Race, Gender and Aesthetics: Representations of Indigeneity in the Artwork of Brownie Downing

Introduction

The article examines the ceramic artwork of Viola Edith Downing (Brownie Downing) from the 1940s and 1950s.
Focuses on representations of Australian Aboriginal children, as well as Native American and Native Hawaiian children on ceramic plates.
These plates were often purchased as tourist souvenirs for home display.
Argues that representations of Indigenous children operate within a gendered white colonising possessive aesthetic.
Childhood innocence and happiness are used to erase colonisation and Indigenous sovereignties.
Keywords: Indigeneity, race, gender, white possessive aesthetic, Brownie Downing

The Rise of Leisure and Consumption

The 20th century saw increased leisure time, private property ownership, and commodity consumption.
Post-World War II, the home became a private space for intimate relationships with objects.
Mass-produced items included household appliances, home décor, and kitsch.
Modernism's introduction into Australian art, led by women artists, influenced the association between consumption and home decorating.
In the 1920s, modernism shifted the focus from white Australian heroism and survival to the immediacy of life.
This transition impacted art teaching outside art schools in museums.
Modernism in Australia was central to discussions about national and cultural identity and the roles of 'woman' and 'artist'.
Female modernist artists like Margaret Preston, Hera Roberts, and Thea Proctor influenced interior decoration, fashion design, and home décor during the interwar years.
The male art establishment considered modernist art a 'marginal, decorative, feminine practice'.
The connection between modernist art and design was associated with feminine attributes like 'fashion' and 'folly', with bold colors seen as an extension of women's accessorising.
The feminisation of modernism and its relegation to the home reflected the gender division of labor.
Women's work was in the private sphere, while men's work was in the public arena.

Masculinist vs. Female Art

Between the 1920s and 1930s, male artists focused their art outside the home, creating a masculinist pastoral representation.
This harmonized Australian landscapes with rural life, signifying the 'nation's progress and civilisation'.
Preston and others opposed this conservative, traditional masculinist form of national art.
Preston and other female artists aimed to develop a unique Australian aesthetic.
Preston sought stylistic inspiration in Aboriginal art, viewing it as 'a legitimate and authentic expression of Australian identity'.
She studied Aboriginal art during her travels in Australia and used it as a template for home décor designs.
Preston frequented the Adelaide Museum's collections of Aboriginal artefacts.
Anthropologist Frederick McCarthy tried to educate Preston on the cultural meaning of Aboriginal designs, but she valued them for their aesthetic application in modernist art.

Anthropologists Influence

Anthropologists played a crucial role in the appropriation of Aboriginal designs for homewares.
Ursula McConnel's 1935 article, "Inspiration and design in Aboriginal art," shaped the use of Aboriginal motifs in homeware design.
Frederick McCarthy's 1938 book, "Australian Aboriginal Decorative Art," featured photographs of Aboriginal designs used by artists and ceramicists.
McCarthy provided Preston with access to Aboriginal material objects.
A. P. Elkin, a leading anthropologist, wrote the foreword to McCarthy’s publication:
- Elkin noted the increasing interest in primitive art.
- He mentioned that people are beginning to realize that Aboriginals are much "higher in the human scale" than previously thought.
- He hoped the book would contribute to the appreciation of Aborigines as people with artistic powers and as human personalities.
- He also hoped that showing appreciation would help Aborigines get rid of the inferiority caused by contact with white people.
Elkin hoped Aboriginal art would bring recognition to Aborigines, providing insight into Australia’s racism in the late 1940s. Aborigines were seen as the lowest form of humanity.
Elkin and McCarthy’s efforts reached the public, but their good intentions did not change Australia’s racism. Aboriginal artists' consent to use their designs was irrelevant.
Aboriginal art entered Australian homes while Aboriginal people remained excluded.
Many designs were reconfigured or reproduced by ceramicists working for potteries like Little Sydney pottery, Studio Anna, Vande, Florenz and Glutch.
By the 1950s, at least 25% of Studio Anna’s products featured representations of Aboriginal people and motifs.

Contributing to Australian Identity

Some immigrant potters aimed for their pottery wares to contribute to an original Australian ethic and identity.
Orpheus Arfaras said, "Aboriginal work must come forward … as the work of Ancient Greeks has come forward, to merge with modern art."
The home was a common place to display objects depicting Aboriginal cultural symbols and people.
Margaret Preston encouraged housewives to buy her wares and take up crafts like interior design and pottery.
Her products were featured in magazines like Art in Australia and The Home.
Preston targeted female tastemakers to build a base for modernist innovations rejected in fine art.
The terms 'housewife' and 'hobby' were frequently associated with representations of Aboriginal art on personal use objects.
Objects depicting Aboriginal peoples and/or culture and motifs produced by non-Aboriginal Australians are now defined as Aboriginalia.
Many ceramic wares produced between the 1930s and the 1960s were for the tourist market, bearing the names of towns or regions.
Tourism had a similar effect in the U.S.A., Canada, Hawaìi, and New Zealand, where Indigenous people and cultural designs were featured in marketing and on kitsch objects for consumption and it commodified and prostituted Indigenous cultures.
Trask argues that the feminisation of Native lands in the Western imaginary sold pleasure to tourists.

Representations and Colonialism

From the mid-19th century, tourism served as a mode of colonisation, creating and spreading stereotypes of Indigenous peoples.
This serviced racist ideologies, shaping national identities and possessive investments in nations.
Tourism promotes commodities that sell inauthenticity as truth about racial and national identities.
Representation involves interpretation and re-presentation that substitutes the very things displaced.
Representations of Indigenous children function within a gendered white colonising possessive aesthetic.
Childhood innocence and happiness erase colonisation and Indigenous sovereignties.
Possession operates through discursive registers, integral to the logic of capital shaping economies of value and subjectivity within modernity.
A gendered white possessive colonising aesthetic is a normative artistic discourse that mobilises race and gender in the service of white taste culture and achievement.

Aboriginalia as Collectables

Aboriginalia continues to be of value as collectables.
Academics have analyzed how Aboriginalia serviced national identity.
Adrian Franklin states that many merchandised Aboriginal objects were and are racist and commercially exploitative.
However, their shock value illustrates and affirms the categorical racism of 20th-century Australian everyday life.
Even respectfully executed decorative arts objects evoke admiration for traditional Aboriginal tribal cultures in a 'lost noble savage' tradition.
These objects may form a starting point for all Australians and Aboriginalia's presence in homes suggests potential for a new understanding in race/cultural relations and a unifying sense of Australianness.
Franklin notes Aboriginalia registers sadness and loss, as well as the moral and ethical contexts, making them shared experiences of Australia.
Franklin’s primary concern is Aboriginalia’s meaningfulness as part of the social construction of national identity and its potential impact on race and cultural relations within the twenty first century.
Franklin’s treatment problematic, noting it was ‘mostly produced by non- Aboriginal people for sale to travellers and tourists around Australia from the 1930s to the 1970s’.
If there is a shared experience of Australia, then what constitutes this experience when these objects were purchased for display in white homes?

Reconciliation and Shared Experience

Reconciliation Australia’s surveys show that many non-Indigenous people have a cultural and racial relationship with Aboriginal people derived from media and educational sources, from 2007 until 2019.
Shared experience involves doing, seeing, feeling, and hearing the same thing.
The production and consumption of these objects were primarily the preserve of white people.
The historical context of Aboriginalia’s production is not the reserves and missions where Aboriginal people lived.
The noble savage tradition fixes Aborigines in a state of nature removed from historical and social conditions.
At the time of production, Aborigines were 'wards' of the State.

Citizenship and Rights

The Australian Citizenship Act 1948 formalized citizenship but didn't stipulate rights.
Australian citizenship came by way of separate Commonwealth and State statutes and administrative practices.
Legally, Indigenous people were 'citizens' but lacked rights due to racially discriminatory legislation as racially discriminatory Commonwealth and State legislation was revoked.
They did not have the right ‘to vote, to speak freely, to choose one’s religion, to move freely, to be equally protected by the law, to enjoy free basic health care and to receive a minimum wage, a minimum level of social security and a basic level of education’.

Racism and Interpretation

Franklin states that these objects are self-evidently racist but does not explain how or why.
He is focused on the affect rather than the conditions that produced the objects.
Taking racism for granted renders it ahistorical and invisible within a sociological understanding of race relations.
This obscures the relationship between groups, elides power, reduces racism to attitudes, implies mutuality, and rivets attention on superficial aspects.
Steinberg argues that epistemic violence occurs in sociological analysis because ‘race relations is the language of the oppressor, whereas “oppression” is the construct – the rhetorical weapon – of the oppressed’.
Race relations, not racism, enables Franklin’s description of these objects as