The most egregious form of “identity politics” in Australia is the politics of aboriginality.  And here, in the cause of advancing the provocative online debate Peter has started, I want to say a few words about role of dot-painting in identity politics.  

Dot-painting is the most visible form aboriginal identity.  The problem is, however, that dot-paintings depend both for their monetary and aesthetic value on the fact that they can only be produced by people who identify themselves as aboriginals.  It is illegal for non-aboriginals to sell or display dot-paintings.  

Apart from a few of them being pleasant-enough arrangements of daubs of acrylic, they have, I maintain, little or no artistic merit.  This emperor has no aesthetic clothes.   Yet modern Australia deems it politically correct to elevate dot-paintings to hang beside (or in rooms adjacent to) the works of non-aboriginal artists like Da Vinci, Monet or Jackson Pollock.

In reality, dot-painting is the invention of a white man, Geoffrey Bardon.  It has no historical provenance before 1971.  That was the year Bardon was sent to teach at a remote indigenous primary school at Papunya, about 200km north-west of Alice Springs.  To foster his boys’ interest in art, he introduced them to acrylic paint, and encouraged them to depict – using their dot motif (borrowed from ritual body-painting) - their “dreaming” mythology.  It was his idea - not theirs.

Soon the older men of the community decided that what the children could do, they could do just as well.  So they began painting their own “dreamtime stories” (purportedly about their local “Honey-ant Dreaming” myth).  First, they painted – it was a community effort – the side of the school-house.  Then, as the outside world began to learn what was happening in Papunya, the activity was taken up by other Aboriginal communities, first in the Western Desert, then in other parts of “outback” Australia, initially using sheets of masonite provided by helpful art dealers.  The prices the dot-works fetched in the cities began to rise.

But as the need for “genuine”, or authentic, dot-paintings grew, the supply lagged behind demand (unhappily, many “genuine” full-blood aboriginal dot-painters succumbed to the ravages of alcohol and chronic ill-health).  Soon rapacious art dealers began setting up dot-painting factories, first in outback communities (which at least invested the works with some geographic provenance), but then in urban Aboriginal enclaves.  

Anyone with any Aboriginal blood was roped in.  Aboriginal neighbourhoods were formed into production lines.  Then, when this wasn’t sufficient to satisfy the growing demand, the art dealers started getting white artists to redress the short-fall.  Itinerant backpackers took it up.  (Today, the bulk of the supply comes from Indonesia and China.)

Yet one universal measure of what art is, or should be, is that it requires some effort, or skill, to produce.  You should not be able to fetch a Rembrandt off the street, as it were.  A major criticism of dot-painting is that it requires no artistic skill whatsoever.  A child can do it – and they do!  Soon the women of the tribe took it up (even though they were forbidden by tribal law to know anything about “the dreaming”).

Today, art critics and academics are, for politically-correct reasons, in effect perpetuating the myth that a race of primitive, stone-age people, with no art training or any knowledge of art – indeed, many of them unable to read or write – can, out of nothing, suddenly start producing what is claimed to be a new form of art, worthy of display in major galleries.

Here, in the interests of truth and decency, one should pause for a moment here shed a tear for the late Albert Namatjira.  Namatjira managed to become an Aboriginal artist of some renown – though these days you don’t hear much mention of his name (indeed, his skill with his brush is an embarrassment to the contemporary Aboriginal art industry) - without the benefit of dots.  But he was trained as a proper, orthodox artist.  He received art tuition.  He learned how to paint with oils.  He learned about perspective, form, colour, composition, etc – trifling technical details that today’s dot-painters don’t have to worry their heads or hands about. All they or their agents or galleries have to do is to say their daubs represent some aspect of “the dreaming”.

But we have to take the aboriginal word for what the dots represent.  Because it is by no means apparent to non-Aboriginals, who are forbidden by tribal law to see any aspect of “the dreaming”.  Yet once you divorce a dot-painting from its supposed “meaning”, then you begin to have problems.  If those dots don’t represent anything apparent to the viewer, this rather undermines their artistic value and significance.  For the dot-paintings to work, they have to say something, or “refer to” or represent something.  Else, they are just random arrangements of dots (which, of course, is all they are).

A year or so ago there was a major exhibition of Australian painting at the Royal Academy in London.  Its centrepiece were several rooms of aboriginal dot-paintings (through which you had to walk to see the rest of the works).  This, the exhibition was saying to the world, was an example – perhaps even the height - of contemporary Australian art and culture.  

The British critics were scarifying.  They could find nothing of any artistic worth in any of the works (the description “desert doodling” was used by one critic).  It was as if some sophisticated London music critics had turned up to Covent Garden to hear some modern Australian music and found a quartet of aborigines on stage playing their digeridoos.  

The exhibition closed quickly, and it will be a long, long time before there will be another exhibition of Australian art in London – or indeed anywhere else if it includes any aboriginal art.  Disappointed politically-correct critics (like Nicholas Rothwell in The Australian) explained the failure of overseas critics to like dot-painting, not on the dots, but the fact that you had to be an Australian to appreciate them.  It’s purely an Australian art-form, he argued (he meant “aboriginal”).

This then goes back to one of Peter’s original points.   Does this form of identity politics and political correctness actually advance the lives of the people they are supposedly championing?  To put it crudely, does the fraud that is contemporary dot-painting improve the lives of aborigines?  The answer, I submit, is no.  The lives of a few indigenous individuals perhaps.  The people – agents and galleries – who sell dot-paintings, probably.  

I have no doubt that the myth that dot-painting is art - rather than “desert doodlings” - makes many Australians, both indigenous and non-indigenous, feel good (and politically-correct).  What’s wrong with that?  That’s a plus surely.  

But for anyone who knows and cares about art, and Australian culture, those dots do a lot of harm – harm that Australian art can ill-afford.