Remote Avant-Garde

Jennifer Loureide Biddle is Director of Visual Anthropology & Visual Culture and Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute for Experimental Arts at the University of New South Wales. She is the author of Breasts, Bodies, Canvas: Central Desert Art as Experience.

• List of Illustrations  viiAcknowledgments  xiiiIntroduction. The Imperative to Experiment  11. Humanitarian Imperialism  21Part I. Biliteracies2. Tangentyere Artists  413. June Walkutjukurr Richards  774. Rhonda Unurupa Dick  91Part II. Hapticities5. Tjanpi Desert Weavers  1096. Warnayaka Art: Yurlpa  1397. Yarrenyty Arltere Artists  159Part III. Happenings8. Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route  1819. The Warburton Arts Project  197Epilogue: (Not) a "Lifestyle Choice"  217Notes  221Further Resources  233References  235Index  257

"[W]ith a breathtaking focus on the new, the emergent, the hybrid and the innovative (213), the book’s artworks, and the writing itself, bristle with energy.... This is a refreshingly sensitive and nuanced account that is a must-read not only for those interested in the specificities of emerging Indigenous artistic traditions in the Northern Territory and elsewhere, but also for those interested in the ongoing political, cultural and economic processes of so-called ‘settler’ societies across Australia and beyond."- Peter Kilroy (LSE Review of Books) "Remote Avant-Garde: Aboriginal Art under Occupation, by Jennifer Loureide Biddle, is a welcome addition to the literature on Indigenous Australian art, and more broadly to anthropologies of art, Indigenous Australia, and global Indigenous arts and aesthetics. I heartily recommend it to anyone in those fields, and would happily teach with it in anthropology, art history, art/artworlds, and museum studies." - Sabra G. Thorner (Anthropological Quarterly) "Jennifer Loureide Biddle has dared to deal with a daunting, dazzling array of 'remote' art in its multiple forms and complex contexts. The result is a profound, far from dispassionate book which does justice to an extraordinary canon of art." - Noelene Cole (Journal of Anthropological Research) "Remote Avant-Garde brilliantly revitalizes the literature on Aboriginal art by attending to fascinating experimental art practices and a fresh aesthetics emerging in remote Aboriginal communities. . . . [It] should be read not only by scholars interested in Aboriginal art but also anyone wanting to understand creative forms of political agency in colonial and postcolonial contexts." - Rosita Henry (American Anthropologist)