One of the leading debates in Cultural Studies around the world deals with the issues of cultural difference or ethnicity in relation to concepts of a national culture.
Exhibition Review: Josie Starrs, Margaret Worth, Fay Poole and Barbara Zerbini
Experimental Art Foundation
Adelaide South Australia
June 1990 and touring to regional galleries.
Fortunately the artists are capable of overturning all the newly acceptable conceits about them, and they might deny most of the assumptions that multicultural academics make about them, whilst still giving a new window on our world, as indeed, all good art from anywhere will.
Since the birth of Australian television, non-anglo Australians have suffered from an acute case of foreign accent syndrome. Unfortunately 35 years on they are still suffering, not only from bad accents usually spoken by Anglo actors playing NESBs, but from the dearth of authentic storylines and subsequently the lack of accurate representation of NESBs on our TV and screens.
A great starting point for more research in this area. List prepared by Dr Helen Andreoni, of the School of Aboriginal and Multicultural Studies, University of New England.
The way that I want to convey that meaning [racism] here is to use a small number of relatively random examples of current art/race = art/power debates from around the world. They give a flavour of the issues. They have obvious relevance to Australia's relationship to the rest of the world, as well as to relationships within Australia.
With the exception of some programming on SBS and the ABC, artists receive very little exposure on television. The limitations of television, the need to maintain a wide audience reach, the difficult question of what is 'good art' in a televisual sense, all may help to explain the absence of living artists from this, the most powerful of all media.
The Broome Mix is useful to bear in mind when thinking on all things multicultural - cultural diversity. In Broome that's culture - a mix of Aboriginal, Asian and European.