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Sat - July 24, 2010Hail and Farewell: an American eye in transitionI started this blog in September 2005 using a
nice piece of software called iBlog and publishing it through my .Mac account.
As you may have noticed if you trawl through earlier posts or follow links
to them in my recent writing, things have gotten a little flaky. Images
are disappearing at random, and sometimes whole posts. So I’ve
decided to bite the bullet and try to shift my work to WordPress where Aboriginal Art & Culture: an American
eye is being reborn (http://aboriginalartandculture.wordpress.com/).
I toyed with the idea of trying to migrate this entire site to WordPress, but there proved to be no practical way of doing so. iBlog has always been a bit out of the mainstream of blogging platforms, and while I've been very happy with its capabilities until recently, the sad fact is that it's no longer actively developed or supported and I'm spending almost as much time each week fixing things as I am writing new posts. So I will leave this site up indefinitely and transfer my energies to learning the tricks and features of the new platform. One of the new features that WordPress easily enables is a link to Twitter feeds, and I hope to take advantage of that to point readers to some of the good stuff that I come across in the course of a week but that I wouldn't normally blog about, or blog in a timely fashion. Comments are built in as well; but check the "About the blog" page if you want to contact me directly. In five years I've managed, thanks to many of you who have put up links to this site on your own websites and blogs, to pull myself up the Google rankings, meaning there's a good chance that those who aren't regular readers can discover posts. So please, if you can, change your links to my new address. Subscribe to the new RSS feed. Spread the word. And thanks to all of you who have made the last five years so exciting, rewarding, and instructive. Here we go again! 
At Yuendumu with Paddy Japaljarri Sims and Kerry S., May 2007. Posted at 10:54 AM Sat - July 17, 2010Brook Andrew at the BiennaleI've always enjoyed and admired Brook
Andrew's work. The way that it slides from slapstick humor to grim
seriousness, sometimes in the same piece. But most certainly over the course of
his career, Andrew has consistently surprised me as his neon sculptures gave way
to the spooky romanticism of the Kalar Midday photographs or the Gun-Metal Gray portraits. And now he's come
back with an installation at the Sydney Biennale that's as goofy and it is grim.
Thanks to the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales and
their COFA Talks Online video series, here is a brief
look at the installation of Andrew's Jumping Castle War Memorial on
Cockatoo Island.
Jumping Castle War Memorial (video) There's a great moment in the latter half of the video when Andrew is asked by a member of his audience what the role of the artist is. His answer? "The role of the artist is like the role of the chef. Some people like the food, some people don't like the food." It's typical of Andrew's spot-on, throwaway, dead serious humor. Just like the Jumping Castle War Memorial itself. Posted at 12:41 PM Sat - July 10, 2010More American HorizonsI don't often write about exhibitions that I
haven't seen in person. Even the best documentation in printed form or on a
website can seriously under-represent the quality of work on display in a
gallery. Tony Bond has just produced a beautiful PDF catalog for the new
Mimili Maku 2010 show that's on display at
his Adelaide gallery. But despite the excellent production values, the
reproductions just can't quite produce the impact of the works on the gallery
walls. Take a look at the catalog, and then watch the short video that Tony's posted on YouTube and see if
you don't agree: the works are knockouts, even on YouTube's small
screen.
 But there are two other exhibitions that I won't get to see in person that I want to draw attention to nevertheless. They have been mounted here in America, and for that reason alone they merit a mention, although they are both fine shows in their own right. Both are out west, rather than on my more usual eastern seaboard stamping grounds. The first to open was the new show from Papunya Tula Artists, Art of the Western Desert of Australia, organized by Julie Harvey, who lent her considerable talents to the PTA exhibition last September in New York City at NYU's WSE80 Gallery. The show, which opened on July 2 in Ketchum, Idaho (Sun Valley) features twenty-one paintings by Papunya Tula superstars and a few younger artists, many of whom were also included in the New York roster ten months ago. The works are on a somewhat more modest scale; only the featured canvas by Ningura Napurrula (right) reaches 6' in either dimension, but they share the elegance and impact of their New York cousins. There is another brilliant work by Johnny Yungut Tjupurrula, who once again manages to evoke flickering torchlight playing over lichenous paintings on the walls of caves. Ronnie Tjampitjinpa's pearl-shell meanders are intricate and hypnotic and optically charged, while Warlimpriinga Tjaplatjarri contributes another visually destabilizing but ineffably subtle painting of the western sandhills. The rising young talent in this show is Matthew West Tjupurrula, with a small (91 x 46 cm) canvas that combines the simple path-and-roundel motif with the right-angled meanders that inform the work of many Kiwirrkura-Balgo based artists from Patrick Tjungurrayi to Fred Tjakamarra. Paul Sweeney was in town to open the show on July 1 with a lecture and a video presentation drawn from Hetti Perkins new ABC documentaries on Indigenous artists, Art & Soul. I'm pleased to see that these events were hosted by the Ketchum Community Library, which also screened the feature on Geoffrey Bardon, Mr Patterns, after the 4th of July holiday weekend. This past Thursday, Julie Harvey herself inaugurated a month-long series of Thursday lectures on the artists' works and Dreaming stories. The exhibition closes on July 30. Meanwhile, in another artistic capital of the American West, Melbourne gallerist Vivien Anderson has teamed up with Santa Fe's Chiaroscuro Contemporary Art to produce a show of exceptional loveliness entitled Australian Contemporary Indigenous Art - Now. Chiaroscuro's director, John Addison, is another in the large community of Americans who saw the Dreamings exhibition in this country in 1988 and whose interest in the new art of Indigenous Australia was permanently piqued by its treasure. As befits a new partnership to develop the market for Aboriginal art in America, Anderson has assembled an eclectic show that demonstrates a breadth of artistic endeavor spanning the continent from South Australia to Elcho Island.  The deserts are represented by work from South Australia's Tjungu Palya (including Kunmunara Tingima's large and lustrous Kala Ala (2009) at left) and Western Australia's Spinifex Project. Burning reds and oranges dominate the works from Tjungu Playa for the most part, intercut with Maringka Baker's rain-soaked greens. Ginger Wikilyiri's mid-sized canvases run variations on themes that Baker has exploited successfully in recent years, but he enlivens the palette with bold strokes of white lines and fields of yellow, all alive with visions of perenties and death adders. In Kunumata (2009) the compositional tension between verdant sandhills, writhing serpents and golden sands is held in check by a grid of black circles that appear to float above the surface of the canvas at the same time that they penetrate the picture plane. The contributions of the Spinifex Project are dominated by two large and brilliant canvases by old master Roy Underwood. A simple black background is overlaid by the red fires of an ancient war in Miramiratjara & Kurualla (2010), while Mulaya (2009) features a similar geometric design in blue, interwoven with serpents and emu tracks. Nulbingka Simms's Wayul and the large women's collaborative painting Tjintirtjintir (both 2010) both feature the characteristic Spinifex fields rich with incident and brimming with color. The northern bark painting tradition is spectacularly represented in Santa Fe by a suite of works by Dhuwarrwarr Marika representing the sacred spring that provides fresh water on the dunes above the beach at Yalangbara. This is where the Djang'kawu ended their long sea journey and set creating the land and the Yolngu peoples. Spinning like inverted vortices, these depictions of life-giving water vibrate timelessly. At Yirrkala's Buku-Larrnggay Mulka art centre, where these paintings come from, art centre advisors Andrew Blake and Will Stubbs are known to speak of an artist's "hand" with admiration: the quality we might call draftsmanship, or admire for its precision or unerring sureness. In my mind, no one among the many brilliant painters in the community has a finer hand than Djirrirra Wunungmurra, who creates intricate, dense, geometrical patternings of the Buyku fishtrap reaches of the Gangan River. She has supplemented these masterpieces of abstraction with a more conventional rendering of the river's reaches that features the iconic crayfishes, snakes, and birds of her clan. In another striking bark painting, Buyku Vortex (2010), she has clearly absorbed the experiments Wukun Wanambi has engaged in over the last few years. But for me, the masterpiece of the show is Yukuwa (2010), a pale white and black depiction of the yam that shimmers like a Chinese waterfall.  Rounding out the exhibition and making explicit the connections between art and ceremony is a group of morning star poles (banumbirr) by the Gali'winku master Gali Yalkarriwuy Gurruwiwi (photo by Vanessa Hunter for hunterlloydmedia). Massed and static collections of these rich, sacred objects have become a familiar feature of many a recent exhibition, yet they never fail to make me catch a breath when I see them. Years on, I find my delight and wonder in front of these magnificent creations as eternal as the morning star's daily return. A brilliant and beautiful catalog for this exhibition is available from both Anderson's Melbourne Gallery and from Chiaroscuro in the US. It features an excellent assessment of the accomplishments of the Tjungu Palya artists by Christine Nicholls and vivid explications of the work of the Spinifex painters by Louise Allerton and Peter Twigg. Will Stubbs contributes a pair of his inimitable essays on Marika and Wunungmurra that are appreciations of art, myth, history and politics all at once. And finally, and perhaps most surprisingly, Gali Yalkarriwuy speaks in his own voice of the meaning of the banumbirr, the history of its revelation to non-indigenous people, and the startling affirmation of its power that he found in Christian sermons as well as in Israel, Japan, and Inuit lands. Australian Contemporary Indigenous Art Now will be on display in Santa Fe, New Mexico until August 31. Posted at 10:56 AM Mon - July 5, 2010"Circles in the Sand" at the Australian Embassy, Washington DCLast weekend I was in Washington DC for the
annual conference of the American Library Association. The city was crowded,
the weather sub-tropical, but I managed to escape for a while to the deserts of
Centralia by visiting the Australian Embassy as the guest of Director of
cultural Affairs Brendan Wall to see Circles in the Sand: Aboriginal Art from Central Australia
in the Kluge-Ruhe Collection , which opened at the Embassy's art
gallery on June 14.
After passing through security at the Embassy, I found myself in the main foyer face to face with the enormous collective work from Warlukurlangu Artists, Karrku Jukurrpa (1996). Commissioned by John Kluge and the work of twenty-nine women and five men, the canvas stands nearly ten feet tall and over twenty feet long (280 x 680 cm). Howard Morphy retells the Dreaming story behind this epic canvas in his monograph Aboriginal Art (Phaidon, 1998). 
The painting is centred on the ochre mine inside the mountain Karrku in the Campbell Ranges west of Yuendumu, which is represented by the set of concentric circles in the centre of the canvas. The mine is associated with the mythical ochre bearer, who travels from east to west looking for a place to deposit the great store of ochre that he carries with him. The ochre man is associated with two ancestral women, sisters with whom he had a lusty encounter. By the time he approaches the mountain at Karrku he is handicapped with his burden and carries it on top of his head. He hears the ngappa (rain ) Dreaming approaching. The rain passes over the country. The great arc represents a rainbow that appeared a number of times during breaks in the storm. The eight small concentric circles running between Karrku mountain and the rainbow represent clouds and the parallel lines on either side lightning. In the face of the storm the ochre man retreats into the mountain shelter. The mountain itself appears to grow. In one version of the myth the old man makes a lasso of hair-string, represented by the green line in the painting, with which he reins in the mountain. In a second version a snake vine is used by the two sisters for the same purpose. The two sisters had travelled from the west, the pathway shown by the footprints following the vine, searching for rain. At last they find a waterhole, drink and fall asleep, the two semicircles representing the women. While they sleep the ochre man has intercourse with them. The women awake and return from where they came, following the rainclouds. They perform ceremonies on their journey, hoping all the time for rain but it never falls and the two women perish in the desert. Their bodies are represented by the concentric circles in the northwest [upper left] quadrant of the canvas (Morphy, pp. 302-303). (As an aside, David Betz's film Singing the Milky Way: a journey into the Dreaming chronicles an extraordinary visit to Karrku by the women painters of Yuendumu led by Judy Watson Napangardi. In the film other variants on the story are described and the incident of the two sisters expiring of thirst is acted out to great effect by Peggy Napurrula Poulson and Jorna Napurrula Nelson.) Impressive as Karrku Jukurrpa is, it performs only the overture to this brilliant and engaging exhibition. (You can get a glimpse of its riches in photos from the opening, hosted by Ambassador Kim Beazley, on the Kluge-Ruhe's Facebook page.) The gallery space has been divided in three, with one "room" devoted to each community. The first of these showcases Warlukurlangu Artists from Yuemdumu, and frankly, is the least impressive. There's a brilliant small painting by Dolly Namipjinpa Daniels that reprises the Karrku story in even brighter colors than the collaborative work in the foyer, and an electrically iridescent square canvas by Bessie Nakamarra Sims, but the remainder of the small works, while representative of the community's bright colors and fluid lines, were not as distinguished as what follows in the next two rooms. The "Papunya" room encompasses works created at the seminal site of the Central Desert painting movement, 
as well as works executed in later years at Kintore and Kiwirrkura. Three early
boards hold pride of place along one wall, a 1973 Corroboree at Tjilka by
Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri that has been in the Kluge-Ruhe's collection since
the beginning and two others, by Anatjari Tjakamarra and Johnny Warangkula
Tjupurrula, that were part of Mr Kluge's gift two years ago of sixteen
additional early boards. They are superb examples of the genre, especially
Anatjari's vivid red Untitled masterpiece from 1973 that may reference
initiation rites at Karrkunya (seen here in an image from the Virtuosity
show at the Kluge-Ruhe in the summer of 2008). Despite immense differences in
style, the resonance of red ochre (karrku) echoes in this small example
of Pintupi painting the large Warlpiri collective work in the Embassy's foyer
and lays bare layers of connections among the desert
dwellers.The remainder of the room is given over to several large masterpieces. The vortices of William Sandy's 1987 Bush Tucker Dreaming stand at one end, opposite a large Tingari canvas painted by Mick Namarari in 1991. Between them, highlighted against a brilliant and startling deep blue wall, are a version of Michael Nelson Jakamarra's famous Five Dreamings and, beside it, what was for me the most thrilling painting in the exhibition. Timmy Payungka Tjapangati's large, somber painting of Tingari men camped at Wilkinkarra is deceptively simple at first glance. A classic of the "line and circle" genre that details the far-ranging travels of initiates as they learn to travel the extent of their ancestral country, it is painted in muted brown and ochre shades that are so close-hued as to seem almost monochromatic on first glance. As I sat and contemplated it, however, more and more detail emerged from the spaces between the campsites and the paths that connect them. (Fred Myers has suggested in other contexts that large paintings of this type also reference the large numbers of initiates involved on the journey.) 
In the interstices between roundels, more colors emerge into the viewer's
consciousness, pinks and golds, and a few scattered patches of brilliant white
that must be a reference to the salt lake of Wilkinkarra, the subject of so many
of Tjapangati's works over the years. Tjapangati was a master of small,
intricate designs; but on the occasions when he expanded the scale of his
canvases to that of a wall, his power amazes. Tjapangati has always been a
personal favorite of mine among the Papunya Tula painters, and it was a delight
to see this magnificent canvas and to have time to contemplate its dazzling
design.The strong connections between Papunya Tula and Balgo (especially of PTA artists who reside at Kiwirrkura) found expression in the final room. Simple considerations of space led to PTA canvases by Wintjiya Napaltjarri and Uta Uta's widow Walangkura Napanangka spilling over onto a wall otherwise hung with women's work from Balgo. The compositional strengths of the Pintupi women formed an aesthetic balance to the bold colors of the ladies from Balgo. A mid-nineties painting by Eubena Nampitjin, Tjalatjadu Rockhole, dominated the wall: its fiery reds and yellowing greens harked back to the artist's earlier days when she painted alongside her husband Wimmitji Tjpanagati, while the structure of the design presaged the famous works Eubena made at the turn of the century when her palette turned to white and golds and her visual structures began to suggest a flowering of life in the desert. Hung next to Eubena's canvas were the brilliant primary colors of one of the finest, brightest, and most intense paintings I've ever seen from the brush of Nancy Naninurra, the 1997 Mina-Mina ceremonies at Kimayi. The other connection between Papunya Tula and Balgo hung on the opposite wall with a pair of large canvases by brothers Patrick Olodoodi Tjungurrayi and Brandy Tjungurrayi. Unlike the riotously colored paintings from the other Balgo artists that poured from the walls of this third room, this pair feature the traditional brown, white, ochre, and black palette of classic Pintupi works and they had the structural restraint in their design that characterizes Papunya Tula painting. They formed an interesting study together. Brandy's tripartite design is the more immediately striking of the two, grandly architectural and imposing. Patrick's painting has a border of parallel dotting running along the edges, with a distorted roundel, not square nor circular, an elongation at the bottom making it look a bit like a cut diamond, lines writhing, never quite coalescing into a definable geometry. The energy and the quirkiness of the shape continued to hold my attention long after the strong verticals of Brandy's painting had exhausted my interest and confirmed my long-held belief that Patrick is among the true masters of contemporary Aboriginal artists. A trio of wild compositions on the far wall of the gallery complete the show's delights. Two small compositions by Sandy Gordon Tjupurrula and Rosie Nanyuma Napurrula manage to suggest Joan Miro at his most intricate and idiosyncratic and are wonders that emerge only slowly to pleasure the eye. Of course, they are at first a bit overpowered by one of Tjumpo Tjapanangka's most arresting compositions, Kangaroo Dreaming at Lake Mackay from 1991 (Lake Mackay is the settler name for the Wilkinkarra of Timmy Payungka's works). This time, the central lake is shown as an enormous central reservoir of deep, brilliant red--recalling again the karrku red ochre theme, but here also the great fire that swept across Wilkinkarra in the Dreaming. To one side of the red lake a field of charcoal black extends the width of the canvas--and one of the delights of the show comes when you approach the painting closely and see that this field is composed of deep blue, black, and green dotting. But from a distance, the Jovian red spot rivets your eye, and its largeness, at first overwhelming, becomes a field that allows the mysteries of the nearby paintings by Tjupurrula and Napurrula to unfold. It's easily the most stunning hang in the show. Circles in the Sand is open weekdays 11 am - 2 pm though September 17. For more information call (202) 797-3000 or contact Cultural.relationsUS@dfat.gov.au. Photo identification is required for entry into the Embassy. If you can't make it to the Embassy to see the exhibition in person, you can console yourself a bit in the pages of Art from the Land: dialogues with the Kluge-Ruhe Collection of Australian Aboriginal art (University of Virginia Press, 1999). Many of the works I've talked about are reproduced in this volume, especially those from Yuendumu and Balgo, and essays by Francoise Dussart, Christine Watson, and Fred Myers offer in-depth analyses to supplement the visual pleasures. More News from the Embassy: If you're in New York City this coming Wednesday, July 7, take note of this announcement: The Australian Consulate-General will be celebrating NAIDOC (National Aboriginal and Islander Day Observance Committee) Week on Wednesday, 7 July from 6.00-8.00pm. NAIDOC Week celebrations are held across Australia and the world each July to celebrate the history, culture and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. This opportunity is further explored with this year’s theme of Unsung Heroes – Closing the Gap by Leading Their Way. Posted at 12:45 PM Sun - June 20, 2010Aboriginal Art in America, AgainThe Hood Museum at Dartmouth College, where Brian
Kennedy, formerly of the National Gallery of Australia, is now Director, has
announced the acquisition of "an important private gift of contemporary
Aboriginal art ... over three hundred works ... representing the many exciting
contemporary art-making practices of Aboriginal peoples across the Australian
continent." The gift follows up the well-received exhibition Dreaming
Their Way: Contemporary Aboriginal Women Painters that traveled
to the Hood in 2006. The full press
release
is available at the Hood Museum
website.
Bessie Sims, Yarla Jukurrpa (Bush Potato Dreaming), 1996; Collection of the Hood Museum, Dartmouth College Posted at 11:55 AM God Save the Queen, and Stephen PageI
heard
from Apolline Kohen this week that Kuninjku artist John Mawurndjul was awarded
the Order of Australia (AM) on the 2010 Queen's Birthday for his service to the
preservation of Indigenous culture. Apolline reports that Mawurndjul is
"thrilled" by the honor, as we all should be. Painter and philosopher,
storyteller and genius of abstraction, a veritable traveler between two worlds,
Mawurndjul epitomizes for me both the potential and the achievement of the
Indigenous artist in modern times. Jeremy Eccles reported
as follows:"For service to the preservation of Indigenous culture as the foremost exponent of the Rarrk visual art style” - which is true enough in its second part – the foremost exponent of rarrk – but fails to acknowledge his huge advances purely as an artist, who developed his painting style from the more traditional representation of Dreamtime creatures from the Kuninjku theology during the 1980s to a virtual abstraction today that shimmers on his barks while still telling his fellow Kuninjku the stories of ceremonies that matter to them. Also honored this year was Gija artist Peggy Patrick for her artistic accomplishments as a member of the Jirrawun group of artists and for the leading role she played in the 2002 theatrical performance Fire Fire Burning Bright, which recounted the story of the Bedford Massacre that took the lives of many of her countrymen--retribution for the slaughtering of cow. 
Another piece of good news came in this morning: Bangarra walked away with the honors at last night's Australian Dance Awards. Their twenty-year retrospective Fire won the award for outstanding performance by a company, while founder and chief choreographer Stephen Page received the services to dance award. Page, cheeky as ever, said that he was tempted to show up at the awards show dressed up as an old man from the Kimberley and admitted, "My ego thinks I need to be old to be accepting that award." Here's hoping the both Bangarra and Page can celebrate another twenty years of creating wonder for audiences around the world. Heck, Stephen, Merce Cunningham was still performing his own works well into his 80's. The best years are yet to come! Posted at 11:15 AM Sun - May 23, 2010Nothing Succeeds Like SuccessAnd nothing beats success for generating envy, or
so it seems.
Last week, Papunya Tula Artists released the following press release:
The press release was quickly followed up by a story in The Australian by Ashleigh Wilson ("Talk about a hullabaloo," May 20, 2010) which reiterated the information in the press release and added some speculation of its own. Rumours have been swirling during the past fortnight that a private dealer, Chris Simon, has been attracting support from local artists for him to take over Papunya Tula Artists, based in Alice Springs. … It seems like we've been here before, although it's been over four years since a similar controversy erupted in Alice Springs, when a group of around ten artists and their family members who were working for Chris Simon protested outside the PTA gallery in the Todd Mall. ("We're upset say artists" and "Art drift into Alice" by Elizabeth Atwood in the Alice Springs News for March 9, 2006; see also my earlier posts "The News (Direct) from Alice Springs" and, for more background, "ABC Radio on Painters in Alice Springs.") In the meantime, Simon has sold up his galleries in Alice and Melbourne, the Senate Inquiry has come and gone, and much ink has been spilled over a Commercial Code of Conduct. Plus ça change. One thing that certainly doesn't change over time is the commitment Papunya Tula's management to the artists and the families and the communities that the cooperative and its business serves. It's been nearly a decade since Sweeney took over from Daphne Williams, who was the driving force in the company for most of the two decades prior. Such a record of consistent, reputable, and responsible management is unrivaled in the Aboriginal art trade. In the last ten years we've seen major exhibitions at home and abroad, from Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius during the Sydney Olympics celebrations to Icons of the Desert and a successful group exhibition at New York University's WSE80 Gallery last fall. In the middle of the decade artist Ningura Napurrula was included in the Australian Aboriginal Art Commission for the Musée du quai Branly. This week, the media were full of reports of the departure of the NMA's Papunya Painting: Out of the Australian Desert leaving for exhibition at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing. But the company's commercial and artistic success, while it may be the envy of art centres and dealers across Australia, is just a partial measure of its achievement. The rest of the story can be seen out in Kintore, where artists and the families gather at the new painting centre to enjoy the warmth of winter's early morning sun in the courtyard, grandkids looking out for the oldies, a few people scattered in the women's painting room or out on the front verandah, quietly absorbed in their work. Or the often repeated scenes in the white-walled gallery in Alice Springs, where artists come when they need a bit of lunch, where a staff member silently slips twenty dollars out of her wallet to help out a mother with her kids, or Sweeney himself seems to risk the stock playing catch in the front room with a mob of youngsters trailing after their parents. The spirit of engagement defines PTA at every level. No wonder people want to be a part of it; it's the classiest act in town. Update: ABC Brisbane has published a story confirming the intent of a hostile takeover by Simon and addressing some of the concerns about a drastic change in the management of Papunya Tula Artists ("What is the fate of Papunya Tula?," by Marie Bout, May 24, 2010). "As part of its community arts mandate Papunya Tula has also contributed funding toward a public pool and renal care facilities in Kintore. Thus, the threat of a takeover in leadership by a private dealer is a resounding threat that echoes beyond the art world. 'As a community organisation that wouldn't be here without Papunya Tula we're incredibly concerned about the future direction of the organisation,' said Sarah Brown, Manager of the Western Desert Dialysis Corporation." The story also features an interview with Paul Sweeney, speaking directly to the governance of Papunya Tula Artists. Posted at 11:00 AM Sun - May 16, 2010Curating at the Kluge-RuheThe Kluge-Ruhe
Aboriginal Art Collection at the University of Virginia, comprising
over 1,700 paintings, sculptures, and artifacts from Aboriginal Australia, is
undertaking a significant new conservation effort. Given that many of the items
in the collection were acquired by Ed Ruhe in the 1960's from communities in the
Top End and are made of extremely fragile, organic materials, this is good news
indeed. The video below gives some fascinating insights into the new program.
But best of all, along the way, it provides the viewer with an extensive look at
the variety of materials held by the Kluge-Ruhe. Apart from the publication
Art from the Land, which curator Margo Smith
edited with Howard Morphy back in 2000, this little video may be the best place to gain a quick
appreciation of the wonders housed in the tiny hilltop museum in
Virginia.
This content requires Flash Version 8 or later. Please upgrade your current plugin to view.Posted at 10:08 AM Sun - April 25, 2010My Emily ProblemEmily Kame Kngwarreye has (almost) always been
with me on my journeys into Aboriginal art. In 1990, the year I first traveled
to Australia and bought my first painting, Emily had her first solo exhibition,
at Chris Hodges' aptly named Utopia Gallery in Sydney. She also had three other
solo exhibitions that year. I'm tempted to wonder if any other artist--let
alone an Aboriginal artist--went from participating only in group shows to
having four solo exhibitions in a single year. But doing so lands me squarely
in the midst of my Emily problem, right here in my first paragraph. Somehow,
talking about Emily without careening straight into hyperbole seems to be nearly
impossible.
Did you know that two large (and thus undoubtedly important) canvases by Emily were lost in the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001? That was one of the first stories I heard a few months after the fires stopped burning and the first waves of shock over the incident receded. Amidst all the other stories of pain and loss, amidst all the questioning, soul-searching, second-guessing, this is the only story I have heard about that day that has a sort of high-culture sheen to it. And who else would star in the greatest of contemporary American tragedies but the greatest of modern Australian painters? It's almost too good to be true, this gift of universality to the mythos. The 9/11 story also serves to locate Emily, again, in the era of the modern and the American. It's almost as if it is one more way in which her proper sphere of influence or operations is in the grand, operatic, American theater. In still another way, she's linked to the culture that produced Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Brice Marden, and all the other titans of Abstract Expressionism whose names crop up like dandelions in the field of art criticism every time Emily's achievements, stature, or reputation are broached. Somehow, we are required to come to terms with Emily's kinship with these artists and with the whole movement of abstraction in painting; at the same time we are constantly reminded that she lived outside of and indifferent to the rest of the art world. It is said that on her infrequent metropolitan visits, when taken to museums, she displayed no interest in any works other than her own. Although what we are to make of this lack of interest is less clear: is it Olympian detachment or sheer provincialism? And of course, long before issues of carpetbagging and the exploitation of Indigenous artists became the stuff of editorializing articles in The Australian or the subject of Senate Inquiries and Codes of Conduct, there was Emily. And here again, the Olympian/provincial binary came into play. Was Emily the ultimate modernist Aborigine, driven by a brilliant, individualist sense of her power as an artist, or an elderly lady, manipulated by self-interested, fortune-seeking merchants and trapped in a machine not of her own making? Was she magnificently prolific, or were many of her canvases tossed off by talented forger-dealers in the back rooms of Alice Springs galleries? A great deal of my Emily problem stems from the fact that by the time I first directly encountered her paintings, six years after that first trip to Australia, she had already died, and the legend had overtaken the woman; the myths had outstripped the paintings in their monumentality and diffusion. I have always had a hard time shutting out the noise and seeing the paintings. Another five years passed before I visited the Art Gallery of New South Wales (in 2001, ironically, about the time I heard the stories about the paintings that had been destroyed in the New York conflagrations) and saw an aisle full of large, relatively early (1991-92) canvases on display there in the Yiribana Gallery. As I remember those paintings, they were what I think of as transitional works. They still contained the undergirding of linear, yam-like structures, lines painted across the canvas, but barely visible beneath meters of densely painted dots. The colors were subdued, autumnal, browns and golds, dusky pinks, muted whites. I was struck, for the first time, by nothing so much as their sheer beauty.  All of these memories, these conflicting stories and conflicted judgements, have been brought back to mind by my recent encounter with the catalog for Margo Neale's magisterial exhibition, Utopia: the genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye (National Museum of Australia Press, 2008), which opened early in 2008 at the National Museum of Art in Osaka, and then traveled to the National Art Center in Tokyo, before returning to the NMA in August of that year. (As usual, the NMA's website documenting the exhibition is superb, if no substitute for either the show itself or the beautifully produced catalog.) The NMA exhibition was developed with the Japanese venues and audiences in mind, and perhaps for that reason the catalog essays tend to focus too much for my taste on placing Emily in the modernist tradition. Doing so probably provides a context through which Japanese aficionados of twentieth century Western aesthetics traditions can approach the works. This strategy undoubtedly underlies the repeated comparisons to the work of Japanese painter Yayoi Kusama, whose hallucinogenic compositions share with Emily's an occasional trompe-l'oeil three-dimensionality achieved through elaborate dotting, but whose work is otherwise as far removed from Emily's aesthetic as it is possible to imagine. In the end, the need to compare and contextualize forces the essayists to stumble, for they must consistently return to the fact of Emily's otherness, her Aboriginality, her ignorance of those Western and Japanese modernist traditions, however much the paintings seem to belong to them. This "recontextualizing" of Emily's paintings emerges in my mind as a consistent theme in the critique and evaluation of her work, and in the end, I find it leads down paths that are ultimately not helpful, indeed, downright distracting. The compulsion to explain Emily's success (and the even more annoying compulsion to replicate it by nominating an endless series of little old ladies to take her place at the vanguard of Aboriginal art) seems to be quite beside the point. In the end, I don't want to know why Emily's career is important. I want to be able to look at the work for myself. Fortunately, Margo Neale's catalog does an excellent job of clearing the air by presenting an extraordinary and generous selection of the paintings. Arranged thematically, in a scheme derived equally from aesthetics and content ("Fields of Dots," Colourism," "Body Lines," etc.), Neale's presentation of Emily's career lays out the changes in style with great clarity. Given that Emily made dramatic shifts in styles in the course of her career, and that she rarely looked back once she took up a new theme, the organization of the paintings by these themes is also quite nearly chronological. As I turned the pages, I could see how body marks became submerged in a kind of floral landscape, how subsequently that engagement with fields of color took over her imagination. And then how suddenly she stripped away the profusion of strokes, dots, and color in favor of line and monochrome composition, and how that change may have reflected equally the pressure to produce more work, the increasing frailty of an octogenarian, and maybe even a compulsion to create as she aged. Neale ends the catalog with an essay of her own that returns Emily to the country she lived in. Neale cuts through much of the chatter in a photo-essay that convincingly pairs photographs of cracked earth, yam seeds and yam blossoms, blooming desert meadows, and women's bodies moving in fields of sand with more reproductions of Emily's paintings. If ever it were true that a picture is worth a thousand words, it is so here in Neale's inspired assemblages. But my Emily problem remains with me. Why was Emily's work embraced with such critical fervor? Why the rush, even when she was still alive, to emplace realm her in the empyrean realms of modernism, midway between Monet and Marden? Of course I have my theory. Doesn't everyone? One piece of my theory has to do with museums and markets. As Neale points out, Emily arrived on the scene at the moment when the state galleries were beginning to collect Aboriginal art in earnest. Nearly two decades of striving by the artists of Papunya Tula had generated momentum, and the desert painting movement had spread to Yuendumu and to Balgo as well as to Utopia in the latter half of the 80's. At the same time, however, federal subsidies for the production of Aboriginal art and the support of art centres were declining. Government operations like the Centre for Aboriginal Arts and Craftsmen in Alice Springs were closing down, to be replaced by commercial galleries specializing in fine art of the Aboriginal kind, like Hodges' Utopia Gallery, or Gallery Gondwana in Alice, owned by Roz Premont, who had formerly managed the government gallery. (See "After the Fall: In the Arts Industry," Chapter 7 (pp. 209-229) of Fred Myers' history Painting Culture: the making of an Aboriginal high art , Duke University Press, 2002, for a full treatment of this transition.) The moment was ripe for a new dynamic in the marketplace. The paintings that had been coming out of Kintore, Papunya, Yuendumu, and Balgo were all of a piece, despite stylistic differences. They were recognizably Indigenous, trading in desert iconography (see Nancy Munn's Walbiri Iconography: graphic representation and cultural symbolism in a central Australian society, Cornell University Press, 1973). The traditional palette of Papunya Tula had been enhanced and vivified at Warlukurlangu; Warlayirti artists would soon redefine the regular dotting style of the Pintupi artists, but all these works shared what could be identified as a consistent Indigenous aesthetic. At Utopia these stylistic changes coalesced and were transformed in the vibrant colors and looser constructions of Emily Kngwarreye's paintings. In many ways they looked nothing like their Central and Western Desert counterparts. They combined the decorative, craftsmanlike compositions of batik with the overall effect of Western abstraction and were neither representational nor iconographic. They created a niche in the market where north met south. For all these reasons, they formed the thin edge of Aboriginal painting into the contemporary art sphere, and their sales indicated the enthusiastic acceptance of a format that was both familiar and other--surely a hallmark of modernism as defined by the cultural canons of the twentieth century. Critical response followed upon commercial success, and more commercial success followed critical response. (I wonder now if a similar dynamic played a role in the success of paintings by Rover Thomas, an artist whose name is often linked to Emily's, and whose performance in the secondary market is the only one to really match hers over the years, but who otherwise shares little with her. Again, a style that was quite different from the norms of "Aboriginal painting" in the late 80's, and which bore superficial resemblances to modern master--famously, in Rover's comparison, to Mark Rothko--led to rapid assimilation into the Euro-American art markets.) Margo Neale cannily called this exhibition Utopia: the genius of Emily Kngwarreye. The first element in the title is a place name. The second element, genius, is originally "the tutelary or attendant spirit ... allotted to every person at birth, or to a place" (per The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary). Despite all the homage to modernism and to modernist critical theory, Neale returns the emphasis to place; she lets Emily be Emily. Emily and her paintings were and are an inextricable part of the network of meaning that constitute Alhalkere, the ancestor, the pierced rock, the Country and the associated Dreamings that emanate from it. She was neither superior nor central to it. When you appreciate Emily's oneness with her world, you gain a better idea of the lived reality of her experience. When I discuss her paintings ... I do not refer to Alhalkere as a body of knowledge possessed by the artists; instead I describe these images as her lived experience and expression of being part of Alhalkere. In other words, her paintings are not about Alhalkere--they are Alhalkere (p. 224). Posted at 12:30 PM Sun - April 4, 2010Blak on BlakIn last week's post on the origin myths of the contemporary
Aboriginal art movement, I speculated that one of the reasons that the story of
Geoff Bardon at Papunya appeals to us is that it locates the narrative of the
flowering of the desert art school in theories of modernism. I have often written about how I see contemporary
Aboriginal art as contemporary art, most extensively in my contribution to Colin
and Liz Laverty's book, Beyond Sacred: recent paintings from
Australia's remote Aboriginal communities (Grant Hardie, 2008).
Sometimes I have been prompted to look at the movement from the opposite angle, and to wonder how contemporary
art partakes of Aboriginality. The latest issue of Artlink magazine (vol. 30, no. 1) has
brought those thoughts to the forefront once again. (If your local newsagent is
sold out, you can order it from the Artlink website.)
An entire issue of a contemporary arts magazine devoted to Aboriginal art is rare enough. One that's devoted entirely to the work of contemporary artists from urban areas whose primary media are photography, glass, video, graphite, or film is an event.  Blak on Blak, as the issue is themed, takes a look at a broad range of contemporary, non-traditional artists and their works. One of the delights of the issue is the list of artists whose work is examined. After a historical look back at the importance of Lin Onus to the urban tradition, the magazine includes profiles of recent work by several members of the Brisbane collective proppaNow (Richard Bell, Vernon Ah Kee, Tony Albert, Gordon Hookey, and former member Fiona Foley). Photographers Dianne Jones, Bindi Cole, and Gary Lee are given generous treatment. There is an article on Beaver Lennon, an extraordinary young painter of landscapes in a style that mixes realism with naivete; Lennon was among the artists included in the 2008 Xstrata Emerging Artists exhibition at GoMA. Yhonnie Scarce,who works in blown glass is among the lesser known artists included here, along with a group of Tasmanian fibre artists including Vicki West and Patsy Cameron. Equally delighting is the list of contributors, the authors who write about these artists. It's a curatorial and critical Who's Who, including Daniel Browning, Bruce McLean, Margo Neale, Brenda Croft, Clotilde Bullen, Julie Gough, Nici Cumpston, Djon Mundine, and Jenny Fraser. That's quite a bit of star power to pack into 100 pages. Few would argue that the works of these artists fit comfortably into almost any definition of contemporary art; indeed, there is often more dispute over when they constitute Aboriginal art. This unfortunate argument smacks of the meanness that is addressed in Daniel Browning's introductory essay in Artlink, "Not black enough: the politics of skin," and hilariously deconstructed in Bindi Cole's Wathaurung Mob (2008), in which a group of suburbanites of varying skin tones, clad in polo shirts and ensconced in a bourgeois home, pose for a family portrait in lamp-black face paint and red string headbands. The whites of their eyes meet the camera's gaze dead on as if to say, "Is this black enough?" As I leafed through the pages of the magazine, marveling at the variety and the beauty of the art presented there, I was struck by several themes that thread themselves through the works of these artists--and reminded that those themes are equally important to other urban, art-school-educated practitioners who have been omitted from this survey. When I list those themes, they are all familiar from the culture debates we read about in newspapers and criticism: language, violence, the masks of identity we wear. Language is a key component of Indigenous identity. People of Aboriginal descent who have been brought up in generations of urban dislocation mourn the loss of language, and refer to their grandparents or their parents faltering grasp on indigenous tongues. The histories of Aboriginal protest and Aboriginal imagery are inextricably entwined in the Yirrkala Bark Petition and the Barunga Statement. Thus Christian Thompson's digital video, Desert Slipper (2006) speaks to his frustrating attempts to reinvigorate even the smallest levels of communication in his ancestral Bidjara tongue. But while such overt use of Indigenous language may be rare among these dispossessed artists, the use of English words as a visual device is a commonplace. Indeed, much of Vernon Ah Kee's work is composed primarily of words, be they cut vinyl applied to gallery walls or stenciled on large canvases, the two modes of deployment suggesting either the impermanence or the durability of language through time. With other artists, such as Richard Bell and Gordon Hookey, language is an equal partner with imagery in the expression of the artists' fury. The Aboriginal whorls and the Pollockian swirls of Scientia e Metaphysica (Bell's Theorem) (2003) tell half the painting's story; the words "Aboriginal Art It's a White Thing" are integral to the painting's meaning. Hookey, says Brenda Croft in her contribution to the Artlink survey, "uses language like a bittersweet lover, toying with the structure, punning, alliterating, pulling apart its signifying capabilities to confuse and challenge, to hit with a sucker punch" (p. 52). Bindi Cole's faux-advertisements rely on marketing hype to make their point about the manipulation of identity through language, and even as visually expressive and inventive an artist as Fiona Foley will construct her message in words. Dispersed is a sculpture of the word itself, 50cm high and 500 long, cast in aluminum and adorned with .30-caliber bullets to punch the point home. Foley's work often engages with violence, though often without words, or only glancingly. Her famous No Shades of White series (2008), depicting the Hedonistic Honky Haters in their Ku Klux Klan inspired kente-cloth costumes collapses histories of Africa, North America, and Australia into a single narrative of racist violence. And of course, Hookey's work is a catalog of violence played out in jails and parliamentary chambers, in courtrooms and on highways. Tony Albert has recently engaged with police violence in a series of lyrical and brutal watercolors, Blak 'n' Blue (2009), replete with truncheons, dogs, and echoes of Gordon Bennett's The Nine Ricochets. Vernon Ah Kee can be indirect in his confrontation of violence ("theendofliving / andthebeginning / ofsurvival" reads one wall text). He can also be shockingly overt, as in Cant Chant (wegrewhere), his multi-screen video installation at the Venice Biennale of 2009, excerpts from which can be seen in this video. Above all, these artists are engaged with questions of identity. What does it mean to be Aboriginal in contemporary, metropolitan Australia? What does in mean to be an artist in such a venue? What is the place of Aboriginal art in the contemporary art world, and how does one present oneself as both Aboriginal and modern? The uncertainties and ambiguities that come in response to these questions often find expression among these artists in the device of the mask. Masks conceal identities, and they also create them. Again, look back to Fiona Foley's hedonistic honky haters in their hoods for a chilling examples. The cover of the Artlink issue reproduces an image from Tony Albert's recent series No Place (2009) in which he has photographed family and friends wearing the elaborate masks of Mexican wrestlers known as luchadores libres. Bindi Cole has documented the "sistagirls" of the Tiwi community of Nguiu on Bathurst Island, transgender men who dress and live as women. Dianne Jones has photographed family members in the pose of the Mona Lisa: Juelisa is demure and could almost stand in for the original, but Murray (both 2005), athletic in a FUBU sweatshirt, is another matter altogether. Similarly, she herself poses in an appropriation of Max Dupain's famous ode to the Australian beach culture in Sunbaker (2003). Jones piles artifice on artifice in other works, casting herself as James Dean in Close your mouth and open up your heart (2008) and as Andy Warhol's Elvis in A little less conversation (2008). Vernon Ah Kee's strategy moves in the opposite direction to Jones's. Rather than recreating artworks, be they the Mona Lisa or Tom Roberts' Shearing the Rams but with black shearers, Ah Kee starts with historical photographs and makes charcoal portraits out of them. His exquisite series of drawings of family members, some derived from photographs taken by the anthropologist Norman Tindale to document a supposedly vanishing race, some life studies, cast aside artifice. In their simplicity and directness, they answer the question of identity with a matter-of-fact grace. These portraits are contemporary, they are art, they are Aboriginal. They speak of sorrow, and they speak of rage, of loss and of dispossession. What these artists all share is the desire to create the self. They do so by engaging with that common history of loss and dispossession, but they also do so by engaging with the broader cosmopolitan world of modern art. For them, modern art is as much a part of their tradition as their Aboriginality. History and art history meet in these works and form a unique and yet at the same time universal statement of selfhood; they define what is Aboriginal about modern art. Djon Mundine launching BLAK on BLAK from Stephen Hooper on Vimeo. Posted at 01:55 PM Sun - March 28, 2010Early Days in the DesertEvery culture--and perhaps every cultural
movement--has its origin myths. These stories of creation and the first days
tell us something essential about the culture that creates them, and the culture
they describe, for the two need not always be the same. And indeed, there may
be multiple and conflicting stories, as the early chapters of Genesis
remind us.
For the contemporary Aboriginal art movement, the origin myth par excellence is the story of Geoffrey Bardon and the Papunya painters in the winter of 1971. And the story has a fair claim as an origin myth: it marks a moment when the marketplace opened up in a significant manner and when paintings by Indigenous Australians drawing on Indigenous traditions began to gain notice and, more importantly, acceptance primarily as works of art. Apart from Bardon's recognition of the aesthetic interest and merits of Central Desert designs, the story he narrates in Aboriginal Art of the Western Desert (Rigby, 1979) reinforces the narrative of separation from country, of longing for homelands, and of the absolute joy the men experienced when they were able to reconstitute, in however small a fashion, the celebration of ritual connected with their ancestral lands. The Bardon narrative encapsulates creation, separation, reunion, and redemption. It also places the artists firmly in the realm of modernism. Bardon saw in the emotional outpourings of these men a kind of recreation of a suppressed identity, a renaissance of self-expression: sure hallmarks of the modernist tradition in painting that has been celebrated throughout the twentieth century. Paradoxically, Bardon's insistence that the men purge their paintings of any traces of Western art, color, and symbolism gave their creations the appearance to Western eyes of originality and aesthetic innovation that reinforced the impression that these could be truly modern paintings. (I owe these insights to my old friend Ken George, who spun them out for me in the early chapters of his new book, Picturing Islam: art and ethics in a Muslim lifeworld, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.) Of course, these are origin stories about an art movement, a very Western phenomenon; they are not about Aboriginal art per se, or about ritual or belief. I think that Bardon's Papunya story has gained such power precisely because its themes resonate so strongly with our theories about modernism and what they say about our own lives as well as our beliefs about art. However, some of the Papunya painters themselves had antecedent stories: before Bardon's arrival Turkey Tolson and Kaapa Mbitjana painted watercolors in the style of the Hermannsburg School. The descendants, patrilineal and aesthetic, of Albert Namatjira had been producing art for three decades and more before 1971. Billy Stockman and Clifford Possum had careers as woodcarvers. But for a variety of reasons, the products of the Hermannsburg School and the punu sculptors had been relegated to the curiosity cabinet and the tourist shop. They were never art in the way that the paintings Bardon sold in Alice Springs soon came to be seen. Similarly, commerce in bark paintings probably began with Baldwin Spencer's tour through the Top End in 1911-12 (recounted in Native Tribes of the Northern Territory of Australia, Macmillan and Co., 1914) when Spencer commissioned works, paid for in tobacco and other trade goods, to take back to Melbourne with him. The missions that followed in the coming decades saw the production of bark paintings for sale in southern cities as a source of income, and a chance to capture a slice of culture, but few saw them as high art. And so the contemporary Aboriginal art movement canonically begins in Papunya in 1971. From there, over the next two decades, it spread slowly, first to Yuendumu, then to Balgo and Utopia. When this story is retold, scant attention is paid to other art-making activities that happened a little farther south, and a little earlier in time. When, for example, the Pitjantjatjara appear in the early chronicles of the painting movement, it is as protestors, enraged at the Pintupi disclosures of sacred iconography. The  story
of the Pitjantjatjara refusal to engage with the nascent art movement is told in
excellent detail, alongside other facets of history that do demonstrate the
early artistic engagement of people in the APY/NPY lands on the border of South
Australia and the Northern Territory, in Painting the Song: Kaltjiti artists of the sand dune
country (McCullough and McCullough,2009) by Diana James, longtime
associate of the arts movement centered in Fregon, SA. James, an
anthropologist, began working with the Pitjantjatjara in the mid-70s, right
around the time that the Desert painting movement began flourishing, and has
maintained her involvement over the decades
since.Around five years ago, there was a great flowering of painting in the APY lands with the art centres such as those at Warakurna, Amata, Patjarr, Warburton, Blackstone, and Fregon suddenly bringing new styles and bold color into the mainstream of the Desert art movement. (See, for example, Nicolas Rothwell's assessment of Desert Mob in 2005, "Lines shimmer into shape," The Australian, September 13, 2005.) Building on that momentum, James has produced a work that is both scholarly and anecdotal documenting the history of the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people in the 20th century and the growth of commercial art production among them. In the first part of the book, "Painting the Song," James traces the development of artistic practice from the early days of watercolor painting, painting on silk, batik, weaving, and textile design through the adoption of acrylic painting in recent years. She traces the connections among the art centres in the APY lands, the cultural forces at work among the Anangu, and the collaboration they have undertaken in their attempts to find a form of expression that is both culturally appropriate and economically rewarding. The second half of the volume, "The Artists' Country of Song," offers the reader a virtual tour of the region. Dividing the area into regions around the central sandhill country (talingka) around Fregon, James highlights the life stories and artistic styles of the major artists (including Tali Tali Pompey, Iwana Ken, and Wati Wangka) producing work for Kaltjiti. Generously illustrated with portraits of the artists and their country along with numerous reproductions of representative artworks, this latter half of the book amounts to a retrospective of the last half decade of experimentation and success in the acrylic school of Desert painting. James concludes, fittingly with a chapter on "Painting songlines to the city" that documents the reception of Kaltjiti Arts in metropolitan Australia. Painting the Song is that rare work that balances history, anthropology, and art criticism and succeeds at all three. Appendices document the major artists, the APY kinship system, and botanical references; a glossary of APY linguistic terms and extensive bibliographic notes richly supplement the text. And finally, there is a superb index, a feature often lacking in even the best monographs on Aboriginal art. At times the wealth of material on offer here can be overwhelming. The book is chockablock with historical photographs, quotations from artists and their kin, maps, diagrams, and artwork. I sometimes had trouble focusing my attention; ultimately I decided to ignore everything but the text itself on the first pass. Once I had digested the narrative that James has to share with us, a second pass through the book to concentrate on the visual materials proved far more rewarding. It's not often that an "art book" can seduce with its story before it can with its gorgeous illustrations, but Painting the Song repays attention to the chronicle. Diana James has filled in an important chapter in the story of the origins of the Desert painting movement, for which we should all be grateful. Posted at 12:00 PM Sun - February 28, 2010Floating Life Among
the numerous shows highlighting Indigenous woven materials in recent years, the
Brisbane Gallery of Modern Art's Floating Life: contemporary Aboriginal fibre
art (2009) is an exhibition with a twist (no pun intended,
seriously). Curated by the legendary Diane Moon and showcasing the
extraordinary breadth of fibre work from GoMA and the Queensland Art Gallery'
collection, this exhibition does not confine itself to the expected examples of
fine woven mats and dilly bags, fish traps and baskets. Rather it takes as its
starting point the basic element of string, the simplest of woven forms, and
explores how string functions in a variety of artistic modes.
Don't be surprised, then, to encounter in the pages of this gorgeous catalog, bark paintings from Yirrkala, for the central importance of the Djang'kawu sisters' dilly bags to the creation myths of the Yolngu finds celebration in barks by Dhuwarrwarr Marika and Wanyubi Marika included here. Similarly, the string-bound coolamons of the Kimberley, represented by fine examples from Rosie and Lily Karedada, are central to the story of the two brolgas that Mabel Juli renders in rich ochres. Moon highlights the use of bark string to bind tunga, ceremonial baskets from the Tiwi Islands in which food is offered to the workers at mortuary ceremonies. The show includes striking examples by Timothy Cook and Pedro Wonaemirri. Fish net designs painted on Michael Anning's Queensland rainforest shields establish the connections of Yidinyji people to string and sea. The meanders inscribed on Aubrey Tiggan's engraved and ochred pearl shells from the northwest resonate with the hairstring they depend from and echo in the painted patterns of Jacky Giles's Centralian acrylics. String is a metaphor of connection across the continent as well. But the bulk of the work on display celebrates the artistry of weaving as we traditionally think of it. And artistry is what is paramount in the selection of works here presented. Although the catalog provides photographs and details of scores of objects, what is included is a mere fraction of the hundreds of pieces that were included in the exhibition, which was on display at GoMA from August through October of 2009. Moon's introductory essay, "Visible songs: captured flight," provides a good overview of the variety of woven forms that constitute the wealth on display, and the variety of techniques by which objects are created from simple string. The detailed photographs of the weave of baskets invite contemplation of such mastery, from the plain, unadorned loop-woven symmetry of an early 20th-century basket from Stradbroke Island, to coil-woven pandanus mats and the tight twining of a waterproof dilly bag with its subtle shades of dyes that enhance our appreciation of the weaver's skill. In the series of essays that follow, curators and contributors examine the place of weaving in hunting and fishing, in the gathering of vegetable food, in the creation of communities and the fostering of families. Thematic explorations of light lead to a consideration of banumbirr, the elegant feather and string morningstar poles from Galiwin'ku, as well as to Gulumbu Yunupingu's painted starscapes. Feathered ornaments in the form of armbands and headbands are exotic and resplendent, and built upon bundles of bark string. Similarly, string is the substratum for Palawa shell necklaces from Tasmania that attest to the survival of tradition in the island state. Elizath Djuttara's traditional bark fiber Wanydjalpi (Yam) and Alan Griffith's commercial wool and wood ceremonial crosses (balmarra), three meters tall, turn string into sculpture. The latter half of the catalog is devoted to short essays focused on individual artists. Judy Baypungala from Ramingining makes mats and bags that look simultaneously archaic and ultra-modern, minimalist and intricate. Likewise, Lena Yarinkura, building on the work of her mother, Lena Djamarrayku, has created new sculptural idioms out of traditional weaving techniques: the distance from her Dancing Belt to the stuffed and painted pandanus yawk yawk sculptures and thence to her assemblages that depict wayarra spirits made out of sticks and paperbark is not very far. And like Yarinkura, Yvonne Koolmatrie has turned her mastery of traditional forms like eel traps to the creation of magnificent and startling hot-air balloons and airplanes woven out of the same riverine grasses that surprise with their originality. One of the delightful discoveries I made in perusing this catalog was the work of Shirley McNamara, an Indilnadji/Alyawarre woman from Mt Isa. McNamara weaves guutu (vessels) that take the shape of baskets and bowls, vases or goblets, out of the runner roots of spinifex. These bear no resemblance to the desert creations of the Tjanpi Weavers who use the grassy upper portions of the plant to create their baskets and sculptures. Instead, McNamara's tightly coiled glossy strands have the look of wood carving, or of a kind of organic pottery built on a weaver's wheel, if such an invention existed. At the opposite end of the spectrum lie artists like Lorraine Connelly-Northey, who simulates the craft of weaving by recycling industrial materials: gauze wire, mesh sheeting, fly-wire. The warp and weft of traditional practice is here provided in a simulacrum, stamped out or molded by mechanical processes. And yet, when Connelly-Northey adorns these works with parrot feathers or echidna quills, I'm reminded of Djamarrayku's dilly bags that, though hand-woven out of traditional materials, can be decorated with bits of cast-off calico and brightly colored commercial yarn, as well as down and feathers. Jonathan Jones combines the handmade and the industrial in his lumination fall series. Perhaps the most famous of these pieces in the large wall weaving of electrical cables and incandescent bulbs that won the inaugural Xstrata emerging artist award in 2006. But Floating Life also contains examples of his small paper and thread pieces, stitched on his mother's ancient hand-operated sewing machine. The creative strategies of this most urban artist thus remind us of the fundamental importance of the transmission of skills from one generation to the next. And in that revelation we find one of the great themes of this exhibition: the importance and power of tradition, the commitment to continuity, the passing on and the new flowering of genius. The art of weaving is associated most strongly these days with the women of the communities of Arnhem Land, but the renaissance of the work as art owes a great debt to Yvonne Koolmatrie. Koolmatrie rescued the traditions of Ngarrindjeri weaving from near oblivion in a startlingly brief apprenticeship with Dorothy Kartinyeri. She then took her knowledge north to workshops in Maningrida where the currents of the two traditions flowed together to revivify both. As with other arts, weaving is a way in which the Dreaming is made visible. The waves still lap at the beaches of Yalangbara, where the Djang'kawu stepped ashore with their dilly bags. The morning star rises and casts it light on the feather-laden strings of the banumbirr, allowing the spirits of the dead to follow the lighted lines east to the island of Bralku. The Dreaming admits of change, of the incorporation of what is newly revealed, of accommodation to new understandings of the world. Floating Life brings together these strands of continuity and change in a dazzling display of beauty and skill. The stunning display of banumbirr from the Queensland Art Gallery and the Elcho Island Artists and Bandigan Morning Star Collection Posted at 11:45 AM Sun - February 21, 2010John Mawurndjul and the Varieties of Aesthetic ExperienceThis year will mark the fifth anniversary of the
opening of the exhibition <<rarrk>> John Mawurndjul Journey Through
Time in Northern Australia at the Tinguely
Museum in Basel, Switzerland. It was a startling event at the time,
as I recall:
 an
internationally oriented retrospective of the work of a single Indigenous
Australian artist--perhaps a first in the history of the art movement. The
exhibition was held at an art museum--perhaps a rather unconventional art
museum, but definitely one outside the realm of ethnography. In the months
surrounding the opening Mawurndjul himself was in Europe preparing for the show,
but also executing a commission for the Musee du Quai Branly, a most decidedly
ethnographic venture. Among the eight artists invited to participate in the
Australian Indigenous Art Commission, Mawurndjul
was the only one to execute an original work on site, the column that adorns a
corner of the Musee's bookstore. (A reproduction of Mawurndjul's Mardayin at Milmilngkan (2003) adorns the
bookstore's ceiling, and its execution was overseen in part by the
artist.)Mawurndjul and, by extension, Aboriginal art in Europe, were much in the news in Australia at the time. It was generally felt that this was the moment when Aboriginal art would finally break free of the anthropological ghetto to be recognized as an important contemporary aesthetic movement in its own right. The incorporation of the work of living, named artists into the fabric of the MQB's administrative building was perceived as proof of this breakthrough. By mid-2006, when the Parisian museum opened to the public amidst international fanfare, the letdown was palpable. The presentation of Aboriginal art inside the museum only reinforced the ethnographic perspective; the celebrated Commission was overlooked among the many international festivities French President Chirac had arranged to mark the completion of his national museological legacy. The museum itself was by no means universally applauded; both its overall architecture by Jean Nouvel and its celebration of the artistic plunder from France outre-mer came under fire. Chirac's hopes for a recognition of the universality of art in human experience nearly drowned in post-imperialist critiques.  All of this context is useful to keep in mind when taking up the recently published proceedings from a seminar held in Basel in conjunction with the opening of <<rarrk>> in 2005. Between Indigenous Australia and Europe: John Mawurndjul, edited by Claus Volkenandt and Christian Kauffmann (Aboriginal Studies Press/Reimer, 2009) collects eighteen essays on topics ranging from the artist's biography to Kuninjku artistic tradition and from Karel Kupka to the neuropsychological bases of artistic expression. The much-worried frontier between art and ethnography is never far from the minds of any of the contributors. And while the essays are as full of insights into the debate as they are into the artistic practice of Mawurndjul and his clan, the perspective from five years on demonstrates how completely, at least in Australia (and I think in North America as well), the matter has been settled. Aboriginal art has found its place in the contemporary art gallery and museum. It may be a welcome visitor in the ethnographic domain, but it is today fundamentally out of place there except as an occasional guest. The protracted process of academic publishing that requires the lapse of four years between the writing and the appearance of a scholarly essay may thus have burnished the contributions in this volume with a patina of historical debate, but it has not in the process dimmed the intensity of the insights contained in many of them. The authors, a mix of Europeans and Australians, bring a multidisciplinary approach to the study of Mawurndjul, his art, and the problems that his work poses from museology, aesthetics, and criticism. Some essays are introductory and factual; others are theoretical and highly speculative. Together they hold the jewel of Mawurndjul's achievements over twenty-five years up to a light that allows the facets of his accomplishments to glow from within and illuminate a larger body of both art and criticism. For my money, the best of these essays is Sally Butler's "Translating the spectacle: John Mawurndjul's intercultural aesthetic." She begins with a pair of complementary quotations, the first from Jean Baudrillard, the second from John Mawurndjul, that comment on the nature of what my friend Ken George has called "objects on the loose," here specifically, cultural forms that become untied from the context of their creation to find a place in the wider world. Most of the contributors to this volume would agree, however, that these objects do so without losing their intrinsic cultural rootedness; this seeming paradox is key to the vision of Mawurndjul's achievement in the Basel show and in his international career. Threads of ritual, spectacle, and transformation run through Butler's assessment of Mawurndjul's work and its place in modern artworlds. I especially liked her assessment of Western exhibitions as rituals, an idea that both provides a distance for us to think about the manner in which we display and consume art while also linking Western practice to the more comfortable association of ritual with Aboriginal art. The concept of spectacle similarly helps to bridge what we often assume to be a chasm in Western and Aboriginal approaches to art; certainly art and spectacle are no strangers in our museums today, nor were they in the halls of the Renaissance. For Indigenous Australians, spectacle and the power of immanence can be twinned in the presence of the Dreaming ancestors manifested in the optical and aesthetic brilliance of their paintings. Both ritual and spectacle traffic in transformation, and Butler argues (as do others in this volume) that transformation is central to Mawurndjul's achievement. This is most important in his development of the use of rarrk. What began as a technique for the infill of certain body parts became in Mawurndjul's hands the generative power for his late, all-over mardayin compositions. By singling out Butler's essay as especially illuminating, I mean no disservice to the contributions of other authors. Howard Morphy's "Art theory and art discourse across cultures: the Yolngu and Kunwinjku compared" adumbrated the themes that would be developed in his monograph Becoming Art: exploring cross-cultural categories (Berg, 2007). Here his essay, among the most fully developed among the proceedings, lays down a theory of an Aboriginal aesthetic. Luke Taylor's "Painted energy: John Mawurndjul and the negotiations of aesthetics in Kuninjku bark painting" is an essential introduction to the particular forms of making art in the artist's home territory; if you have not read Taylor's essential Seeing the Inside: bark painting in Western Arnhem Land (Oxford University Press, 1996), you can gain much insight into Taylor's theses from this short essay. As always, Jon Altman provides a lucid examination of the social and economic contexts of Mawurndjul's painting career in two essays, "A brief social history of Kuninjku art and the market" and "Brokering Kuninjku art: a critical perspective on the complex processes of mediating with the market." The latter half of the proceedings published here offer a variety of perspectives from European (that is, non-Australian) scholars. Especially useful is Christian Kaufman and Richard McMillan's "From bark to art: Karel Kupka between Arnhem Land and Basel," which documents the early history of collecting and contact that led to wide awareness of bark painting in Europe and created the collections in Basel and Paris without which the <<rarrk>> exhibition most likely would never have come to pass.  The essays collected in Between Indigenous Australia and Europe: John Mawurndjul form an essential companion to the catalog of the exhibtion <<rarrk>> John Mawurndjul Journey Through Time in Northern Australia. Many of the authors appear in both volumes, and while there are excellent color plates and plentiful black-and-white illustrations in the newer publication, the catalog naturally provides a far more comprehensive documentation of Mawurndjul's output, which is useful to have to hand while reading the symposium proceedings. Conversely, the proceedings take a more theoretical approach to questions of intercultural aesthetics. They focus less on Mawurndjul the artist and man, and more on what his art and his success in Indigenous, Australian, and European arenas can teach us about art and culture. Together the two volumes bear witness to Mawurndjul's extraordinary achievements as painter and ambassador, theoretician and practitioner. They also provide a useful framework for the continuing and necessary development of a dialogue on the meanings of Indigenous Australian art in the 21st century. Posted at 12:31 PM Sun - January 24, 2010A World of AnimalsI
 don't
know whether Sydneysiders would agree that Object: Australian Centre
for Craft and Design is a well-kept secret. Even though it is
located not far off Oxford Street, on Bourke Street in Surry Hills, close to
many other galleries that I frequented for years, I didn't discover its delights
until almost five years ago, and then in a most indirect manner. In fact, I was
on Melville Island visiting Jilamara Arts. I had the good fortune to number
among my traveling companions that day Brian Parkes, Object's Associate
Director. He was touring the Tiwi Islands as part of his preparations for the
exhibition that year of Woven Forms: contemporary basket making in
Australia.
Woven Forms (Object, 2005) was the Centre's second foray into mounting a
show featuring Indigenous objects, the first being the lovely and legendary
Art on a String: Aboriginal threaded objects from the
Central Desert and Arnhem Land (Object/Centre for Cross-Cultural
Research, 2001, edited by Louise Hamby and Diana
Young).A friendship blossomed that day in Milikapiti, one that was renewed when we met Brian again in Darwin at the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award (NATSIAA) in 2008. And now that connection has brought to me the catalog for Object's finest exhibition of Aboriginal art to date, developed in conjunction with the Australian Museum. Menagerie: Contemporary Indigenous Sculpture was on display across the two Sydney venues during September-November 2009 and is now on a national tour that will last into 2012. It's a show that shouldn't be missed. (It's currently at the Bunjilaka Aboriginal Culture Centre in the Melbourne Museum through February 21; see below for a complete list of venues and dates.) Assembled by Parkes and Indigenous Curator Nicole Foreshaw, Menagerie offers 52 works by 33 Indigenous artists in a stunning survey of traditional and modern work in three dimensions drawn from all the states and territories. The artists represented include international superstars like Yvonne Koolmatrie, Djambawa Marawili, and Lena Yarinkura. Koolmatrie's Murray River Cod (2009) and Yarinkura's Camp Dogs (2008) will be instantly familiar to viewers; Marawili's life-size sculpture Baru (2007) may shock with its startling representation of the ancestral hero's metamorphosis, man and crocodile at the same time. Dennis Nona is represented by Gubuka (Stingrays) (2008), a work that is at once familiar in its use of Nona's trademark lithographic style and utterly fresh in its form. The two marine monsters, one in bronze, the other in aluminum, are frozen in mid-leap, soaring off the support, balanced on the barbs of their tails and tilting against one another like a Richard Serra sculpture transformed into a vision of elegance and grace. Laurie Nilsen's barbed-wire emus and Dannie Mellor's spodeware kangaroos reiterate their makers' prize-winning constructions from NATSIAA's past. There are young artists working in familiar forms, like Patrick Kunoth Pwerle, whose painted bird sculptures from Utopia recall the prize-winning works of his parents, Dinni Kunoth Kemarre and Josie Kunoth Petyarre. Craig Koomeeta's aluminum crocodile and carved wooden camp dog epitomize divergent aspects of the sculptural tradition at Aurukun, but the lesser known Leigh Nampoman contributes one of the show's most captivating pieces. His small (39 cm) sculpture, Waath (Crow) from 2008 embodies simplicity, suppleness, and poise. With a simple white circle for an eye, scooped into the otherwise smooth blackness of the bird's body perched atop a bulky but gently curved red ochre base that merely suggests a tree branch, this is one of my favorite pieces in the entire show. There  are
more surprises. Rahel Kngwarria Ungwanaka takes the Hermmansburg potters'
traditions in a new direction with her 2008 Sgraffito Owl. The
conventional painted pot with totemic lid here is decorated not with the
customary multi-colored landscapes of Hermannsburg, but with white englobe
incised to create designs that emerge from the underlying red clay.
Representing Warmun Arts, Shirley Purdie, long renowned for her dense ochred
canvases, brings birds of the Ngarrangkarni to life in jarlarlu (coolamon
tree) wood. In Warrarnany du Wanggarnal Ngarrangkarni (2009), the
eponymous Eagle and Crow face each other atop a base adorned with characteristic
Gija representations of the hill country around Warmun. What delights me about
this work is the way Purdie has chosen to carve the Eagle's claws into the
scultpure's base (detail at right), using negative space rather than the
expected low relief.And then there are artists new to me, making surprising sculptures from unexpected materials. Badger Bates, a Paakantji man from Broken Hill, creates ants and spiders and spiderwebs from cast-off industrial materials salvaged from the local tip. He also has a pair of mating snakes, barely polished out of their natural state as riverbank red gum roots, that seems almost alive. Garth Lena, who hails from Bundalung country in the northeast of New South Wales, has crafted an Echidna (2006) from mango wood inset with brilliant white porcelain quills. Echidnas also inspired the work of artists from as far afield as Mugularrangu, southwest of Borroloola (Susan George) and Gapuwiyak in Arnhem Land (Penny Milingu Wanapuyngu). Tasmania's Vicki West brings the island state's Devil to life using the traditional technique of weaving broad-leaved bull kelp, a skill that has customarily been used to create sinuous, sensual water-carriers. In the catalog, each artist is given a full profile, and all the works are reproduced in full or double-page spreads, expertly photographed. An appendix offers a photograph and a brief CV for each of the artists, and a map showing where they live and work. The catalog's front matter is equally glorious. Curators Foreshaw and Parkes have each penned essays to introduce the work. Parkes's "Carved, Coiled, Cast and Constructed: contemporary Indigenous sculpture in Australia" focuses on the ways in which the artworks are produced. Foreshaw's "Making Known" elucidates the cultural significance of the creatures on display. The two essays complement one another brilliantly and bring form and content into harmony almost as well as the artists themselves do. Further enhancing the curatorial essays is a bounty of detailed photographic close-ups of the works in the exhibition and of the artists working with their raw materials. Flakes of djundum (the tree root used to make yellow dye for pandanus weaving) crumble in Penny Milingu Wanapuyngu's hand and liquid red ochre runs down Patrick Freddy Puruntatameri's fingers. To see the knots in Johnny Young's wire sculptures of horses and kangaroos, the pits and scars in Graham Badari's cast aluminum fruit bats, the poker burns on Billy Cooley's purnu sculptures magnified to a larger-than-life size is to gain a new appreciation for both the materials and the craft. Respecting artistic tradition and recognizing aesthetic innovation, binding artists' lives and work through the expressive medium of animal life that reveals enduring connections to the country each artist comes from, celebrating beauty in its rough and sublime forms, Menagerie obliterates the distinction between art and craft, traditional and modern, urban and rural. Object deserves our applause its continuing efforts to bring Indigenous artistry to the forefront of contemporary design, exemplified by its appointment of an Indigenous curator (Foreshaw is a Wiradjuri woman) and by its ongoing and expanding collaborations with the Australian Museum. The Museum has launched a campaign to raise the funds required to purchase the exhibition that Object's Parkes and Foreshaw have assembled for its permanent collections. Menagerie would be a significant addition to the Museum's collections of Papunya Tula boards and traditional bark paintings and pukumani sculptures. Celebrate Survival Day with your donation today. 
Posted at 12:20 PM Sun - January 17, 2010Carnival of Ghostly DelightsLate in  2008,
at the invitation of curator Georges Petitjean, Melbourne-based Wiradjuri artist
Brook Andrew turned the entire exhibition space of the AAMU, Museum
of Contemporary Aboriginal Art in Utrecht into an installation he
called Theme Park. In what he described as the
opposite of a solo exhibition in a museum, Andrew turned the museum itself into
a multi-leveled exhibition object. If there were ever an attempt by an
Indigenous artist to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, Theme Park may well
be it. It included original works by Andrew, including his large-scale series
of mixed-media canvases, The Island, based on 19th-century drawings of
Australian exotica, gigantic inflatable clowns inscribed with Andrew's
characteristic op-art designs derived from Aboriginal dendroglyphs, "found
video" of the removal of such inscribed trees by officials of the South
Australian Museum, Aussiebilly ("14 rockin' tracks from Down Under") and
Olivia Newton-John, video interviews with victims of contemporary political
"disappearances," ethnographic artifacts from international museum collections,
and Andrews' own collection of kitsch
Aboriginalia.Hard to imagine? Indeed. And that it why the superb exhibition catalog produced by Petitjean and the AAMU is such a welcome addition to my bookshelves. Theme Park (the book) features extensive photographic documentation of the installation and reproductions of many of the works that occupied the space in Utrecht. There are excellent essays by Petitjean, Marcia Langton, Nicholas Thomas, and Andrew Gardner that address not only the installation itself, but other aspects of Andrew's long career that shed light on his goals in mounting this extravaganza. There is a photo essay, "Corridors and Boxes," by Andrew that looks into the incarceration of Aboriginal history in museums, and an interview with the artist by Maria Hlavajova. The handsome hardcover edition even includes a set of three slightly kitschy ribbon bookmarks in the Aboriginal colors of red, yellow, and black. Andrew's most famous work to date is probably Sexy and Dangerous (1996), a two-meter tall transformation of a 19th-century photograph of a young Aboriginal man, painted and decorated with headband and nosebone, and further overlaid with three Chinese characters and the English words of the work's title. Like much of Andrew's work, it features a collision of ancient and modern, an man whose ritual status is defined by his ornament and denied by his anonymity. Andrew's work is a portrait of an outsider's view of the Indigenous; the original photograph was as much a transformation of its subject as Andrew's late 20th-century manipulation of the image is a transformation of that earlier artifact. The Chinese characters place Australia in an Asian context, removing it from the Antipodean place in nature implied by the original. It asks what sort of reality inheres in the individual and what inheres in the apprehending gaze. The apprehending gaze, be it of explorer, colonist, or museum curator is Andrew's perennial subject. And nowhere does it receive a more thorough exposure than in the corridors and display cases of Theme Park. The supposedly scientific documentation of Aboriginal ceremony that forms the core of The Island's imagery jostles up against souvenir postcard books of modern Indigenous people. A pair of china plates depicting the characters of Marbuck and Jedda from the famous 1955 motion picture by Charles Chauvel is a tumble down a rabbit hole of images of images of stereotypes of Australian blacks. There are mission-era bark paintings and recordings by Aboriginal country singer Jimmy Little: culture or more kitsch? As with a real life theme park full of roller coasters and sideshows, shock and laughter are the sought-after, simultaneous responses Andrew elicits from his audiences. Much of the laughter derives from Andrew's inherent appreciation of the follies of kitsch; a serious man, he has a generous sense of humor, and can spot the ludicrous in the shameful. He makes us smile at the tasteless of ceramic ashtrays, or injudicious contest advertisement that asks the reader to supply a caption for a picture of a young black girl in polka-dot bows and bare breasts offering Violet Crumble to a pack of helmeted soldiers. When I looked up Violet Crumble (a chocolate honeycomb candy, if you're not Australian) in Wikipedia, I learned that its slogan is "It's the way it shatters that matters." Andrew must have had this doggerel in mind when he selected the advertisement for his Theme Park, as with it comes the darker side of laughter, the shock at the shattering subjugation of Indigenous experience to colonialism, the outrage at the reduction of Indigenous people to stereotypes and, worse, the denial of individuality and humanity, the fracture of culture and lives. Andrew has done extensive research in the archives of the Mitchell Library in Sydney, where he has uncovered hundreds of photographs of Aboriginal people, like those that feature in his 2007 series Gun-metal Grey, people who have vanished without a trace other than these neglected portraits. This sense of loss and disappearance has led Andrew to an engagement with other forms of disappearance, most notably the victims of political repression and violence at the hands of juntas in modern South America. Relatives of those desaparecidos are among the people who feature in Andrew's 2006 video piece Interviews, which was included in Theme Park. In addition to his researches in Australian archives and jumble-sale stalls, Andrew has raided the collections of a dozen museums in the Netherlands, Belgium and France for material to include in his exhibition. This international assemblage of the fruits of colonialism is one of the things that distinguishes Theme Park (and the catalog's essays) from more conventional examinations of the impact of European expansionism on the Indigenous people of Australia. The theme of colonialism in Indigenous art is often looked at from the perspective of the presence of the English in Australia or the South Seas, perhaps best exemplified recently in the works of Daniel Boyd. What Andrew has achieved in Theme Park is a broadening of scope: he looks for the evidence of appropriation and exoticism (with its attendant dehumanization) worldwide, and folds it all into his own nightmarish Luna Park. The gaping maw that swallows visitors on Sydney's North Shore has been recast into a voracious global consumer of peoples and cultures. While the Indigenous experience in Australia is still the focal point and the primary means of expression for Andrew, he has managed to cast the local experience as but a single instance of an intercontinental phenomenon whose power extends through centuries. In doing so, whether intentionally or not, Andrew has positioned himself amongst an international cadre of artists working to define dislocation and disaster, as Andrew Gardner notes, including the American dissector of slavery Kara Walker and apartheid's inspector William Kentridge. Like many of his fellow art-school trained Indigenous artists, Andrew mines Aboriginal identity for his work; like very few, he succeeds on an international stage where the implications of his Aboriginal identity resonate in new and stronger ways. 
Posted at 12:50 PM |
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