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Sat - June 28, 2008An Exaltation of BarksThe title of this post is a play on that of a
book published in the 1970s, for those of you who were around (in America?) to
remember it, entitled An Exaltation of
Larks, a whimsical parlor game of a
publication based on the possibilities afforded by collective terms of venery
(hunting): a pride of lions, a gaggle of geese, a murder of crows. An
exaltation of larks. Mutatis
mutandis, the term works well to describe the
riches of the exhibition of paintings on bark from the Arnott's Collection that
is about to enter its last month at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in
Sydney. The exhibition is called They
Are Meditating and was well reviewed by
Nicolas Rothwell a couple of months ago ("Silence and Slow Time," The Australian, May 10,
2008).
The mid-1960s, when American Jerome Gould built this collection, was certainly a golden moment in the accumulation of bark paintings. Karel Kupka was concluding a decade of visits to Arnhem Land that resulted in the romantic scholarship of Un Art a l'Etat Brut (Guilde du Livre/Editions Clairefontaine, 1962; in English, Dawn of Art) and collections now in the Basel Ethnographic Museum and the Musee du Quai Branly. Another American, Ed Ruhe, a professor of English at the University of Kansas, put together an enormous collection of bark paintings and ceremonial objects that is now at the heart of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection. Gould's collection was brought back to Australia by the biscuit-makers Arnott's. The purchase was originally conceived as a bicentenary gift, but delayed five years when the politics of Aboriginal protests over the 1988 celebration convinced those involved that the timing was injudicious. It has been in the possession of the MCA ever since, but like the Papunya collection at the National Museum, has never before been exhibited on this scale. Curated by Djon Mundine, the current exhibition inevitably recalls Mundine's earlier blockbuster for the MCA, The Native Born, which in 1996 displayed that institution's other major collection of Indigenous Art. The Native Born was more focused temporally and geographically: it grew out of a commission from Bula' Bula Arts in 1984, when Mundine was the arts advisor in Ramingining. But it was also more inclusive, representing the variety of artistic output from the community, including sculpture, weaving, and ritual paraphernalia. 
Morning Star Poles at the MCA They Are Meditating, at least as represented in the catalog, restricts itself to bark painting. (The exhibition also includes a spectacular display of morning star poles or banumbirr that may be the commission executed by artists from Elcho Island in 2002.) The works come from all across Arnhem Land, and represent approximately a decade's creative output from roughly 1965 through 1976. The catalog opens with a series of essays that form a somewhat confounding whole. First up is a brief excerpt from a 1990 speech by R. Marika made at the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Art Centre in Yirrkala, which is the source of the exhibition's title ("When the old people paint, it is as if they are meditating") and which introduces the themes of sacred art. Marika's remarks are followed by excerpts from Wandjuk Marika: Life Story (University of Queensland Press, 1995). Typographically set out in short lines that causes them to resemble modern poetry, like Ezra Pound's Chinese Cantos, they speak of deep history and modern history and the sensibility that unites the two. Marika's remarks provide an eloquent counterpoint to Mundine's own historical excursus in the next essay, "An Aboriginal Soliloquy." I have never been an enthusiast when it comes to Mundine's impressionistic, collagist literary style. He tells us (in a paragraph exemplary of most of the essay) In May 1927 Parliament House in Canberra was officially opened by His Royal High the Duke of York and a performance by Dame Nellie Melba: there was no Aboriginal acknowledgment or significant presence. David Maymirringu Malangi was born on the eastern bank of the Glyde River opposite Milingimbi and the Methodist Mission. The following year painter Binyinyiwuy was born on the mainland on the eastern side of the Glyde River mouth. Yes, but what of it? John von Sturmer's contribution, "A Limping World: works in the Arnott's Collection--some conceptual underpinnings," concludes the opening set of essays and perhaps offers a clue about the overall intention of this introduction. It too is a collage of brief, personal reflections on the art, on contemporary Indigenous politics (art as an "intervention" into our normal ways of seeing), and on the artists behind the works on display. It strikes me as the most appropriate style that could be imagined for visitors to the MCA: those who come equipped with little knowledge about Indigenous traditions yet who are conversant with the idiom of the contemporary art catalog will be reassured that they are on familiar ground here. The second section of They Are Meditating, "From East to West: bark painting across the Top End" is reserved largely for the glories of the collection. The paintings themselves are beautifully presented, most often in full page reproductions Four more essays introduce the stops on this route across Arnhem Land, following the sun and the route of the Wagilag creators across the country. Lindy Allen's contribution on Groote Eylandt painting is a useful companion to David Turner's essay in One Sun, One Moon (AGNSW, 2007). Together with Creation Tracks and Trade WInds, the exhibition of Groote Eylandt barks at the Ian Potter Museum of Art at Melbourne University in 2006, the works in the Arnott's collection helped to construct a long-overdue history of the development of painting in the western reaches of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Djon Mundine returns to provide the introduction to "The Spirit Within: North-eastern and Central Arnhem." This section of the catalog covers a lot of ground, geographically as well as artistically. The paintings included here represent the work of painters from Ramingining and Milingimbi east to Yirrkala. And it is here that I wish that some sort of organizing principle had been applied to the presentation (or made explicit if it exists). Although all works by a single artist are grouped together, works from the entire region are mingled with no apparent logic. Thus Gawirrin Gumana's austere Barama (a painting that might have been excised from the Yirrkala Church Panels) appears opposite swirling goannas by Charlie Gunbana. On the other hand, ten pages separate Dawidi's Wagilag Sisters Myth from Gimindja's The Gadadangul Snake, which might profitably have been seen in proximity to one another. Luke Taylor provides an all-too-brief introduction to the art of Western Arnhem Land and the rock art traditions that underlie it. This third section is dominated by a generous collection of works by Lofty Bardayal and Yirawala. It also contains some stunning barks by Bobby Barrdjaray Nganjmirra. Three paintings by Nganjmirra and a fourth by Samuel Garnarradj Manggudja occupy a two-page spread in the midst of Taylor's essay and offer a startling tutorial on traditions that presage the work of Peter Marralwanga and John Mawurndjul in their figuration and use of space inside the frame provided by the sheet of bark. It i  s
here that the real richness of the Arnott's Collection begins to emerge.
Perhaps because there is more coherence to the artistic style presented in this
section, perhaps because major artists are so inclusively represented, one
begins to grasp an aesthetic vision that was muted in the presentation of more
easterly art. One looks at the series of changes Yirawala rings on the
depiction of a set of wallabies and begins to appreciate the sacred, abstract
mardayin
designs. The different ways in which Bardayal and Yirawala impart motion and
liveliness to their animals becomes clear. The many ways in which
rarrk
is treated by the artists offer insights into how patterning operates to impart
volume and vitality as well as instructions to the hunter on how to share the
hunt's yield.A pair of paintings from Wadeye forms a coda to the exhibition, and Kim Barber's essay on Christopher Pugar's small oval painting, Life, attempts to draw together history, geography and biography to explicate its origins. Sadly, she offers no commentary on the most immediately striking aspect of this painting. Its designs elicit striking and perhaps inexplicable comparisons to classic motifs of desert painting. In its shape, this little bark resembles a coolamon or a wunda shield. The design is a set of dotted circles connected by short, dotted lines, and the negative spaces between those lines are filled with two different colors of ochre, recalling again the bush tucker or Tingari designs of the desert. All in all, it is a most intriguing and mysterious painting. The book's back matter includes excellent maps that locate the many communities from which these barks were collected, along with a thumbnail presentation of the works in the show. It is here that the reader must turn for detailed information about the artists, their dates, and their countries of origin. And as you browse these pages, don't neglect to turn the page after you've reviewed the two Wadeye paintings. For there, at the very end, are four small barks from the Tiwi Islands that are otherwise overlooked in the catalog. The surprising discovery of these tiny masterpieces at the very end of the book brought home to me one more time the particular genius of Jerome Gould as a collector. Although he clearly had favorites among the artists whose work he went after, it is the breadth of his interest that informs this exhibition and that makes its presentation in this comprehensive show so important. Although missions had been selling bark paintings for decades, the presence in Arnhem Land in the 60s of men like Gould, Kupka, and Ruhe must have had a tremendously stimulating effect on the painter's output and the richness and excitement of that period shines through the pages of this catalog. There's only a little over a month left to see this extraordinary collection in person at the MCA: They Are Meditating closes on August 3, 2008. 
Posted at 03:58 PM Sun - June 8, 2008Contemporary (Aboriginal) Art, History, and CriticismIn my post from a week ago ("Art News on the Web"), I noted with appreciation
the return of Nicholas Rothwell to the art beat at
The
Australian. Since then, Rothwell has
published two more significant pieces in that newspaper's pages. The
Weekend
Australian for May 31 contained a review of
Colin and Elizabeth Laverty's new publication
Beyond Sacred: recent paintings from Australia's remote
Aboriginal communities. (Hardie
Grant Books, 2008) entitled "Ancient and Modern." Then the
Australian Literary
Review for June 4 published a lengthy and
important piece of meta-criticism, "More Than Dreaming: bringing to light a blaze of
beauty." In this latter piece Rothwell extensively investigates the
current status of critical writing about Aboriginal art. It's one of those
pieces of writing that leaves me shaking my head and thinking, "I wish I'd said
that."
The Lavertys' Beyond Sacred is an extraordinary book, the record of a collection assembled over two decades that includes some of the finest examples of Indigenous art from the Western Desert, the Kimberley, and the Top End, and Rothwell lauds the vision of the Lavertys in building and presenting their collection. He recognizes their genuine love for the art and the artists who produce it, the scrupulous collecting practices, their impeccable taste. But he laments the lack of insight that the book provides into the "instincts and desires" that propel this collecting, and offers a critique of the "intellectual agenda" that the Lavertys have opted to pursue in the essays that accompany the catalogue of their collection: "Our aim is to showcase some of the best pictures in our collection as great contemporary art." Rothwell demurs. [T]o that end they offer up a raft of essays by familiar experts, buttressing this argument from several perspectives. ... The trouble is, this dog pack just won't hunt, and the Lavertys, by erecting their complex superstructure, succeed in blurring the exact qualities that Beyond Sacred -- with its selection of tradition-based works -- seeks to showcase. Before I go any further, I must engage in "full disclosure." I've admired the Lavertys' works on loan to public art galleries for nearly a decade. We first met in Broome in 2005, and I have visited with them briefly at the opening of Dreaming Their Way in Washington DC in 2006 and again at their home in Sydney a year ago. From the first hour, our friendship has been characterized by a shared delight in the vitality of the art we love, by spirited conversation and debate, and by respect. In May of 2007, the Lavertys invited me to contribute an essay to Beyond Sacred in support of their thesis that great contemporary Aboriginal art is indeed great contemporary art, doing me the inexpressible honor of having my views placed side by side with those of Howard Morphy, Judith Ryan and Nick Waterlow in the first section of essays in the book. My copy of the book arrived in the mail only yesterday evening, and I have not yet had the chance to read the other essays; indeed, I've barely skimmed the 300 pages of extraordinary photographs of art, interspersed with Peter Eve's gorgeous and affecting landscapes and portraits. Although I cannot speak for them, I do think we share at least a few perspectives on the nature and value of contemporary Indigenous art. In particular, I agree with their assessment of this art as great contemporary art, and this leaves me with a bone to pick with Mr Rothwell, for I feel that he has missed a point in his assessment of their intentions and achievement in publishing Beyond Sacred. Near the end of his review, he puts forth the following propositions. The masterpieces of the Laverty collection may well be made within an evolving stream of art, and be contemporaneous in time frame, but in one key respect they are as far from the knowing, ironic contemporary as they could be: and it is precisely their difference that makes them so attractive and collectable. In this assessment I think Rothwell does an injustice both to contemporary art in general and to contemporary Indigenous art in particular. There is a reductive logic to asserting that contemporary art is ironic and knowing, double-edged and self conscious, while Aboriginal art succeeds because of its core of mystery and concealment. There is a truth to these statements, of course, but it is not the whole truth. And I think that the very point of the Lavertys' endeavor in Beyond Sacred is quite literally expressed in its title: it is an attempt to push art criticism beyond the consideration of the sacred and the mystical in Aboriginal art and to ask the reader to begin to consider those formal qualities it shares with contemporary non-Indigenous art. As Rothwell himself put it in his review of the catalog for John Mawurndjul's retrospective, Rarrk--John Mawurndjul: journey through time in Northern Australia (Craftsman House, 2005), "Mawurndjul and his fellow masters of North Australian Aboriginal art are thus staking a claim to be regarded as artists without adjectives, contemporary painters who just happen to be from a particular cultural background" ("How the West was won over," The Australian, January 19, 2006). It is true that some aspects of that "cultural background" are unique and may never be knowable to those who stand outside the tradition from which they develop. It is entirely appropriate that some of those concerns are not open to the scrutiny of Western eyes. However, there is much that can be appreciated, understood, and explicated. And this is the work of the art historian who must engage with the products of Indigenous artists and their traditions. To deny the art historian the opportunity to bring his intellectual framework to the conversation is tantamount to denying anthropologists access to the communities in which the art is produced. And to do so can be to condemn those communities to misunderstanding and prejudice, to mistake their difference for inferiority, and to fail to recognize the breadth of their achievements. There is much that needs to be done to build an effective body of criticism and history around the work of the artists from remote communities in Australia. Beyond Sacred is a call to begin that work. There is a need to document the history and diffusion of painting and its associated cultures throughout the continent. And, as Howard Morphy argues in Becoming Art: exploring cross-cultural categories (Berg, 2007), this is an endeavor in which art history and anthropology should cooperate, rather than being at odds with one another as they so often have been in the last century. The essays in Susan McCulloch's recent The Heart of Everything: the art and artists of Mornington and Bentinck Islands (McCulloch & McCulloch, 2008) suggest links between the Wellesley Islands and the Central Desert in both styles of dotted body painting and the songlines of the Dingo Dreaming. Similarly, the trade in pearl shell from the northwest coast around Broome through to the Centre suggests a common origin for the meander designs found in the works of artists as different as Aubrey Tiggan and Jacky Giles. These connections, and more, need to be explored and documented. This will require that art historians cease thinking about "Aboriginal" art and begin to define the "schools" and "movements" in Indigenous painting and sculpture, the variety of styles, motivations, and desires that occupy the continent. The history of influence that such studies will generate must also take into account the influence of western aesthetic traditions on these Indigenous artists. To deny such an influence or to dismiss it as somehow corrupting of something essential is to condemn Aboriginal artists to an ahistorical existence and in so doing, exclude them from the realm of art history. If this work has barely begun, it is in part because art historians, especially academic art historians, often have little motivation to do the work of art history in the Indigenous sphere. As long as the art retains the whiff of the ethnographic, they can leave such interpretation to their colleagues in the anthropology departments, who are however, much more interested (by and large) in investigating different questions. But even the traditional areas of anthropological research--questions of kinship, reciprocity, diffusion--can, to follow Morphy's suggestion, illuminate art history. Without the work of art historians, Aboriginal art and culture will remain largely within the sphere of the ethnographic. I believe that one of the goals of Beyond Sacred is to try to place Aboriginal art of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in the frame of fine arts, to offer it a place within the discourses of art history so that the necessary and fundamental work of documenting influence, diffusion, tradition, and change can be done. Until that fundamental research is accomplished, we cannot begin to see where this art fits into broader historical movements. Beyond Sacred argues for the place of Indigenous painting and sculpture in the intellectual endeavor known as art history. This is not to deny Rothwell's claim that the art "speaks of ritual and beliefs communicated in concealed language; it has a core beyond its visible heart" that generates considerable appeal. It is to release the art from the notion that such a core is its chief, even its only significant attraction. The formal qualities of the art are certainly what first drew me to it, at the Dreamings exhibition, which I saw at about the same time that the Lavertys, "already passionate collectors of contemporary abstract and figurative paintings, were swept away by what they saw" at Brisbane's World Expo in 1988. This vibrating visual presence (linked to those spiritual beliefs, to be sure) gives the paintings a structure that is susceptible to analysis in Western terms and without reference to the underlying belief system. It is time that such analysis begins in earnest, and we must be grateful to the Lavertys for issuing the call and providing such a rich resource for the undertaking by documenting their collection in this way. But what of that "hidden core"? Let me turn aside from the particulars of Beyond Sacred for a moment to consider the question of the esoteric, if not the sacred, in contemporary art. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines esoteric as "designed for or appropriate to an inner circle of advanced or privileged disciples; communicated or intelligible only to the initiated." Surely this definition encompasses the body of knowledge that underlies contemporary Indigenous art. But just as surely, it applies to certain aspects of Western art of the late twentieth century. For an example, I want to reach back a bit in that history, to the great flowering of abstract art in America. This is the art that engaged me before I encountered Dreamings, and is akin to some of the works the Lavertys were collecting before 1988. I'm thinking of, for example, the great bronze veils and "Unfurled" paintings by Morris Louis, or the early black paintings of Frank Stella. Louis's veils communicate a sense of majesty, a concern with color, and precious little in the way of content or representation, yet they are admired by thousands of museum-goers around the world. Very few people who see these paintings are probably aware of the "esoteric" agenda that lies behind their creation. That agenda reaches back to the achievements of the Abstract Expressionists, and their desire to liberate painting from the representational. Louis wanted to solve the problem in a different way; he wanted to get beyond the illusion of space that persists in the great canvases of Jackson Pollock: Blue Poles retains the specter of volume and depth despite the "overall" application of paint. Louis's solution was to attempt, in so far as possible, to obliterate the distinction between the surface (the paint) and the support (the canvas) and to do so by making the paint as thin as possible, so that it became absorbed in the weave of the canvas, one with it. This concern with flatness, with an acknowledgment of the fundamentally, essentially two-dimensional nature of painting, found expression in countless works by other artists of the 1950s and 60s. Kenneth Noland's bull's-eyes and Jasper Johns's flags took "flat" objects as their subject matter; Warhol's silk-screened dollar bills gave the notion a different twist. Frank Stella, meanwhile, began to insist that the shape of the support should dictate the design it carried, and from the simple rectangle of the first black paintings, he progressed to ever more elaborate experiments with shaped canvases, moving from notching the corners to constructing enormous "running V's" and culminating in the experiments of the Irregular Polygons. Art historians have laid out this intellectual agenda for those who are willing and able to be initiated into the academy of criticism. In the West, we have our own sequenced series of introductions to higher learning and revelations of esoteric knowledge that rely on a comprehensive understanding of the visual traditions and the thinking of artists engaged with exploring the rules that govern representation in that tradition. Without that education or initiation, one will not know what to make even of a large body of coherent work, such as could be seen in the recent retrospectives of artists like Brice Marden and Sol Lewitt. Now this agenda is not going to be available to just anybody who walks into a museum or otherwise encounters the art. This abstruse theorizing is never going to be accessible to someone unless he passes through a series of initiations that go by the name of education in our society, initiations that are as stratified and long lasting and themselves result in social stratification not dissimilar to what happens in aboriginal societies. On the other hand, access to sacred knowledge in aboriginal societies has its own kinds of restrictions and gateways. While Rothwell asserts that non-indigenous people can never see into the hidden core of the art, the same can be said of many within Aboriginal communities as well. To take a simplistic example, men and women are said to be excluded from one another’s realms of knowledge, although the degree to which this is absolutely so is arguable and argued. Similarly, knowledge of particular Dreamings and the rituals associated with them is not universally held. As Fred Myers details in Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self, one gains rights to stories (and thus to painting those stories) through a variety of means. These are usually through association with particular country by place of conception or birth, or the place of conception, birth, or death of an ancestor or kinsman. Myers also makes it clear that there is some room for negotiation in the area of access to land and its stories. In a society where all people stand in some kind of kinship relationship to one another one can, as Myers describes, argue for access to knowledge. Whether or not an individual is successful depends on many things—the eloquence of the argument, the political interests of those with more direct or stronger claims to the country, or indeed whether such owners still exist or are in danger of dying out. There is transfer of knowledge and country across affinal lines under certain circumstances where it is deemed important that the knowledge be transmitted to someone rather than being lost. The point that I wish to make is that there are differences in degree as well as in kind in access to esoteric knowledge among both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Would it be impossible for an Aboriginal artist to stand in awe of a great painting, even if he were ignorant of the Dreaming story and the associated ritual that it represents? Might he still not be able to judge the quality of its evocativeness, to intuit its power? For those of us outside the tradition, a different form of initiation is required to further our appreciation of Indigenous art. Rothwell's brilliant essay in the recent issue of the Australian Literary Review praises the great and recent outpouring of critical writing in the realm of art history that promises to make Aboriginal art accessible to a broader audience and to deepen the comprehension of those for whom it is already a work of intellectual and emotional engagement. Among the more fascinating insights he offers is the notion that four distinct strains of critical writing have become associated with four major, distinct areas of Indigenous style. A language of theory and social engagement dominates writing about artists who have grown up and been schooled within mainstream Australian society, the so-called "urban Aboriginal artists." What Rothwell describes as "classical" art history, with an emphasis on history, thrives in the arena of Kimberley art, where a modern history of subjugation and massacre has repressed much traditional iconography and given birth to a genre that combines elements of the Western styles of landscape with a narrative approach to representation. The approach is useful today in chronicling the rise of new art centres: Rothwell cites Sally Butler's monograph Our Way: contemporary Aboriginal art from Lockhart River, but it is equally applicable to McCulloch's The Heart of Everything on the art of the Wellesley Islands. Art and anthropology come closest to cooperation in a field that Rothwell styles "indigneous aesthetics," that flourishes in discussions of art from Arnhem Land, and is, unsurprisingly, best represented in the analyses of Howard Morphy. It is unsurprising as well that it applies best to the work of the Yolngu of Eastern Arnhem Land, who have been most forthcoming in setting out their own intellectual agenda, in attempting to most openly convey to Western eyes and minds the philosophy that underpins their visual strategies. In opposition to the relatively forthright declarations of the Yolngu, the people of the Central Desert are masters of reticence, and here Rothwell suggests that "connoisseurship and genealogical detective work" are the most effective tools in the art historian's kit for assessing and unraveling the "scrim of signs" that encode a "deep, sensuous visual language." I would like to suggest that here, too, the lessons of anthropology that help us to understand the social and cultural milieu from which these art works emerge, along with the kind of historical investigation (perhaps what Rothwell subsumes under "genealogical detective work") offer great promise. In this regard I would suggest that it is the scholarship of Fred Myers that has done the most to advance our understanding of both the formal and cultural structures underpinning Desert art, especially that of the Pintupi. Earlier I mentioned Myers's ethnography, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self; his more recent Painting Culture: the making of an Aboriginal high art is as much a landmark of art history as the earlier work was in anthropology. Rothwell rightly remarks that that critical writing on Desert art "has long been darkened by Bardon's shadow," but the light of Myers's scholarship and the insights gained from long association with the greatest of the Desert painters has done much to illuminate the landscape. However, the most valuable lesson I garnered from Rothwell's ALR essay was the importance of a book that I have overlooked for almost a year now since I barged it home on my back all the way from Brisbane's Gallery of Modern Art: Brought to Light II: contemporary Australian art 1966-2006 (Queensland Art Gallery, 2006). It is an enormous, imposing book that has been silently reproaching my neglect from the corner of an ottoman in my study. I have repeatedly deferred investigating its sixty-two essays, twenty of which are studies of individual Indigenous artists or (less commonly) communities. The essays follow a roughly chronological sequence--roughly because many of the artists, from Fred Williams to Pedro Wonaemirri, have had careers that span decades. That sequencing, though, has the happy effect of interspersing discussions of Indigenous and non-Indigenous art throughout, although the balance tips towards the Indigenous in the book's latter half. But this editorial decision locates Indigenous art of the last forty years squarely in the midst of other contemporary art and thus reinforces the message of the Lavertys' Beyond Sacred. Even better, many of the individual essays combine the strains that Rothwell has isolated in his review to good effect. Thus John Kean's essay on Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri is part biography, part contact history, part anthropology, and part structural critique. Christine Watson's comparative analysis of the works of Lilly Kelly Napangardi and Mitjili Napurrula depends heavily on the structural qualities of the works, while acknowledging their connections to other Luritja and Pintupi painters. Rothwell singles out for special praise John von Sturmer's essay on the sculpture of Aurukun, an extended elegy for the mounting loss of a dynamic connection to ritual, country, and tradition on the west coast of Cape York. In this respect, von Sturmer stands alongside Rothwell in asserting the primacy of the ineffable and the mysterious, which lives apart from the intrusions of Western civilization. And yet, I would argue that all great art partakes of the ineffable, and we are no more able to adequately define or explicate what moves us deeply in front of the works of Michelangelo or Joseph Albers than we are when confronted with the recent canvases of Alma Webou from Bidyadanga that have aroused the Lavertys' passionate appreciation. In the end, I find it instructive to return to the principles Howard Morphy articulated in Becoming Art. He argues for the inclusion of Indigenous art in the realm of art history (and thus, I would argue, in the sphere of contemporary art): "By making Indigenous art discourse part of the data of art history and critically examining the ontological concepts and their relationship to practice, we should become aware of conceptual similarities and differences between different traditions" (p. 145, my emphasis). Or put another way, "the category of fine art is not a category of objects but a way of viewing objects that are prized exemplars of aesthetic value" (p. 20). 
Posted at 02:22 PM Wed - June 4, 2008Mr Kluge's Gift(Updated with new photos, June
5)
John and Tussi Kluge This past weekend we returned once more to the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection in Charlottesville, Virginia for the inaugural reception for the Mara Tjuta Circle, honoring donors, friends and supporters of the Collection. The guests of honor was none other than John W. and Tussi Kluge, whose generosity established the collection in 1997 with a gift of over 1,500 paintings, sculptures and other objects representing the ritual and ceremonial output of Aboriginal artists from the middle of the 20th century to its end. 
Friends of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection gather to honor John W. Kluge The surprise announcement, made by Betsy Foote Casteen on behalf of her husband John Casteen, President of the University of Virginia, was the donation by John and Tussi Kluge of sixteen early Papunya boards that had been loaned to the Kluge-Ruhe for the current exhibition, Virtuosity: the Evolution of Painting at Papunya Tula. Artists represented in this stunning new gift include Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra, Anatjari Tjakamarra, and Uta Uta Tjangala. All the works date from the earliest days of Papunya Tula painting, and any single one of them would constitute a major addition to any collection of early Pintupi painting or indeed of Aboriginal art in general. 
Beth Turner, Vice-Provost for the Arts, University of Virginia, with Mr. Kluge In addition to his largesse in establishing the Kluge-Ruhe Collection, Kluge has endowed scholarships for undergraduates at his alma mater, Columbia University, in recognition and gratitude for the scholarship funds that enabled him to attend and be graduated from that institution in 1937. He has also recently endowed the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. and instituted a $1 million prize in recognition of lifetime achievement in the humanities, an award Kluge himself compares to the Nobel Prizes in literature and economics. Kluge's interest in Aboriginal art began when he saw the Dreamings exhibition at the Asia Society in New York City in 1988. As his business interests often took him to Australia, he began to pursue the collecting of Indigenous art. He initiated large commissions of work from Papunya Tula, Warlayirti Artists in Balgo, and Bula' Bula Art in Ramingining. He later purchased the collection built by Ed Ruhe, a Professor of English at the University of Kansas, who had spent many summers in Arnhem Land during the 1960s, befriending and collecting works from major law men, including Dawidi Djulwarak, David Malangi, and George Milpurrurru. 
Left to right, Tussi Kluge, Betsy Casteen, Beth Turner, and John Kluge The Kluge-Ruhe opened its doors to the public in 1999, and I made my first trip there two years later. I've lost count of the visits I've made since then, and have never ceased to be amazed at the magnificence of its holdings. For sheer size alone, it is the largest and most important collection of Aboriginal art in North America, but size is the merest measure of its riches, and although the exhibition space is presently somewhat limited, every single show has offered delights unimagined: early barks by John Marunwjul, ceremonial poles by Mickey Durrng, exquisite portraits of kangaroo ancestors by Brian Njinawanga, major canvases by the Papunya masters of the 80s and an extraordinary roster of color from Balgo. Masterpieces by artists whose fame may not be quite so far-reaching, like the Bush Onion Dreaming by Limpi Putungka Tjapangati that graces the cover of A Myriad of Dreaming: twentieth century Aboriginal art (Malakoff Fine Art Press, 1989) have also found a home at the Kluge-Ruhe. 
Mr. Kluge with curator Margo Smith (Photo courtesy of Tom Cogill) Mr. Kluge is now 93 years old and somewhat frail, but he is as intellectually engaged with his broad interests in media, technology, the humanities, and philanthropy as one might imagine. And his generosity is still equally vibrant. He opened his brief remarks to the assembly by saying, "A collection is only as good as its curator," recognizing both the extraordinary work that Margo Smith has done over the last decade on behalf of the Collection and his enduring affection for her. 
Harvey and I share a few minutes with Mr. Kluge. (Photo courtesy of Tom Cogill) It was therefore a rare and wonderful privilege to be afforded a brief opportunity to sit and talk with Mr. Kluge once the formalities were over. We began by discussing our mutual interest in Aboriginal art, of course, but once he discovered that I'm a librarian by trade, we were off into the marvels of the collections of the Library of Congress and as the conversation ended he said that if I were ever interested in seeing the originals of Thomas Jefferson's papers, I should have a word with Margo, and he would arrange a viewing for me! All in all, it was a most extraordinary afternoon. 
The view across the lawn at the Kluge-Ruhe Collection towards the hills of Virginia Posted at 09:43 PM Sat - May 24, 2008"Land of All": Art and Artists of Mornington IslandAt the 22nd National Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Art Award in 2005, I caught sight of a (relatively) small canvas that
from a distance appeared starkly white all over; on closer inspection I saw that
the white background was stippled all over with dense black-brown pinpricks of
color.
Amidst the enormous colorful works that dominated the show that year (Nicolas
Rothwell described one of the winning entries as "a vast colour television
screen with a malfunctioning vertical hold control" in his review of the
exhibition, "The Big Picture, Little Dreaming,"
The
Australian, August 15, 2005), this canvas
focused my attention in the way that silence conspicuously fills the world when
a howling windstorm suddenly drops into stillness. Reading the text on the wall
brought more surprises. It was called
Wurruku, Sharp-nosed Brown
Shark, and was painted by a young woman named
Emily Evans from Mornington Island. (At right is a detail of
Baibal, Spotted
Stingray, a similar work from that year.) To
that point in time, the only art from Mornington that I was familiar with were
the semi-naturalistic ceremonial and pastoral scenes painted by Dick Roughsey,
who had passed away twenty years earlier, or artifacts like the conical
dancing-hats topped with emu feathers and adorned with red-and-white stripes
that appeared in the catalogs of specialized Oceanic arts and crafts dealers.
Was a contemporary art tradition, a renaissance, being brought to light on this
tiny island in the Gulf of
Carpentaria?Three years later, the affirmative answer to that question is well known to all, and the reputation of the Mornington Island Arts and Crafts Center further solidified by the publication of a gorgeous new book celebrating the achievements of its artists, The Heart of Everything: the art and artists of Mornington & Bentinck Islands (McCulloch and McCulloch Australian Art Books, 2008). Featuring essays by Nicholas Evans, Louise Martin-Chew, and Paul Memmott, with additional material by Susan McCulloch, The Heart of Everything offers in its brief 100 pages a splendid overview of the variety of styles that have emerged from this community in the last five years, an investigation of the history of painting in the last half-century on Mornington Island, biographies of the leading practitioners, and an all-too-brief glimpse of what the future may hold. The most famous of these contemporary artists is, of course, Sally Gabori, an elderly Kaiadilt woman originally from Bentinck Island, which lies southeast of Mornington off the shores of Queensland. It seems fitting, therefore that the book opens with an explosively colored double-gatefold illustration of Dulka Warngild (Land of All), a 200 x 600 cm collaborative canvas by seven Bentinck Island women that is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria after being displayed in a group show at Alcaston Gallery in Melbourne last August and September. Large expanses of dark sea blue at two extremities of the canvas set off the riotous colors in which each woman has painted her particular stretch of country; each artist's contribution is immediately recognizable in its characteristic style but the boldness of color and the sweep of composition creates a coherence to the canvas that can sometimes be lacking from monumental collaborative compositions of this sort. (A solo show by Gabori opens at Alcaston on Tuesday, May 27, and features a similarly monumental work that is likewise sustained by echoing forms and colors along its six-meter horizontal axis. In an interesting stylistic development, Gabori has chosen in several of her paintings to adopt a strategy of simple, closely-valued hues for some of the smaller works in the show, and in the strongest new paintings pare her palette down to black and white with only the barest hint of pale color staining the lighter surfaces.) But famous as they have become, the Bentinck Islanders have been engaged with painting their country for a relatively brief period of time: Gabori was the first to engage at a workshop in 2005. To its credit, The Heart of Everything does ample justice to the history of the Lardil artists of Mornington Island who have carried the traditions of their country to the rest of the world in painting and dance since the 1950s. Dick Roughsey is, of course, the most famous of these artists--mostly male in contrast to the female stars of the Kaiadilt. Beginning with bark painting inspired by his visits to Arnhem Land in the 1950s, Roughey went on to become internationally renowned for his children's books, often done in collaboration with Percy Tresize, including The Giant Devil Dingo (Collins, 1973) and The Rainbow Serpent (Collins, 1975). Roughsey's literary reputation had already been established by the publication of Moon and Rainbow (Reed, 1971), considered to be the first autobiography penned by an Aboriginal man. 
Dick Roughsey, Rain Dance, 1985 But it was in many ways Roughsey's older brother Lindsay, also known as "Spider," who is at the heart of the history of Lardil painting since the early 1960s, and one of the great achievements of The Heart of Everything is to document this story eloquently, most particularly in Paul Memmott's essay, "Origins of the Contemporary Art Movement." While the book is superbly, beautifully illustrated throughout with a combination of historical photographs, reproductions of paintings, shots of the artists at work, and images of the Mornington Island Dancers, the ambassadors of Lardil culture since 1973, all these elements combine in their most powerful form to accompany Memmott's lucid exposition of the contributions of the Roughsey brother, and of Lindsay in particular, to the cultural preservation of Lardil traditions in the face of the onslaught of missionary culture, alcohol, and natural disasters. Lardil painting is rooted in the traditions of body painting and shows strong affinities to ceremonial designs stretching all the way to Central Australia. Many of these designs were documented in a series of rough paintings executed in the early years of this century and collected in the important publication Paint Up (University of Queensland Press, 2002). Among the many art works illustrated now in The Heart of Everything, it would be hard to find one as exquisite and moving as Lindsay Roughsey's Dingo Story from 1961. Executed in ochres and colored balls of feather down on bark, this gem reproduces chest and leg paint designs combined with a painted ceremonial dancing belt and a pair of clapsticks. At once fragile and forceful, it captures the essence of Lardil visual art better than anything else in the book. From that point onwards, Lindsay Roughsey would remain a source of inspiration to the artists of Mornington Island; he completed his last paintings not long before his death in 2007. Following hard on the heels of the publication of Paint Up, longtime resident Brett Evans set about revitalizing the art centre on Mornington Island, and after exhibiting some small paintings in Sydney in 2004, held a series of workshops that began the contemporary renaissance of painting on the island. Louise Martin-Chew documents this intense period of resurgent creativity in the second of the book's major essays, "A Contemporary Art Movement Develops." It is a story mixed with sorrow, though, as she records in quick succession the passing of many of the men who produced some of the most dramatic works from the first wave of the Lardil awakening. Though Arnold Watt, Melville Escott, Billy Koorubbuba all succumbed over the next few years, along with Lindsay Roughsey, a new generation of Lardil painters, including many women--Renee Wilson, Joyanne Williams, Jolene Roughsey and perhaps most dramatically of all, Emily Evans--have succeeded them in producing vibrant art based on traditional ceremonial designs. After appearing the 2005 NATSIAA, Evans was selected for inclusion in the first Xstrata Emerging Artists exhibition in Brisbane in 2006; the next year she was followed in that competition by Sally Gabori.
The great surprise that erupted in the midst of all this activity was the emergence of the Kaiadilt women, led by Sally Gabori and documented by Nicholas Evans in the book's third essay, "People of the Strand: the Kaiadilt of Bentinck Island." The Kaiadilt had lived relatively undisturbed by Western incursions until the 1940s, when many of the young women were moved by the missionaries to Mornington. There they still lived a life apart from their Lardil neighbors. Even now they retain a distinctive visual style based on painting their country, with an imagery rich in the depiction of the sea, of fishing and of rock weirs, and of the flora of Bentinck. After tracing the history of the development of these disparate schools of painting under the aegis of the Mornington Island Arts and Crafts Centre, the book provides brief chapters detailing the life and work of some of the most noted artists producing today. This opportunity to study individuals' work in the context of the larger story helps one to see the unique qualities of each all the better. And indeed, in looking at Thelma Burke's paintings, their radical difference from the Bentinck Island painters with whom she is frequently group makes sudden sense: Burke is a Yangkaal woman who comes from the third major linguistic group inhabiting the Wellesley Islands. The book's final chapter looks all too briefly at some of the rising stars of Mornington Island, a group once more dominated by the Lardil; there is somehow something quite fitting about the ebb and flow of influence among the various peoples of this stormy island community, something that echoes the elemental movements of people and the sea in the southern waters of the Carpentaria. The Heart of Everything is in some ways as unexpected a book as the emergence of the community on the international art scene itself was startling. Like their fellow Queenslanders, the Lockhart River Art Gang, the painters of Mornington Island seemed to burst out of nowhere to seize the attention and imagination of the art world with astonishing force. To have this lovely monograph delivered in such a timely fashion was a delightful surprise. Its combination of historical exposition with stunning reproductions of the works serves to explain why the art has developed the way it has, in several differing directions, while providing superb visual documentation of that development. The high standards of photographic work and design that characterize McCulloch productions once again serve the subjects extremely well. I closed the book with a renewed appreciation of the richness of the Lardil, Yangkaal, and Kaiadilt traditions, and a renewed hope for the future of this tiny community. 
Arnold Watt, Stripes of the Dingo, 2005 Posted at 11:40 PM Sat - May 17, 2008Living Stories: Indigenous Photographers, part 2A few weeks ago, I published some musings about recent shows by Indigenous
photographers Christian Thompson and Destiny Deacon which led me to think about
the use of the genre of the tableau
vivant among contemporary artists in the
medium. Deacon's work employs the stage photograph to comment on conditions of
contemporary Aboriginal history and social constructions of identity; Thompson
plays in particular with the premier contemporary use of the
tableau
vivant, fashion
photography.
Fiona Foley has blended both arenas--social history and fashion--in her photographic works over the years. In the early 1990s she produced a pair of works, Badtjala Woman and Native Blood (both 1994) in which she became the subject of her own camera in a style reminiscent of nineteenth-century artists like J. W. Lindt. The former (see reproductions here and here) has its roots in anthropological photographs, particularly in one Foley appropriated for an earlier wall installation entitled Giviid Woman and Mrs Fraser (1992) (for a reproduction see Benjamin Genocchio's monograph Fiona Foley: Solitaire , Piper Press, 2001). in which dilly bags, rat traps, and copies of a historical photograph of a proud looking, bare-breasted woman draped in shell necklaces taken together encapsulated Foley's vision of the contact history of her native Fraser Island. In the three self-portraits that comprise Badtjala Woman the artists wears the necklaces and dilly bag; the dramatic lighting enhances the psychological messages of both pride and loss that characterize Badtjala history as Foley reconstructs it. Native Blood (reproduced here) takes these elements out of the realm of anthropology (almost) and into the world of fashion. Foley, wearing the same set of shell and reed necklaces reclines topless in front of a painted backdrop that suggests clouds over a tropical sea. The grass skirt reinforces the sense of the tropical pastorals familiar to National Geographic readers. But the sheer black tights she wears and the platform shoes, which have been highlighted with gold paint introduce a decidedly post-modernist, ironic narrative. Her recumbent pose recalls a mermaid, only here she is part "native" part modern model. There is a seductiveness to the pose that the severe expression on her face contradicts. She is a woman of two worlds, of air and sea, ancient and modern. Almost a decade later Foley produced a series of photographs entitled Wild Times Call (2002). In these she poses alone or with members of Florida's Seminole Nation, thrusting the notion of indigeneity to the forefront. Here she rings interesting changes on the concept of the tableau vivant. In each photograph, Foley is costumed in traditional Seminole garb. In the solo shots, the historical and pedagogical comes to the fore, as we see here at the side of a mangrove swamp, beside a dugout canoe, or floating on a placid lake. (The association with mangroves, a common motif in Foley's work, emphasizes the connections between different indigenous cultures as well.) The sepia cast of the photographs lends them a historical aspect as much as the costume does. In the photographs in which she poses with her Seminole counterparts, the pretense of historicism is unmasked, however. One shot shows Foley at the center of a group of six people; while she is bedecked in the traditional costume, there are wearing obviously contemporary, zippered jackets, albeit with designs drawn from a traditional repertoire. In another, the group poses in front of a large black vehicle (an SUV, or a hearse?) which is parked in a dirt yard in front of a thatched longhouse. Behind the traditional building, the cab of a tractor-trailer also locates the scene in the present, emphasizing the themes of continuity and change in indigenous cultures. Historical fictions and modern fashion photography collide head on in Foley's recent No Shades of White (2005), which has been on display around the world in recent years. This series had its genesis during a 2004 residency spent in New York City, where Foley became friends with a number of African-American fashion models. With characteristic audacity, Foley decided to stage her own fashion show, designing robes and hoods on the model of the Ku Klux Klan, but executed in contemporary African-American kente cloth fabrics. A mock fashion show of the "Hedonistic Honky Haters" along with a suitable backstory relating to 1960s radicalism was arranged, with Foley and her noticeably taller model friends donning the robes. The exhibition consists of individual "head shots" of each of the models, a group photograph, and the original robes and hoods. Each of these photographic expeditions examines the contact and conflict between indigenous and colonizing cultures and points to the continuing influence of tradition and history on both sides to the contemporary moment. From the indigenous perspective, these photographs also serve as a means of constructing a visual history for a non-literate culture that has been marginalized by conventional historiography. In oral cultures, memory serves as the repository of history, but memory is always lodged firmly in the living, contemporary moment, and events of the past are thus subject to the transformative power of the present. Foley's work began with the local (Badtjala, Fraser Island) past and moved outward in space and forward in time to a concern with universal themes of indigeneity. Darren Siwes has seemed to follow a reverse trajectory, at least temporally, moving from simple constructions in transparently modern Adelaide locations towards an ever more elaborate staging of faux-historical tableaux that address the roots of British colonialism in Australia. His earliest work dates from 1998 to 2001 and is collectively titled Mis/Perceptions (a catalog was published by Adelaide's Greenaway Gallery in 2001; several of the works can be seen here on pp. 20-23). The locus of these works is Adelaide and surrounds: Rundle Street Mall, Mt Lofty, Woodside Lutheran Church; parks, roadsides, and train stations. In one the earliest, I Am Standing Still (1998), Siwes stands motionless in the middle of the Rundle Street Mall at night as the time lapse photography turns pedestrians into ghostly traces crossing the street. Usually though, the effect is reversed, and it is Siwes who appears transparent and yet strangely substantial, alone in an otherwise deserted urban landscape. The human figure in his series of tableaux vivants, he is both there and not there, and ineffable and yet ineradicable Aboriginal presence in the modern city. There is an element in these early photographs that once more calls the fashion shoot to mind: Siwes's choice of wardrobe. In the 1998 photograph, the only one that I have seen in which the photographer in the substantial rather than the ghostly figure, he is clad in a proletarian flannel shirt, jeans, and heavy boots. In his "ghostly" apparitions, he adopts business attire: a white shirt and tie, a business suit, a heavy overcoat. The former may suggest the stockman's uniform as much as the latter a sartorial mode only very recently adopted by many urban Aborigines. As with Fiona Foley, costume plays a key role in the visual language used to examine history. In 2002, Siwes was awarded a scholarship which led to an MA in Fine Arts from the Chelsea School of Art in London, and to a series of photographs (collectively titled Just is) that placed the artist, at first alone and later with his (non-Indigenous) wife in a variety of classically English settings including Leicester Castle and Cambridge University. Upon his return to Australia, more photographs, shot in the bush country around Adelaide, were added to the series. In most of these photographs, Siwes and his wife wear masquerade masks; in some of the English series they are unmasked but clad in period costumes, he in a top hat, she in an elegant black gown. In all the English photographs she appears in the foreground, he in the background; this pattern in reversed in the Australian scenes. Just is juxtaposes the colonizing nation and the colony and hints at an irony of modern times: that England has now in turn been colonized by citizens of the nations it once called its Empire. Like Burnum Burnum planting the Aboriginal flag on British soil in 1988, Siwes subtly inserts himself in edifices that represent English history, an imperial immigrant claiming his place in that history. In his latest series, Mum, I Want to be Brown (2006), Siwes abandons the ghostly double-exposure technique for the first time and removes himself from the camera's gaze as well. He substitutes instead the imagination and play-acting of childhood in the most elaborate sequence of historical tableaux vivants to date. This world is still a shadowy country in which the action takes place at night amidst props that carry the aura of dream-objects. Beds and tables removed to the grounds of churches and hospitals appear out of place and all the more fraught with symbolism for that displacement. Children in "brownface" confront the unexplained mysteries of race that surround them yet remain beyond their comprehension. The emphasis on place that dominated Siwes's early photographs in Adelaide has now given way to a phantasmagoria. The scene has shifted to the bush, and the tenuousness of the British attempt to colonize an alien land is foregrounded by the childish theatricals that now dominate the scene. The elaborately carved nineteenth century chairs and plush divans, the Victrola with its trumpet speaker, and the intricately patterns rugs set out amidst fallen leaves and untended grass, so obviously out of place, epitomize the colonial unease in the bush. In this they contrast sharply with the implacable stillness of Siwes's self-portraits in the earlier work where his presence, if ghostly, remains rooted in the urban landscape. Race and identity, and indeed the history of race as identity, play out as key themes in the work of both Fiona Foley and Darren Siwes. Their photographs reconstitute history; they give form to stories that have been unvoiced or spoken of only in whispers. Still other Indigenous photographers use this constructive strategy of the tableau vivant to create new worlds where the real meets the surreal, a theme I will take up in my next installment in this series. Darren Siwes, pre sense, 2003 (Leicester Castle) Posted at 12:35 PM Sun - April 13, 2008Virtuosity: Fred Myers and Pintupi Masters at the Kluge RuheVirtuosity: The Evolution of Painting
at Papunya Tula, the new exhibition at the
Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, curated by
Fred Myers, is full of moments of astonishing visual delight and magic. One of
these occurs near the end of a short film being shown as an ongoing part of the
exhibition. The film, titled Pintupi
Painters at Yayayi, is twenty minutes of
footage extracted from sixteen hours shot by Ian Dunlop
(People of the Western
Desert,
The Yirrkala Film
Project) in 1974 during a month-long stay at
the outstation of Yayayi, a short distance west of Papunya, to which the Pintupi
had recently moved. (This newly edited footage was prepared by the National
Museum of Australia for the recent exhibition
Papunya Painting: Out of the
Desert.)
The film opens with shots of camp life (Pinta Pinta Tjapanangka being berated by his sister Makinti Napanangka for not getting enough meat for his ten dollars at the community store), then switches to a sequence showing Peter Fannin, the manager of Papunya Tula Artists at that time, and Bob Edwards of the Aboriginal Arts Board purchasing paintings and artifacts from a crowd of men gathered at the painting camp. (During the two years that Myers lived with the Pintupi at Yayayi he documented 260 early works by the Pintupi masters.) Included prominently in this section are, among others, Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi, Uta Uta Tjangala, John Tjakamarra, and Anatjari Tjakamarra. The last sequences of the short film document moments during a trip out west to Pintupi homelands that Myers made in the company of several of the men and Jeremy Long, the patrol officer who worked for many years with the Pintupi during this critical contact period. After climbing up a steep sandhill together, Myers and Anatjari are seen crouching near a smoothed patch of sand. Anatjari reaches out a finger and inscribes a small circle in the sand, then draws a short, straight line, then another circle. He whispers the names of the places represented by the tiny circles. Another line, another circle, another whispered name. The line turns north, and Anatjari inscribes two more circles. The scene shifts to Anatjari standing atop a hill near Ilpili in the Ehrenburg Range. At the top Anatjari looks over the countryside. "Pintupi ngurra," he says. Twisting his head and arm around behind him to the right, he announces that the land to the east belongs to someone else: Arrernte country. Then he looks out to the west and in a strong, clear voice says, "Pintupi ngurra, Pintupi country!" His left hand shoots out in front of him as he names a place out to the west. He draws his hand back to his mouth, then rapidly extends his arm to the west again, naming another site. Over and over again this action is repeated, his hand seeming to extract the names of the country from his mouth and hurl them out across the landscape as his arm shoots westward. "Pintupi country!" he exclaims, and again "Pintupi country!" It's a literally spine-tingling moment, as Dunlop's camera pans out, away from the figure of the painter atop the sandridge and across to the rocky hills purple on the horizon. This is the country on display now at the Kluge-Ruhe. 
A screen shot from Ian Dunlop's film, Pintupi Painters at Yayayi. The painting above is a new work (2008) by Pamela Napaltjarri, daughter of Fred Myers's friend Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi. Virtuosity comprises thirty-nine works, dating from 1971 to 2008, that document the development of painting strategies by artists of the Papunya Tula collective. Four artists are given prominence, with a gallery each devoted to Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, Anatjari Tjakamarra, and Uta Uta Tjangala. The fifth room is given over to further developments at Kintore and Kiwirrkura represented by Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, Dini Campbell Tjampitjinpa, and Simon Tjakamarra among the men, and in the 1990s and beyond by women painters Wintjiya Napaltjarri, her sister Tjunkiya, Uta Uta's widow Walangkura Napanangka, Tatali Nangala, and Makinti Napanangka. To round out the show, Papunya Tula Artists has sent over a gorgeous selection of small paintings by some of the best artists working today, available for on-site purchase at blushingly modest prices.
On Saturday, April 12, Fred Myers led an overflow crowd of visitors through the exhibition, holding us all rapt for nearly two hours as he explained the ways in which the stars of the show worked to translate their ceremonial designs into the two-dimensional media of acrylic paint on masonite or canvas board. Myers described how these men developed even more innovative techniques for responding to the introduction of large canvas and the need to depict their artistic and intellectual traditions and their lived experience of their country in ways appropriate to their widening audience. 
Fred Myers, at right, has the full attention of his audience after nearly two hours. As visitors step into the exhibition's first gallery they are greeted, to the left, by five early boards from the 70s by Mick Namarari, and to the right, three larger, later canvases painted between 1989 and 1992. Myers characterized Namarari as an especially quiet, taciturn man who was nonetheless recognized from the first as an unusually gifted painter. Several of the early works are structured around a tripartite set of interlocking forms that may be drawn from the motif of two men seated on either side of a ceremonial pole or a campfire. In the stories behind these designs, these may be brothers, an elder and an initiate, or otherwise family members; the design shows similarities to a structure employed by Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi in several of the paintings Myers had shown to the audience in his lecture two nights earlier. The colors in these early boards are spectacular, with brilliant yellow bands giving prominence to the interlocking design in "Kangaroo Man Ancestor and Bush Tucker Dreaming" (1973) and a glowing warm orange filling the frame of "Family Moon Dreaming" (1976). The larger paintings showcased some of Tjapaltjarri's strategies for filling a large canvas and adapting designs to a more generalized presentation of mythic stories. "Wallaby Dreaming at Tjunginpa" (1990, reproduced on page 109 of the catalog for Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2000) is an example of the classic line and circle motif that came to dominate Papunya Tula painting in the late 1980s; Myers explained that while the painters were retreating from depicting particular narratives at that time, every one of the dozens of roundels in the painting could still be identified as a specific place in the artist's country. The smaller "Two Kangaroo Dreaming at Marnpi" (1989) is a gauzy skein of yellow-gray dots, one of Tjaplatjarri's signature late styles. The tension between overtly depicting ceremonial regalia and the gradual move to a more generalized compositional approach can be seen most clearly in the second gallery, which is given over to five very different but equally dazzling works by Anatjari Tjakamarra. The iconography of the undocumented and untitled board from 1971 is a mixture of clearly decipherable incised ritual objects and a mysterious complex of black ovoid shapes that frame a pair of roundels. One of these roundels sits in a field of white dots, the other at the center of radiating dotted white lines. (The work has some compositional similarity to a painting by Uta Uta reproduced on page 28 of Genesis and Genius, but the colors in Anatjari's board, dominated by a deep, shiny black on a background of red ochre, look far more striking.) Another untitled work from 1973 depicts that story of a Dreamtime initiate who bled to death at Karrkunya, but here the forms have already become more abstracted and less naturalistic. The stone knives of the ceremony, the chunks of red ochre that are mined at this site, and the five-pointed central design can be interpreted if one knows the story, but the bald depiction of the earlier work has already been masked. Myers wryly noted that Tjakamarra never seemed fully able to divorce himself from the naturalistic, and indeed, with that thought in mind, the three ovals that circumscribe half a dozen or more roundels each in "Women's Dreaming" (1989) suddenly look less like classic Tingari designs than ritual objects, despite the elaborate background dotting. The painting (reproduced on page 106 of the Genesis and Genius catalog) depicts the story of a group of Tingari men who travelled in the company of a group of women bearing ceremonial boards to the site of Ngaminya, where the boards were left behind and turned to stone. Myers then led his audience to a third gallery that featured early works by Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula along with a pair of paintings, one early, one late, by Long Jack Phillips Tjakamarra. Both men came from more easterly regions: Johnny W. a Luritja man, Long Jack a Pintupi with strong ties to Luritja country. Long Jack is one of the few men who painted for Geoff Bardon in 1971 still living; today he remains in Papunya and is encouraging the young artists who paint for the newly founded Papunya Tjupi art centre. 
"Wallaby Dreaming" (1971), left, and "Wild Potato Dreaming" (1972) by Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula. The paintings by Johnny Warangkula in the exhibition display a wide range of the artist's styles, but all of them are characterized by his fabulous color sense and extraordinary delicacy in dotting and brushwork. The "Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa" (1972) is a skein of hatched lines in the palest greens and yellows of new plant life tangled and swirling around an equally pale peach-colored central patchwork. Myers noted how in this painting and in others like "Kangaroo Man's Travels" (1973), the roundels that usually anchor Pintupi paintings to the center of the picture plane or describe an organizing axis are simply elements in the overall design of Warangkula's paintings. The circles are off center, secondary, and don't organize the space; Warangkula instead achieves compositional balance through his use of color, and demonstrates a disinclination to employ conventional ritual design, even in his earliest paintings. In the fourth gallery devoted to one of the exhibition's major painters, six magnificent works by Uta Uta Tjangala share the walls with a canvas by his close friend Charlie Tjararu Tjungurrayi and another by his son Shorty Tjampitjinpa Jackson. The early works by Uta Uta all display his characteristic off-center, slightly diagonal axis around which the individual elements of the design are organized. Myers has elaborated on Uta Uta's compositional strategies at some length in the third chapter of Painting Culture: the making of an Aboriginal high art (Duke University Press, 2002), which is entitled "The Aesthetic Function and the Practice of Pintupi Painting: A Local Art History." 
"My Country with Sandhills" (c. early 1970s), left, and "Bandicoot Dreaming" (1987) by Uta Uta Tjangala. For me, the most revelatory painting of Uta Uta's in the show was the "Tingarri Cycle" (1973). A large central roundel is surrounded by eight smaller ones that radiate from it and are connected to it by short straight lines. The entire design thus created is then outlined by bands made up of alternating rows of white and black dotting, which are themselves surrounded by a band of doubled yellow dots that serves to enclose the entire design. From behind this frame-filling set of roundels emerge four naturalistically painted, elaborately decorated sacred boards arranged in a somewhat flattened X shape. Parts of the boards are clearly visible between the outer ring of roundels, other parts are hidden. The designs of the two boards on the right hand side of the painting, though, seem to merge with the overall larger design: they were clearly painted in before the enwrapping dotting was done, and they peer out ambiguously from behind that dotting. Myers pointed out how they invoke the power relationships of ceremony; how things in ritual are simultaneously concealed and revealed and how the actions of concealment and revelation are indices of the social position, knowledge, and power of the initiated men. The image also evokes Tingari stories of enormous sacred boards that rose up out of the ground in a literally awe-inspiring display of Ancestral power. The exhibition's final gallery draws the viewer closer to the present day and completes the narrative of the development and transformation of Pintupi painting over the last four decades in a number of ways. Ronnie Tjamiptjinpa's large canvas "Nyinmi" (1989) depicts the travels and death of the King Brown Snake, a Dreaming track that charts a series of salty waterholes through the Western Desert in what Myers described as a kind of ethnogeology. The Dreaming track that ends at Nyinmi has its beginnings at a site painted by Johnny Warangkula and depicted in his painting "Women's Centipede Dreaming at Central Mount Wedge" (1974) which, fittingly, is hung at the extreme opposite end of the Kluge-Ruhe's exhibition space. 
"Nyinmi" (1989) by Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, left, and "Tingari at Pilintjinya" (1988) by Simon Tjakamarra. Simon Tjakamarra's "Tingari at Pilintjinya" (1988) is characteristic of that painter's bold interpretation of the circle and line motif, and according to Myers, is a good example of the shift in representational strategy that occurred in the late 1980s, and was remarked upon earlier with Mick Namarari's "Wallaby Dreaming at Tjunginpa." A more generalized design aesthetic emerged as the painters strove to reproduce not the details of ceremonial objects but the effect of the performance. The bold, optically vibrant designs simulate the sudden, flickering revelation of body paintings emerging strobe-like from the darkness into the light of the ceremonial campfires. The strength of Pintupi painting has now passed on to the women in the communities of Kintore and Kiwirrkura, who have sustained the stories given to them by their fathers and who follow up the example of the old masters in the exhibition, all of whom have died (with the exception of Long Jack and Ronnie). Walangkura, who paints her father's Dreamings, was married to Uta Uta; Tjunkiya is Uta Uta's sister's daughter; and Tatali was married to Uta Uta's great friend Charlie Tjararu. Myers noted the haptic quality of the women's paintings, the thickness of the paint that they apply to the canvas recreating the effect of ochres applied to their shoulders and breasts during ceremonies. Makinti's large canvas of the "Kungka Kutjarra (Two Women) Dreaming" (2001) represents the hair string displayed and worn by the women in the dance that keep their ceremonies alive today. 
Left to right, "Women's Campsite at Lampintja" (1999) by Tatali Nangala; "Untitled" (2008) by Walangkura Napanangka; "Yumari" by Tjunkiya Napaltjarri. Although Myers's audience ought to have been overwhelmed by the sheer virtuosity of his own performance by this point in the tour, they still hung on every word as he led them to the alcove where the Ian Dunlop film was playing, pointed out the various men gathered in the painting camp, identifying the great painters whose work we had just been taught how to see. But as the audience scattered after watching the film one last time, and after seeing once more Anatjari Tjakamarra calling out the names of Pintupi country, I was drawn back to contemplate a painting of his from the Kluge-Ruhe's collection that has been a favorite of mine since I saw it seven years ago on my first visit to Charlottesville. Entitled "The Artist's Country Near Kurlkurta" (1989), it seemed to encompass better than any other single work the insights that I gained from my three days in Fred Myers's company this weekend. 
"The Artist's Country Near Kurlkurta" (1989) by Anatjari Tjakamarra, sometimes known as Anatjari no. 3. Compositionally, this work appears to be one of the simplest of Anatjari's on display in Virtuosity. About three dozen black and white roundels of various sizes are spread across of field of white and yellow dots on a red-ochre primed canvas. The density of the white dots varies across the field, filling the lower right corner more densely, forming a loosely defined band in the upper right, finding more of a balance with the yellow in the center. Myers described the country that Anatjari Tjakamarra came from: it is hilly country, the hills full of caves. Water runs off the hills and collects in numerous rockholes throughout the region. It is country that Anatjari knew intimately, country he looked over, at least in his mind's eye, as he stood atop the sandhill with Myers on that day in 1974 when Ian Dunlop captured the two men on film. It is country where Anatjari participated in ceremonies, and where, in the Dreamtime, large numbers of Tingari Men, "so many people" in the artist's evocation, gathered together. In Nancy Munn's classic description of the designs employed by Desert painters (Walbiri iconography: graphic representation and cultural symbolism in a central Australian society, Cornell University Press, 1973), she points to the multivalence of the simple designs used in the graphical systems of the Western Desert people. Circles can represent camps, or campfires, hills, waterholes, or caves. All of these elements are clearly possibilities given the nature of the artist's country as Myers described it standing before this magnificent canvas. Myers also evoked the image of ceremony, of painted bodies, black skin covered in white designs, designs that employed just these kinds of roundels, emerging into the flickering firelight. The optical effects of the design, of the circles in their varying sizes, mimic that strobe-like effect that Myers referred to, and they suggest in their visual instability the tropes of revelation and concealment, of bringing forward into the light and retreating into the darkness, that is the means by which initiated men assert their power and indeed their very identity. The men are emanations of the Dreaming when they perform in these ceremonies. By painting images such as these on canvas for all to see they are asserting their rights to reveal the sacred knowledge they received as initiates, and their status as elders; they are establishing who they are. And so finally the power of this painting lies very much in its multivalence, in the ability of these simple symbols to reveal so much at once. What we see here, if we avoid reductivism, if we try to embrace the whole lot, are "so many people," Tingari ancestors and Anatjari's kinsmen, elders and initiates, all the rockholes, hills, and caves of the artist's country; in short, what is given to us in this painting is the whole of the artist's lived experience of his country, transmuted and performed before our eyes. In that transmutation, we experience something of the Dreaming as it is brought forth, manifest, in the artist's country and in our world. To be seized by this revelation is an exhilarating experience, to be brought to the brink of understanding, and to be reminded that much is still concealed behind this facade of circles and dots of paint. It is to see brilliance, prowess, mastery, and excellence. It is, in a word, virtuosity. Virtuosity: the evolution of painting at Papunya Tula is on display at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection in Charlottesville, Virginia through August 9, 2008. The exhibition was curated by Fred R. Myers, who holds the Silver Chair of Anthropology at New York University. His book, Painting Culture: the making of an Aboriginal high art, was recently announced as the winner of the 2008 J. I. Staley Prize. The Staley Prize is given by the School of American Research (SAR) "to a living author for a book that exemplifies outstanding scholarship and writing in anthropology. The award recognizes innovative works that go beyond traditional frontiers and dominant schools of thought in anthropology and add new dimensions to our understanding of the human species. It honors books that cross subdisciplinary boundaries within anthropology and reach out in new and expanded interdisciplinary directions" (SAR website). 
Fred Myers working with Anatjari Tjakamarra at Yayayi; photo by Esras Giddy, courtesy of Ian Dunlop. Posted at 07:15 PM Sat - March 29, 2008Games in the Hood: Indigenous Photographers, part 1When I think about photography in the context of
"fine art," I generally have categories in mind: landscape, portraiture,
documentary, abstraction. The new show of Christian Thompson's work at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi,
Australian
Graffiti (follow the links to the exhibitions
pages), and the recent exhibition,
Whacked, by
Destiny Deacon at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery together made me start to consider how
little those classic modes of photography find expression in the work of
Indigenous photographers in
Australia.
Thompson work can be seen to exist on the fringes of another photographic genre--one I admittedly rarely give much thought to--fashion. Australian Graffiti, indeed, is part mock-fashion show, part self-portraiture, and part, as Rex Butler astutely observes in a catalog essay, still life that harks back to Margaret Preston's program to develop Aboriginal themes in Australian painting. (Thompson's earlier Blaks Palace and Emotional Striptease series also deconstruct the fashion photograph. Images are available, but not linkable, on the Pizzi website from the "Artists" page for Thompson.) The images in this latest series are of Thompson bedecked twice over. He wears a crown, or tiara, or mask made of native Australian flora (banksia, flannel flowers, gum blossoms, kangaroo paw) on his head, and a selection of extraordinarily tacky feminine sweaters or blouses that vie in floral splendor with the headresses themselves. It would all be high camp were it not for "Black Gum," the image that is being used in the publicity for the show. "Black Gum" deviates from the rest of the series in three ways. First, Thompson wears a plain black hoodie rather than an ersatz fashion item. Secondly, there are three images of him so attired, rather than one, and these three are called "Black Gum #1," "Black Gum #2," and "Black Gum #3"; all the rest of the images in the show are simply "Untitled." Finally, the burst of gum blossoms pouring out of the hoodie obscures Thompson's face almost completely: you have to look very closely to make out an eye or a cheekbone, whereas the other photographs mask without disguising him. "Black Gum" doesn't so much twist Margaret Preston's view of Aboriginal design so much as, for me, serve as an ironic comment on the nineteenth-century classification of Aboriginal people as native fauna, or in this case flora. From my perspective in America, where the hoodie is an emblem of contemporary black youth culture, the multiple puns on hood as an article of clothing, the 'hood as the locus of gang activity, and the echoes of West Side Story era juvenile delinquents known as "hoods" all load this set of portraits with an air of menace. Together these three images form a secular triptych of an anonymous gangsta who remembers the emblems of past degradation and dehumanization. Menace and the hood play a big role in Destiny Deacon's latest collection of photographs, artifacts, and photographs of artifacts, Whacked, which was on view in October and November of 2007. In many of the photographs, Deacon's customary cast of characters, including the dolls, are masked with longjohns that are then painted with false faces in marker and lipstick. The masks are obviously meant to make these characters look sinister; in combination with the Australian flag backdrop, the suitcase prop, and the references to fences and hoods in the titles of the photos, they remind us at one and the same time, as John Howard often did, of terrorists and immigrants. Deacon's humor immediately deflates the threat, however, as these creatures seem ludicrous. Unlike the distorted and thus fear-provoking effect of the stocking mask, the masks in these photographs have the effect of reminding us--well, they remind us that these are people with underwear on their heads. The crudely drawn faces become comic when a nose pokes through a lipsticked mouth. They look more like comic strip rabbits than terrorists. But some images in the series, the masks bring an air of poignancy to the comedy. The two light-skinned women in "Waiting for the bust" appear as ordinary and suburban as one can possibly imagine, with their Australia shopping bags, sandals, and painted nails. They seem unaware that they are masked and thus identified as dangerous. The people in "The goodie hoodie family," though, seems all too well aware of the precariousness of their position: the masks are masks of fear and their dark skin and the black dolls also mark them as marginal people (does the beer can do that too, despite the Aussie flag stubbie-holder?) awaiting some terrible judgment. Deacon's work harks back to one of the earliest photographic genres, that of the tableau vivant, itself derived from a popular form of theatrical presentation dating back to Victorian England. In more modern times, the tableau vivant finds its commonest form of expression in fashion photography, where models are posed in "everyday" situations, except of course for the fact that they are wearing fabulous clothes. Often overtly pedagogical in intent, the tableau vivant has become, I think, the premier mode of expression for Indigenous photographers, an argument I plan to take up and extend to other artists in a subsequent post here.  Christian Thompson, "Black Gum #2," 2008 100 x 100 cm Image courtesy of Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi Posted at 07:18 PM Sat - March 8, 2008Cultural Ministers Council Support for Indigenous ArtsIt has been almost nine months since the release
of the final report from the Senate Inquiry into the
Indigenous Arts and Crafts Sector was eclipsed by the Howard government's
announcement of the Intervention into Aboriginal lives in the Northern
Territory. I had begun to despair that we would ever hear more of that Report's
recommendations. But on February 29 the Cultural Ministers Council (CMC) met in
Canberra under the leadership of the new Ministers for the Arts, Peter
Garrett.
Garrett announced $1.3 million in funding to be directed at 24 Indigenous art centres. The money will provide support for infrastructure, training, and marketing. This investment recognises the importance of the Indigenous art industry to Australia and the real benefits the arts centres deliver to many Indigenous artists and communities. Indigenous art centres and organisations are the backbone of Australia’s Indigenous arts industry. The art centres themselves are financial partners in many of the projects being supported by this funding. The funding will assist these centres with priority projects. It will also support the important work they do to ensure that Indigenous artists are being treated fairly and that they are receiving appropriate remuneration for their work. Given the overwhelming needs expressed in the submissions and testimony to the Senate Inquiry, extraordinary funding would be required to make significant progress across the board. And indeed, overall funding for the arts in Australia has not fared well in this initial response from the new government. An article in the March 4 issue of The Australian, despite its headline of "Garrett seeks to nurture creativity," began with details of $50 million in funding cuts to arts organizations, including over three-quarters of a million dollars each from the National Gallery and the National Museum. In this environment, the Senate's recommendation for an infusion of $25 million over five years seems an impossible dream. The $1.3 million seems less adequate once you realize that half of it is going to a single new centre, Arts Northern Rivers, in northeastern New South Wales, in support of a "survey and marketing" project ("Indigenous funding underwhelms," The Australian, March 8, 2008). Arts Northern Rivers describes itself as "the peak body for the arts and cultural sector" in the region, which includes Lismore, Byron Bay, and Nimbin. And while the purpose of the grant is to promote indigenous artists in the region, I can't help but wonder at a strategy that provides a well-established non-Indigenous arts centre with such a large chunk of the money said to be allocated to Indigenous arts centres. I can't quarrel with the rest of the allocation, however, which will provide staff accommodation for Warakurna Artists, and a development program for Central Australian arts centre managers, under the direction of Desart. The necessity of providing adequate training for managers along with housing for them, were constant themes presented to the Senate Inquiry, and I am glad that they have not been totally ignored. The Cultural Ministers Council also expressed support for additional funding for the National Arts and Crafts Industry Support Program, which is outlined in the Indigenous Arts Centres Strategy and Action Plan. They also explicitly committed to "the introduction of triennial funding for art centres" and backed the introduction of a resale royalty scheme and the industry code of conduct. All of these proclamations are in line with the key recommendations of the Senate Report. The full text of the Ministers' press release is available here. I reproduce below the section that pertains directly to Indigenous art and culture, and note with pleasure that priority will be given to promoting Indigenous contemporary music. Perhaps one should expect no less from Garrett. He has promised to report on progress on all Indigenous arts programs at the next meeting of the CMC. I will eagerly await the news, and hope that he can avert my despair over real progress towards meeting the needs of the arts centres. It is not enough to acknowledge "the role the arts play in enhancing economic and social outcomes for Indigenous Australians." The government must build on the success these tiny economic engines have already demonstrated. Extracted from the Media Release of
the Cultural Ministers Council, Canberra, February 29, 2008
Ministers were updated on activities and priorities across governments in relation to Indigenous arts and culture and on potential areas of cooperation. Ministers affirmed their commitment to supporting Indigenous arts as an expression of a dynamic and living culture, and acknowledged the role the arts play in enhancing economic and social outcomes for Indigenous Australians. Posted at 12:10 PM Sun - March 2, 2008Exciting Times at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art CollectionI. Terry Smith on Contemporary
(Indigenous) Art On February 13, 2008, the Kluge-Ruhe Collection of Aboriginal Art at the University of Virginia sponsored the first John W. and Maria T. Kluge Distinguished Lecture in Arts and Humanities, featuring professor Terry E. Smith of the University of Pittsburgh. The event coincided with the opening of the second half of the exhibition Our Way: Contemporary Aboriginal Art from Lockhart River. Smaller works from the show had been up at the Kluge-Ruhe Collection for about a month; the largest works were being given space in Newcomb Hall, the University of Virginia Student Union, which also hosts a permanent exhibition of large works on paper from Western Arnhem Land. Smith's lecture was recorded and can be heard in its entirety as a podcast from the Charlottesville Podcasting Network, but I will endeavor to summarize his major points here. (Both Smith's lecture and the December program hosted by the Kluge-Ruhe on the Howard government's intervention in the Northern Territory can also be accessed from the Kluge-Ruhe website.) Smith began by asking in what way might an art based in a tradition that could be tens of thousands of years old be considered contemporary. It is a tradition whose values were formed during a prehistoric era, transformed by the concentration of energy in urban areas that has eliminated the foraging lifeways fundamental to that ancient tradition. It is an art that comprises ceremonial traditions whose main goal has not been to enter into the universal art canon as defined by modern art theory in the academy. Yet it is also an art of urban artists like Gordon Bennett who deal with the contrasts of contemporary art and criteria. And it is a renovation of a previous tradition of artistic expression forged in the era of early contact with Europeans like Baldwin Spencer who encouraged the production of portable and preservable paintings on sheets of bark. It is an art that many judge to be the best Australian painting, and the best abstract painting being done today, and as movement, sustained for over thirty years. It is an art that surveys the conditions of colonization and strives to attain compromise with them. This above all makes it contemporary: it places ancient and modern temporalities in juxtaposition. It recognizes common elements between them; and lives within and between times. In its very multiplicity of ways of being in time, it is contemporary. Aboriginal art has also become in some ways the national of Australia, in the sense that is has something essential that relates Australia to the rest of the world. Smith reiterated the importance of the art as a reaction to colonization as one of its defining elements. This can be seen in its intense engagement with country in both place and time. This can be seen in works as diverse as those of Emily Kam Ngwarray or the Aboriginal Memorial that now resides in the National Gallery in Canberra. Both exhibit this fierce attachment to place, to the desert of Emily's paintings or the geography of the Glyde River that informs the placement of the log coffins of the Memorial. Both partake of multiple layers of time, the Dreaming present in the modern moment, or the 200 years of colonial oppression and death symbolized by the 200 coffins. Artists working in an urban mode display the same engagement with colonialism, whether it be Tracey Moffatt developing a register of what it's like to live in a racist society, or Gordon Bennett appropriating the work of Imants Tillers, a white artist who comes of immigrant Latvian stock, once unwelcome in White Australia. More broadly, indigenous art is rarely conceived of as contemporary anywhere in the world, but especially in the north, in the Euro-American sphere of influence where indigenous peoples can not be conceived of as modern, where they are viewed essentially as survivals of the past. As Smith noted, art f |
