Plenary title: Visual Culture: Semiotic Paradoxes of Painting, Patronage and Politics

Plenary abstract: Julie Dowling is an Aboriginal painter, born and living in Perth, but with strong kinship ties throughout Western Australia. She is currently one of the best-selling Australian artists, with her exhibitions selling out virtually before they open. Apart from their strong colours and striking design, her paintings confront the viewer with overt themes of racial exploitation and degradation and rejection of institutional authority, but  family solidarity and confident personal identity. They engage the viewer modally with devices of gaze, framing, light, colour and ironic code-switching, and their composition plays with juxtaposition, proportion, texture contrasts, cross-hatching and dots. Moving from an analysis of a selection of Julie’s paintings over a decade to a broad cross-section of current Aboriginal artists, I will trace some of the paradoxes of the politics underlying their patronage. Following the strong principles of M.A.K. Halliday and his followers among critical linguists, I will move from the retrievable evidence in the “visual grammar” of particular texts to the description of genres and the prevailing social semiotics within which and for which Julie is painting.