Open AccessBreasts, Bodies, Art: Central Desert Women’s Paintings and the Politics of the Aesthetic Encounter
Author(s) -
Jennifer Loureide Biddle
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
cultural studies review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.116
H-Index - 2
eISSN - 1837-8692
pISSN - 1446-8123
DOI - 10.5130/csr.v12i1.3410
Subject(s) - painting , interpretation (philosophy) , desert (philosophy) , argument (complex analysis) , narrative , politics , aesthetics , art , history , sociology , art history , literature , philosophy , epistemology , political science , linguistics , biochemistry , chemistry , law
This paper is concerned with a culturally distinctive relationship between breasts and contemporary art from Central Desert Aboriginal women. Contra to the dominant interpretation of these paintings as representations of ‘country’—cartographic ‘maps’ of the landscape, narratives of Dreaming Ancestors, flora, fauna, species—my argument is that these works bespeak a particular breasted experience and expression, a cultural way of doing and being in the world; what I want to call a breasted ontology