Jennifer Loureide Biddle. Breasts, bodies, canvas: Central Desert art as experience. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007. [Book Review]

Breasts, Body, Canvas is an evocative book, providing a new and interesting interpretation of contemporary women’s painting from the Central Desert. This kind of painting is devoid of iconicity that explicitly refers to the landscape or to sacred stories and the women who paint it prefer not to discuss stories in relation to them. The paintings therefore resist our under-standing of what Aboriginal art is about, because we generally understand Aboriginal painting as a kind of map of landscape, or iconic representation of the sacred. The book argues against this understanding of Aboriginal art – the power of the work, for Biddle, is not in its symbolic meaning, but in its affect. As such, it is a book that contributes to debates about how we should understand the development of highly abstract forms of contemporary Aboriginal art, how this can be considered a specifically ‘intercultural’ art form, and why we consider this art to be so powerful.