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 CentreThe
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:
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, 1997Today, 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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 ArtistsOn
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.
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."
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
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 |