The opening exhibition at the University of Melbourne’s newly refurbished Potter Museum of Art has been given a darkly ironic and deliberately provocative title: 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art. While there is a vast and storied tradition of Aboriginal art, its power and dignity have been criminally under-appreciated and devalued until only recently.
For most of the 20th century “this work was considered primitive”, says the renowned academic and co-curator of the exhibition, Marcia Langton. The central point of 65,000 Years is declamatory, a forceful demonstration that “this is not an ethnographic collection”, she says. “It’s art.”
