Professor Fred Myers

The fourth contributor to the 2014-2015 Munro Lectures is Professor Fred Myers.

Anxieties of Circulation: The Fraught Trajectories of Aboriginal Acrylic Painting

Event details

Date: Thursday 19 March 2015, 5.30pm - 6.30pm

Venue: Meadows Lecture Theatre, William Robertson Wing, Old Medical School, Doorway 4, Teviot Place, Edinburgh, EH8 9AG

Biography

Fred Myers is the Silver Professor of Anthropology at New York University.

Myers has written frequently on questions of place and personhood, on Western Desert painting, and more generally on culture, objects, and identity as they are understood both within Indigenous communities and circulated through different regimes of value.

His books include Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines (1986), Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art (2002), and edited volumes The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Anthropology and Art (co-edited with George Marcus, 1995), and The Empire of Things (2001).

His current project involves the repatriation and “re-documentation” of ten hours of film footage from 1974 with the two current Pintupi communities.

Lecture abstract

The paintings in acrylic media in Central Australia are known for their capacity to objectify not only Indigenous presence but also Indigenous understandings of the world into the broader, surrounding society.

However, this objectification of knowledge from a revelatory regime of value into one organized in other ways is fraught. Some paintings executed in the early period of this art movement are now considered inappropriate for general pubic exhibition because of their restricted esoteric meanings.

The issue has been a controversial one in Australia, and museums and galleries attend increasingly to develop protocols to satisfy Indigenous epistemological frameworks.