Australian Rock Art in the Expanded Field: History, Meaning, and Contemporary Context

摘要

Compared with the prehistoric parietal art of Europe, Australian Aboriginal rockart is little known in art historical contexts, despite that fact that many of theseworks are older, more dynamic, and more sophisticated. More than the lanewaysof inner-city streets, much of the Australian landscape is literally layered with art.There are thousands of rock art sites recorded in Australia and perhaps an equalnumber that have been forgotten or destroyed. New galleries and cathedrals ofcolour are regularly reported in the popular press. Yet the status of rock art inAustralian art history, like much of the rest of Indigenous art production, isunder-researched and poorly conceptualised within the discipline. To address this,we devised a panel session for the Art Association of Australia and NewZealand’s 2017 annual conference, at the University of Western Australia, uponwhich this special issue is based. The responses we received were curated intotwo parallel interdisciplinary sessions, each of which had an artist, an art historianand an archaeologist.