Sun - May 11, 2008
Warlayirti Artists, Balgo (Wirrimanu), WA
The very last art centre we visited on the 2007
Austrade American tour was Warlayirti Artists in Balgo, WA. For me, there
was an undeniable tinge of melancholy that this fact brought to what might
otherwise have been among the most thrilling destinations on the tour. As we
flew over the township, memories of years of admiring and collecting the works
of the famous, forgotten, and fresh new talent from Warlayirti mingled with
anticipation of meeting on their home turf artists I had been introduced to on
earlier trips to Darwin and Sydney. And beneath it all was the growing
knowledge that this extraordinary two weeks' adventure was drawing to a
close.
An aerial view of part of Balgo; note the location of the airstrip beyond the town.
Our first view of the local art practice was an unexpected one, discovered as we entered the small "terminal" beside the airstrip.
The mural in the airport lounge at Balgo. Photo by Khadija Carroll.
This mural had clearly been around for a while, and showed signs of weathering, despite being indoors. It was also obviously being repaired, and I couldn't help but think of the repainting of sacred designs on the walls of desert caves.
Detail of water damage, restoration, and overpainting of the mural.
This surprise encounter with local art spread a buzz of excitement through the group that was heightened a few minutes later when we spotted the art centre troopie's dust rising in the air and Annette Cock spun up in front of us to speed us on the short ride to the Warlayirti Art and Cultural Centre. Annette warned us that it was "money day" at the centre, a fact that had two-fold implications. Many of the artists, along with family members, we would like to meet would be there to collect their paychecks. We were warned to be prepared for a hullaballoo.
As we stepped through the door of the art centre, though, the first and overwhelming impression was that of an enormous, marvelous kaleidoscope, miraculously frozen in an instant of time. Display cases immediately to the left glistened with fractals of fired glass coolamons, racks of unstretched canvases crowded the entry, and the walls were hung to the height of eight feet with a mosaic of stretched works. The effect was a cross between an apparition of enormous stained glass windows and one of those paintings of a nineteenth-century exhibition where human figures are dwarfed by ranks of framed salon entries.
A coolamon of fused glass. Photo by Khadija Carroll.
It was only after the initial stunned moment of superabundance passed that the activity in the rest of the room sank in. There were indeed dozens of people waiting for money day to commence. The oldies were seated in rows of chairs, children were erupting with the excitement of seeing visitors, and young men were circulating in and amongst the crowd with business of their own to attend to. Annette gave us a quick introduction to the layout and to what we might find, went over some business rules with us, and then turned us loose. Within minutes the beautiful mosaic walls were being disassembled as the members of our group started collecting the stunners off the walls.
For a while the two groups--artists and art collectors--tended to their business separately and with equal enthusiasm. But as the checks were passed out and the members of the community started to scatter, the artists themselves began to engage in their own aggressive marketing to the whitefellas in the room. First among these was Eubena Nampitjin, whose tiny size and lack of English should deceive no one who meets her. The moment she spied one of our group inspecting one of her canvases, she was instantly in play, making sure that we knew it was her work, giving us a thumbs-up, telling us it was "number one," and bringing her daughter Stella along, introducing her to us and pointing out examples of Stella's work as well.
Bai Bai Napangarti was another equally driven marketer of her art. Reunited with Kerry after an absence of several years, she grinned and launched into a torrent of Kukatja before abruptly disappearing out the door. In a moment she was back, dragging a canvas almost as large as she herself, presenting it to Kerry in a gesture that was equal parts bestowal and bargaining. Or so it looked from my amused position on the sidelines.
Annette, having finished with the majority of the money business, was able to once again turn her attention to her guests, and began circulating, helping us locate works by particular artists, noting our interests, and making more introductions. Elizabeth Gordon Napaltjarri, quiet and shy, was introduced as many of her new canvases were being circulated and examined. Marie Mudgedell, in the midst of all the excitement, quietly and with great determination, laid down a half-finished canvas on the floor of the room and began to work assiduously at it.
When I remarked to Annette that the iconography in Marie's work reminded me of an early painting by Patrick Smith Tjapaltjarri that I had purchased several years ago, Annette said, "Oh he's around here somewhere; let me see if I can find him and introduce you." A few minutes later the introductions were achieved. At the time that I first learned of his work, Patrick was described to me as one of the "younger artists" working for Warlayirti, and I was once again surprised (although I am always surprised at myself most of all in these circumstances) to be introduced to a man who appeared to be about my own age (which he is). Unlike many artists I met on this trip who were excited to learn that I owned one their paintings, and that the painting had traveled all the way to the United States, Patrick seemed much more interested in finding out if I knew any American cowboys and was eager to tell me about his own status as a "cowboy," or stockman as they're more commonly referred to in WA. His pride in that work was clearly as significant to him as his prowess as a painter was to me.
Eventually the moment of financial reckoning began to approach for our group, as we were under pressure to be on our way back to Darwin before military exrecises closed the airspace we had to fly through that day. (The situation was compounded by strong headwinds that would require us to fly south to Hall's Creek for refueling before turning northeast to Darwin.) While the other members of the delegation finished up, I took the opportunity to wander across to the adjacent Cultural Centre.
The exterior of the Warlayirti Cultural Centre
The Warlayirti Cultural Center was one of the first major casualties of funding cuts to ATSIC in 2001, closing just three weeks after its opening (See "Arts Centre: open and shut case" in the Alice Springs News of August 22, 2001 for details.) Since that time, it has served primarily as a meeting space for the community, and has thus met an important need. But the hopes for housing a permanent collection of paintings, artifacts, photographs, and documentation relating to Wirrimanu have foundered for lack of staff, and although there were some stunning examples of early work by masters like Sunfly and old man Tjapanangka that evoked memories of days gone by from Michelle Culpitt, the space was sadly bereft.
As we gathered to leave, a few artists were coaxed outdoors for photographs (photography is not permitted inside the Art or Culture Centres). Well, truth be told, Helicopter didn't need much coaxing, although his daughter, Christine Yukenbarri, did take some paternal encouragement to join her father for this shot.
Helicopter Tjunugrarry and Christine Yukenbarri Nakamarra. Photo by Wolfgang Schlink.
The next thing I knew we were airborne, still buzzing with the excitement of the morning's activities. As a sort of farewell to the country, I took several photos as we lifted off and circled around. In the first of these, below, you can see the very end of the airstrip approaching the dropoff at the edge of the escarpment the town sits on. Have a look back at the first photo above to get a sense of the situation of Balgo in the desert landscape.
In the first days of our journey as we flew over the landscape of the APY lands farther south in WA, I was constantly in awe of the geology unfolding beneath us and impressed repeatedly with a sense of how the people of this country saw the ancestral power embodied in it. That sense of wonderment had subsided a bit during our time in the north, but as we headed for Hall's Creek that afternoon, it returned in full force.
***
And so, with this story, I'm forced to conclude my narrative of my own journey through Dreaming countries. When I left the USA, on May 21, 2007, laptop in my backpack, I was determined to record my adventures as they happened, and was excitied about the opportunity to report live, from the road, on my experiences in the Outback on the trail of Indigenous Art Centres. Now I've finally finished that reporting, ten days shy of a year from my official departure date, and a couple of weeks before the second American delegation starts its journey along a similar path. (If you haven't been with me for the whole journey so far, you can click on the "Communities" link in the sidebar to the right to follow it back in time.)
I've already written of our final night in Darwin, reflections composed and posted from the Darwin airport the day after we were in Balgo as I was started my journey home alone. I was lucky to get three posts up during the two weeks of our travels: there was just so much that I was unprepared for on the trip. We flew over 6,700 kilometers in thirteen days, logging more than twenty hours in the air. We visited twenty-four art centres, meeting dozens of artists and the dedicated people who help mediate between Indigenous and Western cultures to bring that art to market and to those of us who cherish it and draw inspiration from it. In the evenings, when I thought I might relax with a bit of blogging, the camaraderie of my traveling companions became indispensable; there were invitations from generous new friends to be honored, campfire nights and sunset cruises. Strangely enough, I never seemed to be exhausted by the adventures until the moment I fell into bed without having written a word.
The US Art Mob sporting hats emblazoned with "The Territory," a farewell gift to us from the NT Government.
That last night in Darwin I found it impossible to believe that the trip was coming to an end, despite a bit of sadness that I couldn't shake off. Maybe I couldn't believe it because I didn't want to, and maybe because I knew that in other ways new adventures were beginning. I remain to this day deeply grateful to my traveling companions from the US for the insights their own perspectives and experience brought not simply to the days of our travel, but to my appreciation of the art and the communities that we saw. Joel, Wayne, and Bernie, our guides and gurus from Austrade and the NT Government, have helped to keep alive a sense of community and connectedness in the months that have passed since we parted company on the Darwin Esplanade, and I'm eagerly looking forward to reunions to come.
Before this trip, I'd had only limited opportunities to visit a few communities, despite the urgings of everyone I spoke with to get out and experience life on the ground with the artists. I will be grateful to our sponsors to the end of my days for giving me this extraordinary opportunity. It became all the more precious to me a week after I returned to the US and heard John Howard and Mal Brough announce their plans to intervene in the lives of the people I so lately met for the first time, a story that is still unfolding under the Rudd Government, and still full of uncertainty and confusion. The news of the Intervention was doubly shocking coming as it did immediately on the heels of the release of the final report of the Senate Inquiry into the Indigenous Visual Arts and Crafts Industry, Indigenous Art--Securing the Future .
The Intervention effectively buried that report. Its key recommendations remain unimplemented, although it is uncertain how many of them might have come to fruition anyway. (Of course, the key recommendations of Little Children are Sacred remain largely unimplemented as well, but that is another story.) While the Senate Report recognized repeatedly the importance of art centres to an Indigenous economy, the Intervention initially put those operations at great risk through the threat to abolish CDEP (for starters).
And so I feel doubly blessed to have been able to visit all these amazing communities before the threats burst, at a moment in time when there was real hope that the government might recognize the fullness of the gifts that come out of Yuendumu and Yirrkala, of the sustenance that art means to the old men and women of Patjarr and Warmun. I saw the coexistence of the Dreaming with Christian traditions in Nguiu and bought Ngaanyatjarra rock 'n roll recordings in Warburton, met movie stars in Ramingining, and played ball with a young girl in Kintore.
At stops along the way, from Sydney to Alice Springs to Darwin to Brisbane, I was able once more to immerse myself in the other end of the cultural continuum, visiting galleries and museums, meeting scholars and journalists. Perhaps another reason that it has taken me a full year to write up these reports is the need to come to terms with the fullness, the richness of the whole experience. I'm not quite sure I've achieved that even now. I expect that when I next return to Australia to immerse myself again, in different ways to be sure, I will discover things I learned a year ago and still don't fully appreciate.
Writing in the Darwin airport on that final day, I noted how Wayne had promised at the start of the tour that the next two weeks would be a life-changing experience, and how I foolishly disbelieved him. I knew that day in Darwin and know better today how right he was.
An aerial view of part of Balgo; note the location of the airstrip beyond the town.
Our first view of the local art practice was an unexpected one, discovered as we entered the small "terminal" beside the airstrip.
The mural in the airport lounge at Balgo. Photo by Khadija Carroll.
This mural had clearly been around for a while, and showed signs of weathering, despite being indoors. It was also obviously being repaired, and I couldn't help but think of the repainting of sacred designs on the walls of desert caves.
Detail of water damage, restoration, and overpainting of the mural.
This surprise encounter with local art spread a buzz of excitement through the group that was heightened a few minutes later when we spotted the art centre troopie's dust rising in the air and Annette Cock spun up in front of us to speed us on the short ride to the Warlayirti Art and Cultural Centre. Annette warned us that it was "money day" at the centre, a fact that had two-fold implications. Many of the artists, along with family members, we would like to meet would be there to collect their paychecks. We were warned to be prepared for a hullaballoo.
As we stepped through the door of the art centre, though, the first and overwhelming impression was that of an enormous, marvelous kaleidoscope, miraculously frozen in an instant of time. Display cases immediately to the left glistened with fractals of fired glass coolamons, racks of unstretched canvases crowded the entry, and the walls were hung to the height of eight feet with a mosaic of stretched works. The effect was a cross between an apparition of enormous stained glass windows and one of those paintings of a nineteenth-century exhibition where human figures are dwarfed by ranks of framed salon entries.
A coolamon of fused glass. Photo by Khadija Carroll.
It was only after the initial stunned moment of superabundance passed that the activity in the rest of the room sank in. There were indeed dozens of people waiting for money day to commence. The oldies were seated in rows of chairs, children were erupting with the excitement of seeing visitors, and young men were circulating in and amongst the crowd with business of their own to attend to. Annette gave us a quick introduction to the layout and to what we might find, went over some business rules with us, and then turned us loose. Within minutes the beautiful mosaic walls were being disassembled as the members of our group started collecting the stunners off the walls.
For a while the two groups--artists and art collectors--tended to their business separately and with equal enthusiasm. But as the checks were passed out and the members of the community started to scatter, the artists themselves began to engage in their own aggressive marketing to the whitefellas in the room. First among these was Eubena Nampitjin, whose tiny size and lack of English should deceive no one who meets her. The moment she spied one of our group inspecting one of her canvases, she was instantly in play, making sure that we knew it was her work, giving us a thumbs-up, telling us it was "number one," and bringing her daughter Stella along, introducing her to us and pointing out examples of Stella's work as well.
Bai Bai Napangarti was another equally driven marketer of her art. Reunited with Kerry after an absence of several years, she grinned and launched into a torrent of Kukatja before abruptly disappearing out the door. In a moment she was back, dragging a canvas almost as large as she herself, presenting it to Kerry in a gesture that was equal parts bestowal and bargaining. Or so it looked from my amused position on the sidelines.
Annette, having finished with the majority of the money business, was able to once again turn her attention to her guests, and began circulating, helping us locate works by particular artists, noting our interests, and making more introductions. Elizabeth Gordon Napaltjarri, quiet and shy, was introduced as many of her new canvases were being circulated and examined. Marie Mudgedell, in the midst of all the excitement, quietly and with great determination, laid down a half-finished canvas on the floor of the room and began to work assiduously at it.
When I remarked to Annette that the iconography in Marie's work reminded me of an early painting by Patrick Smith Tjapaltjarri that I had purchased several years ago, Annette said, "Oh he's around here somewhere; let me see if I can find him and introduce you." A few minutes later the introductions were achieved. At the time that I first learned of his work, Patrick was described to me as one of the "younger artists" working for Warlayirti, and I was once again surprised (although I am always surprised at myself most of all in these circumstances) to be introduced to a man who appeared to be about my own age (which he is). Unlike many artists I met on this trip who were excited to learn that I owned one their paintings, and that the painting had traveled all the way to the United States, Patrick seemed much more interested in finding out if I knew any American cowboys and was eager to tell me about his own status as a "cowboy," or stockman as they're more commonly referred to in WA. His pride in that work was clearly as significant to him as his prowess as a painter was to me.
Eventually the moment of financial reckoning began to approach for our group, as we were under pressure to be on our way back to Darwin before military exrecises closed the airspace we had to fly through that day. (The situation was compounded by strong headwinds that would require us to fly south to Hall's Creek for refueling before turning northeast to Darwin.) While the other members of the delegation finished up, I took the opportunity to wander across to the adjacent Cultural Centre.
The exterior of the Warlayirti Cultural Centre
The Warlayirti Cultural Center was one of the first major casualties of funding cuts to ATSIC in 2001, closing just three weeks after its opening (See "Arts Centre: open and shut case" in the Alice Springs News of August 22, 2001 for details.) Since that time, it has served primarily as a meeting space for the community, and has thus met an important need. But the hopes for housing a permanent collection of paintings, artifacts, photographs, and documentation relating to Wirrimanu have foundered for lack of staff, and although there were some stunning examples of early work by masters like Sunfly and old man Tjapanangka that evoked memories of days gone by from Michelle Culpitt, the space was sadly bereft.
As we gathered to leave, a few artists were coaxed outdoors for photographs (photography is not permitted inside the Art or Culture Centres). Well, truth be told, Helicopter didn't need much coaxing, although his daughter, Christine Yukenbarri, did take some paternal encouragement to join her father for this shot.
Helicopter Tjunugrarry and Christine Yukenbarri Nakamarra. Photo by Wolfgang Schlink.
The next thing I knew we were airborne, still buzzing with the excitement of the morning's activities. As a sort of farewell to the country, I took several photos as we lifted off and circled around. In the first of these, below, you can see the very end of the airstrip approaching the dropoff at the edge of the escarpment the town sits on. Have a look back at the first photo above to get a sense of the situation of Balgo in the desert landscape.
In the first days of our journey as we flew over the landscape of the APY lands farther south in WA, I was constantly in awe of the geology unfolding beneath us and impressed repeatedly with a sense of how the people of this country saw the ancestral power embodied in it. That sense of wonderment had subsided a bit during our time in the north, but as we headed for Hall's Creek that afternoon, it returned in full force.
And so, with this story, I'm forced to conclude my narrative of my own journey through Dreaming countries. When I left the USA, on May 21, 2007, laptop in my backpack, I was determined to record my adventures as they happened, and was excitied about the opportunity to report live, from the road, on my experiences in the Outback on the trail of Indigenous Art Centres. Now I've finally finished that reporting, ten days shy of a year from my official departure date, and a couple of weeks before the second American delegation starts its journey along a similar path. (If you haven't been with me for the whole journey so far, you can click on the "Communities" link in the sidebar to the right to follow it back in time.)
I've already written of our final night in Darwin, reflections composed and posted from the Darwin airport the day after we were in Balgo as I was started my journey home alone. I was lucky to get three posts up during the two weeks of our travels: there was just so much that I was unprepared for on the trip. We flew over 6,700 kilometers in thirteen days, logging more than twenty hours in the air. We visited twenty-four art centres, meeting dozens of artists and the dedicated people who help mediate between Indigenous and Western cultures to bring that art to market and to those of us who cherish it and draw inspiration from it. In the evenings, when I thought I might relax with a bit of blogging, the camaraderie of my traveling companions became indispensable; there were invitations from generous new friends to be honored, campfire nights and sunset cruises. Strangely enough, I never seemed to be exhausted by the adventures until the moment I fell into bed without having written a word.
The US Art Mob sporting hats emblazoned with "The Territory," a farewell gift to us from the NT Government.
That last night in Darwin I found it impossible to believe that the trip was coming to an end, despite a bit of sadness that I couldn't shake off. Maybe I couldn't believe it because I didn't want to, and maybe because I knew that in other ways new adventures were beginning. I remain to this day deeply grateful to my traveling companions from the US for the insights their own perspectives and experience brought not simply to the days of our travel, but to my appreciation of the art and the communities that we saw. Joel, Wayne, and Bernie, our guides and gurus from Austrade and the NT Government, have helped to keep alive a sense of community and connectedness in the months that have passed since we parted company on the Darwin Esplanade, and I'm eagerly looking forward to reunions to come.
Before this trip, I'd had only limited opportunities to visit a few communities, despite the urgings of everyone I spoke with to get out and experience life on the ground with the artists. I will be grateful to our sponsors to the end of my days for giving me this extraordinary opportunity. It became all the more precious to me a week after I returned to the US and heard John Howard and Mal Brough announce their plans to intervene in the lives of the people I so lately met for the first time, a story that is still unfolding under the Rudd Government, and still full of uncertainty and confusion. The news of the Intervention was doubly shocking coming as it did immediately on the heels of the release of the final report of the Senate Inquiry into the Indigenous Visual Arts and Crafts Industry, Indigenous Art--Securing the Future .
The Intervention effectively buried that report. Its key recommendations remain unimplemented, although it is uncertain how many of them might have come to fruition anyway. (Of course, the key recommendations of Little Children are Sacred remain largely unimplemented as well, but that is another story.) While the Senate Report recognized repeatedly the importance of art centres to an Indigenous economy, the Intervention initially put those operations at great risk through the threat to abolish CDEP (for starters).
And so I feel doubly blessed to have been able to visit all these amazing communities before the threats burst, at a moment in time when there was real hope that the government might recognize the fullness of the gifts that come out of Yuendumu and Yirrkala, of the sustenance that art means to the old men and women of Patjarr and Warmun. I saw the coexistence of the Dreaming with Christian traditions in Nguiu and bought Ngaanyatjarra rock 'n roll recordings in Warburton, met movie stars in Ramingining, and played ball with a young girl in Kintore.
At stops along the way, from Sydney to Alice Springs to Darwin to Brisbane, I was able once more to immerse myself in the other end of the cultural continuum, visiting galleries and museums, meeting scholars and journalists. Perhaps another reason that it has taken me a full year to write up these reports is the need to come to terms with the fullness, the richness of the whole experience. I'm not quite sure I've achieved that even now. I expect that when I next return to Australia to immerse myself again, in different ways to be sure, I will discover things I learned a year ago and still don't fully appreciate.
Writing in the Darwin airport on that final day, I noted how Wayne had promised at the start of the tour that the next two weeks would be a life-changing experience, and how I foolishly disbelieved him. I knew that day in Darwin and know better today how right he was.
Posted at 03:17 PM
Thu - May 8, 2008
Papunya Town Planning
My thanks to Alec O'Halloran for pointing me to
the answer to last week's question about the topography of Papunya, where
a ring road around the center of the settlement is surrounded by the
semi-circular tracks of an Aboriginal iconographic
design.
In Janet Maughan's introduction to Dot & Circle: a retrospective survey of the Aboriginal acrylic paintings of Central Australia (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, 1986) she refers to an earlier publication, J. H. Downing's Aboriginal 'Dreamings' and Town Plans: a report on traditional Aboriginal camp layout in relation to town planning (Institute for Aboriginal Development, 1979). She writes:
The following illustration appears on page 14 of Dot & Circle.
Thanks also to Jan Svenungsson, whose curiosity prompted me to pursue the answer to this question.
In Janet Maughan's introduction to Dot & Circle: a retrospective survey of the Aboriginal acrylic paintings of Central Australia (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, 1986) she refers to an earlier publication, J. H. Downing's Aboriginal 'Dreamings' and Town Plans: a report on traditional Aboriginal camp layout in relation to town planning (Institute for Aboriginal Development, 1979). She writes:
So important is this story [the honey ant dreaming] in the linking of the site to the community that in the face of ordering a town plan, the honey ant story provided the underlying concept.. The Rev. J. H. Downing wrote --The people already knew what they wanted and after I had shown them the various designs, produced a painting of the honey ant dreaming (tjala) (Downing, pp. 22-23).Thus the imposed physical constructions which accompanied European administration were to be grouped centrally with the concomitant housing in semi-circular arrangements around these service buildings (Maughan, p. 15)
The following illustration appears on page 14 of Dot & Circle.
Thanks also to Jan Svenungsson, whose curiosity prompted me to pursue the answer to this question.
Posted at 08:56 PM
Sat - May 3, 2008
Mangkaja Arts, Fitzroy Crossing, WA
Fitzroy Crossing, home of Mangkaja
Arts, was the third stop of the day on our blitz through the
Kimberley. We came down out of the brilliant blue at three o'clock in the
afternoon to be met at the airport by manager Mandy Mcguire for the short drive
across the Fitzroy River floodplain into town. Located on the edge of the Great
Sandy Desert, Fitzroy Crossing has seen waves of migrations in the last hundred
years. As pastoralists moved in and displaced the original inhabitants, other
Indigeneous people moved in from the Desert regions. The result is a most
pluralistic art centre where the local Bunuba meet and mingle with Walmajarri,
Wangkajunka, Gooniyandi, Juwaliny, and other
people.
This historical migration led in recent years to the spectacular pair of paintings known as the Ngurrara Canvases, completed in 1996 and 1997 and documenting the traditional ownership of the surrounding country. In 2000, another large collaborative work once more laid out the Martuwarra and Jila country (respectively the Bunuba and Gooniyandi river country and the Walmajarri and Wangkajunka desert lands). Glimpses of this later work, along with Ngurrara I (which was auctioned at Sothey's in 2003 and was the subject of an extensive article in The New Yorker for July 28, 2003) can be had at the website of the 2002 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. Ngurrara II is currently on tour to museums around Australia and can be seen at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra until June 22, 2008.
Ngurrara II, 1997
Today, Mangkaja Arts operates two facilities. The older of the two is an unprepossessing affair from the outside, located in the Tarunda Supermarket Complex. This small strip mall is the unlikeliest setting for an arts centre that we encountered on our trip, where you would expect to grab a quick meal at the takeaway shop or load up the van with groceries, but not meet up with dazzling displays of art. You can get some sense of the place in a short video clip from Cathy Freeman and Deborah Mailman's Going Bush television series made available by Ninenmsn.
Across the road, a brand new building that had barely opened before our arrival in June 2007 served as a spacious gallery for the display of new work and a storehouse of paintings both on offer and awaiting shipment to galleries and exhibitions around the country.
Mangkaja's new studio and warehouse space. Photo by Margo Smith.
In this new space we were joined by Paul Miller, who helped us sort through the stacks of framed canvases leaning against the walls and even more unstretched works laid out on large tables for our perusal and selection. Although an examination of the styles comprised in the Ngurrara canvases affords some taste of the variety and breadth of expression that is now collected under the banner of Mangkaja Arts, it cannot truly do justice to them all. The boldness of Wakartu Cory Surprise's blocks of color seen on the wall at the left in the photo below easily survive translation to such a large framework; Daisy Andrews' delicately colored landscapes (on the floor below Wakartu's work) need to be savored and absorbed slowly and in their small scale.
Wolf examines the stock. Photo by Margo Smith.
Many
of the older men, including
painters
such as Pijaju Peter Skipper, Mawukura Jimmy Nerrimah, and Spider Snell paint
bold ceremonial designs that clearly show their connections to the iconographic
traditions of the Western Desert. (Spider can be seen dancing on the Ngurrara
canvas in the photograph on the cover of the
Oxford
Companion to Aboriginal Art and
Culture, Oxford University Press,
2001; his painting
Ngunjawali,
2003, which describes a story from the Tingari cycle, is on the right here.) The
women's paintings constantly surprise with the richness of their floral imagery.
The theme of
jila,
the everlasting waterholes in the desert, flourishes in the works of all these
painters, whether through intimations of the great serpents that live in them or
in the fecundity they bring to the
desert.
If there was a disappointment to the finish of this day, it was that changes in schedule and our consequent late arrival meant that all the artists had departed for the day (and we were a day early to boot). However the wealth of work available for us to look through easily made up for the missed opportunity.
Paul Miller helps Nana makes some tough decisions. Photo by Khadija Carroll.
Eventually we all walked across the road to the storefront Art Centre to conclude our business and to peruse the ample selection of catalogs, prints, and paintings by emerging artists. There another surprise was waiting for me: Greg Wallace and Jen Ford were hard at work in the back room, sorting out the photographic archives of Mangkaja Arts. They were there as part of a pilot project being run by Desart to further apply the benefits of technology to the operations of art centres across Australia. Having managed to install the appropriate equipment and software to enable each of Desart's members to capture their output digitally and to begin the work of building websites, John Oster was now committed to exploring the digital options for preserving the history of these hardy organizations.
Two pilot projects had been selected to examine the resource requirements for building differing kinds of digital archives at two Kimberley art centres. At Warlayirti Artists in Balgo, scanning of the entire physical archive of painting certificates documenting in photographs and stories the history of artwork produced for Warlayirti was underway. Here in Fitzroy Crossing Greg and Jen were still at the stage of assessing the riches on hand. Jen took time out to leaf through a set of scrapbooks that appeared to contain hundreds of photos of the painting of one of the Ngurrara canvases. They hoped at some point in the future to scan all these into digital images and document the people appearing in each along with stories being painted.
Night was falling by the time we began to caravan towards the Fitzroy Crossing River Lodge, where we were to spend the night (unknowingly in the company of several tour bus loads of bemused seniors also stopping for the night on a very different tour of the Kimberley). Once we had checked into our rooms, though, it was not yet time to rest and relax.
There was indeed more art to be seen, as Paul Good from Austrade and Linda Butterly of the Kimberley Development Council had just arrived after a long, long drive from Carnarvon, to treat us to an exhibition of new art of the Pilbara region. Artists from the Shire of Roebourne had, in 2006, traveled to Florence, Italy, for an astonishing exhibition called Antica Terra Pulsante (Ancient Land Pulsing). Their work rivaled that of the Mangkaja Artists for its variety and in many cases the intensity of the color they applied to the canvas.
Kathleen Nangala Njamme's squares and roundels recalled the classic works of many Western Desert artists and would not have been out of place on the walls of Warlayirti Artists in Balgo. Yindjibarndi artist Clifton Mack builds fields of color out of an infinite number of small dots and dashes. Some of his work was reminiscent in color and composition of faraway Anmatyerre or Alyawarre painters; other paintings looked startlingly new and spoke eloquently of the seaside light of the Western coastline. But I think we all agreed that Karratha Murniba's shimmering fields of color, once of which is reproduced below, were the star attractions of the show that Paul and Linda had so generously arranged for us.
Murinba is the most dramatic and the freshest of the painters working today out of Roebourne.
After feasting all day on Kimberley art, from Kununurra through Warmun, and westwards from Fitzroy to Roebourne, it was time to replenish the body as well as the soul. To that end, we all repaired to the Fitzroy Crossing River Lodge, where Paul Miller rejoined us while Paul Good and Linda Butterly made sure that the wine flowed as smoothly as the conversation. As this was to be our group's last night on the road--prior to our very last night of the tour in Darwin--it was with real reluctance that we gave in to the need for sleep as the clock ticked past 10 p.m.
Dawn's early light in Fitzroy Crossing
Dawn brought another perfect day and I took the opportunity to wander the grounds of the Lodge, the cool morning nearly silent but for a few birdcalls. After a quick breakfast, we loaded our gear for the return trip to the airport, where Paul and Linda sent us off with a hefty gift of catalogs and books to help us remember the land we hadn't seen, the iron-red Pilbara. Their generosity and kindness, their invitations to return, were the perfect send-off for our final day touring the art centres of the West.
This historical migration led in recent years to the spectacular pair of paintings known as the Ngurrara Canvases, completed in 1996 and 1997 and documenting the traditional ownership of the surrounding country. In 2000, another large collaborative work once more laid out the Martuwarra and Jila country (respectively the Bunuba and Gooniyandi river country and the Walmajarri and Wangkajunka desert lands). Glimpses of this later work, along with Ngurrara I (which was auctioned at Sothey's in 2003 and was the subject of an extensive article in The New Yorker for July 28, 2003) can be had at the website of the 2002 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. Ngurrara II is currently on tour to museums around Australia and can be seen at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra until June 22, 2008.
Ngurrara II, 1997
Today, Mangkaja Arts operates two facilities. The older of the two is an unprepossessing affair from the outside, located in the Tarunda Supermarket Complex. This small strip mall is the unlikeliest setting for an arts centre that we encountered on our trip, where you would expect to grab a quick meal at the takeaway shop or load up the van with groceries, but not meet up with dazzling displays of art. You can get some sense of the place in a short video clip from Cathy Freeman and Deborah Mailman's Going Bush television series made available by Ninenmsn.
Across the road, a brand new building that had barely opened before our arrival in June 2007 served as a spacious gallery for the display of new work and a storehouse of paintings both on offer and awaiting shipment to galleries and exhibitions around the country.
Mangkaja's new studio and warehouse space. Photo by Margo Smith.
In this new space we were joined by Paul Miller, who helped us sort through the stacks of framed canvases leaning against the walls and even more unstretched works laid out on large tables for our perusal and selection. Although an examination of the styles comprised in the Ngurrara canvases affords some taste of the variety and breadth of expression that is now collected under the banner of Mangkaja Arts, it cannot truly do justice to them all. The boldness of Wakartu Cory Surprise's blocks of color seen on the wall at the left in the photo below easily survive translation to such a large framework; Daisy Andrews' delicately colored landscapes (on the floor below Wakartu's work) need to be savored and absorbed slowly and in their small scale.
Wolf examines the stock. Photo by Margo Smith.
Many
of the older men, including
painters
such as Pijaju Peter Skipper, Mawukura Jimmy Nerrimah, and Spider Snell paint
bold ceremonial designs that clearly show their connections to the iconographic
traditions of the Western Desert. (Spider can be seen dancing on the Ngurrara
canvas in the photograph on the cover of the
Oxford
Companion to Aboriginal Art and
Culture, Oxford University Press,
2001; his painting
Ngunjawali,
2003, which describes a story from the Tingari cycle, is on the right here.) The
women's paintings constantly surprise with the richness of their floral imagery.
The theme of
jila,
the everlasting waterholes in the desert, flourishes in the works of all these
painters, whether through intimations of the great serpents that live in them or
in the fecundity they bring to the
desert.If there was a disappointment to the finish of this day, it was that changes in schedule and our consequent late arrival meant that all the artists had departed for the day (and we were a day early to boot). However the wealth of work available for us to look through easily made up for the missed opportunity.
Paul Miller helps Nana makes some tough decisions. Photo by Khadija Carroll.
Eventually we all walked across the road to the storefront Art Centre to conclude our business and to peruse the ample selection of catalogs, prints, and paintings by emerging artists. There another surprise was waiting for me: Greg Wallace and Jen Ford were hard at work in the back room, sorting out the photographic archives of Mangkaja Arts. They were there as part of a pilot project being run by Desart to further apply the benefits of technology to the operations of art centres across Australia. Having managed to install the appropriate equipment and software to enable each of Desart's members to capture their output digitally and to begin the work of building websites, John Oster was now committed to exploring the digital options for preserving the history of these hardy organizations.
Two pilot projects had been selected to examine the resource requirements for building differing kinds of digital archives at two Kimberley art centres. At Warlayirti Artists in Balgo, scanning of the entire physical archive of painting certificates documenting in photographs and stories the history of artwork produced for Warlayirti was underway. Here in Fitzroy Crossing Greg and Jen were still at the stage of assessing the riches on hand. Jen took time out to leaf through a set of scrapbooks that appeared to contain hundreds of photos of the painting of one of the Ngurrara canvases. They hoped at some point in the future to scan all these into digital images and document the people appearing in each along with stories being painted.
Night was falling by the time we began to caravan towards the Fitzroy Crossing River Lodge, where we were to spend the night (unknowingly in the company of several tour bus loads of bemused seniors also stopping for the night on a very different tour of the Kimberley). Once we had checked into our rooms, though, it was not yet time to rest and relax.
There was indeed more art to be seen, as Paul Good from Austrade and Linda Butterly of the Kimberley Development Council had just arrived after a long, long drive from Carnarvon, to treat us to an exhibition of new art of the Pilbara region. Artists from the Shire of Roebourne had, in 2006, traveled to Florence, Italy, for an astonishing exhibition called Antica Terra Pulsante (Ancient Land Pulsing). Their work rivaled that of the Mangkaja Artists for its variety and in many cases the intensity of the color they applied to the canvas.
Kathleen Nangala Njamme's squares and roundels recalled the classic works of many Western Desert artists and would not have been out of place on the walls of Warlayirti Artists in Balgo. Yindjibarndi artist Clifton Mack builds fields of color out of an infinite number of small dots and dashes. Some of his work was reminiscent in color and composition of faraway Anmatyerre or Alyawarre painters; other paintings looked startlingly new and spoke eloquently of the seaside light of the Western coastline. But I think we all agreed that Karratha Murniba's shimmering fields of color, once of which is reproduced below, were the star attractions of the show that Paul and Linda had so generously arranged for us.
Murinba is the most dramatic and the freshest of the painters working today out of Roebourne.
After feasting all day on Kimberley art, from Kununurra through Warmun, and westwards from Fitzroy to Roebourne, it was time to replenish the body as well as the soul. To that end, we all repaired to the Fitzroy Crossing River Lodge, where Paul Miller rejoined us while Paul Good and Linda Butterly made sure that the wine flowed as smoothly as the conversation. As this was to be our group's last night on the road--prior to our very last night of the tour in Darwin--it was with real reluctance that we gave in to the need for sleep as the clock ticked past 10 p.m.
Dawn's early light in Fitzroy Crossing
Dawn brought another perfect day and I took the opportunity to wander the grounds of the Lodge, the cool morning nearly silent but for a few birdcalls. After a quick breakfast, we loaded our gear for the return trip to the airport, where Paul and Linda sent us off with a hefty gift of catalogs and books to help us remember the land we hadn't seen, the iron-red Pilbara. Their generosity and kindness, their invitations to return, were the perfect send-off for our final day touring the art centres of the West.
Posted at 05:43 PM
Wed - April 30, 2008
Papunya Topography: Request for Information
If you search for Papunya using Google Earth,
you'll find* the following image of the
town:
In what must be the surest example of life imitating art, the landscape surrounding the settlement has been scored on four sides with semi-circles that reproduce Western Desert iconography.
I'm hoping that some of my readers can provide some information about this striking terrestrial inscription. When was it done? Who arranged for it? What's the story here?
My thanks in advance to anyone who can enlighten me.
*In order for you to see this for yourself you'll actually have to navigate about 15 kilometers north of the spot on the map where Google Earth locates Papunya. Zoom in a bit and follow the roads to find it.
Update: See my subsequent post on Papunya Town Planning for the answer to the riddle.
In what must be the surest example of life imitating art, the landscape surrounding the settlement has been scored on four sides with semi-circles that reproduce Western Desert iconography.
I'm hoping that some of my readers can provide some information about this striking terrestrial inscription. When was it done? Who arranged for it? What's the story here?
My thanks in advance to anyone who can enlighten me.
*In order for you to see this for yourself you'll actually have to navigate about 15 kilometers north of the spot on the map where Google Earth locates Papunya. Zoom in a bit and follow the roads to find it.
Update: See my subsequent post on Papunya Town Planning for the answer to the riddle.
Posted at 10:15 PM
Sun - April 27, 2008
Indigenous Protocols: Kim Christen at the Kluge-Ruhe
Kim
Christen
was at the Kluge-Ruhe
Aboriginal Art Collection this weekend, delivering two lectures within
five hours on her experiences building a digital archive of cultural and
historical material with the Warumungu people of Tennant Creek. Christen, an
anthropologist and assistant professor at Washington State University, is the
author the forthcoming Aboriginal
business: alliances in a remote Australian
town, soon to be published by SAR Press. She
also writes Long
Road, a premier blog on issues
Indigenous. And she is the architect of the
Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari
Archive, an Indigenous archive tool, that was
the subject of her talks.
The first lecture, "Culture at the Interface" Digital Archives and 'Social' Rights Management in Aboriginal Australia," was actually given in the high-tech Scholar's Lab at the University of Virginia's Alderman Library to an audience interested in Christen's work from the point of view of "digital rights management" and the possibilities for encoding intellectual property protocols into software.
The second, "A Safe Keeping Place: Shifting Museum Spaces and Embedded Aboriginal Protocols," appealed to the Kluge-Ruhe's dedicated lecture audience interested in Aboriginal art and culture. In her presentation examined the ways in which the Warumungu not only keep their culture alive but are working to integrate their sense of themselves and their traditions into the ongoing adjustments of black and white in a multicultural community. Tennant Creek in on the Stuart Highway smack in the middle of both traditional Warumungu country and Australia's Northern Territory.
Christen has been working with the Warumungu in Tennant Creek since 1995 in a variety of capacities. At one point in her career she accompanied a group of people from the town to the South Australian Museum in Adelaide. There they were able to inspect thousands of artifacts that had been removed from Warumungu country since contact with white people began during the construction of the Overland Telegraph line in the middle of the nineteenth century.
A subsequent trip to the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory was much less fruitful at first. Only three artifacts in MAGNT's collection were recognized by the visitors from Tennant Creek. They did, however, receive copies of about 700 pages of written material from the NT Archives relating to activities in and around Tennant Creek. These includied extensive records from cattle stations in the area that provided documentary evidence about the Indigenous people who worked in the area for the station owners.
But on the way back down the highway towards home, the group stopped to visit at the home of a former missionary who had lived in Tennant Creek. There they were shown dozens of boxes containing thousands of photographs taken in the latter half of the twentieth century. Many people still living in Tennant Creek, and many of their deceased family members were included in these photos. The former missionary had already scanned about 500 of these photos into digital images, which Kim loaded up on her laptop and took back to the community.
Inspired by this find, the community began contacting other people who had passed through Tennant Creek, and soon they had an extensive collection of letters, photographs, and even motion pictures. Kim continued to load much of this material onto her computer, sharing it with her Warumungu friends in the form of iPhoto slide shows. But she noticed as she did so that people often shied away or left the room as images of deceased family members or photographs depicting sensitive performances or site in the countryside were shown.
Christen's sensitivity to these cultural protocols, taken together with the delight that the Warumungu people obviously took in seeing and possessing much of this historical material, led to a series of conversations with the members of the community. The challenge was to devise ways in which this wealth of information might be shared with all who had the right to see it, while protecting those who did not. From this came the fusion of technical and cultural expertise that is now known as the Mukurtu Archive.
In her presentation at the Scholar's Lab, Christen noted that we in the west, when thinking of intellectual property management, are conditioned by a corporate and legal frame of mind that aims at creating proprietary systems that embrace centralized control and power. This tends to give the concept of "digital rights management" a bad name, especially in the United States. And indeed a discussion of the Mukurtu Archive appeared on the "news for nerds" website Slashdot back in January. The commentary quickly became quite heated, with allegations that "superstition mumbo-jumba gets in the way of progress." (The discussion was occasioned by an interview with Christen that appeared on the BBC News and is available as a podcast on Long Road.)
But as Christen eloquently stated, in both of her lectures in Virginia this weekend, what she, some American technologists and, most importantly, her collaborators among the Warumungu have done is to encode something approaching the lived social fabric of behavior and access to knowledge. This is a protocol that is appropriate to the community in Tennant Creek, that is flexible enough to respond to changes in attitudes and beliefs among the people it serves, and at the same time permits people to preserve and enjoy a record of recent and contemporary culture. The Mukurtu Archive sets out content via the Warumungu's own dynamic cultural protocols. Along the way, it provides the rest of us with an opportunity to rethink the notion of access restrictions and to gain an understanding of different cultural systems.
Once a photograph (for example) has been uploaded to the Archive, the "owner" of the photo can identify the subject and the names of the people depicted, and can associate the names of family, country, and skin. She can also note whether any of the people in the photograph are deceased. All of this information can be selected from drop-down menus, and can be easily modified at a later date. There is also an opportunity to set down a "story" related to the content of the photograph. In this way, the Warumungu people themselves get to annotate images of their culture in a way that is usually only available to curators or anthropologists.
Someone who wishes to view material that has been archived must first create a personal profile, a process that is doubtless familiar to anyone who is reading this blog, who has ever shopped online, or who has taken part in online discussion forums. In the case of the Mukurtu Archive, the viewer supplies information about gender, skin, family, country, as well as father's family and country and mother's family and country. Then when that person attempts to view the archive, she is only presented with information that is deemed appropriate to her role and position in Warumungu society.
(Two points of clarification here: I am using feminine pronouns simply as a rhetorical strategy to avoid infelicitous constructions like "when one views the archive, they see..."; information is accessible to all members of the community, male and female alike. Secondly, the archive, although it uses the technology of the web, is not online. It is available only in the part of Nyinkka Nyunyu that houses the community centre, which is currently accessible only to the Warumungu. Tourists who visit on their way through from Darwin to Alice Springs are admitted only to the shop and the museum in the building. Future development may allow some access to public, unrestricted images from a kiosk in the museum.)
There are a host of other features available. Viewers may leave comments, enhancing the story as told by the original depositor or owner. They can build their own collections of selected images, and burn those images to a CD, a feature that promises to allow for future sharing of some material in school presentations. One-click printing is available. A viewer can report offensive material, or note if she comes across the image of a person who is now deceased.
One of the most interesting features of the archive's implementation of Warumungu cultural protocols has to do with images of the departed. Fifteen years ago, Christen pointed out, there would have been no question that viewing images of the deceased would be inappropriate. Today, however, some people feel more relaxed about such matters. They recognize that it can be a question of personal choice. So instead of automatically suppressing such images, the program instead presents a pop-up window when someone clicks on a thumbnail or a category that contains a photo of a person no longer living. The pop-up warns the viewer and gives her the option to continue or not.
Another feature of the Archive that members of both audiences remarked on was the fact that all the written information is in English. As Christen explained, Warumungu was only written down in the past couple of decades. Most people speak Warumungu and the local pidgin, but those who read, read English.
In her evening lecture at the Kluge-Ruhe, Kim covered some of the same territory, but also provided us with some history of the creation of the Nyinkka Nyunyu Cultural Centre and some slides of the kind of visual presentations of Warumungu culture that are available in it. The Warumungu built en dioramas (roughly two by three foot) that present important stories from the people's history, including contact history, stories of cattle droving, and material from the NT Archives. Another exhibit explains the skin system, or puntu, through the use of large painted self-portraits. These bold images are wonderfully expressive of the individuals who incarnate the relationships embodied in puntu today. They are a far cry from the abstract information about kinship usually presented in tables in anthropological textbooks.
There are several ways that you can experience the brilliance of Christen's work for yourself, although unfortunately none of them come packaged with Christen's own wit, eloquence, and enthusiasm in quite the same way that we got to experience them this weekend in Virginia. (It was quite wonderful to see her adapt her presentation and her responses to the audience to the different concerns that each group brought to her presentation, and to gain therefore a deeper appreciation for the intelligence and commitment that informs her work.)
First, there is a demo site of the Archive that you can visit. It provides background information about the encoding of cultural protocols, and offers a few collections (mostly drawn from Kim's own family and friends here in the States) to browse and search. More information about the whole project is available from the online journal Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, where Christen and Chris Cooney have built a fascinating website called "Digital Dynamics Across Cultures." This website offers a taste of Warumungu culture in photographs and audio recordings and information about the history of contact in Warumungu country. Most importantly, is cleverly designed to force the viewer into experiencing something of the appropriate cultural protocols for herself.
Christen's work has already proven invaluable in providing a means to preserve a slice of Indigenous culture in one part of the Territory. It has the potential to serve, through the technology that has built the Mukurtu Archive, as the foundation for many other treasuries of indigenous knowledge. And although what we saw this weekend is the culmination of years of work, it was incredibly exciting to feel that we were present at the start of an entirely new chapter in the preservation and presentation of cultural history.
Christen
was at the Kluge-Ruhe
Aboriginal Art Collection this weekend, delivering two lectures within
five hours on her experiences building a digital archive of cultural and
historical material with the Warumungu people of Tennant Creek. Christen, an
anthropologist and assistant professor at Washington State University, is the
author the forthcoming Aboriginal
business: alliances in a remote Australian
town, soon to be published by SAR Press. She
also writes Long
Road, a premier blog on issues
Indigenous. And she is the architect of the
Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari
Archive, an Indigenous archive tool, that was
the subject of her talks.The first lecture, "Culture at the Interface" Digital Archives and 'Social' Rights Management in Aboriginal Australia," was actually given in the high-tech Scholar's Lab at the University of Virginia's Alderman Library to an audience interested in Christen's work from the point of view of "digital rights management" and the possibilities for encoding intellectual property protocols into software.
The second, "A Safe Keeping Place: Shifting Museum Spaces and Embedded Aboriginal Protocols," appealed to the Kluge-Ruhe's dedicated lecture audience interested in Aboriginal art and culture. In her presentation examined the ways in which the Warumungu not only keep their culture alive but are working to integrate their sense of themselves and their traditions into the ongoing adjustments of black and white in a multicultural community. Tennant Creek in on the Stuart Highway smack in the middle of both traditional Warumungu country and Australia's Northern Territory.
Christen has been working with the Warumungu in Tennant Creek since 1995 in a variety of capacities. At one point in her career she accompanied a group of people from the town to the South Australian Museum in Adelaide. There they were able to inspect thousands of artifacts that had been removed from Warumungu country since contact with white people began during the construction of the Overland Telegraph line in the middle of the nineteenth century.
A subsequent trip to the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory was much less fruitful at first. Only three artifacts in MAGNT's collection were recognized by the visitors from Tennant Creek. They did, however, receive copies of about 700 pages of written material from the NT Archives relating to activities in and around Tennant Creek. These includied extensive records from cattle stations in the area that provided documentary evidence about the Indigenous people who worked in the area for the station owners.
But on the way back down the highway towards home, the group stopped to visit at the home of a former missionary who had lived in Tennant Creek. There they were shown dozens of boxes containing thousands of photographs taken in the latter half of the twentieth century. Many people still living in Tennant Creek, and many of their deceased family members were included in these photos. The former missionary had already scanned about 500 of these photos into digital images, which Kim loaded up on her laptop and took back to the community.
Inspired by this find, the community began contacting other people who had passed through Tennant Creek, and soon they had an extensive collection of letters, photographs, and even motion pictures. Kim continued to load much of this material onto her computer, sharing it with her Warumungu friends in the form of iPhoto slide shows. But she noticed as she did so that people often shied away or left the room as images of deceased family members or photographs depicting sensitive performances or site in the countryside were shown.
Christen's sensitivity to these cultural protocols, taken together with the delight that the Warumungu people obviously took in seeing and possessing much of this historical material, led to a series of conversations with the members of the community. The challenge was to devise ways in which this wealth of information might be shared with all who had the right to see it, while protecting those who did not. From this came the fusion of technical and cultural expertise that is now known as the Mukurtu Archive.
In her presentation at the Scholar's Lab, Christen noted that we in the west, when thinking of intellectual property management, are conditioned by a corporate and legal frame of mind that aims at creating proprietary systems that embrace centralized control and power. This tends to give the concept of "digital rights management" a bad name, especially in the United States. And indeed a discussion of the Mukurtu Archive appeared on the "news for nerds" website Slashdot back in January. The commentary quickly became quite heated, with allegations that "superstition mumbo-jumba gets in the way of progress." (The discussion was occasioned by an interview with Christen that appeared on the BBC News and is available as a podcast on Long Road.)
But as Christen eloquently stated, in both of her lectures in Virginia this weekend, what she, some American technologists and, most importantly, her collaborators among the Warumungu have done is to encode something approaching the lived social fabric of behavior and access to knowledge. This is a protocol that is appropriate to the community in Tennant Creek, that is flexible enough to respond to changes in attitudes and beliefs among the people it serves, and at the same time permits people to preserve and enjoy a record of recent and contemporary culture. The Mukurtu Archive sets out content via the Warumungu's own dynamic cultural protocols. Along the way, it provides the rest of us with an opportunity to rethink the notion of access restrictions and to gain an understanding of different cultural systems.
Once a photograph (for example) has been uploaded to the Archive, the "owner" of the photo can identify the subject and the names of the people depicted, and can associate the names of family, country, and skin. She can also note whether any of the people in the photograph are deceased. All of this information can be selected from drop-down menus, and can be easily modified at a later date. There is also an opportunity to set down a "story" related to the content of the photograph. In this way, the Warumungu people themselves get to annotate images of their culture in a way that is usually only available to curators or anthropologists.
Someone who wishes to view material that has been archived must first create a personal profile, a process that is doubtless familiar to anyone who is reading this blog, who has ever shopped online, or who has taken part in online discussion forums. In the case of the Mukurtu Archive, the viewer supplies information about gender, skin, family, country, as well as father's family and country and mother's family and country. Then when that person attempts to view the archive, she is only presented with information that is deemed appropriate to her role and position in Warumungu society.
(Two points of clarification here: I am using feminine pronouns simply as a rhetorical strategy to avoid infelicitous constructions like "when one views the archive, they see..."; information is accessible to all members of the community, male and female alike. Secondly, the archive, although it uses the technology of the web, is not online. It is available only in the part of Nyinkka Nyunyu that houses the community centre, which is currently accessible only to the Warumungu. Tourists who visit on their way through from Darwin to Alice Springs are admitted only to the shop and the museum in the building. Future development may allow some access to public, unrestricted images from a kiosk in the museum.)
There are a host of other features available. Viewers may leave comments, enhancing the story as told by the original depositor or owner. They can build their own collections of selected images, and burn those images to a CD, a feature that promises to allow for future sharing of some material in school presentations. One-click printing is available. A viewer can report offensive material, or note if she comes across the image of a person who is now deceased.
One of the most interesting features of the archive's implementation of Warumungu cultural protocols has to do with images of the departed. Fifteen years ago, Christen pointed out, there would have been no question that viewing images of the deceased would be inappropriate. Today, however, some people feel more relaxed about such matters. They recognize that it can be a question of personal choice. So instead of automatically suppressing such images, the program instead presents a pop-up window when someone clicks on a thumbnail or a category that contains a photo of a person no longer living. The pop-up warns the viewer and gives her the option to continue or not.
Another feature of the Archive that members of both audiences remarked on was the fact that all the written information is in English. As Christen explained, Warumungu was only written down in the past couple of decades. Most people speak Warumungu and the local pidgin, but those who read, read English.
In her evening lecture at the Kluge-Ruhe, Kim covered some of the same territory, but also provided us with some history of the creation of the Nyinkka Nyunyu Cultural Centre and some slides of the kind of visual presentations of Warumungu culture that are available in it. The Warumungu built en dioramas (roughly two by three foot) that present important stories from the people's history, including contact history, stories of cattle droving, and material from the NT Archives. Another exhibit explains the skin system, or puntu, through the use of large painted self-portraits. These bold images are wonderfully expressive of the individuals who incarnate the relationships embodied in puntu today. They are a far cry from the abstract information about kinship usually presented in tables in anthropological textbooks.
There are several ways that you can experience the brilliance of Christen's work for yourself, although unfortunately none of them come packaged with Christen's own wit, eloquence, and enthusiasm in quite the same way that we got to experience them this weekend in Virginia. (It was quite wonderful to see her adapt her presentation and her responses to the audience to the different concerns that each group brought to her presentation, and to gain therefore a deeper appreciation for the intelligence and commitment that informs her work.)
First, there is a demo site of the Archive that you can visit. It provides background information about the encoding of cultural protocols, and offers a few collections (mostly drawn from Kim's own family and friends here in the States) to browse and search. More information about the whole project is available from the online journal Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, where Christen and Chris Cooney have built a fascinating website called "Digital Dynamics Across Cultures." This website offers a taste of Warumungu culture in photographs and audio recordings and information about the history of contact in Warumungu country. Most importantly, is cleverly designed to force the viewer into experiencing something of the appropriate cultural protocols for herself.
Christen's work has already proven invaluable in providing a means to preserve a slice of Indigenous culture in one part of the Territory. It has the potential to serve, through the technology that has built the Mukurtu Archive, as the foundation for many other treasuries of indigenous knowledge. And although what we saw this weekend is the culmination of years of work, it was incredibly exciting to feel that we were present at the start of an entirely new chapter in the preservation and presentation of cultural history.
Posted at 07:30 PM
Sun - April 20, 2008
Aborigines and Architecture
In many of Spencer and Gillen's celebrated
photographs of the Arrernte people, a family can be seen seated in front of a
humpy. We note the old man, his two wives, their children, and perhaps a camp
dog. Donald Thomson photographed the fierce elder Wonngu with his family in a
dry season camp. In his films of
Narritjin at
Djarrakpi, Ian Dunlop lets us watch the
Mangalili family painting under shade shelters they have constructed in their
homeland, as Narritjin instructs his sons in the stories and techniques that
prove their rights to the land.
Our attention is deservedly focused on what these photographs tell us about people now passed beyond our immediate ken. We can spot traces of body decorations, and marvel at a nose bone in the old Centralian men. The expressions on the faces of Wonggu's family members are riveting, the crowd peering out from behind intriguing. The delicacy of the cross-hatched lines so expertly and painstakingly drawn on the surface of a sheet of bark astonishes.
What fades into the background is the spinifex-clad hut, the bark sheets seemingly precariously balanced on forked-stick supports, the welter of interwoven branches that provide protection from both sun and rain. In part, I suspect, because we have been conditioned to think of Australia's indigenous people as nomadic as well as people who have mastered their environment with simple technologies, we pay little attention to the built environment we barely see in these photographs and films.
After reading Paul Memmott's Gunyah Goondie + Wurley: the Aboriginal Architecture of Australia (University of Queensland Press, 2007), I will never be able to look at these photographs in the same way. Thanks to Memmott's scholarship and to the superb design editing UQP has brought to this hefty monograph, I will now be looking for expressions in sticks and spinifex as much as in eyes and mouths. Memmott has produced an eye-opening study of the variety and ingenuity of Aboriginal architecture and told his story with consummate skill. What I thought might be a dry, technical treatise instead provides a shifting panorama of technical, social, and forensic detail that never fails to engage through nearly 400 pages of texts, diagrams, and photographs.
Memmott keeps the reader engaged in part by refusing to proceed in a lock-step manner. On the one hand there are chapters that focus on the unique architectural solutions to Indigneous needs in discrete parts of the country ("Northern Monsoonal Architecture," or "Spinifex Houses of the Western Destern"). Interspersed are others that deal more with the cultural considerations that come to bear on how these architectural solutions are deployed in camps and communities ("Socio-spatial Structures of Australian Aboriginal Settlements," or "Campsite Behavior in Arid Australia.")
And although these chapter titles might sound like the deadliest entires culled from a soporific academic conference, Memmott's lucid writing style (assisted by occasional collaborators on selected essays), descriptive power, and clear enthusiasm for his subject made me turn the pages at a surprising rate and left me reluctant to put the book away when other responsibilities called for my attention.
The surprising variations in structural design strategies employed in different parts of the continent are not limited to the expected differences between bark and post construction in the tropical climates vs branch and grass constructions in the desert. I had no real prior understanding of the extent of stone construction in the south, not just for fish-weirs and eel-traps, but for dwellings as well. Nor did I know that in addition to building roofs over their heads, some groups dug sunken floors within their dwellings to enhance the ability of the shelter's walls to act as windbreaks. Nor would I have considered the implications that such sunken spaces required in terms of drainage during heavy rains.
The lesson that Wadigali and Maljangaba people in the Lake Eyre region built domed structures of tree branches and weather-proofed them with claddings of mud was a surprise to me. Even more surprising was the suggestion, based on narrative evidence from the nineteenth century, that a division of labor, a specialization based on expertise, may have developed among these "Mud Dome Architects of the Lake Eyre Basin." Certain individuals were reportedly sought out by their countrymen to direct the construction of these punga. Memmott details the strength of the supporting beams required not simply to support the mud, but also the weight of the workman who needs to mount the dome to replenish the mud covering. He also injects some human drama with a tale of architectural disaster that involves the collapse of one these humpies onto its luckless occupants after dogs digging at the foundations and heavy rains combined to bring the structure crashing down.
Memmott does not confine himself in this survey to documenting traditional structures from pre-contact and earliest contact days. Within the realm of the traditional, he explores "Symbolism and Meaning in Aboriginal Architecture," looking at ritual structures, including the conical mats of Arnhem Land that women use to hide under during sacred men's business, and also to protect themselves and their children from strong sun and inexorable mosquitos. He inspects nomenclature and examines the connections between the names of various architectural forms and Dreaming stories. In this respect he also describes the bark shelters constructed by the Wagilag Sisters and the role dwellings play in the Lardil myth of Thuwathu, the Rainbow Serpent.
The concluding chapters treat of "Fringe Dwellers and Town Camps," and look "Towards a Contemporary Aboriginal Architecture." I was surprised and pleased to see that the former chapter relied on sociological evidence collected by Jeff Collman and presented in Fringe Dwellers and Welfare: the Aboriginal response to bureaucracy (University of Queensland Press, 1988), a book I found fascinating for its insights into socio-spatial arrangements and culture contact. The discussion in Memmott's book adds much in the way of visual detail and clarity to Collman's analysis.
The final chapter looks at how the traditions of ethno-architecture are being transformed from within Aboriginal society, for example, in the growth of "traveller's camps" designed to meet the needs of transients." It also explores the interface between those traditional forms and Western architecture. He looks at the works of the first generation of University trained Indigenous architects to speculate on the possibilities for better meeting the needs of Indigenous culture. He notes, for example, the importance of open space--not a terribly new insight--but one that is placed within an intriguing discussion of the possibility of "architecture without walls" that made me stop and reconsider the very nature of my definition of the term.
A book like Goonyah Goondie + Wurley succeeds or fails on its visual design, for as vivd and engaging as Memmott's prose is, explications of architecture require good illustrations to fully succeed. UQP deserves to win some prizes for its efforts in this publication. Thirty "boxes," spreads of two or more pages that combine photographs, drawings, plans and text, punctuate the text, intelligently inserted so as not to disrupt the narrative flow of Memmott's text. These boxes often draw together major themes and concepts elaborated in the chapters in which they appear and act as visual summaries or indices of the subject under discussion. They supplement other drawings and photographs interspersed in the text that are also always used to good effect.
The photographs collected and clearly reproduced here span a surprising length of Australian history, with some dating as far back as the middle of the nineteenth century. Photographs are consistently well captioned, including the dates: an important consideration when architectural styles have been documented only occasionally and in a discontinuous manner. Where photographs are not available to illustrate a particular point, reproductions of eighteenth and nineteenth century drawings and engravings are intelligently used. Eight pages of color plates in the middle of the book are a luxurious and pleasant bonus.
There are plentiful drawing and diagrams, with clear, plentiful labels, scale markings, and explanatory texts. Even the typography displays an unusual and highly laudable degree of flexibility and intelligence. Gutters and margins expand and contract to contribute to a layout that brings related material together on a page. Single columns of text are the rule, but double columns are used occasionally to good effect. If a box must be placed so that it interrupts the textual flow, a clearly visible note at the bottom of the page ("Continued on page...") guides the reader across the break.
I initially approached Goonyah Goondie + Wurley almost out of a sense of obligation: here was a major publication from an important publisher of Indigenous studies on a topic of clear academic significance. I almost couldn't avoid the responsibility of taking a look. I wasn't at all prepared to be captivated, stimulated, and entranced by what I found within the covers. It is a book that is almost certain to change the way you think about and look at Aboriginal culture.
Our attention is deservedly focused on what these photographs tell us about people now passed beyond our immediate ken. We can spot traces of body decorations, and marvel at a nose bone in the old Centralian men. The expressions on the faces of Wonggu's family members are riveting, the crowd peering out from behind intriguing. The delicacy of the cross-hatched lines so expertly and painstakingly drawn on the surface of a sheet of bark astonishes.
What fades into the background is the spinifex-clad hut, the bark sheets seemingly precariously balanced on forked-stick supports, the welter of interwoven branches that provide protection from both sun and rain. In part, I suspect, because we have been conditioned to think of Australia's indigenous people as nomadic as well as people who have mastered their environment with simple technologies, we pay little attention to the built environment we barely see in these photographs and films.
After reading Paul Memmott's Gunyah Goondie + Wurley: the Aboriginal Architecture of Australia (University of Queensland Press, 2007), I will never be able to look at these photographs in the same way. Thanks to Memmott's scholarship and to the superb design editing UQP has brought to this hefty monograph, I will now be looking for expressions in sticks and spinifex as much as in eyes and mouths. Memmott has produced an eye-opening study of the variety and ingenuity of Aboriginal architecture and told his story with consummate skill. What I thought might be a dry, technical treatise instead provides a shifting panorama of technical, social, and forensic detail that never fails to engage through nearly 400 pages of texts, diagrams, and photographs.
Memmott keeps the reader engaged in part by refusing to proceed in a lock-step manner. On the one hand there are chapters that focus on the unique architectural solutions to Indigneous needs in discrete parts of the country ("Northern Monsoonal Architecture," or "Spinifex Houses of the Western Destern"). Interspersed are others that deal more with the cultural considerations that come to bear on how these architectural solutions are deployed in camps and communities ("Socio-spatial Structures of Australian Aboriginal Settlements," or "Campsite Behavior in Arid Australia.")
And although these chapter titles might sound like the deadliest entires culled from a soporific academic conference, Memmott's lucid writing style (assisted by occasional collaborators on selected essays), descriptive power, and clear enthusiasm for his subject made me turn the pages at a surprising rate and left me reluctant to put the book away when other responsibilities called for my attention.
The surprising variations in structural design strategies employed in different parts of the continent are not limited to the expected differences between bark and post construction in the tropical climates vs branch and grass constructions in the desert. I had no real prior understanding of the extent of stone construction in the south, not just for fish-weirs and eel-traps, but for dwellings as well. Nor did I know that in addition to building roofs over their heads, some groups dug sunken floors within their dwellings to enhance the ability of the shelter's walls to act as windbreaks. Nor would I have considered the implications that such sunken spaces required in terms of drainage during heavy rains.
The lesson that Wadigali and Maljangaba people in the Lake Eyre region built domed structures of tree branches and weather-proofed them with claddings of mud was a surprise to me. Even more surprising was the suggestion, based on narrative evidence from the nineteenth century, that a division of labor, a specialization based on expertise, may have developed among these "Mud Dome Architects of the Lake Eyre Basin." Certain individuals were reportedly sought out by their countrymen to direct the construction of these punga. Memmott details the strength of the supporting beams required not simply to support the mud, but also the weight of the workman who needs to mount the dome to replenish the mud covering. He also injects some human drama with a tale of architectural disaster that involves the collapse of one these humpies onto its luckless occupants after dogs digging at the foundations and heavy rains combined to bring the structure crashing down.
Memmott does not confine himself in this survey to documenting traditional structures from pre-contact and earliest contact days. Within the realm of the traditional, he explores "Symbolism and Meaning in Aboriginal Architecture," looking at ritual structures, including the conical mats of Arnhem Land that women use to hide under during sacred men's business, and also to protect themselves and their children from strong sun and inexorable mosquitos. He inspects nomenclature and examines the connections between the names of various architectural forms and Dreaming stories. In this respect he also describes the bark shelters constructed by the Wagilag Sisters and the role dwellings play in the Lardil myth of Thuwathu, the Rainbow Serpent.
The concluding chapters treat of "Fringe Dwellers and Town Camps," and look "Towards a Contemporary Aboriginal Architecture." I was surprised and pleased to see that the former chapter relied on sociological evidence collected by Jeff Collman and presented in Fringe Dwellers and Welfare: the Aboriginal response to bureaucracy (University of Queensland Press, 1988), a book I found fascinating for its insights into socio-spatial arrangements and culture contact. The discussion in Memmott's book adds much in the way of visual detail and clarity to Collman's analysis.
The final chapter looks at how the traditions of ethno-architecture are being transformed from within Aboriginal society, for example, in the growth of "traveller's camps" designed to meet the needs of transients." It also explores the interface between those traditional forms and Western architecture. He looks at the works of the first generation of University trained Indigenous architects to speculate on the possibilities for better meeting the needs of Indigenous culture. He notes, for example, the importance of open space--not a terribly new insight--but one that is placed within an intriguing discussion of the possibility of "architecture without walls" that made me stop and reconsider the very nature of my definition of the term.
A book like Goonyah Goondie + Wurley succeeds or fails on its visual design, for as vivd and engaging as Memmott's prose is, explications of architecture require good illustrations to fully succeed. UQP deserves to win some prizes for its efforts in this publication. Thirty "boxes," spreads of two or more pages that combine photographs, drawings, plans and text, punctuate the text, intelligently inserted so as not to disrupt the narrative flow of Memmott's text. These boxes often draw together major themes and concepts elaborated in the chapters in which they appear and act as visual summaries or indices of the subject under discussion. They supplement other drawings and photographs interspersed in the text that are also always used to good effect.
The photographs collected and clearly reproduced here span a surprising length of Australian history, with some dating as far back as the middle of the nineteenth century. Photographs are consistently well captioned, including the dates: an important consideration when architectural styles have been documented only occasionally and in a discontinuous manner. Where photographs are not available to illustrate a particular point, reproductions of eighteenth and nineteenth century drawings and engravings are intelligently used. Eight pages of color plates in the middle of the book are a luxurious and pleasant bonus.
There are plentiful drawing and diagrams, with clear, plentiful labels, scale markings, and explanatory texts. Even the typography displays an unusual and highly laudable degree of flexibility and intelligence. Gutters and margins expand and contract to contribute to a layout that brings related material together on a page. Single columns of text are the rule, but double columns are used occasionally to good effect. If a box must be placed so that it interrupts the textual flow, a clearly visible note at the bottom of the page ("Continued on page...") guides the reader across the break.
I initially approached Goonyah Goondie + Wurley almost out of a sense of obligation: here was a major publication from an important publisher of Indigenous studies on a topic of clear academic significance. I almost couldn't avoid the responsibility of taking a look. I wasn't at all prepared to be captivated, stimulated, and entranced by what I found within the covers. It is a book that is almost certain to change the way you think about and look at Aboriginal culture.
Posted at 02:58 PM
Sat - April 19, 2008
Warmun Art Centre, Turkey Creek, WA
The second stop on our tour of Kimberley art
centres was in Turkey Creek, home of the Warmun Art Centre. We landed around noon, which
meant that this was to be the shortest of stops on our tour, as we needed to be
on the ground in Fitzroy Crossing a mere three hours later. But somehow, we
managed to forget all that almost the moment we stepped out of the plane onto
the roughest airstrip we seen in our travels.
The Turkey Creek airstrip.
For one things the surrounding countryside was among the most beautiful scenes we'd encountered. The blazing blue sky had only grown brighter as the sun climbed higher in the sky, and the air was full of the sharp smells of cattle, smoke, and dry grass. Pretty soon the familiar plume of dust announcing the arrival of the troopie to carry us back to the art centre appeared among the trees. A steel-haired cattleman jumped down from the vehicle and introduced himself to us: Patrick Mung Mung.
Warmun cattle country.
We piled into the truck and began our drive through high grass and deep glades of green trees. As we bounced along the rough red road, we passed what appeared to be a small, fenced garden on our left, filled with a riot of colorful flowers. The blossoms appeared to be piled on top of wire frame; we learned later that we had passed by the Turkey Creek cemetery where the graves of Rover and Queenie are honored still by the members of the community.
The green countryside at Turkey Creek.
We bounced through Turkey Creek, still holding water, as the greenness all around suggested it might be, and soon pulled up at the art centre compound. We were enthusiastically and warmly greeting by Roger Taylor and Jackey Coyle-Taylor, the managers, who were smack in the middle of a two-week orientation to their new responsibilities, having arrived in Turkey Creek from Adelaide only a week before. Megan Buckley and Eamonn Scott had another week on site, and then the new managers would be on their own.
Roger Taylor after a week on the job as manager at the Warmun Art Centre, June 2007.
Someone suggested lunch, and since a table was spread with platters of baked goods and plenty of tea was to hand, we could hardly resist. A few of the old ladies, including Mabel Juli and Nancy Nodea, quietly joined us as we tucked into our airplane lunches...which quickly lost their appeal in the face of cakes and scones the like of which we hadn't seen in all our travels. The hospitality was beguiling, the company charming, and I think we would have been content to sit there under the tall trees for a good long while.
Patrick Mung Mung and Betty Carrington painting in the shade near the old art centre building. (Photo by Rod Hartvigsen, Muranji Photography; courtesy of Warmun Art)
From our seats we could see the lovely old building that had been the home of the art centre for many years, the as yet unfinished, very modern new exhibition space and museum, and the large storehouse where paintings destined for major exhibitions were stored. (The new, $1.3 million facility opened in August 2007, a little over two months after our visit.)
A panoramic view of the new Warmun Art Centre, located just behind the old building. (Photo by Rod Hartvigsen, Muranji Photography; courtesy of Warmun Art)
But being in close proximity to all that art was an irresistible pull, and we soon scattered, climbing the steps of the old art centre to admire hundreds of paintings hung on the walls and sorted into bins. In the office there were etchings and art cards to supplement the ochre canvases, and we heard about plans to introduce jewelry and hand-painted silk to the centre's inventory. They had a good selection of books for sale as well, and I managed to secure a lovely, short monograph on the late Hector Jandany.
Senior, emerging, and future artists of the Warmun Art Centre. (Photo by Rod Hartvigsen, Muranji Photography; courtesy of Warmun Art)
The new building was still quite clearly a construction site and although we were all eager to see what it would look like, caution prevailed, and we left the workmen to their business, undisturbed. I'm most grateful to Roger and Jackey for providing me with photographs of the new display areas. It's a lovely, open space that many urban galleries would be jealous of. Designed by Monsoon Architects out of Kununurra, the new building was constructed largely with funds from the sale of artwork.
Inside the new gallery space. (Photo by Rod Hartvigsen, Muranji Photography; courtesy of Warmun Art)
The large, air-conditioned storerooms were enough to make a collector weep. The painting tradition at Warmun goes back two decades now, making it one of the oldest centres in Australia, and the first to make a mark on the national consciousness in the medium of ochre on canvas in a modern idiom. The characteristic depictions of countries and stories of the Gija people, combining a traditional aesthetic with Western genres of landscape and history painting defined a third way in Aboriginal art, neither desert dot painting nor Top End clan designs.
Mabel Juli. (Photo by Rod Hartvigsen, Muranji Photography; courtesy of Warmun Art)
Instead there was a visual tradition that hovered on the borders of representation, reflecting the metamorphosis of ancestral beings from what the Gija call Ngarrangakrni into landmarks and celestial orders. The boldness of the design, the large, balancing fields of color, find an equilibrium on the borders of representation and abstraction in a way that is unique to the Kimberley and has inspired artists across the region to develop new adaptations of their traditional designs.
Stock in the art centre "shed." (Photo by Margo Smith)
With one last look around at the abundance of spectacular color inside the shed, we were led back out for the short trip back to the airstrip. I left feeling that of the many places we had visited in the preceding two weeks, we needed far more time, and much more traveling the vicinity to really grasp the special relationship between what we saw inside and outside the Warmun Art Centre.
The Turkey Creek Roadhouse. (Photo by Rod Hartvigsen, Muranji Photography; courtesy of Warmun Art)
The Turkey Creek airstrip.
For one things the surrounding countryside was among the most beautiful scenes we'd encountered. The blazing blue sky had only grown brighter as the sun climbed higher in the sky, and the air was full of the sharp smells of cattle, smoke, and dry grass. Pretty soon the familiar plume of dust announcing the arrival of the troopie to carry us back to the art centre appeared among the trees. A steel-haired cattleman jumped down from the vehicle and introduced himself to us: Patrick Mung Mung.
Warmun cattle country.
We piled into the truck and began our drive through high grass and deep glades of green trees. As we bounced along the rough red road, we passed what appeared to be a small, fenced garden on our left, filled with a riot of colorful flowers. The blossoms appeared to be piled on top of wire frame; we learned later that we had passed by the Turkey Creek cemetery where the graves of Rover and Queenie are honored still by the members of the community.
The green countryside at Turkey Creek.
We bounced through Turkey Creek, still holding water, as the greenness all around suggested it might be, and soon pulled up at the art centre compound. We were enthusiastically and warmly greeting by Roger Taylor and Jackey Coyle-Taylor, the managers, who were smack in the middle of a two-week orientation to their new responsibilities, having arrived in Turkey Creek from Adelaide only a week before. Megan Buckley and Eamonn Scott had another week on site, and then the new managers would be on their own.
Roger Taylor after a week on the job as manager at the Warmun Art Centre, June 2007.
Someone suggested lunch, and since a table was spread with platters of baked goods and plenty of tea was to hand, we could hardly resist. A few of the old ladies, including Mabel Juli and Nancy Nodea, quietly joined us as we tucked into our airplane lunches...which quickly lost their appeal in the face of cakes and scones the like of which we hadn't seen in all our travels. The hospitality was beguiling, the company charming, and I think we would have been content to sit there under the tall trees for a good long while.
Patrick Mung Mung and Betty Carrington painting in the shade near the old art centre building. (Photo by Rod Hartvigsen, Muranji Photography; courtesy of Warmun Art)
From our seats we could see the lovely old building that had been the home of the art centre for many years, the as yet unfinished, very modern new exhibition space and museum, and the large storehouse where paintings destined for major exhibitions were stored. (The new, $1.3 million facility opened in August 2007, a little over two months after our visit.)
A panoramic view of the new Warmun Art Centre, located just behind the old building. (Photo by Rod Hartvigsen, Muranji Photography; courtesy of Warmun Art)
But being in close proximity to all that art was an irresistible pull, and we soon scattered, climbing the steps of the old art centre to admire hundreds of paintings hung on the walls and sorted into bins. In the office there were etchings and art cards to supplement the ochre canvases, and we heard about plans to introduce jewelry and hand-painted silk to the centre's inventory. They had a good selection of books for sale as well, and I managed to secure a lovely, short monograph on the late Hector Jandany.
Senior, emerging, and future artists of the Warmun Art Centre. (Photo by Rod Hartvigsen, Muranji Photography; courtesy of Warmun Art)
The new building was still quite clearly a construction site and although we were all eager to see what it would look like, caution prevailed, and we left the workmen to their business, undisturbed. I'm most grateful to Roger and Jackey for providing me with photographs of the new display areas. It's a lovely, open space that many urban galleries would be jealous of. Designed by Monsoon Architects out of Kununurra, the new building was constructed largely with funds from the sale of artwork.
Inside the new gallery space. (Photo by Rod Hartvigsen, Muranji Photography; courtesy of Warmun Art)
The large, air-conditioned storerooms were enough to make a collector weep. The painting tradition at Warmun goes back two decades now, making it one of the oldest centres in Australia, and the first to make a mark on the national consciousness in the medium of ochre on canvas in a modern idiom. The characteristic depictions of countries and stories of the Gija people, combining a traditional aesthetic with Western genres of landscape and history painting defined a third way in Aboriginal art, neither desert dot painting nor Top End clan designs.
Mabel Juli. (Photo by Rod Hartvigsen, Muranji Photography; courtesy of Warmun Art)
Instead there was a visual tradition that hovered on the borders of representation, reflecting the metamorphosis of ancestral beings from what the Gija call Ngarrangakrni into landmarks and celestial orders. The boldness of the design, the large, balancing fields of color, find an equilibrium on the borders of representation and abstraction in a way that is unique to the Kimberley and has inspired artists across the region to develop new adaptations of their traditional designs.
Stock in the art centre "shed." (Photo by Margo Smith)
With one last look around at the abundance of spectacular color inside the shed, we were led back out for the short trip back to the airstrip. I left feeling that of the many places we had visited in the preceding two weeks, we needed far more time, and much more traveling the vicinity to really grasp the special relationship between what we saw inside and outside the Warmun Art Centre.
The Turkey Creek Roadhouse. (Photo by Rod Hartvigsen, Muranji Photography; courtesy of Warmun Art)
Posted at 11:46 PM
Thu - April 17, 2008
Performance/Art
News and notes from around the
web:
Geoffrey Gurrunmul Yunupingu was the star of this week's Awaye! on ABC Radio National, and his appearance is the occasion of the program's first vodcast. The eight-minute video is available for downloading now from Awaye's website and features Gurrumul performing two songs with Michael Hohnen on double-bass, "Djilawurr" (originally recorded on the Saltwater Band's Djarridjarri - Blue Flag album) and "Djarrimirri" from his new solo album. The quality of the recording is excellent, and the fact that you can download it takes a bit of the sting out of the fact that the radio broadcast is not available this time as a podcast. You can listen to the program for the next few weeks from the website, and I urge you to give it a go. It features recordings from his second solo live performance at the 2006 Darwin Festival, and while the sound quality is a little more uneven, it's still a pleasure to hear him captured in performance, and to hear the audience's response. As an incidental bonus, host Daniel Browning notes that the Saltwater Band has just finished recording their third album!
For another video treat, check out two new promos featured by Edwina Circuitt on her blog Thriving in the Desert, "Warakurna Artists: Our Story, Our Art Centre," with a soundtrack featuring UPK's "Tilun Tilun ta," and the new "Thriving in the Desert: Warakurna Artists," also to the sounds of UPK, "Ulkiyala." And if you like the music, you can buy UPK's CDs from the Nganampa Health Council.
While I'm on the subject of performing arts, there was an interesting article, "No More Fading to Black" in the Sydney Morning Herald on March 24 on Wesley Enoch's proposal to create a National Indigenous Theatre. Predictably, the idea has its supporters and detractors. Those who favor the idea (including some high-powered identities like Deborah Mailman, Rachel Maza, and Stephen Page) see the need for a well-funded entity that can preserve work over time; Enoch points to limited successes of Redfern's National Aboriginal Black Theatre in the 1970s and the Black Playwrights Workshops of the 1980s as initiatives that could have benefited from the strengths of a national organization. Many of the skeptics include representatives of regional theatre who fear what the competition for funding from such a high-profile establishment might mean for their own chances of success, and point to the regional theatre as the incubator of new ideas and the voice of distinctive local cultures and idioms. Sadly in an era of limited funding, both sides are right.
The issue of regional vs national recently emerged in Nicolas Rothwell's musings in the aftermath of the theft of several early Papunya boards from the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory ("Mystery of our art in darkness," The Australian, April 5, 2008). Rothwell raises an unusually large number of extremely important questions in this short piece, but there is one that I want to address briefly here. Pondering why so few of these surviving masterpieces are on view anywhere in Australia, he reports on one proposal to increase access to those paintings that can be viewed and studied without risk of breaching sensitive cultural protocols.
There's an obvious appeal to this proposal. If Rothwell's number are correct, such a national gallery of early Papunya painting could contain the 210 boards from MAGNT's collection, the 96 paintings from the Papunya Tula archive now in the Australian Museum in Sydney, and the holdings (number not specified) of the National Gallery in Canberra. Imagine such a collection! Imagine the wealth of knowledge, the opportunities for scholarship, for comparative analysis. Having just had the chance to see a mere twenty works from the 1970s by half a dozen artists at the Kluge-Ruhe this past weekend, my mouth waters at the thought. I can't help it.
But looking back at my own experience of visiting museums across Australia, I also can't help but draw back from endorsing the notion. Long ago, I set up a Google Alert for "Aboriginal art." The vast majority of the citations I get from that service are from traveler's accounts of visiting a museum in a single city on their travels and saying something quite simple and unsophisticated: "Saw incredible aboriginal art at the museum." Now certainly there's more to be seen, more on display everywhere, than just Papunya painting from the 1970s. But I'd like to think that travelers could have the opportunity, no matter where they go, to experience this incredible chapter in world art. And I'm not just speaking from my international perspective here. My love affair with Australia has taken me to all the capital cities: how many Australians can say that, let alone international visitors?
So for now, I will argue that collections, however small they might be, of these seminal works remain scattered across Australia, so that visitors to the NGA, NGV, AGWA, AGNSW, MAGNT, AGSA, QAG, as well as the Araluen Centre can delight in the serendipity of discovering a national treasure wherever their journeys take them.
And a final note tonight from the recent pages of The Australian. In an article entitled "Forget Me Not " (April 5, 2008) Sebastian Smee asks "which Australian artists working at their peak today will be the subjects of books and retrospectives at our leading galleries in 20, 30 or 40 years. Who will be given the kind of attention that artists such as Williams, Nolan and Arthur Boyd are given today?"
Smee narrows his criteria somewhat by excluding those artists who have already attained "legendary" status, for example John Olsen and Jeffrey Smart. He also declines to speculate on the rising younger generation, preferring to focus on "artists no longer in their 30s but not yet in their dotage; artists who already have an extensive body of work behind them and who -- though they may be well established in the art world -- are not so well known to the wider public."
One Indigenous artist makes the cut of nine: John Mawurndjul. Says Smee: "Mawurndjul's bark paintings of the rainbow serpent Ngalyod and, more recently, the Mardayin ceremony are impossible to forget. They relate the drama of ritual to visual forms and patterns that seem to squirm across the surface of the already undulating bark he prepares and paints on. The best of them are spellbinding images -- sometimes figurative, sometimes abstract -- that flicker with light and syncopated visual rhythms."
Spot on, so far as it goes. Would anyone like to nominate other "mid-career" artists? Leave a comment with your suggestions and rationales.
Geoffrey Gurrunmul Yunupingu was the star of this week's Awaye! on ABC Radio National, and his appearance is the occasion of the program's first vodcast. The eight-minute video is available for downloading now from Awaye's website and features Gurrumul performing two songs with Michael Hohnen on double-bass, "Djilawurr" (originally recorded on the Saltwater Band's Djarridjarri - Blue Flag album) and "Djarrimirri" from his new solo album. The quality of the recording is excellent, and the fact that you can download it takes a bit of the sting out of the fact that the radio broadcast is not available this time as a podcast. You can listen to the program for the next few weeks from the website, and I urge you to give it a go. It features recordings from his second solo live performance at the 2006 Darwin Festival, and while the sound quality is a little more uneven, it's still a pleasure to hear him captured in performance, and to hear the audience's response. As an incidental bonus, host Daniel Browning notes that the Saltwater Band has just finished recording their third album!
For another video treat, check out two new promos featured by Edwina Circuitt on her blog Thriving in the Desert, "Warakurna Artists: Our Story, Our Art Centre," with a soundtrack featuring UPK's "Tilun Tilun ta," and the new "Thriving in the Desert: Warakurna Artists," also to the sounds of UPK, "Ulkiyala." And if you like the music, you can buy UPK's CDs from the Nganampa Health Council.
While I'm on the subject of performing arts, there was an interesting article, "No More Fading to Black" in the Sydney Morning Herald on March 24 on Wesley Enoch's proposal to create a National Indigenous Theatre. Predictably, the idea has its supporters and detractors. Those who favor the idea (including some high-powered identities like Deborah Mailman, Rachel Maza, and Stephen Page) see the need for a well-funded entity that can preserve work over time; Enoch points to limited successes of Redfern's National Aboriginal Black Theatre in the 1970s and the Black Playwrights Workshops of the 1980s as initiatives that could have benefited from the strengths of a national organization. Many of the skeptics include representatives of regional theatre who fear what the competition for funding from such a high-profile establishment might mean for their own chances of success, and point to the regional theatre as the incubator of new ideas and the voice of distinctive local cultures and idioms. Sadly in an era of limited funding, both sides are right.
The issue of regional vs national recently emerged in Nicolas Rothwell's musings in the aftermath of the theft of several early Papunya boards from the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory ("Mystery of our art in darkness," The Australian, April 5, 2008). Rothwell raises an unusually large number of extremely important questions in this short piece, but there is one that I want to address briefly here. Pondering why so few of these surviving masterpieces are on view anywhere in Australia, he reports on one proposal to increase access to those paintings that can be viewed and studied without risk of breaching sensitive cultural protocols.
But the most elegant blueprint is the plan nursed by the foremost scholar of the early boards, Vivien Johnson, who believes there should be a gallery at the centre of Australia, holding all the early Papunya paintings from state museums and galleries in a definitive national collection. Such a museum could be in Papunya or in Alice Springs. It should be a magnificent building, with special provisions made for the most sensitive paintings to be held in secure closed storage and for certain works to be displayed in a separate wing, where indigenous women would be in no danger of seeing forbidden images or designs.
There's an obvious appeal to this proposal. If Rothwell's number are correct, such a national gallery of early Papunya painting could contain the 210 boards from MAGNT's collection, the 96 paintings from the Papunya Tula archive now in the Australian Museum in Sydney, and the holdings (number not specified) of the National Gallery in Canberra. Imagine such a collection! Imagine the wealth of knowledge, the opportunities for scholarship, for comparative analysis. Having just had the chance to see a mere twenty works from the 1970s by half a dozen artists at the Kluge-Ruhe this past weekend, my mouth waters at the thought. I can't help it.
But looking back at my own experience of visiting museums across Australia, I also can't help but draw back from endorsing the notion. Long ago, I set up a Google Alert for "Aboriginal art." The vast majority of the citations I get from that service are from traveler's accounts of visiting a museum in a single city on their travels and saying something quite simple and unsophisticated: "Saw incredible aboriginal art at the museum." Now certainly there's more to be seen, more on display everywhere, than just Papunya painting from the 1970s. But I'd like to think that travelers could have the opportunity, no matter where they go, to experience this incredible chapter in world art. And I'm not just speaking from my international perspective here. My love affair with Australia has taken me to all the capital cities: how many Australians can say that, let alone international visitors?
So for now, I will argue that collections, however small they might be, of these seminal works remain scattered across Australia, so that visitors to the NGA, NGV, AGWA, AGNSW, MAGNT, AGSA, QAG, as well as the Araluen Centre can delight in the serendipity of discovering a national treasure wherever their journeys take them.
And a final note tonight from the recent pages of The Australian. In an article entitled "Forget Me Not " (April 5, 2008) Sebastian Smee asks "which Australian artists working at their peak today will be the subjects of books and retrospectives at our leading galleries in 20, 30 or 40 years. Who will be given the kind of attention that artists such as Williams, Nolan and Arthur Boyd are given today?"
Smee narrows his criteria somewhat by excluding those artists who have already attained "legendary" status, for example John Olsen and Jeffrey Smart. He also declines to speculate on the rising younger generation, preferring to focus on "artists no longer in their 30s but not yet in their dotage; artists who already have an extensive body of work behind them and who -- though they may be well established in the art world -- are not so well known to the wider public."
One Indigenous artist makes the cut of nine: John Mawurndjul. Says Smee: "Mawurndjul's bark paintings of the rainbow serpent Ngalyod and, more recently, the Mardayin ceremony are impossible to forget. They relate the drama of ritual to visual forms and patterns that seem to squirm across the surface of the already undulating bark he prepares and paints on. The best of them are spellbinding images -- sometimes figurative, sometimes abstract -- that flicker with light and syncopated visual rhythms."
Spot on, so far as it goes. Would anyone like to nominate other "mid-career" artists? Leave a comment with your suggestions and rationales.
Posted at 09:11 PM
Sun - April 13, 2008
Virtuosity: Fred Myers and Pintupi Masters at the Kluge Ruhe
Virtuosity: The Evolution of Painting
at Papunya Tula, the new exhibition at the
Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, curated by
Fred Myers, is full of moments of astonishing visual delight and magic. One of
these occurs near the end of a short film being shown as an ongoing part of the
exhibition. The film, titled Pintupi
Painters at Yayayi, is twenty minutes of
footage extracted from sixteen hours shot by Ian Dunlop
(People of the Western
Desert,
The Yirrkala Film
Project) in 1974 during a month-long stay at
the outstation of Yayayi, a short distance west of Papunya, to which the Pintupi
had recently moved. (This newly edited footage was prepared by the National
Museum of Australia for the recent exhibition
Papunya Painting: Out of the
Desert.)
The film opens with shots of camp life (Pinta Pinta Tjapanangka being berated by his sister Makinti Napanangka for not getting enough meat for his ten dollars at the community store), then switches to a sequence showing Peter Fannin, the manager of Papunya Tula Artists at that time, and Bob Edwards of the Aboriginal Arts Board purchasing paintings and artifacts from a crowd of men gathered at the painting camp. (During the two years that Myers lived with the Pintupi at Yayayi he documented 260 early works by the Pintupi masters.) Included prominently in this section are, among others, Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi, Uta Uta Tjangala, John Tjakamarra, and Anatjari Tjakamarra.
The last sequences of the short film document moments during a trip out west to Pintupi homelands that Myers made in the company of several of the men and Jeremy Long, the patrol officer who worked for many years with the Pintupi during this critical contact period. After climbing up a steep sandhill together, Myers and Anatjari are seen crouching near a smoothed patch of sand. Anatjari reaches out a finger and inscribes a small circle in the sand, then draws a short, straight line, then another circle. He whispers the names of the places represented by the tiny circles. Another line, another circle, another whispered name. The line turns north, and Anatjari inscribes two more circles.
The scene shifts to Anatjari standing atop a hill near Ilpili in the Ehrenburg Range. At the top Anatjari looks over the countryside. "Pintupi ngurra," he says. Twisting his head and arm around behind him to the right, he announces that the land to the east belongs to someone else: Arrernte country. Then he looks out to the west and in a strong, clear voice says, "Pintupi ngurra, Pintupi country!" His left hand shoots out in front of him as he names a place out to the west. He draws his hand back to his mouth, then rapidly extends his arm to the west again, naming another site. Over and over again this action is repeated, his hand seeming to extract the names of the country from his mouth and hurl them out across the landscape as his arm shoots westward. "Pintupi country!" he exclaims, and again "Pintupi country!" It's a literally spine-tingling moment, as Dunlop's camera pans out, away from the figure of the painter atop the sandridge and across to the rocky hills purple on the horizon. This is the country on display now at the Kluge-Ruhe.
A screen shot from Ian Dunlop's film, Pintupi Painters at Yayayi. The painting above is a new work (2008) by Pamela Napaltjarri, daughter of Fred Myers's friend Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi.
Virtuosity comprises thirty-nine works, dating from 1971 to 2008, that document the development of painting strategies by artists of the Papunya Tula collective. Four artists are given prominence, with a gallery each devoted to Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, Anatjari Tjakamarra, and Uta Uta Tjangala. The fifth room is given over to further developments at Kintore and Kiwirrkura represented by Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, Dini Campbell Tjampitjinpa, and Simon Tjakamarra among the men, and in the 1990s and beyond by women painters Wintjiya Napaltjarri, her sister Tjunkiya, Uta Uta's widow Walangkura Napanangka, Tatali Nangala, and Makinti Napanangka. To round out the show, Papunya Tula Artists has sent over a gorgeous selection of small paintings by some of the best artists working today, available for on-site purchase at blushingly modest prices.
New work from Papunya Tula Artists
On Saturday, April 12, Fred Myers led an overflow crowd of visitors through the exhibition, holding us all rapt for nearly two hours as he explained the ways in which the stars of the show worked to translate their ceremonial designs into the two-dimensional media of acrylic paint on masonite or canvas board. Myers described how these men developed even more innovative techniques for responding to the introduction of large canvas and the need to depict their artistic and intellectual traditions and their lived experience of their country in ways appropriate to their widening audience.
Fred Myers, at right, has the full attention of his audience after nearly two hours.
As visitors step into the exhibition's first gallery they are greeted, to the left, by five early boards from the 70s by Mick Namarari, and to the right, three larger, later canvases painted between 1989 and 1992. Myers characterized Namarari as an especially quiet, taciturn man who was nonetheless recognized from the first as an unusually gifted painter. Several of the early works are structured around a tripartite set of interlocking forms that may be drawn from the motif of two men seated on either side of a ceremonial pole or a campfire. In the stories behind these designs, these may be brothers, an elder and an initiate, or otherwise family members; the design shows similarities to a structure employed by Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi in several of the paintings Myers had shown to the audience in his lecture two nights earlier. The colors in these early boards are spectacular, with brilliant yellow bands giving prominence to the interlocking design in "Kangaroo Man Ancestor and Bush Tucker Dreaming" (1973) and a glowing warm orange filling the frame of "Family Moon Dreaming" (1976).
The larger paintings showcased some of Tjapaltjarri's strategies for filling a large canvas and adapting designs to a more generalized presentation of mythic stories. "Wallaby Dreaming at Tjunginpa" (1990, reproduced on page 109 of the catalog for Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2000) is an example of the classic line and circle motif that came to dominate Papunya Tula painting in the late 1980s; Myers explained that while the painters were retreating from depicting particular narratives at that time, every one of the dozens of roundels in the painting could still be identified as a specific place in the artist's country. The smaller "Two Kangaroo Dreaming at Marnpi" (1989) is a gauzy skein of yellow-gray dots, one of Tjaplatjarri's signature late styles.
The tension between overtly depicting ceremonial regalia and the gradual move to a more generalized compositional approach can be seen most clearly in the second gallery, which is given over to five very different but equally dazzling works by Anatjari Tjakamarra. The iconography of the undocumented and untitled board from 1971 is a mixture of clearly decipherable incised ritual objects and a mysterious complex of black ovoid shapes that frame a pair of roundels. One of these roundels sits in a field of white dots, the other at the center of radiating dotted white lines. (The work has some compositional similarity to a painting by Uta Uta reproduced on page 28 of Genesis and Genius, but the colors in Anatjari's board, dominated by a deep, shiny black on a background of red ochre, look far more striking.) Another untitled work from 1973 depicts that story of a Dreamtime initiate who bled to death at Karrkunya, but here the forms have already become more abstracted and less naturalistic. The stone knives of the ceremony, the chunks of red ochre that are mined at this site, and the five-pointed central design can be interpreted if one knows the story, but the bald depiction of the earlier work has already been masked.
Myers wryly noted that Tjakamarra never seemed fully able to divorce himself from the naturalistic, and indeed, with that thought in mind, the three ovals that circumscribe half a dozen or more roundels each in "Women's Dreaming" (1989) suddenly look less like classic Tingari designs than ritual objects, despite the elaborate background dotting. The painting (reproduced on page 106 of the Genesis and Genius catalog) depicts the story of a group of Tingari men who travelled in the company of a group of women bearing ceremonial boards to the site of Ngaminya, where the boards were left behind and turned to stone.
Myers then led his audience to a third gallery that featured early works by Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula along with a pair of paintings, one early, one late, by Long Jack Phillips Tjakamarra. Both men came from more easterly regions: Johnny W. a Luritja man, Long Jack a Pintupi with strong ties to Luritja country. Long Jack is one of the few men who painted for Geoff Bardon in 1971 still living; today he remains in Papunya and is encouraging the young artists who paint for the newly founded Papunya Tjupi art centre.
"Wallaby Dreaming" (1971), left, and "Wild Potato Dreaming" (1972) by Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula.
The paintings by Johnny Warangkula in the exhibition display a wide range of the artist's styles, but all of them are characterized by his fabulous color sense and extraordinary delicacy in dotting and brushwork. The "Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa" (1972) is a skein of hatched lines in the palest greens and yellows of new plant life tangled and swirling around an equally pale peach-colored central patchwork. Myers noted how in this painting and in others like "Kangaroo Man's Travels" (1973), the roundels that usually anchor Pintupi paintings to the center of the picture plane or describe an organizing axis are simply elements in the overall design of Warangkula's paintings. The circles are off center, secondary, and don't organize the space; Warangkula instead achieves compositional balance through his use of color, and demonstrates a disinclination to employ conventional ritual design, even in his earliest paintings.
In the fourth gallery devoted to one of the exhibition's major painters, six magnificent works by Uta Uta Tjangala share the walls with a canvas by his close friend Charlie Tjararu Tjungurrayi and another by his son Shorty Tjampitjinpa Jackson. The early works by Uta Uta all display his characteristic off-center, slightly diagonal axis around which the individual elements of the design are organized. Myers has elaborated on Uta Uta's compositional strategies at some length in the third chapter of Painting Culture: the making of an Aboriginal high art (Duke University Press, 2002), which is entitled "The Aesthetic Function and the Practice of Pintupi Painting: A Local Art History."
"My Country with Sandhills" (c. early 1970s), left, and "Bandicoot Dreaming" (1987) by Uta Uta Tjangala.
For me, the most revelatory painting of Uta Uta's in the show was the "Tingarri Cycle" (1973). A large central roundel is surrounded by eight smaller ones that radiate from it and are connected to it by short straight lines. The entire design thus created is then outlined by bands made up of alternating rows of white and black dotting, which are themselves surrounded by a band of doubled yellow dots that serves to enclose the entire design. From behind this frame-filling set of roundels emerge four naturalistically painted, elaborately decorated sacred boards arranged in a somewhat flattened X shape. Parts of the boards are clearly visible between the outer ring of roundels, other parts are hidden. The designs of the two boards on the right hand side of the painting, though, seem to merge with the overall larger design: they were clearly painted in before the enwrapping dotting was done, and they peer out ambiguously from behind that dotting. Myers pointed out how they invoke the power relationships of ceremony; how things in ritual are simultaneously concealed and revealed and how the actions of concealment and revelation are indices of the social position, knowledge, and power of the initiated men. The image also evokes Tingari stories of enormous sacred boards that rose up out of the ground in a literally awe-inspiring display of Ancestral power.
The exhibition's final gallery draws the viewer closer to the present day and completes the narrative of the development and transformation of Pintupi painting over the last four decades in a number of ways. Ronnie Tjamiptjinpa's large canvas "Nyinmi" (1989) depicts the travels and death of the King Brown Snake, a Dreaming track that charts a series of salty waterholes through the Western Desert in what Myers described as a kind of ethnogeology. The Dreaming track that ends at Nyinmi has its beginnings at a site painted by Johnny Warangkula and depicted in his painting "Women's Centipede Dreaming at Central Mount Wedge" (1974) which, fittingly, is hung at the extreme opposite end of the Kluge-Ruhe's exhibition space.
"Nyinmi" (1989) by Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, left, and "Tingari at Pilintjinya" (1988) by Simon Tjakamarra.
Simon Tjakamarra's "Tingari at Pilintjinya" (1988) is characteristic of that painter's bold interpretation of the circle and line motif, and according to Myers, is a good example of the shift in representational strategy that occurred in the late 1980s, and was remarked upon earlier with Mick Namarari's "Wallaby Dreaming at Tjunginpa." A more generalized design aesthetic emerged as the painters strove to reproduce not the details of ceremonial objects but the effect of the performance. The bold, optically vibrant designs simulate the sudden, flickering revelation of body paintings emerging strobe-like from the darkness into the light of the ceremonial campfires.
The strength of Pintupi painting has now passed on to the women in the communities of Kintore and Kiwirrkura, who have sustained the stories given to them by their fathers and who follow up the example of the old masters in the exhibition, all of whom have died (with the exception of Long Jack and Ronnie). Walangkura, who paints her father's Dreamings, was married to Uta Uta; Tjunkiya is Uta Uta's sister's daughter; and Tatali was married to Uta Uta's great friend Charlie Tjararu. Myers noted the haptic quality of the women's paintings, the thickness of the paint that they apply to the canvas recreating the effect of ochres applied to their shoulders and breasts during ceremonies. Makinti's large canvas of the "Kungka Kutjarra (Two Women) Dreaming" (2001) represents the hair string displayed and worn by the women in the dance that keep their ceremonies alive today.
Left to right, "Women's Campsite at Lampintja" (1999) by Tatali Nangala; "Untitled" (2008) by Walangkura Napanangka; "Yumari" by Tjunkiya Napaltjarri.
Although Myers's audience ought to have been overwhelmed by the sheer virtuosity of his own performance by this point in the tour, they still hung on every word as he led them to the alcove where the Ian Dunlop film was playing, pointed out the various men gathered in the painting camp, identifying the great painters whose work we had just been taught how to see.
But as the audience scattered after watching the film one last time, and after seeing once more Anatjari Tjakamarra calling out the names of Pintupi country, I was drawn back to contemplate a painting of his from the Kluge-Ruhe's collection that has been a favorite of mine since I saw it seven years ago on my first visit to Charlottesville. Entitled "The Artist's Country Near Kurlkurta" (1989), it seemed to encompass better than any other single work the insights that I gained from my three days in Fred Myers's company this weekend.
"The Artist's Country Near Kurlkurta" (1989) by Anatjari Tjakamarra, sometimes known as Anatjari no. 3.
Compositionally, this work appears to be one of the simplest of Anatjari's on display in Virtuosity. About three dozen black and white roundels of various sizes are spread across of field of white and yellow dots on a red-ochre primed canvas. The density of the white dots varies across the field, filling the lower right corner more densely, forming a loosely defined band in the upper right, finding more of a balance with the yellow in the center.
Myers described the country that Anatjari Tjakamarra came from: it is hilly country, the hills full of caves. Water runs off the hills and collects in numerous rockholes throughout the region. It is country that Anatjari knew intimately, country he looked over, at least in his mind's eye, as he stood atop the sandhill with Myers on that day in 1974 when Ian Dunlop captured the two men on film. It is country where Anatjari participated in ceremonies, and where, in the Dreamtime, large numbers of Tingari Men, "so many people" in the artist's evocation, gathered together.
In Nancy Munn's classic description of the designs employed by Desert painters (Walbiri iconography: graphic representation and cultural symbolism in a central Australian society, Cornell University Press, 1973), she points to the multivalence of the simple designs used in the graphical systems of the Western Desert people. Circles can represent camps, or campfires, hills, waterholes, or caves. All of these elements are clearly possibilities given the nature of the artist's country as Myers described it standing before this magnificent canvas.
Myers also evoked the image of ceremony, of painted bodies, black skin covered in white designs, designs that employed just these kinds of roundels, emerging into the flickering firelight. The optical effects of the design, of the circles in their varying sizes, mimic that strobe-like effect that Myers referred to, and they suggest in their visual instability the tropes of revelation and concealment, of bringing forward into the light and retreating into the darkness, that is the means by which initiated men assert their power and indeed their very identity. The men are emanations of the Dreaming when they perform in these ceremonies. By painting images such as these on canvas for all to see they are asserting their rights to reveal the sacred knowledge they received as initiates, and their status as elders; they are establishing who they are.
And so finally the power of this painting lies very much in its multivalence, in the ability of these simple symbols to reveal so much at once. What we see here, if we avoid reductivism, if we try to embrace the whole lot, are "so many people," Tingari ancestors and Anatjari's kinsmen, elders and initiates, all the rockholes, hills, and caves of the artist's country; in short, what is given to us in this painting is the whole of the artist's lived experience of his country, transmuted and performed before our eyes. In that transmutation, we experience something of the Dreaming as it is brought forth, manifest, in the artist's country and in our world. To be seized by this revelation is an exhilarating experience, to be brought to the brink of understanding, and to be reminded that much is still concealed behind this facade of circles and dots of paint. It is to see brilliance, prowess, mastery, and excellence. It is, in a word, virtuosity.
***
Virtuosity: the evolution of painting at Papunya Tula is on display at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection in Charlottesville, Virginia through August 9, 2008. The exhibition was curated by Fred R. Myers, who holds the Silver Chair of Anthropology at New York University. His book, Painting Culture: the making of an Aboriginal high art, was recently announced as the winner of the 2008 J. I. Staley Prize. The Staley Prize is given by the School of American Research (SAR) "to a living author for a book that exemplifies outstanding scholarship and writing in anthropology. The award recognizes innovative works that go beyond traditional frontiers and dominant schools of thought in anthropology and add new dimensions to our understanding of the human species. It honors books that cross subdisciplinary boundaries within anthropology and reach out in new and expanded interdisciplinary directions" (SAR website).
Fred Myers working with Anatjari Tjakamarra at Yayayi; photo by Esras Giddy, courtesy of Ian Dunlop.
The film opens with shots of camp life (Pinta Pinta Tjapanangka being berated by his sister Makinti Napanangka for not getting enough meat for his ten dollars at the community store), then switches to a sequence showing Peter Fannin, the manager of Papunya Tula Artists at that time, and Bob Edwards of the Aboriginal Arts Board purchasing paintings and artifacts from a crowd of men gathered at the painting camp. (During the two years that Myers lived with the Pintupi at Yayayi he documented 260 early works by the Pintupi masters.) Included prominently in this section are, among others, Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi, Uta Uta Tjangala, John Tjakamarra, and Anatjari Tjakamarra.
The last sequences of the short film document moments during a trip out west to Pintupi homelands that Myers made in the company of several of the men and Jeremy Long, the patrol officer who worked for many years with the Pintupi during this critical contact period. After climbing up a steep sandhill together, Myers and Anatjari are seen crouching near a smoothed patch of sand. Anatjari reaches out a finger and inscribes a small circle in the sand, then draws a short, straight line, then another circle. He whispers the names of the places represented by the tiny circles. Another line, another circle, another whispered name. The line turns north, and Anatjari inscribes two more circles.
The scene shifts to Anatjari standing atop a hill near Ilpili in the Ehrenburg Range. At the top Anatjari looks over the countryside. "Pintupi ngurra," he says. Twisting his head and arm around behind him to the right, he announces that the land to the east belongs to someone else: Arrernte country. Then he looks out to the west and in a strong, clear voice says, "Pintupi ngurra, Pintupi country!" His left hand shoots out in front of him as he names a place out to the west. He draws his hand back to his mouth, then rapidly extends his arm to the west again, naming another site. Over and over again this action is repeated, his hand seeming to extract the names of the country from his mouth and hurl them out across the landscape as his arm shoots westward. "Pintupi country!" he exclaims, and again "Pintupi country!" It's a literally spine-tingling moment, as Dunlop's camera pans out, away from the figure of the painter atop the sandridge and across to the rocky hills purple on the horizon. This is the country on display now at the Kluge-Ruhe.
A screen shot from Ian Dunlop's film, Pintupi Painters at Yayayi. The painting above is a new work (2008) by Pamela Napaltjarri, daughter of Fred Myers's friend Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi.
Virtuosity comprises thirty-nine works, dating from 1971 to 2008, that document the development of painting strategies by artists of the Papunya Tula collective. Four artists are given prominence, with a gallery each devoted to Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, Anatjari Tjakamarra, and Uta Uta Tjangala. The fifth room is given over to further developments at Kintore and Kiwirrkura represented by Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, Dini Campbell Tjampitjinpa, and Simon Tjakamarra among the men, and in the 1990s and beyond by women painters Wintjiya Napaltjarri, her sister Tjunkiya, Uta Uta's widow Walangkura Napanangka, Tatali Nangala, and Makinti Napanangka. To round out the show, Papunya Tula Artists has sent over a gorgeous selection of small paintings by some of the best artists working today, available for on-site purchase at blushingly modest prices.
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On Saturday, April 12, Fred Myers led an overflow crowd of visitors through the exhibition, holding us all rapt for nearly two hours as he explained the ways in which the stars of the show worked to translate their ceremonial designs into the two-dimensional media of acrylic paint on masonite or canvas board. Myers described how these men developed even more innovative techniques for responding to the introduction of large canvas and the need to depict their artistic and intellectual traditions and their lived experience of their country in ways appropriate to their widening audience.
Fred Myers, at right, has the full attention of his audience after nearly two hours.
As visitors step into the exhibition's first gallery they are greeted, to the left, by five early boards from the 70s by Mick Namarari, and to the right, three larger, later canvases painted between 1989 and 1992. Myers characterized Namarari as an especially quiet, taciturn man who was nonetheless recognized from the first as an unusually gifted painter. Several of the early works are structured around a tripartite set of interlocking forms that may be drawn from the motif of two men seated on either side of a ceremonial pole or a campfire. In the stories behind these designs, these may be brothers, an elder and an initiate, or otherwise family members; the design shows similarities to a structure employed by Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi in several of the paintings Myers had shown to the audience in his lecture two nights earlier. The colors in these early boards are spectacular, with brilliant yellow bands giving prominence to the interlocking design in "Kangaroo Man Ancestor and Bush Tucker Dreaming" (1973) and a glowing warm orange filling the frame of "Family Moon Dreaming" (1976).
The larger paintings showcased some of Tjapaltjarri's strategies for filling a large canvas and adapting designs to a more generalized presentation of mythic stories. "Wallaby Dreaming at Tjunginpa" (1990, reproduced on page 109 of the catalog for Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2000) is an example of the classic line and circle motif that came to dominate Papunya Tula painting in the late 1980s; Myers explained that while the painters were retreating from depicting particular narratives at that time, every one of the dozens of roundels in the painting could still be identified as a specific place in the artist's country. The smaller "Two Kangaroo Dreaming at Marnpi" (1989) is a gauzy skein of yellow-gray dots, one of Tjaplatjarri's signature late styles.
The tension between overtly depicting ceremonial regalia and the gradual move to a more generalized compositional approach can be seen most clearly in the second gallery, which is given over to five very different but equally dazzling works by Anatjari Tjakamarra. The iconography of the undocumented and untitled board from 1971 is a mixture of clearly decipherable incised ritual objects and a mysterious complex of black ovoid shapes that frame a pair of roundels. One of these roundels sits in a field of white dots, the other at the center of radiating dotted white lines. (The work has some compositional similarity to a painting by Uta Uta reproduced on page 28 of Genesis and Genius, but the colors in Anatjari's board, dominated by a deep, shiny black on a background of red ochre, look far more striking.) Another untitled work from 1973 depicts that story of a Dreamtime initiate who bled to death at Karrkunya, but here the forms have already become more abstracted and less naturalistic. The stone knives of the ceremony, the chunks of red ochre that are mined at this site, and the five-pointed central design can be interpreted if one knows the story, but the bald depiction of the earlier work has already been masked.
Myers wryly noted that Tjakamarra never seemed fully able to divorce himself from the naturalistic, and indeed, with that thought in mind, the three ovals that circumscribe half a dozen or more roundels each in "Women's Dreaming" (1989) suddenly look less like classic Tingari designs than ritual objects, despite the elaborate background dotting. The painting (reproduced on page 106 of the Genesis and Genius catalog) depicts the story of a group of Tingari men who travelled in the company of a group of women bearing ceremonial boards to the site of Ngaminya, where the boards were left behind and turned to stone.
Myers then led his audience to a third gallery that featured early works by Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula along with a pair of paintings, one early, one late, by Long Jack Phillips Tjakamarra. Both men came from more easterly regions: Johnny W. a Luritja man, Long Jack a Pintupi with strong ties to Luritja country. Long Jack is one of the few men who painted for Geoff Bardon in 1971 still living; today he remains in Papunya and is encouraging the young artists who paint for the newly founded Papunya Tjupi art centre.
"Wallaby Dreaming" (1971), left, and "Wild Potato Dreaming" (1972) by Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula.
The paintings by Johnny Warangkula in the exhibition display a wide range of the artist's styles, but all of them are characterized by his fabulous color sense and extraordinary delicacy in dotting and brushwork. The "Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa" (1972) is a skein of hatched lines in the palest greens and yellows of new plant life tangled and swirling around an equally pale peach-colored central patchwork. Myers noted how in this painting and in others like "Kangaroo Man's Travels" (1973), the roundels that usually anchor Pintupi paintings to the center of the picture plane or describe an organizing axis are simply elements in the overall design of Warangkula's paintings. The circles are off center, secondary, and don't organize the space; Warangkula instead achieves compositional balance through his use of color, and demonstrates a disinclination to employ conventional ritual design, even in his earliest paintings.
In the fourth gallery devoted to one of the exhibition's major painters, six magnificent works by Uta Uta Tjangala share the walls with a canvas by his close friend Charlie Tjararu Tjungurrayi and another by his son Shorty Tjampitjinpa Jackson. The early works by Uta Uta all display his characteristic off-center, slightly diagonal axis around which the individual elements of the design are organized. Myers has elaborated on Uta Uta's compositional strategies at some length in the third chapter of Painting Culture: the making of an Aboriginal high art (Duke University Press, 2002), which is entitled "The Aesthetic Function and the Practice of Pintupi Painting: A Local Art History."
"My Country with Sandhills" (c. early 1970s), left, and "Bandicoot Dreaming" (1987) by Uta Uta Tjangala.
For me, the most revelatory painting of Uta Uta's in the show was the "Tingarri Cycle" (1973). A large central roundel is surrounded by eight smaller ones that radiate from it and are connected to it by short straight lines. The entire design thus created is then outlined by bands made up of alternating rows of white and black dotting, which are themselves surrounded by a band of doubled yellow dots that serves to enclose the entire design. From behind this frame-filling set of roundels emerge four naturalistically painted, elaborately decorated sacred boards arranged in a somewhat flattened X shape. Parts of the boards are clearly visible between the outer ring of roundels, other parts are hidden. The designs of the two boards on the right hand side of the painting, though, seem to merge with the overall larger design: they were clearly painted in before the enwrapping dotting was done, and they peer out ambiguously from behind that dotting. Myers pointed out how they invoke the power relationships of ceremony; how things in ritual are simultaneously concealed and revealed and how the actions of concealment and revelation are indices of the social position, knowledge, and power of the initiated men. The image also evokes Tingari stories of enormous sacred boards that rose up out of the ground in a literally awe-inspiring display of Ancestral power.
The exhibition's final gallery draws the viewer closer to the present day and completes the narrative of the development and transformation of Pintupi painting over the last four decades in a number of ways. Ronnie Tjamiptjinpa's large canvas "Nyinmi" (1989) depicts the travels and death of the King Brown Snake, a Dreaming track that charts a series of salty waterholes through the Western Desert in what Myers described as a kind of ethnogeology. The Dreaming track that ends at Nyinmi has its beginnings at a site painted by Johnny Warangkula and depicted in his painting "Women's Centipede Dreaming at Central Mount Wedge" (1974) which, fittingly, is hung at the extreme opposite end of the Kluge-Ruhe's exhibition space.
"Nyinmi" (1989) by Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, left, and "Tingari at Pilintjinya" (1988) by Simon Tjakamarra.
Simon Tjakamarra's "Tingari at Pilintjinya" (1988) is characteristic of that painter's bold interpretation of the circle and line motif, and according to Myers, is a good example of the shift in representational strategy that occurred in the late 1980s, and was remarked upon earlier with Mick Namarari's "Wallaby Dreaming at Tjunginpa." A more generalized design aesthetic emerged as the painters strove to reproduce not the details of ceremonial objects but the effect of the performance. The bold, optically vibrant designs simulate the sudden, flickering revelation of body paintings emerging strobe-like from the darkness into the light of the ceremonial campfires.
The strength of Pintupi painting has now passed on to the women in the communities of Kintore and Kiwirrkura, who have sustained the stories given to them by their fathers and who follow up the example of the old masters in the exhibition, all of whom have died (with the exception of Long Jack and Ronnie). Walangkura, who paints her father's Dreamings, was married to Uta Uta; Tjunkiya is Uta Uta's sister's daughter; and Tatali was married to Uta Uta's great friend Charlie Tjararu. Myers noted the haptic quality of the women's paintings, the thickness of the paint that they apply to the canvas recreating the effect of ochres applied to their shoulders and breasts during ceremonies. Makinti's large canvas of the "Kungka Kutjarra (Two Women) Dreaming" (2001) represents the hair string displayed and worn by the women in the dance that keep their ceremonies alive today.
Left to right, "Women's Campsite at Lampintja" (1999) by Tatali Nangala; "Untitled" (2008) by Walangkura Napanangka; "Yumari" by Tjunkiya Napaltjarri.
Although Myers's audience ought to have been overwhelmed by the sheer virtuosity of his own performance by this point in the tour, they still hung on every word as he led them to the alcove where the Ian Dunlop film was playing, pointed out the various men gathered in the painting camp, identifying the great painters whose work we had just been taught how to see.
But as the audience scattered after watching the film one last time, and after seeing once more Anatjari Tjakamarra calling out the names of Pintupi country, I was drawn back to contemplate a painting of his from the Kluge-Ruhe's collection that has been a favorite of mine since I saw it seven years ago on my first visit to Charlottesville. Entitled "The Artist's Country Near Kurlkurta" (1989), it seemed to encompass better than any other single work the insights that I gained from my three days in Fred Myers's company this weekend.
"The Artist's Country Near Kurlkurta" (1989) by Anatjari Tjakamarra, sometimes known as Anatjari no. 3.
Compositionally, this work appears to be one of the simplest of Anatjari's on display in Virtuosity. About three dozen black and white roundels of various sizes are spread across of field of white and yellow dots on a red-ochre primed canvas. The density of the white dots varies across the field, filling the lower right corner more densely, forming a loosely defined band in the upper right, finding more of a balance with the yellow in the center.
Myers described the country that Anatjari Tjakamarra came from: it is hilly country, the hills full of caves. Water runs off the hills and collects in numerous rockholes throughout the region. It is country that Anatjari knew intimately, country he looked over, at least in his mind's eye, as he stood atop the sandhill with Myers on that day in 1974 when Ian Dunlop captured the two men on film. It is country where Anatjari participated in ceremonies, and where, in the Dreamtime, large numbers of Tingari Men, "so many people" in the artist's evocation, gathered together.
In Nancy Munn's classic description of the designs employed by Desert painters (Walbiri iconography: graphic representation and cultural symbolism in a central Australian society, Cornell University Press, 1973), she points to the multivalence of the simple designs used in the graphical systems of the Western Desert people. Circles can represent camps, or campfires, hills, waterholes, or caves. All of these elements are clearly possibilities given the nature of the artist's country as Myers described it standing before this magnificent canvas.
Myers also evoked the image of ceremony, of painted bodies, black skin covered in white designs, designs that employed just these kinds of roundels, emerging into the flickering firelight. The optical effects of the design, of the circles in their varying sizes, mimic that strobe-like effect that Myers referred to, and they suggest in their visual instability the tropes of revelation and concealment, of bringing forward into the light and retreating into the darkness, that is the means by which initiated men assert their power and indeed their very identity. The men are emanations of the Dreaming when they perform in these ceremonies. By painting images such as these on canvas for all to see they are asserting their rights to reveal the sacred knowledge they received as initiates, and their status as elders; they are establishing who they are.
And so finally the power of this painting lies very much in its multivalence, in the ability of these simple symbols to reveal so much at once. What we see here, if we avoid reductivism, if we try to embrace the whole lot, are "so many people," Tingari ancestors and Anatjari's kinsmen, elders and initiates, all the rockholes, hills, and caves of the artist's country; in short, what is given to us in this painting is the whole of the artist's lived experience of his country, transmuted and performed before our eyes. In that transmutation, we experience something of the Dreaming as it is brought forth, manifest, in the artist's country and in our world. To be seized by this revelation is an exhilarating experience, to be brought to the brink of understanding, and to be reminded that much is still concealed behind this facade of circles and dots of paint. It is to see brilliance, prowess, mastery, and excellence. It is, in a word, virtuosity.
Virtuosity: the evolution of painting at Papunya Tula is on display at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection in Charlottesville, Virginia through August 9, 2008. The exhibition was curated by Fred R. Myers, who holds the Silver Chair of Anthropology at New York University. His book, Painting Culture: the making of an Aboriginal high art, was recently announced as the winner of the 2008 J. I. Staley Prize. The Staley Prize is given by the School of American Research (SAR) "to a living author for a book that exemplifies outstanding scholarship and writing in anthropology. The award recognizes innovative works that go beyond traditional frontiers and dominant schools of thought in anthropology and add new dimensions to our understanding of the human species. It honors books that cross subdisciplinary boundaries within anthropology and reach out in new and expanded interdisciplinary directions" (SAR website).
Fred Myers working with Anatjari Tjakamarra at Yayayi; photo by Esras Giddy, courtesy of Ian Dunlop.
Posted at 07:15 PM
Sat - April 5, 2008
Gurrumul: Indigenous Music/Mainstream Media
If you've read my previous posts on Indigenous
music, you'll know that I favor loud guitars, am intrigued by Aboriginal
adaptations of hip-hop, and admit to a seemingly incongruous affection for the
Pigram Brothers. "The old folkie days" as Neil Young styled them are well and
truly ancient history in my musical tastes. Maybe that explains why I've
resisted the blandishments of friends in Darwin to check out the new album by
Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu for several months now. But this week, in the wake
of the Sydney Morning
Herald's profile and review of
Gurrumul
("Aboriginal music gets an angelic new voice,"
March 31, 2008), I decided I ought to find out what all the fuss was about.
I was blown away. It's been twenty years since Tracy Chapman's self-titled debut hit me this hard with just an acoustic guitar behind a voice, and maybe another twenty before that when Joni Mitchell first left me stunned by a similar subtlety. Frank Yamma's early acoustic tunes failed to engage me; it wasn't until I heard his collaborations with Piranpa that I began to appreciate his talents as a songwriter. (And I'll confess it wasn't until more recently that I knew that Yamma led the Ulpanyali Band, although their hit "History" is one of the rock 'n' roll standouts on the second volume of the CAAMA 25 Years collection.)
But back to Gurrumul. Although noting the singer's connections to Yothu Yindi, the SMH article paints him as a relative newcomer, discovered and shepherded into the spotlight by producer Michael Hohnen. In fact, Gurrumul has been around for over a decade as songwriter, singer, and lead guitarist for the Saltwater Band, and three songs on the new solo album have appeared on that group's earlier albums ("Gurrumul History" on Gapu Damurrung, along with "Bapa (Father)" and "Galupa" on Djarridjarri/Blue Flag).
Those songs were among the most lyrical pieces in the Saltwater Band's catalog, to be sure. But the versions included on Gurrumul justify the "angelic" hype that's being accorded to their author these days, especially when an understated cello enters the accompaniment on "Bapa." The gentle guitar figures and the softness of Gurrumul's voice, sometimes double-tracked to provide harmonies, had already quite relaxed me by the time the slow bowing of the deep voice of the strings urged me to let go completely and float along with the music. In contrast, the piano accompaniment on the Saltwater Band's (still gentle and quiet) version sounds percussive and clangorous by comparison.
Liner notes on Djarridjarri state that "The songs by Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu incorporate words and concepts, images and sensations which are celebrated in the ancestral songs of the Gumatj people." Occasionally the musical phrasings echo these traditional songs, for example in the opening bars of Gurrumul's song "Galiku." On other songs, like the closer "Wukun," the Yolngu and Western idioms are so tightly interwoven than you could carry water in them. On many of the other tracks, you would be hard pressed to identify the singer as Aboriginal, were it not for the fact that the songs are sung in Gumatj.
I find the SMH's claims that this album contains "authentically traditional Aboriginal music" a bit overblown, as wrong as the notion that such traditional music is "characterised mostly by simple and repetitive chanting" and has been of "little interest outside ceremonies and dances in Aboriginal communities." (It's the notion of "traditional" I'm uncomfortable with, not the "authentic.") Still, I'd be overjoyed if Gurrumul convinced neophyte listeners that Aboriginal music had more to offer than clapsticks and yidaki.
Almost as exciting as the discovery of this album was the fact that I was able to buy it on iTunes. Even better, I discovered that Apple has now firmly latched on to contemporary Indigenous music. A year ago there wasn't much on offer beyond CAAMA's 25 Years set. Now they appear to have picked up a great deal of the Skinnyfish Music catalog as well as other bands distributed by CAAMA.
A quick check the other day revealed albums by all of the following artists (in alphabetical order): Christine Anu, Blekbela Mujik, Sammy Butcher, Coloured Stone, Jagit, Chris Jones, Daryl Kantawara, Lajamanu Teenage Band, Late Lazy Boys, Letterstick Band, Tom E Lewis, Ltyentye Apurte Band, Nabarlek, Nangu, North Tanami Band, Rising Wind Band, Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter, George Rrurrambu, Saltwater Band, Seaman Dan, Spin.FX, Stiff Gins, Tjupi Band, Warumpi Band, Baydon Williams, Warren H. Williams, Bart Willoughby, Wirrynga Band, Frank Yamma, Yilila, Yothu Yindi, and Yugul.
Some of this music had been available earlier on the Australian iTunes store. But licensing restrictions don't allow one to buy iTunes internationally. Now I'm happy to report that all of those are available in the USA, and spot checks showed every one I looked for also available in France, Germany, Spain, and the UK.
Now, if you want to hear more than just the thirty-second snippets that iTunes offers, you can always try your luck on YouTube, and if it's Gurrumul you're interested in now, you are in luck. He's posted six videos recently, including a couple of performances with the Saltwater Band, who are among the best represented Indigenous stars on YouTube. There are several performances captured by fans from their appearance at the 2007 Telstra Art Awards, although these seem to come and go over time: I once added several of them to my favorites, only to find them unavailable a few months later. Now many of those performances are back online.
I've had similar troubles with a band whose music is very hard to track down these days, Bart Willoughby's legendary No Fixed Address. There were some wonderful television clips up once, featuring a very, very young Chris Jones on rhythm guitar, but they've disappeared now, perhaps for reasons of copyright infringement. There are some old clips of Coloured Stone available, lots of Yothu Yindi and Warumpi Band (mixed with Midnight Oil), along with stalwarts Christine Anu and Archie Roach.
The other option is to check out Gurrumul's MySpace page. Half a dozen songs from the album are available for listening here, along with everything else you can expect from MySpace. There's a link to iTunes, and a roster of upcoming performances, from Sydney and Cairns to the Woodford Dreaming Festival and the Tilburg World Festival in the Netherlands. There's also a ten-year old video of Gurrumul performing Yothu Yindi's song "Dots on the Shells" in a lovely acoustic version with Mandawuy Yunupingu and Neil Finn. And of course, there are Gurrumul's friends, whose links can start you on a long hyperadventure through the pages of the Saltwater Band, Nabarlek, T-Lynx, or David Blanasi. Which will, of course, lead you to dozens of other bands you might want to explore.
One final musical note for today. I just learned today that Midnight Oil has released a limited, twentieth-anniversary CD/DVD edition of Diesel and Dust. The brilliant news is that the DVD contains the concert documentary Black Fella/White Fella, the record of the band's trip through the Central Desert and the Top End in the company of the Warumpi Band. Black Fella/White Fella has only been available in the past on videocassette, and for many years only if you were very persistent and tracked its second-hand availability on sites like half.com or Alibris. The new edition is only available at the moment in the US as an import from Amazon, but here's hoping that it will receive wide distribution soon. (There's no indication of region coding for the DVD, but with region-free players available for about US$50, the hardware investment would be well worth it.) Both bands are in top form, and the sight of kids from Kintore to Wadeye bouncing in the firelight to this top-flight rock 'n' roll will make you believe, if just for a minute, that art might really be able to save the world. Or at least make it dance.
Postscript: A reader has written, rightly taking exception to a line in my review above, "that Aboriginal music had more to offer than clapsticks and yidaki." He writes: "What 'traditional' means may require defining but when it means genres and styles used in corroborees and ceremonies then it is complex and fascinating."
Although I voiced my disagreement with the SMH's characterization of Yolngu ceremonial music as "simple and repetitive," the thought that did not make the transition from my mind to the page was that, too often still, the yidaki represents the extent of Aboriginal music in the mainstream media. Aborgines approaching? Cue the didjeridu!
I hope for a day when Anangu singing provides the soundtrack for sunrise at Uluru, when troopies bounce over corrugated roads to the rhythm of the North Tanami Band, when the sun sets into the Arafura Sea to the notes of Geoffrey Gurrumul's guitar. (One of the joys of watching the television series The Circuit was hearing the Pigram Brothers so often as the camera panned across the Kimberley on its way back to Broome.)
My correspondent pointed me to Sally Treloyn's 2006 thesis from the University of Sydney, Songs that pull: jadmi junba from the Kimberley region of northwest Australia as a good place to start reading more about traditional music. Another book readers may want to explore in Allan Marett's Songs, Dreamings, and Ghosts: the wangga of North Australia (Wesleyan University Presss, 2005), which won the Stanner Prize in 2006. The classic musical ethnography of the desert is Richard Moyle's Songs of the Pintupi: musical life in a central Australian society (Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1979.
I was blown away. It's been twenty years since Tracy Chapman's self-titled debut hit me this hard with just an acoustic guitar behind a voice, and maybe another twenty before that when Joni Mitchell first left me stunned by a similar subtlety. Frank Yamma's early acoustic tunes failed to engage me; it wasn't until I heard his collaborations with Piranpa that I began to appreciate his talents as a songwriter. (And I'll confess it wasn't until more recently that I knew that Yamma led the Ulpanyali Band, although their hit "History" is one of the rock 'n' roll standouts on the second volume of the CAAMA 25 Years collection.)
But back to Gurrumul. Although noting the singer's connections to Yothu Yindi, the SMH article paints him as a relative newcomer, discovered and shepherded into the spotlight by producer Michael Hohnen. In fact, Gurrumul has been around for over a decade as songwriter, singer, and lead guitarist for the Saltwater Band, and three songs on the new solo album have appeared on that group's earlier albums ("Gurrumul History" on Gapu Damurrung, along with "Bapa (Father)" and "Galupa" on Djarridjarri/Blue Flag).
Those songs were among the most lyrical pieces in the Saltwater Band's catalog, to be sure. But the versions included on Gurrumul justify the "angelic" hype that's being accorded to their author these days, especially when an understated cello enters the accompaniment on "Bapa." The gentle guitar figures and the softness of Gurrumul's voice, sometimes double-tracked to provide harmonies, had already quite relaxed me by the time the slow bowing of the deep voice of the strings urged me to let go completely and float along with the music. In contrast, the piano accompaniment on the Saltwater Band's (still gentle and quiet) version sounds percussive and clangorous by comparison.
Liner notes on Djarridjarri state that "The songs by Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu incorporate words and concepts, images and sensations which are celebrated in the ancestral songs of the Gumatj people." Occasionally the musical phrasings echo these traditional songs, for example in the opening bars of Gurrumul's song "Galiku." On other songs, like the closer "Wukun," the Yolngu and Western idioms are so tightly interwoven than you could carry water in them. On many of the other tracks, you would be hard pressed to identify the singer as Aboriginal, were it not for the fact that the songs are sung in Gumatj.
I find the SMH's claims that this album contains "authentically traditional Aboriginal music" a bit overblown, as wrong as the notion that such traditional music is "characterised mostly by simple and repetitive chanting" and has been of "little interest outside ceremonies and dances in Aboriginal communities." (It's the notion of "traditional" I'm uncomfortable with, not the "authentic.") Still, I'd be overjoyed if Gurrumul convinced neophyte listeners that Aboriginal music had more to offer than clapsticks and yidaki.
Almost as exciting as the discovery of this album was the fact that I was able to buy it on iTunes. Even better, I discovered that Apple has now firmly latched on to contemporary Indigenous music. A year ago there wasn't much on offer beyond CAAMA's 25 Years set. Now they appear to have picked up a great deal of the Skinnyfish Music catalog as well as other bands distributed by CAAMA.
A quick check the other day revealed albums by all of the following artists (in alphabetical order): Christine Anu, Blekbela Mujik, Sammy Butcher, Coloured Stone, Jagit, Chris Jones, Daryl Kantawara, Lajamanu Teenage Band, Late Lazy Boys, Letterstick Band, Tom E Lewis, Ltyentye Apurte Band, Nabarlek, Nangu, North Tanami Band, Rising Wind Band, Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter, George Rrurrambu, Saltwater Band, Seaman Dan, Spin.FX, Stiff Gins, Tjupi Band, Warumpi Band, Baydon Williams, Warren H. Williams, Bart Willoughby, Wirrynga Band, Frank Yamma, Yilila, Yothu Yindi, and Yugul.
Some of this music had been available earlier on the Australian iTunes store. But licensing restrictions don't allow one to buy iTunes internationally. Now I'm happy to report that all of those are available in the USA, and spot checks showed every one I looked for also available in France, Germany, Spain, and the UK.
Now, if you want to hear more than just the thirty-second snippets that iTunes offers, you can always try your luck on YouTube, and if it's Gurrumul you're interested in now, you are in luck. He's posted six videos recently, including a couple of performances with the Saltwater Band, who are among the best represented Indigenous stars on YouTube. There are several performances captured by fans from their appearance at the 2007 Telstra Art Awards, although these seem to come and go over time: I once added several of them to my favorites, only to find them unavailable a few months later. Now many of those performances are back online.
I've had similar troubles with a band whose music is very hard to track down these days, Bart Willoughby's legendary No Fixed Address. There were some wonderful television clips up once, featuring a very, very young Chris Jones on rhythm guitar, but they've disappeared now, perhaps for reasons of copyright infringement. There are some old clips of Coloured Stone available, lots of Yothu Yindi and Warumpi Band (mixed with Midnight Oil), along with stalwarts Christine Anu and Archie Roach.
The other option is to check out Gurrumul's MySpace page. Half a dozen songs from the album are available for listening here, along with everything else you can expect from MySpace. There's a link to iTunes, and a roster of upcoming performances, from Sydney and Cairns to the Woodford Dreaming Festival and the Tilburg World Festival in the Netherlands. There's also a ten-year old video of Gurrumul performing Yothu Yindi's song "Dots on the Shells" in a lovely acoustic version with Mandawuy Yunupingu and Neil Finn. And of course, there are Gurrumul's friends, whose links can start you on a long hyperadventure through the pages of the Saltwater Band, Nabarlek, T-Lynx, or David Blanasi. Which will, of course, lead you to dozens of other bands you might want to explore.
One final musical note for today. I just learned today that Midnight Oil has released a limited, twentieth-anniversary CD/DVD edition of Diesel and Dust. The brilliant news is that the DVD contains the concert documentary Black Fella/White Fella, the record of the band's trip through the Central Desert and the Top End in the company of the Warumpi Band. Black Fella/White Fella has only been available in the past on videocassette, and for many years only if you were very persistent and tracked its second-hand availability on sites like half.com or Alibris. The new edition is only available at the moment in the US as an import from Amazon, but here's hoping that it will receive wide distribution soon. (There's no indication of region coding for the DVD, but with region-free players available for about US$50, the hardware investment would be well worth it.) Both bands are in top form, and the sight of kids from Kintore to Wadeye bouncing in the firelight to this top-flight rock 'n' roll will make you believe, if just for a minute, that art might really be able to save the world. Or at least make it dance.
Postscript: A reader has written, rightly taking exception to a line in my review above, "that Aboriginal music had more to offer than clapsticks and yidaki." He writes: "What 'traditional' means may require defining but when it means genres and styles used in corroborees and ceremonies then it is complex and fascinating."
Although I voiced my disagreement with the SMH's characterization of Yolngu ceremonial music as "simple and repetitive," the thought that did not make the transition from my mind to the page was that, too often still, the yidaki represents the extent of Aboriginal music in the mainstream media. Aborgines approaching? Cue the didjeridu!
I hope for a day when Anangu singing provides the soundtrack for sunrise at Uluru, when troopies bounce over corrugated roads to the rhythm of the North Tanami Band, when the sun sets into the Arafura Sea to the notes of Geoffrey Gurrumul's guitar. (One of the joys of watching the television series The Circuit was hearing the Pigram Brothers so often as the camera panned across the Kimberley on its way back to Broome.)
My correspondent pointed me to Sally Treloyn's 2006 thesis from the University of Sydney, Songs that pull: jadmi junba from the Kimberley region of northwest Australia as a good place to start reading more about traditional music. Another book readers may want to explore in Allan Marett's Songs, Dreamings, and Ghosts: the wangga of North Australia (Wesleyan University Presss, 2005), which won the Stanner Prize in 2006. The classic musical ethnography of the desert is Richard Moyle's Songs of the Pintupi: musical life in a central Australian society (Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1979.
Posted at 04:10 PM
Mon - March 31, 2008
Theft!!
This just in from the
ABC:
'Priceless' artworks stolen from NT museum
Darwin Police are investigating the theft of seven Aboriginal paintings from the Northern Territory Museum and Art Gallery.
Security staff at the museum alerted the police at 4:20am ACST after noticing thieves had smashed a window to get inside.
Police say the paintings were stolen from the building's main area.
It has been confirmed six Papunya Tula style paintings from the Western Desert and a central Australian watercolour painting have been taken.
The paintings are all highly regarded.
Darwin Police Watch Commander Bob Harrison says an investigation is underway.
"We've had the museum staff initially attend it [the scene] and they've told us that the value of the paintings is priceless," he said.
Watch Commander Harrison says people should be on the lookout for the stolen art.
"We'd certainly be warning people if they were approached by anyone with paintings that are too good to be true they probably are," he said.
"We are waiting for a description which will be certainly circulating once we have it in hand, and we'll be certainly looking in the normal areas to try and locate these paintings."
'Priceless' artworks stolen from NT museum
Darwin Police are investigating the theft of seven Aboriginal paintings from the Northern Territory Museum and Art Gallery.
Security staff at the museum alerted the police at 4:20am ACST after noticing thieves had smashed a window to get inside.
Police say the paintings were stolen from the building's main area.
It has been confirmed six Papunya Tula style paintings from the Western Desert and a central Australian watercolour painting have been taken.
The paintings are all highly regarded.
Darwin Police Watch Commander Bob Harrison says an investigation is underway.
"We've had the museum staff initially attend it [the scene] and they've told us that the value of the paintings is priceless," he said.
Watch Commander Harrison says people should be on the lookout for the stolen art.
"We'd certainly be warning people if they were approached by anyone with paintings that are too good to be true they probably are," he said.
"We are waiting for a description which will be certainly circulating once we have it in hand, and we'll be certainly looking in the normal areas to try and locate these paintings."
Update:
Darwin Police say a person is in custody in relation to the theft of $500,000 worth of Aboriginal art from the Northern Territory Museum and Art Gallery.
Security staff alerted the police at 4:20am ACST after noticing thieves had smashed a window to get inside.
Six Papunya Tula paintings and a central Australian watercolour were taken.
Territory Police have arrested a 37-year-old man over the theft. Officers say he was picked up at a Parap bus stop.
Assistant Police Commissioner Graeme Kelly says all seven works were recovered just before midday.
Senior Constable Brad Currie says it does not appear to be an organised crime and the man is known to police.
"He'll be interviewed and is expected to be charged with unlawful damage, criminal damage and stealing," he said.
Gallery staff will meet tomorrow to assess security at the site.
A Northern Territory Government spokesman says the paintings were found hidden amongst bushes less than 500 metres from where they were stolen.
Museum director Anna Malgorzewicz told a media conference some of the works have been soiled but can be restored.
"As one can expect, they've been stressed, they're slightly soiled but they are in very good condition," she said.
"They are [easy to clean up], the works have already been returned to the museum and gallery and they're currently in our conservation laboratory where are conservators are condition reporting them."
'Significant collection'
The seven paintings included six boards by the Papunya Tula group from the Western Desert and one water colour from central Australia.
Ms Malgorzewicz says while they are not the most valuable in the gallery, the paintings are historically significant.
"It's a historic collection, a very significant collection of works," she said.
"We have quite a number here in our collection. Created in the early 1970s, they are a body of work. One of the first bodies of work from that particular area, so [they are] historically very significant."
Ms Malgorzewicz says the alarms rang straight away, but there was still time for the thieves to get away with the loot.
"They were very quick. We understand it was about 15 or so minutes in the gallery," she said.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/04/01/2204831.htm
Darwin Police say a person is in custody in relation to the theft of $500,000 worth of Aboriginal art from the Northern Territory Museum and Art Gallery.
Security staff alerted the police at 4:20am ACST after noticing thieves had smashed a window to get inside.
Six Papunya Tula paintings and a central Australian watercolour were taken.
Territory Police have arrested a 37-year-old man over the theft. Officers say he was picked up at a Parap bus stop.
Assistant Police Commissioner Graeme Kelly says all seven works were recovered just before midday.
Senior Constable Brad Currie says it does not appear to be an organised crime and the man is known to police.
"He'll be interviewed and is expected to be charged with unlawful damage, criminal damage and stealing," he said.
Gallery staff will meet tomorrow to assess security at the site.
A Northern Territory Government spokesman says the paintings were found hidden amongst bushes less than 500 metres from where they were stolen.
Museum director Anna Malgorzewicz told a media conference some of the works have been soiled but can be restored.
"As one can expect, they've been stressed, they're slightly soiled but they are in very good condition," she said.
"They are [easy to clean up], the works have already been returned to the museum and gallery and they're currently in our conservation laboratory where are conservators are condition reporting them."
'Significant collection'
The seven paintings included six boards by the Papunya Tula group from the Western Desert and one water colour from central Australia.
Ms Malgorzewicz says while they are not the most valuable in the gallery, the paintings are historically significant.
"It's a historic collection, a very significant collection of works," she said.
"We have quite a number here in our collection. Created in the early 1970s, they are a body of work. One of the first bodies of work from that particular area, so [they are] historically very significant."
Ms Malgorzewicz says the alarms rang straight away, but there was still time for the thieves to get away with the loot.
"They were very quick. We understand it was about 15 or so minutes in the gallery," she said.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/04/01/2204831.htm
Posted at 09:40 PM
Sat - March 29, 2008
Games in the Hood: Indigenous Photographers, part 1
When I think about photography in the context of
"fine art," I generally have categories in mind: landscape, portraiture,
documentary, abstraction. The new show of Christian Thompson's work at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi,
Australian
Graffiti (follow the links to the exhibitions
pages), and the recent exhibition,
Whacked