Remote Avant-Garde

"The extraordinary variety of mixed-media arts in outback Australia has not found its scholarly champion. Until now. Drawing on years of immersion in these embattled communities, a complete grasp of relevant theory, and a sympathetic eye, Jennifer Loureide Biddle highlights the painted evocations of everyday life in the town camps around Alice Springs, the animated hybrids of the Tjanpi Desert Weavers, and the Yarrenyty Arltere artists, as well as three exceptional curatorial interventions. In so doing, she demonstrates how Australian Indigenous artists are fighting back, through their ingenious aesthetic, against the degradations that continue to be visited upon them by uncomprehending governments."   - Terry Smith, author of Contemporary Art: World Currents

"Introducing an entire complex array of art, film, and digital forms, Jennifer Loureide Biddle destabilizes standard divisions between urban and remote Indigenous arts and politics, and between art as representation and art as performative social intervention. She does this all while simultaneously moving readers into the social complexity of Western Desert Indigenous art and outward into contemporary Australia's broader social politics of culture and arts. Remote Avant-Garde is a tour de force of aesthetic life under settler occupation that moves approaches to art, politics, and aesthetic theory in new and exciting directions."  - Elizabeth A. Povinelli, author of Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism

"[W]ith a breathtaking focus on the new, the emergent, the hybrid and the innovative (213), the book’s artworks, and the writing itself, bristle with energy.... This is a refreshingly sensitive and nuanced account that is a must-read not only for those interested in the specificities of emerging Indigenous artistic traditions in the Northern Territory and elsewhere, but also for those interested in the ongoing political, cultural and economic processes of so-called ‘settler’ societies across Australia and beyond."
  - Peter Kilroy, LSE Review of Books

"Remote Avant-Garde is a welcome contribution to scholarship on Aboriginal art and cultural heritage. . . . I would (and assuredly will) assign it (or individual chapters) in upper-level or graduate courses in Museum Studies, Visual Anthropology, or Indigenous Studies." - Christopher D. Berk, Museum Anthropology Review

"Remote Avant-Garde: Aboriginal Art under Occupation, by Jennifer Loureide Biddle, is a welcome addition to the literature on Indigenous Australian art, and more broadly to anthropologies of art, Indigenous Australia, and global Indigenous arts and aesthetics. I heartily recommend it to anyone in those fields, and would happily teach with it in anthropology, art history, art/artworlds, and museum studies." - Sabra G. Thorner, Anthropological Quarterly

"Jennifer Loureide Biddle has dared to deal with a daunting, dazzling array of 'remote' art in its multiple forms and complex contexts. The result is a profound, far from dispassionate book which does justice to an extraordinary canon of art." - Noelene Cole, Journal of Anthropological Research

"Remote Avant-Garde brilliantly revitalizes the literature on Aboriginal art by attending to fascinating experimental art practices and a fresh aesthetics emerging in remote Aboriginal communities. . . . [It] should be read not only by scholars interested in Aboriginal art but also anyone wanting to understand creative forms of political agency in colonial and postcolonial contexts." - Rosita Henry, American Anthropologist

"Remote Avant-Garde is a timely book whose affective politics can be read not only in terms of anti-colonialism, but as art theory of figurative and text-based work from the Western Desert, rather than another contribution to the discussion of abstraction that has dominated discussions of art from this part of the world." - Jennifer Hyndman, Anthropological Forum

"It [is] refreshing to see so many women artists represented in the avant-garde. . . . Jennifer L. Biddle sheds a different light on the usual dichotomy of remote/urban artists that has permeated art writing."  - Louise Hamby, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute