Bad Aboriginal Art
Tradition, Media and Technological Horizons
Bad Aboriginal Art is the extraordinary account of Eric Michaels’ period of residence and work with the Warlpiri Aborigines of western Central Australia, where he studied the impact of television on remote Aboriginal communities.
Sharp, exact, and unrelentingly honest, Michaels records with an extraordinary combination of distance and immersion the intervention of technology into a remote Aboriginal community and that community’s forays into the technology of broadcasting. Michaels’s analyses in Bad Aboriginal Art will disrupt and redirect current debates surrounding the theory and practice of anthropology, ethnography, film and video making, communications policy, and media studies - no less than his work has already disrupted and redirected the cultural technologies of both the Warlpiri and Australian technocrats.
Eric Michaels (1948-1988) was an ethnographer and a theorist of visual arts, medial studies, and broadcasting. His published work has had an impact on the areas of aesthetics, policy analysis, ethnographic filmmaking, anthropology, and technology studies. Michaels was a lecturer in media studies at Griffith University in Brisbane at the time of his death 1988. His AIDS diary was published posthumously under the title Unbecoming.
