Innovation of Paintings and Its Transmission: Case Studies from Aboriginal Art in Australia

Abstract

In this chapter, I focused on the process of the transmission of the traditional and newly innovated knowledge among Australian Aboriginal people. Aboriginal people have their own world view with mythological beings who created the land. Each group has their creation stories, and they paint the important places, travels, and mythological beings on their bodies and land surface for ceremonial purposes. Since the 1970s, their paintings concerning the creation stories and their ancestral land were transformed to marketable item and became very popular as art. Especially since 1990s, many examples of transformations of art styles were observed among Aboriginal paintings. Most of them are the move to abstraction. Figurative and symbolic signs which use to dominate the canvas have disappeared and abstract expressions almost dominate the scene. Among these changes, it was always the case that there are a certain people who started to experiment the new styles to find “the right way.” And the newly innovated style is copied and shared among the people around the innovative person. By looking into the process of the transmission, I argue what kind of people become innovators and how the newly innovated technique is shared and spread among what kind of people. It is to argue how the new innovation is possible, and the followers copy the newly innovated technique.