57–68

34 Ibid, p 63

35 Ibid, p 61

36 Ibid, pp 62–63

37 Ibid, p 63

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possible relations between the biennial’s diverse viewers. Its particularfacilitation of relations at the edge of multiple human and non-humanparticipants charted a distinctive course through the contested criticalterrain of relational art. ‘Relational art’ was formally defined by Frenchcurator Nicolas Bourriaud in 1998 (published in English in 2002), forwhom it was ‘a set of artistic practices which take as their theoreticaland practical point of departure the whole of human relations and theirsocial context’.38 Distinguishing this art from earlier practices concernedwith human relations, Bourriaud’s model framed the ‘relational form’ asa ‘convivial’ and ‘democratic’ alternative to the allegedly depoliticising,alienating ‘independent and private space’ of modernist tradition, aswell as the ‘20th century avant-gardes’ whose practices were ‘based onconflict’ and drew sharp lines between various social groups.39 Inresponse to a general late-capitalist social context, in which the ‘socialbond has become standardised’, these relational artworks articulate ‘aes-thetic contracts’ between collaborators, ‘new assemblages, possiblerelations between distinctive units, and alliances struck up between differ-ent partners’.40 Associating relational art most particularly with interac-tive projects, Bourriaud saw them as contributing to egalitarian socialchange, forming cooperative relationships without ‘any precedence, apriori, between the producer and beholder’.41

The influence of Bourriaud’s model of ‘relational form’ and the prac-tices it championed was pervasive throughout the 2012 Biennale. The exhi-bition likewise advanced the idea of ‘relation as [a] generative space of art’and championed practices of ‘empathy, affectivity, the relational, and theintersubjective’ against those of ‘self-absorption’ and ‘critique’.42 Empha-sising ‘co-operation’, the curators suggested this new focus on commonal-ity was necessary to counter the kinds of thinking that have led to theglobal environmental and financial crises.43 This belief in creating harmo-nious relations as an ‘alternative’ to the current globalised world led Art-forum reviewer Anthony Byrt to remark that the exhibition’s curatorial‘view of globalisation was far too sweet’. This focus on convivialityfailed to acknowledge the ‘moments of abrasion, in which past, present,and precarious future were forced into uncomfortable conversations’, ashappens in Do You Remember When?.44 While we can agree with thecurators that there is clearly a sense in which globalisation raises the ques-tion of how to form new and productive co-operative bonds, the margin-alisation of social friction and critique may actually stymie the equalityand democracy clearly valued in both frameworks. This is particularlytrue of the issues raised by Postcommodity’s artwork, in which the questionof commonality between Indigenous and settler ‘relations’ is articulated bycutting open the museum.

The difference between the overall Biennale emphasis on harmony,and the sense of conflict and unease produced by Do You RememberWhen?, represents a larger critical divergence in the discourse on rela-tional art since the publication of Bourriaud’s book. As is well known,numerous scholars have called into question the elision of social frictionand conflict in the model of relationality used by Bourriaud and by theBiennale. Most important in this regard are the numerous critiques devel-oped by the critic Claire Bishop, who has questioned Bourriaud’s demo-cratic political claims for the egalitarian ‘social bond’ created throughrelational art.45 Bishop argues that Bourriaud misses the constitutive

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38 Nicolas Bourriaud,Relational Aesthetics, LesPresses du Reel, Dijon,2002, p 113

39 Ibid, p 113, 45

40 Ibid, p 45

41 Ibid, p 58

42 De Zegher, ‘Arc’, op cit,pp 99–103; McMaster,‘Ntotemuk’, op cit, p 307

43 Ibid, p 331

44 Anthony Byrt, ‘18thBiennale of Sydney’,Artforum International, vol51, no 3, November 2012, p293

45 Claire Bishop, ‘The SocialTurn: Collaboration and ItsDiscontents’, ArtforumInternational, vol 44, no 6,2006, p 178; ‘Antagonismand Relational Aesthetics’,October, no 100, 2004,pp 51–79

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role of exclusions in relational art, which, far from being a completelyopen and ‘convivial’ space of equal relations, is ‘addressed to a commu-nity of viewing subjects with something in common’ who are part of awider social field in which they are distinguished from other subjects.46

While Bourriaud represents relational art as an alternative ‘micro-utopia’ to the ‘communication zones’ of capitalism, Bishop draws atten-tion to the social-embeddedness of both, suggesting that in fact the‘relations’ of contemporary art are part of a highly specific socialcontext, bound up with its various inequities and the conflicts of contem-porary social formations.47

The thrust of Bishop’s critique is against Bourriaud’s association ofharmony with democracy, which she suggests is theoretically flawed.Bourriaud’s emphasis on ‘conviviality’ excludes and silences dissent andcontestability, missing the intrinsic role of conflict, multiplicity and plur-alistic viewpoints in democratic relations. Drawing on the agonisticdemocratic theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, as well asJacques Ranciere, Bishop argues that Bourriaud’s critical frameworkmisses the always-incomplete bonds and unsettled ‘contracts’ betweenpolitical actors. This is particularly the case with the conflictual,unequal, always-incomplete relations between Indigenous and non-Indi-genous peoples in settler states. Acknowledging this social incompletenessraises the question of what relational practices would allow for thisantagonistic dimension of relationality to be processed into a productiveagonistic interaction. That is, which artworks allow ‘relationships’sculpted by the work to acknowledge difference and conflict by producingrelations of unease and tension, even as they may arrange provisional‘assemblages’ between diverse viewers? This agonistic model leadsBishop to champion artists like Santiago Sierra and Thomas Hirschhorn,whose well-known relational art, in her view, exposes viewers to partici-pants and collaborators among whom unequal relations of power andunclear shared interests pre-empt the kind of relational solidarityadvanced by Bourriaud.

As many critics have observed, both Bourriaud’s description of the‘relations’ of the artwork as being harmonious, and Bishop’s focus onthe external exclusions created through the relational practices, tend todownplay the mixture of relations within the relational artworks them-selves (Bishop has more recently acknowledged this).48 Artist and criticDean Kenning writes that the debate between a consensual and agonisticframework has ‘the effect of eclipsing the class and competitive resent-ments, which exist within such a relational work’.49 As Kenning andothers write, aspects of commonality and agonism nest in complexways in art practices, evidencing the multiplicity of human relationshipsthat coexist at one and the same time in any ‘alliance’. We can see a par-ticular instance of this doubled-edged relationality in Do You RememberWhen?, which connects in multiple ways with its diverse global audienceof both Indigenous and non-Indigenous viewers and contexts. Most cen-trally, in Postcommodity’s artwork there is a strong emphasis on the soli-darity and common ground that is at the heart of the trans-Indigenouscollaboration that created the work.50 The creative relations of theartwork underscore both a shared Indigenous world and the complemen-tary elements of a worldview that can be facilitated and communicatedthrough collaborative works like Do You Remember When?. In doing

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46 Ibid, p 68

47 Ibid; Anthony Downey,‘Towards a Politics of(Relational) Aesthetics’,Third Text 86, vol 21, no 3,May 2007, pp 267–275;Stewart Martin, ‘Critique ofRelational Aesthetics’,Third Text 87, vol 21, no 4,July 2007, pp 369–386;Dean Kenning, ‘ArtRelations and the Presenceof Absence’, Third Text 99,vol 23, no 4, July 2009, pp435–446

48 Kenning, op cit; Bishop hasaddressed this through thestudy of different historicalmodels of participation ofart and the respective socialcontexts in Artificial Hells:Participatory Art and thePolitics of Spectatorship,London, Verso, 2012.Shannon Jackson discussesthe way terminologiesinherited from painting andsculpture homogenise the‘relations’ of relational art,suggesting contemporaryart would benefit fromcloser dialogue withperformance studies. SeeShannon Jackson, SocialWorks: Performing Art,Supporting Publics,University of CaliforniaPress, Berkeley, 2011.Prominent promoter ofrelational practices, QueensMuseum executive directorTom Finkelpearl pointstoward the specificity ofsocial relations, suggestingthat American socialpractice works might bestbe read in the framework ofAmerican pragmatism. SeeTom Finkelpearl, What WeMade: Conversations on Artand Social Cooperation,Duke University Press,Durham, North Carolina,2013, pp 343–362

49 Kenning, op cit, p 437

50 Allen, ‘A TransnationalNative American Studies?’,op cit, pp 17–18

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so, it shows that, given the inherently diverse range of social forms atstake in relational art, we must be careful to acknowledge the particular-ity of the relations between the artworld location and the wider socialcontext. With regard to the trans-Indigenous social form of Do YouRemember When?, Allen situates its ‘complementary’ Indigenous solidar-ity and respectful alliance-building in relation to the political form of theglobal Indigenous rights movement with its assertion of sovereignty. Atstake in both is the continuity of ‘Indigenous cultural, political, intellec-tual, and artistic sovereignties’, against colonial ideologies and structuresthat have sought to erase and contain Indigenous peoples.51 In this way,the decolonial political context of Postcommodity’s trans-Indigenous artcontrasts with the categorical claim made by Bishop that the social-engagement of relational art ‘today stands without a relation to an exist-ing political project’.52 It depends on which relational art we are lookingat and the various social actors brought into contact within the relationalform.

A catalogue essay by Maori Indigenous Studies scholar Roger Maakahelped describe the social context of the global Indigenous collaborationfound in Do You Remember When?.53 Maaka told the story of how theconcept of a shared global ‘Indigeneity’ grew out of the ‘internationalisa-tion of Indigenous Peoples’ struggles’ and a solidarity through theirshared ‘loss of autonomy’ in recent centuries’.54 Through alliancesacross Indigenous nations, involving non-governmental organisationsand a variety of international institutions, the global aspect of Indigenousidentity manifests itself through the articulation of a shared trans-Indi-genous worldview shared between locally and regionally distinctpeoples.55 This movement of millions of Indigenous peoples and theirallies across the twentieth century led, notably, to the passing of theUnited Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in2007. While non-binding, this historic legal document enumerates thevarious shared aspirations of Indigenous peoples to determine theirown affairs, to control their own territories and societies, and todevelop their own cultural and educational practices as distinct fromthe ideologies of dominant nation-states.56 As a clear public legal docu-ment, it enunciates the shared aspirations of the common Indigenousworld, articulated aesthetically in relational form in Do You RememberWhen?.

As situating Do You Remember When? in the context of Indigenousrights implies, the collaborative ‘relations between people’, shapedthrough trans-Indigenous collaboration, inevitably has an agonisticdimension. As Allen underscores, trans-Indigenous cultural practiceimplies a decolonial stance toward contemporary power structures thathave sought to circumscribe Indigenous peoples as ‘domestic’ ratherthan as ‘sovereign’ peoples.57 The double-edged relational form of DoYou Remember When? productively facilitated trans-Indigenousagonism in several dimensions. First, the piece literally cut open themuseum, implying that the Indigenous worldview runs against the grainof the boundaries of the state institution and the non-profit Biennale. Inso doing, it brought into frictional visibility and sonic presence the Indi-genous ideas and values performed in the artwork. Acknowledging theagonistic dimension of the artwork, Postcommodity’s artist statementfor the work referred to the removed chunk of floor as a ‘trophy

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51 Ibid, p 17

52 Claire Bishop, ArtificialHells, op cit, p 284

53 Roger Maaka, ‘Indigeneityand Locating IndigenousPeoples: To All OurRelations: Ki o tataukarangataha maha’, in deZegher and McMaster, opcit, pp 365–370. See alsoRonald Niezen, The Originsof Indigenism: HumanRights and the Politics ofIdentity, University ofCalifornia Press, Berkeley,2003.

54 Ibid, pp 366–367

55 Ibid, p 369

56 For the first major study ofthe implications of theDeclaration, see Steve Allenand Alexandra Xanthaki,Reflections on the UNDeclaration on the Rightsof Indigenous Peoples, HartPublishing, Oxford, 2011.

57 Allen, ‘A TransnationalNative American Studies?’,op cit, p 12. For formativeart critical discussions of theimpacts of this denial ofsovereignty on visual art,see Jolene Rickard,‘Sovereignty: A Line in theSand’, Aperture, vol 139,1995, pp 51–59, and‘Visualizing Sovereignty inthe Time of BiometricSensors’, in Eric Cheyfitz, NBruce Duthu, and Shari MHuhndorf, eds, SouthAtlantic Quarterly vol 110,no 2, Spring 2011,pp 465–486.

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celebrating Indigenous intervention’, connoting a war-like relation to thedominant society’s institution, and incorporating this into the formal con-struction of the installation.58 A trace of this agonistic dimension survivesin the Gallery of New South Wales, as the block of floor was replaced(against Postcommodity’s wishes) after the Biennale, but in the pleasedwords of the art collective, ‘a scar remains’ along its edges.59

Adding to the agonistic dimension of Do You Remember When?,there is also the uneven status of viewers in front of the artwork. In Post-commodity’s work, the position of the viewer was to listen, think andacknowledge the relational ties of Indigenous peoples, not to ‘participate’as an ‘equal’ in a dialogue or collaboration. In reversing the historicalinequity of colonialism, and in prioritising the complementary values ofglobal Indigenous peoples, its relational form departed from the open-ended equality championed in Bourriaud’s model of relational art,yet also foregrounded trans-Indigenous commonality in a way distinctfrom Bishop’s agonistic model. In this way, Do You Remember When?incorporated both trans-Indigenous commonality and Indigenous-settleragonism into its relational form, linking itself to the trans-Indigenous cul-tural and social collaboration and the encounters of a shared Indigenousglobalisation. It suggested that the most viable route for decolonial socialtransformation involved re-inscribing the contentious push–pull betweenthe multiple peoples navigating the exhibit, at once furthering the socialbond between Indigenous peoples and keeping the relations betweenIndigenous peoples and others partially open, unpredictable and visibly‘scarred’.

CONCLUSION

Employing trans-Indigenous collaboration across the confines of colonialhistory and ideology, Do You Remember When? acknowledges globalIndigenous sovereignty and ‘centres’ a shared Indigenous ethic of environ-mental reciprocity. While addressed to all viewers for re-evaluation, theartwork’s frictional emphasis on a common Indigenous worldview alsopresented boundaries, and recognised the great differences between theIndigenous and non-Indigenous worlds. This double-edged trans-Indigen-ous relational form may be seen as part of the broader ‘ungovernability’of Indigenous peoples according to the rigid boundaries and categoriesdeveloped under colonialism.60 In words that resonate with the agonistictheories of relationality described above, Indigenous literary theoristRobert Warrior states that critical assessments of contemporary Indigen-ous culture should acknowledge that ‘Indigenous peoples have persisted. . . by being ungovernable, unpredictable, and obdurate’.61 The mainpoint of Indigenous cultural critique, he asserts, has been to articulatenew ways of thinking, seeing, and living ‘unsettled’ in a world in whichIndigenous peoples are often politically and culturally pigeonholed orerased.62 Warrior’s descriptions of ungovernability resonate with thetrans-Indigenous collaboration of Do You Remember When?, the art-work’s contribution to ‘unsettling a history that in the minds of manyis already complete’.63 Thinking, seeing and living across state borders,it created new cultural routes for globalising Indigenous cultures withinthe context of contemporary relational art.

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58 Artist statement: http://postcommodity.com/DoYouRememberWhen(Sydney).html,accessed 24 November2014

59 Postcommodity, personalinterview, 14 April 2014.The term ‘scar’ resonateswith Indigenous artistNadia Myre’s Scar Project,which was also on display atthe biennial.

60 Robert Warrior, ‘NativeAmerican Scholarship andthe Transnational Turn’,Cultural Studies Review,vol 15, no 2, pp 119–130

61 Ibid, 127

62 Ibid

63 Ibid

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