Sat - July 24, 2010
Hail and Farewell: an American eye in transition
I started this blog in September 2005 using a
nice piece of software called iBlog and publishing it through my .Mac account.
As you may have noticed if you trawl through earlier posts or follow links
to them in my recent writing, things have gotten a little flaky. Images
are disappearing at random, and sometimes whole posts. So I’ve
decided to bite the bullet and try to shift my work to WordPress where Aboriginal Art & Culture: an American
eye is being reborn (http://aboriginalartandculture.wordpress.com/).
I toyed with the idea of trying to migrate this entire site to WordPress, but there proved to be no practical way of doing so. iBlog has always been a bit out of the mainstream of blogging platforms, and while I've been very happy with its capabilities until recently, the sad fact is that it's no longer actively developed or supported and I'm spending almost as much time each week fixing things as I am writing new posts. So I will leave this site up indefinitely and transfer my energies to learning the tricks and features of the new platform.
One of the new features that WordPress easily enables is a link to Twitter feeds, and I hope to take advantage of that to point readers to some of the good stuff that I come across in the course of a week but that I wouldn't normally blog about, or blog in a timely fashion. Comments are built in as well; but check the "About the blog" page if you want to contact me directly.
In five years I've managed, thanks to many of you who have put up links to this site on your own websites and blogs, to pull myself up the Google rankings, meaning there's a good chance that those who aren't regular readers can discover posts. So please, if you can, change your links to my new address. Subscribe to the new RSS feed. Spread the word.
And thanks to all of you who have made the last five years so exciting, rewarding, and instructive. Here we go again!
At Yuendumu with Paddy Japaljarri Sims and Kerry S., May 2007.
I toyed with the idea of trying to migrate this entire site to WordPress, but there proved to be no practical way of doing so. iBlog has always been a bit out of the mainstream of blogging platforms, and while I've been very happy with its capabilities until recently, the sad fact is that it's no longer actively developed or supported and I'm spending almost as much time each week fixing things as I am writing new posts. So I will leave this site up indefinitely and transfer my energies to learning the tricks and features of the new platform.
One of the new features that WordPress easily enables is a link to Twitter feeds, and I hope to take advantage of that to point readers to some of the good stuff that I come across in the course of a week but that I wouldn't normally blog about, or blog in a timely fashion. Comments are built in as well; but check the "About the blog" page if you want to contact me directly.
In five years I've managed, thanks to many of you who have put up links to this site on your own websites and blogs, to pull myself up the Google rankings, meaning there's a good chance that those who aren't regular readers can discover posts. So please, if you can, change your links to my new address. Subscribe to the new RSS feed. Spread the word.
And thanks to all of you who have made the last five years so exciting, rewarding, and instructive. Here we go again!
At Yuendumu with Paddy Japaljarri Sims and Kerry S., May 2007.
Posted at 10:54 AM
Sat - July 17, 2010
Brook Andrew at the Biennale
I've always enjoyed and admired Brook
Andrew's work. The way that it slides from slapstick humor to grim
seriousness, sometimes in the same piece. But most certainly over the course of
his career, Andrew has consistently surprised me as his neon sculptures gave way
to the spooky romanticism of the Kalar Midday photographs or the Gun-Metal Gray portraits. And now he's come
back with an installation at the Sydney Biennale that's as goofy and it is grim.
Thanks to the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales and
their COFA Talks Online video series, here is a brief
look at the installation of Andrew's Jumping Castle War Memorial on
Cockatoo Island.
Jumping Castle War Memorial (video)
There's a great moment in the latter half of the video when Andrew is asked by a member of his audience what the role of the artist is. His answer? "The role of the artist is like the role of the chef. Some people like the food, some people don't like the food." It's typical of Andrew's spot-on, throwaway, dead serious humor. Just like the Jumping Castle War Memorial itself.
Jumping Castle War Memorial (video)
There's a great moment in the latter half of the video when Andrew is asked by a member of his audience what the role of the artist is. His answer? "The role of the artist is like the role of the chef. Some people like the food, some people don't like the food." It's typical of Andrew's spot-on, throwaway, dead serious humor. Just like the Jumping Castle War Memorial itself.
Posted at 12:41 PM
A Brief History in Yuendumu
The new service from the National Library of
Australia, Trove, is a marvel whose gifts I'm just
beginning to explore. It offers a single search that will retrieves matches
from over 93 million books, magazines, newspaper articles (dating back to
1803!), diaries and archives, photographs, maps, sound recordings, and archived
websites. Want to peer inside the men's painting shed at Papunya in 1972 or study
the photographs of Central Desert artists by Greg
Weight that were recently on view in Sydney? Or listen to Tom Calma's address
"Still
Riding for Freedom"? You can do it all through Trove. (And there's a
permanent link to the site in the right-hand sidebar of this
blog.)
One of the amazing, serendipitous features of Trove is that links to results from searches continue to pop up in my Google Alerts, which is how I discovered a rather obscure little monograph entitled Yuendumu: Betrayal of Black Rights, by Chris Raynal (Blue Water Publishing, 1990).
Raynal went to Yuendumu in May 1988 as the Administrator of the Community Council on a two-year contract. He left a little over fourteen months later. His book is his record of his times, of what he saw as his accomplishments, and of the bitter fighting and politicking he endured during his tenure. It is a fascinating story, first of all of politics in an Aboriginal community: the infighting among families and factions within the Warlpiri world as well as the tense relations between black and white and among the Europeans themselves. More than that, it describes the fraught connections between the community and the larger world of Territory politics, the conflict between Darwin and the bush, the conservative government and the still-nascent sphere of self-determination.
Raynal's story is not always easy to follow. He was a young man when he wrote it and the writing of the book was at least in part a therapeutic exercise that emerged from his bitterness, stress, and disillusionment on leaving the community and after battling with the Office of Local Government. He apparently went to Yuendumu shortly after leaving university and the voice we hear in these pages is one of youth, naivete, and self-righteousness. If never exactly arrogant, Raynal is utterly convinced of his purity of intention and his moral superiority to the other Europeans who lived in Yuendumu at the time. This isn't always an endearing voice, and occasionally he slips and reveals his unexamined sense of superiority to the Warlpiri to whom he otherwise professes to be the humble servant.
For a number of sensible reasons, Raynal names no names in this book. Everyone is referred to by a title. There is the President of the Council, the Essential Services Officer, the Powerhouse Operator, the Outstations Coordinator. This has the dual effect of making the story into even more of a morality play than its narrative might otherwise create, as everyone becomes a role if not an archetype. It also leads to a fair amount of confusion for a reader like myself not well acquainted with these roles and the people likely to fill them. At one very simple level, it's hard to tell the blackfellas from the whitefellas on occasion, which makes sorting the black hats from the white hats even harder.
By and large, though, the Europeans are the villains in the piece, far more concerned with protecting their own way of life in Yuendumu that supporting the principles of self-determination or even enabling the Warlpiri to manage the most insignificant of their own affairs. Raynal sees himself as the champion of Indigenous desires, and if balancing the Council's budget means reducing hours at the bank and the post office, and setting those reduced hours to accommodate Indigenous rather than European schedules and convenience, he never thinks twice. It is somewhat sad to watch him, early in his career at Yuendumu, win battle after battle without ever quite realizing that he is losing the war.
By his own account, he early on alienated the white community, and he takes this as a badge of honor. When later on, he is caught in the web of Indigenous politics, when the drinkers begin to gain a foothold in the Council, when family politics wearies his allies and they retreat from the fray, he finds himself alone and adrift. When the Office of Local Government steps in to investigate the parlous state of the Council's budget, Raynal's fate is sealed.
But Chris Raynal is nothing if not a fighter. When the OLG attempts to withhold a final payment to him, he settles in from Alice Springs for another battle and in the end is victorious, if pyrrhically. ("Another victory like that and we're done for", jokes Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's Ulysses.)
Apart from its intimate if perhaps slightly unreliable portrait of infighting and politics in an Aboriginal community in the wake of Whitlam's reforms, Raynal's book stands as a welcome historical record of the cyclical struggles to find a way forward in the mire of Aboriginal affairs more generally. In the wake of Howard's intervention and the rhetoric of "thirty years of failed policy" it is more than useful to see what that policy looked like on the ground when it was attempting to break free of the nightmare of history, if I may quote Joyce once more. Leaving Yuendumu, Raynal writes "If we expect history to judge us kindly on our humanity to Aborigines, then we had better use the time still available to us to accomplish something. It is evident that we have wasted two hundred years" (p. 166).
One of the amazing, serendipitous features of Trove is that links to results from searches continue to pop up in my Google Alerts, which is how I discovered a rather obscure little monograph entitled Yuendumu: Betrayal of Black Rights, by Chris Raynal (Blue Water Publishing, 1990).
Raynal went to Yuendumu in May 1988 as the Administrator of the Community Council on a two-year contract. He left a little over fourteen months later. His book is his record of his times, of what he saw as his accomplishments, and of the bitter fighting and politicking he endured during his tenure. It is a fascinating story, first of all of politics in an Aboriginal community: the infighting among families and factions within the Warlpiri world as well as the tense relations between black and white and among the Europeans themselves. More than that, it describes the fraught connections between the community and the larger world of Territory politics, the conflict between Darwin and the bush, the conservative government and the still-nascent sphere of self-determination.
Raynal's story is not always easy to follow. He was a young man when he wrote it and the writing of the book was at least in part a therapeutic exercise that emerged from his bitterness, stress, and disillusionment on leaving the community and after battling with the Office of Local Government. He apparently went to Yuendumu shortly after leaving university and the voice we hear in these pages is one of youth, naivete, and self-righteousness. If never exactly arrogant, Raynal is utterly convinced of his purity of intention and his moral superiority to the other Europeans who lived in Yuendumu at the time. This isn't always an endearing voice, and occasionally he slips and reveals his unexamined sense of superiority to the Warlpiri to whom he otherwise professes to be the humble servant.
For a number of sensible reasons, Raynal names no names in this book. Everyone is referred to by a title. There is the President of the Council, the Essential Services Officer, the Powerhouse Operator, the Outstations Coordinator. This has the dual effect of making the story into even more of a morality play than its narrative might otherwise create, as everyone becomes a role if not an archetype. It also leads to a fair amount of confusion for a reader like myself not well acquainted with these roles and the people likely to fill them. At one very simple level, it's hard to tell the blackfellas from the whitefellas on occasion, which makes sorting the black hats from the white hats even harder.
By and large, though, the Europeans are the villains in the piece, far more concerned with protecting their own way of life in Yuendumu that supporting the principles of self-determination or even enabling the Warlpiri to manage the most insignificant of their own affairs. Raynal sees himself as the champion of Indigenous desires, and if balancing the Council's budget means reducing hours at the bank and the post office, and setting those reduced hours to accommodate Indigenous rather than European schedules and convenience, he never thinks twice. It is somewhat sad to watch him, early in his career at Yuendumu, win battle after battle without ever quite realizing that he is losing the war.
By his own account, he early on alienated the white community, and he takes this as a badge of honor. When later on, he is caught in the web of Indigenous politics, when the drinkers begin to gain a foothold in the Council, when family politics wearies his allies and they retreat from the fray, he finds himself alone and adrift. When the Office of Local Government steps in to investigate the parlous state of the Council's budget, Raynal's fate is sealed.
But Chris Raynal is nothing if not a fighter. When the OLG attempts to withhold a final payment to him, he settles in from Alice Springs for another battle and in the end is victorious, if pyrrhically. ("Another victory like that and we're done for", jokes Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's Ulysses.)
Apart from its intimate if perhaps slightly unreliable portrait of infighting and politics in an Aboriginal community in the wake of Whitlam's reforms, Raynal's book stands as a welcome historical record of the cyclical struggles to find a way forward in the mire of Aboriginal affairs more generally. In the wake of Howard's intervention and the rhetoric of "thirty years of failed policy" it is more than useful to see what that policy looked like on the ground when it was attempting to break free of the nightmare of history, if I may quote Joyce once more. Leaving Yuendumu, Raynal writes "If we expect history to judge us kindly on our humanity to Aborigines, then we had better use the time still available to us to accomplish something. It is evident that we have wasted two hundred years" (p. 166).
Posted at 11:56 AM
Sat - July 10, 2010
More American Horizons
I don't often write about exhibitions that I
haven't seen in person. Even the best documentation in printed form or on a
website can seriously under-represent the quality of work on display in a
gallery. Tony Bond has just produced a beautiful PDF catalog for the new
Mimili Maku 2010 show that's on display at
his Adelaide gallery. But despite the excellent production values, the
reproductions just can't quite produce the impact of the works on the gallery
walls. Take a look at the catalog, and then watch the short video that Tony's posted on YouTube and see if
you don't agree: the works are knockouts, even on YouTube's small
screen.
But there are two other exhibitions that I won't get to see in person that I want to draw attention to nevertheless. They have been mounted here in America, and for that reason alone they merit a mention, although they are both fine shows in their own right. Both are out west, rather than on my more usual eastern seaboard stamping grounds.
The first to open was the new show from Papunya Tula Artists, Art of the Western Desert of Australia, organized by Julie Harvey, who lent her considerable talents to the PTA exhibition last September in New York City at NYU's WSE80 Gallery. The show, which opened on July 2 in Ketchum, Idaho (Sun Valley) features twenty-one paintings by Papunya Tula superstars and a few younger artists, many of whom were also included in the New York roster ten months ago. The works are on a somewhat more modest scale; only the featured canvas by Ningura Napurrula (right) reaches 6' in either dimension, but they share the elegance and impact of their New York cousins. There is another brilliant work by Johnny Yungut Tjupurrula, who once again manages to evoke flickering torchlight playing over lichenous paintings on the walls of caves. Ronnie Tjampitjinpa's pearl-shell meanders are intricate and hypnotic and optically charged, while Warlimpriinga Tjaplatjarri contributes another visually destabilizing but ineffably subtle painting of the western sandhills. The rising young talent in this show is Matthew West Tjupurrula, with a small (91 x 46 cm) canvas that combines the simple path-and-roundel motif with the right-angled meanders that inform the work of many Kiwirrkura-Balgo based artists from Patrick Tjungurrayi to Fred Tjakamarra.
Paul Sweeney was in town to open the show on July 1 with a lecture and a video presentation drawn from Hetti Perkins new ABC documentaries on Indigenous artists, Art & Soul. I'm pleased to see that these events were hosted by the Ketchum Community Library, which also screened the feature on Geoffrey Bardon, Mr Patterns, after the 4th of July holiday weekend. This past Thursday, Julie Harvey herself inaugurated a month-long series of Thursday lectures on the artists' works and Dreaming stories. The exhibition closes on July 30.
Meanwhile, in another artistic capital of the American West, Melbourne gallerist Vivien Anderson has teamed up with Santa Fe's Chiaroscuro Contemporary Art to produce a show of exceptional loveliness entitled Australian Contemporary Indigenous Art - Now. Chiaroscuro's director, John Addison, is another in the large community of Americans who saw the Dreamings exhibition in this country in 1988 and whose interest in the new art of Indigenous Australia was permanently piqued by its treasure. As befits a new partnership to develop the market for Aboriginal art in America, Anderson has assembled an eclectic show that demonstrates a breadth of artistic endeavor spanning the continent from South Australia to Elcho Island.
The deserts are represented by work from South Australia's Tjungu Palya (including Kunmunara Tingima's large and lustrous Kala Ala (2009) at left) and Western Australia's Spinifex Project. Burning reds and oranges dominate the works from Tjungu Playa for the most part, intercut with Maringka Baker's rain-soaked greens. Ginger Wikilyiri's mid-sized canvases run variations on themes that Baker has exploited successfully in recent years, but he enlivens the palette with bold strokes of white lines and fields of yellow, all alive with visions of perenties and death adders. In Kunumata (2009) the compositional tension between verdant sandhills, writhing serpents and golden sands is held in check by a grid of black circles that appear to float above the surface of the canvas at the same time that they penetrate the picture plane.
The contributions of the Spinifex Project are dominated by two large and brilliant canvases by old master Roy Underwood. A simple black background is overlaid by the red fires of an ancient war in Miramiratjara & Kurualla (2010), while Mulaya (2009) features a similar geometric design in blue, interwoven with serpents and emu tracks. Nulbingka Simms's Wayul and the large women's collaborative painting Tjintirtjintir (both 2010) both feature the characteristic Spinifex fields rich with incident and brimming with color.
The northern bark painting tradition is spectacularly represented in Santa Fe by a suite of works by Dhuwarrwarr Marika representing the sacred spring that provides fresh water on the dunes above the beach at Yalangbara. This is where the Djang'kawu ended their long sea journey and set creating the land and the Yolngu peoples. Spinning like inverted vortices, these depictions of life-giving water vibrate timelessly.
At Yirrkala's Buku-Larrnggay Mulka art centre, where these paintings come from, art centre advisors Andrew Blake and Will Stubbs are known to speak of an artist's "hand" with admiration: the quality we might call draftsmanship, or admire for its precision or unerring sureness. In my mind, no one among the many brilliant painters in the community has a finer hand than Djirrirra Wunungmurra, who creates intricate, dense, geometrical patternings of the Buyku fishtrap reaches of the Gangan River. She has supplemented these masterpieces of abstraction with a more conventional rendering of the river's reaches that features the iconic crayfishes, snakes, and birds of her clan. In another striking bark painting, Buyku Vortex (2010), she has clearly absorbed the experiments Wukun Wanambi has engaged in over the last few years. But for me, the masterpiece of the show is Yukuwa (2010), a pale white and black depiction of the yam that shimmers like a Chinese waterfall.
Rounding out the exhibition and making explicit the connections between art and ceremony is a group of morning star poles (banumbirr) by the Gali'winku master Gali Yalkarriwuy Gurruwiwi (photo by Vanessa Hunter for hunterlloydmedia). Massed and static collections of these rich, sacred objects have become a familiar feature of many a recent exhibition, yet they never fail to make me catch a breath when I see them. Years on, I find my delight and wonder in front of these magnificent creations as eternal as the morning star's daily return.
A brilliant and beautiful catalog for this exhibition is available from both Anderson's Melbourne Gallery and from Chiaroscuro in the US. It features an excellent assessment of the accomplishments of the Tjungu Palya artists by Christine Nicholls and vivid explications of the work of the Spinifex painters by Louise Allerton and Peter Twigg. Will Stubbs contributes a pair of his inimitable essays on Marika and Wunungmurra that are appreciations of art, myth, history and politics all at once. And finally, and perhaps most surprisingly, Gali Yalkarriwuy speaks in his own voice of the meaning of the banumbirr, the history of its revelation to non-indigenous people, and the startling affirmation of its power that he found in Christian sermons as well as in Israel, Japan, and Inuit lands.
Australian Contemporary Indigenous Art Now will be on display in Santa Fe, New Mexico until August 31.
But there are two other exhibitions that I won't get to see in person that I want to draw attention to nevertheless. They have been mounted here in America, and for that reason alone they merit a mention, although they are both fine shows in their own right. Both are out west, rather than on my more usual eastern seaboard stamping grounds.
The first to open was the new show from Papunya Tula Artists, Art of the Western Desert of Australia, organized by Julie Harvey, who lent her considerable talents to the PTA exhibition last September in New York City at NYU's WSE80 Gallery. The show, which opened on July 2 in Ketchum, Idaho (Sun Valley) features twenty-one paintings by Papunya Tula superstars and a few younger artists, many of whom were also included in the New York roster ten months ago. The works are on a somewhat more modest scale; only the featured canvas by Ningura Napurrula (right) reaches 6' in either dimension, but they share the elegance and impact of their New York cousins. There is another brilliant work by Johnny Yungut Tjupurrula, who once again manages to evoke flickering torchlight playing over lichenous paintings on the walls of caves. Ronnie Tjampitjinpa's pearl-shell meanders are intricate and hypnotic and optically charged, while Warlimpriinga Tjaplatjarri contributes another visually destabilizing but ineffably subtle painting of the western sandhills. The rising young talent in this show is Matthew West Tjupurrula, with a small (91 x 46 cm) canvas that combines the simple path-and-roundel motif with the right-angled meanders that inform the work of many Kiwirrkura-Balgo based artists from Patrick Tjungurrayi to Fred Tjakamarra.
Paul Sweeney was in town to open the show on July 1 with a lecture and a video presentation drawn from Hetti Perkins new ABC documentaries on Indigenous artists, Art & Soul. I'm pleased to see that these events were hosted by the Ketchum Community Library, which also screened the feature on Geoffrey Bardon, Mr Patterns, after the 4th of July holiday weekend. This past Thursday, Julie Harvey herself inaugurated a month-long series of Thursday lectures on the artists' works and Dreaming stories. The exhibition closes on July 30.
Meanwhile, in another artistic capital of the American West, Melbourne gallerist Vivien Anderson has teamed up with Santa Fe's Chiaroscuro Contemporary Art to produce a show of exceptional loveliness entitled Australian Contemporary Indigenous Art - Now. Chiaroscuro's director, John Addison, is another in the large community of Americans who saw the Dreamings exhibition in this country in 1988 and whose interest in the new art of Indigenous Australia was permanently piqued by its treasure. As befits a new partnership to develop the market for Aboriginal art in America, Anderson has assembled an eclectic show that demonstrates a breadth of artistic endeavor spanning the continent from South Australia to Elcho Island.
The deserts are represented by work from South Australia's Tjungu Palya (including Kunmunara Tingima's large and lustrous Kala Ala (2009) at left) and Western Australia's Spinifex Project. Burning reds and oranges dominate the works from Tjungu Playa for the most part, intercut with Maringka Baker's rain-soaked greens. Ginger Wikilyiri's mid-sized canvases run variations on themes that Baker has exploited successfully in recent years, but he enlivens the palette with bold strokes of white lines and fields of yellow, all alive with visions of perenties and death adders. In Kunumata (2009) the compositional tension between verdant sandhills, writhing serpents and golden sands is held in check by a grid of black circles that appear to float above the surface of the canvas at the same time that they penetrate the picture plane.
The contributions of the Spinifex Project are dominated by two large and brilliant canvases by old master Roy Underwood. A simple black background is overlaid by the red fires of an ancient war in Miramiratjara & Kurualla (2010), while Mulaya (2009) features a similar geometric design in blue, interwoven with serpents and emu tracks. Nulbingka Simms's Wayul and the large women's collaborative painting Tjintirtjintir (both 2010) both feature the characteristic Spinifex fields rich with incident and brimming with color.
The northern bark painting tradition is spectacularly represented in Santa Fe by a suite of works by Dhuwarrwarr Marika representing the sacred spring that provides fresh water on the dunes above the beach at Yalangbara. This is where the Djang'kawu ended their long sea journey and set creating the land and the Yolngu peoples. Spinning like inverted vortices, these depictions of life-giving water vibrate timelessly.
At Yirrkala's Buku-Larrnggay Mulka art centre, where these paintings come from, art centre advisors Andrew Blake and Will Stubbs are known to speak of an artist's "hand" with admiration: the quality we might call draftsmanship, or admire for its precision or unerring sureness. In my mind, no one among the many brilliant painters in the community has a finer hand than Djirrirra Wunungmurra, who creates intricate, dense, geometrical patternings of the Buyku fishtrap reaches of the Gangan River. She has supplemented these masterpieces of abstraction with a more conventional rendering of the river's reaches that features the iconic crayfishes, snakes, and birds of her clan. In another striking bark painting, Buyku Vortex (2010), she has clearly absorbed the experiments Wukun Wanambi has engaged in over the last few years. But for me, the masterpiece of the show is Yukuwa (2010), a pale white and black depiction of the yam that shimmers like a Chinese waterfall.
Rounding out the exhibition and making explicit the connections between art and ceremony is a group of morning star poles (banumbirr) by the Gali'winku master Gali Yalkarriwuy Gurruwiwi (photo by Vanessa Hunter for hunterlloydmedia). Massed and static collections of these rich, sacred objects have become a familiar feature of many a recent exhibition, yet they never fail to make me catch a breath when I see them. Years on, I find my delight and wonder in front of these magnificent creations as eternal as the morning star's daily return.
A brilliant and beautiful catalog for this exhibition is available from both Anderson's Melbourne Gallery and from Chiaroscuro in the US. It features an excellent assessment of the accomplishments of the Tjungu Palya artists by Christine Nicholls and vivid explications of the work of the Spinifex painters by Louise Allerton and Peter Twigg. Will Stubbs contributes a pair of his inimitable essays on Marika and Wunungmurra that are appreciations of art, myth, history and politics all at once. And finally, and perhaps most surprisingly, Gali Yalkarriwuy speaks in his own voice of the meaning of the banumbirr, the history of its revelation to non-indigenous people, and the startling affirmation of its power that he found in Christian sermons as well as in Israel, Japan, and Inuit lands.
Australian Contemporary Indigenous Art Now will be on display in Santa Fe, New Mexico until August 31.
Posted at 10:56 AM
Mon - July 5, 2010
"Circles in the Sand" at the Australian Embassy, Washington
DC
Last weekend I was in Washington DC for the
annual conference of the American Library Association. The city was crowded,
the weather sub-tropical, but I managed to escape for a while to the deserts of
Centralia by visiting the Australian Embassy as the guest of Director of
cultural Affairs Brendan Wall to see Circles in the Sand: Aboriginal Art from Central Australia
in the Kluge-Ruhe Collection , which opened at the Embassy's art
gallery on June 14.
After passing through security at the Embassy, I found myself in the main foyer face to face with the enormous collective work from Warlukurlangu Artists, Karrku Jukurrpa (1996). Commissioned by John Kluge and the work of twenty-nine women and five men, the canvas stands nearly ten feet tall and over twenty feet long (280 x 680 cm). Howard Morphy retells the Dreaming story behind this epic canvas in his monograph Aboriginal Art (Phaidon, 1998).
(As an aside, David Betz's film Singing the Milky Way: a journey into the Dreaming chronicles an extraordinary visit to Karrku by the women painters of Yuendumu led by Judy Watson Napangardi. In the film other variants on the story are described and the incident of the two sisters expiring of thirst is acted out to great effect by Peggy Napurrula Poulson and Jorna Napurrula Nelson.)
Impressive as Karrku Jukurrpa is, it performs only the overture to this brilliant and engaging exhibition. (You can get a glimpse of its riches in photos from the opening, hosted by Ambassador Kim Beazley, on the Kluge-Ruhe's Facebook page.)
The gallery space has been divided in three, with one "room" devoted to each community. The first of these showcases Warlukurlangu Artists from Yuemdumu, and frankly, is the least impressive. There's a brilliant small painting by Dolly Namipjinpa Daniels that reprises the Karrku story in even brighter colors than the collaborative work in the foyer, and an electrically iridescent square canvas by Bessie Nakamarra Sims, but the remainder of the small works, while representative of the community's bright colors and fluid lines, were not as distinguished as what follows in the next two rooms.
The "Papunya" room encompasses works created at the seminal site of the Central Desert painting movement,
as well as works executed in later years at Kintore and Kiwirrkura. Three early
boards hold pride of place along one wall, a 1973 Corroboree at Tjilka by
Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri that has been in the Kluge-Ruhe's collection since
the beginning and two others, by Anatjari Tjakamarra and Johnny Warangkula
Tjupurrula, that were part of Mr Kluge's gift two years ago of sixteen
additional early boards. They are superb examples of the genre, especially
Anatjari's vivid red Untitled masterpiece from 1973 that may reference
initiation rites at Karrkunya (seen here in an image from the Virtuosity
show at the Kluge-Ruhe in the summer of 2008). Despite immense differences in
style, the resonance of red ochre (karrku) echoes in this small example
of Pintupi painting the large Warlpiri collective work in the Embassy's foyer
and lays bare layers of connections among the desert
dwellers.
The remainder of the room is given over to several large masterpieces. The vortices of William Sandy's 1987 Bush Tucker Dreaming stand at one end, opposite a large Tingari canvas painted by Mick Namarari in 1991. Between them, highlighted against a brilliant and startling deep blue wall, are a version of Michael Nelson Jakamarra's famous Five Dreamings and, beside it, what was for me the most thrilling painting in the exhibition. Timmy Payungka Tjapangati's large, somber painting of Tingari men camped at Wilkinkarra is deceptively simple at first glance. A classic of the "line and circle" genre that details the far-ranging travels of initiates as they learn to travel the extent of their ancestral country, it is painted in muted brown and ochre shades that are so close-hued as to seem almost monochromatic on first glance. As I sat and contemplated it, however, more and more detail emerged from the spaces between the campsites and the paths that connect them. (Fred Myers has suggested in other contexts that large paintings of this type also reference the large numbers of initiates involved on the journey.)
In the interstices between roundels, more colors emerge into the viewer's
consciousness, pinks and golds, and a few scattered patches of brilliant white
that must be a reference to the salt lake of Wilkinkarra, the subject of so many
of Tjapangati's works over the years. Tjapangati was a master of small,
intricate designs; but on the occasions when he expanded the scale of his
canvases to that of a wall, his power amazes. Tjapangati has always been a
personal favorite of mine among the Papunya Tula painters, and it was a delight
to see this magnificent canvas and to have time to contemplate its dazzling
design.
The strong connections between Papunya Tula and Balgo (especially of PTA artists who reside at Kiwirrkura) found expression in the final room. Simple considerations of space led to PTA canvases by Wintjiya Napaltjarri and Uta Uta's widow Walangkura Napanangka spilling over onto a wall otherwise hung with women's work from Balgo. The compositional strengths of the Pintupi women formed an aesthetic balance to the bold colors of the ladies from Balgo. A mid-nineties painting by Eubena Nampitjin, Tjalatjadu Rockhole, dominated the wall: its fiery reds and yellowing greens harked back to the artist's earlier days when she painted alongside her husband Wimmitji Tjpanagati, while the structure of the design presaged the famous works Eubena made at the turn of the century when her palette turned to white and golds and her visual structures began to suggest a flowering of life in the desert. Hung next to Eubena's canvas were the brilliant primary colors of one of the finest, brightest, and most intense paintings I've ever seen from the brush of Nancy Naninurra, the 1997 Mina-Mina ceremonies at Kimayi.
The other connection between Papunya Tula and Balgo hung on the opposite wall with a pair of large canvases by brothers Patrick Olodoodi Tjungurrayi and Brandy Tjungurrayi. Unlike the riotously colored paintings from the other Balgo artists that poured from the walls of this third room, this pair feature the traditional brown, white, ochre, and black palette of classic Pintupi works and they had the structural restraint in their design that characterizes Papunya Tula painting. They formed an interesting study together. Brandy's tripartite design is the more immediately striking of the two, grandly architectural and imposing. Patrick's painting has a border of parallel dotting running along the edges, with a distorted roundel, not square nor circular, an elongation at the bottom making it look a bit like a cut diamond, lines writhing, never quite coalescing into a definable geometry. The energy and the quirkiness of the shape continued to hold my attention long after the strong verticals of Brandy's painting had exhausted my interest and confirmed my long-held belief that Patrick is among the true masters of contemporary Aboriginal artists.
A trio of wild compositions on the far wall of the gallery complete the show's delights. Two small compositions by Sandy Gordon Tjupurrula and Rosie Nanyuma Napurrula manage to suggest Joan Miro at his most intricate and idiosyncratic and are wonders that emerge only slowly to pleasure the eye. Of course, they are at first a bit overpowered by one of Tjumpo Tjapanangka's most arresting compositions, Kangaroo Dreaming at Lake Mackay from 1991 (Lake Mackay is the settler name for the Wilkinkarra of Timmy Payungka's works). This time, the central lake is shown as an enormous central reservoir of deep, brilliant red--recalling again the karrku red ochre theme, but here also the great fire that swept across Wilkinkarra in the Dreaming. To one side of the red lake a field of charcoal black extends the width of the canvas--and one of the delights of the show comes when you approach the painting closely and see that this field is composed of deep blue, black, and green dotting. But from a distance, the Jovian red spot rivets your eye, and its largeness, at first overwhelming, becomes a field that allows the mysteries of the nearby paintings by Tjupurrula and Napurrula to unfold. It's easily the most stunning hang in the show.
Circles in the Sand is open weekdays 11 am - 2 pm though September 17. For more information call (202) 797-3000 or contact Cultural.relationsUS@dfat.gov.au. Photo identification is required for entry into the Embassy. If you can't make it to the Embassy to see the exhibition in person, you can console yourself a bit in the pages of Art from the Land: dialogues with the Kluge-Ruhe Collection of Australian Aboriginal art (University of Virginia Press, 1999). Many of the works I've talked about are reproduced in this volume, especially those from Yuendumu and Balgo, and essays by Francoise Dussart, Christine Watson, and Fred Myers offer in-depth analyses to supplement the visual pleasures.
More News from the Embassy: If you're in New York City this coming Wednesday, July 7, take note of this announcement:
After passing through security at the Embassy, I found myself in the main foyer face to face with the enormous collective work from Warlukurlangu Artists, Karrku Jukurrpa (1996). Commissioned by John Kluge and the work of twenty-nine women and five men, the canvas stands nearly ten feet tall and over twenty feet long (280 x 680 cm). Howard Morphy retells the Dreaming story behind this epic canvas in his monograph Aboriginal Art (Phaidon, 1998).
The painting is centred on the ochre mine inside the mountain Karrku in the Campbell Ranges west of Yuendumu, which is represented by the set of concentric circles in the centre of the canvas. The mine is associated with the mythical ochre bearer, who travels from east to west looking for a place to deposit the great store of ochre that he carries with him. The ochre man is associated with two ancestral women, sisters with whom he had a lusty encounter. By the time he approaches the mountain at Karrku he is handicapped with his burden and carries it on top of his head. He hears the ngappa (rain ) Dreaming approaching. The rain passes over the country. The great arc represents a rainbow that appeared a number of times during breaks in the storm. The eight small concentric circles running between Karrku mountain and the rainbow represent clouds and the parallel lines on either side lightning. In the face of the storm the ochre man retreats into the mountain shelter. The mountain itself appears to grow. In one version of the myth the old man makes a lasso of hair-string, represented by the green line in the painting, with which he reins in the mountain. In a second version a snake vine is used by the two sisters for the same purpose. The two sisters had travelled from the west, the pathway shown by the footprints following the vine, searching for rain. At last they find a waterhole, drink and fall asleep, the two semicircles representing the women. While they sleep the ochre man has intercourse with them. The women awake and return from where they came, following the rainclouds. They perform ceremonies on their journey, hoping all the time for rain but it never falls and the two women perish in the desert. Their bodies are represented by the concentric circles in the northwest [upper left] quadrant of the canvas (Morphy, pp. 302-303).
(As an aside, David Betz's film Singing the Milky Way: a journey into the Dreaming chronicles an extraordinary visit to Karrku by the women painters of Yuendumu led by Judy Watson Napangardi. In the film other variants on the story are described and the incident of the two sisters expiring of thirst is acted out to great effect by Peggy Napurrula Poulson and Jorna Napurrula Nelson.)
Impressive as Karrku Jukurrpa is, it performs only the overture to this brilliant and engaging exhibition. (You can get a glimpse of its riches in photos from the opening, hosted by Ambassador Kim Beazley, on the Kluge-Ruhe's Facebook page.)
The gallery space has been divided in three, with one "room" devoted to each community. The first of these showcases Warlukurlangu Artists from Yuemdumu, and frankly, is the least impressive. There's a brilliant small painting by Dolly Namipjinpa Daniels that reprises the Karrku story in even brighter colors than the collaborative work in the foyer, and an electrically iridescent square canvas by Bessie Nakamarra Sims, but the remainder of the small works, while representative of the community's bright colors and fluid lines, were not as distinguished as what follows in the next two rooms.
The "Papunya" room encompasses works created at the seminal site of the Central Desert painting movement,
as well as works executed in later years at Kintore and Kiwirrkura. Three early
boards hold pride of place along one wall, a 1973 Corroboree at Tjilka by
Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri that has been in the Kluge-Ruhe's collection since
the beginning and two others, by Anatjari Tjakamarra and Johnny Warangkula
Tjupurrula, that were part of Mr Kluge's gift two years ago of sixteen
additional early boards. They are superb examples of the genre, especially
Anatjari's vivid red Untitled masterpiece from 1973 that may reference
initiation rites at Karrkunya (seen here in an image from the Virtuosity
show at the Kluge-Ruhe in the summer of 2008). Despite immense differences in
style, the resonance of red ochre (karrku) echoes in this small example
of Pintupi painting the large Warlpiri collective work in the Embassy's foyer
and lays bare layers of connections among the desert
dwellers.The remainder of the room is given over to several large masterpieces. The vortices of William Sandy's 1987 Bush Tucker Dreaming stand at one end, opposite a large Tingari canvas painted by Mick Namarari in 1991. Between them, highlighted against a brilliant and startling deep blue wall, are a version of Michael Nelson Jakamarra's famous Five Dreamings and, beside it, what was for me the most thrilling painting in the exhibition. Timmy Payungka Tjapangati's large, somber painting of Tingari men camped at Wilkinkarra is deceptively simple at first glance. A classic of the "line and circle" genre that details the far-ranging travels of initiates as they learn to travel the extent of their ancestral country, it is painted in muted brown and ochre shades that are so close-hued as to seem almost monochromatic on first glance. As I sat and contemplated it, however, more and more detail emerged from the spaces between the campsites and the paths that connect them. (Fred Myers has suggested in other contexts that large paintings of this type also reference the large numbers of initiates involved on the journey.)
In the interstices between roundels, more colors emerge into the viewer's
consciousness, pinks and golds, and a few scattered patches of brilliant white
that must be a reference to the salt lake of Wilkinkarra, the subject of so many
of Tjapangati's works over the years. Tjapangati was a master of small,
intricate designs; but on the occasions when he expanded the scale of his
canvases to that of a wall, his power amazes. Tjapangati has always been a
personal favorite of mine among the Papunya Tula painters, and it was a delight
to see this magnificent canvas and to have time to contemplate its dazzling
design.The strong connections between Papunya Tula and Balgo (especially of PTA artists who reside at Kiwirrkura) found expression in the final room. Simple considerations of space led to PTA canvases by Wintjiya Napaltjarri and Uta Uta's widow Walangkura Napanangka spilling over onto a wall otherwise hung with women's work from Balgo. The compositional strengths of the Pintupi women formed an aesthetic balance to the bold colors of the ladies from Balgo. A mid-nineties painting by Eubena Nampitjin, Tjalatjadu Rockhole, dominated the wall: its fiery reds and yellowing greens harked back to the artist's earlier days when she painted alongside her husband Wimmitji Tjpanagati, while the structure of the design presaged the famous works Eubena made at the turn of the century when her palette turned to white and golds and her visual structures began to suggest a flowering of life in the desert. Hung next to Eubena's canvas were the brilliant primary colors of one of the finest, brightest, and most intense paintings I've ever seen from the brush of Nancy Naninurra, the 1997 Mina-Mina ceremonies at Kimayi.
The other connection between Papunya Tula and Balgo hung on the opposite wall with a pair of large canvases by brothers Patrick Olodoodi Tjungurrayi and Brandy Tjungurrayi. Unlike the riotously colored paintings from the other Balgo artists that poured from the walls of this third room, this pair feature the traditional brown, white, ochre, and black palette of classic Pintupi works and they had the structural restraint in their design that characterizes Papunya Tula painting. They formed an interesting study together. Brandy's tripartite design is the more immediately striking of the two, grandly architectural and imposing. Patrick's painting has a border of parallel dotting running along the edges, with a distorted roundel, not square nor circular, an elongation at the bottom making it look a bit like a cut diamond, lines writhing, never quite coalescing into a definable geometry. The energy and the quirkiness of the shape continued to hold my attention long after the strong verticals of Brandy's painting had exhausted my interest and confirmed my long-held belief that Patrick is among the true masters of contemporary Aboriginal artists.
A trio of wild compositions on the far wall of the gallery complete the show's delights. Two small compositions by Sandy Gordon Tjupurrula and Rosie Nanyuma Napurrula manage to suggest Joan Miro at his most intricate and idiosyncratic and are wonders that emerge only slowly to pleasure the eye. Of course, they are at first a bit overpowered by one of Tjumpo Tjapanangka's most arresting compositions, Kangaroo Dreaming at Lake Mackay from 1991 (Lake Mackay is the settler name for the Wilkinkarra of Timmy Payungka's works). This time, the central lake is shown as an enormous central reservoir of deep, brilliant red--recalling again the karrku red ochre theme, but here also the great fire that swept across Wilkinkarra in the Dreaming. To one side of the red lake a field of charcoal black extends the width of the canvas--and one of the delights of the show comes when you approach the painting closely and see that this field is composed of deep blue, black, and green dotting. But from a distance, the Jovian red spot rivets your eye, and its largeness, at first overwhelming, becomes a field that allows the mysteries of the nearby paintings by Tjupurrula and Napurrula to unfold. It's easily the most stunning hang in the show.
Circles in the Sand is open weekdays 11 am - 2 pm though September 17. For more information call (202) 797-3000 or contact Cultural.relationsUS@dfat.gov.au. Photo identification is required for entry into the Embassy. If you can't make it to the Embassy to see the exhibition in person, you can console yourself a bit in the pages of Art from the Land: dialogues with the Kluge-Ruhe Collection of Australian Aboriginal art (University of Virginia Press, 1999). Many of the works I've talked about are reproduced in this volume, especially those from Yuendumu and Balgo, and essays by Francoise Dussart, Christine Watson, and Fred Myers offer in-depth analyses to supplement the visual pleasures.
More News from the Embassy: If you're in New York City this coming Wednesday, July 7, take note of this announcement:
The Australian Consulate-General will be celebrating NAIDOC (National Aboriginal and Islander Day Observance Committee) Week on Wednesday, 7 July from 6.00-8.00pm. NAIDOC Week celebrations are held across Australia and the world each July to celebrate the history, culture and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. This opportunity is further explored with this year’s theme of Unsung Heroes – Closing the Gap by Leading Their Way.
In celebration of NAIDOC Week, Cameron McCarthy, a member of the Kuku-Yalanji and Ba-Barum tribes of Northern Queensland, will be exhibiting a series of his artworks as well as performing at the Australian Consulate-General, New York. Cameron is an international visual artist, didgeridoo player, dancer and hip hop solo artist.
After moving to New York in 2001, Cameron was invited to be a part of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues Voices exhibition. Cameron stayed on for a further six month as the first Artist–in–Residence at the United Nations.
Posted at 12:45 PM
Sun - June 20, 2010
Aboriginal Art in America, Again
The Hood Museum at Dartmouth College, where Brian
Kennedy, formerly of the National Gallery of Australia, is now Director, has
announced the acquisition of "an important private gift of contemporary
Aboriginal art ... over three hundred works ... representing the many exciting
contemporary art-making practices of Aboriginal peoples across the Australian
continent." The gift follows up the well-received exhibition Dreaming
Their Way: Contemporary Aboriginal Women Painters that traveled
to the Hood in 2006. The full press
release
is available at the Hood Museum
website.
Bessie Sims, Yarla Jukurrpa (Bush Potato Dreaming), 1996; Collection of the Hood Museum, Dartmouth College
Bessie Sims, Yarla Jukurrpa (Bush Potato Dreaming), 1996; Collection of the Hood Museum, Dartmouth College
Posted at 11:55 AM
God Save the Queen, and Stephen Page
I
heard
from Apolline Kohen this week that Kuninjku artist John Mawurndjul was awarded
the Order of Australia (AM) on the 2010 Queen's Birthday for his service to the
preservation of Indigenous culture. Apolline reports that Mawurndjul is
"thrilled" by the honor, as we all should be. Painter and philosopher,
storyteller and genius of abstraction, a veritable traveler between two worlds,
Mawurndjul epitomizes for me both the potential and the achievement of the
Indigenous artist in modern times. Jeremy Eccles reported
as follows:
Also honored this year was Gija artist Peggy Patrick for her artistic accomplishments as a member of the Jirrawun group of artists and for the leading role she played in the 2002 theatrical performance Fire Fire Burning Bright, which recounted the story of the Bedford Massacre that took the lives of many of her countrymen--retribution for the slaughtering of cow.
Another piece of good news came in this morning: Bangarra walked away with the honors at last night's Australian Dance Awards. Their twenty-year retrospective Fire won the award for outstanding performance by a company, while founder and chief choreographer Stephen Page received the services to dance award. Page, cheeky as ever, said that he was tempted to show up at the awards show dressed up as an old man from the Kimberley and admitted, "My ego thinks I need to be old to be accepting that award." Here's hoping the both Bangarra and Page can celebrate another twenty years of creating wonder for audiences around the world. Heck, Stephen, Merce Cunningham was still performing his own works well into his 80's. The best years are yet to come!
from Apolline Kohen this week that Kuninjku artist John Mawurndjul was awarded
the Order of Australia (AM) on the 2010 Queen's Birthday for his service to the
preservation of Indigenous culture. Apolline reports that Mawurndjul is
"thrilled" by the honor, as we all should be. Painter and philosopher,
storyteller and genius of abstraction, a veritable traveler between two worlds,
Mawurndjul epitomizes for me both the potential and the achievement of the
Indigenous artist in modern times. Jeremy Eccles reported
as follows:"For service to the preservation of Indigenous culture as the foremost exponent of the Rarrk visual art style” - which is true enough in its second part – the foremost exponent of rarrk – but fails to acknowledge his huge advances purely as an artist, who developed his painting style from the more traditional representation of Dreamtime creatures from the Kuninjku theology during the 1980s to a virtual abstraction today that shimmers on his barks while still telling his fellow Kuninjku the stories of ceremonies that matter to them.
Mawurndjul has also maintained a remote lifestyle beyond the reaches of the Western world on his Milmilngkan family outstation where he paints, hunts and cares for his cave-painting dotted country.
From that fastness he has emerged to fascinate and challenge the rest of the world at exhibitions as significant as Les Magiciens de la Terre in Paris in 1989, Aratjara in Germany and England in 1993, Rarrk – the first major one-man show overseas by an Aboriginal artist in Switzerland and Germany in 2005 - and of course, his permanent contribution as one of eight indigenous artists at the Musee du quai Branly in Paris the same year.
Johnny Mawurndjul has also taken on the world simply through his character – making speeches at many of the above events in impenetrable Kuninjku, but leaving his audience convinced they'd understood every word! And, in the name of greater understanding, the Swiss National Science Foundation supported the publication of a multi-authored intercultural text in 2009 – Between Indigenous Australia and Europe – John Mawurndjul.
Also honored this year was Gija artist Peggy Patrick for her artistic accomplishments as a member of the Jirrawun group of artists and for the leading role she played in the 2002 theatrical performance Fire Fire Burning Bright, which recounted the story of the Bedford Massacre that took the lives of many of her countrymen--retribution for the slaughtering of cow.
Another piece of good news came in this morning: Bangarra walked away with the honors at last night's Australian Dance Awards. Their twenty-year retrospective Fire won the award for outstanding performance by a company, while founder and chief choreographer Stephen Page received the services to dance award. Page, cheeky as ever, said that he was tempted to show up at the awards show dressed up as an old man from the Kimberley and admitted, "My ego thinks I need to be old to be accepting that award." Here's hoping the both Bangarra and Page can celebrate another twenty years of creating wonder for audiences around the world. Heck, Stephen, Merce Cunningham was still performing his own works well into his 80's. The best years are yet to come!
Posted at 11:15 AM
Sat - June 19, 2010
Spencer And Gillen Revisited
June is turning into a month on the road for me,
so although I have plenty to write about, I don't seem to have much time to sit
down at the keyboard. I've seen the wonderful, award-winning documentary
Contact (Bentley Dean and Martin Butler,
2009), based on the book Cleared Out by Sue Davenport, Peter Johnson,
and Yuwali (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2005), and read Rod Moss's terrific memoir
of his life and friendships with the Arrernte people in Alice Springs, The Hard Light of Day (University of
Queensland Press, 2010), but further commentary on both will have to wait until
next month when I can be appropriately
expansive.
Quickly noted, however, "The Strange Career of the Australian Conscience" by Dean Ashenden this week at Inside Story takes a look back at the accomplishments and changing reputation of Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen. His essay provides an excellent synopsis of the early collaboration between the two men, focusing on the events leading up to and captured in their first, ground-breaking publication, The Native Tribes of Central Australia. Ashenden frankly explores both the prejudice and the almost unprecedented sympathy with which the two men perceived the Arrernte, focusing especially on the role that Gillen played in opening up the first understanding of the inner lives of the desert dwellers to the European mind. He also explores, all too briefly, the impact that the intellectual struggles of the pair have made on anthropologists and Australian in the succeeding years of the twentieth century, focusing in particular in W. E. H. Stanner. Spencer and Gillen were captives of a world view that saw Aborigines as the lowest rung on the ladder of human evolution, and yet they were captivated by the intelligence and humanity of the people they worked with and who worked for them. Ashenden suggests that this wobbly pivot endures to the present day.
Quickly noted, however, "The Strange Career of the Australian Conscience" by Dean Ashenden this week at Inside Story takes a look back at the accomplishments and changing reputation of Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen. His essay provides an excellent synopsis of the early collaboration between the two men, focusing on the events leading up to and captured in their first, ground-breaking publication, The Native Tribes of Central Australia. Ashenden frankly explores both the prejudice and the almost unprecedented sympathy with which the two men perceived the Arrernte, focusing especially on the role that Gillen played in opening up the first understanding of the inner lives of the desert dwellers to the European mind. He also explores, all too briefly, the impact that the intellectual struggles of the pair have made on anthropologists and Australian in the succeeding years of the twentieth century, focusing in particular in W. E. H. Stanner. Spencer and Gillen were captives of a world view that saw Aborigines as the lowest rung on the ladder of human evolution, and yet they were captivated by the intelligence and humanity of the people they worked with and who worked for them. Ashenden suggests that this wobbly pivot endures to the present day.
Posted at 07:09 PM
Sun - June 6, 2010
Blogs and Feeds, Old and New
It's been a while since I've updated the links in
the sidebar on the right, so this weekend I'll redress that
failure.
First of all, let me introduce a blog that I've been following for a long time, with much pleasure. Sur les pas d'une collection is the work of a dedicated enthusiast of les arts premiers, as they say in French. Entirely appropriate for the best Aboriginal art blog out of France, and one which has been operating since 2006.
Bertrand
is passionate about African, Inuit, and Aboriginal art, and is a traveller and
photographer whose interests stray beyond the usual scope of things that I
discuss here. But I enjoy every one of his postings, be they celebrations of
the art of Bidyadanga or Maningrida or Papunya Tula, or records of his travels
through African and Asian deserts (the image shows him collecting firewood in
the Sahara) or the ruins of Alexandria. Plus, I get to keep the edge of my
French language skills honed a bit. But even if you can't read French, you can
partake of the pleasure through Google's translate service. Bertrand's lyrical
investigations of particular works of art are deeply personal, insightful,
meditative. As the tag line of his blog promises, you'll be following in the
steps of a collector as he learns about the art, follows his interest in both
emerging and established artists, and shares his enthusiasm for the discovery of
a contemporary art replete with meaning and innovation. His cross-cultural
interests enrich his observations, so don't skip his explorations of Inuit and
African art as well as the familiar Aboriginal
paintings.
A newer blog that I've recently begun following (it's been online since March 2009) is Alice Online. This one too has a scope larger than Aboriginal affairs, but given its focus on Alice Springs and environs, Indigenous matters crop up regularly. Although I don't always agree (we're poles apart on the recent news about Chris Simon's activities with regard to Papunya Tula), I find Alice Online to be a sympathetic source of good information. There's been coverage of the Kwementyaye Ryder story, a review (with video interviews) of Margaret Kemarre Turner's new book Iwenhe Tyerrtye: what it means to be an Aboriginal person (IAD Press, 2010), and moments of Centralian serendipity like a video recording of Alice Springs cellist Nic Hempel performing Bach's Suite No. 1 in G Major in the old Lutheran church at Ntaria.
In
honor of the sesquicentennial of John McDouall Stuart's explorations of the
Centre, editor Dave Richards is publishing on ongoing series called "Where's Mr
Stuart?" that charts the explorer's journey in photographs, maps, and
narrative.
If you're looking to keep up with what's been published in the way of Indigenous Australian Resources, you should consider subscribing to the news feed of New Titles acquired by the Library at the Queensland University of Technology. Around the first of each month you'll receive a blast of citations for thirty or forty new acquisitions. It's an especially rich source of information on videos and children's books, and thus may be very useful for teachers. Lots of electronic books here, too, although you need a QUT login to access the full contents of most of them.
Another useful news feed I've taken to scanning lately comes from the Working Group on Aboriginal Rights. Once or twice a week they publish a round-up of news stories on a given topic that serves as an instant bibliography of timely reports. Recent posts have focused on the new National Congress of Australia's First Peoples, the Muckaty nuclear waste dump, the expansion of income management to get around the challenges posed by the Racial Discrimination Act to the NTER scheme, and the controversy over reparations to the Stolen Generations.
If readers have other suggestions for ways on keeping up with Aboriginal art and culture, I'd love to hear about them. Click on the feedback link below and send me your ideas.
First of all, let me introduce a blog that I've been following for a long time, with much pleasure. Sur les pas d'une collection is the work of a dedicated enthusiast of les arts premiers, as they say in French. Entirely appropriate for the best Aboriginal art blog out of France, and one which has been operating since 2006.
Bertrand
is passionate about African, Inuit, and Aboriginal art, and is a traveller and
photographer whose interests stray beyond the usual scope of things that I
discuss here. But I enjoy every one of his postings, be they celebrations of
the art of Bidyadanga or Maningrida or Papunya Tula, or records of his travels
through African and Asian deserts (the image shows him collecting firewood in
the Sahara) or the ruins of Alexandria. Plus, I get to keep the edge of my
French language skills honed a bit. But even if you can't read French, you can
partake of the pleasure through Google's translate service. Bertrand's lyrical
investigations of particular works of art are deeply personal, insightful,
meditative. As the tag line of his blog promises, you'll be following in the
steps of a collector as he learns about the art, follows his interest in both
emerging and established artists, and shares his enthusiasm for the discovery of
a contemporary art replete with meaning and innovation. His cross-cultural
interests enrich his observations, so don't skip his explorations of Inuit and
African art as well as the familiar Aboriginal
paintings.A newer blog that I've recently begun following (it's been online since March 2009) is Alice Online. This one too has a scope larger than Aboriginal affairs, but given its focus on Alice Springs and environs, Indigenous matters crop up regularly. Although I don't always agree (we're poles apart on the recent news about Chris Simon's activities with regard to Papunya Tula), I find Alice Online to be a sympathetic source of good information. There's been coverage of the Kwementyaye Ryder story, a review (with video interviews) of Margaret Kemarre Turner's new book Iwenhe Tyerrtye: what it means to be an Aboriginal person (IAD Press, 2010), and moments of Centralian serendipity like a video recording of Alice Springs cellist Nic Hempel performing Bach's Suite No. 1 in G Major in the old Lutheran church at Ntaria.
In
honor of the sesquicentennial of John McDouall Stuart's explorations of the
Centre, editor Dave Richards is publishing on ongoing series called "Where's Mr
Stuart?" that charts the explorer's journey in photographs, maps, and
narrative.If you're looking to keep up with what's been published in the way of Indigenous Australian Resources, you should consider subscribing to the news feed of New Titles acquired by the Library at the Queensland University of Technology. Around the first of each month you'll receive a blast of citations for thirty or forty new acquisitions. It's an especially rich source of information on videos and children's books, and thus may be very useful for teachers. Lots of electronic books here, too, although you need a QUT login to access the full contents of most of them.
Another useful news feed I've taken to scanning lately comes from the Working Group on Aboriginal Rights. Once or twice a week they publish a round-up of news stories on a given topic that serves as an instant bibliography of timely reports. Recent posts have focused on the new National Congress of Australia's First Peoples, the Muckaty nuclear waste dump, the expansion of income management to get around the challenges posed by the Racial Discrimination Act to the NTER scheme, and the controversy over reparations to the Stolen Generations.
If readers have other suggestions for ways on keeping up with Aboriginal art and culture, I'd love to hear about them. Click on the feedback link below and send me your ideas.
Posted at 12:05 PM
Sun - May 30, 2010
Sentimental Education
John
Danalis's
memoir, Riding the Black Cockatoo: a true story
(Allen & Unwin, 2009) is a narrative of repatriation and reconciliation.
The publisher is marketing it as a work of "young adult non-fiction," and while
it will certainly make a good assignment in secondary schools, I think A&U
sells Danalis a bit short in doing so. I suspect there are a good many adults,
worldwide, who could take more than a few lessons away from this multi-leveled
set of family histories.
John Danalis is a white urban Queenslander who returned to university as an adult, a father of two children who found that he "had tried lots of things in life, but nothing had stuck." He decided to become a teacher, and enrolled to study arts and education. He opted to take a course entitled "Indigenous Writing," and it was there, almost accidentally, that he made a disclosure that altered the course of his life dramatically over the following six months.
For one day, unguardedly, Danalis shared with the class the fact that he had grown up in a home cluttered with his father's magpie collections that included rusted farm implements, antique bottles, convict-manufactured bricks, and specimens of petrified wood. There was also, on the family mantelpiece, the skull of an Aboriginal man, unearthed by an uncle who lived in rural Victoria. The family, otherwise ignorant of all details about the memento mori, nicknamed it "Mary."
Danalis's blurted admission was met with horror on the part of his classmates and produced a sudden and irresistible compulsion in him to set the situation right. The story of how he came to do so, contacting academics and activists, stumbling his way through cultural protocols he never even dreamed existed, penetrating the edges of the Indigenous community, sometimes welcomed, sometimes rebuffed, forms the substance of Riding the Black Cockatoo.
The book contains more than its share of cringe-making moments. Danalis's naivete never seems to lessen, his missteps never quite go away and unconscious cultural arrogance persists despite his best efforts to open himself to the unknown and unfamiliar. In some ways, all his simplistic and well-intentioned efforts contribute to the charm of this book, for Danalis never lets himself off lightly. He wants to act well, he believes in the purity of his motives, and yet time and time again he exposes himself as an unconscious transgressor of sensibilities and sensitivities that lie on the far side of the cultural divide. Indeed, he often seems to forget that the cultural divide exists. And so rather than coming off as pious or indignant or morally superior, he persistently portrays himself as well-meaning but clueless. And there is a degree of charming humility to his willingness to look the fool.
His guileless behavior probably accounts for much of his success in contacting the people who can help him return the skull to its native Wamba Wamba country in Victoria. Buoyed by his belief in the righteousness of his mission, he refuses to give in to any obstacle, accepts chastisement when he overreaches, and persists in trying to understand why the theft of the skull is so deeply offensive to all the Aboriginal people he encounters on his journey. He is seduced by a new romanticism, not that of the primitive, but that of the mystical.
Riding his bicycle along the banks of the Brisbane River one day, he marvels at finding himself in the midst of a startled flock of black cockatoos. Having told us, in a typically unembarrassed moment at the start of the chapter, "[t]he bicycle is my totem," he perceives the hand of fate in this vision when later in the day he encounters a magnificent cockatoo feather headdress at a Brisbane Writers Festival event. The headdress eventually becomes a key element in the handover of the skull and the cockatoo another kind of totem or spirit guide that watches over him even as he travels down to Wamba Wamba country. There the colonial denuding of the Victorian countryside and the loss of the cockatoo's habitat becomes for him a metaphor for Aboriginal history, a history that he is trying to compensate for in a way that he understands can be not much better than symbolic, but no less important for that.
And that is a lesson to remember, always, but perhaps best heard again now in this moment between Sorry Day--this year celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Sydney Harbour Bridge Walk--and NAIDOC Week. The Australian, predictably, commemorated the event by reminding us "that there is a long way to travel until the nation can take pride that the gap between black and white Australian is being bridged effectively" ("Walking the walk a decade on," May 28, 2010). The opinion piece praises not only of Rudd's Apology but also his pursuit of the Howard government's Intervention in the Northern Territory and the agenda of Noel Pearson's Cape York Partnership.
But "bridging the gap" is less than half the story. As Aron Paul wrote this week at newmatilda.com ("Sorry? How did a decade pass like that?," May 27, 2010),
Bridging the gap is important, and the work must continue to provide Indigenous Australians with meaningful and fulfilling lives unburdened by poverty and its attendants, violence, drugs, and despair. What John Howard refused to recognize and what Kevin Rudd seems to have forgotten is that symbolic reconciliation is an essential part of bridging the gap and offering hope to Indigenous people--and to white Australians as well.
Writing this week for Unleashed, Shelley Reys responds to the question she says she is often asked: "whether big emotional events like the walks for reconciliation and the apology to the Stolen Generations really made a difference to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people or if they soon fade from the memory and contribute little to our wellbeing" ("Reconciliation: all of us must set the pace" (May 28, 2010).
Reys speaks of the wonder she felt at seeing thousands of people out in the freezing weather on the bridge, at the powerful message of the "ethos of a 'fair go'" those marchers sent and how it influenced her to join the board of Reconciliation Australia. It gave her a new understanding of what the Referendum of 1967 meant. Similarly, the Apology reached back to inform her feelings about her grandmother's life story and reached forward to focus her thoughts on what the passing of tradition to her own children and grandchildren means for a woman who was severed from her ancestors' language by her grandmother's removal.
For Reys, these symbolic moments can be literally inspirational in the sense of taking a deep breath before marching on, before continuing the fight armed with the knowledge that one is not alone.
John Danalis has told us a true story of that very real and honest human interaction in Riding the Black Cockatoo. You can hear him talk about his experience in an interview conducted for ABC Brisbane on March 24, 2010. But buy the book and read the story as well for, practically speaking, Danalis is donating half his royalties to the Wamba Wamba people in support of their ongoing cultural preservation activities. My thanks to Matt and Deborah for alerting me to this stimulating and motivational story.
Danalis's
memoir, Riding the Black Cockatoo: a true story
(Allen & Unwin, 2009) is a narrative of repatriation and reconciliation.
The publisher is marketing it as a work of "young adult non-fiction," and while
it will certainly make a good assignment in secondary schools, I think A&U
sells Danalis a bit short in doing so. I suspect there are a good many adults,
worldwide, who could take more than a few lessons away from this multi-leveled
set of family histories.John Danalis is a white urban Queenslander who returned to university as an adult, a father of two children who found that he "had tried lots of things in life, but nothing had stuck." He decided to become a teacher, and enrolled to study arts and education. He opted to take a course entitled "Indigenous Writing," and it was there, almost accidentally, that he made a disclosure that altered the course of his life dramatically over the following six months.
For one day, unguardedly, Danalis shared with the class the fact that he had grown up in a home cluttered with his father's magpie collections that included rusted farm implements, antique bottles, convict-manufactured bricks, and specimens of petrified wood. There was also, on the family mantelpiece, the skull of an Aboriginal man, unearthed by an uncle who lived in rural Victoria. The family, otherwise ignorant of all details about the memento mori, nicknamed it "Mary."
Danalis's blurted admission was met with horror on the part of his classmates and produced a sudden and irresistible compulsion in him to set the situation right. The story of how he came to do so, contacting academics and activists, stumbling his way through cultural protocols he never even dreamed existed, penetrating the edges of the Indigenous community, sometimes welcomed, sometimes rebuffed, forms the substance of Riding the Black Cockatoo.
The book contains more than its share of cringe-making moments. Danalis's naivete never seems to lessen, his missteps never quite go away and unconscious cultural arrogance persists despite his best efforts to open himself to the unknown and unfamiliar. In some ways, all his simplistic and well-intentioned efforts contribute to the charm of this book, for Danalis never lets himself off lightly. He wants to act well, he believes in the purity of his motives, and yet time and time again he exposes himself as an unconscious transgressor of sensibilities and sensitivities that lie on the far side of the cultural divide. Indeed, he often seems to forget that the cultural divide exists. And so rather than coming off as pious or indignant or morally superior, he persistently portrays himself as well-meaning but clueless. And there is a degree of charming humility to his willingness to look the fool.
His guileless behavior probably accounts for much of his success in contacting the people who can help him return the skull to its native Wamba Wamba country in Victoria. Buoyed by his belief in the righteousness of his mission, he refuses to give in to any obstacle, accepts chastisement when he overreaches, and persists in trying to understand why the theft of the skull is so deeply offensive to all the Aboriginal people he encounters on his journey. He is seduced by a new romanticism, not that of the primitive, but that of the mystical.
Riding his bicycle along the banks of the Brisbane River one day, he marvels at finding himself in the midst of a startled flock of black cockatoos. Having told us, in a typically unembarrassed moment at the start of the chapter, "[t]he bicycle is my totem," he perceives the hand of fate in this vision when later in the day he encounters a magnificent cockatoo feather headdress at a Brisbane Writers Festival event. The headdress eventually becomes a key element in the handover of the skull and the cockatoo another kind of totem or spirit guide that watches over him even as he travels down to Wamba Wamba country. There the colonial denuding of the Victorian countryside and the loss of the cockatoo's habitat becomes for him a metaphor for Aboriginal history, a history that he is trying to compensate for in a way that he understands can be not much better than symbolic, but no less important for that.
And that is a lesson to remember, always, but perhaps best heard again now in this moment between Sorry Day--this year celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Sydney Harbour Bridge Walk--and NAIDOC Week. The Australian, predictably, commemorated the event by reminding us "that there is a long way to travel until the nation can take pride that the gap between black and white Australian is being bridged effectively" ("Walking the walk a decade on," May 28, 2010). The opinion piece praises not only of Rudd's Apology but also his pursuit of the Howard government's Intervention in the Northern Territory and the agenda of Noel Pearson's Cape York Partnership.
But "bridging the gap" is less than half the story. As Aron Paul wrote this week at newmatilda.com ("Sorry? How did a decade pass like that?," May 27, 2010),
The so-called "Close the Gap" strategy has been driven not by the principles of reconciliation, but by knee-jerk reactions to statistics. In particular, the Northern Territory Intervention has been a "one size fits all" response in an area where Aboriginal groups and researchers alike have pointed to the need for programs tailored community by community.
In spite of its claims to adhere to evidence-based policy, the Rudd Government has overlooked too much of the available evidence in the race to be seen to be doing something big — much like its predecessor.
There is little evidence, for example, of the efficacy of income management, yet this controversial aspect of the NT Intervention is shortly to be extended to all welfare recipients in the NT. The driver behind this expansion is not evidence that it works. Instead, it is driven by the government’s desire to evade international criticism of the intervention which currently breaches UN anti-discrimination covenants and has been exempted by the previous government from the Racial Discrimination Act. In other words, the amendments to the NT Intervention are simply a public relations exercise, with the costs to be borne by an ever broadening tranche of the population.
Bridging the gap is important, and the work must continue to provide Indigenous Australians with meaningful and fulfilling lives unburdened by poverty and its attendants, violence, drugs, and despair. What John Howard refused to recognize and what Kevin Rudd seems to have forgotten is that symbolic reconciliation is an essential part of bridging the gap and offering hope to Indigenous people--and to white Australians as well.
Writing this week for Unleashed, Shelley Reys responds to the question she says she is often asked: "whether big emotional events like the walks for reconciliation and the apology to the Stolen Generations really made a difference to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people or if they soon fade from the memory and contribute little to our wellbeing" ("Reconciliation: all of us must set the pace" (May 28, 2010).
Reys speaks of the wonder she felt at seeing thousands of people out in the freezing weather on the bridge, at the powerful message of the "ethos of a 'fair go'" those marchers sent and how it influenced her to join the board of Reconciliation Australia. It gave her a new understanding of what the Referendum of 1967 meant. Similarly, the Apology reached back to inform her feelings about her grandmother's life story and reached forward to focus her thoughts on what the passing of tradition to her own children and grandchildren means for a woman who was severed from her ancestors' language by her grandmother's removal.
For Reys, these symbolic moments can be literally inspirational in the sense of taking a deep breath before marching on, before continuing the fight armed with the knowledge that one is not alone.
National Reconciliation Week is a fine time to recall just how far we've come in the last 10 years and perhaps think about the way ahead armed with the knowledge that the best outcomes are achieved by working together. It's that human interaction between black and white Australians that is fundamental to true reconciliation.
John Danalis has told us a true story of that very real and honest human interaction in Riding the Black Cockatoo. You can hear him talk about his experience in an interview conducted for ABC Brisbane on March 24, 2010. But buy the book and read the story as well for, practically speaking, Danalis is donating half his royalties to the Wamba Wamba people in support of their ongoing cultural preservation activities. My thanks to Matt and Deborah for alerting me to this stimulating and motivational story.
Posted at 11:30 AM
Sun - May 23, 2010
Nothing Succeeds Like Success
And nothing beats success for generating envy, or
so it seems.
Last week, Papunya Tula Artists released the following press release:
The press release was quickly followed up by a story in The Australian by Ashleigh Wilson ("Talk about a hullabaloo," May 20, 2010) which reiterated the information in the press release and added some speculation of its own.
It seems like we've been here before, although it's been over four years since a similar controversy erupted in Alice Springs, when a group of around ten artists and their family members who were working for Chris Simon protested outside the PTA gallery in the Todd Mall. ("We're upset say artists" and "Art drift into Alice" by Elizabeth Atwood in the Alice Springs News for March 9, 2006; see also my earlier posts "The News (Direct) from Alice Springs" and, for more background, "ABC Radio on Painters in Alice Springs.")
In the meantime, Simon has sold up his galleries in Alice and Melbourne, the Senate Inquiry has come and gone, and much ink has been spilled over a Commercial Code of Conduct. Plus ça change.
One thing that certainly doesn't change over time is the commitment Papunya Tula's management to the artists and the families and the communities that the cooperative and its business serves. It's been nearly a decade since Sweeney took over from Daphne Williams, who was the driving force in the company for most of the two decades prior. Such a record of consistent, reputable, and responsible management is unrivaled in the Aboriginal art trade.
In the last ten years we've seen major exhibitions at home and abroad, from Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius during the Sydney Olympics celebrations to Icons of the Desert and a successful group exhibition at New York University's WSE80 Gallery last fall. In the middle of the decade artist Ningura Napurrula was included in the Australian Aboriginal Art Commission for the Musée du quai Branly. This week, the media were full of reports of the departure of the NMA's Papunya Painting: Out of the Australian Desert leaving for exhibition at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing.
But the company's commercial and artistic success, while it may be the envy of art centres and dealers across Australia, is just a partial measure of its achievement. The rest of the story can be seen out in Kintore, where artists and the families gather at the new painting centre to enjoy the warmth of winter's early morning sun in the courtyard, grandkids looking out for the oldies, a few people scattered in the women's painting room or out on the front verandah, quietly absorbed in their work. Or the often repeated scenes in the white-walled gallery in Alice Springs, where artists come when they need a bit of lunch, where a staff member silently slips twenty dollars out of her wallet to help out a mother with her kids, or Sweeney himself seems to risk the stock playing catch in the front room with a mob of youngsters trailing after their parents. The spirit of engagement defines PTA at every level. No wonder people want to be a part of it; it's the classiest act in town.
Update: ABC Brisbane has published a story confirming the intent of a hostile takeover by Simon and addressing some of the concerns about a drastic change in the management of Papunya Tula Artists ("What is the fate of Papunya Tula?," by Marie Bout, May 24, 2010). "As part of its community arts mandate Papunya Tula has also contributed funding toward a public pool and renal care facilities in Kintore. Thus, the threat of a takeover in leadership by a private dealer is a resounding threat that echoes beyond the art world. 'As a community organisation that wouldn't be here without Papunya Tula we're incredibly concerned about the future direction of the organisation,' said Sarah Brown, Manager of the Western Desert Dialysis Corporation." The story also features an interview with Paul Sweeney, speaking directly to the governance of Papunya Tula Artists.
Last week, Papunya Tula Artists released the following press release:
Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd
PRESS RELEASE 19th May 2010
Over the last two weeks Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd has been made aware of rumours circulating relating to an immediate change of current management. This is untrue.
There have been reports that the artists, shareholders and Board of Directors of the company are unhappy with the current management and that they wish for the manager, Paul Sweeney, to be stood down from his position and replaced. This is also untrue.
On Sunday 16th May the Papunya Tula Artists Board of Directors called a meeting in Kiwirrkura. At this meeting the Board put forward and passed a resolution expressing its absolute confidence in the management of the company. Another resolution was passed noting the Board’s decision that there be no changes made to the current management of the company.
It is believed that a source outside Papunya Tula Artists is conducting an organised campaign attempting to destabilise the company by way of circulating false information.
For any enquiries relating to this release please contact the Manager, Paul Sweeney, Papunya Tula Artists 08 89524731
The press release was quickly followed up by a story in The Australian by Ashleigh Wilson ("Talk about a hullabaloo," May 20, 2010) which reiterated the information in the press release and added some speculation of its own.
Rumours have been swirling during the past fortnight that a private dealer, Chris Simon, has been attracting support from local artists for him to take over Papunya Tula Artists, based in Alice Springs. …
Simon would not comment on the speculation but did say his primary focus was on the "wellbeing of the western desert people".
"If I did [have a desire to run Papunya Tula], that would be my private desire and not for public knowledge," he says.
It seems like we've been here before, although it's been over four years since a similar controversy erupted in Alice Springs, when a group of around ten artists and their family members who were working for Chris Simon protested outside the PTA gallery in the Todd Mall. ("We're upset say artists" and "Art drift into Alice" by Elizabeth Atwood in the Alice Springs News for March 9, 2006; see also my earlier posts "The News (Direct) from Alice Springs" and, for more background, "ABC Radio on Painters in Alice Springs.")
In the meantime, Simon has sold up his galleries in Alice and Melbourne, the Senate Inquiry has come and gone, and much ink has been spilled over a Commercial Code of Conduct. Plus ça change.
One thing that certainly doesn't change over time is the commitment Papunya Tula's management to the artists and the families and the communities that the cooperative and its business serves. It's been nearly a decade since Sweeney took over from Daphne Williams, who was the driving force in the company for most of the two decades prior. Such a record of consistent, reputable, and responsible management is unrivaled in the Aboriginal art trade.
In the last ten years we've seen major exhibitions at home and abroad, from Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius during the Sydney Olympics celebrations to Icons of the Desert and a successful group exhibition at New York University's WSE80 Gallery last fall. In the middle of the decade artist Ningura Napurrula was included in the Australian Aboriginal Art Commission for the Musée du quai Branly. This week, the media were full of reports of the departure of the NMA's Papunya Painting: Out of the Australian Desert leaving for exhibition at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing.
But the company's commercial and artistic success, while it may be the envy of art centres and dealers across Australia, is just a partial measure of its achievement. The rest of the story can be seen out in Kintore, where artists and the families gather at the new painting centre to enjoy the warmth of winter's early morning sun in the courtyard, grandkids looking out for the oldies, a few people scattered in the women's painting room or out on the front verandah, quietly absorbed in their work. Or the often repeated scenes in the white-walled gallery in Alice Springs, where artists come when they need a bit of lunch, where a staff member silently slips twenty dollars out of her wallet to help out a mother with her kids, or Sweeney himself seems to risk the stock playing catch in the front room with a mob of youngsters trailing after their parents. The spirit of engagement defines PTA at every level. No wonder people want to be a part of it; it's the classiest act in town.
Update: ABC Brisbane has published a story confirming the intent of a hostile takeover by Simon and addressing some of the concerns about a drastic change in the management of Papunya Tula Artists ("What is the fate of Papunya Tula?," by Marie Bout, May 24, 2010). "As part of its community arts mandate Papunya Tula has also contributed funding toward a public pool and renal care facilities in Kintore. Thus, the threat of a takeover in leadership by a private dealer is a resounding threat that echoes beyond the art world. 'As a community organisation that wouldn't be here without Papunya Tula we're incredibly concerned about the future direction of the organisation,' said Sarah Brown, Manager of the Western Desert Dialysis Corporation." The story also features an interview with Paul Sweeney, speaking directly to the governance of Papunya Tula Artists.
Posted at 11:00 AM
Sat - May 22, 2010
This Week: Elizabeth Povinelli at the University of
Melbourne
I had the pleasure of hearing Elizabeth Povinelli
speak at Duke University in December of 2007. If you're in Melbourne on
Thursday, May 27, don't miss what ought to be a fascinating, insightful, and
challenging lecture, "The end of knowledge in virtual repatriations." Here's
the abstract, thanks to Emma Kowal.
This paper examines the transformations of the "ends of knowledge" through a discussion of an augmented reality project that I am currently collaboratively constructing. Using what are called mixed reality (also called "augmented reality" and "interreality") technologies, this project aims to bridge the technology gap while examining the cultural biases inherent within new media technologies in order to re-purpose them to serve Indigenous applications and protocols. More specifically it will create a land-based "living library" by using an xml design format in which media files are GPS encoded in such a way that media files are playable only within a certain proximity to a site. It will develop software that creates three unique interfaces: for tourists, land management, and Indigenous families who will have management authority over the entire project and content, and provides a feedback loop for the input of new information and media.This project focuses on mixed reality because of its surface resemblance to local Indigenous understandings of how knowledge should be socially produced and acquired, and the social purpose of its production and acquisition. In Indigenous Australia, scholars long ago demonstrated that the purpose of knowledge acquisition is not merely socially detached "truth", but is more ontologically rich. Among the Indigenous collaborators the ends of knowledge is not truth, though truth was a critical anchor of knowledge, but embodied obligation. This paper seeks to go beyond these surface resemblances to ask how, from the focus on code, hardware and software, are the ends of knowledge being refigured as information circulates across new media technologies and is virtually repatriated.
Professor Povinelli is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at ColumbiaUniversity, where she is also co-director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture. Her most recent books areThe Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Multiculturalism(Duke UP, 2002) andThe Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Geneology, and Carnality(Duke UP, 2006). Her research has focused on critical theory of late liberalism, drawing on decades of research in Belyuen in the Northern Territory and also North American queer worlds.Povinelli Flyer.pdf
Posted at 01:19 PM
Sun - May 16, 2010
Curating at the Kluge-Ruhe
The Kluge-Ruhe
Aboriginal Art Collection at the University of Virginia, comprising
over 1,700 paintings, sculptures, and artifacts from Aboriginal Australia, is
undertaking a significant new conservation effort. Given that many of the items
in the collection were acquired by Ed Ruhe in the 1960's from communities in the
Top End and are made of extremely fragile, organic materials, this is good news
indeed. The video below gives some fascinating insights into the new program.
But best of all, along the way, it provides the viewer with an extensive look at
the variety of materials held by the Kluge-Ruhe. Apart from the publication
Art from the Land, which curator Margo Smith
edited with Howard Morphy back in 2000, this little video may be the best place to gain a quick
appreciation of the wonders housed in the tiny hilltop museum in
Virginia.
This content requires Flash Version 8 or later.
Please upgrade your current plugin to view.
Posted at 10:08 AM
Sun - May 9, 2010
Around the Traps
This has been an unusually good week for news and
features about Aboriginal matters from a wide variety of sources around the
'Net, so without further introduction, here are some of the best bits I've
picked up this week.
First of all, very good news reported by Robbo at Biting the Dust about Western Desert Dialysis. Late last year ABC news reported that Kiwirrkura-based Pintupi artist Patrick Olodoodi Tjungurrayi was unable to travel to Alice Springs for dialysis because the Northern Territory had closed its borders to new dialysis patients. The terrible irony, of course, was that Papunya Tula Artists has raised, and continues to raise, substantial funding for the treatment of renal disease and the provisioning of dialysis clinics in Alice Springs and Kintore--both located in the Territory, while Tjungurrayi resides at Kiwirrkura in WA. Tjungurrayi would have to travel to Perth for dialysis, and he refused to do so, stating that he would prefer to die at home that be exiled to Perth.
Now comes the good news that an agreement has been reached, in part in response to Tjungurrayi's stand, at the recent Council of Australian Governments meeting, to allow patients from the border regions of South Australia and Western Australia to travel to Alice Springs for treatment. The agreements have yet to be signed, money is still to be transferred, but at least it now looks like songlines will take precedence over state lines and seriously ill people can be treated nearer to home.
Artists from Kiwirrkura were among those who traveled to the United States last year for the opening of the Icons of the Desert exhibition at Cornell University featuring the collection of John and Barbara Wilkerson. The current issue of the US publication ARTnews carries an article entitled "Collecting the Dots," by Carly Beswick that reports on the Wilkerson's collection of early Papunya boards.
If you haven't already seen the catalog for Icons of the Desert, you're really missing quite an opportunity to revel in fine art and fascinating scholarship. Among the delights reproduced in the catalog are a series of photographs taken in July 1972 of a group of the original painters working in the men's painting shed at Papunya. Johnny Warungkula's famous Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa can be seen half-completed; Timmy Payungka, Mick Namarari, and Charlie Tjaruru pose with new works. Now the National Library of Australia has posted fifteen of these historic photographs for all the world to see. Don't miss them.
And speaking of history, the latest issue of The Monthly has more. Almost every issue closes with a short column by novelist Shane Maloney featuring a brief description of an unlikely meeting between two celebrities, and this month Maloney regales us with the encounter between two great songment of the Sixties: Wandjuk Marika and Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg was en route from the Adelaide Arts Festival to India in April 1972 and was looking to experience Aboriginal music in context. As fate would have it, he arrived in Yirrkala during a funeral, to which Marika graciously invited him. According to Maloney, Ginsberg chanted the Hare Krishna and sang a Pitjantjatjara song he'd memorized. "He made no mention of Kaddish," notes Maloney.
For reflections on a different kind of Aboriginal song and dance, check out the podcast from German radio's Deutsche Welle broadcast Inspired Minds: One-to-One with the World's Great Artists. This week's fifteen-minute interview (May 3, 2010) is with director Rachel Perkins, on the occasion of the Berlin debut of her film of Bran Nue Dae . There may not be a great deal of new information for Australian audiences here, but North American and Europeans less familiar with either the musical itself or Perkins' career may find it an interesting introduction.
Missions and miracles featured in another news story I ran across this week. Paul Toohey reports in the Daily Telegraph that water from a tap next to the old church building at Hermannsburg is being asserted to have miraculous curative powers, à la Lourdes. It's a fascinating piece of cultural history, in that a spring at the Catholic mission of Santa Teresa has been claimed to possess the power to heal since its "discovery" fifteen years ago. The claims for Hermannsburg have put the Lutherans there in a quandary, as their church is not much on miracles. It's hard to deny hope, however.
Hope? With the Crime and Misconduct Commission's report on the investigations into Cameron "Mulrunji" Doomadgee's death being leaked to the press, is there finally any hope that justice will be served? There is talk about disciplinary action against the four investigating officers, and against two senior officers who oversaw their activities. But somehow I suspect that whatever the outcome, it will be too late. Doomadgee's death will never be settled and peace will be a long time coming to Palm Island.
First of all, very good news reported by Robbo at Biting the Dust about Western Desert Dialysis. Late last year ABC news reported that Kiwirrkura-based Pintupi artist Patrick Olodoodi Tjungurrayi was unable to travel to Alice Springs for dialysis because the Northern Territory had closed its borders to new dialysis patients. The terrible irony, of course, was that Papunya Tula Artists has raised, and continues to raise, substantial funding for the treatment of renal disease and the provisioning of dialysis clinics in Alice Springs and Kintore--both located in the Territory, while Tjungurrayi resides at Kiwirrkura in WA. Tjungurrayi would have to travel to Perth for dialysis, and he refused to do so, stating that he would prefer to die at home that be exiled to Perth.
Now comes the good news that an agreement has been reached, in part in response to Tjungurrayi's stand, at the recent Council of Australian Governments meeting, to allow patients from the border regions of South Australia and Western Australia to travel to Alice Springs for treatment. The agreements have yet to be signed, money is still to be transferred, but at least it now looks like songlines will take precedence over state lines and seriously ill people can be treated nearer to home.
Artists from Kiwirrkura were among those who traveled to the United States last year for the opening of the Icons of the Desert exhibition at Cornell University featuring the collection of John and Barbara Wilkerson. The current issue of the US publication ARTnews carries an article entitled "Collecting the Dots," by Carly Beswick that reports on the Wilkerson's collection of early Papunya boards.
If you haven't already seen the catalog for Icons of the Desert, you're really missing quite an opportunity to revel in fine art and fascinating scholarship. Among the delights reproduced in the catalog are a series of photographs taken in July 1972 of a group of the original painters working in the men's painting shed at Papunya. Johnny Warungkula's famous Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa can be seen half-completed; Timmy Payungka, Mick Namarari, and Charlie Tjaruru pose with new works. Now the National Library of Australia has posted fifteen of these historic photographs for all the world to see. Don't miss them.
And speaking of history, the latest issue of The Monthly has more. Almost every issue closes with a short column by novelist Shane Maloney featuring a brief description of an unlikely meeting between two celebrities, and this month Maloney regales us with the encounter between two great songment of the Sixties: Wandjuk Marika and Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg was en route from the Adelaide Arts Festival to India in April 1972 and was looking to experience Aboriginal music in context. As fate would have it, he arrived in Yirrkala during a funeral, to which Marika graciously invited him. According to Maloney, Ginsberg chanted the Hare Krishna and sang a Pitjantjatjara song he'd memorized. "He made no mention of Kaddish," notes Maloney.
For reflections on a different kind of Aboriginal song and dance, check out the podcast from German radio's Deutsche Welle broadcast Inspired Minds: One-to-One with the World's Great Artists. This week's fifteen-minute interview (May 3, 2010) is with director Rachel Perkins, on the occasion of the Berlin debut of her film of Bran Nue Dae . There may not be a great deal of new information for Australian audiences here, but North American and Europeans less familiar with either the musical itself or Perkins' career may find it an interesting introduction.
Missions and miracles featured in another news story I ran across this week. Paul Toohey reports in the Daily Telegraph that water from a tap next to the old church building at Hermannsburg is being asserted to have miraculous curative powers, à la Lourdes. It's a fascinating piece of cultural history, in that a spring at the Catholic mission of Santa Teresa has been claimed to possess the power to heal since its "discovery" fifteen years ago. The claims for Hermannsburg have put the Lutherans there in a quandary, as their church is not much on miracles. It's hard to deny hope, however.
Hope? With the Crime and Misconduct Commission's report on the investigations into Cameron "Mulrunji" Doomadgee's death being leaked to the press, is there finally any hope that justice will be served? There is talk about disciplinary action against the four investigating officers, and against two senior officers who oversaw their activities. But somehow I suspect that whatever the outcome, it will be too late. Doomadgee's death will never be settled and peace will be a long time coming to Palm Island.
Posted at 11:10 AM
Sun - May 2, 2010
Clinical Notes from the Outback
Howard
Goldenberg's memoir, Raft (Hybrid Publishers, 2009), is not quite
one more story in the line of Mary Ellen Jordan's Balanda (Allen & Unwin, 2005) or Maureen
Helen's Stranger Among the Martu (ABC Books, 2008).
Like those earlier books, Goldenberg details his experiences in remote
Aboriginal and Torres Strait communities. Like Helen's, his story is one of
medicine, illness and health, and encounters with the unfathomable. Unlike
either of them, it is not a narrative of a year spent in a strange and
forbiddingly alien place. Rather, Raft is a series of vignettes that
ostensibly tell us less about the author's struggle to understand and more to
document the lives of the patients he treats, even if those lives are presented
in snippets.
Raised in rural Leeton, NSW, Goldenberg primarily practices medicine in Melbourne. He also frequently works as a relief doctor, seconded over many years to dozens of Aboriginal communities from One Arm Point and Bidyadanga to Wilson's Promontory and Thursday Island. His job is to fill in for the local medico who is on a fortnight's leave home, or sometimes to fly in to provide doctor's services for a spell in a community that isn't fortunate to have a regular attending physician.
As such, Raft can seem a bit disjointed in the early going. The first section of the book offers briefly described incidents ranging from Broome to Halls Creek to Mutitjulu, and thence to Jabiru and Katherine. In each Goldenberg tries to sketch out the role that a doctor plays, and the cultural barriers he must overcome simply to hold a conversation, much less to diagnose a malady or offer a palliative. Succeeding chapters offer tiny case histories, glimpses into the families of afflicted people, tales of despair and, glancingly, the doctor's own struggle to make sense of this world of pain.
Midway through the book, during an extended meditation on life in the relatively calm lands of Galiwin'ku, Goldenberg begins to experience a glimmer of understanding, the chance of hope. Another, surreal, chapter recounts a ride in a troopie with members of a dance troupe from Wadeye making their first appearance at the Garma festival. There is suspicion, a bit of fear, some testing of courage, and ultimately, acceptance.
As Goldenberg tells more and more stories, it seems that a sense of coherence, of logic, begins to shine just over the horizon. His exposure to works of art in Balgo and on Elcho Island opens up a vein of warmth; he marvels at the beauty that painting reveals in the midst of squalor and degradation. But a real sunrise never comes.
The sense of the tragic never goes away, and a real possibility of shaping these shards of his life in the Outback is never realized. I was puzzled by the staunchly episodic feel of the book, the continental meandering that brought Goldenberg no closer to a resolution--a moral, if you will--that he could construct out of these many experiences. As I relaxed my expectations a bit, I began to appreciate the matter-of-factness of his retelling of these lives he has encountered in the course of his work. If this is not exactly a vehicle for Aboriginal people to tell their own stories, Raft at least provides something very like an objective portrait of the people he encounters. I began to respect the author for the simplicity of his reporting and to be grateful to him for his refusal to embellish.
In the acknowledgments that close the book, Goldenberg offers the briefest of explanations for this tone, noting that among his advisors in style was Helen Garner, who urged him "strenuously to publish the pieces she liked and to incinerate those sections -- 'posturing and rhetorical' -- that she did not. It is precisely that lack of an attempt at fiery moralizing that distinguishes Raft from many otherwise similar memoirs of encounters with remote Australia.
A few pages earlier, in a chapter that attempts to summarize his perspective, Goldernberg offers a brief paragraph that adumbrates Garner's advice and offers the closest thing to a lesson learned from these many glimpses into a world "not at peace":
Raft is a series of meditations. To read it is the work of a few hours, but it offers substance for a lifetime of thought. Goldenberg has come to no conclusions, and does not ask his readers to judge either. He simply presents what he has seen, and asks us not to accept it.
Raised in rural Leeton, NSW, Goldenberg primarily practices medicine in Melbourne. He also frequently works as a relief doctor, seconded over many years to dozens of Aboriginal communities from One Arm Point and Bidyadanga to Wilson's Promontory and Thursday Island. His job is to fill in for the local medico who is on a fortnight's leave home, or sometimes to fly in to provide doctor's services for a spell in a community that isn't fortunate to have a regular attending physician.
As such, Raft can seem a bit disjointed in the early going. The first section of the book offers briefly described incidents ranging from Broome to Halls Creek to Mutitjulu, and thence to Jabiru and Katherine. In each Goldenberg tries to sketch out the role that a doctor plays, and the cultural barriers he must overcome simply to hold a conversation, much less to diagnose a malady or offer a palliative. Succeeding chapters offer tiny case histories, glimpses into the families of afflicted people, tales of despair and, glancingly, the doctor's own struggle to make sense of this world of pain.
Midway through the book, during an extended meditation on life in the relatively calm lands of Galiwin'ku, Goldenberg begins to experience a glimmer of understanding, the chance of hope. Another, surreal, chapter recounts a ride in a troopie with members of a dance troupe from Wadeye making their first appearance at the Garma festival. There is suspicion, a bit of fear, some testing of courage, and ultimately, acceptance.
As Goldenberg tells more and more stories, it seems that a sense of coherence, of logic, begins to shine just over the horizon. His exposure to works of art in Balgo and on Elcho Island opens up a vein of warmth; he marvels at the beauty that painting reveals in the midst of squalor and degradation. But a real sunrise never comes.
The sense of the tragic never goes away, and a real possibility of shaping these shards of his life in the Outback is never realized. I was puzzled by the staunchly episodic feel of the book, the continental meandering that brought Goldenberg no closer to a resolution--a moral, if you will--that he could construct out of these many experiences. As I relaxed my expectations a bit, I began to appreciate the matter-of-factness of his retelling of these lives he has encountered in the course of his work. If this is not exactly a vehicle for Aboriginal people to tell their own stories, Raft at least provides something very like an objective portrait of the people he encounters. I began to respect the author for the simplicity of his reporting and to be grateful to him for his refusal to embellish.
In the acknowledgments that close the book, Goldenberg offers the briefest of explanations for this tone, noting that among his advisors in style was Helen Garner, who urged him "strenuously to publish the pieces she liked and to incinerate those sections -- 'posturing and rhetorical' -- that she did not. It is precisely that lack of an attempt at fiery moralizing that distinguishes Raft from many otherwise similar memoirs of encounters with remote Australia.
A few pages earlier, in a chapter that attempts to summarize his perspective, Goldernberg offers a brief paragraph that adumbrates Garner's advice and offers the closest thing to a lesson learned from these many glimpses into a world "not at peace":
I have found myself uncomfortable in many ways. I have felt helpless, and confused by my helplessness; irrelevant and occasionally absurd. I have experienced shock and moral disorientation. Numb hopelessness followed, then a phase of toxic resignation. Later came a calmer state of acceptance, which left me open to encouragement; and now I maintain a poised refusal of acceptance (p. 214).
Raft is a series of meditations. To read it is the work of a few hours, but it offers substance for a lifetime of thought. Goldenberg has come to no conclusions, and does not ask his readers to judge either. He simply presents what he has seen, and asks us not to accept it.
Posted at 11:30 AM
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Will Owen
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Published On: Jul 24, 2010 11:14 AM
Published On: Jul 24, 2010 11:14 AM