SOME PROPERTIES OF ART AND CULTURE

In the early 1970s, the Aboriginal artist and activist Wandjuk Marika asked the Australian government to investigate the unauthorized use of Yolngu clan designs on a variety of commodity forms, inaugurating a process of recognizing indigenous “copyright” for such designs. Copyright, famously, is known to involve a particular formulation of materiality, distinguishing idea from concrete expression, with only the latter being subject to ownership rights as a form of property.¹ However sympathetic to indigenous concerns over controlling their culture, this treatment of design-and cultur-as a form of property involves understandings and practices of materiality and subjectivity that are different from indigenous Aboriginal relationships to cultural production and circulation. In exploring the significance, for material culture theory, of recent work on and events in the development of notions of cultural property, one of my main concerns in this chapter is the relevance of local understandings of objectification-or objectness and human action-as embedded object ideologies. I discuss the limits of legal discourses of cultural property to capture and reflect indigenous Australian concerns about their relation to culture, to creativity, and to expression.