2025 Seminars
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Presentation Type
Presentation
Location
The University of Notre Dame Australia, Broome Campus
The Gallery NDB8 Library Building
Event Website
www.dingodeliveriesfestivefutures.com
Start Date
25-6-2025 12:30 PM
Description
The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds – R D Laing Art as ‘Seeing Business’ into a positive participatively planned future. In the mid 1970s, privileged experiences with respected Kimberley Lawmen of high degree gave me a new life purpose. I learnt a new, systemic paradigm for survival through art, and a reason to use my visual talent in society – differently. I came to realise that the separate threads of my experience as an artist in life incrementally compound and mesh over time. Honed through constant self-reflection in artistic practice, these understandings are the foundation to my 'divergent', altruistic philosophy of art. I can’t expect that those experiences will be easy for others to relate to. I can’t expect the array of encircling words that make sense in my mind will make sense to others who rub different shoulders with more articulate speakers. In WA’s north two stolen generation mothers, Nana Francis and Madge Yu, grew me up. For some reason they steered, coached and coaxed me to join proactive community building initiatives. Initiatives that drew on local volunteers uniting to address urgent local needs. Needs that were often avoidable. Needs caused by bureaucratic discrimination and a domineering sense of entitlement amongst some in power. Operating outside the mainstream art world, my involvement in these often long lasting Indigenous endeavours helped me to see (and see beyond) my well-schooled colonial art market blinkers. These experiences encouraged me to better use my talent, to visualise and try to drive change – anywhere – with both eyes open. Everyone is capable of seeing beyond the binary, in any world. Beyond the line of black and white is the complex tertiary arrangement of ‘full colour’. Beyond charcoal and white ochres, at Old Mowanjum, I watched bush-born Lawman David Mowaljarlai in awe as he marked out a Wandjina figure. He had asked me to “teach” him to paint his story in full colour. I just watched him paint. I was too young, too western, and too blinkered. I am a 1969 WAIT (Curtin Uni) graduate (painting), who was wonderfully educated within a traditional western hierarchy. One that is structured to help me use my visual talent and ability to better compete for profit and status in the braggadocio marketplace of the western art world. In the mid seventies I cobbled together a cross-departmental job as the first ‘guvment art teacha’, teaching art between Derby and Broome in the Kimberley. Up there, Lawmen of high degree challenged me even further to assess and rethink my purpose and identity as an artist. By introducing me to their own art-making context, they disrupted my narrow intentions as 'art teacher', and pushed my focus beyond the box of simple, single-minded 'competition' in the western art world. To me, the art-making context they shared with me seemed to be based on principles of contributing to the enduring survival of families, communities and societies; a comprehensive, social art paradigm of interaction and cooperation. Immersion in that world inevitably changed me. Stories and principles those Lawmen put into my mind reconfigured each other over and over as I painted what I had learned, reworking different hues and patterns from multiple angles, trying to make meaning of and through the whole process-on-canvas. Lawman Albert Barunga taught me to understand something which now feels essential and universal to me, but which I could never have come close to learning from inside the world of universities and art markets: that the reason I am alive, is to learn about life. Indigenous society taught me to recognise culture as a form of belonging, and of learning. In contrast, my Western education felt dominated by notions of 'ownership', including ownership of art, of creativity, and of knowledge itself. Since that time, I’ve tried to use my visual talent with a new emphasis on shared learning, angled towards more meaningful engagement which aims to help solve and act on societal problems, by helping people to see differently. We each observe differently. As J. Pfeffer said, "How we look at things affects how they look and what we do". In traditional Western visual arts, as a matter of survival, we are driven to focus on a competitive marketplace structure (the so-called 'concentric competitive marketplace'). This tends to foster that which is acceptable, popular, and safely 'spectacular', and rewards those artists who best compete for art resources. It prioritises competition and devalues cooperation. Competition can be a powerful driver of progress in all societal domains, but cooperation is necessary for cohesive growth and development (Bacaria, 2007). But what if we can have both eyes opened? Is there a social support structure that creates a public option for better cooperation and crowd engagement in meaning-making? One that may be different from, yet includes our concentric competitive marketplace view of the arts? And if there is such a social support structure, what might it look like? Today, I try to apply my visual talent in an open systems approach, responding to ongoing societal change and contributing to positive future change. As a cartographer of ideas, I call my visual practice “Seeing Business", and describe my work as painterly diagramming. My intuitive “Seeing Business” originated with what I learnt from those Lawmen, leading to the job I call ‘Visionbuilding’. To learn more please visit
Recommended Citation
Buchan, Geoff, "Art as 'Seeing Business'" (2025). Talking Heads Seminar Series. 7.
https://researchonline.nd.edu.au/nulungu_talkingheads/2025/schedule/7
Art as 'Seeing Business'
The University of Notre Dame Australia, Broome Campus
The Gallery NDB8 Library Building
The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds – R D Laing Art as ‘Seeing Business’ into a positive participatively planned future. In the mid 1970s, privileged experiences with respected Kimberley Lawmen of high degree gave me a new life purpose. I learnt a new, systemic paradigm for survival through art, and a reason to use my visual talent in society – differently. I came to realise that the separate threads of my experience as an artist in life incrementally compound and mesh over time. Honed through constant self-reflection in artistic practice, these understandings are the foundation to my 'divergent', altruistic philosophy of art. I can’t expect that those experiences will be easy for others to relate to. I can’t expect the array of encircling words that make sense in my mind will make sense to others who rub different shoulders with more articulate speakers. In WA’s north two stolen generation mothers, Nana Francis and Madge Yu, grew me up. For some reason they steered, coached and coaxed me to join proactive community building initiatives. Initiatives that drew on local volunteers uniting to address urgent local needs. Needs that were often avoidable. Needs caused by bureaucratic discrimination and a domineering sense of entitlement amongst some in power. Operating outside the mainstream art world, my involvement in these often long lasting Indigenous endeavours helped me to see (and see beyond) my well-schooled colonial art market blinkers. These experiences encouraged me to better use my talent, to visualise and try to drive change – anywhere – with both eyes open. Everyone is capable of seeing beyond the binary, in any world. Beyond the line of black and white is the complex tertiary arrangement of ‘full colour’. Beyond charcoal and white ochres, at Old Mowanjum, I watched bush-born Lawman David Mowaljarlai in awe as he marked out a Wandjina figure. He had asked me to “teach” him to paint his story in full colour. I just watched him paint. I was too young, too western, and too blinkered. I am a 1969 WAIT (Curtin Uni) graduate (painting), who was wonderfully educated within a traditional western hierarchy. One that is structured to help me use my visual talent and ability to better compete for profit and status in the braggadocio marketplace of the western art world. In the mid seventies I cobbled together a cross-departmental job as the first ‘guvment art teacha’, teaching art between Derby and Broome in the Kimberley. Up there, Lawmen of high degree challenged me even further to assess and rethink my purpose and identity as an artist. By introducing me to their own art-making context, they disrupted my narrow intentions as 'art teacher', and pushed my focus beyond the box of simple, single-minded 'competition' in the western art world. To me, the art-making context they shared with me seemed to be based on principles of contributing to the enduring survival of families, communities and societies; a comprehensive, social art paradigm of interaction and cooperation. Immersion in that world inevitably changed me. Stories and principles those Lawmen put into my mind reconfigured each other over and over as I painted what I had learned, reworking different hues and patterns from multiple angles, trying to make meaning of and through the whole process-on-canvas. Lawman Albert Barunga taught me to understand something which now feels essential and universal to me, but which I could never have come close to learning from inside the world of universities and art markets: that the reason I am alive, is to learn about life. Indigenous society taught me to recognise culture as a form of belonging, and of learning. In contrast, my Western education felt dominated by notions of 'ownership', including ownership of art, of creativity, and of knowledge itself. Since that time, I’ve tried to use my visual talent with a new emphasis on shared learning, angled towards more meaningful engagement which aims to help solve and act on societal problems, by helping people to see differently. We each observe differently. As J. Pfeffer said, "How we look at things affects how they look and what we do". In traditional Western visual arts, as a matter of survival, we are driven to focus on a competitive marketplace structure (the so-called 'concentric competitive marketplace'). This tends to foster that which is acceptable, popular, and safely 'spectacular', and rewards those artists who best compete for art resources. It prioritises competition and devalues cooperation. Competition can be a powerful driver of progress in all societal domains, but cooperation is necessary for cohesive growth and development (Bacaria, 2007). But what if we can have both eyes opened? Is there a social support structure that creates a public option for better cooperation and crowd engagement in meaning-making? One that may be different from, yet includes our concentric competitive marketplace view of the arts? And if there is such a social support structure, what might it look like? Today, I try to apply my visual talent in an open systems approach, responding to ongoing societal change and contributing to positive future change. As a cartographer of ideas, I call my visual practice “Seeing Business", and describe my work as painterly diagramming. My intuitive “Seeing Business” originated with what I learnt from those Lawmen, leading to the job I call ‘Visionbuilding’. To learn more please visit
www.dingodeliveriesfestivefutures.com
https://researchonline.nd.edu.au/nulungu_talkingheads/2025/schedule/7
Comments
'Geoff Buchan, a fine Artist, Speaker, Vision Builder
Trained in Fine Art Curtain University in Perth was the first Government paid Art Teacher on the Dampier Peninsula 1978 - 1982
A period of massive artistic and enterprise realisation that changed the Broome landscape and drove investment, artistic endeavour and enterprise across theatre, film, music, employment and community initiatives for decades following.
In this talk Geoff explores both the heritage of the Broome Arts Group, why it worked and how that system of thinking and developing community structures and projects is the very process to propel the district forward into the new era of changing geographical, political, community and technology landscapes.
Presentation and interactive experience on the machinations and expression of an evolving Festive Future for Broome, the Dampier Peninsula and the Greater Kimberley region.