Secomb, Linnell (2006) Petyarra and Moffatt: 'Looking from the sky'. Cultural Studies Review, 12 (1). pp. 44-56. ISSN 1446-8123 (Print), 1837-8692 (Online)

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Abstract

Moffatt’s Up in the Sky series draws attention to the relation between sky and earth, through the content and camera angles of the images. Similarly, Kathleen Petyarre’s Central Desert acrylic dot painting evokes this relation representing country and Dreaming from a celestial perspective—as she says ‘looking from the sky’. Yet here any association between these artists seems to end with the urban artist refusing to engage Aboriginal tradition and the desert artist focused on Dreaming, country and heritage. However, a further connection between these disparate works may also be discerned as each, in differing ways, transforms our conventional perceptions of space and time. Reading these images in relation to Walter Benjamin’s concepts of the auratic and of messianic time, I suggest that each restructures dimension and duration putting in question the (post)modern calibrations of our space/time experience. This paper stages an engagement between these artists’ works and Benjamin’s concepts exploring the variations and modifications of the spatial and the temporal that hybrid cross-cultural exchanges require and facilitate.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Tracey Moffat, Kathleen Petyarre, Walter Benjamin, Indigenous art, Dreaming, space and time
Subjects:	N Fine Arts > N Visual arts (General) For photography, see TR
Pre-2014 Departments:	School of Humanities & Social Sciences School of Humanities & Social Sciences > Department of Social, Political & Cultural Studies
Last Modified:	14 Oct 2016 18:47
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/8658

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