"Remembering Forward": Stevenson and Aboriginal Art

Abstract

In 1987 the anthropologist James Clifford told an audience at an art foundation gathering in New York that tribal artists "can no longer be marginalized. They speak not only for endangered 'traditions' but also for crucial human futures." According to Ian Mclean: "Aboriginal art being made today in remote communities of Australia remains distinctively Aboriginal; it may not be traditionalist, but it is neo-traditionalist as it relies to a large extent on traditional thinking to engage with the modern world. If it is accepted into the discourse of contemporary art, then the European model of postmodernism is not the only way to be contemporary in this age of globalization." By using this art as yet another lens through which to read Stevenson's work, I hope to draw this iridescent transitionist into a new discursive nexus - to take him out of the Romantic/Protomodernist/Modernist/Postmodernist battle-line and set him free among his own aesthetic abstractions. There are times when Stevenson gives vehement expression to his desire to strip himself of his physical identity and become one with artistic process - an abstract personality wholly defined by the needs and processes of art.