AustLit

'‘The crucial starting point of this book’, art historian Ian McLean states in his introduction to Rattling Spears, ‘is that Indigenous art has a modern history; it is one of the many modernisms produced from modernity’s global reach’ (8). The book is not a compendium of definitions and interpretations for the general reader, or an anthropological account of Indigenous art, or an attempt to situate it within an Australian art historical narrative. Instead, it is founded on the concept of transculturation – of cross-cultural pollination, influence and exchange, enabling a stimulating and sometimes challenging reading of key figures in the field. McLean’s text makes an important departure in identifying and foregrounding the agency of Indigenous artists in their encounters with colonisers and in their contact with the modern world, presenting a ‘history of how Indigenous artists engaged with, and responded to, this meeting with modernity and in the process became modern artists’ (11). In short, it is not the history of this subject but a history, a thoughtful study which insists on resisting the inclination to interpret the output of Indigenous artists as being somehow diminished for having been created post-contact, demonstrating instead the inventiveness, resilience and defiance intrinsic in ‘contact art’. The rattling spears of the title, McLean explains, ‘is a chilling sound that calls ancestors from their sleep. It is also a strategic manoeuvre to reclaim authority’ (130).' (Introduction)