Contents: Introduction; Mimesis of tradition; The picture proclamation; The encyclopaedia Terra Cognita; Anachronistic mapping; Telling race in silhouette; Conclusions and other performances; Bibliography; Indexes.
Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll is Professor of Global Art at the University of Birmingham. An expert in contemporary art and colonialism, the history of museums and collecting, she wrote her M.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard University. Her films and installations have been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Extracity Antwerp, Savvy Contemporary Berlin,Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the Marrakech Biennale. She has been the curator of various international exhibitions and has held British Academy, Sackler-Caird, and Humboldt Stiftung fellowships. She is an editor of the journal Third Text and of the edited volumes Botanical Drift and The Important of Being Anachronistic.www.kdja.org
'Art in the Time of Colony is an absorbing, experimental
interrogation of colonial art and encounter in Australia. The book
is notable on many grounds, not least for its fresh research on the
intriguing mid-nineteenth century scientific traveller Blandowski,
almost forgotten until very recently, but above all for its
perspective on art history, from the vantage point of contemporary
art. Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll's voice is distinctive and
compelling.' Nicholas Thomas, University of Cambridge, UK 'History
would have it that there are people without history. Or as Hegel
wrote, they were natural cultures that had to perish as soon as the
spirit of the West approached. The spirit of Hegel is a temporal
spectre for Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll in her Art in the Time
of Colony, and its inevitable teleology is brought into question by
what she leads us to see in Australia’s fragments of visual
historical reckoning. Thus the artistic engagement in the
nineteenth century between Australian inhabitants and European
colonists is not just the subject of this original, passionate and
beautifully written book, but it is the means of inquiry about the
nature of time and perception and the arts of Australia today,
reinserting a claim to history and aesthetics that is too often
still denied to too many.’ Thomas B.F. Cummins, Harvard University,
USA 'In this captivating book, historian, artist and curator
Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll draws on contemporary Australian
Aboriginal art to challenge historical blind spots and re-think
stuffy conventions of art criticism. In exploring encounters
between colonial visual cultures, her surprising, fresh and
delightful juxtapositions bring new ideas and objects into view,
and allow us to see familiar things anew. This book tackles the
important task of reclaiming Aboriginal practice from anthropology
for art and in doing so, challenges outmoded notions of
colonialism, media, art, and even time.’ Jane Lydon, author of Eye
Contact and The Flash of Recognition'In her stunning study, Khadija
von Zinnenburg Carroll takes her readers beyond the armchair
enchantments of conventional accounts of Indigenous art, dissolving
boundaries among art history, anthropology, history of science and
contemporary art. She shows that resistance to white norms can take
many and subtle forms, both in the nineteenth century and in the
present. Readers of this book will see how Indigenous cultural
traditions - in this instance Australian, however artificial that
concept may be - though mutable and adaptable, perdure and interact
with settler values in unexpected ways. Carroll's distinctive art
history thereby brings pasts to light - Aboriginal and white - that
would otherwise have remained obscure.'Ivan Gaskell, Bard Graduate
Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture, New
York, USA 'The fascinating premise behind Khadjia von Zinnenburg
Carroll's Art in the Time of Colony is an examination of how
contemporary art has been used to stand in for gaps in the
historical record of Indigenous Australians'. Kelli Cole,
University of Adelaide In: Artlink journal Indigenous Issue 'Art in
the Time of Colony is an experiment in writing history and
generating new knowledge via the discipline of fine art practice,
asking what happens if the relationship between art and history is
reversed? Instead of history being written to understand art, art
becomes the paradigm through which to navigate our understanding of
history... One of the achievements of Art in the Time of Colony is
its articulation and embodiment of art practice as generative of
knowledge. The book is an instance of an artist writing about both
art and history as art, reflecting cogently and intelligently on
her own practice and that of others, as well contextualising this
practice in wider historical narratives. In doing so, Art in the
Time of Colony demonstrates that art can be understood as a
knowledge-forming discipline.'
Alana Jelinek, University of Cambridge; In: Journal of Museum
Ethnography'This is a stunning and ambitious study of cross
cultural encounters which reveals their nuanced and unexpected
poetics and violence. Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll's self
proclaimed 'museum in a book' employs a creative and highly
original way of thinking about the time of the colony through
anachronism and how the arc of colonial time might be best thought
of as being like the boomerang. Her stark juxtapositions and subtle
weaving together of Aboriginal and colonial nineteenth-century art
create emotive and acute alignments that are fascinating and
timely. Rigorously researched, Art in the Time of the Colony is a
seminal study that will change the way in which scholars approach
visual culture and the postcolony. A tour de force.'Natasha Eaton,
University College London, In: Art History: Journal of the
Association of Art Historians
'This accomplished and inventive book puts the cultural practices
of Aboriginal peoples in conversation with some of the most
challenging forms of contemporary critical theory. Khadija von
Zinnenburg Carroll initiates a rhetoric of reading that transforms
traditional accounts of the relationship of the arts of perception
to strategies of power. Her "anachronic method" creates a scholarly
world in which temporal distances and differences collaborate in
the making of contemporary art. Her achievement is both substantial
and remarkably subtle.' - Homi K. Bhabha, Director of the
Humanities Center at Harvard University, USA'This is a stunning and
ambitious study of cross cultural encounters which reveals their
nuanced and unexpected poetics and violence. Khadija von Zinnenburg
Carroll’s self proclaimed ‘museum in a book’ employs a creative and
highly original way of thinking about the time of the colony
through anachronism and how the arc of colonial time might be best
thought of as being like the boomerang. Her stark juxtapositions
and subtle weaving together of Aboriginal and colonial
nineteenth-century art create emotive and acute alignments that are
fascinating and timely. Rigorously researched, Art in the Time of
the Colony is a seminal study that will change the way in which
scholars approach visual culture and the postcolony. A tour de
force.' - Natasha Eaton, University College London, In: Art
History: Journal of the Association of Art Historians’Carroll's
superbly-written study of colonial art, history, science and
cultural encounter in Australia is a compelling account of
Indigenous responses to Western imposition...Carroll's volume
offers rare insight for scholars into what Aboriginal Australia has
always/already understood about Aboriginal art; that the art of
perception has an immutable relationship with the strategies of
colonial power. Carroll understands the patience with which
Indigenous people endure post-colonialism. It is patience that
underpins an unbroken process of creative resistance.’ Greg Lehman,
Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
Studies, Canberra. In: Aboriginal Studies Journal‘Refreshingly
antithetical… Khadija brings an artist’s attention to the many
material details and facts she analyses throughout the book. Thus
we have extensive analyses of the work of Julie Gough in response
to E. Phillips Fox and Eugene von Guerard, Vicky Cousins and Lee
Darrock in response to the Koorie possum skins; Ricky Maynard in
response Frankland’s proclamation; Brook Andrew in response to an
image of Blandowski in response to one by Charles Sturt; the
contemporary African-American artist Kara Walker in response to
Tommy McRae; and Vernon Ah Kee in response to a contemporary critic
of McRae; and the Arnhem Land sand painter Richard Birrinbirrin in
response to the very tradition of which he is a part. These
contemporary anachronistic responses constitute the artistic
afterlife, or survivance, of the original work, allowing it to pass
into our present. But the truly powerful, almost uncanny thing
about Khadijas argument – and this in a way is the very condition
of possibility for work that is able to do this – is that the
Aboriginal artworks and artefacts of the nineteenth century already
foresee this destiny for themselves. In other words, if it is a
question of Dreamings, these Dreamings are not so much of that
commonly cited and by now thoroughly domesticated fact that
Aboriginal culture here constitutes a continuous tradition of some
60,000 years. No, rather we would say that the Dreamings here are
Dreamings of the future, of their own future.’ Rex Butler,
Professor of Art History & Theory Monash University Melbourne. ‘The
book is punctuated by aesthetic performances which confront and
disturb us from the styles of reading to which we are accustomed.
The emblem of this for me are the photographs scattered through the
book, which were taken by Khadija in her role as art historian
through the curator’s microscope of elements of the famous
Tasmanian proclamation boards. These are the boards, which were
intended as a form of legal pedagogy, of a kind of emplacement of
European law and presence on the Aboriginal landscape… But what
Khadija does is to zoom in, through the perfect optical gaze of a
curator’s microscope to represent elements of that particular thing
and these are thrown into the book, in particular irregular ways
almost as moments of logical punctuation. Now what is crucial about
this is that these images are profoundly in optical focus, but so
absolutely, disturbingly out of focus and context. They are
disturbing images.’ Richard Drayton, Rhodes Professor of Imperial
History, King’s College London. In: Third Text'Art in the Time of
Colony is an absorbing, experimental interrogation of colonial art
and encounter in Australia. The book is notable on many grounds,
not least for its fresh research on the intriguing mid-nineteenth
century scientific traveller Blandowski, almost forgotten until
very recently, but above all for its perspective on art history,
from the vantage point of contemporary art. Khadija von Zinnenburg
Carroll's voice is distinctive and compelling.’ Nicholas Thomas,
University of Cambridge, UK'History would have it that there are
people without history. Or as Hegel wrote, they were natural
cultures that had to perish as soon as the spirit of the West
approached. The spirit of Hegel is a temporal spectre for Khadija
von Zinnenburg Carroll in her Art in the Time of Colony, and its
inevitable teleology is brought into question by what she leads us
to see in Australia's fragments of visual historical reckoning.
Thus the artistic engagement in the nineteenth century between
Australian inhabitants and European colonists is not just the
subject of this original, passionate and beautifully written book,
but it is the means of inquiry about the nature of time and
perception and the arts of Australia today, reinserting a claim to
history and aesthetics that is too often still denied to too many.'
- Thomas B.F. Cummins, Harvard University, USA'In this captivating
book, historian, artist and curator Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll
draws on contemporary Australian Aboriginal art to challenge
historical blind spots and re-think stuffy conventions of art
criticism. In exploring encounters between colonial visual
cultures, her surprising, fresh and delightful juxtapositions bring
new ideas and objects into view, and allow us to see familiar
things anew. This book tackles the important task of reclaiming
Aboriginal practice from anthropology for art and in doing so,
challenges outmoded notions of colonialism, media, art, and even
time.'- Jane Lydon, University of Western Australia, author of Eye
Contact and The Flash of Recognition'In her stunning study, Khadija
von Zinnenburg Carroll takes her readers beyond the armchair
enchantments of conventional accounts of Indigenous art, dissolving
boundaries among art history, anthropology, history of science and
contemporary art. She shows that resistance to white norms can take
many and subtle forms, both in the nineteenth century and in the
present. Readers of this book will see how Indigenous cultural
traditions - in this instance Australian, however artificial that
concept may be - though mutable and adaptable, perdure and interact
with settler values in unexpected ways. Carroll's distinctive art
history thereby brings pasts to light - Aboriginal and white - that
would otherwise have remained obscure.'- Ivan Gaskell, Bard
Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture,
New York, USA'The fascinating premise behind Khadjia von Zinnenburg
Carroll's Art in the Time of Colony is an examination of how
contemporary art has been used to stand in for gaps in the
historical record of Indigenous Australians'. Kelli Cole,
University of Adelaide In: Artlink journal Indigenous IssueArt in
the Time of Colony is an experiment in writing history and
generating new knowledge via the discipline of fine art practice,
asking what happens if the relationship between art and history is
reversed? Instead of history being written to understand art, art
becomes the paradigm through which to navigate our understanding of
history… One of the achievements of Art in the Time of Colony is
its articulation and embodiment of art practice as generative of
knowledge. The book is an instance of an artist writing about both
art and history as art, reflecting cogently and intelligently on
her own practice and that of others, as well contextualising this
practice in wider historical narratives. In doing so, Art in the
Time of Colony demonstrates that art can be understood as a
knowledge-forming discipline. - Alana Jelinek, University of
Cambridge; In: Journal of Museum Ethnography‘Carroll’s research
speaks into the archive and activates and awakens the voices of
Indigenous people, reuniting them not just with their objects but
with the practices embedded within these objects. The result is a
welcome addition to the scholarship of Indigenous art and the
expansionary movement that can be created through a rigorous
interdisciplinary approach. Invoking and inviting Indigenous
participation and values, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll’s research
helps to reconfigure our relationship to the archive and transforms
both the archive and future processes of archivisation. Art in the
Time of Colony goes back and forth through history in order to
grapple with objects suspended in time, and poses some of the most
important questions of our age.’ - Stephen Gilchrist, curator of
Everywhen and Lecturer at Sydney University. In: Art Monthly
Ask a Question About this Product More... |