>
Sat - November 7, 2009Because I Could Not Go to Oz......Oz kindly came to me. (Apologies to Emily
Dickinson devotees worldwide.)
This past weekend we had the rare opportunity to see two museum shows of Aboriginal art in an American city, and this only a month after the opening of Icons of the Desert and Papunya Tula Artists in New York. In Washington DC, the Australian Indigenous Art Triennial: Culture Warriors is at the Katzen Arts Center at American University (through December 6) while the National Museum of Women in the Arts is hosting Lands of Enchantment: Australian Aboriginal Paintings (through January 10, 2010). Our adventure was topped off with Cate Blanchett and the Sydney Theatre Company's performance of A Streetcar Named Desire at the Kennedy Center. The  high
cost of transporting artworks across the oceans being what it is, only about
half of the original extent of Culture Warriors made it to America,
although we can be thankful that every artist represented in the original
exhibition is still represented in Washington. Even at such reduced numbers, it
is an impressive collection, and one that should open up new areas of
appreciation for the breadth of complexity of Indigenous artistic practice and
traditions for American audiences. Those over here who identify Aboriginal art
with dot paintings or animal portraits will be in for quite a
surprise.There is, to start with, the selection of the traditional masters that grounds the show: Gulumbu Yunupingu, Philip Gudthaykudthay, Arthur Pambegan, Jr, John Mawurndjul, Waud Namok. There is a bit of classic desert painting in the work of D. R. Nakamarra, and Maringka Baker and Jimmy Baker of Tjungu Palya. And beyond, there is a wealth of examples of work from outside remote communities to testify to the burgeoning styles encompassed under the label "Indigenous Australian." Some of this work surprises, for both good and bad. Vernon Ah Kee's portraits and wall texts share a refined austerity, despite the seeming difference in subject and execution. Gordon Hookey's sometimes sophomoric humor and vitriol fades before an appreciation of his skill as a painter. Christopher Pease's cerebral, historically informed paintings turn out to be ravishingly beautiful, and Julie Dowling's historical portraits have never appeared lovelier. A small room of Ricky Maynard's photographs has the feel of a tiny chapel of mourning and shows off the silence and stillness in his work along with its technical virtues, which appear here to be simultaneously brilliant and subtle. Harry Wedge and Elaine Russell's naive stylings turn out to have much in common, even if a casual viewer might not mistake one for the other. On the other hand, Richard Bell's appropriations come off as unrelievedly sophomoric, and Christian Thompson's large scale photographic impersonations of Tracey Moffatt, Andy Warhol, and Rusty Peters are those rare works that actually look better in reproduction than they do in person. But taken as a whole, the work is impressive and is a credit to curator Brenda Croft's critical and historical eye. Sadly, though, this is an excellent exhibition in a terrible space. Take for instance this all too typical corridor featuring the work of Bidyadanga's Jan Billycan and Maningrada's Anniebell Marrngamarrnga. 
Nearly everything about this is wrong, from the cement wall on the left to the hot-spot lighting to the cramped quarters that create awkward fissures and juxtapositions. Elsewhere, where the lighting is better, the curved walls (almost every wall in the exhibition space) lead to unpalatable choices. Some of the spaces are too large, others too small, for the works they contain. The floor plan doesn't allow for a coherent perception of the group of old masters that introduced the show in the first galleries in Canberra. As you mount the stairs to the opening gallery of the show, there's no clear direction in which to turn, and no indication that the works you encounter at first have that thematic unity of tradition and prowess behind their presentation. Gudthaykudthay's poles and painting are off to the left, Yunupingu's at a distance to the right. Before you reach Pambegan and Marwurndjul, your eye is distracted by Julie Dowling's portraits. There is a single work by Waud Namok to the right; we didn't discover the other two paintings included here and hidden around a corner from the first until we'd made the circuit of the entire floor. That said, the presentation of both Yunupingu and Gudthaykudthay's majestic poles is stunning, equal parts elegance and mystery. 
As we wandered through the exhibition, we asked ourselves over and over again, what must the artists have thought when they saw their work displayed like this? Shane Pickett's paintings were piled up into an unfortunate triangle that served them ill, while Dennis Nona's four-foot linoleum block relief print Yarwarr wrapped and bowed around another curve and could barely be apprehended in its entirety. Nona's sculptured dugongs (Apu Kaz) lodged around the corner to the left of Pickett's paintings at an injudicious but unavoidable remove. One of Treahna Hamm's works, a lovely possum skin cloak, is in the display case in the middle of the photograph above, while the other is up on the next level, hidden around the corner from Jan Billycan in another dark, dead-end corridor. An appreciation of the variety of the approaches taken by Christine Christophersen and by Nakamarra similarly suffer from being too widely dispersed by the constraints of the exhibition space. 
I realize that this review is far too full of carping about the museum, and I don't wish to suggest that you might or should pass up the opportunity to visit Culture Warriors if you are in or around Washington DC this fall. As Janis Goodman of Corcoran College suggests in the local news video below, the show demonstrates how Indigenous artists are engaged with the themes and concerns that artists around the world wrestle with. (Artist Bill Dunlap's comment that these artists have "leapfrogged into the real world" is offensive, but his condescension extends to his surprise that Robert Hughes is an Australian and a great art critic.) Culture Warriors also offers an all too rare chance to examine what "contemporary" means in Australian art. If your experience of Aboriginal art is limited to what you can find in the Todd Mall, you shouldn't miss this exhibition. If, however, you have fond memories of searching for Aboriginal art among the emporia of the Todd Mall in Alice Springs, and your nostalgia isn't sated by Culture Warriors, you can catch the Metro back downtown and visit Lands of Enchantment at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA). Be warned that there aren't any works from Papunya Tula or its artists included here, but there are several fine examples from other galleries and communities. NMWA curated the 2006 show Dreaming Their Way: Australian Aboriginal Women Painters, at that time one of the first shows to rely heavily on works from private American collections (along with those Colin and Liz Laverty and Ann Lewis from Australia). In keeping with the Museum's mission, the earlier show was restricted to women artists, but Lands of Enchantment: Australian Aboriginal Paintings, drawn from another private collection in America, admits a few men, most notably Lindsay Bird Mpetanye and Greeny Petyarre, whose large Yam Dreaming from 2003 will resonate with Washingtonians who love the work of native son Gene Davis, the American stripe painter who emerged as something of a local hero in the 1960s. Its majestic size provoked a bit of a sense of mourning, despite its brilliant and lively colors, as I remembered that Petyarre is now too frail to make more than tiny, almost palm-sized variants of his former glories. 
There is a large and gorgeous work by Dorothy Napagardi and a lovely, decorative canvas by Jean Nampitjinpa Hudson that reminded me of work by Napangardi's daughter Julie Nangala. There are a couple of shockers, too. The work attributed to Makinti Napanangka should not have been hung, out of simple respect for the artist's achievement in color and composition, and the eight-foot cartoon-like Atham-arney Story by Angelina Ngale Pwerle is an unfortunate choice to represent an artist whose work includes some of the most subtle and loveliest paintings to emerge from Anmatyerre country. And after the art, there was Cate. I won't say much; I could embarrass myself too easily. I've been enraptured by her subtlety as an actress since seeing her opposite Ernie Dingo in the early 90s television mini-series Heartland (US title: Burned Bridge). Onstage in A Streetcar Named Desire she seemed by contrast almost to over-extend herself, but she is no less wonderful for that. Indeed, the role demanded it. Joel Edgerton played Stanley Kowalski brutally and believably in a nuanced and highly commendable performance, Brando notwithstanding. Fifty years on, Blanche's Southern culture is more often identified as "gothic" or "grotesque" than as elegant or refined, and the subject more of parody than tragedy today in America. So the Sydney Theatre Company would deserve some serious props just for mounting this show, let alone bringing it home to the US. But as Peter Marks wrote in the Washington Post, "If Cate Blanchett's nerve-shattering turn as Blanche DuBois doesn't knock the wind out of you, then there is nothing on a stage that can blow you away." Too right. Posted at 11:21 AM Sun - October 11, 2009BLACKMANSKINIt has been ten years since Vernon Ah Kee first
exhibited (a solo show, no less), at Brisbane's Metro Arts Gallery. The
Innisfail, Qld native has been active since then in the potent Brisbane
Aboriginal art scene, along with fellow activist artists like Richard Bell and
Gordon Hookey. Like Bell and Hookey, Ah Kee laces his work with political
outrage and often relies on the power of text to generate its message. Unlike
his fellow Queenslanders, though, Ah Kee rarely indulges in strident,
over-the-top rhetoric, even when his texts seem to be almost shouting at the
viewer in their wall-sized installations. For all his directness, Ah Kee is an
artist of considerable subtlety whose message gains strength from its ambiguous
positioning.
All 
of these insights are brilliantly explored in the new monograph,
borninthisskin (Institute of Modern Art, 2009), which is one of the more
insightful collections of art criticism I've had the pleasure to encounter
lately. In addition to four short but punchy essays, and an interview with the
uncommonly articulate artist himself, borninthisskin offers a superb
retrospective look at Ah Kee's decade-long career to date. It even manages to
do justice to his video work, especially the recent CantChant, which
premiered in Brisbane in 2007 before being taken to the Venice Biennale in
2009.In 2008, Ah Kee had two installations at the Sydney Biennale, although I was aware of only one of them before visiting Cockatoo Island. In fact, even after seeing them both, I came away unsure of what I'd witnessed. In the advance press for the Biennale, I had read about the stunning new set of portrait drawings, What is an Aborigine? Executed in acrylic, charcoal, and crayon on six-by-eight foot canvases, these knockout compositions had drawn significant critical attention, and were hailed as a breakthrough for the artist. I suspect that much of the attention was generated by the surprise at seeing such exquisite formal drawings produced by an artist whose reputation had until then rested largely on more mechanically generated media of photography, video, and commercial lettering. And despite their size, they seemed far more intimate and personal that Ah Kee's political polemics; indeed, as portraits of his family, these were indeed both personal and intimate encounters. But they were also inescapably political as well. One of the few works that was not a portrait, "I AM," ironically echoed Gordon Bennett's declaration in his 1990 "Self portrait (But I always wanted to be one of the good guys)." Ah Kee's work depicts a cluster of placards attached to long poles. On each is printed the name of a Queensland Aboriginal language group (Waanji, Yidindji) or a phrase ("Aboriginal all the time") that is partially obscured by a blank insert. (I suspect that these placards were inspired by the numbered "dog tags" that identified subjects in the photographs of Aboriginal people, including some of Ah Kee's own Queensland ancestors, taken by Norman Tindale in the early decades of the 20th century. Ah Kee performs a double erasure by leaving the number plates blank and then using them to partially obscure the language names as well.) The installation gained another degree of power from its very location in the disused shipyard building on Cockatoo: these ghostly faces seemed somehow at home in this abandoned structure, and infinitely sad for being so. Some critics saw reproach in these oversized gazes, others determination, others gentleness. 
Detail of the installation What is an Aborigine? at the Sydney Biennale, 2008 And finally, in what may or may not have been sheer serendipity, Ah Kee's drawings were placed in a room in Turbine Hall next to another installation by the Scottish-born artist Susan Phillipsz. Phillipsz's The Internationale, sung by the artist in a plaintive a capella style and broadcast from a single speaker mounted in the adjacent space, filtered in through the broken windows and open rafters to permeate the air around Ah Kee's portraits with melancholy and disappointment. Ah Kee's other contribution to the Sydney Biennale was infinitely more perplexing. Acting on the  principle
that any large exhibition will ultimately prove exhausting, we set out to see
what we most wanted to see first, and armed with the Biennale's guide map, we
headed for the spot with Ah Kee's name inscribed. The vast, industrial site was
confusing to navigate, and overwhelming with its rusted machinery dominating the
skyline. Often I wondered if I were looking at an installation or a remnant of
previous use. Eventually we came to an old, low building with a small sign,
sitting aslant on a wooden stake and bearing Ah Kee's name. We stepped inside
what turned out to be a toilet block: stinking, decrepit, battered. The walls
were covered with repulsive graffiti and paeans to the metal band AC/DC. Ranks
of disassembled toilet partitions leaned against the walls and signs instructed
visitors "DO NOT USE." The room smelled like many visitors had ignored the
injunction. We were puzzled: this wasn't the show of portraits we were looking
for. We left, turned next door and encountered Mike Parr's equally repulsive
video installation, then consulted our maps to see if we could correct our
mistake.What I didn't realize until I read the essays in borninthisskin was that the toilet block was indeed correctly identified as an installation by Ah Kee. He was not responsible for creating the graffiti, for the warning signs, for the broken plumbing. He had simply claimed the toilet block, as it was, as his own. In a bravura gesture that drew a line from Captain Cook through Marcel Duchamp, he re-inserted an Aboriginal presence and asserted an Aboriginal ownership to a small piece of geography that had been off limits, trespassed, forbidden to everyone for years. And I missed it: I saw it, and I didn't see it. Now, thanks to Blair French's perceptive essay, I understand what a brilliant conceptual move Ah Kee accomplished with this work, which he called "Born in this Skin." These are the latest chapters in Ah Kee's fascinating history, and although I have begun at the end, borninthisskin offers in its essays an excellent overview of how Ah Kee's styles and preoccupations have emerged since 1999. In the best sense of art history, it surveys the artist's development and places it in both a personal and a social context. The authors, and indeed the artist, do not shy away from exploring influences as diverse as the fellow members of the proppaNOW collective to which Ah Kee belongs or the American type-text-and-image artist Barbara Kruger. Robert Leonard offers a superb overview of Ah Kee's career; Anthony Gardner takes an in-depth look at Ah Kee's 30-second video work, whitefellanormal. Aileen Moreton-Robinson's impressionistic assessment of the urban heroism of CantChant gives just enough context to allow the eighteen pages of stills from the seven-minute video to speak eloquently for themselves. It is the interplay of text and images in this book, as in Ah Kee's work, that makes it so thought-provoking and successful. The largely chronological presentation of the drawings allows the reader to follow the evolution of the artist's style as he moves from the sketchy realism of the works from 2004-2005 to the impressionistic and spooky images of the first unwritten series (2007), to the heroic portraiture of What is an Aborigine? and on to a more refined and more unsettling second series of unwritten drawings (both executed in 2008). Selections from the wall-text pieces are interspersed throughout the book and act both as illustrations of Ah Kee's oeuvre and as a kind of critical commentary in their own right. Speakeasy (below), curated by Vernon Ah Kee and Aaron Seeto at the Asia-Australia Arts Centre in Sydney's Hay Street, is on until October 31. Featured artists include Ah Kee, Daniel Boyd, Fiona Foley, Gordon Hookey, and Ginger Riley. The photograph on the left below appears to be a manipulation of Tindale's portrait of Annie Ah Sam, Ah Kee's maternal great-grandmother.
Posted at 12:09 PM Sat - October 3, 2009Arrernte StoriesKathleen Kemarre Wallace has been the defining
artist of the community of Ltyentye Apurte (Santa Teresa) over the two decades
that Keringke Artists has been the focus of Eastern Arrernte art production.
Towards the end of the new book,
Listen deeply, let these stories in (IAD Press, 2009), she has co-authored with longtime Keringke art advisor Judy Lovell, she tells this story: When my grandfather Atyelpe died in 1984, many people were very, very sad. The elders were very sad. They felt his death symbolized the end of our knowledge and our cultural practices. The changes to our culture and our way of life had been happening so fast and Atyelpe was one of the last who represented the old way, one who had held ancient knowledge from the ancestors. The family he left behind was deeply sad and some of them did not want to pass on our cultural knowledge anymore. They didn't want to teach me or other younger people about the old days, the culture, stories, song or dances. They wanted to forget what we had all lost. There was so much grieving, we were always in sadness thinking about the past (p. 158). Luckily 
for the rest of us, Wallace was determined not to submit to that sadness. The
severe drought of the early 60s forced her parents to seek their livelihood in
Alice Springs, and they left Kathleen in the care of the nuns at the Santa
Teresa mission. She knows she was not able to capture much of what her
grandparents and her aunties knew about their country and their culture
thereafter, but she was determined to maintain what she herself had learned as a
young girl growing up in the bush. She pursued the knowledge of her elders, and
committed herself to passing along the story of her land and her people to the
younger generations. Listen Deeply is one manifestation of that will,
and it is a profoundly rewarding
experience.At one level, the book is Wallace's autobiography, and like other Aboriginal autobiographies it is as much the story of the land as it is of the author's life. The narrative begins with the Arrernte people and the altyerre (the Arrernte word for what we call the Dreaming). Wallace tells in succeeding chapters of tyenge artweye akerte ("my family, my country") and apmeraltye ("people of one land") before closing in on Uyetye, the place where she herself was born. Two more chapters, on water and drought, intervene before what we Westerners would recognize as the autobiographical narrative begins. Until this point, Wallace is a voice telling a story that moves easily between the altyerre, recent "history," and her country. With her arrival at the Mission in 1959, she begins to emerge as an individualized character for the first time, a shy young girl overwhelmed by the hard life of learning to speak English, to sew, to behave in a manner that often seems inappropriate and shocking. For example, the nuns' admonition to "look at me when I speak to you" was deeply shaming. "For me, to look at another person's eyes was wrong. We were taught by our elders to look away from another person's face because you could see their spirit in their eyes (p. 99)." In the next few chapters, Wallace briefly tells of her growth to womanhood, her marriage, the many children she raised in Santa Teresa over the years, all fostered or adopted. Such personal details seem, however, less important than the altyerre stories they serve to introduce, as in the chapter "Growing up a big family," which concludes with a retelling of the story of tyangkertangkerte, the mother tree. Similarly, Wallace never speaks about her art or her career as an artist, yet nearly every page of this splendidly produced book glows with reproductions of Wallace's artwork. And I must confess, this is one of the great joys of the book for me. I have long delighted in the work of Keringke Arts, and been frustrated by the lack of attention it generally has received. The only other significant publication I am aware of is Keringke: contemporary Eastern Arrernte art (Jukurrpa Books/IAD Press, 1999). A worthy introduction to the art of Ltyentye Apurte, it nonetheless focuses on the early years of painting on silk and paper, and offers besides just a few examples of the brilliant ceramic works the company has produced for many years. Like the batik works made in the 1980s by countrymen farther north in Utopia, these silks and ceramics tended to pigeonhole and devalue Keringke as a producer of Aboriginal crafts. Truth, the artists of Keringke have never been shy about adopting unconventional supports for their painting: hatboxes, chairs, and guitars have all been adorned over the years with their brilliant acrylic stylings. Indeed, a browse of the galleries at Keringke Arts today shows that they are still exercising that inventiveness, with painted heads and hands recycled from mannequins on offer. The explosive primary color palette, the nearly but never quite symmetrical compositions, the guitars and the mannequins' hands that look like illustrations from a Hindu epic all lend an air of the psychedelic 60s to the company's productions. If those associations have led many people to discount Keringke's work, it is a pity. Happily, Listen Deeply should help to provide a better-informed understanding of this art and lead to a critical re-assessment. All of the artwork included here is Wallace's, much of it done over the last five years: an astonishing and extravagant productivity. The works have been selected as illustrations of the stories Wallace tells. And while they inform the narratives, the narratives also open up subtleties of meaning in the artwork that are too often overlooked in the spangled designs. Wallace retrieves the art of Keringke from mere decoration, gives it depth and poignancy, and makes it sing. To round out this collection of Arrernte culture, Wallace has included a CD that contains recordings of her telling seven of the altyerre stories included in the book. Each was recorded at the location where the Dreaming story took place. Wallace has a soft, gentle, and sweet voice that is wonderfully complemented by the natural sounds--mostly a variety of birdcalls that were serendipitously captured during the taping. There's an hour's listening here: the stories as recorded are much longer than the summary versions included in Arrernte and English in the printed part of the book. The locales at which these stories took place have been sumptuously photographed, and many times, in addition to Wallace herself, there are pictures of her grandchildren and other youngsters out in the country with her. It's easy to imagine them clustered around in the share of the ghost-gum women outside the cave at Uyetye, hearing the story of the cruel and selfish awele-awele woman, learning about family and sharing, learning the language of their ancestors, and the lie of the land. Load the CD's tracks on your iPod, tuck the book under your arm, stretch out in your favorite bush retreat on one of these gloriously sunny equinoctical afternoons, and see if I'm wrong. Listen deeply, let these stories in is a jewel. Resplendent, moving, and fascinating, it is a perfect beginner's guide to Arrernte art and culture and a cultural document of unusual breadth at the same time, whether your interest lies in art, history, or linguistics. It is a delight to come across a book that offers you so many reasons to take it home with you, and promises so many varied hours of enjoyment. Posted at 11:36 AM Sun - September 20, 2009Art of the Western Desert, New YorkWe traveled to New York City last weekend to
attend the linked openings of Icons of the Western Desert at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University
and Papunya Tula Artists' Nganana Tjungurringanyi Tjukurrpa Nintintjakitja (We Are
Here Sharing Our Dreaming) just down the block at 80WSE.
John and Barbara Wilkerson were once more feted for sharing their collection of early Papunya boards with the rest of us, and the show, once again, looked marvelous. The hang this time was organized quite differently than it had been at Cornell, where consideration of history (recreating the sequence in which the paintings were originally made) and theme (comparing cave paintings, or setting the works of brothers Tim Leura and Clifford Possum side by side) directed the placement of the works in a large and very open space. At the Grey, curator Lynn Gumpert and the "legendary" Fred Myers (as he's known around town) presented the paintings in a manner that is sure to appeal to the Manhattan gallery visitor, with plenty of white space on the walls between paintings and an eye for aesthetic  correspondences.
The main exhibition space also included two flat-screens showing films. One was
the marvelous documentary by Ian Dunlop (in the still at the right Anatjari
Tjakamarra is showing Fred Myers his country) that I first saw when Myers opened
the Virtuosity exhibition at the Kluge-Ruhe
Collection in April 2008, showing the painting camp at Yayayi Bore where he
worked with many of the men whose works adorned the walls of the Grey. The
second was a short film documenting the creation of the large ground painting by
men from Papunya Tula Artists that was done at the Johnson Museum at Cornell at
the opening of Icons there in February of this
year.One again, the presence of Papunya Tula Artists at the exhibition led to a fascinating manifestation of culture, though not a ground painting this time. On this trip Yukultji Napangati and D. R. Nakamarra came along. As the catalog of Icons of the Desert makes clear, there are paintings included in the show that should not be viewed by uninitiated Aboriginal men or Aboriginal women, and this posed a logistical problem for the Grey. They solved it quite nicely by giving these sacred works a small space of their own on the level below the main galleries. Visitors who descended to view them were also treated to a video of the film Mr Patterns about Geoff Bardon's days at Papunya when many of the paintings in Icons were made. Copies of the exhibition catalog, of Vivien Johnson's Lives of the Papunya Tula Artists, and other books documenting Pintupi art of the Western Desert were available for consultation as well. 
On Thursday  evening
a crowd of about six hundred jammed the Grey Gallery for the opening of
Icons. Provost David McLaughlin began with a brief welcome to all on the
part of the University, followed by remarks by Australian Consul-General, Philip
H. Scanlan. But the highlight of the short ceremony were the comments of Sonia
Smallacombe (right, in red, in the foreground right Wilkerson, Scanlan, and
Myers), a member of the Maramanidji people of the Daly River region and the
United Nations' Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. She spoke eloquently
herself on the eloquence of Aboriginal art, of the voice it represents for her
people, and of her delight in hearing that voice acknowledged in New York. It
was a rare pleasure--and a measure of one difference between Australian and the
US--to hear her acknowledge the Lenape of the Six Nations, the indigenous
custodians of the island of Mannahatta on whose ground we were
standing.The remainder of the evening, for me, was spent in the delightful business of reconnecting with old friends and the even more rewarding activity of making new ones. Early on Friday we traveled back to Washington Square to drop in at 80WSE where PTA was busily engaged in hanging their show prior to Saturday's opening. It was a scene of memorable and thrilling activity as paintings were lined up against the walls and then hoisted into place by a hard working crew. Even though I'd seen a preview of the show's catalog, I wasn't really prepared for what PTA brought along with them. 
In one of the two windowed rooms that fronted Washington Square itself, a large (six-by-eight foot) painting by Nakamarra dominated. Given the physical scope of the canvas, Nakamarra was able to literally expand her treatment of the creek and the sandhills at Marrapinti. Her trademark undulations threatened to almost spill off the canvas into the gallery space. Across  the
entryway, in a smaller room the show's signature image by Johnny Yungut
Tjupurrula (left) held a dialogue across the space with an explosive work by his
wife, Walangkura Napanangka. Tjupurulla's painting, Tingari Men at
Malparingya, was inspired when staff at PTA showed him images of some of the
earliest works he had done for the company. The rawness of the drawing and the
paint handling gave the image a propulsiveness that evoked the energy of a
ceremonial dance and the flicker of firelight on painted bodies or cave walls.
(If that last sentence seems a bit overloaded with imagery, then I've captured
some of Tjupurrula's power.) Facing it, Napanangka's depiction of the story of
Katungka Napanagka at Tjintjintjin echoed both the color scheme and the
propulsion of Tjupurrula's image. In between them, a black-and-white
masterpiece by Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, Tingari Men at Murmur, seemed
almost serene by comparison. But if you rested your eyes on it for more than a
few minutes, the lines of the composition began to writhe; when I stepped out
into the street for a moment to take in all three works at a glance,
Tjapaltjarri's work looked almost as if it were being held in highly charged and
dynamic stasis by the opposing energies of the other paintings in the
room.
At the opposite end of the gallery, the back wall of one room was covered with a suite of works in the signature 107x28 cm size that PTA uses for small works. Ten paintings by accomplished Pintupi masters, men and women, showed off the varieties of style among the artists, and their brilliant but subtle mastery of color. In nearly forty years the artists of Papunya Tula have never strayed far from the traditional, spare palette of ceremonial design. Red shaded into yellow for some brilliant orange effects in Makinti Napanangka's works, indulged by a lilac streak; red pierced an otherwise black-and-white design by Ningura Napurrula in a fecund explosion. Despite being less than a foot wide, these canvases too pulsated with energy; sawtooth designs by Ray James Tjangala and Nyilyari Tjanpangati pushed at the frame as forcefully as Ronnie Tjampitjinpa's roundels or Nakamarra's serpentine meanders. In 
the other rooms of the gallery the characteristic Papunya Tula panoply of
inventiveness unfolded. Ronnie Tjampitjinpa's bold pearl shell meanders (left,
with Andy Weislogel and Paul Sweeney) played counterpoint with George
Tjungurrayi's austere lines of close-hued colors that gave up the subtleties of
their designs even more gradually than Yukultji Napangati's sandhill mappings.
Michael Reid's painting of designs associated with the rockhole at Tarkul
brought a catch to my throat from across the room, so vividly did it evoke his
father Timmy Payungka's Dreaming stories. Patrick Tjungurrayi's small canvases
were less flamboyant that some of his large, prize-winning works of late but had
the sheen of ceramic mosaics with their thick dottings in white and yellow
against orange and red tracks.The brilliance of the artwork held me captivated for most of the day on Saturday, as did long conversations with friends. I missed all the films that were on show farther downtown in a program organized by NYU's Faye Ginsburg and featuring the work of Indigenous directors Beck Cole and Warwick Thornton. (And we had to catch a flight home too early on Sunday to let us catch the special screening of Samson and Delilah at the Museum of Modern Art.)
Despite the jet lag, all the hard work of prepping the space, stretching the works, and hanging the show, the Papunya Tula mob were clearly having a grand old time. Julie Harvey's efforts on their behalf here in the States paid off handsomely as waves of the curious and the committed kept streaming in throughout the afternoon. The ladies themselves looked resplendent in their flash new gowns, acquired on a downtown shopping trip with Sarita Quinlivan the day before; Paul and Charmaine were unflappable as usual, and eleven-month old Lucinda was stealing hearts left and right. Despite the blustery winds and the sometimes heavy rains, spirits were high all around. Nor was the enthusiasm contained to the PTA crew: by the time I made a final circuit of the galleries shortly before six p.m., over two-thirds of the canvases sported red dots. Not a bad showing for opening day of art from the Western Desert in New York City. Nganana Tjungurringanyi Tjukurrpa
Nintintjakitja closes next Saturday, September 26, so there's just less than
a week left to expierence its glories. Icons of the Desert will remain on at
the Grey Gallery until December 5, and an extended program of lectures graces the fall
calendar at NYU.
October 25, 2009: I have just learned that D.
R. Nakamarra, whose presence graced the opening of Nganana Tjungurringanyi
Tjukurrpa Nintintjakitja, passed away unexpectedly in recent days. We are
all shocked. As a friend said, "What a fragile society that
is."
Posted at 12:28 PM Sun - August 30, 2009Reflections on the Western Australian Indigenous Art AwardHaving stayed at home this year, I don't have
much of substance to say about the 26th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art
Awards that hasn't already been said elsewhere. I've never been
terribly fond of winner Danie Mellor's style; personally it's too fuzzy and too
cute for my taste. But I don't have much patience for the protests that break
out every time someone like Mellor or Richard Bell wins the award, complete with
suggestions that there ought maybe to be two awards so that we can recognize
"traditional" artists every year and not lump "urban" artists in with the
"Aboriginal" artists. And if you really have problems with a blue-eyed winner,
I'm sure you can reach Andrew Bolt at the Herald Sun for companionship
and commiseration.
Plus, I have to admit that my attention was distracted a little by the arrival in the mail of catalogues from the Art Gallery of Western Australia from the 2008 and 2009 Western Australian Indigenous Art Awards. If NATSIAA began as "a few tinnies and a pissup," a party for the artists that has grown into an institution, perhaps the WA award had a loftier (if not necessarily worthier) genesis. Writing in the inaugural catalog essay in 2008, Susan Lowish of the University of Melbourne pondered the problem of establishing an Indigenous aesthetic. Echoing Eric Michaels' question of twenty years earlier, Lowish wonders how we distinguish good Aboriginal art from bad, how we incorporate the meaning invested in these works by the artists themselves into a set of judgements about their quality. As Lowish points out, it is a vexed question, and never more so than in the context of an awards program, be it WA's, the NATSIAA, or the now sadly defunct Xstrata Emerging Indigenous Art Award. In the realm of ceremony from which much of this art emerges, anthropologists have frequently documented the exercise of critical judgement by the community directed at proper execution of designs, songs, and dances. The emotional reactions of contemporary artists confronted suddenly with works from past decades testify likewise to the evocative power of acrylic paintings. But what are the criteria by which these works should be judged? How do Indigenous perspectives differ from those schooled in Western aesthetics? One way in which all the major awards have attempted to deal with this question in the context of determining winners is to invite submissions from artists and communities, so even at the very first pass, there is some assurance that the Aboriginal perspective on what is best in contemporary practice gets taken into account. Beyond that, the selection and judging panels have Indigenous artists and curators as members. The WA award, like the Xstrata before it, and perhaps with this question of Indigenous aesthetic in mind, has opted to invite multiple submissions from each artist. In perusing the catalogs for the first two years of the competition, I was struck by how the artists have chosen to work this angle. Generally speaking, the 2008 entries were more consistent for each artist. Several of the urban-identified artists submitted works in series--Fiona Foley's twin series "Venus" and "Sea of Love," for instance. "Venus" is a set of photographs of Foley, shown from the knees down in a variety of enticing footwear; these photographs themselves hang on the walls behind the men whose portraits form the content of "Sea of Love." Shane Pickett's "Seasons" is a suite of six canvases that assert the ontology of Aboriginal time-keeping over the course of the year. Even among the bush artists, there was a remarkable consistency, with Naata Nungurrayi and Patrick Tjungurrayi presenting variations on the same compositional themes; Sally Gabori offset her black-and-white constructions with large and simple fields of blue-green or intense pink, which Patrick Mung Mung's canvases might have been a series of still images extracted from a moving panorama of his country, each linked by color and form to the other. In the second year, the artists' selections broadened out somewhat. True, Tony Albert's photographs are a deliberate series: in each he poses with a bicornual basket hanging down his back; in each the contents of the basket and his clothing change to fit in with a different environment, be that sporting arena, beach resort, fishing boat, or Queensland rainforest. Likewise Brian McKinnon's suite of graphical political posters gain much of their power when taken as a whole. But while Yinarupa Nangala's canvases all share a common structural strategy, Doreen Reid Nakamarra has chosen works that display the entire range of compositions she works in. Daniel Walbidi's paintings are stylistically consistent, but he varies the shapes and sizes of his canvases from near squares to greatly elongated rectangles. He experiments with variations in his palette; he organizes one composition radially, another in long parallel rows; he combines the two patterns in a third. Dennis Nona went a step further, submitting sculptural work as well as etchings. Shane Pickett, the only repeat finalist in the two years, displayed his virtuosity in variations of color and composition this year. Christopher Pease offered examples of his historical deconstructions alongside his dense, abstract works in resin. In "King George Sound" Pease combined the two styles in one work and added Alice in Wonderland's Rabbit to the mix in a line drawing on the resinous background. Lorraine  Connelly-Northey
submitted only one work (right), but its massive scale--nearly eight meters long
and over three tall--allowed her to build in whole worlds of imagery: landscapes
undulate over memories of desert shields as rainbow serpents transform
themselves into rivers and fish traps, all built out of the discards and scraps
of colonial fences and corrugated sheds rusting back into the primordial
landscape.But the more I lost myself in the rich displays offered by the two years' finalists, the farther I seemed to get from any hope of decoding that elusive Indigenous aesthetic. Apart from some vague notion that all of these works comment directly or indirectly on the interface between colonizers and colonized, on the adaptations of Aboriginal people to new economic and social structures, and on the preservation of aspects of traditional culture in the face of an onslaught of alien custom, I found little to ground a new theory on. What, I wondered, would Timmy Cook make of Tiger Palpatja's canvases? There are some superficial formal similarities in composition, despite the differences between Cook's austere palette and Palpatja's iridescent colorings. How would a Tiwi artist respond to the serpents that dominate these Central Desert paintings? Would Cook read the animal in the upper left corner of Palpatja's red-and-black "Wanampi Tjukurpa" canvas as a long-necked tortoise? Perhaps an "Indigenous aesthetic" is rightly a phantom, a figment; what would the word for it sound like in Aboriginese? Instead, I am reminded of Howard Morphy's Becoming Art: exploring cross-cultural categories (Berg, 2007). In it he recalls an experience in which he and the great Yolngu painter Narritjin Maymuru tried to interpret Abelam art from New Guinea. In summarizing the story I wrote the following in my review of the book: The Abelam have little to say about the content of their paintings and do not relate them to mythic stories or cultural histories in a way that corresponds to either Yolngu or Western methods of organizing either the thematic or iconographic elements of their art. Still, it is clear that the Art Gallery of Western Australia is serious about contributing to a dialogue that advances a broader understanding of what Aboriginal art means to those who make it. In doing so, they are also contributing to a coherent formal aesthetic which can be assimilated into Western modes of thought about the art. The fine catalogs that they have produced for the first two years of the Western Australian Indigenous Art Awards are valuable additions to our literature. So 
too is the catalog documenting Yirrkala Artists Everywhen: bark paintings from the state art
collection, an exhibition which was mounted at the Art Gallery
early in 2009. It is a lovely piece of work, with excellent maps (always a plus
in my evaluation), detailed illustrations, and most of all, a fine essay by Chad
Creighton.Creighton was the recipient of the Gallery's first Indigenous Curatorial Internship, a position he held while pursuing a degree at the Curtin Institute of Technology. His essay is a wonderful synthesis of his own research, insights gained from academic studies (Morphy figures prominently in the bibliography along with Stanner and many others), and work with the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Art Centre in Yirrkala. (Creighton helped to repatriate materials collected by Louis Allen to the community in the course of his work.) The exhibition was the culmination of Creighton's three years at the Gallery, and he was fortunate in having a superb collection of early works to draw upon. Among the highlights presented in the catalog are the last three paintings completed by Mathaman Marika before his death, all documenting the story of Wuyal, the ancestral sugar-bag, and created to protest the development of the bauxite mine at the sacred Rirratjungu site of Nhulun. Creighton has done right by his material, meticulously documenting the works in the exhibition, blending Yolngu voices with those of scholars while developing his own--which may well prove to be an important voice among the next generation of Indigenous curators being launched through laudable efforts like this internship at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. Perhaps the most delightful aspect of discovering these fine catalogs is that they are in some ways very modest productions. Although great care and no doubt some expense went into the production of these books, none of the three tops 50 pages. They prove that galleries can produce thoughtful contributions to the interpretation and documentation of Aboriginal art that don't need to be blockbusters to succeed. AGWA deserve to be commended for mounting such fine shows, and for sharing them with future scholars and art lovers alike. Posted at 03:10 PM Sat - August 22, 2009The Western Desert in Painting, Film, and LectureThere will be a wealth of lectures and films
coming up in the next few months in New York City in association with the
exhibition of Icons of the Desert: early Aboriginal paintings from
Papunya at the Grey Gallery of New York University. A program of
New Indigenous Cinema from Australia will
kick things off on September 12 at the National Museum of the American Indian's
NYC venue. Fred Myers will be giving a series of lectures
illuminating the cultural context for Pintupi painting. Francesca Cubillo, late
of the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory and now Senior Curator
of Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Australia will be speaking on
October 22. Roger Benjamin and Andy Weislogel, who mounted the exhibition for
the first time at Cornell University's Johnson
Museum of Art, round out the lecture series on the first weekend of
November.
Full details can be found on the Grey's website, and in this program listing: IconsOfTheDesertPublicProgram.pdf Below are just some highlights from the season. (Download the PDF above for more.) 
It's a particularly rich moment for Aboriginal art in America. Culture Warriors, the inaugural Australian Indigenous Art Triennial curated in 2007 at the NGA by Brenda Croft opens at American University's Katzen Art Center in Washington DC the same weekend that Icons of the Desert debuts at the Grey Gallery. And a retrospective of the work of Richard Bell will be at Location1 on Greene Street in New York's Soho District from October 8 through November 21. Posted at 11:51 AM Sun - August 16, 2009Desert & Metropolis: Papunya Tula Comes to New YorkIn little less than a month, Icons of the
Desert: early Aboriginal paintings from Papunya returns to the east coast of
America, where it will be on view at the Grey Gallery of New York University
through the first week of December. There will be a host of events coinciding
with the exhibition over the next four months, but none may prove as momentous
as the premier exhibition of contemporary work by Papunya Tula Artists in New
York City. Of course, works by the company have been on display here before,
but the Big Apple has never yet seen the likes of Nganana Tjungurringanyi
Tjukurrpa Nintintjakitja (We Are Here Sharing Our Dreaming) at 80 Washington
Square East Galleries from September 12 through September 26. Only two short
weeks to witness this miracle, so make your travel arrangements
now!
When Icons of the Desert first opened 
at Cornell University in February 2009, Papunya Tula came over in the persons of
three senior men from the company, Bobby West Tjupurrula, Joseph Jurra
Tjapaltjarri, and Ray James Tjangala, who built a link between the present day
company and the historic works of Icons by creating an enormous ground
painting out of desert sand, vegetable down, and ochre in the gallery of
Cornell's Johnson Museum. In doing so they demonstrated the living continuity
of a tradition both aesthetic and spiritual that affirmed their solemn
connection both to their country, in the materials they brought with them to
make the painting, and to their Law, in the design of the Tingari story from
Kiwirrkura that mirrored the works hung on the gallery
walls.This 
interweaving of past and present, of ancient tjukurrpa with contemporary
acrylics, is of course part of the essence of contemporary Aboriginal art from
Australia. Indeed, it is of the essence of tjukurrpa itself, W. E. H.
Stanner's famous everywhen that characterizes the Dreaming not as an
ancestral, creative past, but a spirit infused through and sustaining what we in
the west think of discretely as past, present, and
future.If I think of present and future, for the moment, I am struck by how this opportunity to see a significant selection of contemporary painting from Papunya Tula--there are 45 canvases in this exhibition--offers an unparalleled opportunity for the future of Aboriginal art in America. Will "the most exciting field of contemporary Australian art ... be able to gain the trust of serious art buyers in countries like the United States," as Paul Sweeney wonders in his essay for the catalog now in preparation for this show? It certainly seems that, for Papunya Tula, the moment is especially ripe. Just two days ago, Yinarupa Nangala took the General Painting Prize at the 26th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards. (Yinarupa's brother is Ray James, who participated in the Cornell ground painting; she was married to the late Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi whose work is in included in Icons.) Doreen Reid Nakamarra, who won the General Painting award last year, was highly commended by the judges this year, and of course Makinti Napanangka, the grandest of grandes dames of Pintupi painting, was last year's overall winner at NATSIAA. All three women have significant work in the New York show. Just three years ago, Papunya Tula mounted a smaller but no less stunning contemporary exhibition in another major world capital with the Pintupi show at Hamiltons Gallery in London, and collectors lined up four deep for the chance to purchase works by the likes of Makinti, Patrick Tjungurrayi, Naata Nungurrayi, and Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, all of whom will be also represented in New York. Nganana Tjungurringanyi Tjukurrpa Nintintjakitja will bring to America other deep links to the past in the persons of Doreen Reid Nakamarra and Yukultji Napangati, traveling with the company to New York this time. Nakamarra was born in Ikuntji (Haasts Bluff) in the 1950s and attended school as a child in Papunya, where she saw the famous mural that began the Western Desert art movement that is being celebrated now. Ikuntji itself was the place where the first paintings were done in the mid-1990s by the women who are now mainstays of Papunya Tula Artists, and Nakamarra has been painting for Papunya Tula since 1996. Napangati, along with Warlimpirrnga, was part of the famous family group who walked out of the Western Desert into Kiwirrkura in 1984. She, like Nakamarra has painted for the company for a decade, although the two are seen as among the newest stars in a long line of masters. An old master whose work will be seen in New York is Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, the only member of Bardon's group of "painting men" from 1971 still actively producing work for Papunya Tula Artists. Tjampitjinpa has recently undertaken a series of Water Dreamings from the country west of Kintore whose iconography evokes the meanders of pearl shells that were traded all the way from the northwest coast of Australia to the Central Deserts as rain making charms. And so, nearly forty years after the company came into existence, Tjampitjinpa electrifies its latest show with motifs drawn from a spiritual and aesthetic past that predates contact with Western culture. So too does Johnny Yungut, whose newest work calls forth memories of paintings created as part of ritual men's business on the walls of caves and the backs of initiates in the far reaches of the Western Desert. Among  the
lesser known artists whose work will be on display in New York is the young
Michael Reid Tjapanangka, son of the eminent Timmy Payungka Tjapangati, whose
late works, kangaroo and goanna dreamings, conjure the country around
Wilkinkarra (right) in black and white meanders. Family connections are thick
on the ground here, for Tjapanangka was raised by Doreen Reid and her late
husband, George Tjampu Tjapaltjarri and Timmy Payungka's works feature in
Icons as well.But fascinated as I am by the play of history and the resonance of the past in the present, I do not want to lose sight of the glorious quality that Nganana Tjungurringanyi promises to bring to America. The artists who are included, be they relative youngsters like Yukultji Napangati and Michel Reid or senior painters like Yungut and Makinti, are all painting at the absolute top of their form. There are enormous, expansive canvases comparable to those now on display at the 26th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award in Darwin and delicate works in PTA's trademark 107 x 28 cm stretcher size. (According to Nicolas Rothwell's review of the Award show, all eight of the canvases PTA submitted this year made it through pre-selection to the finals, a testament to the power and sophistication of the company's art. In addition to artists mentioned above, this year's slate at the NATSIAA includes George Tjungurrayi, Nyilyari Tjapangati, and Walangkura Napanangka, all of whom will be represented in New York. See "Evolution of a Landscape," The Australian, August 17, 2009.) There c  an
be little doubt then that the artwork on display next month at 80 WSE Gallery
will be dazzling in style and execution, as the show's signature piece by Naata
Nungurrayi (left) demonstrates. Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri's vertiginous black
and white optical patterns will astonish, as will Yukultji Napangati's finely
crafted evocations of sandhills that call to mind Agnes Martin's grids,
shimmering and melting gently in the furnace of the Australian desert. Many of
the styles that PTA brings to the metropolis will seem instantly familiar to New
York's eyes, but that is only part of the
story.For in the title of the exhibition, We are here sharing our Dreaming, these artists have made it clear that they are coming half way around the world to tell stories, to penetrate hearts and minds as well as markets. This may prove the more difficult task, for as cosmopolitan as New Yorkers can be, they can also be notoriously immune to the cultures that have historically flocked to their island. It is not easy for group shows of art from other countries to penetrate the insular mindset of the New York art scene. But I will be astonished if the sheer exuberance, delicacy, power, grace, and excitement of these works fails to ignite the imaginations of all who come to see them. For the art of Papunya Tula at its finest is, quite simply, unparalleled. It has the power to reach deep into our senses and our spirits; I trust that New York audiences will be up to the challenge.
Posted at 12:40 PM Sun - July 12, 2009Roper River's RichnessAs
 a
school of art, painting from Ngukurr and the Roper River region south of Arnhem
Land has never been easy to classify. The four-color dotted patterns of precise
work from Papunya are immediately recognizable, as is the brighter and less
precise palette of Yuendumu. The slurred dotting and equally brilliant colors
of Balgo, the warm landscapes from Warmun, the shimmering brilliance of
Maningrida all make for easy and immediate identification. But how do you
concisely characterize the commonalities that exist in the work of Ginger Riley,
Willie Gudabi, and Angelina
George?Cath Bowdler, the new director of the Wagga Wagga Gallery, has come as close as possible in the title of the new exhibition she has mounted there: Colour Country: art from Roper River. "Colour" is the immediate key, brilliant and spectrum-crossing, primary, fluorescent, multi-hued, tonal: you could exhaust an entire thesaurus of color terms in describing these works. And "country," likewise, in a sense that is immediately accessible even to audiences unfamiliar with the idioms of painting country that characterize much Indigenous art. This is landscape painting that is immediately recognizable as such, whether the style be seemingly naive, as in Gertie Huddleston's painting, or epic, in the recent work of Angelina George. But this diversity of style and temperament is only one reason I have never really grasped the concept of a "Ngukurr School." Given the high profile of a number of the artists from this area, and the frequency with which their works appear in catalogs from Sotheby's, it is astonishing to learn that the six major painters whose work is the focus of Bowdler's new exhibition--Ginger Riley Munduwalawala, Willie Gudabi, Gertie Huddleston, Djambu Barra Barra, Amy Jirwulurr Johnson, and Angelina George--have appeared all together only once before in a public gallery exhibition. That was on the occasion of Ngundungunya: Art for Everyone, organized to accompany the major retrospective of Ginger Riley's work at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1997. And as the extensive bibliography that Bowdler has compiled for her catalog shows, there has been a disappointing paucity of critical writing on these artists, individually and collectively, apart from the catalog of the Riley retrospective and the forthcoming catalogue raisonne being prepared now by Beverly Knight, a long-time champion of the community's output. Happily, Bowdler has rectified both these omissions, gathering together 50 artworks for the Wagga Wagga show and writing a superb catalog (with supplementary contributions from Judith Ryan on Ginger Riley and Nicolas Rothwell on Angelina George) that reveals both the history and the achievements of this remarkable school of painters. The diversity of styles and subjects was the subject of Bowdler's recently completed doctoral thesis at the ANU; now in the catalog's scant 100 pages, superbly illustrated, she has managed to share the fruits of her years of research in a way that ought to effect an important and immediate re-evaluation of the work. Bowdler begins her analysis with two chapters of history. The first is of the region itself and the disruptions and dislocations caused by white settlement. Maps and photographs hint at the extensive geographic diversity of the land, from the stone country hills, along the Roper's valley, and down to the Limmen Bight on the Gulf of Carpentaria. The paintings and the artists' biographies, taken up in later chapters, also speak of diversity, of tropical richness, hard cattleman's country, and humid sea plains. The second history exercise chronicles the founding and growth of the art centre itself, from its early days as an outgrowth of the Ngukurr Adult Education Committee's work to its first headquarters in a disused hospital building known as Beat Street, and finally into a secure, comfortable facility that was formerly the town library. The enthusiasm and drive of the artists themselves is the thread running through these two decades of changes. A chapter is then devoted to each of the six major artists, and these chapters are art criticism of the highest order. Blending biographical information with close examination of the imagery and iconography, Bowdler, Ryan, and Rothwell stretch our comprehension of the sources and achievements of each artist's career. We learn what makes each of them unique, but also what binds them together: the luminosity of Ginger Riley landscapes, the color-soaked totems of Djambu Barra Barra's Yolngu-inspired desire, and the friendship that existed between the two men anxious to find new forms of expression. We learn about early successes for the community, and a long fallow period when it seemed as if the new community's ambitions would founder. Especially satisfying is Bowdler's brilliant exegesis of Djambu Barra Barra's work. The combination of bold graphic design, an almost psychedelic palette that revels in a unique, eccentric color sense, and the use of rarrk for infills and backgrounds makes Barra Barra a standout even in this crowd of individuals. Bowdler delineates and explains Barra Barra's connection to the traditions of Arnhem Land (he hails from Nilpidgi, northwest of Blue Mud Bay and well north of the Roper) and skillfully shows how his adoption of the intense color schemes characteristic of the Roper River artists transfigures the brilliance of the rarrk tradition in a way that no other artist has attempted. Similarly, Bowdler study of influence reveals how Barra Barra's sensibility finds some continuity in the work of his wife Amy Johnson and equally how her own vision and creativity flourishes apart from his. The story of Willie Gudabi's mentoring of Gertie Huddleston and her own adaptation of his style through the lens of Christianity offers new insights into the work of each. Reading the chapters on these latter two artists, I found myself thinking alternately of the composition of the Yirrkala Church bark panels and the Baptistry Doors on the Florence Duomo--not that Bowdler mentions either, but her text is rich enough to have sparked new associations and dreamy (if not Dreaming) paths for me to wander down. The exhibition and catalog conclude with an all too brief consideration of the art of "Ngukurr Now." Ginger, Willie and Djambu are all gone. Maureen Thompson now carries on the tradition of empaneled country-telling. Her daughter Faith Thompson Nelson re-interprets Ginger Riley's country on the one hand, and on the other draws upon father's Alyawarra heritage to paint fiery transformations of the traditions of Utopia in the Central Desert. Alan Joshua Junior's sculptures spirit sculptures keep alive the tradition of rarrk painting in the Roper; his paintings reveal a burgeoning talent whose future path is so full of possibilities as to be unpredictable. I wish there had been room for other new artists to be included in this show. (Gertie Huddleston's daughter Joyce is a particular favorite of mine: she lifts what might have been tiny swatches from a painting by Gertie and fills large canvases with them in rhythmic, colored bands representing treetops and ravines or the depths of a billabong.) Perhaps Bowdler will turn her attentions to the Roper's new generation of artists in a future exhibition. I, for one, would be very grateful. In the meantime, Colour Country: art from Roper River is a feast worth settling down to. The show is on at the Wagga Wagga Gallery until August 2. Thereafter it will travel to the Flinders University Art Museum in Adelaide in December, open at Drill Hall in Canberra in February 2010, and close out its run at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory from the end of May through mid-July 2010. If you plan to take advantage of the opportunity to see this important exhibition in any of its upcoming venues, I would urge you to acquire a copy of the catalog (A$30) in advance, as careful study of these essays and the superb reproductions of the works will vastly enrich your experience of viewing the paintings in person. Few catalogs offer such deep insight, which is reason enough to purchase it if you can not see the show sometime in the next twelve months. You can contact the Wagga Wagga Gallery or Cath Bowdler directly. (Please note that you'll have to edit the addresses the links provide: replace (at) with @ for it to work.) 
Installation view of Colour Country at the Wagga Wagga Gallery. Posted at 11:15 AM Sun - June 28, 2009Boxer"That Sturt Creek country is crying for that
boss...." Boxer Milner Tjampitjin, c.
1934-2009
(thanks, Dianna.) Posted at 08:49 AM Sun - June 21, 2009Nakamarra's Abstraction: Continuity and ChangeI remember visiting Papunya Tula Artists' Todd
Street shop late in 1998, a few months after Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri passed
away. Namarari was among the first of PTA's artists whose work I came to
recognize and love: the bold swirls of Bandicoot Dreamings, the subtle
variations of the dotted fields of Kangaroo or Marsupial Mouse Dreamings, the
broad, bold stripes of Rain Dreamings. I was hoping that I might find something
to add to our collection at this last moment, though I knew the odds were
long.
Daphne Williams was hesitant when I asked. Yes, she said, I have a couple of small canvases, but I can only show them to you very quickly, in the back room. She explained that Mick's widow was still in town, and Daphne feared upsetting her should she wander into the shop and see the paintings again. When we returned to PTA in 2001, Daphne remembered the incident, and our interest. This time, she suggested, we might want to look at some new canvases that Mick's widow, Elizabeth Marks Nakamarra, had painted; she also had a small Mouse Dreaming their daughter Angelina had recently completed. I remember that last work as being a gem-like haze of pointillist dots and to this day I regret passing over it, as Angelina's artistic career proved short-lived, and we never saw another of her works. But that day sparked an enduring interest on my part in Nakamarra's work, in no small part because the paintings that we saw that day, while quite different from those of her late husband, showed her, like Mick, to be an artist willing to experiment with a variety of styles. Like many of the widows or daughters of the great old painting men of Papunya Tula, Nakamarra did not take up painting her husband's Dreamings. Instead, she began producing works that were focused on her own country, in her case Kalipinpa, just north of Sandy Blight Junction and Kintore. Kalipinpa 
is the site of a major Rain Dreaming, most famously depicted in the masterpieces
of Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula. In the Tingari story, groups of ancestral men
and women gathered at the rockhole at Kalipinpa, where they danced and sang the
stories associated with the area before continuing on to the west and the
country around the great salt lake at Wilkinkarra, or Lake
Mackay.One of the paintings that Daphne showed us that day was done in the classic style in which the Kintore women worked at that time, with a heavy impasto of white acrylic on a black field marking out a bush tucker story: the women collecting kampurarrpa, or bush raisins near the main rockhole of Kalipinpa. It was in some ways an unusually naturalistic work, with a clearly recognizable branch of honey grevillea in the upper-right corner and large black bush raisins set around the central waterhole and its surrounding sandhills. It was a lovely example of the style of work being painted in the early years of the women's painting movement out of Kintore but, I thought, nothing more. (My thanks to Papunya Tula Artists for permission to reproduce the images included here.) Another painting in the lot that Daphne shared with us that day was quite another story, however. Well, not another story in the sense that it, too, was a Kalipinpa Rain Dreaming showing the great lightning storm and the ensuing floods that swept across the country, swirling over the sandhills and filling the rockholes. But the iconography of this painting was most unusual, the composition extraordinarily dynamic. It shared a quality of naturalism with the black-and-white composition, though. These were works that required no great leap of comprehension, no tutelage in the traditional iconography of Pintupi painting to decipher the world being depicted. 
There is no need to precisely identify any graphic element in this composition to grasp its story. The jagged lines at the center certainly look like lightning bolts; they also call to mind the rough and broken channels that floods have eroded through the terrain around Kintore. The red circles suggest rockholes, but also, perhaps, unripe bush raisins. There is a suggestion of a creek bed in the unusual pale, sandy, dove-pink color of the ground behind those jagged lines and circles. The rest of the design, however, is far more ambiguous: it all reads as water in a hilly landscape, but I can't say that one element is the rush of water, another is the representation of a sandhill. Nonetheless, the painting succeeds brilliantly at capturing the rush of floodwaters through the countryside. There is an exquisite balance, to my eye, between Pintupi and Western conventions of depicting landscapes. The painting captures the violence and the turbulence of the storm. This, I thought, was a striking and original new direction in Pintupi painting. As the decade of the 'Naughts progressed, other styles came to the fore. One of the major new directions in painting from Kintore and Kiwirkurra was the adoption of a vividly optical sense of design, a visual trickery that recalled the Op Art paintings of Sixties artists like Bridget Riley, filtered, of course, through a Western Desert sensibility. The emergence of bold new styles from painters like George Ward Tjungurrayi, a dramatic minimalism in the works of Warlimprringa Tjapaltjarri, and the sinuous mature works of Charlie Tjapangati all partook of this visual vibrancy. Elizabeth Marks Nakamarra joined in this experimentation, producing works with a complexity of surface like this canvas from 2003. 
Nakamarra retains a looseness of hand in this work, a quirkiness of drawing that produces incidents to interest the eye beyond an illusionist's tricks. The regularity of right angles in three corners of the work gives way to a looser composition in the upper-right corner of the work as shown here (I've rotated the canvas 90 degrees to allow for a fuller, more detailed presentation of the design in the confined space of a browser window). Just right of center a gentle curve intrudes into the maze; at the upper left a pair of concentric rectangles emerge to float semi-detached above the rest of the design. More recently, Nakamarra has tightened up her line and begun to experiment with the effects of color on her geometry. 
Indeed, I could say that in this 2008 work she has begun drawing with color, fashioning depth and direction by varying shades of yellow-orange that are set against an dull gray line that nonetheless sings with a pearlescent quality. (This ability to manipulate the eye's perception of this neutral gray that sits in the background of many such paintings is a device employed frequently by several Papunya Tula artists and one that never fails to surprise me when I discover that some brilliant sky-blue line or a vivid white accent turns out on close inspection to be more the color of a battleship more than anything else.) Moreover, the illusion of stair-step depth is this painting will not maintain itself in my eye. Nakamarra breaks up the pattern on the right-hand side, flattening out the appearance of depth. Once the Escheresque spell of illusion is broken, my eye starts to focus on the larger pattern created by the darker and lighter blocks of orange stripes; field and ground destabilize and suddenly the entire surface of the canvas appears to be in flux, heaving, flowing, stopping, and then starting up again. As I was pondering this painting's ability to create such visual turbulence, I was suddenly reminded that it, like the previous two works I've reproduced here, depicts the Rain Dreaming at Kalipinpa. Lining the photographs of the three paintings up side by side, I was struck by how much they resemble one another.
In each painting, with a little imagination and if you know the story, you can see how Nakamarra brilliantly suggests the flashing  lightning
and the cascading water of the storm. Over the years she has experimented by
increasing the level of abstraction in her representation of the Dreaming and
the countryside. She continues her experiments with color as well. From the
very first she understood the power of monochromatic design; at the same time
she has worked with color choices that vary subtly from the classic
red-yellow-black-and-white Pintupi palette to achieve bold and dramatic effects
that nonetheless remain true to the colors of her country (seen in this snippet
at right from Google Maps of a landscape of rocky gullies just north of
Kintore).I am fascinated by the way in which Nakamarra's career has illustrated many of the points of tension between traditional and western ways of image making. Some critics of Aboriginal methods complain that most painters paint the same painting over and over again and dismiss the argument that many western artists, working in series, do the same. Nakamarra manages to have it both ways, remaining faithful to the core of the Dreaming and to a traditional palette, working variations on both drawing and painting, and skillfully deploying imagery drawn from both traditional and western models (the roundel and curve, as well as the abstracted line) to expand her visual vocabulary. It is in this mode of innovation within tradition, of refashioning the customary while remaining true to it, that I find her closest kinship with the late great artist to whom she was married. All images reproduced with the generous permission of Papunya Tula Artists. Posted at 11:05 AM Sat - May 16, 2009Gone Troppo: Vultures in the Top EndThe weather in Darwin is lovely this time of the
year. The late autumn days are warm and bright, but not suffocatingly hot the
way they can be at the start of the year; the humidity drops to an imperceptible
level. Harbor nights can be downright chilly. All the more surprising, then,
to read this week of a monsoonal vortex of controversy surrounding the
collection of Papunya boards held by the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern
Territory (MAGNT), where events seem to have briefly gone
troppo.
Monday's Australian carried a report that Alison Anderson, who holds the portfolios for Art and for Indigenous Policy in the Territory, had "intervened to overturn government policy of researching and displaying several Papunya board paintings that contain sacred Aboriginal material" (Natasha Robinson, "Minister lashes 'culture vultures' of Aboriginal Art," The Australian, May 11, 2009). MAGNT holds over two hundred masterpieces from the early days of the Central Desert experiments in acrylic painting that launched the modern Aboriginal fine art movement, although you might never know it given the paltry history of conservation and exhibition that has attended the collection. While a small number of these early boards contain depictions of highly sacred ritual actions and paraphernalia, the vast majority of them have lived on racks in the back rooms of the museum for most of the last fifty years, with only a handful every on display at a single time. Worldwide attention was focused on this collection a little more than a year ago when a thief smashed a plate glass window in the small hours of the morning of April 1, 2008 and made off with seven of the works from a ground floor gallery. The paintings were recovered within hours, and the thief was apprehended. But the incident focused minds on the sorry state, not only of security, but of conservation at the Museum, which is chronically and desperately underfunded. Painted on scraps of cast-off lumber or masonite and often mounted by gluing them onto rough, acidic, burlap-covered supports, these artworks are at risk even in the controlled environments of the Museum. They are poorly documented, lost wonders from a lost world, but described at the time by Nicolas Rothwell as "no doubt ... one of the glories of Australia's national heritage" ("Mysteries of our art of darkness," The Australian, April 5, 2008). Then, last August, word began to circulate that something would be done, and finally, on the night of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, then Minister for the Arts and Indigenous Policy Marion Scrymgour announced a grant to the museum that would allow for professional curation and documentation of the boards in preparation for an international tour. I would guess that most everyone gathered on the lawn of the Museum that night felt like a winner. Early Papunya boards have been the focus this year of one of the most extraordinary exhibitions of Aboriginal art mounted in recent times (which is saying a lot), Icons of the Desert: early Aboriginal paintings from Papunya. Included amongst the fifty paintings in this show are a number of works of a sensitive nature, but it is important to note that those involved in the mounting and publication of the exhibition have gone to extraordinary lengths to respect the concerns of men from the desert about the visibility of these images. Some paintings were not reproduced in the catalog, but instead were included in a sealed insert available only in the United States. The catalog itself includes a lengthy essay by Centralian historian Dick Kimber describing the process by which he contacted relatives of the painters to determine the suitability of the works for exhibition and reproduction. It is worth noting that all this care was taken with paintings that had been offered at auction during the past decade. The works in question had been reproduced in auction catalogs (in print and on the web, and at least one of them, Clifford Possum's Emu Corroboree Man (1972), was widely reproduced in newspapers and on websites at the time of its most recent sale, in July 2005, when it sold for a record price for the artist. And yet despite the problems of curation and documentation, despite a growing awareness among scholars and collectors that the Pintupi, long known for being culturally conservative and no doubt still remembering the stories of recrimination and payback that resulted from the exhibition of these early paintings in Yuendumu, Alice Springs, and Perth, have expressed new doubts about the continued display of these works, despite all this, Alison Anderson made an announcement this week that could have set back all of the progress that is being made towards honoring both the paintings and the culture that produced them. Anderson made some startling accusations in announcing her plans to scrap the exhibition. The Northern Territory's most senior Aboriginal politician has launched a scathing attack on "culture vultures" who exploit sacred Aboriginal artworks and has vowed to halt a planned international exhibition of early Western Desert paintings. Luckily, Monday's reversal has itself already been reversed in a rather startling fashion. On Friday, several papers including the Brisbane Times and The Age (Lindsay Murdoch, "Treasures to finally see light," May 15, 2009) carried the latest installment. Now, the Territory will benefit from the government's largesse. A collection of priceless and culturally sensitive Aboriginal paintings that has languished unseen in vaults for almost 40 years will soon be exhibited in the Northern Territory. There is no mention in either of these stories about the conservation and documentation of the boards, but I sincerely hope that both matters will be well attended to before any exhibition of them opens. There are some very good and not so obvious reasons to do so. At the heart of the controversy about exhibiting these works today, abroad or in Australia, is the issue of revelation and concealment. As the news stories note, the men who originally painted these boards may not have grasped how widely disseminated their images would become. Nor did they expect the angry reactions of other desert groups to the revelation of such sacred material. And although the Pintupi greeted the exhibition of their and their fathers' or grandfathers' paintings during Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius in 2001 with joy, attitudes have changed in the years since. As Friday's story notes, some of the elders, particularly Anderson's grandfather, Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra, are now reluctant to have the works publicly viewed. (See my post on Fred Myers' lecture at the Hood Museum in 2006 for details and references about this growing conservatism among the Pintupi.) Of course, not all of these paintings contain such sensitive material. The irony, and the danger, is that without appropriate study and curation, especially now when there is a chance that the direct descendants of the painters can still be consulted, it may not be possible to determine which works should be properly restricted. Again, Rothwell reported on this aspect of the problem in his story on the April 2008 theft, noting that Vivien Johnson, who has spent an academic lifetime studying Papunya painting, "believe[s] paintings are being hung that show undisguised secret ceremonial designs against the wishes of their contemporary custodians." It is for such reasons that Anderson's assertions that those who study Indigenous culture because they have none of their own, and that they want to steal the culture from its owners are not just offensive but ill-considered as well. There is no doubt that the ethnographic study of Aboriginal people has not always benefited them, a point explored at some length by Aileen Moreton-Robinson in "How White Possession Moves: After the Word." This essay was an invited response to a collection of academic papers published in 2006, Moving Anthropology: Critical Indigenous Studies (Charles Darwin University Press). Moreton-Robinson points out that in carrying out such studies, academics may define indigeneity from within their own world view, misrepresenting it or setting limits on it that differ significantly from the point of view of Aboriginal people themselves. Yet even at her most critical, Moreton-Robinson suggests a need for "engagement from outside the confines of anthropology." I would suggest that the study of these early paintings offers an opportunity to open up such new perspectives. Indeed, I hope that, as Minister for the Arts, Anderson does more that just bring the perspective of her family and her home community of Papunya to bear on the study of these paintings and calls on the knowledge of the communities of Kintore and Kiwirrkura to insure the broadest net is cast in seeking to understand these formative, pioneering paintings. Such research, carefully shepherded by scholars of Vivien Johnson's character, can indeed prove the very opposite of what Anderson alleges. It can demonstrate how culture is fundamentally inalienable. It might be lost over time, but it can never be given away, nor taken away. These paintings are expressions of ritual, and it would be well to remember that rituals were (and still are) a form of commerce in the deserts. The songs and stories of the "Balgo business" have been traded from the western coast all the way into the Centre, much like pearl shells with their incised meanders. Ritual business has value, and trading it establishes connections among "the many clans in this nation, not all of one law, but many laws" as Anderson was quoted saying in Monday's article in The Australian. Although her reference was explicitly to the varieties of Indigenous law and culture, it is equally apt in relation to Anglo-Australians as well. It is important to remember that when one group passed a ritual on to another, they did not lose the rights to that ritual; in fact, they enriched themselves in the exchange by gaining new rights to other rituals. In painting stories associated with ritual business, the early artists at Papunya were asserting the value of their connection to the country they painted. By offering those paintings for sale, they looked to achieve an exchange of value. It may have been an unequal exchange in the end, and it may have been built on misunderstood premises, but it was engaged in enthusiastically and hopefully. All that is not to say that the terms of exchange may not be renegotiated over time. Indeed, the Pintupi famously altered the terms of exchange under pressure from the Pitjantjatjara by restricting the display of the offending works and by ceasing to paint explicit renditions of ceremony and ceremonial objects. They also made retribution. And now, decades later, their knowledge and cooperation must be enlisted to elucidate the meanings of those early paintings, to determine which of the vaulted treasures need to be treated with proper respect for the secrets they embody. An uneducated eye can not distinguish between secret and public images. Vivien Johnson's concerns demonstrate this fact, as does Kimber's essay in the Icons catalog. Indeed, some of Anderson's own paintings recently shown at the Karen Brown Gallery in Federation Square contain images that look like sacred ritual paraphernalia (see in particular the modified string cross in "Relatives: sequence of Rain Dreamings" and other motifs in "Sacred Women Dancing at a site in Desert Country"). Without study and documentation and exhibition, misunderstandings and misappropriation will only worsen. The Papunya boards entered the marketplace nearly 40 years ago. It is impossible to unring that bell completely. Moreover, it should be recognized that much good has followed from that initial set of transactions. There is no doubt that the art market has enriched, not only buyers of the art, but some of its creators as well (although not equally). And these transactions have certainly elevated the general understanding and value of Aboriginal culture both within Australia and abroad. Properly directed conservation and exhibition will only serve to increase that value in both monetary and cultural terms. With regard to the question of the equality of the exchange, it is worth noting briefly that ignorance and disregard for those values contribute to carpetbagging and to unscrupulous dealers prizing their own financial gain over the concerns of the artists and their families. Happily, cooler heads and cooler temperatures seemed to have prevailed against the tropical maelstrom. Some good may have emerged in the end, for it would surely be a boon to see MAGNT's treasure on display in the Territory and then in galleries across Australia and around the world. There is still time to step back and take a deep breath, to engage in meaningful and respectful dialogue about the future of the Papunya boards and the place of Aboriginal painting in a broader context. These discussions will inevitably be political. (I never fail to marvel at how Fred Myers nailed the key concepts of desert culture in the subtitle to Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self by describing his work as treating of "sentiment, place and politics among Western Desert Aborigines.") Political though they must be, they need not be partisan. The work is too important for that. Posted at 12:00 PM Sun - May 10, 2009John Mawurndjul, Past and PresentIt has been little more than a dozen years since
the name of John Mawurndjul was linked for the first time (to my knowledge) to
what were and perhaps remain the most famous names world-wide in Aboriginal art,
Emily Kam Kngwarray and Rover Thomas. The occasion was an exhibition whose
scope still staggers me, The Eye of the Storm: eight contemporary Indigenous
Australian artists, organized by the National Gallery of Australia
for display at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, India late in
1996 and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney the following year. (The five
other artists in the show were George Milpurrurru, Brian Nyinawanga, Fiona
Foley, Ken Thaiday, and Roy
Wiggan.)
Kngwarray had just passed away; indeed she is listed in the catalog as "Kwenentway" rather than as "Emily." Rover Thomas would die just thirteen months after the Sydney opening. Mawurndjul (b. 1952) was a relatively young man and all of the works in the exhibition were completed before he had turned forty. For years afterwards, Kngwarray and Thomas remained the touchstones of celebrity in the Indigenous art world, and even today, the media remains awash in stories that celebrate that fame, be in the shattering of auction records or allegations of fraud and forgery. In the years since that exhibition, Mawurndjul's achievements and the accolades he has received for them have continued to mount, although he has never seemed to seize the public's imagination in quite the same ways as the two great oldies did. In 1999, Mawurndjul won the Bark Painting Award at the 16th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award. In 2003 he received the prestigious Clemenger Contemporary Art Award, the first Indigenous artist to be so honored. He was among the stars of 2004's Crossing Country exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and in the same year was among eight artists included in the Australian Aboriginal Art Commission for the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris. In 2005 a major retrospective of his work, <<rarrk>> John Mawurndjul: journey through time in northern Australia opened at Basel's Museum Tinguely. In  that
year and early in 2006 Mawurndjul spent several months in Europe, with some of
that time dedicated to painting a large column in the form of a lorrkon,
the ceremonial burial pole of the Kuninjku, which was the only original work of
art produced by the hand one of the eight painters for the administrative and
curatorial building at Quai Branly. He appeared on the cover of Time
magazine on May 15, 2006, and in the accompanying article ("A Parisian Romance") Michael Fitzgerald claimed
that "more than anyone else, John Mawurndjul has changed the face of bark
painting" and called the artist "the Michelangelo of
rarrk."In November of 2006, the Drill Hall Gallery at the Australian National University mounted a major exhibition, Mumeka to Milmilngkan: innovation in Kurulk Art, featuring sixty-six works by the extended clan, descendants of Anchor Kulunba, over whom Mawurndjul now stands as the senior figure. The excellent catalog for this exhibition contains major essays by Jon Altman, Luke Taylor, and Apolline Kohen, in addition to a most useful genealogy that charts the family relationships among the dozen artists in the show. The theme of innovation that is central to Mumeka to Milmilngkan is itself centered on Mawurndjul. In particular, Luke Taylor's essay explores the stylistic experiments that Mawurndjul began thirty years ago, building on the work of Yirawala and Marralwanga to create new ways of encoding ancestral power in the shimmer of the rarrk's cross-hatchings. Kohen traces the growth of the younger generation, the grandchildren of Kulunba, and especially the emergence of strong painters among Kuninjku women. Innovating in this instance as well, Mawurndjul was central to the development of women's painting, with his wife, Kay Lindjuwanga, and his younger brother James Iyuna's wife, Melba Gundjarrwanga, among the first to take up a brush and gain recognition. Now Drill Hall has returned to honor the master once more in the new exhibition, John Mawurndjul Survey 1979-2009, which celebrates three decades of creativity and gathers together, in addition to his paintings on bark, a significant corpus of the etchings Mawurndjul executed between 2004 and 2007. (The exhibition opened on April 16, 2009 and will be on view in Canberra through May 24.) Kohen, Altman, and Taylor have once again teamed up to produce useful and informative essays for the catalog. Kohen provides a brief history of Mawurndjul's experimentation with etching, following on a similar piece by her father, Jean Kohen, published in the <<rarrk>> catalog. (The elder Kohen is himself a printmaker and was instrumental in introducing the technique at Maningrida.) Altman and Taylor have collaborated on "Articulating Differences: John Mawurndjul and the creation of a distinct identity through art." Brief as it is, this essay is an exemplary critique of Mawurndjul's style and subjects, especially good in its interpretations of the later, more abstract works. Taylor offers a guide to understanding the imagery (for example, the white bars that have often appeared in the bark paintings of late reference specific landforms such a rocky cliffs) and the representations of the networks of billabongs whose shimmering skeins project the djang of Mawurndjul's homelands. Examples of Mawurndjul's latest magical variations on the waters of Milmilngkan will be on view in a solo show at Annandale Galleries starting May 24 and can now be seen in preview at their website. The new works manifest serenity and grace; the frenetic fracturing of the picture plain that characterized his output a decade ago has given way to a gentle line that lofts across the surface of the bark in stately rhythms. The broad white bars and the large circles that denote waterholes are moments of stasis in these paintings. The power of the country is immanent; the transcendence and vigor of work like the Mardayin Ceremony (2003) that adorns the ceiling of the Quai Branly is now muted.
The Annandale website, by including links to half a dozen earlier exhibitions, both solo and group shows, acts almost as a minor retrospective in its own right, letting us chart the changes in Mawurndjul's style over the years in which his accomplishments have multiplied along with his fame. That fame can only further increase with the long-awaited publication by the Aboriginal Studies Press of Between Indigenous Australia and Europe: John Mawurndjul, edited by Claus Volkenandt and Christian Kaufmann. Altman, Kohen, and Taylor are joined by scholars Australian and European in providing a baker's dozen of essays, which sprang from an international symposium held in Basel in 2005 on the occasion of the opening of the Mawurndjul retrospective there. (Many of the authors also contributed to the catalog of that exhibition.) I'm looking forward to settling down to what promises to be a challenging and rewarding read. In fact, challenging and rewarding are good adjectives to describe Mawurndjul's art itself. And perhaps that is why he is not quite the household name in Australia that Emily and Rover are. Mawurndjul's work is beautiful, but not decorative, strong but not bold or stark. And to some extent bark paintings still suffer from a perception that they belong to the past, that their physical qualities--bark and ochre--distance them from both fine art and contemporary art, and that those qualities make them a curatorial problem not easily embraced by the average collector. (I'll admit that central air and heating do make it easier to consider owning paintings that are especially susceptible to fluctuations in temperature and humidity.) Thinking it over, I am struck by how Mawurndjul's art, in a unique way, does stand between Australia and Europe, and how Mawurndjul himself seems to relish having a foot planted in each world. In a statement he made in preparation for the Crossing Country exhibition and reprinted in the catalog for that show, he stresses the variety of ways in which he has altered the traditions from which his art has emerged. "Any bark you see in Maningrida, mine will be changed from that," he said (Crossing Country, p. 137). The exhibition's subtitle was "the alchemy of Western Arnhem Land art" and Mawurndjul reinforced that theme while at the same time distancing himself from the European tradition. Speaking of his travels abroad he said, "I go all over showing my paintings and they all look at me, photograph me. We all join together. They look at me and see I am very different to those white people. But through some kind of magic, I am a chemist man. The number one chemist man, yes" (ibid.) Last week, in reviewing a new collection of essays on W. E. H. Stanner, I remarked on Stanner's insight into the concepts of continuity and change in Aboriginal culture. I'm struck again by how relevant those ideas are to Mawurndjul's work. If you look at the broad sweep of his career, it is easy to discern the metamorphoses from early depictions of wallabies and echidnas through the complex tangles of his portraits of Ngalyod, from the similarly intricate depictions of billabongs to the serene abstractions of the twenty-first century. And yet take any single painting out of the chronological line-up and it is difficult to guess with much precision what period of his career it belongs to. The magnificent Buluwana now in the collection of the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (cat. no. 17 from the new Drill Hall show) looks far earlier than 2000; the 1997 Mardayin Ceremony - theme IV (cat. no 13) would not look terribly out of place in the upcoming Annandale show. Apolline Kohen notes that during the 2004 etching workshop in Maningrida, "Mawurndjul made two prints ... which reacquainted him with figuration" (John Mawurndjul Survey 1979 - 2009, p. 28). Poised between tradition and innovation, concealment and revelation, Milmilngkan and Paris, figuration and abstraction, stasis and change, John Mawurndjul is at once the most representative of Aboriginal artists and the most individual.
Posted at 01:05 PM Sun - April 5, 2009Batik BrillianceThere is a paradox in the story of Indigenous
textile art, the most famous examples of which are undoubtedly the Utopia
batiks. As the market for painting by Aboriginal artists took off in the 1990s,
the Utopia batiks were rightly celebrated as the progenitors, not just of an
expansion of painting beyond the boundaries of Papunya Tula, but of the first
important Indigenous artworks produced by women. The rapid rise in the
reputations of the Petyarre sisters and their auntie, Emily Kam Kngwarray gave
further prominence to the importance of these woven
wonders.
And yet the batiks themselves, like much textile art, are notoriously fragile, their materials and colors both susceptible to degradation by exposure, to handling and to light. And so these exemplars of Indigenous women's creativity have all but disappeared from view in the State galleries that display countless other examples of native styles and testify to the subtle line between art and craft that such work foregrounds. For 
this reason alone Across the Desert: Aboriginal Batik from Central
Australia, the recent exhibition of batik mounted by Judith Ryan
at the NGV Australia, would be a cause for celebration. Similarly, although
numerous publications on batik and related textile arts have appeared over the
years, the catalog for this show is a resource to be
treasured for the beauty and extravagance of its documentation of the movement
in five desert communities.Earlier publications have treated the story of batik in a variety of ways. Perhaps the earliest, mirroring the initial excitement generated by the emergence of women artists there, was Utopia: a picture story: the Robert Holmes a Court collection (Wakefield Press, 1990) by Anne Marie Brody. A large-format and most handsome volume, this book offered gorgeous photographs, not only of 88 batik works in all their glory, but also of the artists themselves, in expressive, dramatic black-and-white portraits. One of the great strengths of this collection is the evidence it provides of the breadth of artistic experimentation in the medium that women of Utopia (and one man, Lindsay Bird Mpetyane) undertook. There are transformations of bush tucker and women's ceremonial body paint, images familiar from the acrylic paintings that have become so popular in the years since this collection was assembled. But there are also surprises in store for batik lovers, most notably examples of the naive style of landscape painting that didn't re-emerge in women's painting until a decade later. Eileen Kngwarreye's ghostly blue, black, and white "Night Scene" and Edie Kemarre's ghost gums in an ochre-tinted desert scene entitled "Emu Dreaming" are arresting, startling, and beautiful. The 1998 exhibition at the NGV, Raiki Wara: long cloth from Aboriginal Australia and the Torres Strait broadened the scope of the investigation considerably. Although the emphasis was once again on work from Utopia, the catalog offered insight into the seminal role played by Ernabella Arts in establishing a market for Indigenous women's production of textile arts. Raiki Wara also included batiks from other desert communities, notably Kintore and Yuendumu, and stretched its geographical coverage far to the north, presenting stunning works from as far away as the Torres Strait Islands. Vividly reproduced in brilliant detail, the painted silks from Santa Teresa and the equally astonishing silks from Merrepen Arts on the Daly River fairly leap off the pages of the catalog. Among other revelations are the 1995 screenprints from Galiwin'ku with their images of marine life and ceremonial objects floating atop washes of color that seem to be composed of equal parts fire and water. Austere screenprinted patterns from the Tiwi Islands stand in counterpoint to Sydney artist Euphemia Bostock possum-skin cloak patterns, while Donna Brown's lush but soft silk painting contrasts with the lively, sharp desert examples of the art. And finally, the decade's documentation drew to a close with the publication of Don't Ask for Stories: the women from Ernabella and their art (Aboriginal Studies Press, 1999). Founded in 1948, Ernabella is the oldest surviving desert art centre and this publication not only documents the early attempts at producing textile art as an income-generating scheme, but also presents the life stories of the artists and other members of the community in brief, bilingual texts. With the rise of acrylic painting, the demand for textile arts declined across the desert; the lower status and price for batik nearly finished off the industry in Ernabella as elsewhere. This is a situation much to be lamented. And so it is fitting that this latest NGV show, Across the Desert, resurrects the glory of batik, and never better than in its homage to the brilliance of Ernabella. The catalog for Across the Desert, like all of the quality productions from the NGV, is a sumptuous record of the exhibition studded with high-gloss full-page photographs, a comprehensive illustrated listing of works in the exhibition, biographies of the creators, an introductory essay by Judith Ryan, and two short pieces on batik as couture. These alone would make a substantial contribution to the literature on Aboriginal batik production. For me, the heart and soul of this catalog, though, are the five central essays with their exuberant photographic documentation of the work produced at art centres in five desert communities: Ernabella, Fregon, Utopia, Yuendumu, and Kintore. This geographical organization foregrounds the differences among the various "schools" of batik, and also allows us to see the work in the context of the later and in some cases more famous acrylic paintings that emerged from these art centres. The Yuendumu works, for example, though not as brightly colorful as their acrylic counterparts, vibrate with familiar kurruwarri designs, tiny footprints and the signs of women with their digging sticks and coolamons. The dense designs in pink and mauve out of Kintore (including a stunner by Tjunkiya Napaltjarri) immediately recall the early paintings that emerged from the contemporaneous women's painting project that brought the Pintupi women to the attention of the art world for the first time in the mid-1990s and changed the course of art at Papunya Tula. But these Kintore works also reveal a debt to the women of Utopia in design as well as medium and remind us how significant Emily Kngwarray's influence was fifteen to twenty years ago. The Utopia batiks themselves have lost none of their glory in two decades. But it is the work from Ernabella that is here revealed in all its stunning richness. Revisiting the earlier publications I mentioned above, partly out of disbelief that I had overlooked the genius of these long cloths until now, I saw that the Ernabella production has never been slighted. But to have it displayed as it is in Across the Desert, collected together on page after page, allowed me to appreciate the richness, the luxury, the radiance of these artworks for the first time. The designs themselves show the influence of the artists' Indonesian mentors, and hence of Islamic art, more than anything else in the exhibition. The complexity of drawing is further enhanced by the most dazzling color of all that is on show. (The catalog's cover illustration, reproduced above, is a detail of a 2007 batik from Ernabella by Tjunkaya Tapaya; it testifies not only to the Indonesian influence but to the continued vitality of batik production in Ernabella.) If you are intrigued by the story of Indonesian influence on Aboriginal art in the realm of batik (stylistically quite different from the traces of Macassan culture among the Yolngu), look for the fascinating documentary The Golden Cord (Daedalus Films, 1996, distributed by Ronin Films). Directed by Hilary Furlong, who went on a few years later to work at Ernabella, The Golden Cord tells the story of a cultural exchange. Ten women from Utopia traveled to the Brahma Tirta Sari batik studio in Yogyakarta to learn the techniques of batik from Agus Ismoyo and his wife Nia Fliam. The two Java-based artists then paid a return visit to Utopia, in a heartwarming episode which shows the ladies delighting in the special qualities of their country as they return the hospitality they were shown in Indonesia. The film also documents the critical role that Jenny Green played in the development of batik at Utopia, a story that is curiously understated in Across the Desert. The story of batik is of central importance to the history of the development of Aboriginal fine art in the late twentieth century. It was critical to the emergence of women as artists of equal stature in the desert; it launched the career of the most internationally famous of all Aboriginal artists, and it opened an appreciation of the importance of what was traditionally considered "craft work" in the Indigenous aesthetic. We can only be grateful to Judith Ryan and the NGV for reminding us of all this once more, and for once more giving audiences the opportunity to experience these jewels of the deserts.
Posted at 12:10 PM Wed - March 18, 2009Yuemdumu in India/Maningrida in AmericaA couple of announcements just in of new
Aboriginal art shows outside of Australia. Warlukurlangu Artists will be
opening in April in New Delhi, and the first all-Maningrida show to grace
America's shores arrives the same week in Washington,
DC.
Posted at 09:45 PM Sat - February 28, 2009New Writing on Aboriginal ArtKeep your
 eyes
peeled for the inaugural issue of Australian
Aboriginal Art: an international quarterly magazine, due to go on
sale on March 11, 2009. I first heard about it during my recent weekend at
Cornell for the opening of Icons of the
Desert, an event that will be featured in the magazine's premiere.
I had the good fortune to share an evening's meal and an equally nourishing
conversation with Stephen Oxenbury, whose photographs (including
the portrait of Papunya Tula artist Joseph Jurra Tjapaltjarri, left) will grace
the pages of this new publication. The Cornell exhibition will be one of the
features, with contributions by Fred Myers and Roger Benjamin along with
Oxenbury's stunning photographs of the
event.The list of other contributors to the first issue reads like a who's who of experts on Indigenous art, beginning with Judith Ryan of the NGV and Brenda Croft, late of the NGA. Sasha Griffin, Professor of Art History at ANU joins Myers and Benjamin in the ranks of academic contributors. Alison French, also from ANU (at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research) bridges the academic and curatorial expertise on offer with a contribution on Albert Namatjira. The curatorial ranks are augmented by contributors Zara Stanhope of the Heide Museum and Georges Petitjean of Utrecht's Aboriginal Art Museum. Rounding out the slate of authors for the debut are Susan and Emily McCulloch, publishers of The New McCulloch's Encyclopedia of Australian Art and authors of guides to collecting Aboriginal art (and collections of it as well). In addition to the pieces on Icons and Namatjira, articles include studies of Bidyadanga artist Daniel Walbidi and photographer Destiny Deacon, as well as what promises to be a fascinating story of a collaboration between Mangkaja Arts doyenne Wakartu Cory Surprise and Ildiko Kovacs, whose work was featured in an exhibition mixing Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, Paint, at Raft Gallery in Darwin last June. Australian Aboriginal Art promises to be a great adventure and a long-overdue forum for serious writing from a broad range of perspectives. I can hardly wait to see it. Posted at 11:04 AM |
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