Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons.

The third volume in the "Theory Out of Bounds" series published by the University of Minnesota Press, Bad Aboriginal Art is a collection of writings by the American ethnographic researcher and media specialist Eric Michaels. At the time of his death in 1988 at the age of 40, Michaels was a lecturer in Media Studies at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. As explained in an introduction by Dick Hebdige, Michaels never obtained sufficient insider status to complete a scholarly text for publication before his death. One of Michaels's last wishes was for the publication of an anthology of his essays, papers, and project reports. Bad Aboriginal Art is that long-awaited collection. From 1982-86 Michaels was a Visiting Fellow at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies to research the impact of new global communications technology on specific rural Aboriginal communities with a tradition of complex and controlled internal information systems. During these years he studied the Warlpiri people of Yuendumu, western Central Australia. Most of the work in this collection stems from this period of intense research.

Three introductions to the book outline Michaels's role in the local Aboriginal media revolution; its larger role in the area of universal cultural studies (where Hebdige draws parallels to the work of Jacques Darrida, Marshall McLuhan, and Edmund Carpenter); and the ongoing effects of his work on the local community. These introductory essays provide a concrete background from which to view Michaels and his ethnographic practice, but it is Michaels's unique style and his obvious investment in his studies that hold the most interest for the reader.

Michaels's humor and sarcasm. as well as his range of study and interest, are evident in essay titles ranging from "If All Anthropologists are Liars . . .," in which he discusses, in part, the epistemological role of reflexive anthropological practice, to "Hundreds Shot at Aboriginal Community: ABC Makes TV Documentany, at Yuendumu," in which he calls into question the methods and motives of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, to "Bad Aboriginal Art," in which he discusses the artistic and economic state of contemporary Aboriginal painting and its place in the postmodern debate. His tone is well-versed, casual, even intimate, and although he refuted claims that he had "gone native," his writing reflects a great sense of connection with and loyalty to the Aboriginal culture. He expresses concern over the potential harm of a movement toward protectionism in "Hollywood Iconography: A Warlpiri Reading," and stresses the need for a more complete understanding of the attractiveness and accessibility of electronic media to Aboriginal communities over print and literacy. The essays evidence Michaels's excitement over the creative potential of the communities he studied, and he is quick to point out their technological successes. But it is the struggle for Aboriginal media access that Michaels feels closest to, the processes of acquisition, production, and examining content and the relevance it has for all cultures. As he states in "Aboriginal Content: Who's Got It--Who Needs It?," his intent was to adopt a reflexive posture to examine the Aboriginal experience of contemporary media in order to understand "not [the Aboriginal] media revolution," but our own.

Michaels examines the social mores governing the use and dissemination of traditional tribal information and technologically-produced images, as well as the economic hardships faced by Aboriginal television and video producers. He discusses the possible contemporary uses of media in Australia as both an agent of culturecide and one of Aboriginal empowerment. He demonstrates a remarkable empathy with the cultural history of the Yuendumu people and their struggles to maintain traditional ways while incorporating appropriated technologies and images into their changing society. Michaels maintains that to truly understand another culture, one must study specific ethnographic examples, such as his description of the recently-adopted Aboriginal act of replacing the memorial bones of the deceased with photographs as "taming the magical properties of recording media." He discusses in depth the vast differences between cultures based on an oral tradition and Western societies steeped in print and electronic media, such as taboos concerning the transmission of certain information both among tribal members and to those outside the community and specific representations of such icons as alcohol consumption, ceremony, gender, the dead, and sacred notions of time and place. Also addressed are the specific differences in production techniques and content as prescribed by existing tribal laws of representation and image re-production, as well as the complexities of tribal ideology. Michaels explains the implications and practical considerations of the secrecy and sacredness of information and imagery, as they are considered by many Aboriginals to be the most valuable personal property.

As a researcher, Michaels had great strength of character, determination, and belief in his own work. Although his stance often tended to ostracize him from his own native non-Aboriginal community, he never hesitated to criticize Australia's technocrats, among others, including the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) and its symbiotic relationship with the federal government. This collection includes "Aboriginal Content: Who's Got It--Who Needs It?," a controversial speech given to the Australian Screen Studies Association that concerns the CAAMA. Following the essay is reprinted a letter of self-defense to criticisms levelled at Michaels in which he states "I believe that the things I said in the talk were right . . . that the effect of my criticisms [is] really positive." In the same letter he explains that he has refused offers from another camp to publish the paper as it "is part of a whole performance and without the talk and response by the panel . . . might get misinterpreted."

Unfortunately, the text is sparsely illustrated, and perhaps would have benefited from the inclusion of more and larger visual examples of Aboriginal video and television production. The essays in Bad Aboriginal Art provide a fascinating account of a changing society by a talented, dedicated researcher whose premature death has left a void, and a legacy, in contemporary Aboriginal ethnography. As Michaels himself states in closing the last piece of the collection, "Postscript: My Essay on Postmodernism": "I have bought myself another five minutes' fame."