Investigative TaskEssay - Meaning Of Art Essay - 1,464 words

Investigative Task- Meaning of Art To be honest, every person asked would define art in his or her own way, and often the definitions made would significantly differ one from another. These differences can be a result of cultural diversities, different trends, or just different time spans. Nevertheless, there should be a definition universally acceptable for any culture and any epoch. Art can be defined as any human creation that contains an idea other than its utilitarian purpose. Anything can fall under this definition, whether it is a painting, a dance, some object, or just an act. The word idea in the mentioned above definition is a key one, for an artwork without an idea cannot be considered as art.


It is important to understand and interpret numerous issues art addresses, its purposes and themes. The origins of early Australian artwork can be characterized by the aboriginal art, dating as much as several thousands years ago. The Dreaming is a term that refers to all that is known and all that is understood by Aboriginal people. It is central to the existence of traditional Aboriginal people and their lifestyle and culture, for it determines their values and beliefs and their relationships with every living creature and every feature of the landscape. It is the way Aboriginal people explain the beginning of life and how everything in their world came into being. It tells of the journeys and the deeds of Spirit Ancestors who made the trees, rocks, waterholes, and rivers, mountains and stars as well as the animals and plants, and whose spirits inhabit these features of the natural world today. Naturally, there are many different kinds of visual art in Aboriginal Australia.


Some modern paintings are clearly representational and might depict, for example, totemic ancestors in recognizable forms. Central Australian Aborigines like the Walbiri and Pintupi, however, employ a more abstract style, which to uninformed Europeans appears to be non-representational. Yet the abstract nature of these paintings fits neither into representational categories of art nor into abstract art in the sense that we usually mean it. To understand these paintings, (but not to understand precisely what is being said, what the specific narrative or narratives are, or what each mark might represent, but rather to understand the essence of the works) one has to start from the ways in which Aborigines envision them The Dreaming. Central desert paintings contain the essence of aboriginal thought; by examining them one can begin to gain access to an Aboriginal way of perceiving the world. Upon examination of these drawings one can see revealing, their ritual and ceremonial function; there is no concept of an end-directed creation producing an artistic object for contemplation. The purpose of the designs is to pass on knowledge by re-telling the stories of the ancestors; by visually re-visiting the topographical sights that the ancestors saw or created during the Dreamtime, the initiate reinforces a connection with his totemic ancestor. In this way Aboriginal art is process-oriented rather than product-oriented, and perhaps is more closely associated with Western notions of dance than painting.


And, in fact, for ritual purposes, the drawings are almost always executed in conjunction with dance and song. The designs are not used as display devices once they are finished or, indeed, while they are being created. They are instead ritual re-enactments of the ancestors Dreamtime traveling which, in Aboriginal mythology, are synonymous with the creation of the world. As the ancestor traveled he or she created the sites of the earth through song, dance and ritual. Another area of interest when discussing the art of Australia is the multitude of paintings presented by the medieval painters of Australia. Early painters of Australia included artists who recorded scientific and geographical information which were called topographical paintings. Professional artists on voyages of discovery from Great Britain (also known as the United Kingdom) recorded the coastlines and harbors, plants and animals, and local people of the new colony for official accounts; these painters were Thomas Watling, John Eyre, John Glover Conrad Martens and ST Gill. Most of the early Australian painters were amateur artists.


The traditionally English aspects of these topographical paintings were trees or rocks framing the picture, large exposure of the sky; bright ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

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Essay Tags: painting, aboriginal people, aboriginal, sydney, australian

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